Amazon Prime Video TV series The Peripheral, based on the original novel by William Gibson, the future circa 2100 has developed a technique for manipulating the past via its technology. These interactions change the course of history, creating splinter timelines called stubs. People from these historic stubs can be hooked up to a fancy hi-tech headset that temporarily transfers their consciousness into a robotic body waiting for them in the future.
In practice for The Peripheral, this usually means Chloë Grace Moretz's Flynne Fisher transferring from her own timeline in 2032 to London in the future, where she assists Wilf Netherton and Lev Zubov in finding their missing associate, Aelita West. A weird contradiction arises, however. The Peripheral season 1 shows Wilf, Lev, and other 2100 characters waiting for Flynne to return to her robotic avatar, despite time being of the essence in their search for Aelita. Flynne's peripheral has an AI setting for when the body is empty, and Burton in 2032 even receives a text from 2100 saying Lev is "waiting" for his sister. Why can Flynne not spend as long as she likes in her own timeline, then simply return to her peripheral in the future, say, five minutes after she last exited it?
Time Is Relative In The Peripheral's Two Settings
The exact mechanics remain murky, but the future appears to share a relative relationship with the past in The Peripheral. Unusually for a sci-fi time-travel story, London in 2100 and Flynne's stub in 2032 appear to be running parallel like train tracks, so however long es in one era, a corresponding amount of time seemingly es in the other. Practically, if Flynne wants to spend a few days deciding whether she wants to cooperate, that forces Wilf Netherton and Lev Zubov in the future to show a little patience and wait for her.
This strange aspect of The Peripheral's temporal rule book may be connected to the Research Institute's as-yet-unexplained method for creating stub universes. One possible explanation is that stubs run in real-time to The Peripheral's future. If Lev Zubov chooses to meddle in, for example, August 2032, a splinter timeline is created that begins on the specific date that interference happened. Maybe that stub must then tick away in the background, and if Lev wishes to return to it a month later, he finds the stub now in September. Stub timelines in The Peripheral aren't saved games players can pick up where they left off - they're virtual pets where time continues to even while unattended.
The Real Reason For The Peripheral's Unique Time Travel Rules
Whatever theoretic scientific principle one applies to explain the past and future's relationship in The Peripheral, the true reason behind this unusual setup has more to do with storytelling. If a week ed in Flynne's 2032 but only a few minutes had ed for the future by the time she used her peripheral again, The Peripheral's dual timelines would unnecessarily become more complicated than they already are. More importantly, The Peripheral's dual narratives would develop unevenly. Flynne returning to her stub allows The Peripheral to focus closer upon future-timeline characters, showing Wilf and Lev talking alone, having Wilf poke around to discover whether peripheral AI is sentient, etc.
The Peripheral's relative time trick is also necessary for the burgeoning love story between Flynne and Wilf. "Haptic Drift" begins to sow seeds of ion between the pair, and this only makes sense if their timelines are running almost parallel. The romance would feel uneven if the couple had known each other for days from Flynne's perspective, but mere hours from Wilf's.
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The Peripheral continues Friday on Amazon Prime Video.