Hiding in plain sight in your Netflix queue is one of the most original and complicated series you’ll ever watch. It’s called Sense8 and it’s really worth investing in. It’s a love story, it’s a murder mystery, it’s betrayal and treachery, it’s hunting and being hunted and it’s 8 people across the globe trying to survive because they’re …different.
Created by the same people who brought us Babylon 5 and The Matrix, J. Michael Straczynski and Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Sense8 tells the story of eight people who are mentally and emotionally linked. They live in South Korea, India, Iceland, Germany, Kenya, Mexico and the United States. They’re men and women who are live in wealth and in poverty. They have different professions: the vice-president of an international company, pharmacist, actor, policeman, computer hacker, a DJ, bus driver and a safe-cracking street thug. They have no physical contact with each other (other than the cop and the DJ) and yet they are literally on and in each other’s minds. They share each other’s lives, knowledge and problems. However, their chief problem is that they are being hunted by a Mr. Whispers who wants to weaponize their abilities. Their gift makes them a target for extermination, but it’s also the only thing keeping them alive.
The cast is good, but Korean actress Doona Bae is outstanding. You’ll remember her from Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending. She steals every scene she is in and fortunately for us, she is in many of them. The storytelling is too long in some spots and way too short in others. However, that is to be expected when you have a story to tell that runs for twenty-three 50-minute episodes.
Sense8 is not for everyone. I’ll be blunt, if you’re the least bit homophobic, some of the themes in Sense8 will smack your button so hard you’ll cry. On the other hand, it is 23 hours of compelling TV that is character driven and thought-provoking, asking more questions than it answers. As one of the characters says, “… nothing good ever happens when people care more about our differences than the things we share in common.” For this reason, we can’t get enough of Sense8.
