In this episode, a mother gives into her paranoia and allows her young child to serve as a test subject for an experimental new surveillance system. I found this episode to be kind of meandering and never quite sure of exactly where it wanted to go. At first, it seems like it’s going to be an episode about censorship as the mother locks in a permanent content blocker on her daughter; then it seems to shift to being about the way technology stunts emotional development; and then it finally settles back onto the over-protective parent theme. I felt there was something kind of interesting in all of those ideas, but the episode never really got at them in a meaningful way. I also don’t really like Rosemarie DeWitt’s central performance. Performances in this show always go for broke and she does too, so I’m not a hundred percent sure why it doesn’t work for me, but it didn’t. I did really like Brenna Harding as the teenaged daughter and I will admit that the final confrontation between mother and daughter at the end of the episode was very cathartic. I’m trying to analyze my reaction to this episode from the outside in a kind of weird way. I question if my kind of cool reaction has to do with the fact that I’m not a parent or, even more specifically, that I’m not a mother. I’ve certainly had very positive reactions to other things that related to those themes, so I think this episode probably has problems beyond my inability to access it. It is somewhat troubling to me that the first episode, outside of The Waldo Moment, that I’ve been really mixed on is an episode that has two women as the main characters and is also the first to be directed by a woman. Just checking my perspective, I guess, though, at the end of the day, I think the episode simply has some script problems and an off-putting central performance. Still, it’s not terrible by any stretch; it has plenty of ideas even if it doesn’t quite nail them in the execution. It’s my second least favorite, I’d say, after The Waldo Moment, but this episode isn’t anywhere near that bad. It’s just weak, I guess, and in a show this consistently superlative, even moderate weakness stands out. 2 ½ stars.
tl;dr – a meandering, unfocused script is further hampered by a weak central performance; still there are interesting ideas and a genuinely cathartic ending, but this one is pretty weak overall. 2 ½ stars.