Memory torture: Jenny has done a Very Bad Thing. She didn’t mean to though, it all happened so fast. There but for the grace of *insert deity of choice” go any one of us?

Constance Wu portrays Jenny, a woman on the edge. Something awful has happened, we know it’s the worst day of her life, but it’s initially a guessing game, as we try to imagine what it might be.

There are no holds barred in terms of the explicit nature of Jenny’s recollections, particularly her feelings for her neighbour, allegedly the sexiest man alive, his impossible perfect partner and their kid who annoyingly runs out to greet her in the shared driveway of their houses. We learn of her desire to be a mother and how her hopes are dashed while over-indulging at a toddler’s birthday party. Ouch, that’s got to hurt – so has bleeding in front of everyone at that party while having a breakdown. All of this is so very relevant as the tragedy is unveiled.

The final 2 minutes of the episode provide the (tenuous) link to the sci-fi genre as we learn that Jenny is in a coma and having her memory ‘uploaded’ for ‘donation’. It’s the only jarring point in the narrative for me because, as one of the technicians tending to her unconscious form says: “who would want that memory?”

The bitter pill to swallow in these closing moments is the judgemental, dismissive, and disgusted way in which Jenny is described and written off by said technicians, and the way in which it’s so easy to imagine ourselves passing such a swift judgement on one of our fellow humans. However, we’ve spent the episode with Jenny, hearing the horrifying experience of accidental murder from the perspective of the perpetrator, so even though the act was terrible, having walked in her shoes, we… dare I say it… sympathise? Jenny is condemned outright and ‘left to sit’ with her torturous memory.  Locked inside her mind, reliving how it felt to kill a child with her car while over the limit.

I’ll let you sit with that.

Verdict: An essay on overwhelming guilt and pain and how it feels to relive something you can never make right. 8/10

Claire Smith