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Reviewed by:
  • Sense8
  • Anna McFarlane (bio)
Sense8 (US 2015). Netflix 2015. Distributed by Netflix.

2015 was a big year for the Wachowskis, who brought Jupiter Ascending (US/Australia 2015) to the big screen and made their television debut with Sense8, a series made for Netflix. The output of the Wachowskis has never again reached the heights of The Matrix (Wachowskis US 1999) with its effortlessly cool philosophical nous and action-movie thrills, but they have begun to build up a coherent portfolio, even if the common theme of that portfolio is its dalliance with joyful chaos. While individual works, including Sense8, might be criticised for being muddled, the concerns they tackle reappear across the Wachowkis’s output. Their film adaptation of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (Tykwer and the Wachowskis US 2012) attempted to capture the commonality of human experience over space and time, while destabilising identities through actors who played multiple roles, some of them crossing races in order to do so. While the film was not always successful, its goals were largely clear. Sense8, written by the Wachowskis with J. Michael Straczynski, best known as the creator of Babylon 5 (US 1994–8), attempts a similar feat by bringing very different characters from different places across the globe into a unified narrative.

The first episode opens on a dark night in Chicago. Angelica (Daryl Hannah) lies on a mattress in an abandoned church, apparently in her death throes. But, as the scene goes on, we realise that it is not death that makes her suffer, but birth. We see the figure of Angelica appear to eight different people across the globe, her new ‘children’. While these people are all in their late 20s, they have been reborn as sensates, mentally linked with each other across space, and with their mother Angelica, who promptly shoots herself in an attempt to protect her children from a grey-haired man known as Whispers.

This opening echoes the Christian imagery often used by the Wachowskis since The Matrix, but the series goes on to complicate ideas about spirituality, identity and culture through its characters. The eight sensates are clearly chosen with the intention of imbuing the show with diversity: four men and four women, one of them trans, are awoken across the globe. The men are a police officer from Chicago named Will (Brian J. Smith); Lito (Miguel [End Page 149] Ángel Silvestre), a Mexican actor hiding his homosexuality through a fake relationship with his co-star; Wolfgang (Max Riemelt), a crook from Berlin and Capheus (Aml Ameen), a van driver from Nairobi. Among the women are Sun Bak (Doona Bae, veteran of the Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas), a Korean martial arts expert who struggles to contribute to her father’s business in a patriarchal culture; Riley (Tuppence Middleton), an Icelandic DJ living in London and Kala (Tina Desai), an Indian pharmaceuticals worker who has doubts about her impending marriage. The final sensate is a trans woman, Nomi (Jamie Clayton), a blogger and hacker in San Francisco. Her character may well have been informed by Lana Wachowski’s transition a few years ago, and by Lily Wachowski’s own transition, which was recently made public. Taking inspiration from the experiences of its creators has allowed the show insights into trans lives that many mainstream media portrayals lack, and so the show has been praised for Nomi’s portrayal with prominent trans figures such as Laverne Cox tweeting in support of the show. These different characters begin to cross over into each other’s lives and even take over one another’s bodies to share their skills. The diversity of the show is explicitly connected with its sf content. The awakening of the sensates and their slow realisation of their new capabilities, allows them to engage with their cultures and identities in new, pluralistic and freeing ways. As Nomi writes a blog about her mixed emotions towards Gay Pride, coming as she does from a religious background, she writes that ‘I’m not just a me, I’m also a we; and today we march with pride’ (Episode 2, ‘I Am Also a We’), drawing together the multiplicity of the telepathic sensates with the...

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