Series / The Peripheral (2022)

It's real. It just hasn't happened yet.

"This isn't a sim, Miss Fisher. You're inside a peripheral. Telepresent. Piloting that body as if it were your own."

— Wilf Netherton

The Peripheral is a Prime Video original Cyberpunk series, adapted from William Gibson's 2014 novel of the same name by Scott B. Smith, with Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (the husband-and-wife team behind Westworld) serving as executive producers alongside Vincenzo Natali, who also directed half of the first season's episodes.

The year is 2032. Flynne Fisher (Chloë Grace Moretz) is stuck working at the local 3D-printing store in the small town of Clanton, and struggling to take care of her gravely ill mother Ella (Melinda Page Hamilton). Her Marine Corps Super-Soldier veteran brother Burton (Jack Raynor) contributes by playing VR video games for rich folks — something Flynne is much better at herself. So much better, in fact, that her high scores catch the attention of the company Milagros Coldiron, who want 'Burton' to test out a strange headset that represents the latest breakthrough in VR technology...

And after donning the headset, Flynne is wholly immersed, mind and body, in a world that could not be any more different from her own miserable life: a shining, futuristic vision of London, where she has been recruited by a woman, Aelita West (Charlotte Riley) to infiltrate a shadowy organisation known as the Research Institute. But events in London swiftly take a dark turn, and it becomes apparent that it's not a game — she's actually controlling a peripheral, seventy years into her future. What's worse is that she's now in possession of R.I. secrets, with the organisation, and its boss, the ruthless Dr. Cherise Nuland (T'Nia Miller), being rather keen to get them back — and they're more than willing to wreak all kinds of havoc on Flynne's timeline to get what they want.

In February 2023, Prime Video renewed The Peripheral for a second season with a release expected sometime in 2024. Unfortunately, they canceled it instead, citing the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes as the reason.

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The Peripheral (2022) contains examples of:

Tropes A-M

• 20 Minutes in the Future: Flynne lives in 2032, only ten years in the future of the series' air date. Life is largely the same, but there are a number of rather improbable technological breakthroughs, such as military cybernetic implants, cloaking cars, 3D printers that can fabricate complex electronics, and even floating Roombas. These advancements are explained as a result of the Research Institute meddling in the timeline by introducing tech from the future.
• Accidental Murder: Zig-zagged. After being pushed a little too hard, Jasper leaves his passed-out "friends" in a car parked on the train tracks, intending to let the train hit them. He calls his wife and cryptically hints at becoming more ruthless, but she talks him back into being a kind person. Unfortunately, he left the keys in the car and locked the doors, so they end up dying anyway.
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: Poor Flynne. The series goes to much greater lengths to emphasise just how much living her entire life in a Wretched Hive like Clanton sucked. Most obviously, when it becomes apparent that the headset used to control the peripheral may be damaging her, she doesn't care, because anything is worth it to escape her wretched existence, seizures be damned.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • While Flynne wasn't exactly a wimp in the novel, she (in a peripheral) engages in combat in London far more in the series, and even in Clanton she attacks one of the mercs in Episode 2.
  • All the Haptic Recon vets still have their implants, meaning they're capable of becoming Super Soldiers with better-than-human reflexes and Improbable Aiming Skills, rather than just tough ex-military guys.
• Adaptational Dumbass: Lowbeer is nowhere near the nigh-unstoppable Chessmaster she was in the book, who instantly took control of events as soon as she appeared, and effortlessly strung all of the other characters along into fulfilling her goals. She's still clearly intelligent in the series, but Flynne has to come up with her own plan to put herself out of the villains' clutches, though the Inspector's true aims are yet to be revealed. Note that this is clearly Justified as a means to preserve tension in the series.
• Adaptational Early Appearance: Corbell Pickett is around from the first episode, whereas he only appeared in the book somewhat later on as unwanted attention the Fishers had attracted after fighting off a second bunch of assassins.
• Adaptational Late Appearance: Lowbeer doesn't show up until the third-to-last episode, presumably because her Story Breaker Powers rather rapidly nullified most of the tension when she showed up in the book.
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • Conner Penske. While he wasn't ever a bad guy as such, in the series his personal troubles mainly stem from him being The Alcoholic, while his literary counterpart was flirting with the wrong side of the law — tellingly, in both versions of the story he gets into a confrontation with some thugs outside Jimmy's, but while in the novel he was pointing a gun at some local toughs who had mocked him, necessitating Flynne to defuse the situation, here he's defending Flynne from some creepy drug dealers, who are themselves armed.
  • In the book, Reece was forced into betraying Flynne to Corbell Pickett. Here, nothing of the sort happens, with him instead getting killed by Bob in Episode 7.
• Adaptational Relationship Overhaul:
  • Flynne and Conner are friends from the beginning, while in the book he barely knew her to begin with. Perhaps related to Adaptational Nice Guy, above.
  • Flynne shares several romantic moments with Wilf, particularly in the finale when they link up and discover their mutual feelings towards one another. In the book, Wilf had a massive crush on Flynne, and held her hand a few times, but he never said anything about it.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Lev Zubov is an out-and-proud member of the Klept, whereas in the novel he was the hapless White Sheep of his evil family, unsuited for a life of scheming, and interested in Time Travel only as a futuristic Idle Rich hobby. In the series, Ash describes him as a "killer", and Wilf ends up on the receiving end of a very thinly veiled threat when he inquires about Lev's original plans for Flynne's stub. This is revealed in Episode 4, which does a brilliant job of demonstrating just how horrible he really is — His goal was to figure out how to open more stubs, so he could make money off of exploiting their residents as a resource, such as for drugs testing. Oh, and he bumps off himself and his family in the stub, too, as it made him feel a tad existentially uneasy. He refers to Wilf as a "pet" in the same episode, too.
  • Corbell Pickett, while always a bad guy, has become even worse — in the book he liked to present himself as a respectable businessman, trying (but mostly failing) to keep himself at arm's length from his drug-building operations. This incarnation of him, however, may have the same demeanour but is a sadistic monster, and makes no attempt to disguise this, being much more willing to get his own hands dirty.
  • The Neoprims, and by extension, Aelita, are no longer folks who abandoned civilisation either as a result of the Jackpot or of their own accord, but violent partisans who oppose the Klept's rise to power — such as by attacking the boarding school where they sent their children. Later episodes reveal that their ultimate aim is to Restart the World in order to destroy the Klept's corrupt regime.
  • In the finale, Ash and Ossian defect to the R.I. in an attempt to get revenge on Lev and after deciding that it's the Lesser of Two Evils to let the R.I. keep their technical data as opposed to letting the Klepts get their grubby hands on it.
• Advertising by Association: As seen on the above poster, "From the creators of Westworld".
• The Alcoholic: Conner is slowly wasting away into a bottle. He's first introduced being cut off at Jimmy's, and when Burton visits his house in Episode 2, the detritus of alcohol abuse is everywhere. Burton then offers him a role as Number Two in the militia he's setting up to protect his family from assassins, with being sober a requirement. It seems to work.
• Affectionate Nickname: Subverted with Aelita calling Wilf "Wolf". Turns out that it was his real name (short for Wolfgang), pre-Jackpot, which was changed to "Wilfred" when he was adopted by a rich couple after the Depopulation Bomb hit.
