Sense8: The Finale

Wolfgang is a prisoner of BPO, but his fellow sensates have taken the enigmatic "Whispers" prisoner in turn. The two sides arrange a prisoner swap in Paris, but both are eager to double-cross the other and gain the upper hand in their clandestine war. For BPO, the sensates are a weapon and a resource to be exploited. All the sensates want is freedom. The two sides are poised for a final confrontation.

Sense8 is one of the oddest shows on television, an anthology show with eight main characters in which the central character of each story can call upon the skills and advice of the other seven, despite each story being very different in tone and ideas. It's also a show that is fairly over-brimming with positivity about humanity and about life. If the relentless cynicism of the likes of Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead gets too much for you, than Sense8 is the antidote, a show in which the characters can escape murderous torture, gun down some bad guys, and then get together with their cluster for a telepathically-communicated musical throwdown to Depeche Mode. As you do.

When Sense8 was cancelled after its second season, it was the raucous reception by the fans that saw Netflix agree to commission a TV movie to round off the story. This presented Lana Wachowski with a difficult choice to make. Sense8 was envisaged as a five-season project. With more than half of that material remaining, should she chuck all of that out and craft a simpler resolution to the story, or try to cram in another 36-odd episodes worth of plot into a single special? Her conclusion was to try to do a bit of both. So the central struggle of this finale is firmly on the sensates vs. BPO, with Whispers as the key in that conflict. That's fine and focused, but Wachowski also brings in a huge number of other elements which there is simply no time to develop, such as a neutral council of sensates who have so far stayed out of the struggle but are now willing to support one side and then don't do very much. Some of this excess baggage should have been dropped.

Sense8's finale gives fans a lot more of what they've seen so far: our characters swapping skills, having emotional heart-to-hearts and a couple of musical numbers and party scenes, along with the show's standard, fantastic location filming (the use of Naples is excellent, but the actual use of the real Eiffel Tower for the grand finale is jaw-dropping). However, it also drops the characters' individual storylines to focus on the grand mystery. This is possibly unwise, as the show's central storyline of shadowy government or trans-national organisations and mysteries dating back decades always felt a bit undercooked and took too much time away from the characters (a similar problem to Orphan Black and latter-day Lost). Still, at least the finale straightens out the show's mythology and resolves it with admirable efficiency.

Possibly less successful is the decision to pay off every single character in the show. And I mean every single character. Sylvester McCoy's elderly sensate has a part to play, as does Wolfgang's Conan the Barbarian-quoting best friend, and Kala's eternally confused husband and Capheus's political team and Will's cop partner from Chicago and Riley's chill hippy dad and Nomi's transphobic/homophobic mother and Sun's Korean cop nemesis/boyfriend and that bald girl from the second season and Angelica and her cluster (despite them all being dead) and pretty much everyone who hasn't been killed off. Jamming all of these characters into the special is nice, but unwieldy, massively self-indulgent and not very logical. Even worse, the proliferation of characters beyond the central eight means that some of the main cast of characters, most notably Capheus and Lito, don't really get much to do.

The finale also has some decidedly undercooked action scenes. Sense8's action scenes have always been phenomenal, the Wachowskis relishing their relatively low budget to get back to the ground-level tricks for shooting gunfights and martial arts they haven't had to employ since the original Matrix. For the finale, they clearly had much less money and time available than normal. The fight scenes feel perfunctory and the CG in the gunfights (to simulate bullet sparks) is poorly integrated with the live action. Given there's quite a few action scenes in the finale, this is definitely a bit of an issue, but ultimately a minor one.

But these questions of logistics and over-indulgence and logic are perhaps the wrong ones to address. Sense8 was a show about eight well-drawn characters from completely different backgrounds coming together and finding commonality despite their very different origins, and overcoming the obstacles in the way. The show wasn't perfect - bum dialogue and a tendency to schmaltz dogged it from early on - but its flaws were often endearing, its characters resolutely human and its message determinedly hopeful. Hopefully we will see its like again.

Sense8's finale (****) is available to watch on Netflix worldwide now, along with the rest of the series.

