Well, I thought I was getting a week off here but Mad-Pac posted the next episode and sent me a copy so I managed to watch two episodes in one weekend. The good news is it was totally worth it. This episode was hands down the best episode of the series so far – a solid premise, good acting, and a plot that moved along steadily to a satisfying conclusion.
The premise was the idea of erasing people’s memories – the painful, traumatic or embarrassing ones people would rather forget. That’s something all of us can relate to. I can think of a few memories I’d love to forget forever. I even once had a similar story idea to this one years ago, but never did put it in writing. Here, Dr. Ovid Brazil has found a way to erase unpleasant memories. He has the patient write it down, pointing out that the hand and the brain are in sync and writing the memory down helps his device locate the spot on the brain where the memory is stored. From there it is erased. Dr. Brazil is so successfully that he is late coming home one day because he had so many patients to process. When he arrives home, he finds his wife brutally murdered. Feeling guilty about not being there, and lost without her in his life, Ovid buries himself in his work.
All goes well for the first 100 patients or so, until one of them frantically demands his memory back. Ovid has him read back the writing from earlier but the revised memory and the connected emotions come back with such force that he is traumatized, possibly permanently. The doctor escapes a lawsuit and is discharged but he still believes in his system and decides to use it on his own.
He starts a clinic near an international bazaar. He perks the interest of a young man named Rudy, who turns out to have a gift for fixing things and wants to be able to help out since he can see people’s lives are being improved here. Ovid even explains that he has solved the earlier problem: instead of having the person read back their own memory, he reads it back to them making it less traumatic. He himself runs the risk of a traumatic injury if he breaks the connection in midstream.
Again, thing are going well until Frank Daskin shows up. He looks like trouble right from the start. He has several memories he wants to rid himself of but starts with one. The next day one of Ovid's former clients Rwanda, who had a memory of an attempted rape erased, returns needing to have it replaced. But Frank bursts in and demands that he remove the rest of his memories right now, as eliminating one of them just magnified all the other ones. Dr. Brazil leaves Rudy to complete Rwanda’s process so he can take care of Frank. Rudy discovers two truths – one that Rwanda killed her attempted rapist in self-defense and the other that the person who reads back the memories absorbs the emotions of the memory – leaving the client with her memory back but no trauma. Ovid assures him that the emotions will wear off in time; he has absorbed many himself. Rudy decides he’s had enough of the place, and leaves, but not before telling him that people like Frank shouldn’t be helped. “A guy like that deserves his memories,” he declares, “who are you to let him off the hook?”
Ovid is disturbed as to how Frank knew about his practice out there. Frank told him his former colleague Dr. Newman told him about it. He goes back to Dr. Newman and she confirms the story. He admits to her that he is losing touch with what’s right and wrong. He is genuinely remorseful about letting Rudy read to Rwanda without really warning him of the consequences. Meanwhile, Frank returns to Dr. Newman trying to retrace his steps – realizing that he’s lost some memories but not sure what and why. He comes across Rwanda who remembers him being at the clinic. He returns demanding that Dr. Brazil return his memories. He begins to do so, and we find out that Frank was the one who murdered his wife – all because he lusted after her and was angry that she already had a husband whom she loved. Rudy finds Rwanda upset over the incident and puts two and two together. He gets to the clinic before Ovid can complete the reading and gently pulls the glasses off of him. The connection broken, Franks gets the full trauma of what he did and either dies or goes insane - good riddance eother way. Ovid is not traumatized likely because it was not he who removed the glasses.
There are actually two endings here. The first immediately after the above has Rudy telling the doctor it wasn’t his fault about Frank. “Now all I have to do is live with it,” Ovid declares guiltily. But then later on, we see Rudy guiding Dr. Brazil through the memory process. The doctor looks at his own special pen and asks what it is. “Just junk,” Rudy assures him, leaving him free of his guilty memories and off to lead a hopefully happier life. The host is a little off the mark at the end, declaring the lesson was about what you become when you lose your memories – but it really wasn’t. Not a problem, though. This episode earns a solid 10 fortune-telling birds, which really didn’t seem to tell anyone’s fortune but was a good connector for the characters and incidents in the story. I’d love to read the original short story this was based on someday, as I suspect this would turn out to be a faithful adaptation of it. It played like a genuine sci-fi short story.
By the way, it wouldn’t have mattered last week if I had known what episode was next, as neither “Hemeac” nor “All Our Sins Forgiven” was available on YouTube. They have mostly the earlier episodes which we’ve seen, although they do have a copy of the upcoming “Options.”
When Frank came across Rudy after his traumatic effect from reading Rwanda’s memory back, he said, “Man, you look like…” but I couldn’t make out the rest. I tried replaying it but it didn’t help. Could anyone else make out what the line was?
