Review

of Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams – a 10-Episode

Anthology

by Paul Levinson

Episode 1.1 Real Life: Mutually Alternate Realities

I watched Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams - a 10-episode anthology of separate stories, all
based on the work of Philip K. Dick - on Amazon Prime. Here are my reviews of all ten
episodes. They were written in the following manner:

• I wrote these reviews right after I saw each episode.

• I've read many of Dick's stories (and enjoyed to loved all of them). But I generally find
reviews that prattle on about how the movie or TV show compared to the novel or story boring
or irritating, so I generally refrained from doing that in these reviews, except where exceptions
were manifestly warranted.
• I tried very hard not to deliver any crucial spoilers (like how the story ends, if there is a
resolution), but there inevitably will be some spoilers, so, proceed at your own risk if you
haven't seen an episode yet.

Now to Real Life: It engages, as most of Dick's works do, the question of what is real and what
is a dream, or fantasy, or alternate in contrast to primary reality. But Real Life takes this in
an exquisite direction, giving us two realities, each with devices that allow their protagonist to
have a great vacation in an alternate reality based on what they need, and we soon learn that
each protagonist's presumably primary reality is the other's vacation or alternate reality. So
what we get are mirroring alternate realities.

This, of course, raises the question of which of these mutually dependent realities is the real
one? Since neither character is very happy, we have to search deeper to find an answer. And
as this episode progresses, each protagonist not only begins to question if her or his reality is
real or the mental vacation, but finds the other reality spilling into his/her own.

You'll have a tough time figuring our which is which - which means this is a good story - and
there is a conclusive answer given at the end. Fine acting by Anna Paquin and Terrence
Howard as the interdependent leads, and good "written for television" by Battlestar Galactica's
and Outlander's Ronald D. Moore.

Episode 1.2 Autofac: Human v. Machine

In Autofac, we have Dick addressing his perennial what's real and what's fantasy, dream,
alternate whatever conundrum in a form likely best known these days, and for better than
three decades: which one is more human, the android (robot) or the humans who made
it/her/him. This is the theme of Bladerunner, original movie and recent sequel, based on
Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - two words of which are part of the title of
this 2018 streaming series.

Since Autofac is just the second episode I've seen of Electric Dreams, I can't tell you if it
captures the essence of Dick's science fiction better than the other episodes. But I will say it
does an outstanding job of presenting the story of which is android and which is human - with
the intensity that we might expect to find in HBO's Westworld. Which in turn means that
Amazon Prime in this series is playing on some high intellect/octane terrain indeed, as it did in
its other Dick production, The Man in the High Castle.

One of the reasons that Dick has had more of his stories brought to the screen than has Asimov,
Heinlein, Clarke, and all the masters of science fiction combined, is that he knew how to put
twists and turns and surprises right in with the most complex philosophic puzzles. Autofac has
that, and manages to provide a narrative that is fresh and surprising even though its post-
apocalyptic setting and artificial intelligence motifs are almost commonplace on the page and
the screen.

Top-notch acting by Juno Temple, and it was good to see Revolution's David Lyons back. Well
written for television by Travis Beacham, and sharply directed by Peter Horton.

Episode 1.3 Human Is: Compassionate Or Alien?

Humans in outer space has been adapted to the screen less frequently than other themes of
Philip K. Dick. But his work in that area is equally brilliant and sometimes better than his
better-known themes - I've thought that ever since I read his "Beyond Lies the Wub" first
published in 1952 - and in the case of Bladerunner ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"), the
two motifs (outer space and robots) are in effect combined.

Human Is, the third standalone episode in Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams 10-episode
anthology, is just about outer space, and is science fiction at its very zenith. Though, if we're
dealing with Philip K. Dick, nothing he writes is ever just about that, whatever that is, because
it's always imbued with the question that haunts and animates just about everything he
wrote: is it real or dream, human or android, this dimension or another one?

In Human Is, the question is whether Silas (powerfully played, of course, by Bryan Cranston) is
human or Rexorian, a dangerous species from another planet that likes to inhabit its human
hosts. Silas left on the mission cold and distant to his wife Vera (played with sensitivity by
Essie Davis, last seen - by me - in The White Princess and Game of Thrones) and returns full of
tenderness, consideration, and lovemaking that Vera tells him she never experienced like that
from him before. Silas nearly died on this mission. So is his new, much better behavior the
result of that experience changing him, making him more human, or because he is no longer
just Silas but a meld of Rexorian and human?

