Based on the best-selling book of the same name by author William Gibson and set in the 2030s and 2100s concurrently, Amazon’s The Peripheral follows Flynne Fisher (Chloe Grace Moretz) and her brother Burton Fisher (Jack Reynor) as they navigate a complex tech-noir that explores time travel and quantum computing.
Is it worth streaming this weekend?
The Peripheral isn’t getting the hype it deserves
Like many underrated programs on Amazon Prime, audience opinion on The Peripheral isn’t exactly aligned with critic consensus. Here’s how Rotten Tomatoes summed it up.
Somewhere on the edges of this sci-fi vision is a compelling narrative, but The Peripheral‘s single-minded focus on its lofty ideas comes at the expense of character or coherence.
In other words, The Peripheral has such mind-blowing ideas that it loses focus on the catalyst of the story, that a crime was committed and the wrong person saw it. But we’re not sure that’s a fair statement. Yes, the series kicks off with a traumatizing experience for Chloe’s character, doing nothing more than filling in for her brother, in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it’s The Peripheral’s ideas that make it interesting in the first place.
The Peripheral plot synopsis
Brother and sister Burton and Flynne Fisher share a home together with their mother who is dying of cancer. They make ends meet by playing sims (simulations) for wealthy customers in a not-too-distant future (around 2030s).
Unfortunately for them both, Burton is asked to try out experimental tech that transports the user to a space that feels like a sim but isn’t. When Burton asks his sister Flynne to fill in for him, Flynne witnesses something she shouldn’t and finds herself pursued by characters from the present and future.
The constructs The Peripheral uses to frame time travel are complex, but in short, the present and future are connected through advanced technology (controlled on a server) and manipulated by nefarious characters.
Complex, but fun
What’s really interesting about The Peripheral though is how it threads a narrative that is some parts thriller, sci-fi, and noir. Embracing the metaverse for all its possibilities and vulnerabilities, The Peripheral imagines a world where technology is used to travel in time through a technique called quantum tunneling, a phenomenon whereby a wave function can propagate through a potential barrier.
Quantum tunneling occurs when a wave function is transmitted from one side of a barrier to the other. In this case, “time” is the barrier. But no one is really traveling. In The Peripheral, a server that exists in both times (2030 and 2100) makes it possible for a sim to be accessible to users in the present and future. In other words, the server existed in 2030 and 2100, so users in 2100 use this technology loop to travel back to 2030 on the server and communicate with people in the past. For the server, the year 2030 and 2100 live side-by-side and the sim is somewhere in between.
And that’s what makes The Peripheral so great. It’s the kind of story that makes you question what’s possible. Theoretically, if we all lived in a metaverse in some far-off future, who’s to say our avatars couldn’t explore the past by accessing an old copy of the metaverse and experience history in ways we can only dream?
It’s science fiction to think we could use that access point to influence events in the past, but it’s perfectly reasonable to imagine a world where accessing history is as easy as jumping to a restore point and replaying an event (or changing one in the sim, which could have technological impacts on future versions of the sim and cause chaos in real life – like corrupting a file on a computer). Digital avatars surfing the bytes and reliving those recorded events have effectively experienced time travel, even if they haven’t actually achieved it. And their actions in past simulations could change their present, just not their past.
At a time when the metaverse is being built all around us, how much further in the future do we need to be before we’ve created a structure that allows avatars in 2100 to visit those access points?
Of course, our understanding of Gibson’s version of time travel isn’t perfect. But that’s what makes the show fun. The point is, the writers have given us enough information to imagine how this concept is possible without spilling the beans (like revealing who’s behind the crime or spoiling how quantum tunneling is possible).
We’re not looking for a perfect explanation, we want to walk into this world the same way that the characters do, overwhelmed, inspired, and shocked. Thrillers can’t reveal it all, it kind of defeats the purpose. If you tell me up front they can’t really travel through time, this was all a dream, it’s the corporation….I’ve already lost interest.
The Peripheral is insightful because its concepts can’t be rushed. Given that much of what the series is based on isn’t far from the shift in society we are witnessing today, it’s a good thing the showrunners are taking their time to let these ethical thought experiments play out as a process. In this case, the slow-burn approach works for this fun and thought-provoking noir, and it’s streaming this weekend.
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