No good news could have possibly come out of Westworld‘s cancelation earlier this week; not to worry, however; creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan didn’t have all their eggs in the Westworld basket.
As for the other basket in play, it’s none other than The Peripheral, the latest sci-fi series to grace Amazon Prime Video that just released its fourth episode yesterday.
First announced by Joy and Nolan back in 2018, The Peripheral is an adaptation of William Gibson’s novel of the same name. Starring Chloë Grace Moretz as protagonist Flynne Fisher, a talented gamer living in the not-so-distant future, the series follows her plight as she tries to hold the delicate strings of her family together while facing off against an organization that wants her and her family dead.
It wouldn’t be a 2020s-era sci-fi show without multiverse nuances, of course, and The Peripheral delivers; as Flynne launches her consciousness into the future by way of a fancy (and probably illegal) virtual reality peripheral, she delves deeper into the mystery of time travel and alternate realities as more personal troubles continue to crop up around her.
For one cast member, it’s a refreshing take on the once-obscure genre fiction nuance, which is now a mainstay in the minds of consumers due in large part to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In an interview with Digital Spy, JJ Feild, who plays wealthy quantum shenanigans enthusiast Lev Zubov in the show, compared The Peripheral‘s handling of the idea of a multiverse with that of Kevin Feige’s magnum opus.
“What’s different about this multiverse is that the multiverses set in Marvel are completely fantastical. There’s a scientific basis for it, as it were. But what Gibson has done is: this is the first time that you don’t have to study quantum physics to go, ‘Oh, that makes sense’.”
He further expanded on what such handling entails and explained how the finer details of time travel work in the series.
“You can’t actually physically time-travel yourself. What you can do is time-travel digital information. You can send that information to a different time, and they can use it and utilise it. That’s the premise of it, and how time-travel and the multi-times and multi-stubs works in this.”
Of course, in the world of genre fiction, and sci-fi, in particular, realism isn’t quite the flex that Feild, himself an MCU veteran thanks to his role in Captain America: The First Avenger, seems to think it is. Nevertheless, The Peripheral certainly isn’t without its merits, and it will continue to deliver full episodes’ worth every Friday on Amazon Prime Video up until the first season’s conclusion on Dec. 2. A second season is already in development.