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The science fiction series "The Peripheral" post 
by Marcus Hammerschmitt
Good science fiction series are rare, and "The Peripheral" is one of them. The production, based on a novel by William Gibson, takes viewers to a dystopian London of the future - and fortunately deviates from the original quite often.
Rural America is no fun. Not currently, and if the Amazon Prime series "The Peripheral" has its way, not in about a decade, in the year 2032. Flynne Fisher (Chloë Grace Moretz) lives with her sick mother in a run-down house on the outskirts of the small town of Clanton, her brother Burton (Jack Reynor) lives in a dilapidated Airstream trailer right next door. Flynne works at a 3D printing company and takes care of her mother; Burton lives on VA (Veterans Affairs) assistance, having once belonged to an elite Marine unit in which members were fused into a cognitive and emotional whole with the help of a kind of Bluetooth. He suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome and the side effects of the technology implanted in his body, which is still active. He has fared far better than his comrade Conner Penske (Eli Goree), who has been missing half his body since the war and who usually thunders around at night on a specially made trike, often intoxicated with alcohol and drugs.
> Anyone who picks up the novel will discover that not only have individual characters been accentuated differently, added or removed, but that this also applies to entire storylines and thematic complexes.
Not rosy circumstances in Clanton, then, which is also evident in politics and economics. The power structures in the area are quickly unraveled: An unscrupulous former car dealer named Corbell Pickett (Louis Herthum) controls the production and distribution of synthetic drugs throughout the area - and thus the only remaining profitable industry. In addition, there are the law enforcement officers in the form of Sheriff Jackman (Ben Dickey) and his deputy Tommy Constantine (Alex Hernandez), who, while not part of the dirty club himself, has to overlook a whole lot of dirt day in and day out. That's the way things are in Clanton, and have been for a long time.
The distant future breaks into this mixture of corruption and resignation completely unexpectedly. Burton illegally supplements his VA pension by working as a paid gamer; his skills as a former marine are only useful in this regard. But Flynne is at least as good as he is at virtual shooting, and she fills in for him when he's indisposed. Her mother's medical bills have to be paid somehow.
But the latest gaming job feels different. First, the mysterious client has sent over a neural interface that is generations ahead of current VR technology. Second, the strange world this interface leads to is not only extremely detailed, but also brutal in a way that even the experienced Flynne can't handle. And third, of course, something goes thoroughly wrong. In a surreally cruel way, data is transmitted to her in the game world that she is not supposed to know about. And then it turns out that the game is not a game at all, but the access to a possible future. Since this has contact with Flynne's present, both can influence each other. It's not about time travel, but only about information transfer, but that's enough for all kinds of unpleasant entanglements.
The place in the future, more precisely in the year 2100, to which Flynne has access, is an extremely strange London. At first glance, everything is quite pretty and technologically advanced. But the few people who live there have to find their way in a brutal social structure. Besides criminal, originally Russian oligarchs (the so-called Klept), there is the much too advanced Research Institute and the much too nosy and powerful Metropolitan Police. London's population poverty is explained by a kind of end of the world that caused 80 percent of humanity to disappear.
However, residents of this London have a decisive advantage, provided they have the necessary money and access to a certain Chinese server: They can not only influence past parallel universes (so-called stubs), but create them themselves with freely chosen parameters and configurations. One of the main fun parts is playing through whether and, if so, how the end of the world ("Jackpot" as it is called) will occur in these simultaneously artificial and real worlds, or editing the worlds in question so that it takes a course that suits the player in question. Burton and Flynne stumble upon the fact that they are characters in a very same game played, for example, by people like Lev Zubov (JJ Feild), the equally charming and murderous klept with whom the two have to deal.
The series is based on a 2014 novel of the same name by cyberpunk founder William Gibson. Has the team led by "Westworld" producer Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan managed to turn this novel into a good TV series? You bet. The actors are excellent. JJ Feild plays Lev Zubov with incredible elegance and style. Jack Reynor's Burton Fisher is not as damaged as Wes Chatham's Amos Burton from "The Expanse," but the two characters could be brothers. That "good monsters" of this sort appear in not one but two recent U.S. science fiction series, and that they are portrayed so believably, makes one wonder: are these the contemporary damaged heroes that filmmakers and audiences can possibly still believe in? Broken figures with almost unlimited potential for violence that only narrowly misses lustful mass murder?
For Conner Penske, on the other hand, Burton's former colleague and friend, there can be no more normal everyday life. Rarely has one seen a person so badly damaged physically and emotionally embodied so believably in an entertainment series; Eli Goree's acting is painfully intense. Gary Carr is incredible as Lev Zubov's underling Wilf Netherton - he brings a mix of subtlety, mendacity and lostness that you won't soon forget. Chloë Grace Moretz, on the other hand, tries her hardest, but no matter how much martial arts training she has undergone, no matter how hard she tries to portray the good monster's unexpectedly tough little sister - she is a bit too smooth for her role and is played up against the wall by the others. That this does little to harm the series is a mark of its quality.
The biggest surprise is a detailed comparison of the series with the original novel. Anyone who picks up the novel discovers that not only have individual characters been accentuated differently, added or removed, but that this also applies to entire storylines and thematic complexes. There is no trace of the Research Institute and its director Cherise Nuland in the novel version. There, Wilf Netherton is first the PR agent of an eccentric artist who does not appear in the series, which necessitates the complete reconstruction of the plot line with the data to which Flynne foolishly gains access. An Irish-born killer who hunts Flynne and Burton in the series does not appear in the novel.
The interventions are so serious that, strictly speaking, the series cannot be considered a film adaptation of the novel - and that's only a good thing. The novel tries to simulate cinematic speed with its multitude of short chapters and quick scene changes, but it doesn't always succeed and even causes signs of fatigue here and there. The series is able to concentrate on the essentials and tighten up the material; in this way, it achieves the cinematic speed that Gibson laboriously tries to imitate with his writerly technique.
While the streamlining also loses many of the delightful details for which Gibson is justly famous, this drawback is made up for by his own inventions, the mostly excellent production design, and the animation technique. One of the series' inventions, for example, is the gun that is leaked to the Irish killer from the future and that he is supposed to use to carry out his murder missions. It plays a dramaturgically highly convincing role in the hands of Deputy Tommy Constantine. Paradoxically, one could say that the series is faithful to the work against the novel and not with it. This is no small feat.
Mistakes? There are. The slight weaknesses of the leading actress have already been mentioned. It's annoying that a central prop seems all too cheap and limp in this good production design - the neural interface, with which the whole story begins, deserved a bit more attention in its development. A few of the martial arts scenes are superfluous, and some brutalities seem as if they were staged solely for the love of brutality. The biggest flaw of the first season of this series, however, is that it ends too soon and with an over-obvious cliffhanger.
The novel by William Gibson is a good book about the violence that is currently ruining the world. "The Peripheral" is not only a good series based on this book, but generally the best science fiction series since "The Expanse," which started in 2015. The fact that this series comes from Amazon is highly ironic, of course, but that's also part of this world.
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