Review: Enlightened ‘Higher Power’ – I Have To Write This Shit Out

Ever since last season’s beautiful ‘What About Helen’, I’ve been hoping Enlightened would spend an episode inside Levi’s head. ‘Higher Power’ puts everything on pause to check in with Levi up at Open Air, opening and closing the episode with his letters to Amy during his time in Hawaii. What comes in between is signature Enlightened material, digging into someone’s psyche, combining an internal journey with gorgeous cinematography.

As expected, Levi is struggling up at Open Air, clinging onto the bitterness and self-hatred that’s been driving his depression for a long, long time. But the reasons he’s not buying into things are superficial: he can’t stand someone’s face, he thinks everyone is stupid for doing trust falls, and he hates his roommate because he’s got digestive issues. But like his rehab-mate Travis (a great performance by Girls‘ Christopher Abbott), what he really fucking hates is himself, and by doing so, he’s pushed away everything and anything around him in order to try and forget that.

His moment of realization while Travis is crying and talking about what a piece of shit he is, is really on the nose – as is the shot of sun peeking through the clouds after, screaming to the audience “Look! He’s enlightened!”… but Wilson’s performance in the last few scenes (and throughout the episode) drive home Enlightened‘s optimism in a really meaningful way. Changing yourself is really, really hard – and doing so while dealing with a drug addiction makes it a lot, lot harder. It’s not an instantaneous thing, of course – as we’ve seen since the pilot, Amy’s steps forward are always the product of a few steps back – but when he hears Travis echo his conversations with Amy when he says “there’s just so much that I fucking hate, and so little that I love.”

It awakens something in Levi, something that makes him realize that finding Amy’s turtle isn’t going to help him. He even admits in his second letter to Amy that he’s never been the best version of himself at any point in his life, and the only times he felt close were when he was with her. When he finally gets all his self-centered delusions out of his way about his failures, he can finally see the promise in himself. “You believed in something that didn’t exist” he writes to her, “.. or maybe it did.”

‘Higher Power’ – co-written by Mike White (who also directed) and Laura Dern – is Enlightened at its best: a reflective half hour of dramedy that finds powerful, rewarding moments in deeply flawed characters. It’s not quite on the level of ‘The Trip’ or ‘What About Helen’, but the sidestep into Levi’s persona and the mentality of a person in the first stages of rehabilitation were terrific.

Grade: A-

Other thoughts/observations:

– another great guest appearance: Christopher Douglas Reed (Fat Phil from Sons of Anarchy) as Tony, Levi’s room mate.

– I’m glad we didn’t see Amy’s reaction to Levi’s second letter at the end of the episode; it would’ve taken some of the emotional impact of her reaction to his first letter away.

– Danielle failed to be an interesting character, save for her mirroring Levi and Travis’s narcissism.

– did The New Day Co-Op sponsor HBO tonight? Both Enlightened and Girls were tootin’ away this week.