I'm not going to tell you ending. What I will say is that this is one beautiful piece of work,
down to the cinematography by David Katznelson, the directing by Francesca Gregorini, and
the writing for television by Jessica Mecklenburg. And the acting not only sails with Cranston
and Davis, but strong supporting performances by Ruth Bradley (last seen in Humans - an
android series about as Dickian as it gets) and Game of Thrones' Liam Cunningham.

Having now seen three episodes of Electric Dreams, I'd say it's right up there with The Twilight
Zone, and better (from what I've seen) than Black Mirror.

Episode 1.4 Crazy Diamond: DNA Batteries

The fourth episode in Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams returns us to familiar territory: a man in a
dangerous relationship with a female, well, not android, precisely, but she's a "Jill" and is some
kind of DNA-engineered, with an organic battery, that runs down and needs to be replaced.
That's what makes this relationship especially dangerous - Jill needs Ed, a thoroughly human
programmer, to get her a new battery, and maybe some others, so the two can sell them,
makes lots of money, and run away together. And one more piece of this: Ed is married.

Now, one could say that all relationships between human and android, or human and something
that's quasi-human and runs on DNA batteries, are dangerous, and I'd agree. But what always
gives Philip K. Dick's stories an edge is that he mixes the science fiction with a war or a crime
or something else. It's a potent cocktail, and mixed well in Crazy Diamond.

The thing is, Crazy Diamond is so far the least like the original Dick story - "Sales Pitch" - it's
based upon. It doesn't even have the same name, which makes it different in that respect
from the other three I've so far reviewed. I did say in my review of the first episode that I
wouldn't be comparing the streaming episodes to the original stories, but I'm obviously making
an exception for Crazy Diamond, which also has a strong feminist element not in the original.

But I don't want to give anything more away. Like the first three episodes, Crazy Diamond has
top-notch acting by famous and not-so-famous actors, including Steve Buscemi as Ed and Sidse
Babett Knudsen (from Westworld and Borgen!) as Jill. Written for television with a good ear
as well as eye by Tony Grisoni and well directed by Marc Munden, with kudos for whoever came
up with the idea of Ed in the water, reminiscent of Buscemi in the open scene of Boardwalk
Empire.

Episode 1.5 The Hood Maker: Telepathy and Police

Telepathy is another favorite but not-as-well-known-as-some-other themes of Philip K. Dick -
appearing in the aforementioned "Beyond Lies the Wub" in 1952 - and its combination with
police procedural in Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams episode 1.5, The Hood Maker, makes for a
classic Dick amalgam.

It's also a great story, compellingly rendered. Honor is a telepath or TEEP teaming with Agent
Ross to maintain order, which includes controlling the TEEPs, whose ability to read normal
human minds sows unease and disorder (understandable). The situation is brought to a boil by
the "hood maker" who makes hoods which, when donned, block out the TEEP probes.

The Hood Maker is smartly written for television by Matthew Graham (who also wrote the TV
adaption of Childhood's End and the British version of Life on Mars, much better than the
American, by the way), and he has Honor saying such memorable things as "I could read people
before I could read books" and Ross telling Honor "you can read minds but you can't read my
heart". I just love quintessentially science fictional lines like those.

And there's a nice symmetry between Holliday Grainger (from The Borgias) playing Honor and
Richard Madden (from Medici) playing Ross. Good directing, too, by Julian Jarrold.

I've been a sucker for telepathy in fiction every since I read Alfred Bester's Demolished Man as
a kid at the end of the 1950s (which, by the way, was also a police story). And I put Sense8 as
#1 on my list of the Top 10 best 2017 television series for the same reason (it also has a strong
telepathy and police element). I put The Hood Maker in the same company.

Episode 1.6 Safe & Sound: This Isn't a Drill

Safe & Sound - episode 1.6 in Philip K. Dick's standalone 10-episode anthology series on Amazon
Prime - returns to the familiar but always exquisite Dick territory of is it real or illusion, in this
case the real being an ear gel through which Foster Lee hears the voice of a digital assistant,
the illusion being the possibility that the voice is literally in her head, given some credence
since her father was a psycho who heard voices.
This dilemma is presented in the environment of a not-so-distant future in which the big
Eastern cities are worried about domestic terrorist attacks from the rural "bubbles" out
West. On that count, Safe & Sound is as reminiscent of Damon's Knight's 1951 story "Natural
State" as it is of Philip K. Dick's 1955 "Foster, Your Dead" on which it is thinly based.

But there's nothing thin about Safe & Sound, written for television by Kalen Egan and Travis
Sentell, who give us an hour rich in symbolism and relevance to our own time, including the
words "this isn't a drill," heard just yesterday in Hawaii, in our reality, when someone who
should have known better released an announcement of an incoming ballistic missile attack in
error.

