HBO Enlightened “The Key” #11 On a Mission

The season 2 of Enlightened premiered on Sunday January 13 on HBO. It’s officially named #11, “The Key.”

Amy Jellicoe (played by Laura Dern) is on a mission. She’s always on a mission of one sort of another. It is how she defines herself and gives her life meaning.

Her “partner-in-crime” is her co-worker, Tyler (played by Mike White). Amy usually manages to drag poor Tyler into her schemes.  For a lady who portrays an image of sweetness and light, she is quite a manipulator.

Amy has used Tyler’s password to hack into the email files of Abbadonn’s management.  She takes these files to a journalist, Jeff Lender (played by Dermont Mulroney) known for writing corporate exposés for the local newspaper. 

Amy’s dreams of bringing Abadonn down are crushed when Jeff tells her she has nothing. The emails show unethical and immoral behavior, but not anything illegal.  Jeff asks her if she is just on a mission for revenge. Amy says her mission is only to right wrongs.

Jeff tells Amy that she can be useful. Her access to the company’s electronic files can right wrongs. Abaddonn has been paying off government officials. Jeff’s mission is to use Amy to “blow the lid off” these secret pay-offs.  

Amy is tired of feeling small. She needs to do something to feel alive. She doesn’t want to go back to being nothing. Tyler on the other hand is something of a nebbish.  He doesn’t have much ambition, he doesn’t want much from life; he’s just a quiet guy who lives a quiet lonely life.  Maybe that is why Amy has so much power to manipulate him—she may be his only friend.

And that’s about it for this episode. Not much action—the episode is just setting the stage for the rest of the season. We will see some kind of relationship between Amy and Jeff, and we’ll see Amy’s adventures as a spy.

I hope we will be seeing more of Jeff.  He’s a hunk and a nice change from Amy’s ex-husband, Levi, the slacker.

A lot of time in this episode is spent on voice-over philosophy-ing.  There are lots of shots of skyscrapers glittering in the night and talk of “dreams and kingdoms and how this will end and life and earth will reign again.”  (The writers have apparently fallen into a bushel of metaphors.) And the final shot—the “guess-what- the-metaphor-means” moment of the week-- is a sea turtle swimming alone in the ocean.

Oh my little seas turtles—each of us swims alone in the sea of life.

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Amy's new squeeze--journalist Jeff Flender (played by Demont Mulrooney)