Summary: Cliff and David are two astronauts working in space while robotic replicas live their lives down on Earth. Cliff stays in the country with his wife Lana while David is more sociable with his family in public. A cult attacks David at night, murdering his family and destroying his replica before turning themselves in. David is deeply depressed and Cliff offers to let him use his replica. David does and finds some peace in doing this, and continues to use the replica occasionally to paint a picture for Cliff to keep in his house. As he does this, David becomes obsessed with Lana and makes a pass at her. Lana tells Cliff and doesn't want David to come back, while Cliff is suspicious that they had an affair. Cliff refuses to let David use his replica again so David fakes an emergency and goes back to murder Cliff's family. Cliff goes back and sees what happened before returning horrified to David.
The Good: This episode does a lot of things right, and it has its heart in the right place emotionally. David's story is genuinely disturbing and upsetting. We establish a great, sociable family, and seeing them get slaughtered ruthlessly by a cult group is absolutely horrifying. David's grief is realistically portrayed and it's tough not to feel for him as he suffers alone in space. Him finding some peace in using Cliff's replica makes sense, and the story told between them is good as David goes from grateful to entitled and dependent on Cliff's life. Aaron Paul is the glue that makes this work. He does a tremendous job playing two different characters, and the quality of his performance sells the story being told magnificently. What we get is a pretty standard domestic conflict for much of the episode (with a technology twist of course), but the strength of the performance makes it much better. The Bad: This episode has no business being 80 minutes long. The story is enough for a 40-50 minute episode, but the pacing is screwed up when the story is extended to be almost twice that length. Scenes go longer than they should, there are scenes that should have been significantly trimmed or cut out entirely, and the episode doesn't have an additional layer of complex storytelling to justify being so long. I'm usually not too bothered by methodical pacing, but this story drags and bores me at times because it is needlessly slow, and it doesn't even capitalize on any of the strengths that come from slow-paced storytelling. One of the biggest strengths of slow storytelling is that you can dive deep into character. Yet as slow as the episode is, somehow it still failed to emotionally sell me on the choices the characters made at various points in the story. We had so many scenes of David using Cliff's replica, and yet I still couldn't buy into his decision to advance on her and try to hook up, which seemingly came out of nowhere. The show failed to effectively convey David's over-dependence and entitlement to the degree where I could buy into him hitting on Lana. This is unforgivable when the episode is so slow-paced. I also was baffled by David's decision to kill Cliff's family. Was he really so far gone that he felt like he had to do this? I couldn't believe that David was so willing to blow up Cliff's life, especially considering that David was technically living a significant part of his life as well. These are key emotional moments in David's character arc, and I felt like they were unearned and difficult to connect with. The premise of this episode is marred by one enormous plot hole. If repairs on the space shuttle are only required once in a while, why wouldn't the replicas be sent to space instead of the humans? Surely it would be much cheaper and more feasible to send robots to space and let the humans remain back with their families. I can't find any answer to explain this plot hole, and it unfortunately destroys the entire premise because this situation is no longer feasible. The Unknown: What's next for David and Cliff? Will they attack each other or will they somehow keep things civil? It's hard to see a world where they get through their job together, but you never know. Best Moment: David crying out in the woods was incredibly well acted by Aaron Paul and devastating. Character of the Episode: David. Conclusion: This episode was the most emotionally heavy and horrific of this season, but unfortunately it is too slow paced, inconsistently written, and it has an enormous plot hole. The result is a disappointing episode that should have been much better. Score: 57
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Aaron DhillonJust a university student who loves to watch TV. And analyze it way too much. Archives
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