Recap / Philip K Dicks Electric Dreams S 1 E 9 Safeand Sound

• Adaptation Name Change: In "Foster, You're Dead!" the character's last name was Foster and his first name was Mike; in this adaptation the protagonist is a girl whose full name is Foster Lee.
• Adaptation Title Change: "Safe and Sound" is based on the short story "Foster, You're Dead!"
• Big Brother Is Watching You: What Foster's mom thinks of life in the East. Everyone blithely accepts being tracked and monitored by the government at all times as part of daily life — although, to be fair, none of them seem to be actually negatively affected by it in any way. Turns out Foster's mother was more right than even she knew.
• Divided States of America: Though never fully explained onscreen, we are told that the United States, while still nominally one country, is divided between the "East", which is a high-tech ubiquitous surveillance state, and the "West", where people live in relatively low-tech "Bubbles" whose borders the East fanatically patrols for terrorists. The area between the two regions appears to be a no man's land referred to as the "Rift", although the closed captions say "Riph".
• Double Reverse Quadruple Agent: Foster unwillingly becomes one of these.
• Doublespeak: A given for the type of Orwellian Crapsaccharine World the East appears to be. Notably, Irene's biggest political enemy claims to be a mere "consumer rights advocate", but turns out to be highly-placed enough in the government to order an op to turn her daughter into an unwilling asset.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The episode takes the fairly well-trodden trope of The City vs. the Country, specifically an old-fashioned Midwestern white girl moving to the East Coast, and mixes it up with The War on Terror and modern fears of immigrants and refugees.
• The Ending Changes Everything: Everything that's happened to Foster since the moment she purchased a Dex has been carefully manipulated by the government to bring down her mother.
• False Flag Operation: Foster's mom believes this to be true of all reported terrorist incidents of the past 20 years. She ends up the victim of one.
• Free-Love Future: Thanks to the Dexes keeping track of everyone's health and the existence of sterilizing drugs, nobody seems to bat an eye at things like non-Dexed students soliciting favors for sex, or even two students making out and groping one another in full view in a hallway.
• Gaslighting: What Ethan and his boss are putting Foster through.
• Gender Flip: In the original short story "Foster, You're Dead!" Foster was a boy (named Mike Foster) and the story was about his conflict with his father; this time around, the main character is a girl being raised by a single mom.
• Hearing Voices: Foster begins to question whether any of her communications with Ethan are real, at least after the first one.
• Hypocrite: The government is spreading propaganda about terrorist groups creating sleeper agents by brainwashing psychologically vulnerable children. Ethan tries to convince Foster this is what her mother has done to her. Turns out the only people brainwashing children into terrorists are the government themselves.
• Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: Once Ethan begins talking to Foster even after she's lost her Dex, and giving questionable explanations about sending signals through beams of sunlight and bouncing them off the antennae of ants. Although Foster begins to worry that maybe she's the one who's off her meds.
• New Technology Is Evil: This was the somewhat Anvilicious Aesop of Dick's original story satirizing the Cold War arms race. This adaptation turns it into a New Media Are Evil story about ubiquitous surveillance.