Inventing Anna · Season 1 · Episode 6 · 11 February 2022
S1E6 Friends in High Places
THE MOMENT The Moroccan hotel checkout - the specific mechanics of how Anna engineers the escape from the bill, which the episode stages as simultaneously appalling and impressive.
Episode 6 is Inventing Anna at its most purely entertaining - the Moroccan trip sequence, in which Anna orchestrates a vacation on stolen credit and sheer audacity, plays like a caper film. The episode clarifies the show's implicit argument: Anna's success depended entirely on other people's desire to believe in the version of wealth she was performing.
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Episode 6 is where Inventing Anna fully commits to the caper-film register its subject invites. The Moroccan trip - Anna assembling a group of friends, running up a bill that exceeds anyone's reasonable expectation, then engineering an exit through social pressure and theatrical confidence - is the series at its most kinetic. The episode illuminates the central mechanism of Anna's fraud: she was not exploiting the greedy but the aspirational, people whose desire to be proximate to wealth made them complicit in the performance. Julia Garner is the episode's engine throughout, modulating between Anna's warmth and her calculation in a way that makes the viewer's own complicity in enjoying the story visible.