Back to Life Review: Season 1 Episodes 3 & 4
Back to Life Season 1 Episodes 3 & 4 make for a strange middle chapter to Daisy Haggard’s story: both episodes often struggle to find a consistent tone, but the infectious emotional resilience shining in each half hour’s closing moments is potent and promising.
It’s odd to watch Back to Life continue to shift and expand through “Episode 3” and “Episode 4”; between the creepy conspiracy theorist, a surprise marriage, and a case of elderly chlamydia, there’s a sense too much is going on for Back to Life to embrace its true calling as a study of mundanity.
When it does pause for those moments – like to examine the loaded subtext in a conversation between Oscar and Caroline in “Episode 3” – Back to Life is fascinatingly measured, capturing decades of fallout in a marriage in but a few curt lines of dialogue and muted body language.
Scenes like those help bring the central narrative to life, juxtaposing the frivolity of their marital melodrama with the deeper, existential pain of a woman realizing she’s lost an entire chapter of her life staring at walls, and listening to a woman say “beetle” every two minutes for years at a time.
Back to Life‘s middle chapters just doesn’t lean into those ideas enough; the rapid delivery of plot developments in “Episode 3” is a particular blemish, coating a rather introspective half-hour in a thick layer of unnecessary elements.
Dom continues to be an absolute waste of time, his annoying existence on the fringes only second to the weird “journalist” who begins rampaging through Miri’s personal life in these two episodes.
The farther Back to Life‘s attention strays from Miri’s emotional journey through her past (and uncertain future), the less satisfying it is as a series. There are so many moments I wish “Episode 3” and “Episode 4” would just slow down a little, to linger on Mandy’s loneliness or the telling way she mimics Billy’s social cues during their impromptu “date”.
There are times where Back to Life does embrace the smaller, more personal scale of a character-focused story; but even in those moments, it still feels like “Episode 3” and “Episode 4” are trying to find the right balance of tone.
Any scene with Janice is a perfect example: her obsession with the unimportant things in life is richly comedic, a fun dynamic for Miri’s contained introversion to play with in their therapy sessions.
But Back to Life doesn’t truly embrace the potential of their relationship, a la Hannibal or The Sopranos, to explore deeper, more meaningful truths about its protagonist. The scene opening “Episode 3” hints towards something more going on in these scenes; but it never capitalizes on it, instead it relies on Jo Martin’s wonderful performance as Janice to act as comedic filler between more dramatic moments.
As Back to Life continues to fill in the gaps of information around Miri’s criminal mistake, the more I worry it’s softer, more rewarding elements will be lost in the storm.
As the marital conflicts, conspiracies, crazy neighbors, and menacing neighbors simultaneously reach their dramatic apex, there’s a chance they’ll end up like Mandy’s own attempts to climax; it all could just feel underwhelming, an unnecessary layer of plot obfuscating the quiet, rewarding study of inner strength and forgiveness underneath it.
With two episodes left, it is easy to think Back to Life kind of is what it is at this point: a mildly rewarding series with a wandering eye for silly dramatics. But this third act also holds a lot of promise; despite my frustrations, any time the camera focuses its eye on Miri and stays out of the way, it remains a uniquely engrossing watch.
At this juncture, though, those moments are just too far and few in between the other, slightly more traditional structures Back to Life has built itself on in its first two hours.
While these middle chapters aren’t necessarily disappointing, there’s some unrealized potential there I hope it finds in its closing episodes.
What did you think of this episode of Back to Life? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Back to Life airs Sundays at 10/9c on Showtime.
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Randy Dankievitch
Randy Dankievitch is a TV critic living in Portland, Maine, whose obsession with pop culture began as a child, watching reruns of The Muensters while listening to Paul's Boutique on repeat. A writer since 2011, Randy is currently the writer of TV Never Sleeps, TV Editor at Goomba Stomp, and a columnist for Up Portland, with previous bylines at Sound on Sight, Processed Media, TV Overmind, and many others.