• After the End: The 2099 timeline is set roughly two decades after a series of disasters known as the Jackpot wiped out most of the population and brought humanity to the brink of extinction.
• The Alleged Car: Conner's Tarantula motor tricycle is in the habit of breaking down rather a lot.
• Alternate Timeline:
  • The present day timeline is a "stub", a branch timeline created by the act of contacting the past to begin with. Any action taken in the stub doesn't affect the future.
  • Lowbeer reveals to Flynne that her timeline has diverged significantly from the original thanks to R.I.'s interference. In the original, Conner was never crippled, Burton was killed in action, and Flynne married Tommy. The events leading up to the Jackpot are also happening faster in Flynne's timeline than they did originally.
• Ambiguously Bi: Flynne has a massive crush on Tommy Constantine — but, when she's instructed to seduce a woman during her first visit to London, she doesn't exactly seem to dislike it, despite being slightly taken aback at first.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: Downplayed. After Tommy guns down Sheriff Jackman and puts Corbell Pickett on life support, nobody in Clanton seems to miss them. Dee Dee is clearly relived to learn that the corrupt Sheriff is no more, and Pickett's goons immediately start squabbling over who should take the reins of his drug-building empire, happy to know that their Bad Boss won't be around to teach them any more "lessons".
• And You Thought It Was a Game: The key to the series as Flynne slowly realizes she's not in some highly realistic simulation but has in fact traveled to a 2099 London.
• Animal Motifs: Bees, for Cherise. When Flynne, through Peripheral Burton, first lays eyes on her, Aelita warns her away, describing her as "the queen bee of this entire vile hive". The logo of the Research Institute, which she leads, is a honeycomb-like shape made up of hexagons, she keeps bees with an apiary serving as her inner sanctum, and she kills Grace by using pheromones to incite a swarm of bees to sting her to death. Her outfits tend to feature a splash of gold or other honey-like colours too.
• Apocalypse How: The "Jackpot" event lies somewhere between Class 1 and Class 2. 80 percent of the Earth's population was wiped out and civilization has been reduced to small enclaves.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: The Klept are the ruling class of 2099 London, descended from Corrupt Corporate Executives and Russian oligarchs who managed to sit out the Jackpot in whatever bunkers or safe-zones their resources could buy, and now spend most of their time devising new schemes of making even more money with very little regard to morals.
• As You Know: Lev and Cherise are particularly given to hyperexpository monologues, possibly as part of being a Smug Snake (q.v.).
• Ascended Extra:
  • Aelita West's role in the novel can be summed up as "she gets murdered". Here, she's a major character who's responsible for connecting to Flynne's timeline in the first place, since she concocted a scheme with Wilf and Lev which involved breaking into the Research Institute — a job she needed "Easy Ice" for. After the heist goes horribly wrong, Wilf and Lev need Flynne to help them find her.
  • Corbell Pickett also gets a far greater degree of focus than he does in the book, with his backstory, motivations and influence over Clanton being more fully fleshed out.
• Assassin Outclassin': The mercenaries who accept the Research Institute's $9m dark-web bounty are ex-members of an elite military unit. Unfortunately for them, Burton and his buddies were part of an even more elite unit and quickly gun down the goons with the help of their cybernetic implants, despite being outnumbered three to one.
• Attack Animal: Lev's pet Tasmanian tigers are utilised as backup when he confronts the treacherous Ash and Ossian. So much for being "bred for domestic companionship".
• Auto Erotica: Downplayed. After Flynne, as Peripheral Burton, successfully seduces Mariel, they make out rather heavily in in the back of her Rolls-Royce — at least, until Flynne is instructed to knock her out and battle the Michikoid driver as it springs to her defence.
• Badass Bystander: Deconstructed. Guess what? Attempting to fight a Professional Killer who just killed four men in the blink of an eye is a terrible idea, as the bowling alley bartender who pulls a shotgun on Bob finds out.
• Bald of Evil: Cherise, doubling up as a (relatively) rare female instance of Bald of Authority.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Daniel is Head of Security for the Research Institute... Which kind of explains how easily Alieta was able to knock it over, since he really isn't very good at his job. He lets Aelita escape in his first appearance, fails at assassinating the Fishers (to be fair, he wasn't expecting resistance), fails to bribe Corbell Pickett (twice!), fails to trace Aelita's funding back to Lev, and finally, once he manages to corner Flynne and Wilf in Aelita's hideout, only brings a single Koid Mook along as backup — if he'd brought one more, it is likely he would have won, but his overconfidence winds up with Flynne pointing the Sonic Punch at his own head. The latter screwup earns him a You Have Failed Me from Cherise.
• Big Brother Instinct: Burton is extremely protective of Flynne, most clearly shown when he insists on taking her to Dee Dee for medical attention after she has a seizure, even though this risks blowing their cover and she's insisting that she's fine.
• The Blank: The Michikoids ("Koids") are portrayed as featureless mannequin-like androids, though they can simulate more expressive faces if need be.
• Blank Stare: Wilf develops a spectacular one after he visits Lev at his gentlemen's club to tell the oligarch that his family have been killed in Flynne's stub... Only for Lev to laugh at him, explain that he arranged the murders himself because his other self's presence made him uneasy, and elaborate on his plans to open other stubs and exploit their inhabitants for money, leaving Wilf to goggle in horror at the abject Lack of Empathy.
• Black and Nerdy: Macon, the bespectacled guy who appears to be in charge of the technical side of Forever Fab, and is a part-time hacker to boot.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Lev denies to Flynne that her Peripheral is kept in a box while it isn't used... While she's still standing in said box.
  • When Bob arrives in Clanton and is waiting on the bridge to perform his hit on Flynne and Burton, Billy Ann drives by and asks why his car has no windshield — he claims unconvincingly that a gravel truck in front of him spilled its cargo (it had been shot out by Frank's son). She clearly smells a rat, given that she comes back with a shotgun.
• Blood Knight: Burton, and especially Conner, who loved being involved in a firefight again at the start of Episode 2. They later, piloting peripherals, are sent on a training-simulation course beating up dozens of Koid targets, which gets them both super revved-up by the end.
• Blown Across the Room: The 'sonic punch' weapons are intentionally designed to achieve this, firing powerful pulses of concussive force which send anything they hit flying.
• Body Backup Drive: Downplayed. On two occasions, Koids are used to replicate the appearance, memories and personality of individuals who are dead or otherwise elsewhere (Aelita and Daniel), but it's rather apparent that this is at best a hollow imitation and the resulting 'copy' isn't sentient. In fact, it's noted to be illegal to make a convincing facsimile of a person, living or dead, and the only person able to get away with it is Lowbeer.
• Book Ends: Corbell Pickett established his control over Clanton by locking his enemies in black Chevrolet Suburbans and having them die of dehydration as the cars baked in the hot sun. His influence over the town is mostly wiped out when, after Tommy attacks him with the sonic punch and puts him in a coma, Jasper gets fed up of Corbell's other minions treating him like crap and parks the black Chevrolet Suburban he was driving them in on train tracks, accidentally locking it and preventing him from saving them when his conscience returns.
• Briefcase Full of Money: When Daniel hacks into Corbell Pickett's "old-timey-showbar-come-bordello" sim, he offers to pay Pickett $2 million in exchange for offing the Fisher siblings, using a virtual representation of this trope as a prop. It's possible these theatrics contributed to Pickett's (incorrect) suspicion that Daniel was a Homeland Security agent trying to set him up.
