What I’m Watching: Enlightened

Enlightened: Season 1, Episode 9 “Consider Helen” (B)

The title of this half-hour is extremely fitting and entirely descriptive of its contents, taking the focus off Amy and looking instead at her mother, Helen, who we’ve seen be nothing but cruel to her daughter. It’s a brave effort for a series to disregard its main character and take up the story of someone that, to this point, has been given minimal screen time. It’s still quite thought-provoking and meaningful, but only seeing Amy twenty minutes in is going to make it a bit less interesting for the sake of the show as a whole. The reveal of what happened to Helen’s husband was particularly well-done, and this show knows how to be subtle and explicit at the same time. Running into her old friend in the supermarket gave Helen a chance to trumpet her daughter’s failures as if they were successful, talking up her position at Cogentiva as if she were in some fancy new department. Amy’s return at the end of the episode brought it all back into focus as she revealed its true nature to her mother. Defending her daughter against Levi was perhaps the episode’s strongest moment, and we haven’t seen Levi so passionate before since he seems incapable of expressing that same kind of rage directly to the woman who never seems to be able to let him out of her life. This was an interesting experiment, one the show should try again, but I hope to see more of Amy in next week’s season finale.