While Prime Video’s underrated cyberpunk sci-fi series only lasted one eight-episode season, the show still managed to solve a problem that is shared by almost every time travel series. It isn’t easy for any sci-fi show to explain how its in-universe time travel works. There’s a reason, after all, that even the profoundly silly, tongue-in-cheek animated sci-fi comedy Rick and Morty has a strict, longstanding “No Time Travel” rule.
Whether time travel is treated as a serious, real-life possibility, as in the movie Primer or the Netflix masterpiece Dark, or a fantastical, far-fetched phenomenon reliant on entirely imaginary technology, movies and shows in the genre still need to answer a few pivotal questions. Queries like what happens to the bodies of time travelers as they travel through spacetime, how they can avoid altering the space time continuum disastrously, and whether their actions result in alternate timelines are often hand waved or outright ignored thanks to limited runtimes.
That’s why one underrated Prime Video sci-fi series, The Peripheral, deserves credit for tackling one of these common plot holes head on. Although Prime Video’s earlier acclaimed sci-fi series The Expanse arrived before this William Gibson adaptation, The Peripheral still predates a lot of the biggest sci-fi shows of the 2020s. Debuting in October 2022, the show arrived before Apple TV’s Silo and Dark Matter, Hulu’s Paradise, and HBO Max’s The Big Bang Theory spinoff Stuart Fails to Save the Universe.
The Peripheral Worked Around Characters Physically Traveling Through Time
Starring Chloë Grace Moretz as the gamer Flynne Fisher, The Peripheral has a dual timeline of sorts. An adaptation of Neuromancer author Gibson’s 2014 novel of the same name, the show is initially set in the near future of 2032, wherein Fisher is gifted a VR headset by a shady Colombian games company. Since she needs money to pay for her mother’s care and is already an avid VR gamer, Flynne tests this headset and is soon transported into an immersive futuristic London landscape.
While Flynne initially has fun with this new game and its kidnapping plot line, it is not long before she learns that she’s not playing a hyper-realistic VR game at all. Instead, the headset allows her to control and inhabit an android in the future, and the events of the so-called VR “game” have really been taking place in 2102 London all along. Like Netflix’s equally underrated Altered Carbon, this cyberpunk thriller uses clever world building to sidestep the tricky logistics of its sci-fi storyline.
In The Peripheral, the characters don’t physically move between timelines when they travel through time, but instead plug into a technology that allows them to use quantum tunneling to control a robot in the future. This completely removes the many problems with people physically hopping between timelines, and serves the secondary function of adding another layer of suspense to proceedings.
The Peripheral Season 2 Not Happening Is A Huge Disappointment
After all, this means that Fisher’s body, and the body of anyone else using the VR headsets, is still present in the 2032 timeline when piloting an android in 2102. If the villains can’t get to her in London, they could track her down in 2032, especially when she’s defenseless as her consciousness is busy puppeteering a robotic body 70 years into the future.
Much like Netflix’s superb Three Body Problem, Gibson’s works were historically considered unfilmable due to their dense sci-fi plot contrivances, their hallucinatory action, and their often trippy tone. However, The Peripheral proved that Gibson’s brand of sci-fi could not only work but soar on the small screen, which made Prime Video’s inexplicable decision to cancel the acclaimed show after only eight episodes all the more disappointing for fans of the genre.
- Release Date
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2022 – 2022-00-00
- Network
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Prime Video
- Showrunner
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Scott B. Smith
- Directors
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Alrick Riley, Vincenzo Natali
- Writers
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Scott B. Smith, Jamie Chan, Greg Plageman, Bronwyn Garrity, William Gibson
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Chloe Grace Moretz
Flynne Fisher
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