• The Butcher:
  • While in the IRA, Bob was known as "The Butcher" O'Connell.
  • Abbie and Reggie pretend to be butchers at the Crown and Rose Chop Shop as a cover identity, with their real work being fabricating and modifying peripherals, and also performing old school scalpel surgery to transplant the occasional human eye into a peripheral to bypass iris scanners.
• Cannot Spit It Out: Flynne has supposedly been infatuated with Tommy since elementary school, and has done nothing to act on this. Curiously, Lowbeer indicates that she actually married Tommy in the prime timeline, so having more family around in this one has also made her more reserved.
• Canon Foreigner:
  • The R.I. and everybody associated with it (Cherise, Daniel, Mariel and Grace), with the organisation serving as the primary antagonistic force for most of the first season and replacing the novel's Big Bad Triumvirate of Daedra West, Hamed al-Habib and Sir Henry, who are all Adapted Out.
  • Bob, too, is unrelated to any character in the book.
  • Jasper and Mary. Corbell Pickett had no family or relatives mentioned in the book.
• Card-Carrying Villain: The oligarchic overlords of London (and presumably the world) openly refer to themselves as "the Klept"^note Short for "kleptocrat" - a person who acquired power through robbery. Or at least Lev does, anyway.
• Chekhov's Skill: Downplayed. Billy Ann gives Flynne some advice on how to flirt (very bluntly indeed) early on in the first episode... Which she, controlling Peripheral Burton, deploys almost word-for-word against Mariel to great effect.
• Cigar Chomper: The vicious drug baron Corbell Pickett is almost always seen puffing on a fat cigar — even in his VR game!
• Classy Cane: Lowbeer sometimes carries one, being a morphed version of her tipstaff.
• Cloaking Device: The team of Hired Guns sent to kill Flynne and Burton in the first episode travel in a pair of blacked-out SUVs equipped with cutting-edge technology allowing them to become virtually invisible. In Episode 5, Corbell Pickett got his hands on one of them.
• Concealment Equals Cover: Averted. Burton finally manages to take out Bob using a high-powered rifle which fires straight through a cinder block wall and into the vicious assassin.
• Connected All Along: The Research Institute had already been performing Time Travel experiments into Flynne's stub — specifically, the Haptic Recon implants are transplanted technology, and the R.I. decided to test their capacity for emotional manipulation, causing Conner's disability by taking him off his guard when confronted with a potential threat.
• Crapsaccharine World: 2099 London easily qualifies. Everything is sleek and shining, with technological marvels around every corner — the whole place is "magical", in Flynne's eyes. However, the Jackpot has wiped out most of the human population, said advanced technology is the only thing keeping the world from collapsing into ruin once more, the powers that be are ruthless oligarchs, and everyone is subject to Sinister Surveillance. And in Episode 6, Wilf reveals that the city's gleaming appearance is a facade enabled by virtual-reality Glamour, and in reality London is little better than a ruin in many places, with an even smaller population than previously thought.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • Back when Corbell Pickett was a car salesman, the drug trade in Clanton County was controlled by the "Mad Dogs Cartel". Pickett managed to trick them into buying three armoured SUVs from him on a hot day — and sabotaged the vehicles so that the unfortunate bikers were locked inside, leaving them to die slowly and painfully from heatstroke. Then he crucified them.
  • In Episode 3, Cherise finds out that Grace, one of the Research Institute's scientists, gave Aelita information about the RI's investigations into stubs. She summons Grace to her apiary, and offers her a nice cup of tea... Which is laced with pheromones causing the bees to think she's a hornet, swarm, and sting her to death.
  • One of the major events of the Jackpot was "The Blood Plague", a truly terrifying disease which attacked the body's viscera, causing the unfortunate victim's abdomen to swell and explode.
• Cultured Badass: Conner is a Blood Knight ex-Marine... And avid chess player.
• Curse of Babel: Ash and Ossian have the ability to encrypt their speech, sounding like gibberish to all those around them but perfectly understandable to each other. The pair unfortunately underestimate Zubov's ability to break said encryption, allowing him to spy in on their attempted betrayal and thwart it.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul:
  • Burton's Haptic Recon implants occasionally 'glitch', causing him immense pain as they fire off signals into his nerves at random.
  • There are worrying signs that Flynne's use of the headset may be causing some sort of dangerous bleed-through effect — leaving London usually renders her weak and disoriented, she vomits after the session where Aelita exposes her to immense pain and the peripheral she's controlling 'dies', and has started periodically losing control over her hand. In Episode 4 this develops to a full-on seizure, and echoes of the injuries her peripherals have sustained appearing on her body. However, there are hints that this is not a side effect of the technology, which Wilf is genuinely surprised to learn is affecting her negatively, but the data Aelita forced Flynne to download in the first episode, which is confirmed in Episode 7.
• Dark and Troubled Past: The Jackpot occurred when Wilf was still a young child — he and Aelita were left orphaned and roaming the streets, semi-feral. He was "adopted" by a wealthy couple from Oxfordshire, who were implied to, at best, have been very inattentive and changed his name from "Wolfgang" to "Wilfred". Aged 14, he later earned Lev's trust by killing four Neoprim terrorists who attacked his boarding school.
• Darker and Edgier: Overall, the series has a considerably more gritty tone than the book, and things go far less smoothly for the characters. Flynne seems to get the worse of it, given that she's involved in several brutal fights, essentially undergoes torture, and gets her brain fried by the headset, but in general there's also a lot more on-screen violence, and the series' incarnation of Lev is The Sociopath and a straight-up villain who just happens to be on Flynne's side, rather than the more benevolent figure he was in the books.
• Death by Adaptation:
  • Zig-Zagged, oddly. Reece gets stabbed and choked to death by Bob in Episode 7, whereas in the book he was compelled to betray Flynne to Pickett, leaving his fate mostly unclear — it's equally possible that he ran away before Burton could catch up to him, or he was killed when Pickett's compound was bombed.
  • Flynne has herself killed in the series one finale... Because she's opened another stub of the immediate present, putting the alternate-universe version of her, and the R.I. data, out of reach of London's factions.
• Deep South: The "present day" events take place in Clanton, a small town in South Carolina.
• Depopulation Bomb: A series of man-made and natural disasters beginning in 2039 and spanning several decades reduced the population from 8 billion to less than 1.
• Desolation Shot: Two — one showing London in the 2070s, ravaged by the Jackpot, during the flashback at the beginning of episode 4. The second one comes in episode 6 when Wilf turns off the R.I.'s Glamour to show that London is deserted and most of the structures are in disrepair, demonstrating that things aren't that much better in 2099.
• Determinator: Bob the hit man. He takes two shotgun blasts to the chest and only surrenders when the shooter threatens to blow his head off. See also Made of Iron, since he got up after that.
• The Dog Bites Back:
  • After being taunted by Sheriff Jackman about being powerless, Tommy kills Jackman and makes it look as if Bob's responsible, then blasts Corbell with with Bob's sonic punch for good measure.
  • Jasper never liked being part of Uncle Corbell's gang anyway, but when Tommy's attack puts him in a coma, the other thugs start treating him like a servant without the fear of their Bad Boss keeping them back, so he decides to kill the lot of them by leaving their car on railroad tracks, and changes his mind too late.
