The Wachowskis Repurposed: Making Sense of "Sense8"

- by Leo Stableford, 6 June 2015

The war between television and cinema has never made much sense to me. It always brings to mind the fight between Leito and Yeti at the end of District 13. One of them is light, nimble, able to jab and punch with deft artistry. The other's a lumbering juggernaut that soaks up damage and can fell you with a good hit.

The irony is that I don't know which way round the analogy works.

Both media have their moments of deft artistry, both can be like lumbering juggernauts, it all tends to depend on context. Each has tactics to attract the wandering eye of the attention-deficient modern audience.

Come on, says cinema, you won't lose more than an evening to a movie. Ah, responds television, but where are the emotions, the characters, the bold new visions? Television has the power to hit you where you live.

This is true, but a single episode of a television show is never more than an hour, as a general rule. Over time, the emotions can accrue but in a single hit, with a lower budget, television has to work harder to dazzle.

Then Netflix changed the game. The power of Netflix is only now beginning to turn up the heat on competitors. The moment when you could first feel the warmth on your skin was probably as much a surprise to them as anyone else.

I remember walking down a supermarket aisle. I overheard  two women praising "Orange Is The New Black", the Netflix Original women's prison drama. Not much surprise there: women like content oriented at women. A little later I got home to see a status update from my cousin expressing surprise. He was into a drama about a women's prison and not for any of the reasons you'd think.

Just to be clear here my cousin is not a woman. He works in a "high science" job and knows more about the current state of the Marvel Comics Universe than most people, me included. He is not in any way the target demographic for "Orange Is The New Black".

I love "Orange Is The New Black", so does my wife. Ironically it seems OITNB sees no colour, creed, race or religion, it's just good.

It's not alone either. Netflix has established that if you're an Original on their service the chances are you'll get renewed. Even "Hemlock Grove" is getting to series 3.

Enter the Wachowskis.

I'll be up front, I am a Wachowskis fan. Maybe that's not the right word. There's a connotation to that term that has in it too much flag-waving and apologising. I am a Wachowskis supporter, in that I support their aims and goals for a more intelligent pop-culture.

In February this year my staunch defense of their foibles and excesses was repaid. For my troubles I trteated myself to the blinged out crapfest that was Jupiter Ascending. Loving the Wachowskis can be like supporting a sports team that always loses, I imagine. Sometimes all the emotional energy you pump into enthusiasm ends up with space cinderella. Space cinderella supported by Sean Bean as a cosmic bee-keeping Han Solo knock off.

Yeah, not a great day at the pictures.

It's not a huge surprise, though. After all, these are the minds that fumbled the Matrix Trilogy, Speed Racer, V for Vendetta, Ninja Assassin and Cloud Atlas. I have a lot of time for these movies, but I'm never going to tell you that any of them reach the status of unqualified success.

The Wachowskis have high-minded ambitions for bringing philosophy to life in pop culture. The Wachowskis love complex multi-threaded plots. The Wachowskis love to create epic fantasy worlds that comment on the essence of humanity.

Maybe television was always the way to go. Television's array of weapons would appear the obvious choice for these ambitions. Television loves characters. Television loves ideas. Television embraces a level of complexity that cinema abhors.

Not only that but Netflix has given television producers space to create a new breed of original stories. One of Netflix's great advantages is that it allows viewers to choose when to dip in. Watching a Netflix season is more like reading a novel than a serial. You don't have to wait to see how it turns out in Netflix, you can just press 'OK' and the story continues.

And so we come to "Sense8".

The show's main cast. From left to right: (top) Sun, Will, Riley, Kala, (bottom) Capheus, Nomi, Wolfgang, Lito.

It seems like we've taken a long time to get here. This is both a summary of the article so far and something you will probably say to yourself more than once during Sense8's 12 episode run.

SPOILER STATUS: I have avoided talking about anything more than the Wikipedia entry on the series already discloses. So the spoiler factor on this article is low. Still, this isn't suitable if you want to go in completely clean.

What could we expect from a collision between the minds that brought us Run Lola Run, Cloud Atlas, Babylon 5 and The Matrix? Something epic? Something intricate? Something complex? something ambitious? All of these things are true. Something bloated? Something self-indulgent? Something infuriating? Something flawed? All of these things are also true.

In the end, I think, it is beauty that saves this awkward beast.

To be sure, it steps up to the plate with eight viewpoint characters as if that's all going to be fine. This means that if all the characters were treated equally they would all be in the spotlight for the length of a single movie.

If we stop for a moment to think that through, then we have a problem. Lost tried something this ambitious. At the outset, it succeeded in engaging people with some of around nine main characters over a twenty four episode season. One more character, twelve more episodes to give them room to breathe.

So it comes as no surprise that Sense8 has no problem benching characters for entire episodes, Lost did the same thing. Unfortunately, when the characters are so distant from one another, it's easy to lose track. At least in Lost they were all on the same island at some point in the narrative.

It's also inevitable, that in a show about eight individuals acting as a telepathic hive mind some get lost in the shuffle. If D&D has taught us anything it's that a party needs a tank, a spell caster, a healer and a thief. If World of Warcraft has added a corollary it's that you could probably stand to lose the thief without ill consequence.

