Leah
Episode 1 of Solos begins on day 1227 as Leah continues to experiment in a bid to communicate with the future. Specifically she’s reaching out in a bid to communicate with herself. Well, before that she receives a call from Rachel who’s currently looking after her Mother. After an emotionally charged call, Leah hangs on the “tauchy horizon” she’s been casually dropping in conversation. Whatever she does with the console it seems to work; Leah communicates with her future self. She even manages to brings up her face on the monitor as a projection too. After discussing time travel movies and pop culture references with her future-self, Leah receives a call from her Mum again. While talking, future Leah manages to listen in to their conversation. With the phone call over, Leah continues to work and manages to communicate with the past after a blatant lie from her future self. With selfie-taking Leah a lot more bubbly and innocent, present Leah realizes the woman she’s facing her past and future. Yes, Leah 2 is actually from 2029, five years ahead of this current timeline. She refuses to give up the algorithm to get to the future. It turns out Leah’s Mum has ALS and this is why Leah is desperate to leave. She needs to escape her Mother’s sickness no matter what. She wants her Mum to be a thing of the past so she herself can be the future. It turns out future Leah is the one who communicated back in time too. She wants to keep Leah in that timeline and has been unable to let go, making her feel empty and full of regret. Well, present day Leah makes a big decision. She communicates with the past and reveals all, including the solution to time travel. She implores past-Leah to find a cure and save their Mother. Leah eventually decides to mute her future self and rings her Mother back, listening to her hum. As she sits and listens on speaker phone, everything in the room slowly dissolves and fades away – including this version of Leah.
The Episode Review
If you could save a loved one from dying by communicating with the past and wiping your own existence out, would you? It’s a question that Solos explores in its first episode and it does so in a pretty compelling way. There’s a mix of Black Mirror and Room 104 bleeding through here, with the former working well with the twists and the latter hanging on the one-room concept. The acting of Anne Hathaway is enough to prop this one up though and elevate what’s otherwise a rather average episode, with the pop culture references to time travel movies a nice nod toward the direction this chapter is taking. Ultimately, by the end of the episode past Leah is seemingly successful in her mission in saving her Mother, or at least in changing the timeline. Whether that be treasuring her Mother more and spending more time with her or actually finding a cure, either way the timeline is completely changed and everything fades by the end. It’s a nice conclusion to this chapter, one that sets the tone and mood nicely for the season ahead.
