Accused closes out its sophomore season with ... sex robots? No, we're not exaggerating. Check out our review of the season finale!
The post From Whimper to Weird: A Weak Accused Season 2 Ends with Sex Robots & Bizarre Murder appeared first on TV Fanatic.
Where do we begin, Accused Fanatics?!
Can you think of any other way to wrap up the most inconsistent season of Accused than a bizarre, seemingly futuristic case about murder and sex robots?!
It’s absolutely, unquestionably the most ridiculous case we’ve ever had on this series yet, but that aside, it was at least bizarre enough to be weirdly entertaining.
That’s more than can be said for some of the humdrum installments of the season.
With Accused Season 2 Episode 8, the series broadened its timeline. They expanded into the future with cases because the whole situation with Humanix feels like something meant to be in the not-so-distant future.
We don’t currently live in a world where humanoid robots are so mainstream that they’ve taken over job positions like food servers and personal assistants. And that was the case during this hour.
So, with “Megan’s Story,” Accused takes a massive leap with this approach; frankly, I don’t know how to feel about it. But given the nature of the season at large, at least I can give them points for creativity.
Megan wasn’t a flat character but was positively loathsome, selfish, self-absorbed, ambitious, jealous, self-serving, and manipulative. She was nothing short of a complicated woman with layers, and the hour didn’t hesitate to put her worst traits on full display.
The more we saw of this woman, the less likely one wanted to root for her, and that’s something that Accused doesn’t often do as it likes to make the people on trial sympathetic more often than not.
It was refreshing to see the series deviate from the norm by building up the story and adding context to complicate the situation and resulting crime.
Megan was simply an awful person, and something was gratifying about that, even if it bumped up against the occasionally unsatisfying tendency to vilify female characters for their audaciousness, ambition, and possession of all society typically praises in men.
Thematically, the hour took a forward approach in exploring things like big corporations in tech, not entirely unlike Accused Season 2 Episode 3, while also tackling artificial intelligence and its takeover.
Megan was the head of a music company where it seemed AI was completely taking over the music scene, something that’s quickly becoming a reality and a grating and frustrating thought.
We’ve naturally been weighing the pros and cons of artificial intelligence and how it can be a useful tool in our lives versus a blight on how we live, pursue our jobs, or do anything else.
“Megan’s Story” touches upon that as we immediately see the conflict between Megan and John over the nature of her company and how she finds success.
John, as an artist and musician, values creativity and originality and what art brings to the world, something that gets completely lost through the use of AI.
John’s music died out, and he resented Megan for not doing enough to fight for it or him, instead chasing after the very thing that was killing the industry in the first place: AI.
It’s enough to make your skin crawl when you think about an entire music industry running on music compiled and created by artificial intelligence instead of actual humans.
Yet Megan was ecstatic about these developments and seemingly had the entire industry on lock, resulting in her success as a music mogul alongside John’s old friend and bandmate.
John and Megan’s relationship was tense before she pushed it over the edge by introducing a sex robot into their lives. Megan’s self-absorption prevented her from noticing it.
Megan was a narcissist, always blinded by her ambition, always striving for the next big thing, new milestones, and accomplishments. Meanwhile, John was like a kept husband withering away on a vine.
Their marriage was doomed well before Eve came into the picture, and it would’ve dissolved quickly whether she was there or not. Eve was simply a catalyst for something much worse and a real tragedy.
It was jaw-dropping that Megan thought getting her husband a sex robot to essentially delegate her “wifely duties” of sex would be the answer to all of their prayers.
Of course, she would be jealous when she had to see this in action or when her husband connected to a tailor-made robot to appease him in all the ways he desired.
No one can compete with a robot programmed to suit all of a person’s needs, so she set her own self up to fall painfully short with a husband who was already halfway out of the door in the first place.
John was lonely in his marriage, and he found all the support and gratification that he needed via this sex robot, falling in love with it and finding true happiness in a way he hadn’t in quite some time.
By that point, nothing Megan could have done would make up for the years she spent neglecting her husband, disregarding and invalidating him in favor of her own needs and desires.
Even her choosing to implant the embryos they saved so that she could finally have the kids that he had been wanting from her for a lifetime was totally self-serving and not about him.
It took Megan’s come-to-Jesus moment to decide that it was best for her to jump into this next big decision.
It didn’t bode well and merely highlighted their issues in the first place when she didn’t talk to him about this new choice and instead went to get the embryos implanted as “a surprise.”
Who does that? If she couldn’t even sit down and have a proper conversation with her husband, who was already on the brink of divorcing her, would they ever be a good couple or decent parents?
Once again, Megan made a unilateral decision that affected them without consulting him and expecting him to go along with the ordeal.
Except this time, he did not, doubling down on wanting a divorce so that he could be with Eve.
And that was laughable, like something pulled from Lars and the Real Girl, where he truly believed that he’d be genuinely happy and in a healthy relationship with something that wasn’t even real.
There was barely enough time to unpack how John’s solution to the years of dealing with a strong-willed, ambitious woman who emasculated him was to seek a relationship with a gorgeous robot incapable of individual thought who was programmed to love all his interests and serve all his needs.
Naturally, there’s this deep, inherent sexism in that, but the installment is such a fast-paced, bizarre one that there’s little room for that to settle in. We don’t need the show to handhold us through some of this, so it’s fine in the end.
It’s a pity that John could feel so torn down after living in Megan’s shadow for so long that he ultimately gives up on even considering a real woman capable of her own thoughts who could challenge him.
The infidelity angle of it all was unique because Megan greenlit it, so it wasn’t cheating, and Eve wasn’t real in the first place, though that didn’t matter in the end.
The moral conundrum in all of that, while not a unique premise, was interesting enough.
But the hour consistently showed us from beginning to end that Megan is a manipulative, self-serving woman who always gets what she wants.
She talked her sister, whom she was never close to, into jeopardizing her job and study to give John a sex doll.
Megan constantly manipulated John, and then when he finally had enough and wanted to leave her, she killed him in a fit of hurt and rage as an emotional reaction to what happened and then blamed it on pregnancy hormones.
She also blamed it on Eve, knowing full well that a robot wouldn’t be held to account, and she manipulated her sister yet again to cover for her.
Megan was ruinous, not hesitating to manipulate her sister into throwing her entire career away, tanking a full study, and destroying progress with AI, all to cover her tracks.
She succeeded in all of that, too, with an acquittal for her husband’s death, a belly-full of twins she suddenly desires, and her sister under her thumb.
Megan was one of the series’s most diabolical and loathsome characters, which made things interesting.
As far as a finale goes, it’s not the strongest finish, and the series fully leans into a death yet again.
It’ll be interesting to figure out if there’s a future for Accused Season 3 and what that could possibly look like after this shockingly weak one. Was the first season just a one-off success?
Can the series right the ship and find its footing and rhythm again? How many stories can they tell with this formatting without feeling redundant?
These are all questions I never gave much thought to heading into the season, but I’m ending it thinking about them.
It mostly feels like Accused has gone out with a whimper, albeit with this one, it was a salacious bit of sci-fi bizarreness that added some oomph to the preceding “Eugene’s Story.”
And I don’t know what to do with that. How about you?
Over to you, Accused Fanatics.
How do you feel about this unusual episode closing out the season?
What were your overall thoughts on the season? Do you think Accused has earned a renewal?
Let’s hear your thoughts below.
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The post From Whimper to Weird: A Weak Accused Season 2 Ends with Sex Robots & Bizarre Murder appeared first on TV Fanatic.
