Finished the show today. I hope it gets a second season. It is not amazing, but it is quite good and deserves a second year.
I concur that you could easily skip, say, the first three episodes.
It was interesting, and I’ll watch more, but I suspect it might go all Mission Impossible in the sense of a team with a diverse set of skills, but in this case you need to only send in one person at a time and the other members will “upload” as necessary.
Favourite line: “We weren’t really looking for a live-in beard.”
That’s the thing. I thought everyone would have everyone else’s skills, but it appears you have to temporarily body swap. Sucks if the cluster buddy you need is busy.
Works better for the story, I think. It would seem too easy if they all just suddenly have all those skills all the time. It veers close enough to that as it is.
All superpowers require kryptonite, or at least Scotty;s “I canna hold 'er, Captain!” doubletalk generator.
A cluster mate in trouble is going to be really stuck if they have to drive and kick the crap out of someone at the same time.
True, and I kind of liked it when Capheus got beat up because he couldn’t simply activate Sun when needed, and then later he managed on his own anyway.
Didn’t we already see a scene like that?
“So Nomi, how hard would it be to hack Bank of America and steal a trillion dollars?”
“Wooooolfgang! We talked about this.”
The Wachoskis directed everything shot in Mexico, London, Iceland and San Fransisco.
Tom Tykwer directed everything in Berlin and Nairobi.
James McTeigue in Seoul and [del]Bombay[/del] Mumbai.
Straczynski has the whole thing plotted out for five seasons, which is also the reason for the slow burn.
It’s absolutely fantastic. The best thing And & Lana have done since the first Matrix and the best Straczynski has done since the fourth season of B5. The sex is certainly not gratuitous, it’s messy, because the whole show is about how incredibly messy life is. The multitude of ways we fuck up ourselves and others every single day. Another way to recognize why it’s not gratuitous is the lack of the male gaze.
I’d condense that to “the multitude of ways we can fuck ourselves,” which is what about 95% of the sex seems to be about.
I like sex. I like cinematic sex. I like realistically-portrayed film sex. I like the latter when it’s integral to the story and plot and character development. But at a certain point, I have to aside, “Bring me a bucket!” and this show has hit that point more than once.
Finally finished it a few days ago.
Sex scenes: Yes, Nomi/Amanita’s scene at the beginning was over the top, especially the soggy dildo. In a later episode, where members of the group were having sex all over the globe, now, that was HAWT - and really emphasized the group’s connection to each other.
Final episode: OK, they physically got away, for a bit - by going up into the mountains. That just stops Whispers’ henchmen from grabbing them right now. Sooner or later they’re going to have to come back down. With Whispers’ link to Will’s mind, tracking Will down should be relatively trivial.
Riley’s collapse (and Nomi’s, early on): Why? What caused their collapses?
And, finally: full male frontal nudity on TV (Wolfgang, at Kala’s wedding). For some reason, breasts have been OK in movies for decades but penises are Just. Not. Done.
In Riley’s case, she was re-experiencing the trauma of losing her child. I think it’s because the sensates are really really vulnerable to strong emotions, and Will had to snap her out of it by making his possible death worse than what she was going through.
In Nomi’s case, it was probably related to her brain lobes fusing together, assuming Dr. Shapiro was being truthful.
Anyhoo, I’ve been speculating on the story behind the story. I’m thinking Whispers is a sensate who was originally a scientist who studied psychic phenomena such as deja vu, and somehow got a huge grant from the government to fund his studies. He put out feelers to locate anybody who felt they had “out of body” experiences or something similar, and noticed a pattern of clusters among his test subjects. His best test subjects were Jonas and Angelica, and Jonas was instrumental in locating other sensates.
Jonas and Angelica belong to Whispers’s cluster, and the three of them worked together to further investigate these psychic links, and wound up discovering that sensates are actually mutated forms of humans. Whispers probably got the idea that theirs was a superior race and could rule humanity. Jonas and Angelica felt differently, and left the study group. This caused Whispers to feel betrayed, and because of the deep emotional nature of sensates, became convinced Jonas and Angelica would undermine him and destroy everything he worked for. So, he worked on increasing his own powers and went so far as to recruit less-than-ethical doctors and scientists like Shapiro and have them develop ways for him to access sensate batteries for his own use. That’s why there’s so many lobotomy patients across the globe.
Jonas and Angelica in the meantime, somehow figured out how to tie themselves to other clusters and activate new ones. Jonas is actually almost as heinous in nature as Whispers, because he’s establishing himself as kind of the grandfather of the other clusters. He was already able to call on somebody else’s fighting skills when he slapped Will around in the grocery kiosk. I’m thinking in future episodes, he and Will will have differences of opinion that will lead to more schisms.
In a sense, Angelica is still alive in the clusters’ psychic network, and is reluctant to possess any of the others, for now. She has a mother’s sense of protectiveness, and will appear to lend an encouraging word when needed. Will she influence one of the female sensates to birth another cluster? Only the Netflix overlords can decide their fate.
