Dimension

a key moment early in their relationship where her
girlfriend stands up for her against a hostile TERF
during a picnic in Dolores Park.
It’s the specificity that rings true to this San Franciscan,
and that signals to all viewers that this world
is real, and the character is alive within it.
It’s a vision of how the entire show could have been,
if the Wachowskis could have figured out in time
how to bring this level of intimacy and specificity to
their depiction of all the characters, and all the cities.
Because Tom Tykwer, himself a Berliner, directs the
Berlin sequences, you see a little bit of this familiarity
in the locations chosen for that city and in the character
of Wolfgang — his East German origins, his family’s
Slavic name and orthodox religion, etc.
But none of the other sensates, including the idealistic
Chicago cop, bear anything close to the level
of intimate knowledge or specific detail that Nomi
or Wolfgang have. In fact, pay attention and you’ll
see how generalizing the locations and incidents are.
For example: in Nairobi, the sensate’s bus is robbed
in what the characters themselves call “a bad area,” i.e.
they don’t refer to the district by its name.
But even this failure in the rest of Sense8’s world is
countered somewhat by its second great virtue, which
is that it commits totally to its clichés and rides them
out to their conclusions. Thank the slow pacing for
this. The entire 12-episode first season covers a story
arc that would generally be covered in the first two
episodes of any other show (the sensates are introduced,
discover each other, start to learn the rules of their
condition, meet their antagonist, and finally successfully
pull off their first combined action). The very
deliberation with which the story unfolds forces the
writers to unpack details of each character’s life and
situations that bring a kind of life and reality to the
clichés they’re embedded in. Details are forced into the
narrative — one by one in each character’s arc — and
each character eventually becomes rooted in these
details, even though they often come late in the season.
For example, Kala, the Indian sensate in Mumbai,
is characterized over simply at first: she is to marry a
man she doesn’t love, and she is a dedicated worshiper
of the Hindu elephant god, Ganesh. We don’t actually
learn more large details about her, but in drilling
down on these two things, we learn a great deal of
anchoring detail: the marriage is not arranged, but
a “love match;” with her boss’ son; whom she met at
work; at a pharmaceutical company; where she works
as a chemical engineer; because she has a master’s degree
in chemistry. She worships Ganesh; not because
she’s a benighted third world person but because she
sees no conflict between science and spirituality; and
because she had an experience of being lost as a child
and then discovering a literal new perspective of the
world through the eyes of a papier maché Ganesh
parade float; as a consequence, she takes her sensate
role in stride because she trusts that she is still seeing
the world through Ganesh’s eyes.
All of the characters get drilled down into in this
way, to varying degrees, and all start to take on life
and verisimilitude. The main problem with forcing
this kind of life into characters is that the audience
cannot trust its, for lack of a better word, authenticity.
To return to Kala: we see her more than once visiting
the temple of Ganesh where she has out loud, private
conversations with the god, a la Are You There, God?
It’s Me, Margaret. I don’t know whether or not Hindus
are taught to converse vernacularly with their gods in
their temples, but the extreme Americanness of the
depiction warns me that the Wachowskis probably don’t
know either. My suspicion is that they transposed an
American Christian moment into an Indian Hindu
one, without really finding out if the translation held.
Moments like this are sprinkled throughout.
The Wachowskis fail to examine characters in the
characters’ own context. These are some of the basics
of fictional world building and character development:
you create the rules of the world, create the
Sense8 commits
totally to its clichés
and rides them out to
their conclusions.
24 DIMENSION