The Peripheral finale is a mind-blowing thrill ride that “reboots” reality

It’s been quite a ride, but we’ve finally arrived at the season finale of The Peripheral. Over the course of eight episodes, Amazon Prime Video has introduced us to a riveting dystopian cyberpunk world based on the science fiction novel by William Gibson. Flynne Fisher’s struggle to stay one step ahead of assassins, futuristic cabals, and the bacteria eating her own brain have come to a head, and there’s a whole lot to discuss.

As always, this review will contain SPOILERS for The Peripheral. 

The Peripheral Episode 8 review: “The Creation of a Thousand Forests”

I’ll be honest with you: there were so many different moving pieces on the board going into the finale that I wasn’t sure how The Peripheral could possibly wrap things up in a satisfactory way. “The Creation of a Thousand Forests” exceeded my expectations by hitting us with a few enormous twists. But it was also a lot to digest. Tell me this show is produced by the creators of Westworld without telling me it’s produced by the people who made Westworld.

The episode begins with a brief flashback to 2028, where Connor (Eli Goree) is still recovering from the loss of his legs and arm. Flynne (Chloë Grace Moretz) sits at his bedside, as Connor laments that in real life, you can’t just “reboot” if something goes wrong the way you can in the video games Flynne loves so much. It’s a short, poignant scene which lays out the major theme for the finale.

One of the most jaw-dropping twists from last week’s episode was the dark turn for deputy Tommy Constantine (Alex Hernandez), who murdered his boss Sheriff Jackman (Ben Dickey) and crime kingpin Corbell Pickett (Louis Herthum) after realizing just how corrupt the police force had become. Tommy has often lingered in the background, shielded from the worst of what’s going on by Flynne and her brother Burton (Jack Reynor). His descent from upstanding policeman to a desperate murderer was the kind of meaty character work that has made The Peripheral so compelling.

Tommy tries to cover up the murders by blaming the assassin Bob (Ned Dennehy), which seems to work…with the major complication that Corbell Pickett survived. Herthum has been a delight as Pickett so I’m glad he’ll be sticking around for season 2, even if it means Tommy’s life is about to get much more difficult. We don’t see the ultimate fallout of Tommy’s decisions in this finale, but it’s fantastic setup for next season.

Don’t park on the train tracks!

Jasper Baker (Chris Coy) is also dealing with a dilemma. Since the local lowlifes are assuming Jasper’s uncle Corbell will succumb to his injuries, they get very drunk and proclaim themselves the next in line to run his criminal empire. Much like Tommy, Jasper finds himself pushed around, which ends about as well.

Deciding he’s had enough of trying to be the nice guy in a world of thugs, Jasper parks his car on a set of train tracks and locks it with his three drunken, unconscious cohorts inside. But as he sits on a nearby hillside and calls his wife Billy Ann (Adelind Horan), he realizes he doesn’t want to become a murderer. But by then the train is already coming, the keys are locked in the car, the drunks won’t wake up, and the windows are reinforced glass that won’t break despite Jasper’s frantic efforts.

The train demolishes the car, killing the three thugs inside while Jasper grapples with what he’s done. It’s a heartwrenching scene, but it’s nothing compared to what happens elsewhere in the finale.

The Peripheral ending explained

Most of “The Creation of a Thousand Forests” centers around Flynne’s journey back to the future, a chaotic gambit to save her stub timeline after Research Institute head Cherise Nuland (T’Nia Miller) decides to wipe the entire slate clean by nuking Flynne’s town. This is where the episode gets a bit confusing, so let’s break it down.

Over the course of the season, we’ve discovered that Cherise is trying to recover the data that Aelita West stole from the God font, which was basically all the data gathered by conducting unethical experiments on different stub timelines. Aelita’s plan was to store that data in Burton’s haptic implants and retrieve it at another time, but she didn’t know it was Flynne who was inhabiting Burton’s peripheral in the beginning of the season. So the DNA-based data is transferred into Flynne’s brain since she doesn’t have haptics, leading to the bacterial attack on her nervous system that causes her seizures.

