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The Peripheral, review: Amazon have a big, fat meta-mess on their hands

Gary Carr and Chloe Grace Moretz in Amazon Prime Video's The Peripheral - Amazon/Amazon
Gary Carr and Chloe Grace Moretz in Amazon Prime Video's The Peripheral - Amazon/Amazon

The future, we’re often told, is going to be spent wearing funny goggles. VR goggles, to be specific, transporting us to virtual worlds where we can be other people and, when we’re not buying stuff, ponder the nature of reality.

It's an intriguing concept, which is why it’s wowed everyone from Plato to Mark Zuckerberg. But just as Zuckerberg’s gamble on the future being meta – I liked the concept so much I renamed the company! – is currently looking as daft as the goggles, it may be that the idea is more interesting than the actuality. That’s certainly the case with The Peripheral (Amazon Prime Video), a big budget, great-looking Amazon-made technopia that gets stuck in a rabbit hole of its own digging.

An effective summary would require its own FAQ page but here goes: Flynne Fisher (Chloe Grace Moretz) and her brother Burton (Jack Reynor), who is a Marine veteran with a load of glowing haptic sensors in his back that look like a ceramic hob, live with their dying, blind, possibly painkiller-addicted mother in a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains in 2032. In order to pay the medical bills and make ends meet Flynne and Burton play video games in virtual worlds, much like Ready Player One. The two siblings share Burton’s avatar, “jockeying” for high-paying customers to beat game levels. But Flynne is better: generally she pretends to be her brother and kicks virtual ass.

So that’s two levels of simulation already, and we’re only in scene two. Burton then takes delivery from a shady Columbian company of a headset that clamps itself on to your bonce like the torture weapon in A Clockwork Orange. It couldn’t be more suspicious if it fired out a pop-gun flag saying, "Guaranteed to Flash Fry Your Mind, AVOID!" yet Flynne, who is otherwise street-savvy and circumspect, whacks it straight on nonetheless.

The game it transports her to takes place in London, even further in the future, and it tasks Flynne-slash-Burton-slash-Burton’s avatar with breaking into a corporation known as the Research Institute to steal a valuable secret. Also, Charlotte Riley is there sporting the best/worst gor blimey guvnor accent since Dick Van Dyke.

There is of course nothing wrong with TV shows founded on mysteries wrapped inside enigmas that take more unravelling than a lorry load of chocolate oranges. Indeed, in shows such as Lost or Westworld (with which The Peripheral shares executive producers) the WTF-ness is part of the point: when you go beyond the looking glass things can – indeed, should – go a little woozy.

But in order for any SF to work the characters, the world and even the shady corporation who are inevitably up to no good all have to convince. Otherwise, the whole thing can become, to hijack the parlance, a bit whack.

Regrettably, given its hallowed provenance (it’s based on a William Gibson novel), The Peripheral is indeed a bit whack. In fact it’s chock full of premium-grade whackness, from a script that clunks its way through the manual of robo-cliches to a story that just doesn’t add up. (If Flynne is so good at gaming that she can make $1,000 in three minutes, as she does in the opening section of episode one, why wouldn’t she just keep doing that?) Once you start thinking, "Isn’t this all a little silly?" the invisible cars, sonic death rays and (silliest of all) a future London where traffic runs smoothly, morph in to irritations.

It’s one reason why dystopian futuramas tend to work better in novels: your mind fills in the gaps. On telly what you see is what you get, and in The Peripheral, what you get is a big, fat meta-mess.


The Peripheral is on Amazon Prime Video from tomorrow