Mara’s chance encounter with another Reverie via a glitch in her own leads the team to investigate the apparently wrongful arrest of a young boy by the government, who may be using Reverie for more than they had previously disclosed.

Reverie gets a little political this week, with an episode following the arrest of a young man from Syria by the government who believe he’s a terrorist. Mara’s chance encounter with the young man, springing from an apparently random glitch in the Reverie which crosses her IP with that of the Reverie in which the young man is being interrogated, leads to the whole team having some awkward questions about exactly what that military funding they rely on might be buying.

For Mara of course, it’s a no-brainer. Trained as she is, and with her experience and personality, she’s determined to believe that the prisoner is innocent, and equally determined that she needs to try and rescue him. It adds another fascinating spin on the central premise, because the young man himself – Ehmet – has no idea he’s not in the real world. Instead of Mara trying to persuade someone who knows they’re in a dream world that they need to leave, she has to persuade someone that they are in a dream world at all, and that’s made more difficult by the specific nature of the Reverie he’s in.

In the real world, Alexis and Charlie have some hard questions for Monica Shaw about the exact uses to which the government and the military are putting the Reverie programme. Shaw merely directs them to the man in charge of the interrogation and again we’re left with the shrug that the military own 30% of OniraTech, and so what they do with the Reverie is their concern. Alexis’s concerns run beyond mere pride – lesser brains than hers taking the programme down paths she’s left unexplored risk doing permanent damage to the subject on a mental level.

In terms of the political themes it’s addressing, the show does little more than flirt with them. In fairness, it does give a bit of an extended backstory about Ehmet and his brother and family, and their experience as refugees who fled violence in their homeland to make it to the US, but it approaches everything in fairly simple, broad strokes. Ehmet is automatically assumed innocent, he and his brother speak immaculate English thanks to a father who studied at a US college, and the show ultimately becomes more about Mara’s own journey as she relates to the experience of Ehmet and how it (in her mind) mirrors her own trauma and her way of dealing with it. It’s a soft sci-fi show so you don’t expect hard politics, and therefore to say this element of proceedings is disappointing would be unfair, but it can’t help but feel slightly like an opportunity missed.

Still, it is a nice twist on the formula once again, and it explores a little more about both its central protagonist and OniraTech as a whole, as well as its relationship with the authorities. Once again, the credit goes equally to the earnestness of the performances as it does to the writing, but I can’t help but feel that it just could and should have been a little better.

Verdict: Decent ideas which aren’t really utilised to their full potential. It’s not bad, just not as good as it might have been. 7/10

Greg D. Smith