Episodic Classics: Enlightened, "The Key" & "Revenge Play"| Season 2, Episodes 1 & 2
As Season 2 begins, Amy's got the goods but the world's not sure it wants them
Welcome back to our Episodic Classics coverage of HBO dramedy Enlightened, which aired its second season eleven years ago in 2013. With White’s White Lotus still a year out, Dennis Perkins returns to the beat to conclude the show’s two-season run over the next two weeks. Reviews will arrive on Thursdays and Tuesdays through 1/29. You can find more about our Winter 2024 schedule here.
Mike White must have been surprised as anyone when his tough-sell comedy drama Enlightened got a second season pickup from HBO in 2012. The reliably cringe-inducing crusade of Laura Dern’s disgraced and vocally reborn corporate executive Amy Jellicoe to first reform then bring down monolithic Abaddon Industries relentlessly rewarded its sparse viewership with a maddeningly uncompromising takedown of both unchecked capitalist abuse and unexamined altruism, and even the weekly spectacle of the towering Dern inhabiting such a fascinatingly complex character was hardly the stuff ratings magic was made of.
But here Enlighted returns, along with Episodic Medium’s perhaps equally improbable continued coverage of this, the series’ second and final season. Amy, with what she views as Abaddon’s smoking gun in hand in the form of all the company’s incriminating in-house emails, seeks to go scorched earth on a culture where she’d first thrived then spectacularly flamed out. Naturally, Amy finds that her inner clarity of purpose and the messy reality of the world rarely sync, leaving her flailing for purpose—and allies.
“The Key”
“Honestly, there’s a lot of crazy stuff that’s probably gonna go down…”
When we last saw Amy Jellicoe, she was aflame. All of Abaddon Industries’ top secret emails in her hands, Amy envisioned torching her employer’s skyscraper to the ground with the searing power of undeniable truth and righteousness (and actual fire). As Season 2 of Enlightened begins, Amy finds out, again, that real life isn’t that simple.
It’s all in Amy’s opening narration, as Laura Dern imbues Amy’s vision for a righted universe in terms of overthrown castles, broken spells, and magic keys that set the world free. “Would you use it?,” Amy asks rhetorically about the magic key represented by Tyler’s backdoor into Abaddon’s treasure trove of dirty laundry, replying with certainty, “You’d have to use it.” And so she does. And reality dashes Amy’s single-minded will into pieces.
It’s true that Amy, the former Abaddon up-and-comer laid low by personal demons and corporate malfeasance, has accomplished a startling amount from her lowly desk in the mighty company’s lowest basement. Through her steamroller tactics and Abaddon’s foolish surety that their former executive has been well and truly humbled, Amy Jellicoe has secured a cache of inter-company communiques proving not only the mega-corporation’s habitual kickbacks and skimming, but its skirting of health and environmental regulations, and workers’ rights. What’s most galling to the post-rehab Amy is that, according to the emails she clutches in white-knuckled fury, nobody among her former Abaddon higher-up colleagues gives a damn.
“That’s not the sickest part,” Amy scream-whispers to Tyler at their outdoor lunch among the upstairs employees, “They don’t care, Tyler!” As ever, we’re left to parse our responses to Amy’s vehemence here, series creator and writer Mike White weighing Amy’s essential rightness on the issue of corporate greed and indifference against this newly “enlightened” former sinner’s unwillingness to consider either the practicalities or the ramifications of her proposed, scorched-earth solutions. White’s exquisitely hapless Tyler, meanwhile, can only offer up the squirmy defiance of the perpetual pawn. His desire to stay out of trouble (the terror in Tyler’s eyes when he raises the very real spectacle of going to jail is palpable) is only overcome once Amy drops the bomb that her corporate delving has shown that his job, along with Amy’s and everyone else’s at Cogentiva, will be unceremoniously terminated once their ruthless worker efficiency project can be operated by “one fat guy in an office somewhere.”
