The Peripheral Season 1 Finale: The Putin Diaspora

Well, if you've been reading these reviews, you know how I am regarding what strikes me most in an episode: it could be a word, a phrase, that a character utters, something that has a special relevance either to our own world outside of the series, or something in the series, or both.

In the case of the season one finale of The Peripheral on Amazon Prime, the phrase is uttered by one of those three gents -- probably too nice a word for them -- in that gentleman's club in that brief coda after the closing credits.  One of them talks about "the Putin diaspora," which was a big factor in their world.  Nice current touch, a reference to the fascist dictator who has been terrorizing Ukraine for nearly a year now with an attack which clearly cannot succeed.

The mention of a "Putin diaspora" in the future -- or maybe "a" future would be a better word -- suggests that something Putin did led to a mass exodus of Russians from Russia.  That would certainly be a logical result if Putin continues his monstrous aggression in our all too-real world.  Good for The Peripheral for calling our attention to that.

[Spoilers follow ... ]

Now as to the rest of the season one finale and its science fiction: It's good to see Flynne and Lowbeer united, my two favorite characters in the series.  I didn't like Flynne's ingenious solution to the problem at hand -- setting up a new stub -- because, well, I didn't like Flynne being killed, in any manner, shape, or form.  Even if being killed in the stub in which this narrative began was necessary for Flynne to confound Cherise, and flourish in a new stub in which Cherise, at least for now, can't find her.

Flynne's death in our reality also makes sense, though, given Flynne's not wanting to live here with her mother dying in less than a month, and neither Flynne nor Lowbeeer or anyone apparently being to stop it.  The reason for that, though, is still not clear, at least not to me.

All in all, an excellent finale to an excellent first season, more than enough to make me sure and eager to watch what comes next.

 

See also The Peripheral 1.1-1.2: Cyberpunk, Time Travel, and Alternate Reality ... 1.3: John Snow ... 1.4 Who Took Lev's Tea? ... 1.5: The AI Therapist ... 1.6: Now or Soonest ... 1.7: The Unreliable Genie

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The Peripheral 1.7: The Unreliable Genie

Let's just start with what I thought was the most significant moment in The Peripheral 1.7 on Amazon Prime since yesterday, an episode which I thought was laden with significance.  Which, I think is a good thing.  As I've been saying throughout these reviews.

[And, of course, spoilers follow ... ]

That moment comes when Lowbeer -- who again plays a highly informative narrative role in this episode, in just about everything she says -- but the most significant moment comes, in my opinion, in what she doesn't say, when she declines to answer the third question Flynne puts to her, after telling Flynne that Lowbeer would answer three questions, just like "a genie".   And that third question to Lowbeer is: do you have the power to sever our connection, i.e,, Lowbeer's connection to Flynne?

Lowbeer's demurral -- stated as an apology for "overpromising" -- is notable for more than one reason.  First, Lowbeer refuses to answer that question after she in effect robs Flynne of her second question, categorizing Flynne's clarification of her first questions as the second question.  (Flynne's first question was "What's your biggest fear?"  Lowbeer answers: "the past".  Flynne replies: "What, like where I'm from?")  And Lowbeer says that's a second question?  Come on.  Not fair.  At most, it's a quarter question, or maybe an eighth of a question.  But ruling that fragment a "second" question shows that Lowbeer is unfair, not honest, and not really wanting to answer Flynne's questions.

Even more important, it shows Lowbeer doesn't want to answer that question.  Which is reinforced by Flynne's immediately preceding not being able to answer Lowbeer's follow-up question of why Flynne would not want to cut the connection between their two worlds.  All of which reinforces the flashing neon sign that this is one crucial question indeed.

I doubt we'll find anything close to why it's such a pivotal question in next week's concluding eighth episode of this first season.  But we'll likely get some more intriguing glimpses of what travel by avatars to the past can do, who lives and who dies in the alternate realities that are engendered, and that's more than fine with me, in this powerhouse of a story, in which, as I've said before, the intellect provides even more punch than the doodad which provides a title for this seventh episode.

See also The Peripheral 1.1-1.2: Cyberpunk, Time Travel, and Alternate Reality ... 1.3: John Snow ... 1.4 Who Took Lev's Tea? ... 1.5: The AI Therapist ... 1.6: Now or Soonest

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The Peripheral 1.6: Now or Soonest

A really high-octane high-intellect episode 1.6 of The Peripheral on Amazon Prime Video tonight -- by which I mean the action, as good as it was, was easily surpassed by the ideas and razor sharp conversation.

And the height of the conversation was offered by Inspector Lowbeer, given a tour-de-force performance by Alexandra Billings, who at her best barely let my near-namesake Lev get a word in edgewise as she spelled out what she thought was going on and what she wanted.  Lots of gems in that one-way conversation, but my favorite was her response to Lev asking her when she wanted to see the three peripherals and their operators -- i.e., our heroes from the near future -- that Lowbeer had instructed Lev to summon.  "Now -- or soonest," she responded.  That order is both a paragon of presumptive and reasonable, at the very same time.

