The Peripheral: Episode 1 & 2: Books Included Books Included

October 23, 2022 7:42 PM - Season 1, Episode 2

Let’s talk about the show - and the book.

First Fanfare post, if I’m doing something wrong please let me know!

posted by mygothlaundry (24 comments total)

I think the casting is great, the design and effects are great - but I’m not 100% on board with how it seems to be turning into a straight up action thriller. There are so many more layers to the book that just feel missing in this take. Hoping they’ll bring them in as it progresses. I do like the subtle touches - the bee show on tv, the bananas that used to be a fruit.

Also, turning Will from a hapless alcoholic to secret agent man is sort of hard to swallow. I like him as bumbling PR guy in over his head.
posted by mygothlaundry at 7:49 PM on October 23, 2022 [5 favorites]

book and blue earlier :P
posted by kliuless at 9:02 PM on October 23, 2022

I'm with you on the casting and design overall, though I'd like the bar to have looked more divey. One of the recurring themes in the book was that the local economy had crashed to pretty much nothing other than building illicit drugs, and having worked in bars in the general region it's set in where there was 30% unemployment, they were always way dingier and beat up. But that's a small complaint. I'd also have made the roads more cracked and damaged, because that's always an indicator of economic decline.

I'm liking the little nods to the book that show they paid attention to the source material, like the coffee being from the chain in the series rather than being swapped out for product placement with Starbucks or whatever.

The question about whether peripherals would be designed to experience pain is an interesting one.

I hope the Patch makes an appearance, as that's one of the things I enjoyed in the book. Though given the lack of fan service, at least so far, the double penis might have been a no-go.

I'm not wild about the gratuitous increase in violence. I am however, pleased that they're fleshing out the villains better than the book did, which I thought was one of the biggest flaws (and was even worse in the second book). The nominal big bad of the book had barely even been mentioned and there wasn't really a great rational for what he was doing.

I also wasn't big into the shift from the book for what Flynn was initially doing in "the game" at the beginning of the story. That part of the book was one of the weaker parts IMO but shifting from having some rando from a parallel universe chasing away paparazzi drones to engaging in crucial seduction, kidnapping, etc. stretches plausibility quite a bit. What was the plan if the person that they threw into an unexpectedly violent situation without briefing hadn't taken out the driver?

But overall I think it's a decent adaptation, though I'll have to see where they go with the Research Institute concept.

turning Will from a hapless alcoholic to secret agent man is sort of hard to swallow. I like him as bumbling PR guy in over his head.

I agree, though I was pleased with the change given that they cast a person of color in the role as well as Conner.
posted by Candleman at 10:18 PM on October 23, 2022 [3 favorites]

Also curious if Luke 4:5 will make an appearance or if that will be too political for the Amazon overlords.
posted by Candleman at 10:22 PM on October 23, 2022

I don't think I understand the motivations of Lev et al yet.

In the novel, Lev was basically a hobbyist who got access to a stub through connections and money. It was "his" stub as far as I remember. Wilf and Lev then loaned out the services of Burton/Flynne to Aelita, which set in motion Flynne's witnessing of the murder and, crucially, Lowbeer's investigation. Although there was an initial debriefing of Flynne by Wilf after the murder, the primary driver of bringing Flynne to the future, and sending protection back to the past, was Lowbeer.

In the show, something completely different seems to be happening. Ash explains at lunch in episode 2 that Aelita worked for Research Institute (RI), which gave her access to Flynne's stub. Lev had been paying Aelita (since Wilf's remembered conversation on the street, I guess) for "backdoor" access to the stub. So the stub is property of RI, and Lev's team has just hacked into it. His motivation for doing so is thus far unclear. Flynne suggests its just a game to him but Lev deflects. Aelita's (successful?) attempt to breach the RI building and gain access to the pyramid light beam thing, however, seems likely to have been driven by Lev (unless she was already working at RI under her own false pretenses).

