Prime Video has finally unleashed the first two episodes of The Peripheral from Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the creators of “Westworld,” and screenwriter/novelist Scott B. Smith (“The Ruins”). The series premiere is a supersized science fiction trip through two different worlds that leads to lots of intrigue and danger for our heroine. Let’s dive in!
Meet the Players | Our story begins in London, as a figure named Wolf (Gary Carr) sits on a bench and is met by a barefoot girl named Aelita (Sophia Ally), who has a very cryptic conversation with him about saving the world, before she tells him goodbye and stops moving. Next thing we know, it’s 2032 in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and we meet Flynne Fisher (Chloe Grace Moretz), who is tending to her sick mother (Melinda Page Hamilton) before heading to the trailer parked outside their house to meet her brother Burton (Jack Reynor), who is playing a VR “Call of Duty”-esque game under his gamer tag Easy Ice. Flynne takes Burton’s place and wipes the floor with the attacking enemies, earning Burton’s account a $1,000 payout. If only real games paid you for playing, I’d be rich by now!
Welcome to Reality | Flynne rides an electric bike downtown to her job at a 3-D printing shop, after cashing out the grand from Burton’s game. She gets a visit from Tommy Constantine (Alex Hernandez), the town sheriff, and later, her coworker Billy Ann (Adelind Horan) reveals that Flynne is crushing on Tommy, despite the fact that he is engaged. Later that day, Flynne gets a package for Burton that holds an experimental headset, which she delivers to him that night. He explains that he’s been hired to beta test the headset for an obscene paycheck- or rather Easy Ice has been hired and since Flynne’s been using his gamer tag, she has to use it.
Flynne gets in the headset and wakes up in Easy Ice’s avatar (Reynor) riding a motorcycle through the streets of a futuristic London. As she- he?- rides through the streets, a woman’s voice (Charlotte Riley) guides him to his mission at Buckingham Palace and once she arrives, her motorbike dissolves into dust. After walking through the halls and trying out the sim, which Flynne can feel everything through her fingertips, Ice enters a party and is ordered by the voice to take a woman named Mariel (Poppy Corby-Tuech) home with her. Ice convinces her to do just that and they end up making out in the back of Mariel’s car with her robotic driver watching their every move.
It All Goes to Hell | The voice orders Ice to use a sedative on Mariel, but as soon as she does, the driver goes homicidal and tries to kill Ice. Ice manages to destroy the robot and the voice guides her to drive Mariel to a hidden street, where the woman behind the voice is waiting. She suggests to Ice that he won’t exist in ten years and then ends the simulation, as Flynne wakes up and Burton tells her that they want her to try again tomorrow for more money. Normally, the episode would end here, but there’s a lot more left and trust me, it gets wild!
Flynne rides to a bar to pick up medicine for her mother, where she walks past a one armed and no legged man named Conner (Eli Goree) in a really cool wheelchair/motorcycle. She runs into trouble with her medicine dealer, Atticus (Harrison Gilbertson), who tries to rip her off, but Conner scares him into delivering the medicine after threatening to shoot him and his crew. After Conner gives Flynne a ride home, Atticus is called to meet his boss, Corbell Pickett (Louis Herthum), in the bar, who not only chastises Atticus and his cronies for trying to rip off Flynne, but smashes Atticus’s friend’s face into the table as he is drinking from a glass! Ouch doesn’t begin to describe it!
Come to Collect | The next morning, Flynne’s mother reveals that Burton has been giving her his extra medicine, which troubles Flynne, but she doesn’t say anything to Burton about it. She logs into the sim again, only to wake up paralyzed on an operating table as the woman orders a doctor to remove Ice’s left eye and replace it with Mariel’s severed eyeball! It gets worse: The woman takes Ice to a secret lab, where Mariel’s eyeball gets them in via retina scan. They go down to the basement floor, where the woman orders Ice to use her own eye to scan at a strange looking upside down pyramid hanging from the ceiling, but they are interrupted by a security officer who fires a concussive gun at them. The officer identifies the woman as Aelita West, as Ice gets the skin from her hand torn off, revealing a robot hand underneath. Aelita flees the coop, as the officer blows Ice’s head off with the gun, logging Flynne out. She immediately tells Burton that she’ll never again log in.
The next day, Flynne gets a call from Wolf, who demands that she log back in, but she hangs up. Elsewhere, a cop sees a group of shady figures in black cars and purses them, but gets cornered by one of the men with a gun. The man orders the cop to stand in the middle of the road as an invisible car runs him over and the man gets away. Flynne is once again contacted by Wolf, this time through the 3-D printers at her shop, and he says that a $9 million bounty has been placed on her and her family and the only way out is to log back into the sim. Flynne races home to tell Burton and his friends, who are discussing the incident that took Conner’s arm and legs and how they knew something about it. They immediately doubt the legitimacy of the warning, but send drones out around their house just to be sure- and see an army of soldiers coming for the house.
The Peripheral is now streaming on Prime Video.