Aeon Flux "Mirror" Analysis

At the beginning of the directors commentary on this episode Peter mentions that his goal was to see if he could tell a story with just one character on screen and if he could create an interesting conflict this way. What we see throughout the episode is Aeon constantly fumbling and making mistakes, which again subverts our expectations since she is cast in this mercenary type role throughout the show.

We start with her eyeing her next target from a cliff afar near a compound. She looks at the window as we see the silhouette of a man pass by and turn off the lights. This gives her the green light to break into the facility and as she makes her way down the ladder she decides to backflip her way down and fumbles. She immediately straightens up and sees a camera looming over her. 

She makes a run for it and runs up the stairs making her way through the facility before being distracted by a flickering light coming from a room that ends up being the camera room. She goes into the room and we are given a visual association of the record button and the camera we just saw to make the point that this is indeed the camera that recorded her fall. She takes the tape out contemplating destroying it before deciding to rewatch it instead. However the cable connection is loose and when she decides to reach over the desk to fix it she spills coffee all over herself. We also see in this shot that the cable is loose because the air from the air conditioning vent is pushing on it, which will be important later in this 4 minute episode. 

Aeon makes her way to the bathroom and decides to clean her arm off in the bathtub and when she turns on the water it gets her hair wet. She looks annoyed bby this comedy of errors that keeps happening to her, nothing is going her way and right as she combs her  hair we see the tv behind her plays out her fall from grace that she was hoping to erase earlier. She looks embarrassed and according to the director this whole episode was based around her being in conflict with herself and he wanted to show her falling more and more into digressions that take her away from the mission at hand which raises the stakes for her because we know she has to get back on the ball if she is wanting to assassinate this guy. 

Again like mentioned before, everything she is doing so far is very mundane and an attempt to get into her psychology alittle bit rather than making it about her just assaulting another base and looking like a badass while she does it. Next we hear acouple of gunshots which snaps her out of her thought pattern and she crawls out the window and up the side of the building to the room where the guy is she needs to kill and finds him dead from two gun shots. Its important to note that we see a visual representation of the gunshots at the window as they flash letting us know where they are coming from physically around her. 

She finds the man dead and pokes at his toes which i think is kind of hilarious, the show is full of these kind of moments and then she makes a run and jumps over the railing to catch the guy who killed him but not before she is shot and falls down laying dead before the stairs. We dont see the captor but we catch a glimpse of a looming figure on the distorted camera. She suddenly puts together that the cable in the camera room is being influenced by the air coming from the air conditioner  connected to a thermostat near her and she shoots the thermostat which corrects the camera. We then see it was trevvor goodchild, all along she is stunned and then we see her die as the gun drops to the ground.