Pilot
The first episode of The Peripheral begins with a man sitting on a bench in London, in the year 2099. A young girl walks up to him and asks what trouble she’s gotten into now. ..
Aelita says that he got her into that mess. They talk about how she once saved him. Aelita claims she is, even now, saving a world, just not this one. She says goodbye to the man she calls Wolf. She blinks and the young girl’s face grows blank. ..
A table holds a white model of a house, its surrounding area and the people in it.
Flynne Fisher is a young woman in the year 2032 who lives with her mother and brother. She is interested in winning money to buy more medicines for her mother, who has recently lost her eyesight. When she sees that some pills are missing from her brother’s backpack, she goes outside to ask him about them, but he tells her that he has something big coming tonight that will give them enough money for more medicines. He hands her his VR headset so she can win the level for him.
Flynne enters the game, taking on her brother’s persona. She easily wins the game, finding a map that the others hadn’t been able to find all this while. She tells Burton to wire the money to her. ..
Later, she cycles through town and withdraws cash from an ATM. There, she meets Tommy, the town sheriff. They discuss his upcoming wedding and he tells her he’s asked for wedding decorations to be made at the print shop where she works. ..
At the print shop, Flynne’s colleague Billy Anne teases her about still having a crush on Tommy. Two boys at the shop show her the decorations Tommy asked for. When they realise there is an extra figurine of the groom, one of the boys breaks it. Flynne later finds the broken figurine and keeps it.
Burton opens the box and finds a metal contraption inside. It’s from a Colombian company called Milagros Coldiron, and was paid for by the boys. ..
Burton reveals that he was asked to beta test this game since he crossed level 100 on another game. Except, it wasn’t him but Flynne who had done that. Since they’ve been offered a lot of money for the gig, Flynne agrees to test it. Burton puts it on for her and she counts back from ten. ..
When she opens her eyes, she’s in the sim, in Burton’s body, riding a motorbike. She’s in an iridescent city with large statues looming over it. A voice in her head welcomes her to the sim. When she says she can feel everything, the voice tells her she will also be able to feel pain. She has to do whatever the voice says in order to earn her keep.
Flynne is a woman who has been taken over by a voice that tells her to do things. One day, she is directed to an extravagant cocktail party in Buckingham Palace hosted by an organisation known as the R.I. or Research Institute. There, she meets a woman named Mariel and is told to convince her to take ‘him’ home. Flynne does so and is attacked by the driver, a robot, but overpowers it. The voice in her head muses about the power it has in simply planting words in Flynne’s head, like seeds. Flynne drives the car to a dead end and says the words ‘I’ve arrived’ before driving inside to find a woman standing there. The woman tells Flynn they will resume tomorrow. ..
Flynn gets out of the sim and raves about how real it feels. She feels a bit dizzy on standing up but then decides to go get her mom’s medicines. At a bar, she pointedly looks at a group of four men and two of them meet her outside. She gives them the money for one pill but the men claim it isn’t enough. They try hassling her for more ‘services’ when a disabled man, with only one arm, comes out from the bar. Conner attaches his monowheel to a larger automobile and threatens the men into giving Flynne the medicine. He and Flynne head home.
The men return to the bar to see an old man in a suit waiting for them. He gives them a dressing down for being bullied by Conner.
Flynne’s brother, Gareth, is in pain from a condition that he has never been able to cure. His skin is glowing and the marks are causing the pain.
Flynne washes her mother’s hair in the morning. Her mother reveals that Burton has been giving her his pills, to help her deal with the pain.
Later, in Burton’s trailer, Flynne apologises for accusing him of stealing the pills. She then logs onto the sim, excited, but finds herself in a surgery room, unable to move. The woman from earlier is there and she tells her that Flynne can’t leave the sim without her permission. The surgeons begin the process of removing Flynne’s eyeball and replacing it with the one they took from Mariel. The woman tells Flynne to rein in her heart and control her mind to deal with the pain. Flynne does so and the woman lets her ‘sleep’.
The woman tells Flynne that she has to put her own eye on the lens and that if she doesn’t then she will die. Flynne does as she is told and feels a sharp pain in her eye. She looks down to see that her eye has been replaced with the woman’s.
In a disturbing sim-reality, a woman tells Flynne to take care of her attacker since he is there to kill them both. Flynne tries but the man ties her hands behind her back. He uses a gun that shoots sonic punches to attack the woman and make her reveal her intentions. Flynne gets her hand out and in the process sees the skin peel off to reveal a robot arm underneath. She helps the woman, who runs away, but the man then turns the gun on Flynne. In reality, Flynne wakes up and vows never to log onto that sim again. ..
Billy Anne tries to cheer up Flynne on the next day. Flynne admits that she has a crush on Tommy and talks about the sim. She theorizes that it’s actually a real place where she inhabits a robot body. ..
Flynne got a phone call from Wolf, who tried warning her about some impending danger. However, she cut the call before he could finish. ..
Elsewhere, a policeman notices two suspicious cars and follows them but they disappear. When he stops his own, a man pulls out a gun on him from behind and tells him to stand in the middle of the road. An invisible force knocks the policeman down. It turns out to be one of the cars cloaked in invisibility. ..
Flynn is closing the print shop when she hears Wolf’s voice through all the machines. He claims her life is in danger and there is a bounty of 9 million dollars on her head. ..
Flynne tells the group of friends that he’s been following them and that he knows they’re up to something. Burton and his friends decide to take action and use a drone to fly over the group of people, identifying them as potential terrorists.
The Episode Review
The show starts out slowly and ominously, setting up its futuristic world. Flynn and Burton are both compelling characters while our 2099 counterparts are shrouded in enough mystery to keep one watching. The intro is infused with iridescent lighting, suitably apt for a story like this one. I think we can definitely expect some stunning visuals and set pieces in the episodes to come.
The episode does a great job of slowly introducing viewers to all the characters and the world they inhabit. Now that we know a bit more about Flynn, we can move on to more exciting things.
