Reverie episode 2 review: She sees dead people

By the end of Reverie episode 2 one thing started to feel clear: Despite her job and her responsibilities, Mara was not any more immune from the reverie addiction than anyone else. She has the same regrets and longing from her past that she wants a fix for; yet, it’s so hard to fix anything when false hope is starting you right in the face.

For Mara, she finds that clearly in the spirit of her late niece, who was killed alongside her sister in a situation that still haunts her. She learned at the end of the pilot that her niece was haunting her in a way outside her reverie, but at the end of the episode she decided, in the midst of hearing what seemed to be laughter, that she wanted to summon the girl to figure out why she was there. She ignored Paul’s advice and decided to deliberately bring her forward for answers. This could be a problem — Mara’s invoking a possible side effect that could cause the niece to stick around forever in her mind, and that is very much a bad thing.

Unfortunately, this is not going to be healthy for her, largely in the way that the reveries themselves are unhealthy for many of the clients. How is this business going to avoid being shut down? The idea here is clearly to give clients an escape from their lives and to a certain extent, the program works — but it also works too well, really to the point where the clients don’t ever want to leave. They’re either content with being in their false reality or simply unaware of the serious health concerns that can crop up from being trapped in this particular place for too long. Either way, it’s far from good.

All of this was manifested this week in the case of Rachel a.k.a. Jane Bond, a woman who lived out a secret-agent fantasy that was designed, in her mind, in order for her to be able to see her father. Yet, this vision of her father was nothing more than a vision in her mind. He wasn’t able to offer her up any solace or answers as to what happened to him. It was an artificial high. To date, the only long-term benefit that the Reverie program seems to provide is Mara finding a way to sort out their problems. Here, she with the help of Charlie was able to locate Rachel’s father in real life so that she could have the family and the love that she was missing.

CarterMatt Verdict

Do we have questions as to how long a business like this can sustain with all of its problems? Sure, but we also do love the whole idea of Mara entering dreams every week and solving problems. It’s just such an imaginative way to watch a show and it feels at this point almost like a given that we’re going to enter Mara’s own reverie if the show lasts long enough. We also feel that way about Alexis, one of the architects of the company who is already living out her own reverie somewhat through the AI of her dead brother.

While Reverie may still need a little more expansion in terms of its reality, its dream worlds remain nothing short of astounding.

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