Thoughts on episode 1 of The Peripheral (Amazon Prime TV series based on the William Gibson novel). Book and show spoilers, notes and musings not a review.
SPOILERS follow, you have been warned.
Feels like this is going to be a good adaptation of the book, tho neither J nor I have read it recently enough to remember everything it definitely had the right feel for what we liked about the book. It did change stuff (the stuff Flynne saw in game wasn’t the same for instance) but it all felt like it rhymed.
Quite a few visual reminders of The Matrix without being totally unsubtle. Like the fight in the car between Flynne/Easy Ice and robot, the way she dropped right into a body in another world on a motorbike, even the jacking in/peripheral process. Obviously the original conceptual influence goes the other way round, but the references here were a nice touch and set up the “but wait, is it real?” moment.
I love the way (which is absolutely true to the books) Flynne is the shit-hot gamer but she uses her brother’s avatar and takes his place in games. Male avatar, gender neutral nick, no-one knows you’re a girl on the quake server (unless you tell them) and sometimes that’s a damn good thing. And one thing Gibson is really good at, and always has been, is writing central female characters for his works who are real people and totally badass.
They’re doing neat things with colour, too, I think. The world Flynne lives in is golden. It sucks but the colouring somehow gives it a sense of nostalgia for a lost youth. The world she goes to in the “game” is sharper & colder and bluer.