OK, this episode was... not bad? Not great. Not surprising. Not really saying anything new or novel. But it had a point. It wasn't just weird shit happening for no reason. It may have been repeating things that have been said before, but at least it was saying something.
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| The camera is magic. |
The protagonist is Nina, mother of Dorian. The two of them are eating breakfast and Nina is filming Dorian, documenting the trip to drop him off at uni. Then a cop walks in and it is instantly obvious that the cop is going to shoot Dorian. It would probably qualify as a twist if that didn't happen, and this episode has no twist.
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| Wait, isn't it the younger generation who are supposedly filming everything instead of living in the present? |
Nina is fucking around with the camera and hits the rewind button, which causes time itself to rewind. No one is aware of this but her, so she's able to undo events and try to change things. Obviously they get into a confrontation with the cop, so she rewinds and tries again. And although things go differently the confrontation always happens somewhere.
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| No ambiguity here, the cop is unpleasant in both appearance and manner at all times. |
This is where the subplot about family comes in. Nina hasn't seen her brother, Neil, in years because of a falling out she had with their father about going to university herself. Dorian wants to visit him on the way but she won't allow it, until she tries every other route to get there and they all fail. So they go see Neil and he helps sneak them to the university.
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| Neil conveniently knows all sorts of secret passages and sneaky alleyways. |
But the cop shows up there anyway, and they confront him again - only this time there are a bunch of other people around with phones, and so the cop is forced to back down. And then we basically just get the moral delivered to us in dialogue in case we couldn't follow along - it's harder to get away with abusing power when people can see and record what you're doing, basically. Although the cop does point out that he would probably get away with it anyway, he does back down when it's clear that the other cops present aren't going to support him.
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| Add caption |
And then we jump forward ten years. Nina has been obsessively recording Dorian and his daughter, Trinity, with the magic camera. But then Trinity breaks the camera and Nina is forced to confront the fact that she can't protect them from everything and magic won't solve your problems. Which I guess is making the point that cameras won't save you. Abuse of power still happens and, like the cop said, they still get away with it. No solution is offered, it's pretty much just a statement: this is what the situation is and it's bad. Recording it helps, but it's not a solution. Fair enough, I guess, but it felt a bit weak to me.
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| She recovers remarkably quickly from the loss of a literal magic time machine. |
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