(minor spoilers)

Flynne and Wilf discover Aelita’s connection to the neoprims

The source novel for The Peripheral is complex and layered. It covers events in two separate worlds with multiple factions in each. The story follows political and social elements as well as multiple characters as they navigate the threats and challenges before them.

In adapting the story the television show has cleaved closer to the structure of the novel than modern fashion demands of thrillers. The consequences of this are that the show’s pace is slightly uneven and it doesn’t do much exposition outside of worldbuilding. There is a lot of show and not much tell.

Events like the Jackpot are the exceptions because there’s only so much that can be shown and sometimes telling is exactly the right strategy. The thing is, showing world building when the implications of those elements are nuanced is a fraught pastime. I suspect viewers will miss some of the subtler world building here and that the novelish structure will leave others wondering both what is going on and why it isn’t happening in a straighter line.

It works for me.

I appreciate the structure, the world building and the way the worlds are tied together. The show isn’t all surface and its meaning isn’t laid out on the table in dissected form with arrows telling you what to think.

My main criticism is I want more from Wilf.

Flynne, Burton and the others in contemporary America are well fleshed out but Wilf in particular feels lacking (and it’s the same in the source material). There’s some good reasons for this – the chameleon aspect of survivors is a big one – as we’ve discussed before but they don’t add up to satisfactory excuses.

Wilf’s lack of presence (deliberately or otherwise) comes into sharp relief this episode when my favourite character from the novel, Inspector Lowbeer arrives on the screen with delicious dry humour and eyes that pin her quarry to their seats as she slowly takes them to pieces.

Lowbeer is flamboyant, frightening and funny in a self-possessed, perpetually disappointed mother’s kind of way. Her arrival also rounds out the political landscape of future London, giving us representation from the third of the three pillars of the new world.

There’s also more of the aforementioned excellent world building. First in how Flynne discovers most of what she’s experienced about future London is an illusion overlaid a truth so tragic and empty she’s left speechless.

The second piece is between Burton and Connor – tying in to the experiments being run by future London but also grounding both characters in the present and showing how they got to where they are now.

This is a story where the McGuffin – in this case the hunt for Aelita – is juggled only insofar as the plot needs it to help move things on. None of the characters are interesting because they’re finding Aelita. None of them are even driven by this quest. Aelita exists in the background as something important but every single person on screen has urgent problems taking precedence. Although there’s an inevitability of their slowly circling towards a resolution, it is, in many senses, incidental to something larger and that’s how their lives have become entangled unintentionally, how such ties end up diverting us, steering us and creating the bounds within which we make our decisions.

One of the least believable aspects of stories are where characters make decisions that make no sense. These come in two flavours. The first is where a character is inconsistent or makes a dumb decision a moment’s thought would have rectified. Horror movies for teens are full of these kinds of idiocy.

However, the second type is more subtle and demands better writing to avoid. When characters make the rational decision, the one focused on problem solving and divorced from emotion. They’re characters who exist only in our heads – the people who make the sharp comeback we’ve had time to craft when recounting an experience to friends, or who dispense the sage advice we offer when someone’s gossiping about someone else’s problems.

As much as we think we’d be those people when under pressure it simply isn’t the case. There’s no one who holds it together under pressure in all circumstances. All of us have pressures we’ve learned to be functional in the face of but most of us fall apart when confronted with novel stressors. Good writing reflects this.

I don’t mind shouting at the screen when a character makes a stupid decision but it’s a different kind of frustration when that same character chooses or reacts badly because of pressure. This drives me mad but it’s because of empathy; because I know it’s bad and I know I’d probably be no different if it were me.

I think The Peripheral gets this fracturing of critical thought right – whether it’s in failing to talk about problems, in pushing away those who could help or simply in refusing to do what’s asked because we don’t want to feel owned or directed by others.

The truth is, if everyone acted optimally in their context there would still be plenty of drama but real life isn’t like that and, at least for me, fiction shouldn’t be either.

As we head into the last two episodes of the show we have a clear idea of what’s at stake and a hope that Flynne and Burton can survive this encounter with the future. It may even be that they make something more meaningful out of that relationship.

Rating? 8 inspectors out of 10.

Stewart Hotston