• Double Tap: Bob is finally stopped when a high-powered sniper round is shot through his heart, but Burton takes no chances and pops him in the head three times to be absolutely sure this is the last they'll hear of him.
• The Dreaded: Everyone is terrified of Inspector Lowbeer. And with good reason — though this is played with, it's less fear of her, specifically, but the immense power wielded by high-ranking members of the Met in general.
• Elaborate Underground Base: The Research Institute. It goes down at least 95 storeys, and contains an aquarium large enough to hold whales, hydroponics farms, factories, and Lord knows what else. The use of Assembler nanobots would easily Handwave the financial and structural constraints that a facility of this size would face in Real Life.
• Electronic Eyes: Daniel has heavily augmented vision which allows him to identify Aelita on sight, and the Haptic Recon implants extend to the eyes as well, enabling auto-targeting. This is because the implants were part of a R.I. experiment in the stub.
• Enigmatic Institute: The Research Institute, a powerful organisation in 2099 which brought humanity back from the brink of collapse by developing Assemblers and "air scrubbers" to restore some stability to the ruined world. However, the organization, and its leader Dr. Cherise Nuland, serve as the primary antagonists throughout the first season, given that Flynne was tricked into stealing valuable data from them and because said data includes information about their implants and other unscrupulous activities.
• Epic Battle Boredom: Downplayed. Bob walks into a bowling alley to confront an old enemy of his for threatening his daughter. He shoots the man and three of his sons dead in a matter of seconds, and pulls an Offhand Backhand on the proprietor who was going for a shotgun, all with an immensely weary look on his face.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Bob may be a sociopathic assassin, but he really does love his daughter. Daniel has to threaten her to get him to come out of retirement in the first place, and he shares a tearful phone call with her before he carries out the hit on Burton and Flynne, fully expecting that he might die in the process.
  • Pickett is genuinely shaken up after discovering that Bob killed Mary in Episode 7, and has a few things he wants to do to the assassin.
• Eviler than Thou: Corbell Pickett took control of Clanton's drug trade in 2015 by brutally killing his enemies, the Mad Dogs Cartel, and lining the road with their crucified bodies.
• Evil Is Petty: Corbell Pickett is cruel for the sheer joy of it, beats and disfigures his own men, ands pees in his pool.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Corbell Pickett learns the hard way that a trained killer is not someone you can keep on a leash, and his wife pays the price.
• Evil Luddite: Implied to be the case with Aelita and her Neoprim allies, given that the former once used a symbol of a thumb-less hand, believing that opposable thumbs, and the ability they grant to grasp tools and weapons, have doomed humanity. The fact they want to Restart the World helps suggest this, too.
• Evil Mentor: Jasper Used to Be a Sweet Kid, but unfortunately his uncle Corbell Pickett had other ideas, and decided to 'educate' the boy with such enlightening lessons as making him watch as he tortuously killed a rival gang by trapping them in cars on a hot day. Unsurprisingly, Jasper grew up to be one of his minions.
• Expendable Alternate Universe:
  • Or timeline, rather. Since the stub timeline doesn't impact the future timeline, the residents of the latter at best see protecting them as pragmatic and at worst treat them as lab rats. The R.I. uses alternate timelines to experiment with new technologies, and Lev wants access to stubs for similar reasons. He even went so far as to have his stub timeline family killed, just to ignore that potential existential crisis.
  • In the season 1 finale, when Cherise threatens to kickstart the Jackpot in Flynne's timeline as a Godzilla Threshold to eliminate the threat of the data in her head, Flynne creates a stub of her stub so an earlier iteration of herself and everyone else will exist while having Conner kill her in the main stub. This way, Cherise won't have any reason to target that stub, and even if she does, versions of everyone will continue to exist in a stub Cherise can't access.
• Eye Scream: When Flynne puts on the headset for the second time, Peripheral Burton is sedated and Strapped to an Operating Table. Aelita, looking on, calmly informs her that that she's not a sadist... But all the same, she will test the very limits of pain "Easy Ice" is willing to endure by cutting out one of the peripheral's eyes and replacing it with Mariel's while its operator is still conscious. And there's most pointedly no Gory Discretion Shot, either. Yeuch.
• Fair Cop: Tommy Constantine is a very handsome sheriff's deputy who Flynne has an enormous crush on. Pity he's engaged.
• Fake-Out Make-Out: When a Met Police Koid becomes suspicious of Flynne's peripheral in Episode 3, Wilf pretends it belongs to his friend "Rainey" who he has suddenly developed feelings for, leading to one of these, complete with a very sincere-sounding declaration of love. Given that Wilf's profession is essentially a Consummate Liar, there is no indication as to exactly how fake it was.
• Fashionable Asymmetry: Lowbeer wears what can only be described as half a tweed overcoat, on top of a differently-patterned tweed suit.
• Fat Bastard: Sheriff Jackman is somewhat portly, and also entirely in Corbell Pickett's pocket.
• Faux Affably Evil: The series loves this trope:
  • Corbell Pickett carries himself like a charming Southern Gentleman and adopts a fatherly demeanour when talking to a bunch of his goons in the first episode... Right before smashing their leader's head into a glass because they've not been selling enough drugs for his liking and let themselves get intimidated by Conner.
  • Aelita's warning to Flynne about Dr Cherise Nuland in the first episode wasn't exactly wrong. She has immaculate manners, but will become immensely menacing at the drop of a hat, and anyone who crosses her tends to have very little time left to live.
  • Lev Zubov, too, has the appearance of a suave and charming sophisticate — and had his own family murdered in an Alternate Universe because it made him uneasy.
  • And Bob O'Connell, too, can be argued to be this. At first glance it appears that he wants to leave his violent past behind him and is only trying to kill the Fishers because otherwise his daughter gets it, but he has no problem causally murdering bystanders who are dumb enough to try and stop him, repeatedly displays needless brutality and engages Ella Fisher in a very disturbing conversation about the best way to stab someone.
• Femme Fatale: Lev's extremely slinky wife Domenika flirts outrageously with Wilf, but she also happens to be the scion of the world's most powerful Klept family, and can presumably have somebody wiped off the face of the Earth for so much as annoying her.
• Fighting Irish: Played deadly serious with the ruthless ex-IRA operative turned Professional Killer Bob "The Butcher" O'Connell, though he is a Retired Monster when we first see him.
• Giving Radio to the Romans:
  • The 'neural cutout' headset which provides access to 2099 in the first place is constructed from bizarre un-patented components nobody at Forever Fab has ever seen before.
  • As a gesture of good faith to help ensure Flynne's cooperation, Wilf arranges for the formula for a Cure for Cancer to be sent to her local pharmacy to save her dying mother. It then turns out the 'fixer' had been exaggerating and the cure only has a success rate of 57% — it provides temporary relief, but her condition relapses and she's left with only a month to live.
  • Daniel or the Koid that thinks it's Daniel, anyway, sends Bob a version of his "sonic punch" weapon. Exactly why is a bit unclear, given that it's not that much more useful than a plain old gun.
• Ghost City: In Episode 6, Wilf demonstrates that London is in fact even more empty than it really looks, and much of the city is still half-ruined — the rest is just R.I. Glamour used to make life a little less miserable for the survivors.
• Godzilla Threshold: When Cherise learns that the data Aelita stole is on the verge of falling into Lev's hands, she arranges for Clanton to be nuked in a terrorist attack just to make sure that doesn't happen. This in turn inspires Flynne to take the equally desperate measure of creating a new stub from her existing one and then having herself killed so her stub copy, unburdened by Cherise's attacks, can bring the fight to her.