Some questions I have: (1) Why is Lev so interested in "finding Aelita", when it would makes most sense that she is dead? (2) If he was involved in organizing the RI break-in, why isn't he pressing to access the data streamed into Flynne's brain by that pyramid thing? (3) How do these hackers maintain access to RI's stub after their intrusion (both physical and network) has already been discovered; Lev and Ash worry that they will lose access now that Aelita is missing, but is RI's IT department really so bad that they can't shut them down? (4) If Lev was not involved in planning Aelita's break-in, if he really is just a wealthy and bored hobbyist, then why wouldn't he just cut his losses now? (5) At what point, and how, did Lev discover it was Flynne at the controls and not Burton?

Perhaps some of these are answered by the fact that Flynne hasn't been debriefed; perhaps Lev doesn't yet realize how successful Aelita's break-in was.
posted by pjenks at 5:52 AM on October 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

First Fanfare post, if I’m doing something wrong please let me know!

I flagged the post so that the proper "Books Included" tag was added (though now it says it twice).

I was bothered by the Airstream trailer not being covered with white expansion foam when the teaser trailer was released, so I admit that I'm impossible to please when adapting my favorite author. That said, it feels dumbed down and actioned up.

I think Clanton's fuckedness quotient isn't high enough. While they have Flynne's bike, I was hoping to see "cardboard Chinese car[s]" like "the two-seater their mother would have called an egg box, its paper sheet nanoproofed against water and oil. It smelled of buttered popcorn." Especially considering that they skipped over the first attempted hit being by guys with fabbed pistols and steak knives in a stolen car and went straight to fully kitted-out operators in SUVs with optical camouflage.

Also, turning Wil[f] from a hapless alcoholic to secret agent man is sort of hard to swallow. I like him as bumbling PR guy in over his head.

I was already put off by his simply being a fixer now, but Lev's line about his capacity for violence (or something to that effect) really worries me as to the changes to the character.

Especially with the absence of Luke 4:5 (thus far, but I'll be pleasantly surprised if they actually appear), Burton seems too well-adjusted to me. I thought of him as only coming off as normal in comparison with Conner. I was surprised to see that his (and everyone else's, which was another change, he and Conner were the only HaptRec vets in town in the book) haptics still work when a botched removal is why he's on disability, but I imagine that this choice was made to facilitate there being more action (now I'm wondering if Burton's tomahawk/axe will make an appearance).

To end on a positive note, I really liked that Ossian remained Irish while also being non-white (Julian Moore-Cook is the first actor I know of who has a background almost identical to my own).
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 6:45 AM on October 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

unless she was already working at RI under her own false pretenses

In the scene at the beginning of episode 2, Wilf approaches her because she works for RI.
posted by Candleman at 6:59 AM on October 24, 2022

I'm liking this Wilf okay, but he's not at all book Wilf. I'd love to see this actor play book Wilf. I worry a bit, because that character for me acted as a good balance for a lot of the grimness.

I was also wondering about when/how they figured out Flynne was the one driving the peripheral. I mean, it's not surprising that they could or would figure that out, but it just seems weird that it wasn't addressed at all. Did they do it that way just to avoid an extra scene where they talk to Burton first?

The interface headset looks great. Top notch props and effects all around. I actually squeed when I saw the animated tattoos. I was kind of just assuming they'd leave them out entirely.

At this point I'm hoping Lowbeer shows up sooner rather than later. I'm hoping Griff shows up, too.
posted by thedward at 9:39 AM on October 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

In the scene at the beginning of episode 2, Wilf approaches her because she works for RI.

Yes, I'm just wondering if Aelita's breach of the facility was driven by Lev, or if she is part of some other conspiracy, which caused her to accept a position at RI for the purposes of infiltration.

I do like the fact that the plot has been changed significantly enough that people who've read the novel still have a mystery.
posted by pjenks at 10:10 AM on October 24, 2022

I was already put off by his simply being a fixer now, but Lev's line about his capacity for violence (or something to that effect) really worries me as to the changes to the character.
Yes, this exactly. I really like the actor as book Wilf - he makes perfect sense to me. But I'm not as keen on turning him into Action Guy. Book Wilf doesn't have a capacity for violence and in fact that lack is sort of key to the plot and his development as a character, so the change bothers me.

