Episodic Classics: Enlightened, "The Ghost Is Seen" & "All I Ever Wanted"| Season 2, Episodes 5 & 6
Two brilliant episodes raise the stakes for everyone
“Follow Me” saw Amy Jellicoe at her most manically messianic. And Amy’s not a messiah. The gap between Amy’s, well, enlightened singularity of purpose and vision after her stint in rehab and her inability to wedge this inflated version of herself back into grimy everyday life often tips Enlightened into the most uncomfortable sort of cringe comedy. We watch Amy fixing her zealous altruism on a point so far and so high that her actual self lurches from one painful interaction after another, her single-minded righteousness exposing Amy’s blind spots even as her steamroller attack on the corrupt old world gathers momentum.
It’s such a difficult balance Mike White and Laura Dern are striking, and there are times when Amy at her most glassy-eyed verges on a caricature of dilettantism and white privilege. The first of this week’s episodes is almost all that in fact, as we see Amy mainly through the eyes of her unlikely accomplice in corporate sabotage Tyler. And then, once En…