• Gold Digger: Subverted. Corbell Pickett's beautiful wife Mary is far younger than he is... But is also a canny strategist and a trusted advisor in his criminal dealings, possibly even being the real brains of his operation. Though Pickett (played by Louis Herthum) isn't exactly ugly, either, just very, very evil.
• Gone Horribly Right: Sheriff Jackman attempts to convince Tommy to stop trying to be a good guy and accept that his entire job is based on lies. Tommy, after stewing things over for a while, agrees, and kills Jackman.
• Gory Discretion Shot: We never see exactly what Bob does to Mary Pickett. It's probably for the best.
• Grin of Audacity: Flynne seems to relish beating up the surgeons responsible for her "enucleation" almost as much as Wilf enjoyed watching it.
• Hazy-Feel Turn: In Episode 8, Ash and Ossian defect to Cherise and the R.I. to get revenge on Lev and keep the invaluable data contained in Flynne out of the Klept's grasp — which is this trope as the R.I., Lev and the Neoprims they were originally working for are all some measure of evil.
• Honey Trap:
  • During Flynne's first 'visit' to London using Burton's first peripheral, her task is to seduce Mariel, a high-level Research Institute employee, knock her out, and deliver her to Aelita, who needed her eye to bypass retinal scanners and access the depths of the Institute.
  • This appears to be a favourite tactic of Aelita's, given that she deploys a Downplayed form to learn about the Stub Research Division in the first place by flirting with her ex-girlfriend Grace.
• Hydro-Electro Combo: Bob manages to get out of his his Shock Collar predicament by smashing a conveniently-placed fish tank in the Picketts' mansion, dousing the whole room with water — when Mary tries to shock him afterwards, she ends up zapping herself, too, and he recovers far quicker.
• I Know Mortal Kombat: Even though Flynne has no combat training, she's better at combat sim video games than her Super-Soldier brother. Her video game combat skills seem to come with her when she's piloting a peripheral, as she's capable of taking down a whole crowd of trained guards in peripherals.
• In Love with Your Carnage:
  • Wilf seems to rather enjoy the sight of Flynne beating the tar out of the peripheral fabricators who cut out her eye in the first episode.
  • Conner, far more obviously, becomes infatuated with Beatrice after she hands him and Burton their asses in hand-to-hand combat, simultaneously, gleefully pronouncing that he will marry her shortly afterwards. Beatrice indicates afterward that the feeling is mutual, even if she can't properly quantify it.
    Conner: [after watching Beatrice perform a Neck Snap on Burton's peripheral] Shawty, you are fucking amazing.
• The Internet Is for Porn: One of the blindingly obvious applications of super-realistic VR gaming would be pornography — as aptly demonstrated by Corbell Pickett's "Old Havana" sim. His haptic suit even has a codpiece.
• Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Lowbeer threatens to hold Wilf liable as an accomplice for Daniel's murder. What this means in practice is that she will kill him personally within seven minutes.
• Just Before the End: While 2099's historians cannot agree when the series of cataclysmic events which would become the Jackpot began, most agree it was in 2039, only seven years away from Flynne's time in 2032, when an enormous hack of the entire American continent's electricity grid causes chaos and presumably kills millions. Things get worse from there. And if that wasn't bad enough, R.I. has deliberately accelerated that timetable in Flynne's stub, so seven years is probably a generous estimate.
• Kick the Dog:
  • The merc team in Episode 1 have active camouflage which renders their vehicles invisible on command. When they're followed by a local cop, they speed off, cloak, then pull over, confusing the cop when he can't figure out where they went. He gets out of his cruiser, only for one of the mercs to hold him at gunpoint and order him into the road... where one of the team's cloaked cars runs him over. They could just have done nothing and the cop would have at worst a weird story to tell, but decided murderously screwing with the unfortunate man would be funnier.
  • Rather similarly, Bob paralysing an assailant with his "sonic punch", informing the poor man he'll let him live if he can get out of the way, and running him over with his car. Later on, he murders an unconscious Mary Pickett — while she had been controlling a Shock Collar attached to him, she posed absolutely no threat by that point.
  • The Texan forces pull off a literal one: The bomb which disabled Conner was implanted in a dog in order to blow up anyone unfortunate enough to try and help the obviously-pained animal.
• Killing Your Alternate Self:
  • Lev had his past self killed because he didn't want to deal with the existential questions it provoked.
  • In the season 1 finale, Flynne creates a branch timeline off her own that Cherise can't interfere with, then has herself killed in the original to deny Cherise the data in her head.
• Large Ham: Most of the bad guys, but particularly Cherise. Even her wardrobe overacts: the shaved head, the shoulder pads, the asymmetrical umbrella.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After Daniel assaults Flynne with the painful concussive blasts of his 'sonic punch' weapon on two separate occasions, she finally manages to turn it on him. It's very satisfying.
  Flynne: Hurts, doesn't it?
• Leg Focus: Flynne often wears denim shorts which show off her shapely legs, which consequently get a bit of Male Gaze in her establishing shot.
• Living MacGuffin: Episode 7 reveals that Flynne is one: the device Aelita forced her to scan in the first episode was supposed to download all of the R.I.'s secret technical information into Burton's implants, but due to her lack of them, the data was converted into bacteria which have infected her brain instead, which is both the cause of her seizures and makes her a rather unfortunate living asset for the factions of 2099 London.
• Lovable Rogue: Wilf's characterisation has shades of this. He works as The Fixer and general Consummate Liar dogsbody for the scheming Lev, but is far more empathetic than his sociopathic boss and has at least some sort of a moral compass.
• Made of Iron:
  • Bob. Sure, he's wearing a bulletproof vest, but he still takes two pistol rounds and a shotgun blast at close range, and he still has to be told to stay on the ground. Seems like a case of Artistic License – Physics. Later on, he repeatedly recovers in a matter of seconds from being electrocuted by a Shock Collar, and seems to be mostly unaffected by a very deep self-inflicted cut and a badly broken nose.
  • Reece is stabbed a truly impressive number of times and just refuses to go down. Bob has to suffocate him to make it stick.
• The Mafiya: As of 2032, Lev's family were part of this, somewhat unsurprisingly for Russian oligarchs.
• Mating Dance: Lev's wife Domenika insists on performing a sensual slow dance with Wilf in Episode 4, with Lev watching the whole thing. He isn't angry, just mildly amused — describing it as "playing with a family pet".
• Matter Replicator: Downplayed. By 2030, 3D printing has advanced to the point that most items can simply be fabricated in a printer as long as you have the materials and blueprints. Flynne works in such a shop, which mostly prints mundane items like cake toppers (and weapons, once Burton buys the shop with the money given to them by Lev's group), and a local pharmacy likewise doesn't carry any actual inventory, merely printing up whatever the customer orders on demand. The prevalence of the technology means those in 2099 can drop in technology and medicine that is nearly identical to their own, simply by getting someone on that end to print it for them.
• Meat-Sack Robot: While attempting to escape Daniel's bonds and protect Aelita in the depths of the Research Institute, Flynne pulls the skin off Peripheral Burton's hand, revealing a robotic endoskeleton underneath, just like that of The Terminator. Presumably, all peripherals are like this.