Agree with the comments about Clanton not being beat up enough and the dive-iness - or lack thereof - of the bar. But in general I do like it - it always just takes me a while to change gears from book to TV show.
posted by mygothlaundry at 3:11 PM on October 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

I also wasn't big into the shift from the book for what Flynn was initially doing in "the game" at the beginning of the story. That part of the book was one of the weaker parts IMO but shifting from having some rando from a parallel universe chasing away paparazzi drones to engaging in crucial seduction, kidnapping, etc. stretches plausibility quite a bit. What was the plan if the person that they threw into an unexpectedly violent situation without briefing hadn't taken out the driver?

Though I am enjoying this series so far, I have to agree with you about the shift from the book vis a vis what Flynn saw as a drone in the “game.” Truth be told, when I heard they were adapting the book, I was actually looking forward to seeing how they would visualize that particular scene from the book. Alas, not to be.

I’d really like to know why they opted to take it out. It would have been a quite amazing bit of CG to open the series on.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:41 PM on October 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

I hope it's okay to cross-post a question that I'd asked in the Show Only thread. I'd not quite gotten an answer there. It follows from Thorzdad's comment anyway:

One thing I'm not clear on: why was (the pyramid thing) shown to her? In the book, it was something she saw accidentally IIRC. Here it was intentional. Have I missed the motivation/explanation for why she has been taken down into that chamber in the first place?

Like, why did they need some stranger from another timeline to be lasered in the eye by this (non-canon) pyramid thing? I suppose this will be explained in time? I also agree that the change stretches credulity and that a few things are dumbed down / actioned up.
posted by tovarisch at 11:23 AM on October 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is great, it's funny I've loved Gibson's books but I've started this several times and it just has not clicked. Think I'll try to watch/read simultaneously, well concurrently.
posted by sammyo at 12:28 PM on October 25, 2022

Based solely off the sense that Lowbeer is late in their introduction, relative to the book, and the stub's confrontable baddies are prematurely arriving in the show, I have a premonition that the big big bad is actually going to be the Jackpot itself.
Somehow this plucky band of Appalachian know-howers is going to, with assistance from the future, avert the loss of 50% (?) of the human population from antibiotic resistant infections, climate change created catastrophes and everything else Gibson waved his hand at so glibly* in 2014.
The ultimate villain of the book, I guess, was "guy who likes to create suffering in stubs". He was never fully compelling as a villain, primarily because he was introduced so late. But as they've been holding out on the Jackpot info, in the show, and the 'good-ish' characters are actually controlling the stubs' access, I can see the narrative sense of averting-the-soft-apocalypse-as-finale if this is just a limited series.


*charitably, I think he was only being glib because, he, like so many of us, thought that the world would change for the better before we actually got to that tipping point.
lol try writing Agency a few more times before you traffic in the near future again.
posted by Cold Lurkey at 7:47 PM on October 25, 2022

↑ Cold Lurkey Somehow this plucky band of Appalachian know-howers is going to, with assistance from the future, avert the loss of 50% (?) of the human population from antibiotic resistant infections, climate change created catastrophes and everything else Gibson waved his hand at so glibly* in 2014.

That's really not too far off from what happens in the book. It's less unambiguously a victory over the impending jackpot--which, if you're right (and I think there's a good chance you are), is what I'd expect in the TV adaptation--and more "hopefully we can blunt its impact", but as I recall, one of the "plucky band of Appalachian know-howers" even gets installed as president or vice president of the US with the help of influence exerted by the future (or "up the line" as they say in the book), and one of the final chapters definitely alludes to them "stockpiling vaccines against diseases they wouldn't even have known were out there" and doing "climate stuff".
posted by zztzed at 6:06 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

zztzed, you're totally correct in that the book had "up the line" set up the stub for success against the coming scourges and plagues with knowledge and material. However, I still think the need for a more direct confrontation and forestalling of the Jackpot is predicated on both the strictures of narrative television and visual storytelling and the deeply cynical lessons learned in the historical interim between the book and its screen adaptation.

