Summary
“In Us We Trust” forces Sarah to delegate responsibility when her controlling tendencies threaten to backfire on everyone.
Being in charge is pretty addictive. Once you get the sense that people are listening to you, and turning to you for help with their problems, it’s hard to let that go. Everyone wants to be liked. Everyone wants to be respected. And nobody wants to admit that other people are just as smart, useful, and important as they are.
But these aren’t desirable qualities in a leader (trust me, I live in England.) They’re qualities that Sarah has to learn to let go of since the potential repercussions of bad leadership are pretty calamitous when the thing you’re leading is an entirely independent nation. You can’t make decisions about currency in the same cavalier my-way-or-the-highway fashion that you choose, say, which rehab facility your mother attends. It requires all kinds of expertise. It affects everyone.
The title of The Republic of Sarah episode 4, “In Us We Trust”, is symbolic of the solution that the town’s residents – and Grover specifically – come up with to solve the currency problem. It involves them literally buying into the country, and being allowed to submit their own personalities and ideas in the process of making the place their own. But it’s also symbolic of Sarah learning to trust other people to help her.
Grover makes this too easy for her. But Danny doesn’t, and there’s a lot of potential richness in this unusual sibling dynamic. The reason Sarah struggles to delegate now is that she has been left to do things by herself all her life, both because of her mother’s alcoholism and her brother’s abandonment. But that abandonment was justified since it was Danny who received the brunt of their mother’s abuse.
These compelling human questions are the bread and butter of The Republic of Sarah season 1, episode 4. This isn’t a perfect show, far from it, but it’s also one that I look forward to each week because it’s always interesting, even when it’s outright bad. It can be difficult to care about some of the subplots occurring in the margins when Sarah’s own backstory and current predicament are so complicated, but if nothing else, Greylock kind of feels like a real place. You just probably wouldn’t want to live there.
