The Crowded Room Season 1 Episode 6 Review: Rya

The Crowded Room Season 1 Episode 6, “Rya,” tries to flesh out one of its lead characters more, but it’s difficult to see how it is relevant to the overarching story.

Amanda Seyfried’s role in The Crowded Room as Rya Goodwin was highly marketed leading up to the show’s premiere. However, up until “Rya,” she played a surprisingly minor role in the series.

This episode attempts to remedy this by putting Seyfried directly in the spotlight and navigating Rya’s family situation, motivations, and how much she really knows about Danny Sullivan’s case.

The story isn’t quite the one viewers may have been expecting for Rya. It was easy to initially believe she was a brilliant psychologist who joined Danny’s case for her expertise and compassion for Danny.

Instead, viewers find she’s an exhausted newly divorced single mother who is hoping her exploration of Danny’s dissociative identity disorder (DID) will land her a grant and financial stability.

The story is realistic, and it parallels Candy Sullivan’s story in a way that further elevates the show’s empathy towards single mothers and working women facing workplace discrimination.

While the episode does give Rya some backstory, there are still a lot of pieces missing.

The focus is solely on Rya’s current situation and her reactions to it. Hence, it’s difficult to see what her true personality is when she’s not overworked and stressed.

Viewers will find themselves wondering what led to her divorce, what her relationship with her father is, and how she interacts with her son when she’s not ignoring him for the sake of her career.

With these missing pieces, it’s hard to connect with Rya, and she sometimes comes across as a bit unlikeable and cold.

Rya’s mother, with her tender care of her grandson, wise words to Rya, and wry humor, proves to be a far more intriguing character who is pleasant to watch, despite not having even a quarter of the screentime Rya does.

As a result, it’s a little difficult to see the purpose of the episode. Rya’s backstory and character development are left still feeling incomplete, and the overarching story makes minimal advances.

The show does, for the first time, discuss Danny’s DID diagnosis and sees two of his alternate personalities. Of course, viewers already knew that he has DID, so it isn’t very thrilling to hear this repeated by Rya.

Tom Holland gives a mildly interesting performance as his alternate personality Jack and as a second mischievous personality.

However, it doesn’t quite measure up to the performances of actors like James McAvoy or Oscar Isaac, who both portrayed a character with DID before Holland.

Without any particularly inspired performances, aside from Laila Robins’ minor role as Rya’s mom, Susie, or major strides in the plot, the episode feels mostly like filler with a few poor attempts at character development and surprise.

The only hope it raises is that the story will pick up at a quicker pace next time, now that Danny’s DID has finally been acknowledged by the characters.

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

 

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The Crowded Room airs Fridays on Apple TV+.

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