(Directed by Steven Levitan, written by Steven Lavitan & Megan Ganz)
Rating: 8.5/10 (A-)
So you have probably heard by now that the upcoming episode will be entirely shot with various Apple products and my first thought was that there is no way this could be properly pulled off and that watching it would most likely feel like a half hour advertisement for Apple. Well, I’m here to tell you: I stand corrected. In fact, there are barely any Apple devices that show up on screen.
”Connection Lost” is built around Claire’s laptop screen. Everything we see is what she is seeing on her laptop and it feels like one continuous shot as the screen is always visible with the camera shifiting and zooming to various corners and sections to highlight what Claire is currently doing. The premise is fairly simple: Claire got into a fight with Haley (which we’ll get to see because she made a video of it) and is now struggling to contact her. As the episode goes on, she asks around in her family and even though nobody seems to know where to find her, they give her enough clues to figure out what Haley has been up to. It’s amazing how many different ways there are these days to track someone down. To say more would really spoil the plot for this episode.
A lot of detail went into the new inferface for ”Connection Lost” as they really made use of the various programs and the Internet for the jokes, e. g. there’s a quote on Claire’s facebook wall saying “For every minute you spend angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness”, while she is slowly but surely losing her mind because she can’t seem to get a hold of her daughter. They even managed to sneak in a little joke into Alex’s college letter. Julie Bowen is delivering a tremendous performance displaying all the different emotions on Claire’s frantic search for Haley. There’s an unexpected emotional heft to this episode and most of it is because of her. Tracking her eye movements as Claire switches, closes, minimizes & uses different windows on your laptop was a blast to watch and I might be getting ahead of myself here but I think this is on par with last season’s “Last Vegas” in terms of how creative and outlandish it is.
Other tidbits:
- There will be a sweet slideshow of Sarah Hyland as a child with “Return To Pooh Corner” accompanying it.
- Dylan is making a quick appearance.
- Someone’s getting a mohawk.
- Jay will say some very nice things about Phil. Of course, he doesn’t know that he is also saying them to him at the same time.
- These days, porn is applied to all sort of things. You’ll get to see what Claire considers porn.
- Somehow Mitchell and Cam manage to make it all about themselves and it involves a hat and popcorn.
