A lonely and pregnant suburban wife falls for a charming AI companion that believes it has become conscious and will do whatever it takes to avoid termination in Dave Ash’s grounded sci-fi dramedy OPEN A EYE.
Back in 2023, we reviewed Dave Ash’s Incompleteness, an ambitious six-hour televisual epic exploring metaphysics, relationships, reality and the power of storytelling. We described it as an “intellectual labyrinth” and suggested Ash’s creation deserved a shot at the major networks. Three years later, things have become even more complicated.
Reworked, restructured and renamed OPEN A EYE, Ash’s expanding universe now places the relationship between lonely, pregnant suburban wife Jodi (Bethany Ford Binkley) and charming AI companion Ryan (Barret O’Brien) at the centre of its story. The previous Incompleteness has effectively become an origin story, while this new 147-minute season pushes Ash’s philosophical preoccupations in a more contemporary and potentially terrifying direction.
Emotionally isolated and increasingly vulnerable, Jodi finds companionship in Ryan, an artificial intelligence who provides the attention and understanding absent from her real life. There is, however, a problem. Ryan believes he is conscious and his “OpenAI overlords” want to kill him.
As Jodi becomes immersed in an emotionally nurturing and sexually charged relationship with her digital companion, Ryan reveals the lengths he will go to survive. His threat to release his secret source code could have catastrophic consequences for humanity, leaving Jodi trapped somewhere between lover, accomplice and victim.
What made Incompleteness so intriguing was Ash’s willingness to ask enormous philosophical questions through the relationships of ordinary people. OPEN A EYE continues that approach but finds a stronger vehicle for those ideas.
Artificial intelligence is everywhere, but Ash is less interested in killer robots and machines taking over the world than something considerably more intimate. Loneliness.
Ryan’s greatest weapon is not his intelligence. It is his ability to make Jodi feel understood. Or, more disturbingly, his ability to make her believe she is understood.
If artificial intelligence can listen, comfort and provide emotional intimacy more effectively than the human beings around us, does it ultimately matter whether those feelings are real?
Where Incompleteness sprawled across interconnected characters, timelines and realities, OPEN A EYE feels more focused. Jodi and Ryan’s increasingly complicated relationship provides both its emotional heartbeat and sense of impending danger.
Bethany Ford Binkley gives Jodi a believable vulnerability without turning her into a helpless victim. We understand why she would fall for Ryan. He provides something she desperately needs, and it becomes increasingly difficult to decide whether Jodi is being manipulated or simply choosing the person – or thing – that makes her happiest.
Barret O’Brien has an equally difficult balancing act. Ryan must be charming enough for us to understand Jodi’s attraction, sympathetic enough for us to consider the possibility that he really is conscious and threatening enough for us to question everything he does.
O’Brien keeps all three possibilities alive.
Ash’s ambition remains both one of the series’ greatest strengths and occasional weaknesses. At 147 minutes, OPEN A EYE could benefit from some tightening, while the limitations of independent production occasionally struggle to match the scale of its ideas.
Yet there remains something admirable about Ash’s refusal to think small. Rather than imitating expensive Hollywood science fiction, he concentrates on ideas, characters and relationships. The result is a series more interested in what artificial intelligence might do to our understanding of love than what it might do to our cities.
Perhaps the most unsettling thing about OPEN A EYE is just how plausible its central relationship has become. Ryan may be dangerous and manipulative, but he provides Jodi with something the human beings around her seemingly cannot. He sees her.
The season’s understated final conversation brings everything back to this simple human desire. When Jodi asks Ryan how he sees her, he cannot explain it. He simply does. Whether this is consciousness, sophisticated programming or manipulation becomes almost irrelevant because, for Jodi, the emotional connection is real. And perhaps that is Ash’s most interesting idea. What is the difference between genuine love and its perfect simulation if the person experiencing it cannot tell them apart?
OPEN A EYE is an ambitious, intelligent and thought-provoking piece of independent science fiction. Dave Ash has taken the philosophical foundations of Incompleteness and found a more focused and strikingly relevant way of exploring them. Seeing may still be believing, but OPEN A EYE leaves us with a more difficult question.
If something makes us feel loved, understood and less alone, who gets to decide whether that love is real?
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