Of all William Gibson’s books – most of which are considered unadaptable for so many reasons – The Peripheral as a series is arguably best suited for the big screen. At first glance, the 2014 novel is poised to begin with a compelling premise of a tale of two worlds: rural, small-town America meets a post-apocalyptic, nanotechnology-powered London that follows the god-given European tradition of striving to colonize everything with it a profitable heartbeat. It causes ordinary people to become enmeshed in powerful mysteries, discernible near-future technologies, and a characteristic barrage of Gibsonian terminology – klepts, polts, neoprims – which you pick up on the path of context and extrapolation. The book is considered one of Gibson’s more accessible and engaging works; Sure, some of it hasn’t “held up” well over the years, but (and that’s a hill I’ll die on) cyberpunk and its offshoots aren’t genres destined to age like fine wines.
This review contains mild spoilers for Amazon’s adaptation of The Peripheral.
The Amazon Studios version of The Peripheral goes something like this: In the near future, Flynne Fisher (Chloë Grace Moretz) is an average girl in a small town (probably somewhere in the Carolinas) who also happens to be pretty damn good at gaming. She and her brother Burton (Jack Reynor) take freelance VR gaming jobs and play for rich people. Burton is an ex-Marine from an elite Haptic Unit, a group of friends from his hometown who were all recruited together to exploit their ready-made sense of camaraderie. Her mother (Melinda Page Hamilton) is ill and blind, and Flynne, who works at a 3D printer, keeps things running while Burton and his friends drink beers and play with drones. Flynne’s world is a dramatized expansion of contemporary American capitalism, complete with predatory medical supplies, rural corporate infrastructure where everyone relies on HeftyMart, and ubiquitous drug manufacturers (“Builders” in the book) in an age when anyone can print anything .
Flynne eventually takes a job playing a new experimental simulation in London that requires wearing a mysterious headset. She realizes a little too late that something doesn’t feel, and she sees things she shouldn’t see. She meets Wilf Netherton (Gary Carr), a contact for the shady Colombian company Milagros Coldiron, who allegedly hired her for her gambling skills, and Aelita West (Charlotte Riley), a mysterious woman with an ax for sharpening. When Flynne returns to the real world, she discovers that her family has a bounty on her head for playing this so-called game. As the characters struggle to settle into both worlds, it becomes clear that she wasn’t playing a sim – it’s actually a version of the future (I wouldn’t normally have chosen to be so explicit in a review, but marketing for the show Straight-Up shared the revelation on social media).
As with all customizations, The Peripheral brings changes; Unfortunately, in this case, they come at the expense of history. In the book, Gibson does a great job exploring celebrity and power and the delicate task of managing optics in a post-social media world – the complex art of seeing, observing, being seen and being observed. He goes fully into the trends and cultural crutches we use to prop up our stunted attention spans, and to that end the book is packed with some really great trainwrecks, like selfish artists performing ill-conceived stunts in spectacularly bad scenarios. The show thinks nothing of it. Originally a charming alcoholic mess of a publicist, Wilf is relegated to a generic fixer character, existing only on the periphery of the rich and powerful. Several key figures are absorbed and combined into one. Flynne, intentionally a low-key, voyeuristic character in the book to underline the larger themes, becomes a much more conventional, proactive heroine on screen, which makes sense when you’re playing in front of Westworld fans who are prepared to see a new one Dolores-type see your path to self-empowerment.
And then there’s London. In the fourth episode, Wilf reveals that an apocalyptic series of events called The Jackpot – a domino effect of climate change, multiple pandemics and thirty-two types of disasters – have decimated the future, so all the people Flynne was “seeing” on London’s streets are just technological placebos to alleviate the misery of Wilf’s empty reality. In the book, London is described as pretty much…London except for the presence of structures called “shards”. In the show, we get colossal, overgrown, kitschy Greco-Roman statues dotting the city, surrounded by blocky clouds of what I can only imagine, the Assemblers (fictional nanotechnology used to transform post-jackpot society rebuild). It feels like a leftover moodboard idea from Westworld, like a crude afterthought thrown in to emphasize the idea of narcissists and oligarchs running the city.