Paranoia is also a mainspring of Dick's fiction (and as his biographers and people who knew him
attest, sadly also his life), and Annalise Basso does a fine job of portraying Foster in the throws
of struggling with whether what she is hearing is real or worse - though, in this case, paranoia
could be the better of the two choices, since what she hears from her digital helper are
escalating warnings about terrorists about to attack, and what she needs to do to stop that.

Well directed by Game of Thrones' Alan Taylor, and it was good to see Maura Tierney as
Foster's mother, with almost the exact same personality as Helen in The Affair. Hey, I'll take
that until The Affair comes back on the air, and Safe & Sound is eminently worth seeing in its
own right.

Episode 1.7 The Father Thing: Dick from Space

The 1950s were invaded with science fiction in which entities from outer space arrived here
and took over the bodies of human beings. Invasion of the Body Snatchers - made into a movie
at least three times (1956 and 1978 by that name, and again in 1996 as just Body Snatchers)
and many more times as riffs on the same story with different names - is the best-known iconic
template for that tale. It was good to see it back again in The Father Thing, episode 1.7
of Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams.

The Father Thing tells us this story from the perspective of a boy whose father has been taken
over by an alien from space. Written and directed by Michael Dinner (Justified) from Philip K.
Dick's 1954 story "The Father-Thing," The Father Thing without the hyphen nonetheless has an
appealing 1950s flavor, with a Twilight Zone ambience and a Stranger Things wrap-up - as the
boy and then his friends in effect become freedom fighters - which brings the story into the
present in terms of what we're seeing these days on television. Indeed, that and the hashtag
#RESIST and video-chatting, plus the use of the word "dick" in several pivotal places (such as
when the son refers to the invaders as "dicks from space"), are about the only concessions The
Father Thing makes to 2018.

It's not surprising that Dick the writer partook of this theme, since the question of whether the
man is my father or an alien who has commandeered his body is another version of is it real or
my imagination, this or that dimension, which all but consumed Philip K. Dick. But Dick and
now Dinner do an especially good job at telling this story, fusing the angst of the son with the
beginning of a coming of age story for him. Good work by Greg Kinnear as the father
thing, Mireille Enos as the mother, and Jack Gore (Billions) as the son. Philip K. Dick's Electric
Dreams episodes continue to have excellent performances by big name and lesser-known
actors.

 Episode 1.8 Impossible Planet: Eyes of the Beholder

I've been saying throughout these episode-by-episode reviews of Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams
that this anthology has been attracting some top-draw stars. I mean, we're talking Bryan
Cranston, Steve Buscemi, Anna Paquin, Terrence Howard, Maura Tierney, Mireille Enos, and the
like. But episode 1.8, Impossible Planet, brings us Geraldine Chaplin (Charlie Chaplin's
daughter, first big appearance in Dr. Zhivago) as a woman in her hundreds wanting to visit
Planet Earth before she dies.

The story brings us back out into space and is pure Philip K. Dick, this time pitting us into a
choice of not whether this person, memory, or thing is real or illusion, but whether the faux
"Earth" to which the unethical captain is taking her will fool her into thinking she's really back
on humanity's home. The ending - which I won't reveal - is also classic PKD.

More than most of Dick's stories and the movies and TV episodes made from them,
though, Impossible Planet explores beauty (or, better, reality) in the eye of the
beholder. There's also an explicit religious element in this story, or a recognition that you
can't talk about the wonder of the cosmos without some reference to God.

That part was especially music to my ears. I long ago realized that what was missing in our
efforts to get out into space was a connection to our need to know more about our place in the
universe, which is inevitably not only scientific but spiritual. Towards that end - to get that
deeper element out in the open and into the mix of reasons to get out into space - Michael
Waltemathe and I put together an anthology of essays and short stories in 2015, Touching the
Face of the Cosmos, and we're planning a conference at Fordham University (with co-organizers
Lance Strate and James Heiser) with Guy Consolmagno (the Pope's Astronomer) as keynote
speaker this April.

But back to Impossible Planet, the writing (from the 1953 story by Dick) for television and
direction by David Farr (best known for MI-5 and The Night Manager) is excellent, as is the
acting not only of Chaplin but Jack Reynor and Benedict Wong (Kublai Khan in Marco
Polo). Even the robot - a combination of Malik Ibheis and Christopher Staines, also due in part
to "movement director" Ita O'Brien - was memorable, and reminded me of the great robots
in Forbidden Planet and Day the Earth Stood Still. And I'm pretty sure that's more than in just
the eye of this beholder.

