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Being Erica (2009 – 2011)

We all have regrets. During our lives, we chose one door, when we perhaps should have taken another. But what would happen if you were allowed to have a do-over? Would you be willing to see how things could be different? We’ve seen this in other shows and films: Back To The Future and Sliding Doors.

Erica Strange is a young woman, smart and well-educated, but an underachiever who has been perennially unlucky in her career and her love life. After accidentally consuming a drink with hazelnut flavouring, to which she is allergic, she wakes up in the hospital and meets Dr. Tom, who claims that he can help her fix everything that is not going well in her life. Although initially reluctant, she soon learns that what he is offering is the ability to go back in time to relive and even change her deepest regrets.

Each time she faces a problem in the present, Dr. Tom sends her back to revisit a related regret. The situation is rarely as simple as it first appears: in nearly every case, the event she was seeking to avoid by acting differently still occurs, and she must instead seek out new information to uncover the event’s real meaning, which gives her new insight into how to handle her problem in the present. It quickly becomes apparent the therapy’s true purpose is not to let Erica erase her regrets, but to help her improve her future by learning from past mistakes and making different decisions in the present.

Over the course of the series, the sessions also serve to reveal some of the limitations and complications, as well as the metaphysical implications, of the therapy process — such as whether a patient can intervene to change somebody else’s destiny besides their own, whether the therapist can intervene on the patient’s behalf to change their past without the patient’s knowledge, whether a patient is allowed to reveal the future to another person during a session, and whether the therapy was ever really happening or was merely a dream all along. Later seasons introduce a group therapy session, where several patients gather to discuss and share ideas about one patient’s time travel sessions.

Premise (Wikipedia)

This post is, in part, responding to last Friday’s “Human Ascension with Ellie” video as shared on Facebook. Ellie’s question is whether any of us have free will or is everything predestined. It’s a good question. To have a Canadian TV comedy-drama explore those very questions seems to me serendipitous.

In my own life, I can totally relate to Erica, as played by Erin Karpluk. It’s probably why I became a hypnotherapist during some of the years I lived in the UK. It is also why I’ve been an astrologer since 1977: I wanted to be of service to others. And now I’m a writer of daily posts exploring all these ideas.

Amen.