Gary Carr and Chloe Grace Moretz in The Peripheral Image: Sophie Mutevelian / Prime Video
It’s really hard to resist the Westworld comparisons while watching The Peripheral – with its shallow monologues and light-hearted androids, it’s more of an expansion of the world of Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy than a heartfelt adaptation by Gibsons. This particular vision of The Peripheral has, for some reason, chosen to destroy the book’s most succinct social and cultural cues and replace them with a lukewarm extension of Westworld’s formula for presenting artificial life: a shallow, cosmetic exploration of inanimate puppets, on we can rely on to project our hopes, dreams and desires. It’s clear that London is a power fantasy for Flynne, Burton and their friend Conner (Eli Goree), a triple amputee determined to find a way to live in a peripheral body in the future. But it’s a fantasy without the bite or weirdness or quirkiness that made the source material so compelling from the start. It’s also a show that can’t handle the way Gibson writes relationships — not romantic ones, but ambiguous, awkward, comfortably strained friendships — so of course they make the main characters kiss.
The meatiest part of the story (here’s a spoiler) is that the world of Fishers is simply one “stub” of many – a past story that branched off from reality when “Continuua enthusiasts” found a way in the future to swap dates with the past. It’s not time travel, but rather a way of remotely influencing things (hence the peripherals, state-of-the-art artificial bodies that basically act as telepresence robots), like manipulating the lottery, or starting a shell company to run a shell game. However, it ends up becoming a routine tale about Flynn and Burton “leveling the playing field” and getting what’s theirs.
Book-Flynne’s original foray into London was as a security drone operator, where she gets to attend a very fancy party as an outsider who shouldn’t be there. The original incident has a fantastic rear-window voyeur quality that would have been dynamite on screen. But instead it’s translated into a simple Hollywood action sequence. Even the ubiquitous Michikoids – ceramic robots that can transform into killing machines with unnerving spider-like eyes – feel like remnants of Westworld. “This isn’t just another sim.” I watch character after character repeat as I reach for The Peripheral novel to remind myself that there is a better world.
JJ Feild in The Peripheral Image: Sophie Mutevelian / Prime Video
But it’s not all bad. There are some really entertaining moments in later episodes involving Flynne’s best friend Billy Ann (Adelind Horan) and a vicious ex-hijacker named Bob (Ned Dennehy) who is hired to kill the Fishers. The scenes with Bob are a breath of fresh air, and I love how Alexandra Billings plays Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer, one of the strongest characters in the book who is sadly underused on the show. Scruffy Russian Lev (JJ Feild), Wilf’s kleptic “boyfriend”, exudes all the charm and confidence that Wilf should have deserved. There’s also a brief moment where a body mod specialist mentions the possibility of giving a customer retractable titanium razor claws, which is a fun Easter egg for Gibson enthusiasts pining for a Neuromancer adaptation. When Ash (Katie Leung) finally says what no one wants to say – that Flynne’s altered history “stub” is simply another form of colonialism in which the rich and powerful of the future can act as imperialists – it feels far too late to throw it that as a hook.
As for the merits and methods of evaluating book-to-screen adaptations, Sean T. Collins put it best in his review of the Rings of Power finale – that changes are value-neutral and adaptations should not be judged morally. Instead, says Collins, we should examine whether the new adaptation increased or improved upon the source material, and whether this new visual version of the story generally retained the tones and themes of the source material. The first six episodes of The Peripheral have felt, at best, like a bad misunderstanding and handling of the source material, straining the overall character and flavor in favor of a much more familiar, simple action hoopla. The novel is a testament to Gibson’s strength as a keen observer of trends and linguistics, and the way he can transform the future into sharp, clever set pieces we can spot without feeling too alienated.
I can’t help but think that this was a missed opportunity to bring to life a world that resonates so well with our current media landscape – a world that begs for an adjustment, that understands why we see what we see, and do what we do.
The Peripheral will stream on Amazon Prime Video on October 21st.