Is Gorgo Ma-Ma?

Queen Gorgo of Sparta...

...and Ma-ma, gang-leader of Peach Trees.

One a heroine, one a villain. Both leaders of men. Both played by Lena Headey. Both inhabiting universes of slow-motion ultraviolence.

And both the same person.

Reincarnation's a tricky business. Officially Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and Jewish reincarnation fans will tell you souls have no gender, no ethnicity and no memories of their past, but this is the movies, and casting the same actor carries certain implications (see Cloud Atlas). There's also nothing that says souls have to reincarnate immediately after their death. They only return to Earth when their soul teachers believe they've learned all they can from the spirit realm, so it could be centuries or even millennia before a soul surfaces again.

Such as the vast ocean of time between Thermopylae (480 BCE) and grimdark future of 2099.

Ma-ma clearly has a chip on her shoulder, so it could be she's carrying emotional baggage from her time as Gorgo. I wouldn't hold it against her. She was raped and betrayed by Theron, after all, and even though she had the satisfaction of sticking a sword through his guts, it still cost the life of her beloved Leonidas. I wouldn't be surprised if the trauma from such events lasted beyond a single lifetime.

You sit tight. Or run. Makes no difference you're still mine.

Left to simmer, pain and humiliation like that could do things to a person. The sense of violation, the penchant for lashing out, it all has to come out some time, and what happens in her next life? She ends up a prostitute, forced to endure congress with any number of men she despises, including her pimp. This does not end well.

"Word is, she feminised the guy with her teeth..."

Gorgo at least had her son Pleistarchus to comfort her, but even that didn't turn out right. After Leonidas's death the Agiad kingship of Sparta was passed to his nephew Pausanias, who, instead of acting as regent as he should, passed the kingship to his own son (and so on down the line to Kleombrotus, as I've outlined before). That little boy in 300 never got to be king.

To a woman of a royal household, that kind of disappointment would stick. Her son was too weak-willed to reclaim the kingship that was rightfully his. In turn, Ma-ma found herself having to work with her Clan Techie, another despised weakling who brings out her dormant maternal side, and pays the price.

Those aren't the eyes he was born with.

This is where it starts to get thematically interesting. In both movies her troubles start when she has someone thrown to their death. Sure, in neither case does she do the dirty work herself, but she's still responsible. In 300 Leonidas stops to check with her before kicking the Persian messenger down the well: she nods regretfully, as if it were an unpleasant duty, and he goes on to create the greatest meme of 2007.

You're already hearing it.

But she could've stopped it, and she should've. 300 is, by the director's own admission, pure Spartan propaganda, and the Persians weren't the evil empire he made them out to be. For one thing, Xerxes followed the Zoroastrian religion and would've seen a claim to god-kingship as the height of blasphemy (and possibly madness). The Archaemenid Persians were a surprisingly progressive lot, building roads, running a postal service and enforcing religious tolerance (they were also the people that let the Jewish exiles go home, making them the "silver breast and arms" of Nebuchadnezzar's dream-statue).

You could talk to them, in other words. A moment to consider a more diplomatic response, and bold king Leonidas and 298 other Spartans might well still be alive.

This personality flaw, a predisposition to trigger-happiness, has emerged front and centre by the time we get to Dredd. It's a plot point, even: her overreaction to Kay's capture in that iconic minigun scene is what clues the judges in that he might be more than he seems. And she repeats the mistakes of her past, making trouble for herself when she has some local thugs thrown to their deaths. "Skin 'em. Throw them off the balcony," she says, not even deigning to watch. She's seen it all before.

According to The Splat Calculator, a fall from the top of Peach Trees would last 14 seconds. Under the influence of Slo-Mo, that would seem like 24 minutes.

Like 300, this triggers a response from those in power, but this time the outcome is different. The central space of Peach Trees creates a space very similar to the well in Sparta – and like the well, she resides at the top. This time the bottom is not a dark space where her victims vanish and are forgotten: this time the bodies are found. There is gossip and unrest. Her nemesis arrives to investigate, then focuses on her and ascends from the bottom of Peach Trees, floor by floor, making his way inexorably to the top. To her.

My High-Ex, Incendiaries and Hot Shots will blot out the sun.

Delivered in the visual language of film, the metaphor couldn't be clearer if the Persian messenger himself had climbed back out of that well, Sadako-style. As if to confirm his role, Dredd even warns her "This is not a negotiation." He is the anti-messenger: karma cannot be outrun. The time has come to atone for her sins with a 24-minute plunge of her own.

She did not enjoy this. It was not over quickly.

GorgMa failed to deal with her past in this incarnation, but that's okay, because according to the rules she gets three lives to patch things up. The bad news is, if after three chances a soul still hasn't managed to put anything right, they are considered beyond redemption and are not reincarnated again. And from what I've heard of her latest incarnation...

...she's only got one chance left.