Martha Goddard took less than 15 minutes to create a beautifully fleshed out world that could easily be a feature film all on its own. Atmospheric, stunningly poetic, and just enough melancholy to create a quiet ache in your heart, Godel: Incomplete is a masterwork, far surpassing any straight-to-digital release, and deserves accolades and honors beyond the episodic world.

Kurt Gödel may not be a household name for most. Logician, mathematician, and philosopher, Gödel paved the way for theories on time travel, incompleteness, and mathematical logic that would change the world. Everyone from Einstein to Turing took notes from Gödel. He died, mentally ill and starving by his own choice, in 1978. But not for particle physicist Serita Cedric (Elizabeth Debicki). Late nights studying, theorizing, and taking notes are just as much an excuse to test her perfect and profound theory, combining her work with Gödel’s, and potentially changing the world, and what we believe about our reality.

While the science and logic behind smashing particles together and creating wormholes isn’t accessible to me, or to most, the love story of Godel: Incomplete absolutely is. Highlighting women in science, while also painting Serita as a soft, sentimental, loving person, Godel: Incomplete is a soft and stirring portrait of feminism. Elizabeth Debicki as Serita carries the formidable weight of a heady story with grace. Small choices, the way she opens a soda can or smokes a cigarette, create a deep character with habits and history giving her a real sense of life and livelihood.

Dreamlike sequences intercut harshly with the sterile lab environment, fluorescent lights, and distinct buzz of working late at night after everyone else has gone home. Melancholic romance is the sweeping mood of the episode, which is a beautifully complete short film on its own, but is a welcome shift from the horror and gore of the prior ETHERIA episodes. Even with an anthology series, it’s pleasant to have a flow between episodes, and three episodes in, I can see the flow of this series.

9 out of 10