Created by Scott B. Smith
Based on The Peripheral by William Gibson
Starring
Chloë Grace Moretz
Gary Carr
Jack Reynor
JJ Feild
T’Nia Miller
Louis Herthum
Katie Leung
Melinda Page Hamilton
Chris Coy
Alex Hernandez
Julian Moore-Cook
Adelind Horan
Austin Rising
Eli Goree
Charlotte Riley
Alexandra Billings
Music by Mark Korven
Executive producers Steven Hoban, James W. Skotchdopole, Greg Plageman, Athena Wickham, Vincenzo Natali, Scott B. Smith, Lisa Joy, Jonathan Nolan
Producers Jamie Chan, Halle Phillips, Noreen O’Toole, Jay Worth, Sara Desmond
Production companies Kilter Films, Copperheart Entertainment, Amazon Studios, Warner Bros. Television
Distributor Amazon Studios
Now, the first thing going in when you watch The Peripheral is to remember it is based on the William Gibson novel. That means it’s fast-paced, cyber-intensive, imaginative, and often over the top. Oh, and it’s a branching time streams tale, which means a) you’ll really have to concentrate to figure out what’s going on and b) you’ll only partially succeed. Having written one of those myself, I can attest to the complexity. This series isn’t something you noodle through while vaguely pondering what to make for dinner.
The two main locales are North Carolina in 2033 and London in 2099. The North Carolina world is similar to ours, but with small but significant augmentations in technology. A brother and sister are given a new VR headset to field test for some company in Colombia. While both are gamers, neither are so prominent in that world that they would be selected to test top-secret avant garde technology like this. Which is perhaps why they were picked. Smart but not sophisticated. They have a group of other vets from Burton’s (Jack Reynor) old squad living nearby and they have what are called “Hapetic implants” that give them elevated awareness of one another’s location, mood, and level of stress. They live in a small town with the usual levels of corruption, good and bad cops, and local bosses. It reminds me a bit of Ozark, particularly since the sister, Flynne (Moretz) is small, blonde, and a total badass, just like Ruth.
London 2099 has a lot of the same buildings and monuments that the London of today has, but it’s curiously empty of people, the result of a set of apocalyptic events known collectively as the Jackpot. The remaining population (at a guess, maybe 50,000 people) live in a high-tech wonderland where all reality is augmented, and time manipulation has become possible. The city is dotted with a couple of dozen classic Greek statues, each about a mile high, some part of buildings, some stand-alone. Apparently Gibson and the showmakers decided that London was lacking in buildings and landmarks that would let the viewer know what city this was.
Now, if the technology to do such a thing had been available to Londoners over the past 500 years or so, I could see them building mile high statues all over the place. But it wouldn’t be old Grecian statuary, not even in the middle Victorian era. No, it would have been the mythic Londoners of yore: Samuel Pepys, David Beckham, Winston Churchill, Sherlock Holmes, Attila the Hen, Dick Turpin, Liz Truss. Others might have different lists in mind. But it does give me a heretofore unimagined reason why London might be nearly completely empty: all the people were driven mad and/or out of town by the sound of the wind whistling and howling through those bloody big statues.
The human element in this series seems a bit superficial, which is something that Gibson, in his love for cybertech, is prey to, but as an intellectually challenging and pulse-pounding thriller, it’s well worth the time.
Now on Amazon Prime.