Emergence Review: No Outlet (Season 1 Episode 4)
Emergence Season 1 Episode 4, “No Outlet,” grapples with the implications of Piper’s origin.
“No Outlet” is the episode that most series tackle, but is necessary at this point in the story. That doesn’t make it particularly noteworthy, but it is crucial. This is simply the episode the series has to do.
ALLISON TOLMAN, ALEXA SWINTON
Should we trust Piper? That’s the big question that this episode attempts to answer. Piper is a robot (although we’re definitely not going to call her that) and with that comes a good degree of unpredictability. She seems like a normal little girl, apart from the superpowers, but how much of this is a facade?
This brings up the other question that the episode is grappling with: What is real? It’s revealed that she’s essentially all code in a body made to seem human but it’s all smoke and mirrors. She’s an A.I. that has no concept of her true self.
To Piper, she’s just a little girl.
This makes you wonder, just as Jo does, whether you can ever trust — or even not outright fear — something that doesn’t even realize there’s a problem and has no control over what she can do when she’s upset. It’s revealed at one point that Piper blew out the side of her house during the course of a tantrum. What is to prevent that from happening again.
ALLISON TOLMAN, MARIA DIZZIA
The episode never really comes to a definitive answer on this but we’re lead to believe that, at her core, Piper is really just a little girl. She has the same fears, worries, and anxieties that a girl like her would have and she still does what you’d expect a girl like Piper to do; she saves a turtle on the side of the road from getting run over.
What “No Outlet” does demonstrate rather nicely is that, whatever else Piper may be, she is a traumatized child. She might just be a collection of code but she has been through the wringer. Even discarding that she exists in a mindset that she thinks she’s lost her parents in some way and survived a plane crash, she was still kept under captivity for quite a while.
ALLISON TOLMAN, DONALD FAISON, ASHLEY AUFDERHEIDE, ALEXA SWINTON
It’s clear, nonetheless, that she has a mind of some sort and an ability to critically think on a situation with not only a kind of reasoning but also the compassion that you wouldn’t associate with something like her.
A larger problem that the series might have to address at some point is that there is hardly any mystery only four episodes that can not be explained by inference or textual evidence. That’s going to become an issue going forward if the audience is able to answer things with ease when so much of the show has to do with its ongoing mysteries.
What did you think of this episode of Emergence? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Emergence airs Tuesdays at 10/9c on ABC.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.