These days, it’s almost impossible to talk about any kind of science-fiction TV anthology without comparing it to Charlie Brooker’s future-fears series Black Mirror. It’s the question most SF fans and telephiles will immediately ask. The new Amazon Prime Video anthology Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams does have some comparison points to Brooker’s series, and it’s unlikely that either Amazon or its UK television partner, Channel 4, mind having their fledgling series mentioned alongside Netflix’s well-established, buzzy technological creepshow. But Electric Dreams is decidedly brighter than Black Mirror. Co-creators Ronald D. Moore and Michael Dinner are every bit as pessimistic as Brooker about how technology is going to transform the culture in the centuries ahead, but they have a lot more faith in the people who will still be around.
The 10 episodes of Electric Dreams’ first season (each roughly 50 minutes long) are driven more by grounded characters than far-out premises. Those who know Moore’s work shouldn’t be surprised. In his Battlestar Galactica remake and his Outlander adaptation, Moore has often just let wild fantasy be the backdrop for stories about the deepest yearnings and aspirations of human beings (or robots who look and act like human beings). And he falls into the usual pattern of science fiction, where most stories about the future are really about the present. In stories set a thousand years from now — or even 10 — the creators are usually extrapolating from current trends, and reflecting their own visions of where humanity’s headed. The stories in Electric Dreams are a snapshot of today, filtered through our collective hopes and fears.
Like Moore, Philip K. Dick based his science fiction in human longing. Even the best-known movie adaptations of his work — Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly — put their spectacle in service of complex considerations of what animates us all, and ask, “How much is disappointment, injustice, and compulsion a necessary byproduct of being alive?”
The best Electric Dreams episodes make this theme fairly plain. The haunting “The Commuter” has more in common with The Twilight Zone than Black Mirror, as it follows a good-natured railway worker (played by great British character actor Timothy Spall) who discovers a town that isn’t on his maps. There, people who’ve had difficult lives get a chance to be happy. Because his biggest problem is a psychologically disturbed son, he gradually realizes that “escape” could cost him someone he loves. “Safe and Sound” (based on the story “Foster, You’re Dead!”) has Annalise Basso as a teenager from a socially suspect hippie community, who tries to fit in with her new big city classmates by wearing one of their Apple Watch-like tracking devices, but learns that thinking about security and conformity all the time makes her more paranoid… and less popular.
“Real Life” (scripted by Moore, adapting Dick’s “Exhibit Piece”) is the most overtly Dick-ian episode, conceptually. Anna Paquin and Terrence Howard play stressed-out professionals in different realities whose favorite method of recreation is to live vicariously through each other. The episode never fully clarifies whether one of them is fictional, or if they’re connecting across time and space. The “how” of “Real Life” matters less than the way it depicts a sort of melancholy ouroboros, with two people creating a feedback loop of dissatisfaction. Similarly, “The Hood Maker” derives its strong emotional pull from the tenuous bonds formed between a cop (Richard Madden) and a telepath (Holliday Grainger) who have been socialized to fear and resent each other.
Unlike Black Mirror (or The Twilight Zone, for that matter), Electric Dreams doesn’t exactly excel at hooking viewers with plot. “Safe and Sound” and “The Hood Maker” are fairly full (as is the genuinely surprising “Autofac”), but episodes like “Impossible Planet,” “Crazy Diamond,” and “Father Thing” offer only mildly spooky situations, not nail-biting thrills. They’re low on suspense, and don’t build to any cruelly ironic twists or gasp-inducing revelations.
Instead, they offer remarkably strong performances. In “Impossible Planet,” the excellent young Irish actor Jack Reynor (so memorable in Glassland and Sing Street) plays a jaded interstellar tour guide, while Geraldine Chaplin is the dying aristocrat who’ll pay a fortune to get him to take her to a place that may no longer exist. “Crazy Diamond” (based on the story “Sales Pitch”) has Steve Buscemi as a scientist agreeing to help one of his company’s androids (played by Borgen / The Duke of Burgundy star Sidse Babett Knudsen) outlast her expiration date. In “Father Thing” (written and directed by Dinner), Greg Kinnear is an alien who’s taken the form of one skeptical suburban kid’s dad. Even when Electric Dreams’ episodes are flat and predictable — and frankly, “Father Thing” is both — they’re still well-acted.