Lev, though, contributes something more substantive in the subsequent conversation, in which he explains how every contact in the past provokes a branching of a new reality, which Lev and his people call a "stub".  That's as good an explanation as you'll find of what travel to the past can do, and how indeed it is even possible -- whether the travel is physical or informational -- because it explains how you could want to travel to the past in the first place, or want to change something there, if you succeed on interfering back then and changing that something.  Without branches, that very change in the past that you wanted would remove the very reason you wanted to change that something in the first place.  It would erase the very motive for the erasure.  In other words, what some people (like me) usually call alternate realities, which any interference in the past generates -- or, as I like to say, is tripped off by any time traveler's tip or drop of the hat -- is called a "branch" by Lev, who adds: "we call" that "a stub".

And in a further linguistically sweet part of the conversation, Lowbeer then wonders why "stub" -- not because it reminds her of something you see on Wikipedia (I don't know if they have Wikipedia in that reality) -- but because stub "sounds nasty, short, brutish".  Lowbeer continues, "wouldn't you expect the fork's new branch to continue to grow?"  Lev responds, "we do" (I agree with Lowbeer and Lev, of course -- fine acting by J J Feild in that role, too, by the way).  It's left to Ash (well played by Harry Potter's Katie Leung) to explain that calling the branches stubs makes it easier for this future to practice imperialism on the past.

Wow!  I don't think I've ever thought of the future manipulating the past as a kind of imperialism -- or "colonialism," as Lowbeer then quickly puts it -- but it's a powerhouse concept, and just one of the reasons I said I thought this episode was sheer intellectual dynamite.

See you back here next week with more.

See also The Peripheral 1.1-1.2: Cyberpunk, Time Travel, and Alternate Reality ... 1.3: John Snow ... 1.4 Who Took Lev's Tea? ... 1.5: The AI Therapist

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The Peripheral 1.5: The AI Therapist

The mention of an "AI therapist" caught my attention in the first few minutes of The Peripheral 1.5 on Amazon Prime Video tonight.  It reminded me of Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA program at MIT in, what, our late nonfiction 1960s?  His program passed the test of being believed to be a human psychologist by subjects who communicated with it and didn't know they were exchanging information with a  cleverly programmed computer.

Information is what this episode, which continued to be excellent, was all about.  (Makes sense, in an episode of a series which is prime cyberpunk.)  In one of the best scenes, Flynne explains to her mother that she did not get her medicine from the future.  Rather, Flynn got information in the future about how to make this powerful medicine, which in a nice touch was "printed" (Flynne's word) on a 3-D printer.

Flynne goes on travel to the future -- informationally -- to ask Wilf he was trying to seduce her via the haptic union they had, and he either plays dumb or honestly tells her he has no idea what she's talking about.  Meanwhile, it becomes palpably clear, once again, that not just information can travel from the future to the past when a car materializes and crashes into the police car carrying the Irish assassin with an ok American accent.   But did the car that hit the police car really come from the future, just like the coffee container a few episodes back, or was the car printed in the past (which is more or less the present in the story), and somehow teleported to collide with the police car?   Come to think of it, could the coffee have come from a current printer, too?  With all those expresso commercials with fancy machines on TV these days with Brad Pitt, somehow the idea of 3-D printing coffee doesn't seem that absurd.

It's almost enough to get you to a therapist, though an AI therapist in this case likely wouldn't be the best.  Speaking of which, the episode ends -- apologies, I didn't advise you about spoilers -- with Flynne's avatar in the future rendering the powerful Cherise into unconsciousness in a fight.  So, how did Flynne become such a proficient fighter?   Maybe she picked up some useful martial information from the future.

See also The Peripheral 1.1-1.2: Cyberpunk, Time Travel, and Alternate Reality ... 1.3: John Snow ... 1.4 Who Took Lev's Tea?

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The Peripheral 1.4: Who Took Lev's Tea?

Who took Lev's tea? The disappearance of his tea in episode 1.4 of The Peripheral up on Amazon Prime Video since yesterday was an another signalic moment, just like the coffee container materializing in thin air in what now seems like a much earlier episode.  The tea gone and the coffee appearing just like that symbolize the immense forces at play in this so far delicately powerfully rendered series, which as far as I can tell so far hasn't missed a step.  (Reminder: I haven't read the book.)

Everyone, certainly in the near future, is struggling to understand what's going on.  "It's not time travel, it's data transfer," Flynne says, after Burton tells her traveling to the future caused her seizure.  But Burton is more right than his sister here, since the transfer of data from the future to the present (or past, depending on how you look at it) is indeed a kind of time travel.  (See Gregory Benford's 1980 Timescape if you don't believe it -- that's a book, by the way, that I did read.)

Also in the near future, Connor wants to know if the data visits to the future come with real bodies?  This is another key to what's really going on.  As we well know, the bodies in the future are both real and not.  As in countless science fiction stories about cyberspace, the original flesh-and-blood bodies can be seriously injured if not killed when their avatars in the future are hurt or killed.  That in itself makes those entities real enough.

