Sense8 Season 1 Review

The Wachowskis are laying the seeds for a gargantuan tale in the first three episodes, one that will need much more than the greenlit 12 episodes to unfold in an organic fashion. Hell, it might need a full six seasons, Lost-style, to get where it’s going without feeling somewhat cramped. And even then, it may not be worth the wait. That’s just not a question anyone can answer yet. It’s up to Netflix whether the Wachowskis get there. But rest assured, this is the kind of story that the directors could never tell on the big screen. It doesn’t just feature some of the themes that the pair’s past works have touched upon – it highlights all of them, in a sometimes jarringly direct and detailed manner.

For one, Sense8 displays a remarkably strong LGBT bent (no doubt prioritized by the two, given that Lana Wachowski has transitioned from male to female and become a vocal spokeswoman for transgender individuals over the past decade). It loudly champions the cause of personal identity and being comfortable with oneself in any form. Nomi’s narrative feels a touch more emotional than the others, and it’s obvious that the story of a trans woman fighting for her right to self-determine how she identifies holds personal significance to the creators. Sense8 doesn’t stop there, though –  with poverty, racism, sexism, depression, suicide, police brutality and more hot-button topics on the agenda, the show feels like it’s wielding a ten-page checklist of modern human crises.

Sometimes, that’s a little exhausting to watch. The show’s pilot is one of the most scattered in recent memory, struggling to hit every note at once and nailing not a single one. The acting isn’t as convincing as it needs to be, and some of the stories are fired up so abruptly that they could induce whiplash in less engaged viewers. The latter two installments are much stronger, peering into the swamp of plot points and beginning to trace the ways in which they’ll eventually connect. Sense8 is without a doubt Netflix’s most drifting and dreamy series, and the jury’s still out on whether its reach will dramatically exceed its grasp. What’s clear is that if what the Wachowskis have started turns out to be a failure, it will be one for the ages. But though its first steps are admittedly more than a little shaky, Sense8 stays far short of falling on its face.

No one could ever accuse the show’s creators of lacking ambition, and that’s what’s really, more than anything else, splayed out across every frame of Sense8 – striking, spellbinding, quite possibly screw-loose ambition. Watching the show feels like observing two extreme pointillist painters as they labor in tandem across an impossibly large canvas, breathing heavily but never once tearing their eyes from the blank space in front of them. In Sense8, the pair are executing a complex, tangled vision that merges philosophy, social commentary and sci-fi adventure into something that may have never been successfully carried out on the small screen: a grandiose, hyperlink epic about nothing less than the inexplicable intricacy of human existence. And for any critique of the Wachowskis’ new series to hold water, we’ve got to let them take it somewhere first.