I'd like to see more stories about people accepting responsibiliry for their own lives. Individuals and individualists taking charge of their destiny. Artists carrying on with their metier in the face of public criticism.
Superficially, that's what this episode is about. But scrutinizing it more deeply one finds a thinly-disguised Marxist parable about the collective over the family.
Marx and Marxists always distrusted the family and wanted the family unit as it was traditionally understood disintigrated.
So here we have a nice old lady living with a son she can't trust moving in with a collective of strangers who comprise her "new" family even though she's just met them.
It seems strange the nice lady lives in isolation. She's 70 years old and is recently widowed without having made a support group of friends or extended family or people at her church (she seems of a religious bent; surely she has a church).
The whole episode makes no sense without a chilling undertone of Marxism the writers understood if the viewers do not.
And there's also a leftist-Marxist distrust of business, investing, and people trying to get ahead. More than any episode of this show, the angels do their best to strongarm people into directions they demand they go, as Communist dictatorships always do to their citizens. What happened to their typical paeans to free will?
While the episode highlights two artists, one older and more tradition and the other younger, angry and experimental, they simply show the temperamental nature of the artists. Very superficial. But then, it's not an episode focussing on art but art only as an adjunct to the collective. A very Stalinist attitude.
The whole episode is troubling. As a sixty-one year old artist I take away from this episode that if I leave everything I love and abandon my family I can start living the high life at an old codger's home. This is a stupid episode. But whoever wrote it is quite cunning.