I was way behind with everything on Friday morning, but I decided to use it to check out “Our Lady of the Machine.” Boy, was I glad I did.
Definitely an improvement over last week’s episode, more focused, more logical, and with a delightfully multi-layered storyline. I’m not a fan of stories that ridicule religion, but this tale did not do any such thing. In fact, it respected the basic tenets of religion more than most shows would do in the present day.
We begin with a man dressed like a stereotypical monk, asking a businessman for money allegedly for his Church. The businessman refuses. The monk goes outside and presses his fancy watch announcing with a smirky attitude, “We have a nonbeliever.” Thus, we see right away that he is no religious man - just a shakedown artist. The businessman, however, then sees a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The writers are careful never to pervert this sacred religious figure. She never says or does anything threatening but speaks simple thoughts about helping others. The businessman isn’t fooled: he knows this is a hologram and has a barrier that should scramble the signal. But the “image” of Mary reaches through the barrier, physically touching and embracing him. The effect is lethal to him.
Enter the main character, a police detective of the future ironically named Angel despite the fact that he is a nonbeliever. He is also an Intuit, meaning that he created Turbo Tax. No, it actually means he can anticipate people moves and has a sense of whether they are lying or telling the truth – so much so that some people think he can read minds. He knows the details of what happened and is sure it is a tactile hologram, something that would take a large amount of power to generate. Having seen other shows where people seemingly enter a virtual reality world and have no trouble interacting or even having sex with computer-generated characters, it’s refreshing to see this story admit that even having a hologram just appear to touch you would be very difficult to achieve.
To be certain that the Blessed Mary he saw on the recordings could not possibly be real, Angel goes to see a genuine priest. The scene showing the priest clearly reaching out to help other people and both characters discussing the Virgin Mary with utmost respect demonstrates that religion is still alive and well in this future. The priest assures Angel that Mary is a religious figure of the greatest magnitude, a symbol or forgiveness and grace, and could never harm anyone even unintentionally.
Angel goes undercover as another businessman and he is approached by the same monk. He tells him a story that is apparently true or partly true that he had a mother who was a true churchgoer and always reached out to help people. But one of the people she had helped came back for more and tried to rob them. His mother ended up dead, and Angel stopped believing in a God that wouldn’t help a good person like his mother. It’s a familiar and all-too-true tale of someone losing his faith when God appears to have abandoned them. Unfortunately, religion is not something that will keep you from never being harmed; it’s something that helps you get through the trials and tragedies you will eventually have in your life. Shortly after his refusal, he too receives a visit from Blessed Mary. But unlike the previous mark, he is not harmed. She tells him he has a pain that he is suffering from and she touches his chest. Earlier on, he had admitted to someone else that he was having a phantom pain in his chest since the day his mother was killed. Doctors have examined it and found no cause for it. Though he doesn’t say anything about it until much later, it is clear from his reactions that the Virgin’s touch has taken away the pain.
The con artist from earlier in the show is captured and unsurprisingly he has been using an alias and his real identity has a long rap sheet. He cooperates enough to tell Angel how to get in touch with the man he works for, by mixing in with his “clergy.” He also learns of a man, now dead, who was working on creating a hologram image of the Virgin Mary to try to do good for the world. Angel suspects someone else took the software and turned it into something sinister. Following the con artist’s instructions he mixes in and is able to follow the man down to his secret lair where there is a massive computer complex. He also finds the supposedly dead creator of the program alive but being held captive. He tries to escape with him, but is caught by the leader. After being beaten up, he is reminded of the night of his mother’s attack. He realizes it was his own Intuit powers that failed him that night. He was the one who couldn’t protect his mother – not God. Left alone afterward, he remembers what he heard about the original intention of the program. He prays to the Virgin Mary and she appears before him. He tells her she must have a replicator program somewhere in case she is destroyed. He convinces her to prove herself by activating it. She activates the program replicating her image, yet still saying that she is the one and only Virgin Mary. This is enough to create havoc in the computer program, shorting the computer out long enough for him to get free and for the rest of his force to break in and capture the bad guys. Confusing the computer’s logic circuits – works every time. Meanwhile, the man who subverted the program is hugged by the hologram and collapses. Did he die from his own tampering with the program, or merely collapse unconscious? Doesn’t really matter either way – that’s left open to the viewer to decide.
The hologram’s creator destroys the program – not wanting to see it subverted for evil purposes again. Angel admits that the fact that the hologram disappeared after the first victim started to die was done so that she could not see that she had harmed anyone, which would have destroyed the program. But Angel admits that Mary’s touch did take his pain away, and he had never told her the spot that the pain came from, but she had touched it anyway. God didn’t create the hologram of Mary, but maybe he had used it for a good purpose. Angel starts to believe again.
I used to read science fiction short stories when I was young, and this reminded me of some that I had read as I watched this. I could almost picture the description of when the businessman first sees the hologram of the Blessed Virgin. This story gets 9 futures that are thankfully not all dystopian like last week’s episode was.