The Sense8 "cluster" includes in its roster a Chicago cop, a German thief, a Kenyan bus driver, a San Franciscan uber-hacker, an Icelandic DJ, a Spanish actor, an Indian pharmacist and a Korean businesswoman. That all has the potential for balance until it turns out that the Korean businesswoman is Jet Li crossed with Jason Bourne.

The question becomes what do we do with a pharmacist, an actor and a DJ? The answer is, unsurprisingly: not that much. Both pharmacist and actor find their moments to shine. It is obvious both come from the big book of "Character Moments For Dramatic Characters Lost In Action Stories".

Watching the first season of Sense8 I got many feelings of foreboding. Anyone who watches enough television these days has a good visual vocabulary. We have learned to be sensitive about pacing and what the pace means for plot development.

Early on in a series, you can often picture people online start comments "I've got a horrible feeling that..." Referencing some dangling plot thread they fear will never be dealt with.

For the savvy viewer, Sense8 is rife with these feelings. After a crazy first five minutes, plot development slows to a crawl. Questions put front and centre in those first five minutes aren't dealt with any time in the next twelve hours of television. You don't need to wait for the end of the first episode to anticipate this.

Sun, controlling the actions of Capheus in a fight against a street gang called the Superhumans.

In February of 2014 zap2it published an interview with co-creator J. Michael Stracynski. In the interview JMS shares  the production team's vision of the show as a five-season arc. A risky move on the part of the show runners.

Asking people to give you twelve hours of their life in the first place is no small matter. Asking them to give you 12 hours of their life a year, for a minimum of five years, has frequently proven to be too much for most. Particularly without the guarantee of resolution.

The weight of the favour begged weighs heavy on Sense8. It never gets away from its first five minutes and that's a serious problem. People say things and do things in that short segment, that are not explained in any of the material thereafter. This sounds maddening and it kind of is.

The series villain, Mr. Whispers, has to project menace despite having little to do and no clear motivation to his actions. Terrence Mann does an epic job in this role as only a man with A Chorus Line, Critters and The Dresden Files on his CV could.

Nevertheless, having a bad guy with no through line is one order of pop culture crime. Having him take part in an action set piece genre finale, that the series simply hasn't earned, is on the list of crimes that just are not cool. Not cool at all.

Now that I've done with all the flaws it is time to ask the big one. Does Sense8 earn twelve hours of your attention? I  would argue that it does. I am not saying that it is confident in its claim. It is audacious and it gets away with things, rather than accomplishing them with ease.

Sense8 finds its rhythm in tried and tested moments of character, well away from its Sci-Fi agenda. The hive mind telepathy hook may get you to bite but the cultural diversity draws you in. In the arena of caring about the characters, the dynamic of the action potential is often reversed.

I embraced the characters of Riley, Capheus, Lito and Nomi, I cared about them. The other four in the cluster I did not object to, but they suffered at the hands of the big picture. Brian J. Smith as Will Gorski does a great job. The fact remains that playing a white, male Chicago cop in his late twenties is always going to be a tough call when it comes to standing out.

I haven't ever seen stories about the problems of an Icelandic DJ in London, a Kenyan bus driver, a Spanish actor in the Mexican film industry or a trans, lesbian hacker in San Francisco. These stories are fresh, and the characters are explored with sympathy and depth. I haven't seen the story of an Indian pharmacist devoted to the god Ganesh either. Unfortunately, that character draws the shortest straw out of the pile.

I got an impression, that over the course of development Sense8 ended up a much different thing than the creators intended. At the outset, there was an exuberant energy of the weird about it. The surreal touches of the first episodes, coupled with a seeming joy in its own existence were transient. As the series knuckled down to the business of being a good story, it lost a little shine, became more ordinary.

Angelica, the "mother" of the cluster, who reappears throughout the series.

The score reflects this. At the outset, the use of electronica and pop music was organic with the score. The first few episodes benefit from a vibrant energy in the musical choices. As the series continues, the score begins to stands separate from its library choices. When the musical high point of the last six episodes is an Icelandic man playing "Baba O'Riley" on a ukelele, you know that something has gone wrong.

Sense8 is like the best of the Wachowskis. It contains much that is beautiful. Some that is strong. In the end, where it falls down is when it becomes afraid to play with its own idea too much. This is the great failing.

In my opinion, the team needed to burn through its first stock of ideas, keep slapping us in the face with new things. It tends to be the case that people think that they will run out of ideas if they use up their first stock. Nowhere has this idea been more absurd than in the premise of Sense8.

When the Matrix came out, we had seen some cyberpunk and a lot of post-apocalypse fiction. There was no shortage of bizarre, awful space opera when Jupiter Ascending slithered onto the screen. Hive mind fiction, unlike these two, is not a vein that's been mined for pop culture to any great extent.

When Sense8 does set narrative rules for its "cluster", they tend to be reasonable and strong. There was no need to be timid about the idea. The fear of exposing too much story is what undermines the antagonist so badly. If the agenda of the villain was as unimportant as presented here, then I might have been tempted to excise the bad guy entirely.

Now there's a risky strategy. That's the kind of thing I expect the Wachowskis to do from time to time. It's also one of those places I have also become used to them failing.

Here's hoping that Netflix gets enough buzz from this that Sense8 survives to season 2. I, for one, am definitely eager to experience more.


Have you finished watching the first season of "Sense8" yet? How do you feel about the show? Make your voice heard in the comments section below!

Tagged: movies & TV.

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