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'Little Fires Everywhere' Episode 3 '70 cents' is about the veneer of life in suburbia coming off

This episode sees Mia Warren obsessively track down an illegal immigrant's baby girl and Elena Richardson unknowingly leads Mia to the baby
UPDATED MAR 20, 2020
(Hulu)
(Hulu)

'Little Fires Everywhere' tells the story of two families, that of Elena Richardson who belongs to the upper-class White family and leads a "normal" life in Shaker Heights and of Mia Warren, a single black mother who has faced multiple obstacles when it comes to bringing up her child.

The show usually draws parallels between the two families, what kind of mother Mia is in comparison to Elena and how the kids in the Richardson household go through life in comparison to Mia's daughter Pearl.

In a nutshell, the show portrays how privilege influences lifestyle and belief system. 

In its third episode titled 'Seventy Cents', the episode begins by showing us how Bebe Chow (Huang Lu) abandoned her baby outside a fire station and why. She is an illegal immigrant and has no money to take care of her child. She is unable to feed herself, let alone her baby and in desperation, she abandons her baby.

In the present, we see Bebe and Mia having a conversation about the possibility of Bebe tracking her baby down. However, because she is not a legal immigrant, she cannot go to the cops and so, Mia begins to track the baby for Bebe.

Mia's desperation to bring the baby and her biological mother come across as more an obsession than sincere concern. 

Coincidentally enough, one of Elena's couple friends has adopted a baby after having tried really hard to have one of their own. Turns out, they were approached by officials at Shaker Heights to check if they would be interested in adopting a baby girl who was abandoned.

Elena is planning the first birthday for the baby as a celebration of her friends' perseverance and Mia is helping her with some of the arrangements. So when Elena shares her friends' story Mia is unable to help herself and ends up offering her services further in an attempt to meet the baby. 

Mia with her daughter Pearl in 'Little Fires Everywhere' Episode 3 (Hulu)

Once she meets the baby, she tries to identify the baby by her birthmark that Bebe had shared about her daughter Mai Ling. When she finds the same birthmark at the birthday celebration, she ends up revealing where the baby is to Bebe with no thoughts about how this would affect the life of the baby.

She is unable to think logically and the reason partly seems to be because she keeps thinking back to the time when she was left to take care of Pearl alone. Her heartbreak over the mother being separated from her daughter is clear when she finally sees baby Mai Ling and that is when we know that Mia is not thinking of the baby's best interests but about the mother's guilt. 

When Bebe ends up crashing the birthday party, she shocks everyone, including Elena, because they do not know if Bebe was telling the truth. While Elena convinces the adoptive parents that their baby belongs to them alone and no one can take her away, Mia is busy distracting herself from facing the consequences of her actions by having sex with a man. She is impulsive and her decisions come from a complex space.

This is apparent in her parenting style, even her conversations with her daughter Pearl. Everything that Mia sees present in Elena's life is something she deems is a result of privilege. 

Elena's friends who were privileged enough to be able to adopt a baby, Elena's daughter who was privileged enough to pay for Pearl's dress in return for "inspiring" her Yale essay, Elena's eldest son Trip who believes that the world belongs to him because he belongs to a family that is privileged enough to fulfill his needs — are all instances that the episode doesn't underline but it is present throughout the episode at intervals to show how all of this affects both Mia and Pearl. 

Amid all the drama about the kids getting ready for Homecoming, and struggling with conflicts of their own, this episode was mainly about how privilege can change lives. 

'Little Fires Everywhere' new episodes drop on Wednesdays on Hulu.

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