Ezra’s heart condition means he is losing his long-term memories but is running out of digital storage space in which to preserve them.

Things were going so well with last week’s perfect Extrapolation, but I’m afraid to report that I’m back to shouting at the TV. 2066: Lola is a beautifully made episode. I could watch Tahar Rahim read the phone book (although I’m not sure they make them anymore, for reasons that will become relevant below), but almost nothing about this makes sense.

I can see exactly where Scott Z. Burns, and Sarah Nolen (who wrote the teleplay), are going with their story. Rahim plays Ezra, the son of Sienna Miller’s Rebecca (who we last saw in Episode 2 talking to a humpback whale that sounded uncannily like Meryl Streep) and Omar, also played by Rahim, in the series opener. Anyone paying attention will have noted that Ezra was born in Episode 1, which was set in 2037, making him 29 in this instalment. While Rahim, at 41, is a good-looking fellow who wears his years well, he’s going to struggle to pass for anything below 35.

Let’s park that. We find him in London working as a sort of paid ‘memory escort’ whose job it is to role play as lost relatives, or stand in to take the blame for things others are too cowardly to face. He’s great at his job, accessing people’s stored memories for the kinds of details that will make emotional mimicry more convincing. Okay, so this is a lovely idea in theory, but when I saw it acted out, I just thought it was plain creepy. Why would anybody want that ever? It didn’t make sense to me and I didn’t believe it for a moment.

The second act complication comes when we discover that because of Ezra’s climate related heart condition, he is developing a form of dementia that destroys his own long-term memories. Okay, I’ll take it as read that might be a climate-related health risk. The trouble is that the company that keeps the memories for him digitally, has put its prices up and so he’s running out of storage space that he can afford.

Whoa! Stop. Anyone who’s been alive over the last half a century (63 years in my case) knows that the one thing we’re never short of is digital storage space. Storage capacity has increased exponentially in the last thirty years and there’s no reason to think that our ability to find more and more economical ways to keep data is about to shrink any time soon. I started out as a writer in the 1990s still using 1.4Mb floppy discs. I have a terabyte on my laptop and external solid-state hard drives that store more, and get smaller, every time I buy a new one, which is probably why you don’t see telephone books any more, no matter how beautifully Mr Rahim would read them. I think they know this is piffle so they try to fudge it by saying that it’s reliant on the blockchain, but what on earth has blockchain got to do with data storage? So this part of the story doesn’t make sense, and it’s hard to buy into the rest of it because it is supposed to motivate everything that happens next.

But even if you accept the improbability of the science at this point, why doesn’t Ezra take some screen shots, or even video the projections of the memories he’s watching. Doesn’t he have any photos? Or audio recordings? And he tells us he can make new memories so why can’t he remember the old ones when he watches them? How about writing some stuff down in a journal? I’m shouting at my TV but it’s stubbornly refusing to answer me.

If I could forget this massive problem with the story then I would appreciate that the question Burns and Nolen are trying to ask is a profound one:

Does the past matter?

Well, at least I think they were. Assuming that to be the case, it’s certainly worth exploring the idea in relation to climate change and the destruction of a planet which will ultimately have to be rebuilt. Do you need the past if the life you have now can be better?

One last niggle, in Episode 4, back in 2059, Edward Norton got his knickers in a twist about geo-engineering, and a load of guck was tipped into the atmosphere courtesy of Indira Varma, but aside from a few floods (which surely were happening anyway) that storyline, seven years later, seems to have been forgotten. Frustratingly we don’t really know whether Norton’s predictions came true or not. I’m hoping that the series will pick this up at some point otherwise they’ve played fast and loose with what they’re asking the audience to invest in.

Verdict: 2066: Lola is the most frustrating episode yet, precisely because it ought to have been the most interesting and challenging of all. 5/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com