• Mecha-Mooks: Michikoids are humanoid robots used for all sorts of mundane tasks, such as regular police duties or service positions like limo drivers. They also make decent bodyguards.
• Mêlée à Trois: There are four different factions, each with their own agenda, vying for the data in Flynne's head.
  • Aelita and the Neoprims want to take control of the R.I.'s tech so they can overthrow the corrupt system and Restart the World.
  • Cherise and the R.I. simply want their data back, much of which is illegal material.
  • Lev and the Klept want the data so they can open their own stubs for research they could never perform in the present, using this and the other R.I. tech to make lots of money.
  • Finally, Inspector Lowbeer becomes a player late into the first season, her motives not clearly defined. She seems interested in recruiting Flynne and her compatriots as some form of Plausible Deniability operatives, but what she actually wants is yet to be revealed.
• Mental Time Travel: The quantum tunneling technology can only send information back and forth, so travel between the two is done by virtual projections or piloting Peripherals.
• Minion with an F in Evil: Zig-Zagged with Jasper. It's clear that he is a genuinely nice, if somewhat hapless, guy, who almost certainly wouldn't have become involved in a criminal gang without Corbell's influence. After Corbell pays him to keep an eye on the Fishers, he regrets accepting the money and in fact doesn't even do this before Tommy puts Corbell in a coma. However, what finally gets him to snap and have his gangster "buddies" run over by a train isn't their criminal actions, but the fact that they lose all possible respect they had for him and start ordering him around now that Corbell is out of the picture.
• Mook Horror Show: The Private Military Contractor group finds themselves subject to one of these when they discover Burton's drunken redneck friends are all cybernetically enhanced special forces soldiers.
• Mugging the Monster:
  • The corporate mercs get a rude wake-up call when they try to kill Burton and his friends, discovering they're all highly trained soldiers with assault rifles and implants which allow them to fight as if they're a single individual.
  • Same goes for Frank's three sons who are unfortunate enough to believe Bob is just some old man they can push around. He kills all of them, Frank, and an unlucky (or just plain stupid) bartender, in about ten seconds. Technically, one of them didn't die then, but he probably wished that he did.
• My Skull Runneth Over: Aelita had her Burton Peripheral download data from R.I. The expectation was that Burton would be piloting and his haptic implants would store the data. Instead, Flynne got it, and the headset converted the data into microbial DNA which is now colonizing her brain.
• Mythology Gag:
  • While performing his elaborate declaration of love and Fake-Out Make-Out routine with Flynne in her peripheral to confuse the Met Police Koid, Wilf claims that the body is being 'piloted' by a woman called Rainey in Canada — a reference to the character he would fall in love with and eventually marry in the book series.
  • Reggie offers Flynne his latest peripheral augmentation — retractable titanium fingernails. This is very likely a reference to Molly Millions in William Gibson's Neuromancer, who had Wolverine Claws that extended from beneath her fingernails.

Tropes N-Z

• Neck Snap:
  • Flynne gets into a fight with (a peripheral of) Cherise specifically so she can perform one of these on the smug villainess. She makes good on her promise. She later does this several times while wiping out the R.I. peripherals guarding the "stub portal" in the finale.
  • Beatrice does this to Burton's peripheral in Episode 7 after she reveals herself to be the Final Boss of the Unwinnable Training Simulation Lowbeer uses to test him and Conner.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Sheriff Jackman taunts Tommy about being powerless against him, as Jackman and Pickett can easily fabricate a story to discredit him should Tommy arrest them, capping it off with the declaration that unless Tommy can think of a better story, he might as well play ball. Tommy does think of a better story, and Jackman doesn't live through it.
• No Body Left Behind: According to Wilf, the presence of Nanotechnology makes this very, very easy to pull off in 2099.
• "Not So Different" Remark: After uncovering Ash and Ossian's betrayal, Lev notes that he doesn't really want to kill them since he is rather fond of the former, who "has the heart of a Klept".
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Gladys Baker, a civilian employee in Clanton's police station who is loyal to Jackman and tries to dissuade Tommy from searching for the missing invisible SUVs and Bob's weapons.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: When Burton learns that Pickett has potentially accepted a contract on him and his sister, he meets Pickett at the bar and offers him $200k a week to mind his own business. Should he refuse that offer, Burton has one of his buddies snipe Pickett's glass and warn that his entire unit will be gunning for Pickett should anything happen to him or Flynne.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • The look on the drug dealers' faces when Corbell Pickett, their boss, suddenly appears in their booth at Jimmy's says it all.
  • Flynne, Burton and his friends also get one when Carlos sends up the drone and notices that there really is a kill team of mercenaries converging on the house.
  • Reggie the peripheral "fabricator", when he realises who Flynne is, and that she's about to pay him back for cutting out her eye.
  • Everybody has this reaction to meeting Inspector Lowbeer or hearing that she's come to call.
  • Ash and Ossian, when they realise Lev has cracked their vocal encryption and knows they're planning to betray him.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When Lev hears that the Metropolitan Police have come to call, his eyes bulge out of his his skull and his suave, calculated facade instantly shatters as he lets off a Cluster F-Bomb.
• Overlord Jr.: Lev's adorable little boy Anton is accompanying him when he corners Ash and Ossian having learned of their attempted betrayal. His father asks him to fetch him a knife, and, when he returns, he asks if he can watch.
• Overt Operative: Played with — the team of mercs hired to kill Flynne and Burton in the first episode have state-of-the art vehicles equipped with Cloaking Devices, but underneath the cloaks said vehicles are blacked-out Audi SQ8s, which are about as brash and thuggish as a vehicle can look, and the team members all wear matching black t-shirts and camouflage combat trousers. This means they attract the attention of a cop at a gas station, and murder him to cover their tracks. You'd think professional assassins would try and look normal while on their way to a hit to avoid this.
• Pay Evil unto Evil:
  • After Jackman attempts to bring Tommy under his thumb with a Breaking Speech telling him to stop clinging onto his morals, it works a little too well, leading Tommy to gun down the corrupt Sheriff in cold blood and blast Pickett with Bob's sonic punch, putting him into a coma.
  • After getting tired of being treated like a servant by his drug-dealing "buddies", Jasper parks the car he was driving them in on railway tracks — while all three have passed out from drinking. After calling his wife, he changes his mind, but by then it's too late, and the car is crushed, hurled from the tracks, and explodes.
• Power Outage Plot: Exaggerated and Played for Drama. The first major event of the Jackpot was a hack of all electricity grids on the entire American continent, with power remaining offline for months. This would presumably have killed millions, if not tens of millions, as all modern infrastructure instantly ground to a halt. Other countries suffered the same, and this is the least damaging thing that came out of that period.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: Flynne has control of a peripheral from her first trip into future London, presumably because the scenes in the book (where she's initially piloting a drone and obtains the peri later) would be difficult to film and/or boring for the viewer.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Displayed by Corbell Pickett, of all people. While he may be a sadistic crime boss, he seems more interested in finding out exactly what the hell is going on in his town (or, as he puts it to Bob, who's "fucking up his brine") than jumping at the chance to kill. He's suspicious when Daniel offers him $2m to off Flynne and Burton, believing that it's more than likely a setup, and when Burton counter-offers with $200k a week, or else, he decides to play along, given that it leaves him more time to send Jasper to spy on the Fishers while plotting his next move. He does eventually try to target the Fishers when his wife is killed, but that one can be blamed on his distress and he doesn't get to follow through.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Tommy gets one when he levels the sonic punch at Corbell Pickett, with the drug lord unaware he's about to get a taste of his own medicine. Though it's implied he didn't actually die afterwards.
