This was a bad one if you are desiring of narrative substance. It was all like some sheltered suburban teenager trying to be edgy and deep. I am hard pressed to think of more to say. Whatever it is that it was intended a viewer see or feel from this episode simply didn't land with me. I suppose I can summarize it and go over why it sucked. So, the lady wakes up with like, a bunch of like video static overlay effects and stuff, and there is this shape on the TV in front of her, and it has like a digital glitch effect on it and it is all so creepy and cool. The shape is on every TV she sees. She has amnesia apparently. There are people all around that don't talk but look at cellphones and film with cellphones, you know, because cell phones are bad.
They are like zombies with phones because deep, and so a sci-fi show about the perils of information technology can do a zombie movie thing. That and there are random people who are like Hot Topic style horror villains, like a woman in an animal mask with an electric carving knife because like edgy. At this point, I'm surprised there was not a Guy Fucks mask in this.
Short story long, it turns out it was all a set up for our main character who is having her brain erased every day and put through this as a court ordered sentence for being accessory to a child abduction. That irons out some logistic issues in the story before the big twist / reveal, such as who works at the power plant to keep the TVs on and how the phone zombies charge their phones and so on, but also.. WHAT? If her brain is erased every day so she forgets she is punished. What are they even doing exactly?
Here is where we may have found a flaw in how this series handles the problem of self poorly. Without her memory of her having been tortured, what does her being tortured mean? They keep her from being permanently injured, and they establish the technology is indeed erasing her memory of each previous day successfully, so her having "experienced torture" becomes a tree falling in the forest question. They are then simply; in her perception, fast forwarding her some days ahead in her life, leaving a "blackout" of however long, but that was time she was being tortured anyway, so, I don't get it. They of course don't address this philosophical aspect, as it was all so they could avail an edgy aesthetic in films popular of its time, but still follow the show "rule" of a twist involving technology.
As the audience, what was I supposed to think of this? Was I supposed to get some kind of synthetic vicarious fourth party schadenfreude from her punishment? Was I supposed to feel something about cellphones and society or something? Was I supposed to be maybe creeped out by cruel and unusual punishment? Was she actually innocent maybe? Was I supposed to think that? These are the mysteries.