As if there wasn't enough drama going on with Owen and Annie meeting up in their versions of this computer-generated dreamworld, now there's a wild card thrown into the mix.
In the previous episode, when the newcomer hotshot scientist comes back to replace the one who died, he told the computer AI who he was and what happened to his former counterpart. Then the computer did an odd thing: It cried, which had a physical manifestation somehow as a liquid metal drop fell in the wires that Owen and Annie are attached to. That's supposedly what's causing this glitch in their realities. But now, the computer itself is making its own appearances in these realities as it manifests itself in a character within the reality. If this AI storyline goes where I think it's going, this could get bonkers, but so far it's just kind of silly.
In this episode, they're both part of a ritzy life. Owen's character was framed by his ex-wife, and Annie's character is trying to take advantage of his frail state. She knows the secret location of some valuable document inside a room guarded by a secret mirror (seriously, I'm not making this up. She spun this mirror a few times, then the entire room around them changed), but she doesn't know how to crack a safe or get past security. Well guess who can do that? So she and Owen team up to find it, but Annie turns on him with a gun (what an incredible "twist). What this leads to is a small miniature set of the mountainside where her sister crashed and died in her car crash (the new scientist confirmed she died, so a surprise return from her is unlikely).
On a side note, it's getting harder and harder to care about these half-concocted stories within each mind-reality time period. Thankfully there wasn't a whole lot of wasted time in this reality. Annie's experiment ended with a thorough test akin of a lie-detector test. Good answers contributed to an overall score (she had to reach 9.2 for her tests to be usable in the pharmaceutical company's collection of information from this experiment as a whole.
She finishes the exam with just that, a 9.2, and she clearly has some kind of breakthrough in realizing the pain and hurt she's suffering from her sister's death, which included traits such as highly defended, borderline personality disorder, and trauma with loss and pain.
Seeing a character realize what the audience already knows is a hard sell for any actor. Emma Stone delivered a balance of that emotional, yet stoic, response when she was coming to her grand realization. It's unclear if she's fully there or not, but since Annie is one of the only two characters to care about, it was a bit moving to see some progress, and if the bulk of the payoff for the remaining five episodes is character-driven psychology stuff, it won't make for a total dud.
THE WIFE'S TWO CENTS: She also likes how they have personified the computer AI, and she's interested to see how that plays out with the computer.