Class of 09 Season 1 Episode 4 Recap
Not Your Girlfriend opens with Drew being shot, right before it cuts to her explaining the importance of firearms and the responsibility that comes with them to the recruits in 09. She never fired her weapon, and she leaves out that she was fired upon by someone else’s. This is a deliberate choice.
A special agent must be ready to draw their gun, and to take a life. It’s probably better for morale that they’re not reminded how likely the reverse is.
How Does Hour Come up With the Idea for Better Life?
Some recruits, like Tayo, know their way around a firearm already. Others, like Hour, have never held one before.
This is a deliberate choice too. For Hour, the child of an immigrant family, there are worse fates than being shot, and the willingness to risk them such as by inviting the FBI to investigate her life is braver than pulling a trigger.
A gun, fundamentally, is just mechanical working parts mixed with a bit of chemistry and physics. But a gun represents something. Power, yes, but also the ability to wield it to maintain the status quo. An hour of never having held a gun, and her rigorous questioning of a polygraph test, is the same thing as resistance.
This is the genesis of an idea that will eventually become Better Life, a way for law enforcement to work so efficiently that the very idea of it is terrifying to the FBI itself, which has a vested interest in remaining, in many ways, very much unchanged.
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Why Does Poet Change Her Answers on The Polygraph Test?
When the recruits shoot their new guns at pop-up targets, interesting things happen. Tayo is a good marksman, but he briefly hesitates when the next target that pops up is a Black man. It goes unremarked upon, but not unnoticed. After a second or two, Tayo shoots him anyway.
Poet does the same thing, but the target she hesitates over is a woman. And she doesn’t shoot, despite her being armed. When she’s questioned about it, she invents a fictional biography for the target an off-duty officer, or a woman simply defending herself. She’s reminded that the point of the exercise isn’t to do that. But shouldn’t it be?
Poet also draws attention to herself when she resits her polygraph test, changing her answer to the question of whether she’s concealing anything that may jeopardize her application by revealing her relationship with Lennix.
She’s already putting the system above her own right to privacy. After, Drew takes her aside to explain the agent-on-agent shooting we saw in the cold open. She was blamed for that, for being in the wrong place, which is to say in the same place the men were.
The situations might not look the same on paper, but the outcome is consistent. Women always end up suffering when things go wrong.
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Class of 09 Season 1 Episode 4 Ending Explained
Who Dies in Not Your Girlfriend?
Poet obviously isn’t dead, since we’ve seen her and her bionic eye in the future timeline, but this is clearly the event that precipitates AI being embraced by Tayo.