The Peripheral

Flynne Fisher lives down a country road, in a rural America where jobs are scarce, unless you count illegal drug manufacture, which she’s trying to avoid. Flynne earns money assembling product at the local 3D printshop. She made more when she was working as a combat scout in online VR games, beefing up character stats for the lazy and inept rich, but she’s had to take a break from the shooter games recently.

Flynne’s brother Burton lives on money from the VA, for neurological damage suffered while serving in the Marines’ elite Haptic Recon unit down in the Texas Outback war in ‘28. He’s been moonlighting online, secretly working security in a video game prototype, a virtual world that looks like London, but a lot weirder. One night, he asks Flynne to take over a shift, promising her that the game’s not a shooter.

Still, the crime she witnesses there is pretty bad.

Wilf Netherton lives in a London that is seventy-some years into a possible future, on the far side of a decades long slow-motion apocalypse. Things are pretty good there, for the haves, at least, and there aren’t that many have-nots left. Wilf, a high-powered publicist and celebrity-minder, moves in powerful circles, fancying himself a romantic misfit, in a society where reaching into the past is just another hobby for the wealthy and powerful.

Flynne and Wilf are about to meet one another. Her world will be altered utterly, irrevocably, and Wilf’s, for all its decadence and power, will learn that some of these third-world types from the distant past can be more formidable than expected.

This is the synopsis from William Gibson’s novel, The Peripheral, of course, but the tv show is a good adaptation that sticks pretty close to the source material.

William Gibson is a well known author. His first book was titled Neuromancer, published in 1984, and it was inspired by a throwaway line from John Carpenter’s 1981 film Escape From New York, where Lee Van Cleef’s Police Commissioner Bob Hauk says to Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken: “You flew the Gullfire over Leningrad, didn't you?” That book is the reason why Gibson is considered the father of the Cyberpunk genre, why he is credited with first envisioning the Internet and Cyberspace before it ever really existed, and why Gibson Supercomputers were named after him. This book, and his subsequent ones, thrillers set on the bleeding edge of a near-future, featuring technology and trends that would often then end up appearing in real life, earned him a reputation as a bit of a prognosticator, a kind of futurist meets seer.

This is why I think about his idea of The Jackpot every single day now…

A quote from the book about the roots of the Jackpot that sticks with me: “people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were."

The parallels to our own world is a bit chilling…

So, anyway, we’re here to talk about the TV series.

The Peripheral dared to be a slow-burning cyber-noir thriller that ends with a deceptively simple plot twist idea for a very ballsy cliffhanger, that is probably too weird/complex for a lot of non-nerds to really wrap their heads around, let alone for them to walk away from feeling satisfied, so for that alone, I was very impressed.

Beyond that? I Loved it.

Fingers crossed for season 2, but I’m not holding my breath. This show may have been right up the alley of a certain kind of geek like myself and those like me, but to quote the most well-known Never Nude: “There are dozens of us! Dozens!”

The Peripheral is one of my favorite Gibson books. It’s fairly straightforward, plot-wise, but it turns on the idea of two different futures locked in a race for information, one to use for their very survival, and the other to use for financial gain. One future is a century from now, a time of high technology that is still recovering from a series of contemporaneous global catastrophes that killed off 80% of the population known as The Jackpot. The other is 10-ish years from now, a familiar day after tomorrow world of iPhones and Walmart off-the-shelf trash tech that is very obviously teetering at The Jackpot’s edge and about to tip over and fall in. These two timelines can communicate with each other digitally, through phones, emails, or VR connections that allow them to pilot robot bodies, all due to the “magic” of some quantum computer bloopty-blah technobabble shit, so you gotta be cool with that kind of vague handwavey sci-fi type of nonsense explanation in order to engage with this show.

If you’re not, then this show probably isn’t for you.

If you’re okay with that idea, you will find that it is used very effectively for a “the privileged use the poor to fight their wars” class war metaphor embedded in this war across time. The rich in the far future wield their money like a superpower, dazzling the desperate poor in the past with glimpses of their seemingly magical world, all so the poor will fight for the interests of the rich, fueled by their own petty grievances, all while far far away from the cushy safety of the rich’s homes. It not only highlights clearly who benefits, and who is left to pay the price, but also the willingness of the poor to spill blood for a system that does not benefit or care about them: “Now, you won’t get anywhere in life, Jasper, if you don’t have the courage to be cruel now then, just for the pure animal joy of it.” If there’s a better line that sums up the culture of White Christian America, I don’t think I’ve heard it.

I also really liked the story’s related commentary on the way these same wars for profit turn soldiers into War Machines, honing them to a keen edge for a specific bloody purpose, then deploying them as weapons, only to cast them aside once they’re no longer useful, abandoning them like tools left out in the rain to rust. Most of all, I especially loved (hated/feared) how the global events that lead up to The Jackpot very much mirror our own world.

Anyway, all around big thumbs up. Hopefully we’ll get a 2nd season.

SPOILER: We did not get a 2nd season…