(minor spoilers)

Flynne and Wilf work together to find Aelita. Meanwhile, Burton takes steps to eliminate a new threat.

After the visceral assault on our senses of the first two episodes, this third entry in the series is a little more contemplative. By which I mean we get to see people coming to grips with their worlds shifting and changing under them and outside of their control.

There is a lot of activity this week but it’s the kind that’s associated with moving pieces around the board while you tee up your next big move.

That’s not to say the pace is lacking. We have people wrestling with what they’ve experienced, getting their heads around the changes to their world and the follow on consequences. No one is static. It’s not a case of do the traumatic thing and move on – the show is interested in the human experience, both of trauma but also of our encounters with technology.

Both in the near future and the time after the unspoken-of apocalypse, technology is something that surrounds us, fights with us for mastery and threatens to take us over. This isn’t a transhumanist’s dream; this is a regular person’s nightmare and it’s all the more political for that.

Many people talk about dystopias and use technology as their enabling tools for such horrific scenarios but very few interrogate just how much technology works against us in so many situations.

What I mean is that science is, largely, neutral in nature even if fundamentally political in its funding. However, technology is not neutral in any way. The design of phones to fit men’s hands, the skew of medicine to test treatments on men, the availability of technology for the rich and not the poor are examples of how resources and defaults privilege some over others. On top of this we forget that people design technology to have a purpose. Facial recognition technology is not neutral. AI that suggests PoC are gorillas on image comparison sites are not neutral. Stun guns are not neutral. Drones are not neutral and the decisions about which medicines to make and for whom are not neutral.

The impact of these biased decisions on how to make the world end up impacting us at every level and The Peripheral explores much of this superbly through its world building, from how haptic small unit groups are recruited to how technology is clearly distributed on a restricted basis by social class.

There is definitely more of this to come and even as our players move around the board there’s conflict as they bump up against one another in their search for meaning in this radically changed world.

Verdict: Adjustment is not boring – it is where we find ourselves.  

Rating? 8 shattered glasses out of 10

Stewart Hotston