  Pickett: The fuck's that supposed to be?
  Tommy: It's a doodad, you arrogant piece of shit.
  (buzz-whump)
• Quantum Mechanics Can Do Anything: The time travel technology is enabled by "quantum tunnelling", and the strange inverted-pyramid device is identified as a quantum computer in behind-the-scenes material shared by Vincenzo Natali.
• Remote Body: Peripherals are bio-mechanical robots that can be mentally controlled by an individual elsewhere. This even works across timelines.
• Replacement Goldfish:
  • Wilf's horrible adoptive mother Mrs. West, has a Koid programmed to impersonate Aelita — just with all of her "troublesome tendencies" edited out. Indeed, according to Cherise, a good fifty percent of Koids are used to replicate loved ones lost to the Jackpot. She herself replicates Daniel the same way, albeit just to have a helpful underling around.
  • Inspector Lowbeer has an autonomous Peripheral modelled after her dead daughter, a fact she keeps secret to avoid complicating their relationship.
• Restart the World: What the Neoprims, and by extension Ash and Ossian, are planning to do after gaining control of the R.I.'s technology — and they need the data contained in Flynne to do this.
• Robot Girl: Conner calls Beatrice a "robot lady," and he's spot-on. She's a peripheral, but one running under its own, seemingly self-aware AI, and as such she is essentially an Artificial Human. What this means in practice is that she's the single most capable fighter in the show. This is noted to be illegal under ordinary circumstances, hence why Cherise has to make due with a Koid copy of Daniel, but Lowbeer was able to get a special exception on account of her position.
• Rural Gangsters: The small Southern town of Clanton, one of two primary settings in the series, is dominated by the sadistic car salesman turned drug lord Corbell Pickett and his gang. They are responsible for a significant part of the country's economy thanks to his drug-building operations and have the local police department in their back pocket: so much so that Pickett can happily mutilate his own men in public places without any fear of reprisal.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: Jackman attempts to bring Tommy over to his point of view by offering him a promotion and cold hard cash. It doesn't work.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: The "Uncanny Valley Act" prohibits Peripherals from being allowed to run under their own AI. Inspector Lowbeer has one anyway, which is modelled after her daughter, thanks to a special exception she was granted as a law enforcement officer.
• Second American Civil War: The conflict that Burton and his Marine buddies fought in was against a secessionist Texas.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Wilf has a remarkable tendency to be excessively verbose regardless of the present subject of conversation. Lev Lampshades this.
• Sexual Extortion: One of the sleazy drug dealers who controls Flynne's supply of her mother's essential medicine claims that she's not got enough cash to buy said medication, but he'd be open to accepting a 'barter deal' as payment. Flynne is, unsurprisingly and rightfully, disgusted.
• Shock Collar: Corbell Pickett fits one to Bob after capturing him, with his wife Mary holding the remote that sets it off.
• Shoot the Dog: In Episode 8, Flynne gets Conner to kill her after she creates another stub 'branching' off from the immediate present, preventing Lev and Cherise from trying to recapture the data in her brain. This is darkly ironic, given that Conner became disabled after refusing to shoot a literal dog.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: After Tommy refuses to go along with Sheriff Jackman's plan to pin the blame on Flynne and Burton for Mary Pickett's death, the Dirty Cop chews him out for continuing to play the "good cop" despite knowing that Clanton, and its police department, are wholly controlled by Pickett. It works a little too well, and Tommy really takes it to heart.
• Single Tear: Wilf produces one of these twice in Episode 8, once after reminiscing about his past with Aelita with Flynne, the second time after finally reuniting with Aelita and being told the horrible truth of his forcibly Repressed Memories.
• Sinister Geometry:
  • The strange inverted-pyramid machine lurking deep in the RI's basement, later called the "God font" by Grace. Per Word Of God, it's a quantum computer.
  • Several of the floating nanotech exhibits in the Jackpot Museum, are these, with each one memorialising a specific aspect of the Depopulation Bomb which wiped out most of humanity. Most notably is the one which represents a terrorist attack on a U.S. nuclear weapons silo, which resembles a murderous star-shaped Christmas tree decoration.
• Small Town Boredom: Played for Drama. Flynne has been trapped in the Wretched Hive that is Clanton for her entire life, having to take care of her sick mother and provide for the family while Burton was in the Marines. Her trips to 2099 London have been such an amazing source of escapism that she doesn't even care that the headset may be harming her, she just wants to keep going, and even admits without hesitation that she wouldn't sever the link even if she had the power to.
• Small-Town Tyrant: Corbell Pickett is a car salesman turned drug baron who runs Clanton with an iron fist. He's secure enough in his position to beat up his own men in public, and the local sheriff's department is stuffed with Dirty Cops who answer to his every whim.
• Smug Snake: Corbell and Lev AND Cherise Nuland. So much smugness, so many snakes. Oftentimes they appear to be competing as to who can be the most slimy, arrogant and self-assured.
• Sonic Stunner: Zig-Zagged with David's "sonic punch" weapon - it fires a powerful pulse of concussive force that knocks targets flying, but the pulse affects organs too — this makes it a portable Agony Beam at close range, while a point-blank shot to the head is lethal. It's actually even more damaging to humans, who generally aren't getting back up if hit by it, while Peripherals can survive a couple hits.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Aelita and Grace's conversation at the start of Episode 5's Cold Open, where the latter speaks in the high-class vernacular common to London's residents before recounting the text of a profanity-laden note Aelita sent her after their breakup.
• Spotting the Thread: Flynne becomes convinced that 2099 London isn't just a sim after she sees that Peripheral Burton had a robotic endoskeleton — if she genuinely was playing a simulation designed to be as realistic as possible, why wouldn't her avatar just have normal human anatomy?
• Star Scraper: London is dotted by massive combination statues/buildings that serve as air scrubbers and corporate office space. Nanotechnology can be thanked for such impractical behemoths being built.
• Super Soldiers: The Haptic Recon implants Burton Fisher and his friends are fitted with achieve a Downplayed version of this trope: they essentially turn the user into a Wetware Body, allowing them to interpret targeting data from drones or other sources to calculate precisely when and where to shoot, and facilitating instant communication within a squad. It allows them to take down a much larger and otherwise better-equipped team of Hired Guns in Episode 2.
• Synchronisation: While searching for Aelita in London, Wilf establishes a neural link with Flynne so they can cover more ground — which has the unintended side-effect of making her feel his hangover. It's mentioned that the Haptic Recon implants work like this, too, and are later revealed to have been given to the military by the R.I. to test the technology.
• Techno Dystopia: London in 2099. The R.I's technology has been able to halt the Jackpot, but what's left isn't pretty. The city is mostly ruined and almost empty, with most citizens using their eye implants to view it as spotlessly clean and somewhat more populated. Furthermore, everyone is fitted with a neural implant which is supposed to provide immunity from the various Jackpot plagues, but is actually a Mind-Control Device suppressing everyone's memory of the atrocities perpetuated by the klept to gain and maintain power.
• Technology Uplift: The future timeline has provided the present timeline with future technology to beta-test before widespread adoption in the future. The Haptic implants Burton and his unit have are one such example.
