TV Review: Electric Dreams (Season 1, Episode 9)
14th March 2018
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Electric Dreams’ penultimate episode is one which achieves great things with its world-building, but suffers from its oversimplified themes.
PKD’s original short story, Foster, You’re Dead is an anti-consumerist story set in the context of the Cold War. In ‘Safe and Sound’ however, the writers have taken the same core theme but built an entirely new and high-tech world around it.
Hence the need to add the backstory about her father’s own insanity and subsequent suicide, confusing her and making her question whether the voice in her ear is real or whether she is experiencing the same symptoms her father did. It’s a cheap swipe at a mental-illness angle, but it does succeed in keeping up the plot’s pace and the questioning of what’s real.
Yet even then, the episode closes with unnecessary flashbacks explaining how it all ‘really’ happened, that the audience simply doesn’t need. It would have been far better leaving in the element of ambiguity, rather than removing what few questions and little depth viewers would otherwise have been left with, in favour of heavy-handed preachiness about the dangers of technology.
Science fiction is designed to bring its readers or viewers closer to the ‘truth’, to reality, to ourselves as a species and as individuals. ‘Safe and Sound’ loses sight of its truths when it tries to do too much, to dazzle with buzz-word themes and commentary whilst never delving deep enough into any one.
The latest of Electric Dreams is well-acted and directed, with great world-building and great potential, but sadly the themes it addresses are treated without nuance nor the complexity they deserve.
Electric Dreams airs on Mondays at 9pm on Channel 4.
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