So let’s review the sex scorecard, here:
[ol]
[li]Nomi, transgender white woman, seen completely nude and in graphic, extended sex with her partner many times. The only part of her that hasn’t been front and center on the lens is her crotch. (I think we even got a flash of Amanita’s, or more than one.)[/li][li]Wolfgang, straight (AFAWK) white male. One fairly subdued het-sex scene (the only one in the season?) and a full-frontal shot.[/li][li]Riley, straight (AFAWK) white female. Drawing a blank; maybe some breast nudity and discreet sex in the bad guys’ penthouse?[/li][li]Will, straight (AFAWK) white male. No sex at all except flashes in the orgy scene, which clearly make him uncomfortable when Lito mentions it. Minor nudity.[/li][li]Lito, gay Mexican male. Much nudity, no full-frontal I can bring to mind, some of the most graphic and extended gay and +1 sex in any “TV” show, extended PDAs, rather weird voyeur displays for Daniela.[/li][li]Sun, unknown orientation Korean female, probably not gay. Minor nudity, don’t recall any sex.[/li][li]Capheus, unknown orientation African male, no nudity or sex.[/li][li]Kala, straight, probably virgin Indian female. Brief gauzy nudity, no sex.[/li][/ol]
And, as someone pointed out, the season plot resolution is “straight white guy we never see nude saves straight white girl we never see nude very much.”
So the function of the gay characters is to be lascivious, fuck like rabbits, provide us with extended nudity and get into deep, deep trouble… while the three other nonwhite characters simply get into trouble… while the three straight, white characters act as the cluster saviors.
Hmm. Anyone else think all the edginess and rule-breaking here is a little bit grounded in the imaginations of an aging trio of showrunners?
Lana Wachowski definitely modeled Nomi after herself. Other than that, I don’t think the showrunners were overtly projecting themselves into the white heterosexual characters. All writers do tend to make their own race and culture the dominant features of their stories, since that’s what they’re most familiar with.
JMS said this was definitely a learning experience for them. One of the directors had ties to studios in Nairobi, so they already had a knowledge base there, but not so much for India. That’s where they spent the most time filming, as they were having to consult with locals to make their scripts more suitable for the location. That’s how they learned about the rates clergy charge for weddings.
Well, that’s good, but Nomi is… 30? A bit older? and Lana is 50 and was Larry until [choose pronoun] 40s. I accept her unique vision but there’s still a bit of that porn-y “if I’d done this when I was young and hot, y’know…”
I will give them credit for bringing the male couple so front and center and not leaning on the tired, cross-gender intrigue of just the women. But even there, they felt compelled to throw a hot babe into the mix, however ridiculously and demo-servingly.
(“No, honey, I’'m all hard looking at Dani. Really.”)
Yeah, it took about five minutes before their lives were centered around a straight woman literally sandwiched between them in bed like a pair of new parents with a small child sleeping with them. Goodbye sex life. I enjoyed Lito & his hubby a lot, but that wasn’t lost on me.
[QUOTE=Amateur Barbarian;]
So the function of the gay characters is to be lascivious, fuck like rabbits, provide us with extended nudity and get into deep, deep trouble… while the three other nonwhite characters simply get into trouble… while the three straight, white characters act as the cluster.
[/QUOTE]
I dunno about Riley as a savior. She was pretty much a damsel in distress from minute one. Sun spent pretty much all her time saving people - her family, other cluster members, people in prison.
Correction accepted. That does muddle the lines just a bit.
Actually, I’m not sure what Riley brings to the cluster except being the token straight white woman. Affinity for the arts, maybe. Not that I’d sneer at that - hardly - but I don’t see any of the cluster getting out a jam because they can stop and grok a painting.
ETA: Maybe she evolves into the Mother, as Daryl Hannah’s character apparently was. The emotional glue.
I forget now, maybe it’s my imagination, but I thought Riley’s tolerance to drugs helped get someone out of a jam.
Really though, the whole show boiled down to Riley getting over her fear of driving. Kind of anti-climactic. 
This is one of the bigger “What’s going on here?” spoilers you learn near the end, so if you’d like to keep it as a reveal during the unfolding of the story, I really recommend you do so.
Big Spoiler Inside:
[spoiler]The Sensates are actually the predecessor to Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Humankind was connected by clusters since the dawn of humanity, but then a mutation occurred at some point, and splintered the human race into two groups: those that could connect with a cluster, and those who couldn’t. Fairly fast, the human race became dominated by those who couldn’t connect (us normal humans). Why? Because it’s easier to kill off those different form you when you can’t feel.
So, this species still remains, but it’s far rarer, and there’s a global conspiracy to keep this knowledge locked up.
There’s more to it than that, and more at play, but that’s the gist.[/spoiler]
I loved the series, thought it was the Watchowskis best since Matrix too. I liked Cloud Atlas a lot, and it seems they borrowed some technique they learned making that film and put it to better use here. This was by far more accessible and there is a real plot within. Really hoping for season 2.