Sense8: Season 2

The sensates are in danger. The sinister Whispers has formed an unwanted, hideously invasive mental connection with Will and is stalking his every move, hoping he betrays his location. However, Will is likewise stalking Whispers, determined to defeat this enemy before he can kill anyone else. The rest of the group has to deal with their own problems, but soon find new allies waiting as they make contact with other clusters and discover their numbers are far greater than they could possibly imagine.

Sense8's first season was a deliberately-paced introduction to eight different, diverse characters hailing from completely different parts of the world, each accompanied by their own set of supporting characters but linked by a shared mental connection. It was excellent, but it was slow and at times risked becoming self-indulgent.

Season 2 has no truck with this. After the Christmas special bridging the two seasons (which gets the show's apparent annual need for a rave scene and orgy out of the way quickly) the show kicks into gear and slams the accelerator down so hard you'll be forgiven for thinking this is the same show. By the end of the second episode our characters have already reversed many of the devastating incidents of misfortune that afflicted them in the first season and the story is moving forwards on all fronts.

The show employs the same structure that we saw the first time around, with each of the eight sensates having their own story to follow as well as being unified by the ever-growing threat of Whispers and the organisation he fronts. The biggest difference is that we now know all eight characters and they now know all each other. When confronted by individual danger they can call upon the entire team's help rather than just one or two as with last season and this definitely massively ups the stakes in both emotional and dramatic terms. Seeing the team join forces to expose the identity of one of Whispers' superiors based on a glimpse of his office, like a telepathic edition of CSI, is a great idea. It's also good to see slightly under-served characters having more to contribute: Kala gets to use her scientific knowledge to great effect in several scenes (including working out how to blow up a van during a gunfight whilst Wolfgang and Will are arguing about whether to flank or fall back).

This is also the year that the show ups the stakes in action and visual terms. Season 1 had some excellent moments (rocket launcher, anyone?) but Season 2 takes it up to the next level. Lana Wachowski - flying solo for the first time as a director (Lily took a break this year) - revisits the Matrix lobby scene with a shoot-out in a restaurant between two sensates (complete with their own cluster, meaning sixteen skillsets being showcased together) which is ridiculously good fun. Even better is a high-speed car chase through the streets of Seoul - complete with vehicles flipping through the air and crashing for real - which is jaw-dropping and looks as good as any feature film. The production values, if anything, step up a notch in line with the confidence of the directors and returning co-writer J. Michael Straczynski.

But the show's characters remain the core focus of the show. As well as the central cluster and their returning allies (including a still-excellent Freema Agyeman, acting on an altogether different level to her stint on Doctor Who) there are new characters, including a wonderfully batty turn by ex-Doctor Who, ex-Radagast the Brown Sylvester McCoy as an older Scottish sensate and Valeria Bilello as a sensate from another cluster who works as an enforcer and fixer for a shady German businessman. But the core cast remains at the centre of attention, including newcomer Toby Onwunmere who is given the difficult task of replacing he likeable and energetic Aml Ameen as Capheus. Onwunmere is a different kind of actor, less funny and more intense, and the adjustment is a bit rough (not helped by a couple of comments lampshading the change) but by the end of the season he has managed to make the role his own. The rest of the cast are on top form, with Jamie Clayton in particular improving from the first season where her massive, hacker-driven infodumps of exposition could be clunky.

The second season also spends some time developing the backstory of the sensates - no Lost-style teasings here, the sensates have pretty mundane origins and well-established rules on how they operate - and how many clusters there are and how they operate. "Our" cluster, it turns out, is pretty lucky in having so many complimentary skills. We also learn that just being a sensate isn't enough to make you a good person and that some sensates are downright nasty. There's more to come on this front but the sheer size of the sensate population means that the writers have a lot of material to play with in coming seasons.

Weaknesses? Well, there are some very jarring tonal moments in Season 2 which don't quite connect with the rest of the story, some bum lines of dialogue and occasional over-indulgence in positivity (as refreshing as this is from shows like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead almost making a fetish out of grisly cynicism). A scene where Nomi and Nita form a secret hackers' alliance with Anonymous, who it turns out know all about the sensates and have been helping protect them (no, seriously), feels like it was biked in by a totally different writer who'd done three minutes Internet research on the organisation before he wrote it. Also, and this was exacerbated by watching this show immediately after Mr. Robot, the hacking scenes in general are pretty unconvincing. Overall, though, this year emerges as slightly stronger than its predecessor season, more confident, much better-paced and with more of a sense of purpose and energy.

