Again, a marathon watch, so I'll thread the episodes together. In a weekly series this would probably be a poor way to review, but for a block release like Sense8 it actually works.
Capheus (Nairobi)
Capheus decides to step away from Kabaka's business, despite the fact that it will mean no more medicine for his mother. He makes up with his friend and partner Jela in a scene which contains one of the most succinct pieces of relationship establishment I have ever seen:
Mrs Jela: Hey shithead! It's motherfucker!
Jela: How’m I supposed to tell them apart if you keep calling all my friends motherfucker? Oh. It’s this motherfucker.
Sun Bak (Seoul)
As we surely all suspected, Sun has a chance to establish her prison yard chops when she trips the bully who keeps stealing her trainer's work. In the ensuing confrontation at the painting wall, she drops half a dozen of the bully's crew before the guards subdue her. In solitary, she receives a paintbrush as a token of regard from the other inmates.
Hope arrives in the form of her father, who explains that he has decided to come clean, having realised that his daughter is important to him, regardless of tradition. Her lawyer visits, and she agrees to let her father do this, despite the consequences for her brother. A day later, her brother comes to tell her that their father has apparently committed suicide in remorse and she attacks him, knowing that he killed their father to save himself.
Nomi Marks (San Francisco)
Nomi and Amanita are truly thunderstruck by the violence that they witnessed in the murder of Dr Metzger, opening the montage of pain in 'We Will All Be Judged...' They fall back to Amanita's family home, where Nomi and Will work the case in part of an ongoing collaboration between her hacker smarts and his cop skills. She loses her tools, however, as Whispers brings the heavy crew to their hideout and this is where Sense8 really gets to play with its concept.
Trapped in an alleyway by two federal agents, Nomi asks for help and Sun hops in with her usual extreme badassness, while Will provides expert analysis on the agents' tactics. Nomi then hops a bicycle until she can find a car. "But I can't drive!" she protests, before finding herself experientially in the passenger seat. "I can," Capheus assures her, and he can. This is a scene that could only happen in Sense8, and manages to top both the orgy and the 'What's Up?' scene for proof of concept.
Nomi retreats to her old apartment, having used Will's badge number to put out a BOLO reporting her last seen boarding a flight to Australia. Amanita finds her there - not sure how or why they let her go yet.
When Riley collapses, Nomi works to keep her off the radar, knowing that if she is discovered, Whispers will trace the entire cluster. Will joins her to work out what to do, but Jonas visits them both and tells them - prompted by Whispers - that Whispers knows, he is going to Iceland and knows that Will will not be able to resist going there as well.
Kala Dandekar (Mumbai)
Nomi describes the dislocation following Metzger's death as akin to being in a cinema where everyone else is laughing but you don't get the joke. This segues to Kala, watching an apparently hysterical movie with her family, but in tears from the communicated grief of Wolfgang. Later, she asks to have the wedding in her own temple, which prompts her Papa-gi - Rajan's father - to seek her out there and ask her to call the whole thing off. He does not approve of religion, as was noted earlier, and rather than see this as an out she takes umbrage at the attack on her faith and refuses to cancel the wedding at his say so. Before he can press his case, a masked gang deliver a run by stabbing, leaving him bleeding on the pavement at Kala's feet.
Kala gives her statement to the police, omitting the specifics of Papa-gi's visit. As he is in a coma, Rajan's mother feels able to ask Kala to pray with her.
Later, Kala visits the temple again and is greeted as the hero who lured the enemy to be killed. She rejects this, and Will steps in to help her run off the fanatics.
I'll be honest, this is the segment that is most dragging, and Kala only really kicks in when she interacts with the other Sensates, like watching Van Damme movies with Capheus or being all awkward with Wolfgang. In a way, this is because she is the most normal, and the only Sensate to show any significant revulsion of violence. Even Riley is afraid of violence, but not notably shaken by it, and Nomi's reaction is a bit of a one-off. This is made explicit when she watches Lionheart with Capheus and comments that the film is violent. 'Life is violent,' he replies, and while he is a good man with a heart as big as outdoors, that it his truth and why he is able to channel Sun without being wracked with guilt.
