Archangel: An angel of higher than ordinary rank – PARENT
Arkangel tells us a story of a mother (Marie) who is extremely concerned for her daughter’s safety like most parents. Her greatest fear is of losing her only daughter. Jodie Foster (Director) depicts this perfectly when Sara (daughter) goes missing in the park. Even during birth, she becomes restless when doctors don’t utter anything about the health of her newborn baby. This fear paves the perfect way for the trap of Arkangel. Arkangel is a company making technology to monitor children using a parental control device. They insert a permanent chip inside the child and provide a tablet-like tracker. Added features like blurring violent situations give full control of a parent over the child. The complete inexperience of the evil of the world makes Sara violent. We can see that most of the people didn’t go for the Arkangel or stopped using it. Trick, her friend, shows all the extremely violent stuff on the internet. This exposure to extreme violence changes Sara’s perception of it. She is only able to think about violence to the extreme extent. This is the reason for her aberrant behavior in the last scene when she hits her mother.
After some years, when Sara is a teenager, she goes outside and isn’t home for a long time. This makes her mom very anxious to the extent that she uses the Arkangel again. She finds out that Sara is with Trick doing all kind of bad teen stuff. When Sara realizes that her mom started using Arkangel again, she hits her into unconsciousness and leaves home forever. The moral that this episode is strongly suggesting is that children must go through all the good and bad things with privacy so that they can distinguish between those and act accordingly in situations and make decisions. Complete control makes people violent and prone to doing bad things. For every angel, there is a need of a satan. That’s what people call ‘necessary evil’. Jodie Foster’s direction skills are to be appreciated because of the way Sara’s aging is shown while she walks across the street. The way that she illustrates Marie’s fear of losing Sara come true because of her over-control when she yells her name just like she did during the park scene and the birth scene is splendid.
EASTER EGGS:
- The test video that is played to Sara in Arkangel for using filter mode is from previous season’s ‘Men Against Fire’
- The operating system of the Arkangel is similar to the one used in the episode ‘The Entire History of You’
- Tusk’s (a famous rapper featured in the episode ‘Hated in the Nation’) poster can be seen in Sara’s room
- Waldo toy is featured in the park scene.
Arkangel: 3/5
CELECRITY 