Season 2 ends on a titanic cliffhanger, which is a sign of huge confidence from the writers, producers and Netflix themselves. Sense8 is massively expensive, probably the most expensive show on the Netflix roster apart from the in-production Altered Carbon, and it hasn't quite hit the same level of success in the USA as the likes of Stranger Things and Daredevil. However, it's a lot more popular in many other parts of the world (such as Brazil, which gets its own huge shout-out in an episode set in Sao Paolo) and a third season seems pretty likely at this point. Hopefully Netflix won't tease us for quite so long like they did last time and also won't make us wait two years for the next full season.

Sense8's second season (****½) is wacky, bizarre, over-brimming with optimism and also deeply rooted in interesting and engaging characters, with an interesting backstory and some of the greatest action scenes ever filmed for television. It is available on Netflix now.

Sense8: Season 1

A woman named Angelica kills herself in a derelict church in Chicago. She dies alone, but the moment of her death is imprinted in the minds of eight other people in different parts of the world: Riley, Will, Sun, Capheus, Wolfgang, Kala, Lito and Nomi. From that moment onwards, those eight people can touch each other's minds, see through their eyes, talk and share their skills and abilities. They have become sensates, eight who can act as one, the result of a different strand of human evolution. But their skills and abilities are jealously desired by a mysterious organisation and the man - known only as "Whispers" - they send to find them.

Sense8 is a bewilderingly original, maddening, confusing TV show, refusing to stay still and be pinned down. One second it's a melodramatic Mexican telenovella starring a handsome action hero living in the closet. The next it's a brooding, gritty Berlin crime drama. Then it morphs into the story of an Icelandic DJ living in London trying to find herself, but denying the secrets of her past in Reykjavik. The next episode might explore transgender identity issues, the next might delve into the story of family and religious life for a young female scientist living in Mumbai. One key storyline focuses on corporate drama in a South Korean business that segues into a Seoul prison drama. Another is a comedy about a cheerful Kenyan man who drives people around Nairobi in his Jean-Claude Van Damme-themed bus...which takes a darker turn when he invokes the ire of the city's gangs. Finally, it's a modern Chicago cop drama musing on race relations and family struggles, right up to the point our cop hero runs into another sensate.

At its heart, Sense8 is a show about empathy. The ability to step into another human being's shoes, imagine what their life is like and try to relate to them emotionally as well as intellectually, is a vital part of what makes us human. It's a vital tool for writers and journalists. Empathy is vital for humans to coexist with one another and understand each other's place in the world. The denial of empathy, the reduction of other people, other cultures, entire other strands of humanity to cliches, to generalisations and to "the other" is to deny their humanity and justify the worst excesses of crime, war and bigotry.

Although a quintessential part of humanity, it's also a nebulous concept to build a TV drama around. J. Michael Straczynski tried once before in his epic mid-1990s space opera series Babylon 5. A subplot explored the lives of telepaths, people who can touch each other's minds and live each other's lives, engaging in an exchange of thoughts, ideas and emotions that "mundanes" could never understand. It was a thoroughly intriguing idea, but one that had to jostle for attention alongside other stories involving war, religion and space-going teddy bears (long story). Straczynski clearly wanted to do more with it, at one time planning a feature film spin-off focusing on the concept, but it was never made.

A meeting with the Wachowskis, who at the time were fresh off their own movie about human lives touching and affecting one another across time and space (Cloud Atlas), led to the development of Sense8. The writers wanted to create an epic show exploring empathy, diversity, emotion and the truth of what makes people people, their joys, their fears, their loves and their prejudices. It was a tall order, but you're never going to accuse the creators of The Matrix trilogy and Babylon 5 of lacking vision or ambition.

