Episodic Classics: Enlightened, "Lonely Ghosts" & "Comrades Unite!"| Season 1, Episodes 7 & 8
Amy finds her cause, and Abaddonn is in trouble
As Enlightened heads down the back stretch of its first season (and with no guarantee at the time of a second) Episodes 7 and 8 see Mike White refocus on the conflict viewers were led to believe would be central—Amy Jellicoe’s inevitable collision with Abaddonn. If the series’ first episodes promised a dark cringe comedy about a formerly hard-nosed businesswoman rampaging back into her unwelcoming old company armed to the teeth with a nebulous but implacable sense of moral righteousness, Enlightened quickly broadened into a dissection of one of the most infuriatingly fascinating characters in recent TV history.
Laura Dern’s Amy, unceremoniously warehoused in the Abaddonn basement alongside seemingly every unfortunate hire the company simply wants to disappear without any costly termination lawsuits, initially spent her sunless workdays dodging whatever work Cogentiva actually entailed. She instead used the office internet to plot either a way back up to her old, cloud-…