The Peripheral: Greg and Zanna review the alternative worlds of the new sci-fi thriller

The Peripheral.

Greg and Zanna go as deep as they're willing into The Peripheral.

SCORES
Number of alternative worlds: 2
Number of episodes before you know what's going on: 2
Number of related events required for a coincidence: 2

SHE SAW

After watching the first episode of The Peripheral, I sought assistance from an article titled "Everything You Need to Know About The Peripheral" on entertainment news website Collider. Almost nothing from that article I had gleaned from the first episode. It made the show sound quite straightforward forward but the pilot itself, unless you're familiar with the premise of the series or the William Gibson book on which it's based, is very confusing. It's firmly rooted in the popular "Who's that? What are they doing? What's going on?" canon of brain gymnastics television.

It's by the makers of Westworld and has a very similar tone: an unsettling sci-fi dealing with technological imaginings that are frighteningly close to the horizon. It's set in two time frames: somewhere in the rural south of the United States in 2032 and London in 2100. It's not about time travel exactly but it's not NOT about time travel either. Although the protagonist Flynn (Chloe Grace Moretz) does appear in both time frames, her 2100 body is actually just a human-like robot that her 2032 mind inhabits when she puts on a pronged headset that loosely resembles an electro-shock therapy device. I can hear fans of the book screaming at me for describing The Peripheral universe so simplistically and I'm sorry.

When Flynn inhabits a future robot for the first time, she witnesses a murder, which results in her and her family being chased by bounty hunters from the future. Thus the two time frames become inextricably linked and Flynn has to keep returning to the future to save herself in the present. Is any of this making sense?

The pilot episode did an excellent job of setting the tone of the series. I knew exactly the kind of show I was watching and exactly the audience for it - my brother - but ultimately found the balance between the known and the unknown was off. Were we not reviewing it, I probably wouldn't have bothered to watch the second episode, in which many of the first episode's questions areanswered and the story begins to unfold at a decipherable pace.

As in Westworld, there's a lot of violence in this series, including a horrifyingly gruesome depiction of an eyeball transplant that, despite the fact I'm quite partial to onscreen surgical procedures, made me turn away from the TV lest I crawl right out of my skin and leave my body on the couch, open to being inhabited by any old headset-wearing time tourist. Two episodes deep, I now know everything I need to know about The Peripheral and likely won't continue watching, but if mind-bending, dystopian future, tech sci-fi is your jam, then this is absolutely for you.

HE SAW

The Peripheral is just the latest in a long line of high-profile entertainments dealing with the idea of multiple possible planes of existence. Westworld, The Matrix, The Truman Show, Stranger Things and Inception are just some of the most high-profile stories driven by the idea that there's some sort of alternative world affecting this world in ways we can't see until eventually the scales fall from our eyes.

I'm not opposed to these movies/shows in principle, but I'm increasingly bored by the idea at their collective centre and would happily see no more stories driven by this idea. It might have been novel once, but it's become repetitive and its chief purpose now is to deny space to the exploration of other interesting ideas. A good tagline for The Peripheral would be: Westworld, but dumb.

A week or so ago, when I was on holiday in Wellington, my brother, who lives in Auckland, texted me a screenshot from one of his favourite TV shows, Deadliest Catch. The screen featured the subtitle: "DEJA-VU ALL OVER AGAIN" and his accompanying text was: "Why do people keep saying this, surely it ain't proper?"

I briefly wondered what had inspired his text, since this was not a phrase we'd ever talked about. I read his message while walking through the Wellington CBD, put my phone away and assumed that would be that. Seconds later, I rounded a corner, and was stopped dead in my tracks because, there in front of me, was an enormous billboard with giant lettering reading:"It's like deja vu all over again."

I was stunned. I looked around me, looked back at my phone, looked back at the billboard. What was going on? The universe, which until that moment had at least seemed to obey most known laws of rationality, suddenly seemed a more unsettling, more uncertain place. I guess you could make the argument that it was just a coincidence, but what is a coincidence if not a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection?

It crossed my mind that I had entered The Upside Down or that I was being toyed with by a nefarious director in some kind of Truman Show situation, or was subject to whatever happens in Inception. Although I knew that wasn't the case, I didn't know how I knew. Now I've had a chance to think about it, I still don't. There are very few things I know for sure. One of them is that there are very few things we can know for sure. Another is that The Peripheral isn't very good.

The Peripheral is now streaming on Prime Video.