Sense8 is mostly successful, although given there's never been anything quite like it before it's hard to come up with a metric to measure it by. Possibly the closest touchstone is Lost, particularly its structure and construction as it builds up the story of eight main characters (and several supporting ones) in tremendous depth and detail, often employing flashbacks and thematic devices so we get to know them better. The presence of Lost actor Naveen Andrews may be a nod to that inspiration (Straczynski was a fan of Lost, as the producers of Lost were big fans of Babylon 5). However, the central mystery in Sense8 is nowhere near as all-encompassing as Lost's, or Babylon 5's for that matter. Sense8 is the product of an older and more mature writer, with Straczynski employing surprising restraint in his storytelling. The show's mythology and main story arc are fairly low-key until the last two episodes, with most of the season's twelve episodes instead focusing on each character and the local struggles they are facing.

To achieve the authentic tone they wanted, the writer-producers made a decision which I can imagine appealed massively to Netflix's PR department, right up to the point it was costed and the budget presented to them. Usually most "international" shows are filmed in one city, with a mixture of set dressings and CG used to make that city look like another. For example, Lost visited Frankfurt, Seoul, London, Guam and Sydney whilst almost never stepping foot outside of Hawaii. Sense8 has no truck with that: to film scenes in nine different cities, the production simply filmed in those cities. And yes, this meant the production had to move between San Francisco, Chicago, Mexico City, Reykjavik, London, Berlin, Nairobi, Mumbai and Seoul for real. This immediately adds a huge amount of authenticity to the project. They also timed shoots to coincide with major street festivals and events (such as San Francisco's Pride march and religious celebrations in Mumbai) to add a sense of scale to events. They even filmed several live childbirths for one particularly memorable scene in the series. Although they often look expensive, a lot of Netflix's original productions are quite modestly-budgeted. Not so much Sense8. This is a big-budget production that looks like a huge amount has been spent on it, but no so much that they producers can get lazy and rely on effects or explosions to make up for good storytelling.

The one thing Sense 8 had to nail, and nail absolutely correctly, is tonal variation. Sense8 is a comedy; it's a martial arts movie; it's a soap opera; it's (briefly) a Bollywood musical; it's one of those gritty crime dramas that turns into a ludicrous Jason Statham action film halfway through. And it has to be able to move between all of those hats easily without blowing the viewer's sense of disbelief. For this viewer, it worked brilliantly. It even sells the tonal variation by inserting "less serious" characters into other storylines: Wolfgang's hardcore Berlin gangster shtick turns into outright lunatic farce when Mexican action thesp Lito helps out, resulting in a sudden escalation into rocket launchers and comical quips whilst gunning down an improbable number of enemies. Similarly, Lito's story is mostly played for laughs right up until the moment when Wolfgang jumps in to help him in a fistfight, when it suddenly becomes bloodier and more serious. Later on, Lito's difficulties with self-identity and sexuality become emotionally raw and real when transgender hacker Nomi relates the story of her own difficult upbringing and coming to terms with who she wanted to be. In such ways bonds are formed between the characters, initially in pairs and trios, and later on between all of them.

There are several key scenes which help with this, perhaps the best of which is the characters simply sharing a musical karaoke moment together at the end of the fourth episode (yes, you will have 4 Non Blondes "What's Up" rattling around your brain for the next few months as a result). Later on the characters witness the moment of each other's birth (featuring some actual live births filmed for the purpose) as a piano concerto wells up in the background. Another scene has a character evading pursuit with each of the other seven characters jumping into her body and steering her between obstacles using their skills. Another scene has all eight of the sensates coming together in one moment soundtracked by Sigur Ros, because Sigur Ros automatically makes everything awesome. There's another scene in which the gang get their wires crossed when several of them are, er, enjoying amorous moments at the same time. And so forth.

Some of the actors are established faces: Daryl Hannah as Angelica and Naveen Andrews as Jonas are the most immediately recognisable, whilst Doctor Who fans will recognise Freema Agyeman as Nomi's girlfriend Amanita. Agyeman was a reasonably good actress on Doctor Who, but in Sense8 she's an absolute revelation. She has some pretty challenging scenes to handle, but blows each one out of the water.

Of the main cast, Tuppence Middleton brings both street-savvy steel and emotional vulnerability to the role of Riley, whilst Will Gorski does an excellent job as all-American cop Will who rapidly has his horizons expanded. Will and Riley's connection forms both the emotional lynchpin of the season and also results in the actual storyline being pushed along the most, so it's helpful that their chemistry is highly convincing. Wachowski regular Doona Bae is both highly intelligent and adept at violence as Sun, although her character arguably suffers a little in the late season period from only showing up when arse needs to be kicked and disappearing for long stretches (although given her character's circumstance, perhaps that's not too surprising).

