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“The Peripheral” plays with two worlds, the present of North Carolina, where people drink beer while a dull yellow haze covers their daylight, and the future in cloudy London, where everyone looks as fancy as possible and casually use terms like “atavistic.” Neither world, despite the attention given to them by the production designers and costuming, feels more than a bit hollow, or anything other than an appeal to both the heady sci-fi fans at the same time as those who watch “Reacher,” “The Terminal List,” etc. And maybe worst of all, the series is full of gummy North Carolina and British accents, which gives little life to its reams of self-conscious exposition meant to make sense of what’s really going on.
It’s all so cluttered, and so laborious by the writing and therefore even more laborious to keep up with. Worst yet, the emotional stakes are lost in the mess, despite the focus of a brother and sister relationship bonded by their care for their tumor-afflicted mother, and the respect the siblings have for each other. But it’s not until episode four that the series gives a sense of what’s really going on here, of what we should be afraid of, and does so with a flashy “museum” presentation that illustrates what catastrophic events happened before these stark 2090s. There’s repeated mention about Flynne’s first mission leading to the disappearance of a key figure from this future named Aelita West (Charlotte Riley), and a backstory with Flynne’s mentor Wolf Netherton (Gary Carr), but it does not create the intrigue a mystery box like “The Peripheral” needs.
The less dialogue-driven sequences don’t fare much better—“The Peripheral” inserts bits of action into the story, but they are continuously dull. Watching some men exchange bullets in the nighttime, with call-and-response editing, shares the same boring quality of when some hackers battle it out across different timelines, furiously typing on keyboards to a standard thriller’s score. It’s telling that the series wants to make a plea for being more exciting with these sequences but reveals how little else it has to offer when it comes to basic thrills.
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