TV Review Electric Dreams K A O

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Spoiler alerts The series has had a few highs among the lows but finishes with a great 1984-noir story that I thought was the best of the run. It was a mistake to watch this right after Channel Four’s brilliant expose of the Cambridge Analytica organization. (Illuminati-R-Us). It had a lot of familiar Philip K Dick elements, holographic ads, automated factories with minimalist staffing, self-driving cars, totalitarian politicians. Here a candidate known only as The Candidate spouts Trumpian slogans but also presents her chilling Kill All Others (anyone showing doubt or individualism). The message isn’t subliminal but out in the open. Most people are already too brainwashed to see it. The one man who does, or at least the only man willing to admit it and resist, is Philbert (Mel Rodriguez) who rashly tells others what he knows and believes, drawing himself to the attention of the authorities. Philbert can’t stop intervening. Seeing a woman being assaulted in the park, he tries to help her and gets branded as one of the others for his heroism. His work mates end him to Coventry and he is given a wristband that can further control his behaviour, even raising or lowering his blood pressure rather than just monitoring it as claimed. Philbert gets more desperate and irrational as his world falls apart. His assault on his wife is perhaps the one mis-step, as he cease to be sympathetic at that point though he just trying to snap her out of the fog of her blind consumerism and state acceptance. Philbert’s desperate, pathetic, and futile effort to phone the candidate to shout her down under a false identity is almost instantly exposed and he becomes a fugitive, a Kafkaesque loner screaming truth that no one wants to see even though he is in front of a billboard that spells it out, ‘kill all others’. There is even a hanging stranger there, already killed, who Philbert quickly ends up replacing. His work-mates carry on playing pool as if they saw nothing unusual on live TV, though one of the men hints that he has seen the truth, but he is bright enough not to run round yelling it for all to hear. After all, that just tells everyone who to silence next. Who is worse, the guy shouting for freedoms and making a fool of himself, or the guy who knows the truth but says no more than all the people who just don’t see past their consumer toys. With so many blind to Trump’s blatant lies and folly despite so much going on in plain sight we need more Philberts – we need too many for the World to keep blinkering itself from the truth. We need more exposes of the Cambridge Analyticas of the world. This episode professed to be science fiction, but it had all become real over the immediate preceding hour. Never has a TV show become dated so quickly. Arthur Chappell