And so Amy goes in search of her white knight. First seen tearing the front page out of mom Helen’s morning paper with a half-apology, Amy tracks down the L.A. Times reporter Jeff Flender, the city’s resident muckraker of corporate corruption. In her phone conversations with Flender (and/or his answering service), Amy displays all the confident circumspection of Deep Throat, assuring Tyler upon heading into a clandestine meeting with the reporter that she could be meeting with “a Woodward or a Bernstein.”
In truth, Flender—played with typical rumpled forthrightness by Dermot Mulroney—is, in Mike White fashion, less and more than Amy’s conception. Indeed a dedicated journalistic crusader against the one percent, Flender is nonetheless deeply skeptical of this wild-eyed woman who attempts to extort a promise of front page coverage in the state’s paper of record before she even hands over her yet-unseen documents. Bowing to the curious but wary reporter’s assurance of at least a serious evaluation of the info, Amy’s self-important pronouncement “that’s me passing the baton to you” is met with Flender’s crumpled smile of a guy weighing the pros and cons of dealing with someone obviously ready to blow.
All impatience, Amy finally extorts a follow-up meeting at Flender’s tidy L.A. apartment (after dragooning Tyler to chauffeur her there and then wait in the car). Greeted by a distracted and shirtless Flender on the phone about his upcoming assignment in Dubai, Amy goggles at her chosen champion’s writer’s pad, asking after the photograph of a beaming Flender and an older man she assumes is his grandfather. “That’s Noam Chomsky,” Flender explains to the uncomprehending Amy. And then the intrepid corporate reporter drops the hammer.
“Are you freaking out?,” asks Amy, expectantly. Jeff Flender is not freaking out. Assessing the bulging envelope filled with Amy’s hopes and dreams, Flender (not unkindly) explains that while it’s true that the company’s executives are engaging in shady dealing and finding ways to squeeze every penny out of an underpaid, over-scrutinized workforce, and essentially laughing all the way to their stuffed bank accounts, Abaddon is merely the capitalist norm. Flender saying “it’s immoral, unethical, disgusting—but not illegal” lands on the fired-up Amy like an avalanche, and his followup question about Amy’s personal motives in seeking revenge only raises her temperature more. Still, as Flender notes to stop the furious Amy from storming away, there’s a bigger story at Abaddon—one they can work to uncover together.
Of course, that means more exposure for Tyler. Trying to convince him, Amy points out the ticking clock (Cogentiva is set for the chop in two short weeks) but it’s not enough. It’s in their final confrontation in Tyler’s sensible little car that Amy and Tyler’s unequal but equally desperate dynamic plays out in heartbreaking fashion.
Amy’s crusade slights everyone, even as she assumes her universal beneficence sweeps aside others’ qualms and complaints about being tools in Amy Jellicoe’s greater mission. Nobody gets it worse than Tyler, the meek office drone whose lonely need for connection wars every moment with his breathless fear of being noticed. White makes Tyler’s position as Amy’s quarter-willing sidekick as much a result of his inability to resist Amy’s own will as his curiosity about how this beautiful weirdo’s madness will serve his own thwarted needs.
In his car, the confused Amy tries to parse just how her meeting with Flender went, and makes her pitch. Amy reacts to Tyler’s waffling with a speech as utterly, painfully sincere as it is festooned with red flags. “I’m just tired of feeling small,” the tearful Amy tells Tyler: “For two minutes there, I left like something—not just dead and plastic and numb. Oh god, I really don’t want to go back to being nothing, do you?”
And therein lies Amy Jellicoe. Once Tyler (after White makes the conflicted little man’s response, “I don’t know anything else,” land like a sandbag to the head) agrees to throw in with Amy’s plan once more, Amy Jellicoe ends the episode as she began it. With the beautiful, tragic poetry of one grasping for desperate clarity.
This kingdom
This amazing kingdom we have made
This monstrous kingdom
Its castles are magic
They are beautiful
They are built on dreams and iron
And greed
They are inorganic and cannot sustain
No kingdom lasts forever
Even this will end
And life and earth will reign again.
