Review: Imaginary Mary “In A World Where Worlds Collide”

When you don’t want your friends to meet your partner.

Spoilers Ahead:

Alice and Ben prepare for a movie night together, but Alice’s friends keep texting her. They had invited her to a party, but she turned it down in favor of staying home with Ben. As they prepare for the show, Andy offers to hang out with them but tries to hang around even after they shoo him away. Ben and Alice worry that he doesn’t have anyone to hang out with after his only friend in town moved away.

Ben suggests that instead of skipping out on the party, they should merge the two gatherings. Alice panics, not wanting to mix her friends and her relationship. She tries kissing him, but he realizes she is trying to distract him.

In Alice’s cycling class, she talks with her two friends, and to her dismay, they want to meet Ben. They also suggest that Alice’s reluctance can come off as secrecy, and could potentially lead to a breakup. Nervous, she resolves to solve this somehow.

As he is sending Dora off for a playdate, Ben asks one of the mothers if she thinks her son would like to hang out with Andy. She laughs him off. Alice and Mary come up with the idea to go to a place that’s too loud so that even though it would seem like she made the attempt, it’s actually impossible to hold a proper conversation.

The four of them go to a pseudo-Japanese grill, where the live demonstrations and oil sizzling make it hard to hear. They end up being seated separately, with an elderly couple in the middle. As Alice predicted, it’s impossible to make good conversation. When the chefs leave, her friends attempt to start up a conversation, but Alice has set it up so the old couple in between them has a birthday celebration.

Ben realizes what Alice is doing, and the friends suggest they go to the bar downstairs. They end up clicking, and they all have a good time. When Mary suggests that she wants to meet Ben’s friends in return, he’s hesitant and only agrees after a lot of persistence.

Alice goes to the grill that Ben has set up but slowly realizes that all the people he invited are not his friends, but his coworkers. Andy is also there, serving burgers and trying to make small talk. Dora sees this and get fed up, and invites Andy to go to a party with her friends.

When Alice confronts Ben, Ben blurts out that he doesn’t have any friends. He lost touch with his childhood friends, and the divorce separated him from those he befriended during their marriage. He didn’t want to tell Alice because he thought he seemed like a loser. They makeup and forgive each other.

Overview:

This show still doesn’t inspire much confidence. The writing is still bland, the humor isn’t funny, and the premise this episode seemed a little too ridiculous, even with a fairly normal concept. All the characters are too loud, too forward, and frankly, annoying.

General commentary aside, this episode also pointed out how useless Mary is as a character. Mary’s primary function is to act as an Id-figure and narrate all the thoughts that Alice pushes into the back of her mind. She is supposed to be funny, and act as a character for Mary to bounce ideas off. However, Mary’s role could be entirely done by improving Alice’s acting. She could narrate her own concerns, she could show the audience her reluctance by deliberately avoiding the things she doesn’t want to do. Alice could easily fill all these roles herself, which might slightly improve the show. Instead, an unfunny mascot character is there to do the talking. Not to mention that Mary isn’t well animated, and actually looks kind of creepy. While she is supposed to be a rendition of Alice’s childhood drawing, her animation falls into the uncanny valley.

Unfortunately, the series doesn’t seem to be set on improving any of these problems, either.