While this may be more a reflection of how all the optimistic stuffing has been beaten out of us (me) in the past 8 years, if Flynn and the PBAKH* are simply handed the awareness and scientific capability to avert the Jackpot and told, "okay you got this, go win" it would be a tragicomic unhappy ending at best. We now know that awareness, scientific expertise and even halfway competent leadership are insufficient for steering us humans through global scale crises**.
Therefore, I'd expect this show to lead towards some form of direct diffusing of the Jackpot (which, I have to remind myself, doesn't have to be the multifactorial thing anymore... ) so that an unambiguous victory may be had by all.

*PBAKH: Plucky Band of Appalachian Know-Howers

** Which is why, in future, I suggest that we have only localized crises.
posted by Cold Lurkey at 4:46 PM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's less unambiguously a victory over the impending jackpot

I can't right now due to the current technical issues with the site, but I'm going to favorite this comment simply for the lowercase "j" jackpot (though Gibson's initial "mixed feeling[s] about capitalizing it" have given way to acceptance and the third book in the trilogy being called Jackpot will confuse matters more).
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 12:38 AM on October 27, 2022

Agree with a lot of the takes here. I'm enjoying the show well enough on it's own, though it feels a bit like generic UK sf to me in the London TL (lots of shots that feel like a slightly off costume in front of an architect-y building) yet too glittery-CGI in the wide aerial shots of the city.
My main beef with the change in what Flynne does on the first shifts in the "sim" is that the conceit that she's in a peri built for Burton a) seems to mess up the phenomenology that's interesting later in the book, about inhabiting a body that's (not quite) your own; and b) that it makes the scene visually about the actor playing Burton (Jack Reynor), rather than about Flynne and Moretz (I mean, Gibson already sometimes has a slight issue with women protagonists who are more often witnesses than actors).
I'm waiting to see if what feels like a slight lack of texture also translates to a disappointment in what I think of as the "ambient politics" of the books--that they don't so much offer an opinion as a kind of diagnostic of how power works in these worlds (ours included).
posted by Mngo at 2:23 AM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

I forgot all about the barefoot (peripheral) girl scene that opened the show, until I read a review that mentioned it.

So: (1) Aelita and Wilf are friends from childhood; she "saved him" (or "did she?" she says, harshly), and (2) Aelita is "up to something" (seemingly independent of Wilf's involvement, although maybe not Lev's) in which she is "saving a world" ("I didn't say our world", she says).

I guess that this scene occured chronologically just before the breach/heist, but probably after Wilf approached her on the street to get Lev access to the stub? Aelita asks Wilf "what sort of mess have you gotten me into", so it seems that Lev's involvement started her quest.

I'm still confused about what is going on!
posted by pjenks at 5:52 AM on October 28, 2022

Show prediction: "London Calling" is the key. What if the city itself has become self-aware, and has opinions about Flynne's stub, its own past and present, and is trying (through its human agents and non-human agency) to mitigate actual and potential damage?

“We all do the City’s will, Wilf. Don’t imagine otherwise.”
posted by MonkeyToes at 12:15 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

I agree that everything in the near future stub timeline seems better than my impressions from the book. Now I'm thinking that maybe I projected and the book didn't have things as bad as I thought it did. I'm liking Flynne and Burton's relationship more here. Everyone's relationships in general really. It feels like for the most part the characters care for each other and are trying their best despite their tough situations.

Enjoying the series so far. It can be enjoyable even if it doesn't end up being particularly faithful to the book.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:16 PM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

I've been trying to read the book in anticipation of the series but it's been rough going. I normally love Gibson but I've found this book to be pretty impenetrable. I'm 2/3 of the way through and barely understand what's going on.

So far I'm liking the show much better.
posted by octothorpe at 6:25 PM on November 2, 2022

Despite not being visible in the show, this is a nice detail and one I had incorrectly also noted as missing from Burton's Airstream. Though, to continue nitpicking (my one joy in life), the expansion foam was for insulation and this should be a "curatorial" polymer.
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 11:09 PM on November 4, 2022

I wonder if they shot the London scenes much later, and the script was changed in the interim, because Flynne talks about witnessing something in London and not being part of an abduction and murder.
posted by rodlymight at 9:10 PM on November 14, 2022 [1 favorite]