• Teenage Wasteland: London in the 2070s, or at least part of it, was like this due to the Jackpot, with adults being menacing Hazmat Suit wearing figures who attempted to coax out and abduct the semi-feral children.
• Time Travel: According to Wilf, the connection between Flynne's past and his future isn't really time travel, just a matter of data transfer. Achieved through something called "quantum tunnelling", apparently. Specifically, engaging in this 'data transfer' will establish a new Alternate Timeline known as a "stub", which the instigators are free to screw around with as much as they want without affecting the present.
• Time Travel for Fun and Profit: The reason Lev hired Aelita in the first place was so he could figure out how he and the rest of the Klept could establish alternate timelines of their own... And thus exploit the residents as a captive human population for medical experiments or whatever else takes their fancy. How nice.
• Thanatos Gambit: Flynne manages to rustle up a drastic plan to escape the clutches of Lev and Cherise in the season one finale — she opens up another stub timeline branching off from the immediate present, destroys the MacGuffin which allowed her to do so, and has Conner kill her in the 'old' timeline so nobody in 2099 has any reason to mess with it anymore.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Bob, despite being a deadly assassin, looks just like a perfectly ordinary guy at the upper end of middle-aged. This is probably very useful for taking his targets off-guard.
• This Is Gonna Suck:
  • Frank visibly flinches when one of his sons lays a hand on Bob, as he likely knows exactly what his former friend is capable of.
  • Conner's reaction to realising he's about to be blown up by a dog is simply "You gotta be fucking kidding me."
• Token Good Cop: While the Clanton county Sheriff's department is mostly in the pocket of Corbell Pickett, Deputy Tommy Constantine remains genuinely principled, but this starts causing no shortage of problems. He grows increasingly frustrated when his attempts to investigate a ramming attack on his own police cruiser (conducted by Pickett) are stymied, and he eventually snaps when he is asked to help frame his friend Flynne Fisher and her family, killing Pickett and the corrupt Sheriff Jackman, who had previously mocked him for attempting to cling onto his sense of justice.
• Token Religious Teammate: Conner is shown saying Grace before eating his breakfast, while no other characters have shown any religious tendencies whatsoever.
• Too Dumb to Live: The bowling alley bartender just saw Bob gun down four (armed) people in seconds, yet feels the need to be a Badass Bystander and pull out a shotgun from under the counter. After her first shot misses, Bob dispatches her too.
• Uncertain Doom: Episode 7 ends with Corbell Pickett having been blasted by the sonic punch gun, but since the weapon's lethality is directly proportional to proximity, there's a fair chance he survived. The following episode reveals that he wasn't outright killed, but isn't expected to recover.
• Unholy Matrimony: Corbell Picket and his wife Mary are equally ruthless, and he consults her for advice on running his criminal empire.
• Unusual User Interface:
  • Folks in 2099 control the various functions of their ocular implants using finger gestures.
  • Ash and Ossian's computer is some sort of strange touchscreen orb.
• Unwinnable Training Simulation: The Met Police test Lowbeer sets up for Burton and Conner. After bowling over dozens of Koid targets, the pair are forced to fight Beatrice, who hopelessly outmatches the both of them.
• Unwitting Pawn: Episode 7 reveals that Aelita, Ossian and Ash were all loyal to the Neoprims, and were only working with Lev in order to access his resources so they could steal the R.I. data. Lev defies this by cracking Ash and Ossian's vocal encryption, and forcing them to give the data to him instead.
• Villain Decay: Daniel mops the floor with Flynne, in Peripheral Burton, and Aelita in his first appearance. He subsequently fails to do anything else right, and Cherise kills him after he gets overpowered by Wilf and Flynne. Following this, he's "brought back" as a Koid and Demoted to Extra.
• Villain in a White Suit: Corbell Pickett is shown wearing one in his pornographic VR game, even if he's yet to do so in reality.
• The Villain Knows Where You Live: Cherise decides to drop in on Lev as he's eating breakfast, resulting in the two hurling threats at one another (very politely, of course). Lev warns Cherise of his powerful friends and the fact that if you mess with him, you mess with the entire Klept... She counters by reminding him that the Klept value their collective interest over any so-called friendships, as he should very well know, the R.I. has a Nanotech super-weapon in the basement she's been itching to use again, and she has also just walked right past his security systems.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: It's unclear what became of Mariel after Aelita extracted her eye, but it was presumably fatal. Flynne asks about this in Episode 3, but Wilf knows nothing beyond the fact that she's vanished. He does admit, however, that if Aelita didn't kill her, Cherise almost certainly would have.
• What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: When Beatrice offers her assessment on Burton and Conner, she pegs Burton as the more reliable of the two yet says she'd be more inclined to trust Conner in spite of that claim. When Lowbeer asks why she would make such a contradictory decision, she can't offer a satisfactory answer, as it was part of her deep subconscious and she isn't consciously aware of the rationale. Lowbeer brushes it aside for more present concerns.
• Wild Card: Inspector Lowbeer. As a high-ranking member, if not the overall head, of the Metropolitan Police, she has immense power and nigh-Omniscience thanks to the "Aunties", but as of Season 1, her true goals are entirely opaque, whereas all of London's other factions have a clear aim to work towards.
• The Worf Effect: In Episode 7, Bob brutally kills Reece, one of Burton's Haptic Recon squadmates, but not after the assassin has stabbed him a couple of dozen times and got his nose busted open in the process.
• Worth It: Despite the headset causing seizures by somehow generating bacteria inside her brain, Flynne 's Small Town Boredom is so severe that she's happy to accept this as the cost of her adventures in London.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Bob opens up a deep cut on his arm with a knife so he can pretend to be an ordinary patient entering Clanton's medical centre. It seems far, far larger than necessary.
• Wretched Hive: Clanton in 2032 and London in 2099 provide two very different interpretations of this trope. Clanton is a decaying small town Just Before the End controlled by the brutal drug baron Corbell Pickett, while London seems clean and efficient on the surface, but is a almost deserted Techno Dystopia controlled by two corrupt cabals, the klept and the Research Institute. This is also Lampshaded with Cherise's bee motif.
• You Can't Fight Fate: As foreshadowed with the return of her blindness, it's revealed in Episode 8 that the futuristic medicine didn't work, and Ella Fisher is going to die anyway.
• You Have Failed Me:
  • Grace, Aelita's ex-girlfriend and a scientist at the Research Institute, made the mistake of telling her about the RI's Stub Research Division. When Cherise finds out, she has Grace stung to death by bees.
  • After Daniel and his Koid Mook get overpowered by Flynne and Wilf in Episode 3, Cherise instructs the construct to execute him before he can reveal any information to the heroes.
  • Wilf also suggests that if Aelita had spared Mariel's life, the R.I. wouldn't exactly have welcomed her back with open arms, given that her horniness enabled a major security breach.
• Your Days Are Numbered: Wilf informs Flynne that Ella Fisher is going to die in about a month, but has medicine from the future that can cure her. Unfortunately, while the medicine provides temporary relief, her condition relapses and she is again stuck with a month to live and no known cure.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: The Neoprims are vehemently opposed to the objectively corrupt rule of the Klepts, but have no qualms whatsoever as to their actions against the oligarchs. They are willing to take schoolchildren hostage and Episode 7 reveals that their endgame is to Restart the World in order to burn down the rotten system.

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London calling to the faraway towns...

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