Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams Episode 4 Review: Crazy Diamond

| January 14, 2018 |

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Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams Season 1 Episode 4

This Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams review contains spoilers.

Philip K. Dick'southward Electric Dreams Season 1 Episode 4

Twoscore-iv novels, ane hundred and twenty-1 short stories, vi published volumes of correspondence… nobody could ever say Philip K. Dick lacked for ideas. The same goes for this week's Electric Dreams , which is, to use a technical term, chocka. There's ecology plummet, a dystopian level of land command, widespread infertility, implanted consciousnesses, maritime-themed sci-fi architecture, Julia Davis, a gang of piratic teddy boys, Syd Barrett, and a race of chimeric grunter-people.

And that's before the plot fifty-fifty kicks in. "Crazy Diamond" has packed its hour of screen-time to the rafters. The result is this series' about visually memorable, tonally unusual episode notwithstanding. If sci-fi'due south all about transporting usa to new and metaphorical worlds, then this does the job and then some. The final epitome alone, of Steve Buscemi supine in the waves, smiling a faraway smiling and tenderly rubbing a Syd Barrett LP, is one that'll stay with y'all.

Every bit volition Joanna Scanlan's cameo every bit a 60/40 grunter-human hybrid named Su. A chipper security guard who teeters effectually on her trotters, Su provides a glimpse into a earth where manufacturing plant-made chimeras, many of which are indistinguishable from "normals," are treated as second-class citizens. The brief friendship Su forms with Davis' character plays a role in awakening Emerge, who goes from questioning Su's right to align herself with 'normals' to telling her conspiratorially that "united states of america girls accept to stick together."

U.s.a. girls practice stick together by the end of the hour, when Emerge turns the tables on hubby Ed (Steve Buscemi) and sails into the sunset with another chimera – Jill (Sidse Babett-Knudsen), the manufacturing plant-produced adult female whose archway into Ed and Sally's life topples their carefully established equilibrium.

Ed and Sally live on a sterile coastal estate that'southward literally crumbling beneath their feet, where they're surveilled past a sinisterly cheery and invasive refuse collector (Abraham Popoola). It'due south into that world that insurance saleswoman Jill arrives, an orange flame against a sea of blueish-dark-green, and separately, gives both partners the same sales pitch.

Even before Jill'southward touch on is felt, there are signs that Emerge, similar Ed, dreams of a unlike life. He hides abroad on the gunkhole he's restoring and talks of escaping to risk on the high seas, while Emerge sprouts illicit plants, contraband in this weirdly controlled life where fresh food rots inside days of commitment and gardening is considered a threat to the local economy. Nurturing a tray of seedlings is Emerge's first transgression of the rules. Pushing Ed off the side of his gunkhole and running away to observe out what 'normal' really ways, is her final.

"Crazy Diamond" lays its themes on thickly earlier getting involved in its fifties-way noir thriller plot. Information technology'due south about atrophy and the inevitability of death. We picket several things wither and decay in the starting time ten minutes—Jill's confront in a dream, half a dozen eggs and a handful of potatoes.

Jill is "declining" and due to be recalled. Like Roy Batty though, she wants more than life, and that's where scientist Ed comes in. One of the quantum consciousnesses Ed farms at the half-mystically, half-industrially named "spirit mill" would restore her spark, if she were able to steal one, while ix more sold on the black market would ready her and Ed up for life. A heist and a joint escape is planned. Jill takes a mould of Ed'due south paw for the access scanner and he teaches her what to sing to unlock the lab (John Dowland's sixteenth century lute vocal "Flow, My Tears," which also provided the title for a 1974 Philip Grand. Dick novel. Like PKD, Ed is obviously a fan of Dowland'due south – his gunkhole is named the "John D").

The heist works only Jill is betrayed past her contend, a madly charismatic golden-toothed villain named Noah (Michael Socha), leader of a pack of zoot-suited and bolo tie-wearing baddies. Jill gets her new consciousness, and it turns out that Ed'south dominate, the Spirit Factory director (Lucian Msamati) was backside the whole thing. Anybody simply Ed and Jill is killed in a dramatic and encarmine shoot-out.

The noir-inspired thriller plot, which namechecks Billy Wilder'due south 1944 film Double Indemnity besides as borrowing from it, seems less important than the episode's unusual and fascinating atmosphere. That's cheers to director Marc Munden, cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland and composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, all of whose work informed Channel 4's Utopia with the same unnerving sense. In fact, with its acrid greens and dreamlike, twitchy soundtrack, "Crazy Diamond" feels and then like Utopia , it'due south clear who was responsible for the onetime show's distinctive atmosphere.

The performances are deliberately mannered and bewitching. Babett-Knudsen, fresh from another investigation of fabricated consciousnesses and manufacturing plant-produced people in HBO'due south Westworld , has all the glamour and danger of a classic femme fatale as Jill, while Buscemi is wonderfully confused and conflicted equally Ed.

From a brusque story about the desperate lengths to which one man goes to silence the invasive presence of advertising in modern life, writer Tony Grisoni ( Fearfulness And Loathing In Las Vegas , Ruby-red Riding ) has spun a mad tale, pulling in influences and ideas from far and broad. The result is crammed, comic, tragic and chaotic, and, like the Syd Barrett song of which Ed is such a fan, it's an endlessly interpretable and unforgettable world in itself. Shine on.