As Amy’s woozy vision of a city of glorious, cold skyscrapers rises to reveal the sea turtle that’s come to represent her concept of a true and just world, we’re left to contemplate the seeming futility of Amy’s dream. Enlightened puts dreams on trial for their impractical notions of goodwill and justice, even as it sits in pained and sympathetic judgement of Amy Jellicoe’s aching need to make things right. For everyone. For everything. Forever.
“Revenge Play”
“This is our chance, people don’t get these.”
“The Key” started the engine on Season 2, and “Revenge Play” sees Amy Jellicoe’s plan lurch right into its first victim.
After an energizing planning meeting with reporter Jeff Flender at the jazz club owned by a pal of his (as Flender notes offhandedly), Amy has a dream. It’s of a quartet of jet black SUVs descending on Abaddon, the cars disgorging Amy alongside a cadre of sharp-dressed, conspicuously non-white agents whose purposeful strides send the cornered executives literally screaming in terror. Amy watches in grim triumph as everyone, including Abaddon’s chair, Charles Szidon (the late James Rebhorn) is led away in handcuffs, her resolve only shaken upon seeing Sarah Burns’ very pregnant Krista begging for her help as she’s whisked away in the descending elevator.
Mike White, who directed the episode, pitches events high and builds comic momentum and tension relentlessly throughout “Revenge Play.” Mark Mothersabugh’s score segues early on from the mournful loveliness that usually accompanies Amy’s opening narration to an accelerating martial cadence that peaks once the reality of Amy’s initial salvo against Abaddon has drawn first blood. Or rather, Amy and Tyler’s salvo, as Tyler’s ambivalence at the end of “The Key” kicks over into unnervingly gleeful vindictiveness.
Amy’s dream is Mike White at his most savagely funny, her psyche transforming the shushing patrons of the jazz club into her own personal army of Black righteousness, her former colleagues’ abject humiliation the pinnacle of her own moral victory. Looking back on that meeting, we can see some grubby realities—Flender, who has indeed been working on a story about Szidon bribing a senator to cover up an Abaddon chemical spill, sneers in his telling like a college sophomore in ethics class. He also couches his further entreaty to Amy and the worried Tyler in terms he knows will resonate with Amy’s fevered worldview. (In Flender’s pitch, Abaddon is the “dark empire” and Szidon is Darth Vader.)
Here, White’s thesis statement is writ comically large. Is Abaddon almost certainly evil? Yes. Is Dermot Mulroney’s ambitious reporter manipulating a clearly susceptible and over-her-head source in Amy? Yes. As Amy muses to herself, “Of course the world is vast and complex. You can reflect your whole life away and what have you done? Nothing.” Called on her muddled motivations by the panicky Tyler, Amy assures her waffling partner that everyone at Cogentiva would be behind them if they knew what she knows. Tyler is uncertain, and so are we. And we’re both right.
Consequences land quicker than Amy or Tyler could have imagined, as the next morning Amy worries mom Helen by whispering through a call from the freaked out Tyler, explaining that Abaddon IT is coming in to examine everyone’s computers. They know about the security breach. “Whatever, we’re fucked!,” we hear Tyler’s voice through the receiver, with Amy hurriedly and unconvincingly reassuring Helen that of course she’s not “up to something funny” before rushing out the door.
The IT crew is indeed checking everyone’s terminals when Amy arrives, and Amy is only more alarmed at Tyler’s uncharacteristically glowing assurance that’s he’s “taken care of everything.” Mike White makes Tyler’s self-regard genuinely unsettling. Maybe it’s because it’s the first time we’ve seen the usually downtrodden office drone take pleasure in hurting someone else. At first we watch anxiously along with Amy as each of Cogentiva’s variously unimpressive employees undergo scrutiny. When Amy sees the IT guys circle the immediately terrified Omar’s desk and bring their findings to Dougie, Tyler’s continued smug triumph looks more and more grotesque on his leering mug.
