What happens when the smartest girl in school picks a new face and personality over grades and the good life she is already leading?
Some Spoilers Ahead
1. Love Yourself – Again
Like the previous episode, “Which Witch?”, “Unfiltered” is all about accepting and loving yourself as you are and teaching a lesson that just because you can change your physical appearance, you may not like who you become once you do. It’s a good message and it is a lot more successful this time, even if the rules of this world get a little muddy as the story progresses.
2. Sexy Substitute
The substitute art teacher comes into the episode as just another user of the magical app that changes your appearance, but the way she crosses lines with our young protagonist Lily, that it almost immediately becomes clear that she is the villain. That’s if you miss that her name is Ms. Fausse, a synonym of fake/fraude/counterfeit, etc. Played with a shrewd over-confidence by Christine Ko, it’s hard to ever believe she’s out to help Lily. This is another episode that lingers on the attractive characters. The camera really hammers it home, a bit too much.
3. Even Nice Girls Have (Personality) Flaws
Our lead, Lily, is a sweet and extremely intelligent teen. But her vanity takes hold when she obsesses over the shape of her nose, and the hope of dating a classmate she tutored a couple years before lead her to using this app. Izabela Vidovic plays Lily with a real down to earth portrayal. She is a girl that everyone knew in high school. She is sweet, pleasant, smart, no disliked, but not at all popular in the typical sense. Anyone who has ever felt unwanted will understand where she’s coming from, and even a high IQ won’t always stop you from making the worst decisions for yourself. And that’s even without an evil app that makes you look anyway you want while subsequently draining your intelligence and memories.
4. The Timeless Best Friend
Lily’s best friend Carmen is played with quirky teen comedy perfection by Jordan Sherley. Carmen is everything you’d come to expect from a good pal in this kind of story. She’s the descendant of every best friend from 80s rom-coms, to 90s TGIF shows, to current Disney shows. She stands by her friend for as long as she can, but as Lily takes things too far, even Carmen breaks ties. It’s a twist I didn’t expect, and up to the last two minutes of the episode it really feels like there could be no reconciling between the two friends. Carmen is so sweet, and so nerdy/quirky you feel bad for, and protective of her almost immediately. But she proves that she can stand up for herself throughout the episode. Sherley feels like a combination of Fiona Dourif and a less-mean/snarky Aubrey Plaza. Just enough snark under the best friend charm. I’m not sure of her actual age, but she feels like an old soul. So, even if she was playing her actual age, or close to it, she still comes off as a bit older. It’s probably the fact that she is also playing a very mature and smart character as well, but even in the beginning she feels older than Lily. It’s a great supporting performance.
5. All Made Up And Nowhere To Go
The prosthetic makeup used on Izabela Vidovic is actually quite excellent for a show like this. From the beginning she is given the slightly larger nose bump that she hates, and the it really is so seamless I wasn’t sure if that was actually how her nose looked. From there, as she makes various changes to her look, with the app changing not only her physical features, but also the amount of make-up or hair dye she has, she begins to shift into how she actually looks in real life, and then into further plastic surgery nightmares. When anthology shows get made their budgets tend to be stretched pretty thin to cover everything for the various episodes. Even with a giant conglomerate like Disney, you feel those budgetary restraints in most of their kid shows, so it was nice to see some really great practical and digital effects throughout the episode. Once Lily achieves peak hideousness, she’s stuck running away from everyone and everything she’s wanted or had up until this point. The episode rightly spirals into some bleak territory and I wasn’t sure if there would be any sort of positive resolution at the end, even on a R.L. Stine & Disney joint. Thankfully Lily learns her lesson in time to make things right.
