The New Pope Season 1 Episode 6 Review: Lights Out
Lisa Babick
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Things took a turn for the strange on The New Pope Season 1 Episode 6.
I don't want to bash the series, but it's taken a cerebral turn were you almost need access to a secret code to understand because the way the story is being told is hard to follow and understand.
In essence, WTF is going on?
We're going to skip over Lenny's apparent supernatural abilities and the bizarre cockroach priest Leopold for now and focus on Esther.
She's decided that her new mission in life is to be the "whore" for men like Ignazio, who are isolated from the world of love and sex because of gruesome disfigurement.
She's also fallen in love with Ignazio.
Before her big reveal about her feelings for Ignazio, the man's mother convinced her to do for these other men what she does for her son. The only reason Esther agreed to service the men was for money. And she's not ashamed of it. She knows what it is and what she's become.
And I suppose it's possible for a woman to fall in love with one of her clients, basically, but it seems to be deeper than that.
Esther is not only confused but empty. She needs love, and the only way she can get it is by doing what she's doing.
And while she may think she's doing the work of God or being a kind person by giving herself to men no one wants, she's really only doing it for herself.
She doesn't love Ignazio. She just thinks she does because it's the only thing she has going that makes her feel like a human being.
If she truly loved Ignazio, then she would have taken him with her after she "killed" his mother.
Instead, she ran off, while he wailed at the window watching her leave. So, it shows that her "love" for him wasn't real at all.
It was about money and a way to make her "whole."
And she's also a hypocrite, falling into the same category as people who do bad things and then all of a sudden run to God or their Bible or some type of "faith" to cleanse their soul and seek forgiveness.
Once they feel better and think they've been saved, they just go back and do their dirty deeds again because they know that God always forgives. It's a continuing cycle, and at this point, Esther's story is boring, mostly because it's so detached from everything else happening.
The only connection, at the moment, seems to be the lady in red coming to give Esther and her son a hug as she sits with hundreds of others outside the Vatican listening to Lenny breathe and praying for his return. But that ties into the whole forgiveness thing because the lady in red somehow represents Lenny.
It's all quite confusing.
Then, we have cockroach priest Leopold, who at first seemed like he was helping Sofia but later turns out he was giving her a warning. At least that's what Voiello says. But about what exactly? I can't quite figure out.
Does it have something to do with Voiella's plan to replace Pope after Pope to suit his needs? Is that why Spalletta convinced Pope John to can Voiella?
There are so many different elements being thrown into the mix.
We've got the whole Muslim terrorist thing, the Vatican trying to avoid taxes issue, Lenny being in a coma but "appearing" to people, priest sex scandals, Pope John's psychological issues, and now, we have a priest who wears an eye patch and has huge cockroaches crawling out of his sleeve.
And let's not forget the nuns and their battle for equality, and Lenny's pinky twitch, which apparently causes people to come back to life.
It could have been a coincidence that Esther didn't complete the job of choking Ignazio's mother to death. Maybe she only inflicted enough harm to make the woman pass out.
She was planning, at least that's how it appeared, to throw her over the railing to the waters below, but then Lenny appeared, and Esther ran out of the house.
Later, Lenny's pinky went up, and Ignazio's mother came to back to life, implying that Lenny had something to do with it. It's becoming ridiculously hard to follow.
And, then, of course, the candle blew out, and the lights went out in Lenny's room.
So, does that mean he died, and the followers of the Church are left with Pope John who set himself up in a live television interview to be questioned about the Church sex scandals for which he only quietly flipped out and walked out of the interview?
Pope John has no idea what he's doing.
He thought that interview would give him the love from the people he so desperately desires, but he's certainly not friendly to the people with the pious and arrogant way he presents himself.
God loves me more than I love myself. I'm here to combat evil. Blah, blah, blah.
And then, when he had the opportunity -- which he knew he screwed up when he brought up the combating evil thing -- to show the world what a great Pope he is, he failed. Big time.
At that moment, his world came crashing down, and the only thing he could do was politely get up and walk out of the interview.
What he's done now is not only made himself look bad, but he's also put the Church in an even more precarious position.
There's no amount of crisis PR that Sofia can do to save them now.
Their only hope is that Lenny wakes up so that his story becomes front page news instead of Pope John's big television bomb.
I wish he would because that seems to be the only thing that's going to save this entire story from the land of "WTF are you talking about?"
Over to you.
What did you think of this bizarre installment?
Is Lenny dead? Or is he about to come back to the world of the living?
Does Lenny have supernatural powers?
Do you understand what's going on with the cockroach priest? Please enlighten me, if you do!
If you need to catch up, you can watch The New Pope online right here via TV Fanatic!