“Revenge Play” sets us up just as Tyler does Omar, giving the irascible Omar his longest and most entertaining appearance to date just before the shit goes down. Sure, he—in the manner of all Jason Mantzoukas creations—is weird and crude and humorously offputting as he sighs in relief that the secretive Amy and Tyler are not, as he’d speculated, hooking up. After referring to the abashed Tyler as “a little albino man” compared to the beautiful Amy, Omar offhandedly rambles that “in my country, somebody with this skin tone is considered like a devil and is killed as a child,” before happily heading back to work as Dougie’s second-in command. There’s a secondary fake out as well, with Bayne Gibby’s insufferably pious Connie asking after Amy’s well being and offering to pray with her for a sick friend’s misfortune. (More about that in a bit.)
But in the end, it’s the innocent but convenient Omar who takes the fall, Tyler explaining to a shocked Amy that he’d “killed two birds with one stone” by switching Amy’s hard drive for Omar’s. Tyler’s not wrong—Omar is Dougie’s watchful snitch, and framing him lifts suspicion from Amy and Tyler. Tyler’s smirk at his own deviousness is also belied by Amy’s subsequent misgivings, as she muses at the sight of Omar’s stripped workstation, “Everyone can be wicked. Everyone can feel pain? Who am I fighting for?”
That conflict only deepens in the episode’s side-plot, when Amy sees an ambulance whisk the pregnant Krista away from Abaddon, her rushed flight to her former friend’s side thwarted by the closing ambulance doors. Echoes of her dream see Amy asking Connie if bad intentions can manifest in bad outcomes (Connie smugly proclaims that God’s will will take care of all that), and a harried approach to Krista’s hospital room sees her further thwarted by Michaela Watkins’ acidly dismissive Janice.
When Amy finally does get in to see the wary Krista (who’d had a dangerous stress-related seizure at work), the interaction is nearly as cringe-inducing as Amy’s bum-rush of Krista’s baby shower. Despite Krista’s patient explanation that now is not the time to get into anything remotely stressful, Amy simply can’t help but try to reframe the sundered relationship in pleadingly self-exonerating terms, with Krista once again forced to slam on the brakes.
Amy Jellicoe contains multitudes, and no one in there comes off unscathed under Mike White’s unflinching gaze. Amy is messed up and incomplete, just like everyone. Amy has latched onto not just a fix, but the fix, and fixing herself and fixing the entire world are inextricably bound. Amy cares so deeply about doing right for everyone that individual collateral damage must be rationalized, swept past, or forgotten before it can blunt her resolve. Amy is right that the world is cold, venal, and unjust, and that it needs correction. And Amy will be the one to correct it all—or no one will.
The show cannily glides over all this moral chaos on the peerless sonorousness and persuasiveness of Amy’s episodic voiceovers. Staring at the empty desk where the fired Omar sat until a few hours previous, Amy intones to herself, “They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. My intentions are good. My intentions are so good.” She almost sounds convinced.
Stray observations
A sudden power outage just as Tyler and Amy are photocopying some incriminating documents sees the pair scurrying out of Abaddon and proving hilariously bad at lying to the security guards investigating the malfunction.
Amy is much better later when a coworker-interrupted secret phone call to Flender sees her drop the fact of where she works in order to firm up the reporter’s curiosity.
“He’s sitting on a powder keg that could blow the country of America wide open and he’s busy? I don’t think so.” Amy has no time for Tyler’s understandable doubts concerning Jeff Flender’s enthusiasm for their leak.
Jason Mantzoukas gives Omar a second little grace note as he meets Amy in the parking lot, his meager workplace effects in a box under his arm. “Good luck with your side business,” he offers to the contrite Amy, who barely remembers the lie she’d told him about Tyler setting up a crafting website for her.
Omar also brings up the specter of him, a post 9/11 Arab-American, being blamed for espionage as evidence of corporate racism. Which, fair enough, even if we saw how Omar’s hair-trigger, computer smashing temper escalated his proposed without-pay suspension to an immediate shit-canning on the spot.