Although each of these science-fiction mini-movies has a different writer-director team, and they all take place in different realities, there’s some uniformity to the presentation. The show as a whole tends to take its cues from an opening credits sequence and Harry Gregson-Williams theme song that are unabashedly retro in their vision of a future filled with electronic pleasures. With rare exceptions (like the noir-inflected “The Hood Maker” and the post-apocalyptic “Autofac”), the clothing and architecture doesn’t have that common Blade Runner grubbiness, even in tales that take place in dark times. Instead, characters travel in spaceships and live in cities that could’ve been copied over from the 1950s pulp magazines where Dick’s work first appeared.
One of the must-see Electric Dreams episodes, “K.A.O.,” is a case in point. Written and directed by Mudbound’s Dee Rees (very loosely adapting Dick’s “The Hanging Stranger”), the episode stars Mel Rodriguez as an ordinary citizen of the gleaming mega-nation Mex-Us-Can, whose life is turned upside down when he hears his country’s lone presidential candidate casually say in a speech that she intends to “kill all others.” Initially surprised that no one else is freaking out over the comment, he soon learns that the more he protests that something’s amiss, the more he risks being labeled one of those “others.”
Rees is cleverly illustrating how easily an entire society can accept the unacceptable, so long as their basic needs are met and the people in charge seem to know what they’re doing. But she also emphasizes that even here, one person can stand up for what’s right.
That’s what makes Electric Dreams a little easier to take than Black Mirror, even though it’s generally less exciting. One of the key lines in the entire series comes toward the end of “The Commuter,” when Spall’s railway man sums up his life with his troubled son and admits, “There were moments of joy.” In this show’s vision of the world to come, no utopia is perfect, and no dystopia is unlivable. Both will ultimately depend a lot on the company we keep.
Ranking the episodes
Because Electric Dreams is an anthology, the episodes don’t follow any particular pattern or order. (In fact, judging by the early reviews, different critics got different episodes randomly labeled as “episode 1, “episode 2,” etc.) There are no outright terrible episodes, but for viewers with limited time, here’s a ranking of all 10 in descending order, from “watch as soon as you can” to “not bad if you have an hour to kill.”
1. “K.A.O.” A barbed political allegory, brought to life by a brilliant Mel Rodriguez performance and energetic filmmaking from writer-director Dee Rees.
2. “Safe and Sound” Contemporary relevance abounds in this story about a society that couches authoritarianism within technological convenience.
3. “The Commuter” A wistful atmosphere and a heartbreaking Timothy Spall define this meditation on why we can’t always get what we want.
4. “The Hood Maker” The most cinematic and narratively ambitious of these first 10 episodes plays like a mash-up of Blade Runner and Minority Report.
5. “Autofac” In which the remaining humans after a nuclear war (led by a resourceful rebel played by Juno Temple) fight against the automated factories and delivery drones (represented by a robotic Janelle Monae) that keep running after the end of the world.
6. “Human Is” Bryan Cranston (also one of the series’ executive producers) is scarily intense as a cruel military officer whose sudden change in personality after a mission on a hostile planet is both a blessing and a concern to his wife, played by The Babadook’s Essie Davis.
7. “Impossible Planet” Jack Reynor and Geraldine Chaplin flesh out a thin story, which asks whether it’s compassionate or exploitative to pretend to make someone’s dream come true.
8. “Real Life” Virtual reality offers an escape for two soulmates who don’t mind who they become, so long as they can stop being themselves for a little while.
9. “Crazy Diamond” Even the great Steve Buscemi and Sidse Babett Knudsen (plus a soundtrack featuring songs by Syd Barrett) can’t overcome the familiarity of this story about an artificial entity striving for survival.
10. “Father Thing” Another episode that’s overly generic, drawing on the usual “body snatcher” clichés.
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