Ten years from now, a younger girl within the rural South turns to a profitable facet hustle to pay for her mom’s medical therapy: taking part in digital actuality video games to assist wealthy purchasers stage up. But as we see in The Peripheral, her newest gig is excess of a recreation, and the world it opens up is extremely vivid, harmful, and complicated.

That’s the very primary set-up for Prime Video’s new sequence, which is predicated on the 2014 novel by cyberpunk legend William Gibson, is produced by Westworld’s Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, and was created for TV by novelist turned screenwriter Scott Smith (A Simple Plan, The Ruins). With that sort of pedigree, it’s no shock that The Peripheral paints a grim but intriguing imaginative and prescient of the longer term—or futures, because it seems. Not solely does gamer Flynne (Chloë Grace Moretz) stay in 2032, her VR adventuring sees her go to London in 2099, which seems to be a really actual time and place the place know-how has superior to the purpose that “quantum tunneling” permits contact between the time durations, together with the power to port somebody’s consciousness from the previous into an eerily lifelike android physique, known as a “peripheral,” sooner or later.

Much like Westworld, The Peripheral is a sequence that calls for viewers pay shut consideration, lest they miss some little bit of important info—be it a clue to the story’s central thriller, or an evidence as to who’s the place and what the hell is happening. Fortunately, we now have Flynne and her brother, Burton (Midsommar’s Jack Reynor) studying proper together with us, and a script that admits greater than as soon as that even the characters pulling the strings get confused typically. (If you’re somebody who needed to rewind Westworld occasionally to make clear WTF simply occurred, like I did, get able to do the identical right here.) The Peripheral runs eight episodes—io9 acquired an opportunity to see the primary six, however received’t be spoiling story factors right here—which feels precisely proper; it’s the perfect framework for a handy guide a rough tempo, but additionally offers sufficient respiratory room to let its extra sophisticated concepts settle in.

Once you could have a grasp of The Peripheral’s tech components, in addition to the inventive approach it approaches “time travel,” then it turns into the intrigue-laden thriller it actually goals to be, and turns into much more enjoyable to look at, too. There are two storylines at play that intersect an increasing number of because the episodes progress. Flynne and Burton’s life revolves round caring for his or her ailing mom and attempting to make ends meet in a small city the place Flynne works in a 3D printing store and Burton spends most of his time hanging out along with his associates, all of whom served within the Marines collectively and have an intense bond additional enhanced by the “haptic implants” all of them share. Then, 70 years later in a dystopian London—nonetheless an unsteady, underpopulated place many years after a cataclysmic worldwide occasion dubbed the “Jackpot”—we meet Wilf (Gary Carr), a “fixer” for the outrageously rich Lev (JJ Feild), who’s looking for Wilf’s adopted sister, Aelita (Charlotte Riley); she vanished whereas doing high-stakes company spying on his behalf, accompanied by Flynne (in peripheral kind).

Other components complicate each storylines, together with backwoods kingpin Corbell Pickett (Louis Herthum), who turns into an at-first-unwilling participant in Flynne and Burton’s drama; and the machinations of Research Institute, which controls future London with its insidious, reality-shaping tech, and whose chief (The Haunting of Bly Manor’s T’Nia Miller) can be very focused on monitoring down Aelita, believing she’s stolen one thing of unimaginable worth, and Flynne by extension. There’s additionally a homicide, and that’s when issues get actually messy.

It’s quite a bit to soak up—however hardly any of it’s extraneous, and practically each nugget of knowledge sprinkled all through each tales turns into necessary. (Like I mentioned, The Periperal calls for you pay shut consideration.) And even with all that plot happening, which is fastidiously doled out one puzzle piece at a time, and all of the glossy visible results it essentially depends on, the present does a superb job fleshing out its characters, utilizing flashbacks to indicate us moments that formed them into the individuals we’re assembly now. It helps that the performances are throughout the board wonderful, with Moretz on the heart as a sheltered younger girl who’s additionally clever and confidently badass sufficient to carry her personal after being plunged into some somewhat outrageous circumstances. The supporting turns are of the type the place the characters make indelible impressions even when they’re solely in a number of scenes—like Riley because the elusive, sharp-tongued Aelita, and Miller, whose RI boss merely oozes evil and magnificence from each pore.

The Peripheral poses some urgent inquiries to its characters—together with, however not restricted to, why everybody sooner or later is so focused on North Carolina circa 2032—that can little doubt discover solutions by the top of the season. But the present additionally explores larger themes that come into play with its bleak view of the longer term. The “Jackpot” warns of a near-apocalypse attributable to a domino impact of all-too-relatable horrors (local weather change, a pandemic, home terrorism), and there’s an underlying narrative in regards to the risks of adjusting the previous, in addition to what not altering the previous may imply when one thing so near doomsday is looming on the horizon. The Peripheral’s final message is mostly a warning; as we see fairly clearly, even one thing as dire because the “Jackpot” can’t curb humanity’s obsession with greed, energy, violence, and stomping on anybody who questions the fucked-up established order. By season’s finish, the present may discover some form of uplifting ending for its heroic characters—however there’s a darkness working all through that feels much less like science fiction, and extra like a troubling inevitability.

The Peripheral may have a weekly launch on Prime Video beginning October 21.

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