This week is the Board of Trustees meeting for Union, and I’m currently in the middle of my term as a faculty trustee, which means a really heavy load of meetings to hear reports on what’s happening with the college these days. I had three 90-minute Zoom meetings yesterday alone, plus most of an in-person class, so I have very little brain left to ponder Big Ideas. Which means it’s time for a little pop-culture criticism…
I am rarely on top of pop-culture events, because of the way my personal work schedule operates, but we’ve had a few weeks of weather that’s been too cold to be outside riding a bike but not snowy enough to be outside skiing. Which means that, since I feel gross if I go more than a couple of days without some exercise, I’ve been logging a good number of fake miles on the stationary bike in the basement (which we’ve had for a bit more than two years, and which has over 2000 miles on it. That allowed me to stream the full first season of The Peripheral on Amazon Prime, an adaptation of William Gibson’s novel from 2014. This dropped back in October(-ish), but it took a while to make it to the top of my watch list.
This is not atypical for me with regard to Gibson, who has been on my buy-on-sight list since I discovered Neuromancer back in the day. Every time he releases a book, I buy it at once, and then spend an inordinately long time working myself up to read it, in the mistaken impression that it’s going to be work. I’m basically always wrong about that— he’s a writer whose style really clicks with me, such that his books are always highly readable. He’s got a bit of a reputation for engaging Big Ideas, but he does it in a way that generally goes down very smoothly.
A big part of the reason— both for the readability and the reputation for being difficult— is that he tends to focus pretty narrowly on characters who don’t entirely understand what’s going on, so the books mostly operate on vibes. As I noted in a Twitter thread a week or so ago, this makes the whole idea of adapting his work to the screen kind of complicated (click through to read the whole thing, though I’ll recap some of it below):
Having now finished the series, I’m still not entirely sure how successfully this played out.
The plot is split (in both the book and the show, though I’ll focus on the show here, because it’s more fresh in my memory) in both time and space. One thread is set in a near-future Appalachian town where a young woman named Flynn Fisher lives with her brother Burton, who has both physical and mental scars from his time as an augmented soldier; their mutual friend Conner lost both legs and an arm serving in the same unit. Flynn barely scrapes by working with a local outfit that does 3-d printing of tech gadgets on demand, and Burton makes money by assisting rich kids in VR games. Flynn is his secret weapon there, though— she’s better at the games than he is, and he’ll get her to sub in for him when there’s a really challenging level.
The main action is kicked off when a mysterious company in Latin America hires Burton to play-test a new kind of game, using a custom rig unlike the standard VR setup. He gets Flynn to enter the game in his place, and she finds herself in the other plotline, doing some sort of secret agent thing in a future London. Operating with an avatar who looks like Burton and guided by a mysterious woman’s voice, she seduces and abducts a woman at a party, then uses the woman’s eye to gain access to a secret facility for her avatar and the mysterious Aelita West; after doing something inscrutable with a huge futuristic set, she’s killed and dumped out of the “game.”
As viewers, we learn that the game is not, in fact, a game, but is a real future London, existing in the wake of “The Jackpot,” a planetary calamity that wiped out the vast majority of humanity. Flynn and Burton inhabit a “stub,” an alternate universe contacted via technobabble controlled by the Research Institute, one of the main power centers in future London. Aelita’s adoptive brother Wilf Netherton begins looking into her disappearance at the behest of his employer and maybe-friend Lev Zubov, a member of “The Klept,” which is basically the Russian mob from John Wick transplanted to future London. Wilf contacts Flynn and begins bringing her to the future where she moves around in an artificial body known as a “peripheral” (drink because a character said the name of the show), and sending money and information to Flynn and her family in the stub. At the same time, the elegantly creepy Dr. Cherise Nuland, head of the RI, is trying to have Flynn killed in both timelines.
The basic structure here is based on the book— in the novel Flynn witnesses a murder while taking Burton’s place in VR, and the investigation and cover-up drive the action— but as noted in that Twitter thread, the cast is a bit more expansive. It’s also pushed a bit more in the direction of Gibson’s flashier genre work from the heyday of “cyberpunk,” with more guns and kung fu, because you kind of need that in a visual medium.
The cast is also considerably more expansive than in the novel, where I think we only see things through the eyes of Flynn and Wilf (it’s been ages since I read it). This is both good and bad. T’Nia Miller as Dr. Nuland and Louis Herthum as the drug dealer Corbell Pickett (who runs Flynn’s hometown) are both chewing the hell out of every bit of scenery the props department and CGI artists can bang together around them, and Ned Dennehy puts in some highly entertaining work in later episodes as a kind of Irish John Wick. The rest of the cast, while more restrained, are also fun— Chloe Grace Moretz has to do a lot as Flynn, and carries it off well. As noted in that Twitter thread, though, the wider cast necessarily brings in a lot of people who know what’s going on and have the duty of spelling it out for the viewer, and that ends up being a little clunkier. I’m not entirely sure what would constitute a better justification for all the skullduggery with the RI and the Klept meddling in Flynn’s world, but what they lay out in the show ends up being a little disappointing. I think it might’ve been better left more enigmatic, as Gibson’s novels tend to do, but the move to an inherently external medium like video doesn’t allow quite the same leeway to have things obscured by sticking to the POV of a character who never has access to all the facts.
One of my colleagues was vocally outraged about the final episode, which does take a bit of a turn; I wasn’t wild about how it ended, but I think it pushed his buttons in a way that doesn’t really hit mine. Anyway, if you haven’t watched it but are considering doing so, consider that a warning that there’s a not-exactly-a-twist ending that may or may not work. And also a warning that there may be spoilers in the comments to this post, should John or anybody else who disliked the finale want to expound at greater length.
Anyway, this was an enjoyable distraction while exercising, and I’m happy to hear it’s been renewed for a second season. I’ll watch that when it comes out, possibly even in a more timely manner, though I guess that will depend a bit on the weather…
So, yeah, that’s some pop culture. If you like this kind of thing, here’s a button to get months-out-of-date reviews of streaming shows sent to your inbox:
And if you’d like to discuss the show or the book, the comments will be open:
(The spoiler-averse should enter at their own risk.)
Agree, mostly. It was my second favorite series of 2022 behind Severance. It is a different thing from the books and doesn't play by the same rules. I thought they watered down Wilf's character more than I would have preferred but amped up the crews in both timeframes in a few interesting ways. I am prepared to see new things to get used to in the second season which I think will start to edge closer to what happened during the Jackpot.
I just finished the sixth episode of The Last of Us on HBO and get a similar vibe from the style of storytelling they used. That show is wrenching because of the skill with which they get you into the minds of the characters.
FWIW, I really liked the Peripherical. I do find the reason to have stubs (to test stuff out) a bit... underwhelming but I am trying to ignore that and enjoy the show.
The Flynn status and "I am dead but only in that stub so it doesn't count" could be seen as asking complicated questions about consciousness in an expanding multiverse but it's frankly just a problem with time travel etc. stories. You got to deal with these inconsistencies and narrative logical loops as elegantly as possible. Making them into plot points is risky, as it can easily get you mired in your own phlebotinium ...