The 10th and last episode of Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams - which I've been reviewing here episode-by-episode (because each one is standalone), and which I hope will be the first ten of very many - is Kill All Others. Although each story is different, they're deeply connected and intertwined by the central, galvanizing themes of all of Dick's work: it is real or an illusion, with the struggle to decide which is which always laced with paranoia.
Kill All Others has these characteristics par excellence, and is also the closest to the very time we're living in right now. That makes it closer to Black Mirror than The Twilight Zone, though it feels a lot like a Twilight Zone episode, too. Philbert Noyce sees a political candidate on television - the only candidate running for President - introduce a slogan, "Kill All Others". At first it seems he's the only one who saw this - the real vs. illusion quandary - but soon confirms that others have seen this, and inevitably comes to think of himself as an "other" and then becomes an "other" himself. This is where the paranoia comes in, with the inevitable Dickian question of whether what Noyce is feeling and seeing is real, or his over-active mind - a reversion, as often happens in Philip K. Dick's stories, to the "is it real" dilemma, which never really goes away.The story for television, well written and directed by Dee Rees, departs from Dick's original 1953 story, "The Hanging Stranger," replacing nefarious aliens who have taken over the bodies of humans (as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Heinlein's Puppet Masters, also the theme of episode 1.7 of Electric Dreams) with just us humans as both villain politician and "others" in Kill All Others. The near-future setting gives us "Yes Us Can" and "Mex Us Can" as government slogans - a good example of how fascism can co-opt democracy by twisting its words - and Royce saying "Kill All Others" is "hate speech". But there's no one who looks like Trump in power - likely because this was written before he was elected, but still unfortunate. The single candidate is a woman, which puts Kill All Others in league with the new season of Homeland and even Claire in House of Cards, with women in charge with dictatorial tendencies. A shot against Hillary Clinton? You can decide. All I'll say is I would have rather seen a Trumpian in this role, since his polices are indeed getting closer and closer by the day to the xenophobia towards everyone around us in Kill All Others.
Good acting by Mel Rodriguez as Noyce, Glenn Morshower (24!) as one of his co-workers, and Vera Farmiga as the nameless candidate.
With the 10-episode anthology concluded for now, I always like to pick a favorite episode. The choice is tough - there are so many superb ones. I guess I'd go with 1.3 Human Is. But I loved almost everything about this series, including the great opening sequence. And I'll be back here with more whenever Electric Dreams continues.
See also Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams 1.1 Real Life: Mutually Alternate Realities ... 1.2 Autofac: Human v Machine ... 1.3 Human Is: Compassion or Alien? ... 1.4 Crazy Diamond: DNA Batteries ... 1.5 The Hood Maker: Telepathy and Police ... 1.6 Safe and Sound: This Isn't A Drill ... 1.7 Father Thing: Dick from Space ... 1.8 Impossible Planet: Eye of the Beholder ... 1.9 The Commuter: Submitted for Your Approval
Jack Thorne does a fine job bringing it to the screen in 2018, greatly assisted by Timothy Spall whose Ed has one of those quintessentially British faces. His "Willoughby" is "Macon Heights," a stop on a train line that doesn't quite exist - literally. So here the "real or not real" thread is woven around a town, replete with a diner that serves great pie, which, when you add in the attractive, talkative waitress, also resonates with another real-or-not multiple reality classic, Twin Peaks. David Lynch, Rod Serling, and Philip K. Dick do have a lot of uncommon in common.
The story brings us back out into space and is pure Philip K. Dick, this time pitting us into a choice of not whether this person, memory, or thing is real or illusion, but whether the faux "Earth" the unethical captain is taking her to will fool her into thinking she's really back on humanity's home. The ending - which as you know from my previous reviews I won't reveal - is also classic PKD.
The Father Thing tells us this story from the perspective of a boy whose father has been taken over by an alien from space. Written and directed by Michael Dinner (Justified) from Philip K. Dick's 1954 story "The Father-Thing," The Father Thing without the hyphen nonetheless has an appealing 1950s flavor, with a Twilight Zone ambience and a Stranger Things wrap-up - as the boy and then his friends in effect become freedom fighters - which brings the story into the present in terms of what we're seeing these days on television. Indeed, that and the hashtag #RESIST and video-chatting, plus the use of the word "dick" in several pivotal places (such as when the son refers to the invaders as "dicks from space"), are about the only concessions The Father Thing makes to 2018. 
But there's nothing thin about Safe & Sound, written for television by Kalen Egan and Travis Sentell, who give us an hour rich in symbolism and relevance to our own time, including the words "this isn't a drill," heard just yesterday in Hawaii, in our reality, when someone who should have known better released an announcement of an incoming ballistic missile attack in error.
It's also a great story, compellingly rendered. Honor is a telepath or TEEP teaming with Agent Ross to maintain order, which includes controlling the TEEPs, whose ability to read normal human minds sows unease and disorder (understandable). The situation is brought to a boil by the "hood maker" who makes hoods which, when donned, block out the TEEP probes. 
The thing is, Crazy Diamond is so far the least like the original Dick story - "Sales Pitch" - it's based upon. It doesn't even have the same name, which makes it different in that respect from the other three I've so far reviewed. (I'll be reviewing all the episodes of Electric Dreams, one at a time.) I did say in my 
Human Is, the third standalone episode in Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams 10-episode anthology now streaming on Amazon Prime, and which I'm reviewing one episode at at a time (see my 
In Autofac, we have Dick addressing his perennial what's real and what's fantasy, dream, alternate whatever conundrum in a form likely best known these days, and for better than three decades: which one is more human, the android (robot) or the humans who made it/her/him. This is the theme of Bladerunner, original movie and recent sequel, based on Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - two words of which are part of the title of this 2018 streaming series.
Now to Real Life: It engages, as most of Dick's works do, the question of what is real and what is a dream, or fantasy, or alternate in contrast to primary reality. But Real Life takes this in an exquisite direction, giving us two realities, each with devices that allow their protagonist to have a great vacation in an alternate reality based on what they need, and we soon learn that each protagonist's presumably primary reality is the other's vacation or alternate reality. So what we get are mirroring alternate realities.