Episode 1.9 The Commuter: Submitted for Your Approval

I said in my review of Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams 1.3 that I thought the series was "right up
there with The Twilight Zone". I tend to make quick judgments - but I still feel that way. I
even entitled my review of Electric Dreams 1.8 Impossible Planet "Eye of the Beholder," which
was the title of one of the best Twilight Zone episodes. Of course, there were 156 episodes
of The Twilight Zone, in contrast to only 10 so far of Electric Dreams, so when I say "right up
there" I mean only that the episodes I've seen in Electric Dreams rank with any random fraction
of a season of The Twilight Zone. If and when Electric Dreams gets to exceed 150 episodes -
which it actually could, given that Dick wrote 44 novels and 121 short stories - I'll get back to
you with a more definitive comparison.

In the meantime, episode 1.9 The Commuter feels so much like a Twilight Zone episode that I
half expected Rod Serling to appear and say "submitted for your approval" (though he actually
said that only three times in the entire Twilight Zone series). But The Commuter easily could
have been a companion to "A Stop at Willoughby," the 30th episode of The Twilight Zone, from
1960, which has also always been one of my favorites. Indeed, since Philip K. Dick's original
"The Commuter" story was published in 1953 (in Amazing Stories - where, by the way, one of
my first stories, "Albert's Cradle," was published in 1993), Rod Serling may well have read Dick's
story and had it in mind when he wrote "Willoughby".

Jack Thorne does a fine job bringing it to the screen in 2018, greatly assisted by Timothy Spall
whose Ed has one of those quintessentially British faces. His "Willoughby" is "Macon Heights," a
stop on a train line that doesn't quite exist - literally. So here the "real or not real" thread is
woven around a town, replete with a diner that serves great pie, which, when you add in the
attractive, talkative waitress, also resonates with another real-or-not multiple reality
classic, Twin Peaks. David Lynch, Rod Serling, and Philip K. Dick do have a lot of uncommon in
common.

Episode 1.10 Kill All Others: Too Close for Comfort

The 10th and last episode of Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams, which I hope will be the first ten
of very many, is Kill All Others. Although each story is different, they're deeply connected and
intertwined by the central, galvanizing themes of all of Dick's work: it is real or an illusion,
with the struggle to decide which, always laced with paranoia.

Kill All Others has these characteristics par excellence, and is also the closest to the very time
we're living in right now. That makes it closer to Black Mirror than The Twilight Zone, though
it feels a lot like a Twilight Zone episode, too. Philbert Noyce sees a political candidate on
television - the only candidate running for President - introduce a slogan, "Kill All Others". At
first it seems he's the only one who saw this - the real vs. illusion quandary - but soon confirms
that others have seen this, and inevitably comes to think of himself as an "other" and then
become an "other" himself. This is where the paranoia comes in, with the inevitable Dickian
question of whether what Noyce is feeling and seeing is real, or his over-active mind - a
reversion, as often happens in Philip K. Dick's stories, to the "is it real" dilemma, which never
really goes away.

The story for television, well written and directed by Dee Rees, departs from Dick's original
1953 story, "The Hanging Stranger," replacing nefarious aliens who have taken over the bodies
of humans (as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Heinlein's Puppet Masters, also the theme
of episode 1.7 of Electric Dreams) with just us humans as both villain politician and "others"
in Kill All Others. The near-future setting gives us "Yes Us Can" and "Mex Us Can" as
government slogans - a good example of how fascism can co-opt democracy by twisting its
words - and Royce saying "Kill All Others" is "hate speech". But there's no one who looks like
Trump in power - likely because this was written before he was elected, but still
unfortunate. The single candidate is a woman, which puts Kill All Others in league with the
new season of Homeland and even Claire in House of Cards, with women in charge with
dictatorial tendencies. A shot against Hillary Clinton? You can decide. All I'll say is I would
have rather seen a Trumpian in this role, since his polices are indeed getting closer and closer
by the day to the xenophobia towards everyone around us in Kill All Others.

Good acting by Mel Rodriguez as Noyce, Glenn Morshower (24!) as one of his co-workers, and
Vera Farmiga as the nameless candidate.

With the 10-episode anthology concluded for now, I always like to pick a favorite episode. The
choice is tough - there are so many superb ones. I guess I'd go with 1.3 Human Is. But I loved
almost everything about this series, including the great opening sequence. And I'll be back
here with more whenever Electric Dreams continues.