‘Maniac’ Episode 2 Recap: Crashing from the High

“I hate this character. I hate this character.” The note so nice I wrote it twice! Maniac Episode 2 (“Windmills”) focuses on Emma Stone’s Annie the same way the pilot centered on Jonah Hill’s Owen. Like that fifth-generation photocopy of Zach Braff in Garden State, Annie is, with all apologies to Pirandello, six tics in search of a character. High-functioning addict, self-injury scars, fractured family, needless hostility as behavioral baseline, sarcastic scofflaw, skillful dissembler. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, you know?

Aside from being a pernicious way to portray mental illness, it’s a cliched (and therefore also pernicious) way to write a leading role for a woman, however much allegedly dazzling and mind-bending sci-fi shit she’s surrounded with. The episode gets by in part because it lets us in on the nature of said mind-bending sci-fi shit: the drug study for which Annie and Owen have signed up.

Annie finds her way there after finding herself in desperate straits. She’s broke. She’s months behind on rent, and has a pile of unpaid parking tickets. Her dog (well, a dog, anyway) is missing. Her dad lives in some kind of isolation chamber in a backyard someplace. And her connect, who spends his days playing chess in the park against a robotic koala (zany!), is all out of her drug of choice…which just so happens to be one of the ones Neberdine Pharmaceutical and Biotech is studying.

Being a huge asshole, Annie decides to blackmail her way into the study. She goes to the doxxing store (this is a thing in this world) and digs up information on a staff member named Patricia. She then signs up for a service called Friend Proxy, in which people get paid to pretend to be old pals with the service’s users, in order to meet the staffer. None of this is insightful about the workaday dehumanization of technology and the sharing economy, but it’s insight-adjacent, I suppose.

In the end, the woman she’s trying to extort winds up being more intrigued about someone pretending to pretend to be her friend than she is alarmed. So Annie gives her the honest truth, or most of it anyway: She had a huge fight with her sister, and this drug is the only thing that makes her feel better. Patricia does the human thing and gets Annie into the building, but she flunks the entrance exam by being too phony. Then she really does extort Patricia, specifically threatening her kid, and into the study she goes.

She and Owen learn exactly what’s going on through a deliberately low-tech video introduction spiel starring Dr. James K. Mantleray (Justin Theroux), the project’s inventor. The vibe they’re going for doesn’t succeed at all; Theroux comes across like a particularly ill-suited celebrity cameo on Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, and you’ve seen this done much better a million times before.

But the gist of the video is this: using three pills — Pill A, Agonia, isolates your worst memories; Pill B, Behaviora, locates the defense mechanisms your brain has built up ‘to hide yourself from you’; Pill C, Confraxia, involves Confrontation in some vague way, presumably facing down and defeating your bad memories once and for all — Dr. Mantleray and his associates Dr. Muramoto and Dr. Fujita aim to eliminate all unhappiness. Unfortunately, the prisonlike confines of the subjects’ “pods,” the repeated recriminations and warnings among the staff, and the burn marks on the equipment indicate that they’ve failed fairly spectacularly.

The precise nature of Annie’s major malfunction is finally revealed in a prolonged flashback sequence that ends the episode, induced by her ingestion of Agonia. (Which she’d already been taking, and enjoying? Look man, I don’t make the news, I just report it.) In this too-pat-by-half origin story, we see her on vacation with her normie sister, played by the great Julia Garner of Ozark and The Americans fame. I don’t wanna get into a whole thing about the difference between a movie star and an actor — for starters there isn’t one, if the movie star is good. But it’s hard to watch the two of them together and not feel that Garner, perhaps because of her experience living longer with characters (even supporting ones) than a lead actor in big Hollywood movies might be, is burrowing into the sister’s skin while Stone is cosplaying Annie. Then again, as detailed above, there’s not a lot of Annie to burrow into.

Anyway, it’s a nice enough trip out in nature, but Annie keeps pushing the gags and pranks just a little too hard and too much each time. Sometimes it’s funny, if forced, like when she parlays their driving game of making up movie plots for the people in other cars into getting furious with the driver for his wholly imaginary actions and screaming at him from the next lane. Other times it isn’t, particularly a recurring bit in which she takes a photo of her armpit instead of her sister or the scenery and laughs it off.

Snuggling together in a hotel bed one night, the sister makes up a movie plot of her own, one in which a woman is afraid she’ll ruin her normal life in Salt Lake City with her kids and husband and whatnot, but the happy ending is that it all works out fine regardless. Annie tosses this back in her face, saying it’s the story of “someone who gave up.” This unsolicited bit of nastiness escalates into an argument, culminating in Annie saying she’s glad the sister has moved all the way across the country, since now they can drift apart naturally without having to pretend they haven’t. “I’m gonna miss you too, Annie,” Garner’s character replies, deeply and visibly wounded. (Julia Garner, folks. Do not sleep on her.)

Then, in a twist straight out of a screenplay you wrote during a manic phase and haven’t looked at since, the sisters get in a fatal car accident caused by Annie doing the armpit-photo gag one last time. Annie survives. The sister doesn’t.

My patience with how Maniac cobbles its plot together from the most shopworn shit it finds lying around is another casualty. To wit, I’d like to call a moratorium on car accidents that happen right at the moment of maximum emotional impact as a storytelling device. It can work if the project has enough follow-through (I can think of a couple of horror movies that do it, but I’ll avoid saying which for fear of spoilers). But I don’t think it’s how the world works, and at any rate the out-of-nowhere vehicular-manslaughter thing is now so common it’s practically a joke. I’d think a project with this kind of talent, star wattage, and money attached to it could come up with something a bit more novel. But novelty is very clearly not what this show is about.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Maniac Episode 2 ("Windmills") on Netflix