PHILIP K. DICK’S ELECTRIC DREAMS — ‘Crazy Diamond’ ✭✭✭✩✩
The best episode yet owes the least to Philip K. Dick.
This was the most impressive and entertaining instalment of Electric Dreams so far, thanks to the sterling work of BAFTA-winning director Marc Munden, Ole Bratt Birkeland’s gorgeous cinematography, and composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer. They all worked on the late lamented Utopia, which fans of that short-lived Channel 4 series will immediately realise.
“Crazy Diamond” also, finally, gave this anthology series major star-power with Steve Buscemi (Boardwalk Empire) taking the lead as Ed, a meek scientist who lives on a crumbling coastline with wife Sally (Hunderby’s Julia Davis). Importantly, Ed’s employed at the local “spirit mill”, where he manufactures “quantum consciousnesses” for implantation into genetically-engineered host bodies.
Into Ed’s life comes flame-haired insurance saleswoman Jill (Borgen’s Sidse Babett Knudsen), an artificial human who’s “failing” and needs Ed to smuggle out a container of souls to sell on the black market. After she injects one into her own body to extend her lifespan, of course, which is the same motivation as replicant Roy Batty in Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (best known as Blade Runner).
Jill’s a femme fatale type, tempting Ed into pushing back against the system and doing something exciting and radical for a change. Ed’s the kind of milquetoast schlub who takes refuge in restoring a boat, dreaming of adventure on the high seas, so Jill offers him a chance to live out his fantasies and profit by being the ‘inside man’ for a heist.
There are even signs that his wife, Sally, harbours a burning desire to do something that goes against The Man. She’s growing her own plants, which is considered contraband in this world because the future economy’s as fragile as the eroding cliffs she lives near. All of Ed and Sally’s fresh food rots within days of delivery.
There’s a lot going on in “Crazy Diamond”, which is often to its detriment.
It has more ideas in its head than the previous episodes combined, but the story would’ve done better focusing on just a few. It takes awhile to wrap your head around how this society operates, and the script never gives you enough time to fully understand something before another oddity’s thrown onto the pile. I still don’t get why half-pig people like security guard Su (Joanna Scanlan) exist in this world, when the “spirit mill” seems capable of creating bodies that are entirely human in appearance and only missing “a soul”.
And if those bodies need one of the quantum consciousnesses implanted, is the same true of the pig people? Maybe they do? I don’t know. A lot of this episode just wasn’t very clear to me, and while I like asking questions, I sometimes felt like the world-building was getting in the way of the story.
Quite alarmingly for a series built on the idea of adapting Philip K. Dick short stories, “Crazy Diamond” had almost nothing in common with “Sales Pitch”, which Dick wrote in 1954. That’s possibly for the best, as Dick himself commented in 1978 that the story’s not very good and he hated the ending. Still, writer Tony Grisoni (Red Riding, Tideland) threw almost everything away and came up with his own sci-fi ideas. And, lo and behold, the best episode of Electric Dreams so far is the one that has the least Philip K. Dick in its DNA.
However, while it was certainly preferable to previous episodes, I still can’t bring myself to rate “Crazy Diamond” as anything more than slightly above-average. Buscemi and Babett-Knudsen gave strong performances, it looked looked fantastic (with the familiar aesthetic of Channel 4’s Utopia making a welcome return to our screens), and sounded great thanks to Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s squawky soundtrack. But the meat of the story was a bit familiar and the overarching story didn’t go anywhere unexpected.
Maybe that’s why it was overflowing with random ideas, like state control, global infertility, entropy, implanted consciousnesses, and a subclass of chimeric pig people. When you actually push aside all that clutter, I think “Crazy Diamond” was distracting us from a routine sci-fi storyline (which Grisoni tried to punch up by starting events in media res, then flashing back a week). The characters also didn’t leave much of an impression, in the sense I didn’t care when anyone was put in danger, or have much of a reaction to Ed’s plight. And that’s despite Buscemi undoubtedly doing the material proud.
I feel like I’ve been very down on Electric Dreams since it began last month, but that’s because it feels like they assembled a lot of talented folk, with the goal of outdoing Black Mirror by updating stories a true legend of sci-fi wrote (no offence, Charlie Brooker)… but the result is less than the sum of its parts.
Maybe most of Dick’s short stories don’t warrant adaptation? Hollywood’s already taken the best ones and given them the big-budget treatment — with Blade Runner (1982) and Total Recall (1990) the high benchmarks — so are these tales the dregs? Even Dick didn’t rate some of his older stories, with hindsight, so maybe a series “inspired by the writing of Philip K. Dick” might have worked better?
The strengths of “Crazy Diamond” certainly suggest inspiration is better than pure adaptation.
Cast & Crew
writer: Tony Grisoni.
director: Marc Munden.
starring: Steve Buscemi, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Julia Davis & Joanna Scanlan.