Speaking of science fiction entities, I liked that android that Cherise is starting to school in the distant future, especially how he's able to moderate the percentage of sarcasm in his attitude.  That one, brief scene struck me as one of the best I've seen or read in any android story, starting with Isaac Asimov's stories back in the 1950s.

And last but not least -- last is an apt word for for this -- I thought the end of our civilization sequence was top-notch, too.  Given the deadly perils we're currently encountering -- pandemics, climate change, the resurgence of fascism in the U.S. and all over the world -- I found that very appropriate to be watching tonight, too.

Don't forget to turn your clocks back tonight if you live in the U.S.

See also The Peripheral 1.1-1.2: Cyberpunk, Time Travel, and Alternate Reality ... 1.3: John Snow

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The Peripheral 1.3: John Snow

So, I entitled this review of The Peripheral 1.3 "John Snow," even though it had an already very excellent title, "Haptic Drift".

First, John Snow is a great name.  In our real history -- which may be the history of The Peripheral story, too (since there's time travel in this story, its history is changeable)  -- John Snow was a British doctor who lived mostly in the first half of the 19th century, and helped put anaesthesia on the map of crucial medical treatments as well as get a handle on how to blunt cholera epidemics.  Anaesthesia, if you think about it, is deeply related to the transportation of consciousness at the core of The Peripheral.  Plus, we already saw the role that deadly illnesses and their treatment plays in this narrative, with Flynne's mother in last week's episodes.

In last night's episode, Flynne cleverly guesses that where "snow falls" could refer to where "Snow falls" as in John.  And as an added bonus, we have the acoustic reference to the hero of Game of Thrones that some people hate, the one and only Jon Snow.  (I actually first thought that Jon was the Snow being talked about in "Haptic Drift"). What a difference an "h" makes.

And in addition to all that, the action really picks up after John Snow is named.  We get Flynne and Cherise in a nice battle, and see Flynne pick up a little snowy figure -- not a snowman.  Years ago, I went up to the attic of my house where a new roof was being put in -- after a hurricane had taken part of it off -- and  I found a tiny figure of a soldier that someone in the family who originally lived in house must have put there.  And it reminded me of what Flynne picked up near the end of this episode.  So far so good, no one from the future has come after me, either physically or virtually.

By the way, "haptic drift" refers to people falling in love -- or souls melding, as Flynne is told -- when they spend too much time together in cyberspace, and that may be happening with Flynne and Wilf.  Good for them, they both could use it. (By the way, we have "haptic feedback" in our reality -- but, as far as I know, nothing called "haptic drift" has been noted when people fall in love in virtual communities like Second Life, or in any metaverse.) 

Otherwise, I'll say again that the Southern old boy stuff is not my favorite part of this excellent series -- mainly, because I've seen one version or another of it too many times before.  Also, in general, I'd say murder by bee stings is more creative than being locked into a car in the hot sun.  But I'll put up with it, because the rest of the story is so good.

See also The Peripheral 1.1-1.2: Cyberpunk, Time Travel, and Alternate Reality

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The Peripheral 1.1-1.2: Cyberpunk, Time Travel, and Alternate Reality

Just saw the first two episodes of The Peripheral on Amazon Prime Video.  It's an adaptation of the 2014 novel of the same name by William Gibson, the veritable godfather of cyberpunk, and made by the creators of Westworld on HBO, so it has to be good, right?

Well, it is.  Pretty good, that is.   I haven't read the book, so I'm not making comparisons.  My favorite parts are 2099 London, inside the peripheral, a cyber construct that our heroes and villains from an earlier time -- just ten years from now, and who knows when else -- inhabit.  But there's some triteness here.  Good old Southern boys.  The mother of the hero (or one of the heroes), Flynne (well played by Chloë Grace Moretz) dependent on some drug to treat her deadly cancer.  I also could have lived without such physical detail of the eye-transplant in the first episode.

But there are also lots of fun and cool details, like the deputy or whoever he was coming upon what seems to be a coffee-to-go just floating in the air, in the second episode.  And Flynne does bring back a drug from the future to cure her mother, after seeing an obituary for her, who would otherwise have died very soon.  We also soon learn that Flynne's entering the peripheral causes her visceral self to branch off in a different life back in 2030.  So we're dealing here not just with cyberpunk, but with time travel, in effect, and alternate realities, which is tremendously ok in my book.

In addition to drugs and knowledge, money can also be transferred from 2100 to 2030, or seventy years back in time, from the cyberworld to the real world -- if you can call a world already significantly different from ours in 2022 really real -- and that opens all kinds of possibilities, such as people in the further future hiring assassins in the nearer future.  And at this point, that's what we have in The Peripheral, all kinds of intriguing possibilities.  Good guys and bad guys, young and older people, of all genders, and lots of people and things in between.  I'd say as long as The Peripheral continues to mine the esoteric, mind-bending possibilities of cyberspace, time travel, and alternate realities, it could be a top-notch series.

I'll be watching and reviewing.

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