The finale lets the cat out of the bag: Lev Zubov (JJ Feild) finds out about the data in Flynne’s head and wants to use it to help the criminal Klept create a new world order; Zubov’s helper Ash (Katie Leung) turns on him after he injures her partner Ossian (Julian Moore-Cook) and tells Cherise the data is in Flynne’s head; and Wilf Netherton (Gary Carr) is finally reunited with his sister Aelita only for her to tell him that she wants the secrets inside Flynne’s head to help her fight the Klept, who were responsible for murdering millions of people during the Jackpot.

It’s a chaotic mess, but damn is it compelling. Cherise’s solution is to initiate the Jackpot early in Flynne’s timeline by inciting the explosion of a nuclear facility nearby, something which is considered a defining event of the apocalypse. Flynne tries to find another way out, enlisting the help of both Inspector Lowbeer (Alexandra Billings) and Connor to pull off her scheme.

Flynne decides to use the RI’s own tools to make another timeline, one where Cherise can’t find her. To do this, she invades a safehouse that contains a machine capable of creating a stub timeline. After a very cool Matrix-style fight between Flynne and a bunch of other peripherals, she succeeds in creating another timeline, then destroys the machine which holds the coordinates to it.

But this still leaves a pretty big loose end: Flynne is still alive in her own stub timeline. No matter what happens in the other one moving forward, those in the timeline she knows are still in danger from the nuclear explosion. To stave it off, she decides to eliminate the reason Cherise was going to do it in the first place: herself.

Flynne’s final walk in the forest near her home is a stunningly beautiful moment. From the second she opens her eyes after her last trip through time with the headset, there’s a feeling that she knows she’s done all she needs to. So she goes out by herself after asking Connor to snipe her from afar. The entire time I kept wondering whether the show would actually go through with killing her. It did.

Of course, since she already made another timeline, which branched off after she and her friends became aware of the future, that other Flynne is able to get back into her peripheral in future London. She wakes up in the robotic body across from Inspector Lowbeer, and the two resolve to get to work bringing down the RI for its unethical experiments.

“The Creation of a Thousand Forests” is a hard episode of television to digest. The writing is incredibly powerful and layered, the acting is excellent, and the twists turned my mind into a pile of mush. This finale solidified The Peripheral as a show that should be watched more than once, because there is so much going on and it’s easy to miss a lot of it. Complaints that the show is confusing are probably warranted — if you miss any one of those hundred plot points, others start to unravel — but if you are willing to invest in the journey and really dig deep, it’s gripping.

“The Creation of a Thousand Forests” may not have wrapped everything up as nicely and neatly as I expected, but it managed to genuinely shock me more than once. It’s a solid capstone to a great debut season.

The bullet points

• But wait, there’s more! The Peripheral season finale has a post-credits scene that you absolutely want to stick around for, where Lev Zubov goes to visit the higher-ups in the Klept. He’s understandably nervous that they’ll kill him since he’s exposed them to scrutiny with his antics, but instead they order him to clean up his mess. So definitely expecting Zubov to go on a killing spree next season.
• Speaking of Zubov, I need to take one last opportunity to gush about how deliciously evil the villains were on this show. JJ Feild as Zubov, T’Nia Miller as Cherise, Louis Herthum as Corbell Pickett and India Mullen as Pickett’s wife Mary; all of them were fantastic. I can’t recall the last time I saw a show where the bad guys were having this much fun.
• We get confirmation that the attempts to use medicine from the future to heal Flynne’s mother’s glaucoma have failed. This entire adventure started because Flynne was trying to earn enough money for her mother’s meds, and it’s devastating that they’re back to square one, knowing her time is slowly running out. Melinda Page Hamilton has delivered a really great, understated performance as the Fisher mom.
• It’s a very cool touch that everyone treats the opposite timeline like a game. Flynne and her friends literally treat the future as if it’s a “sim,” while the residents of future London are performing experiments on other timelines as if they don’t matter.
• Presumably the Flynne in the peripheral at the end of the season still has all the memories from her experiences throughout the season, even though it’s technically a different timeline. I presume that means she would have the data from the God font as well.

Verdict

The Peripheral has concluded its first season, and it was a total banger. Things got a little confusing at times, but for the invested viewer who isn’t afraid to roll up their sleeves and work through its convoluted mythology, the payoffs are excellent. In a year filled with exceptional genre television, The Peripheral has carved out a quiet place for itself as one of the sci-fi shows to watch moving forward.

Episode Grade: A

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