YMMV / The Peripheral (2022)

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Jasper, specifically his snap decision to murder all of his fair-weather 'friends' by parking the car he's driving them in on train tracks while they're unconscious. Is he a broken man finally standing up from himself and trying to free Clanton from his Evil Uncle's influence? Or is he a cowardly Entitled Bastard who can't cope with being pushed around by Pickett's gang now Corbell's been put in a coma, depriving him of his privileged status as "the boss's boy"?
• Ass Pull: Flynne's exceedingly dramatic Thanatos Gambit — killing herself, after creating a new stub, which the villains supposedly can't access, and thus another version of herself — in the season one finale comes out of nowhere and leaves an awful lot of questions unanswered. How on earth is Burton going to react to his sister essentially committing suicide? Are there now going to be two versions of all the 2032 characters bar Flynne? Why was the stub-bunker so poorly defended, and how did Flynne use it so easily? And what is there to stop the Jackpot taking place in the 'old' stub (or Cherise blowing it up For the Evulz), rendering Flynne's sacrifice meaningless? It's all a bit of a muddle.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: Cherise always wears ostentatious clothing, featuring Giant Poofy Sleeves, honeycomb-style fabrics or jewellery, and the occasional asymmetric parasol. Although she often manages to somehow pull it off.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A fair few people watched the series solely for the purpose of seeing Chloë Grace Moretz kick ass once again.
• Not So Crazy Anymore: The idea of the "Jackpot", a slow-motion apocalypse where disaster after disaster slowly whittles down human civilisation to a shadow of its former self seems much more terrifyingly plausible than when William Gibson first wrote The Peripheral in 2014.
• The Woobie: Wilf Netherton, as more and more of his Dark and Troubled Past is slowly revealed. We first learn that he was a child amidst the horrors of the Jackpot, got 'adopted' by a truly ghastly pair of Klepts alongside Aelita after his abduction from the ruins, and, at the tender age of 14, killed three terrorists who attacked his boarding school. Then, in Episode 8, it turns out that he was orphaned after the refugee camp he was living in was exterminated by the Klept after the Blood Plague began to spread within it, and that his lifelong step-sister Aelita has some far more sinister ambitions than he ever realised.

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