The Peripheral Pilot Throws Us into a Intriguing Future (or Two)

The following contains spoilers for The Peripheral S1E1, “Pilot” (directed by Vincenzo Natali and written by Scott B. Smith, based on the book by William Gibson)

I don’t know about you, but I’m actually getting a little burnt out on stories involving alternate universes. Thankfully, with The Peripheral, it’s clear from the jump that the devil will be in the details, and I infer from the pilot that the many worlds result from people messing with time. We don’t quite know how any of this works yet, exactly, but that’s part of the fun. This first hour loads me with questions that I expect it may take some time to find answers to, so I’m going to focus here on articulating the questions.

I should note as we get going that I have not read the source material for this show. I am familiar with the work of William Gibson generally, and recognize him as the master of cyberpunk that he is, so I do have confidence coming in that everything will get even more compelling as we go. Plus, the world (or should I say ‘worlds’?) of The Peripheral is immediately intriguing.

The basics are relatively straightforward: By 2032, virtual reality video games have really taken off, to where it’s possible to earn money by completing tasks for people within them. Our protagonist, Flynne (Chloë Grace Moretz) is super good at these games, but she largely eschews them at this point because they’re not real. At least, this is what she tells her friend Billy Ann (Adelind Horan) when they talk about it, but Flynne is pretty easily persuaded by Burton (Jack Reynor) to test out the new headset tech he’s received to beta test, and her motivation doesn’t exactly seem to be primarily the money he says they can earn. She’s into this stuff, and obviously thrilled by her first experience with it.

Of course, things take a really dark turn when she logs in for the second time. Seducing, drugging, and kidnapping Mariel (Poppy Corby-Tuech) was already pretty dark, mind you, but if you’re operating under the presumption that you’re playing a video game, such a sequence of events isn’t all that disturbing. In contrast, waking up unable to move before having your eye removed from its socket without benefit of anaesthesia is rather disturbing, game or no.

But this isn’t a game, as you may have guessed from the get-go. It’s something else. Flynne gets suspicious because when she lost the skin on her hand she discovered she was a machine underneath, which would just be weird game design, but everything else about what happens in the “game” also points to such a conclusion.

Apparently, people in the future hire people from the past to inhabit robots and do crimes for them. That’s what I’m gathering anyway, but there are a number of further wrinkles that could indicate that this isn’t quite right. Why, for example, does Flynne feel things so vividly, like they’re really happening to her, if she is inhabiting a robot? Is this robot like the other robots we see in the future she visits, like the driver of Mariel’s car she dispatches? Obviously not insofar as Flynne looks like a human being (Burton, to be precise, since she’s using his avatar for him), but is this the only difference? I’m wondering if perhaps the other robots are programmed in such a way that they couldn’t be used to break laws, leading to a kind of black market that requires an actual human consciousness in order to work.

To be clear, this is all speculation on my part at this point. I did look up the term ‘polt’ because Aelita (Charlotte Riley) uses it to describe Flynne in this episode, and the definition does start verging into territory The Peripheral the TV show has not fully laid out yet, but in another way that information is already here in the pilot if you can piece it together.

The episode begins in 2099 before jumping to 2032, and in the London we start in old-timey ships appear to be battling in the river that Wilf (Gary Carr) sits near. A young Aelita (Sophia Ally) approaches him to say some cryptic things about not wearing shoes and how she’s off to save the world (but not this world, which she agrees cannot be saved), before spacing out.

The older version of Aelita asks Flynne whether she’d change her life if Aelita told her she’d likely not exist in another decade, and while she’s kind of musing to herself more than anything in this scene, I think we can take this as evidence that Flynne’s world is indeed in peril—however that works and whatever that means.

We can also infer that whatever Aelita is trying to access using Mariel’s eye has to do with her goal of saving whatever world it is she wants to save. Whether we should be on her side in all of this is more questionable. (Side note: never lose sight of the fact that the more we begin to depend on biometrics like eyescans, the more we create a world where people will be motivated to do things like kidnap people in order to steal one of their eyes. Perhaps continuing to use keys is not such a bad idea?)

We don’t really know what Aelita was after, but given the straightforwardness of her remark to Flynne that what would come next would be an “eye-opening experience” we should maybe take seriously the remarks she makes about it being infinity in the palm of your hand. Maybe this is somehow what enables all of the messing about in time, the creation of alternate universes and so on. Or maybe it’s something else. Either way, I do hope we see Aelita again and get some more insight into what exactly her failed heist was all about.

In the meantime, Flynne would seem to have a team of commandos out to kill her due to her participation. Do people in the future know that polts are being tricked into thinking they are playing a game? Do they not know that, or do they simply not care?

Wilf has gone to great lengths to warn Flynne of the threat to her, and urged her to log back in so that he can help her. I would guess she might proceed to do that now that Burton and his buddies have discovered the commandos with their drones, but the pilot ends before we can find out.

So I guess we’ll have to wait until next week. See you then.