Reverie Review: Apertus (Season 1 Episode 1)

Pilots are notoriously messy things. So, it probably shouldn’t surprise you that Reverie Season 1 Episode 1 Apertus is…mediocre at best. But you should also remember — that doesn’t necessarily make it bad.

In fact, the series’ premise is interesting enough that the show probably deserves a bit of leeway, just to see what it can become.

On paper at least, Reverie looks extremely promising. It’s a drama with a distinctly dystopian feel, but it’s not as bleak as Black Mirror or as complicated as Mr. Robot.

The story follows Mara Kint, a former hostage negotiator turned college professor who gets recruited by a technology company that specializes in a very unique virtual reality program.

Called Reverie, it allows users to basically create a waking dream of their own design. In this virtual reality, you can go anywhere you want, relive favorite memories, even spend time with lost loved ones, as long as they existed somewhere in your social media footprint.

REVERIE — Pilot  — (Photo by: Sergei Bachlakov/NBC)

Happily, Sarah Shahi is instantly appealing in this role, which anyone who ever watched Person of Interest or Fairly Legal probably could have predicted.

She infuses the character with intelligence, kindness and a genuine determination to help others. And Mara, of course, has secrets of her own.

It’s pretty standard for any protagonist on a show like this to have some kind of dark or mysterious past, and Reverie is no different. In Mara’s case it’s the horrific tragedy that caused her to switch careers: The brutal murder of her sister and niece, and her failure to save them.

(Maybe let’s just not talk about the advisability of anyone with Mara’s personal history getting clearance to muck about in people’s minds, okay?)

This twist perhaps hints that Reverie will be willing to eventually explore some darker sorts of spaces in the future. But ultimately, this show appears to be about catharsis, rather than nihilism.

Maybe some optimism is precisely what TV needs right now. The show’s hopeful tone manages to feel fresh and interesting in our current dark television landscape.

The show’s sci-fi procedural set-up allows the story to be told in digestible bites, while still leaving room for overarching characters arcs and larger mysteries. (Does Mara have a psychiatric disorder? What’s Onira Tech trying to cover up?)

Plus, the show looks beautiful. Sure, it’s not quite The Matrix or Inception in terms of special effects, but its virtual reality setting leaves a lot of room for creativity and whimsy. (Everyone’s mental landscape is unique after all.)

In short, there’s a lot of potential here.

However, as pilots go, this one is aggressively bland. That’s because the hour is jam-packed full of explanation, exposition and vaguely high-tech lingo that’s ostensibly meant to show us all how edgy and modern this series is going to be.

There’s a whole lot of talking about how you can retrain your brain to ignore pain sensors and fear responses. There are limits and protocols and things the system isn’t mean to sustain.

The show’s insistence on spending half of its first hour beating viewers over the head with technical jargon doesn’t exactly mesh with its later focus on emotion, either. Because the science fiction isn’t really the point.

Despite its fancy futuristic trappings, Reverie appears to be a story about heart as much as technology.

Yes, this week Mara must enter the virtual reality dreamscape of a particular user named Tony. But she doesn’t get him out by outsmarting the program he’s using.

Instead, she focuses on the emotional explanation for why he doesn’t want to leave his virtual world in the first place. (It’s because he needs to say goodbye to the wife he lost in a car crash.)

Reverie seems well positioned to explore the intersection of empathy and technology, of what we give up when we focus so firmly on the virtual worlds that exist on our screens instead of each other.

Whether or not the show can leave up to that promise is something the coming weeks will have to bear out.

The pieces for a great show are all there, though, and sometimes you can’t ask for a whole lot more in a pilot. See you next week.

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• Seriously, Onira Tech is smart enough to build virtual worlds that can recreate your life down to the dumbest Facebook update and no one thought to figure out a plan for what to do if people didn’t want to leave? I’m going to go with it but that is just dumb.
• There were a few fleeting almost horror-esque instances in this episode that I personally found very intriguing. That flash of the little girl at the end made me jump.
• I know, I know, the most important thing the first episode of a show can do is introduce us to the protagonist. And, yes, Mara is great. But I’m going to need the series’ second episode to do a little more work on these secondary characters. At the moment I don’t even remember their names!

What did you think of this episode of Reverie? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Reverie airs Wednesdays at 10pm on NBC.

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