The future exists now: Bringing William Gibson’s The Peripheral to television
Enlarge / Chloe Grace Moretz stars as Flynne Fisher, a young woman who may or may not have witnessed a real murder. (credit: Prime Video)
Sci-fi legend William Gibson's 2014 densely layered novel The Peripheral ingeniously combines elements of noir murder mystery, time travel, and the author's trademark cyberpunk futurism. It's those features that make the novel so challenging to adapt for television, but Prime Video managed to pull off that feat with its new nine-episode series, The Peripheral, starring Chloe Grace Moretz.
(Minor spoilers below, but no major reveals.)
There are obviously some key divergences from the source material, as befits a TV adaptation. But as with Gibson's novel, there are two plot lines that eventually begin to converge in the series. The first arc takes place in our near-term future and is centered on a young woman named Flynne (Moretz). Flynne works at the local 3D-printing shop in a small town. Flynne's brother Burton (Jack Reynor) is a veteran of the US Marine Corps' elite Haptic Recon force and suffers from brain trauma resulting from his cybernetic implants. Burton works security for a video game/virtual world maintained by a company called Milagros Coldiron. Flynne sometimes substitutes for Burton, and one day, he asks her to try a new kind of headset that introduces her to a virtual reality so vivid, it seems like she's really there. The twist: She actually is "there," but "there" isn't where, or when, she thinks it is.