Max Riemelt is a well-known and very busy German actor, but I wouldn't be surprised if we saw more of him in English-language productions after Sense8. He is excellent as the safe-cracking, Conan the Barbarian-quoting criminal Wolfgang. Tina Desai is likewise excellent in the role of Kala, although her storyline of family drama feels a little undercooked compared to some of the rest. However, it comes to life later in the season when Hindu religious tensions in Mumbai spill over and her previously underplayed abilities with Science! are called upon to help her fellow sensates.

Ami Ameen brings tremendous, infectious energy and enthusiasm to the story of Capheus, which probably has the widest range of tonal variations. Ameen is excellent. Unfortunately, due to a falling-out between Ameen and the producers, he's been recast for Season 2. Hopefully the new actor will be able to bring a similar level of commitment and passion to the role.

Jamie Clayton - a transgender actress playing a transgender character - is tremendously, emotionally honest and real when playing her character of Nomi, especially touching on storyline and character moments that clearly derive from her real life (something Straczynski, in particular, is renowned for). However, she struggles a little more in her role as a font of exposition. Nomi is the group's resident "hactivist" (groan) and starts accumulating data on what's going on by hacking the bad guys' internets and bringing down their firewalls and doing all that TV hacking stuff. To be fair, it's not actually that bad compared to a lot of shows, but it feels like a bit more authenticity was needed to overcome the IT cliches.

One of the most impressive performances comes from Spanish actor Miguel Angel Silvestre as Lito, the closeted Mexican action hero deeply in love with his boyfriend Hernando (a likewise accomplished performance by Alfonso Herrera) who then reluctantly ends up with a "beard" in the form of fellow performer Daniela (Erendira Ibarra). At first glance Lito's story serves as the comic relief only to take a turn for the more dramatically intense later on. In fact, this is the story that sounds the weakest on paper but on screen ends up being one of the best. It also features a hilarious moment where the Wachowskis completely take the mickey out of their own past work, when it turns out even cheap Mexican action films are still stealing ideas from The Matrix.

The performances, then, are brilliant. The writing is very effective for the most part, moving between genres and tones with accomplished ease. There are some monster action scenes across the season and, without their usual infinite buckets of money and six months of CGI rendering to fall back on, the Wachowskis resort to giving us some in-camera, practical stunts, wire work and gunfights that are more real and convincing than anything they've done since the original Matrix.

 

Where I think people will fall off or on the Sense8 bandwagon is the pacing and structure. Sense8 is, for most of its first season, almost an anthology show, just with characters from one story able to help out briefly in another. The focus is clearly on each character's own up-front problems in their own immediate vicinity. The story of what is going on with the sensates, why they can do what they do and who is trying to capture them unfolds very, very slowly in the background and occasional moments of rising to the fore. This slow-burning fuse to the story can be frustrating, but only if you view the series through the prism of "What is the answer to this mystery?" If, on the other hand, you engage with the characters it's not a problem. Viewer patience is eventually rewarded in the final two episodes of the season when the ongoing mystery explodes into prominence, a very nice car is set on fire and two of the sensates finally actually meet for real.

Other problems? Er, the main title sequence and music are both pretty underwhelming, which is odd as Netflix actually had a great potential one they used in their trailers (the one set to Weshley Arms's cover of "Need You Tonight") and the rest of the soundtrack is pretty good. That's about it.

The first season of Sense8 (****½) is messy, weirdly-paced and sometimes misses the profundity it is aiming for to such a degree that it is inadvertently hilarious. It's also phenomenally well-written, often beautifully-directed (this is easily the Wachowskis' best directing job since the first Matrix film) and tremendously human. It's bold, experimental and offbeat in a way that none of Netflix's other shows - no matter how well-made - are, or have even tried to be. Sense8 shoots for the stars and perhaps falls short, but its ambition is breathtaking, its scale epic and its characters both charming and compelling. It is available to watch through Netflix now. Season 2, which is wrapping up production now, will air on Netflix in early 2017.