'Sense8': Being Confusing Can Be a Good Thing
The new Netflix series Sense8 follows eight people in eight different countries who are psychically connected in a sci-fi way that I’m sure makes sense to its creators — Andy and Lana Wachowski and J. Michael Straczynski — but didn’t make much sense to me over the first three episodes made available to critics. But not making sense is not in itself a deterrent for a TV show — or any sort of art, for that matter — as long as the work pulls you in, intrigues or satisfies some aspect of your nature. In this, Sense8 isn’t bad at all.
Certainly the Wachowskis (best known for the Matrix movies and the recent Cloud Atlas) and Straczynski (best known as the creator of the 1990s series Babylon 5) know how to present a spectacle, even if for many Netflix viewers that spectacle may reside on a laptop screen. Spread across the world — the eight characters live in Berlin, Chicago, London, Mexico City, Mumbai, Nairobi, San Francisco, and Seoul — the plots of Sense8 dovetail and separate with a fluidity that’s a characteristic of good storytelling and editing. (The Wachowskis directed the first three episodes.)
Related: ‘Sense8’: Inside the Wachowski’s New Globe-Trotting Netflix Series
Some of the subplots are more interesting than others. I was caught up in the tale of Nomi (Jamie Clayton), a San Francisco “hacktivist” and her lover Amanita (Freema Agyeman), both because that love affair is passionate and touching, and because Nomi’s life is in danger unless she receives brain surgery. You may be more interested than I was in Lito (Miguel Angel Silvestre), an actor in Mexico City, who feels his stardom will be threatened if the public finds out he’s gay.
Sense8 is literally all over the map, and figuratively as well — it features a wide diversity of genre styles. The Chicago cop played well by Brian J. Smith is working in a fairly straightforward police-drama subplot so far — that is, if you can accept the occasional presence of Jonas (Lost’s Naveen Andrews), a figure who appears to all the main characters telling them variations on the idea that they’re about to be reborn. (Typical exchange: The Chicago cop, after Jonas pops up out of thin air in his car, says, “I’m losing my mind”; Jonas responds, “No, it’s just expanding.”) By contrast, the second episode takes a pause to stage an entire Bollywood dance number to illustrate the world into which Tina Desai’s Kala is about to enter in her new marriage.
One thing is clear: Sense8 is going to benefit from the binge-viewing option offered by Netflix, because the show has so many things to say about love, death, gender, family, class, geography, and the distinctions between entertainment genres that no individual hour captures what the series is about. Whether Sense8 will cohere as a unified whole by the time its 12 episodes are viewed is something we can talk about after we’ve watched them all.
Sense8 is streaming on Netflix now.