Towards the end of 'Just Turn the Wheel...', she asks Sun how she deals with emotional turmoil. Sun tells her that to seek to avoid feeling is to know death, and that she puts all that she cares about into her fists and fights for it.
Riley Blue (Iceland*)
Riley and Will share a moment, and a kiss; a touching scene nicely offset as Will's partner walks in on him. Getting settled in Iceland, she visits an old family friend, Sven, who offers to drive her anywhere she needs to go.
In 'Death Doesn't Let You...', Riely visits the scene of her childhood encounter with 'the hidden folk' and encounters Yrsa, an older Sensate who works with BPO, but does her best to conceal undetected Sensates from notice. She wanted to scare Riley away from Iceland, with its high volume of DNA researchers per capita. Ojnce one Sensate is found, BPO can then trace the psychic connections to others. When their meeting crosses with Riley's visit with Will, Yrsa derides love within a cluster a 'pathological' and a form of extreme narcissism. Learning that Jonas is talking to Will, she cuts the meeting short, telling Riley that Jonas is a hunter, working for Whispers to find new clusters. This seems odd given that in episode 1, Whispers was unable to interact with the visiting Jonas and told Angelica that he was looking forward to meeting him.
Riley next visits a graveyard, where we learn that she was married to a man named Magnus who once picked her up from school on a pony, before he died, along with their newborn daughter Luna. She discusses loss with Capheus, and provides the episode title: 'Death doesn't let you say goodbye.' She then attends her father's concert, but the music triggers birth memories for all of the cluster, ending with Riley remembering giving birth to her daughter as the car her husband was driving them to the hospital in went off the road. She suffers a violent nosebleed and collapses.
Wolfgang Bogdanow (Berlin)
Kala visits Wolfgang at Felix's bedside, and we learn that they were more than just working partners. Friends from childhood, with a shared love of Conan the Barbarian (seriously, this series has a thing about life-influencing movies,) who became brothers, not by an accident of blood, but by choice, setting up another important pillar of the overall thesis of the series.
Wolfgang's uncle visits and tells him that he must put an end to his rebellion; toe the family line, as he does not want to have to bury him.
Visiting a holocaust museum, Wolfgang sees various members of the cluster and has a rare clash with Will, who doesn't get Genghis-by-Conan references. Cousin Steiner visits Felix's hospital room and threatens to kill both Wolfgang and Felix if he doesn't get his diamonds. He arranges a handover and plans to counter-ambush Steiner, but is unable to get enough space until Lito steps in with an expert lie to put Steiner off his guard, allowing Wolfgang to take out Steiner and his thugs with a pistol and a rocket launcher, because the man has pizzazz.
He takes Felix from the hospital and secretly installs him in another, where his family have not influence, before going to deal with his uncle. Kala begs him not to and they kiss, but he says this is what he has to do, or his uncle will destroy everyone he has ever cared about.
Lito Rodriguez (Mexico City)
Lito is at first delighted to hear that Daniella has retrieved her phone and that Joaquin will not be releasing the photographs, but less so when she turns up to a late night meeting with a black eye to explain that in exchange for the phone, she agreed to marry Joaquin. This is too great a sacrifice for Hernando, who turns up on set to explain that he is leaving Lito, although he still loves him very much. "We will all be judged by the courage of our hearts," he tells Lito, quoting the film he is shooting and setting the title of the episode.
Lito gets drunk, insults a gay barman who hits on him and then visits a gallery where he had his first date with Hernando. There, he and Nomi discuss art and shame; his fear of exposure and the loss of his career, and her experiences as a shy boy whose father wanted him to 'man up' through the tried and tested method of institutionalised locker room bullying. Faced with his cowardice, Lito wallows in tequila and finally tries to end it all, but the gun he tries to eat is a lighter (providing a splendid moment of bathos at the end of an overwrought montage.) "Fake," he decides, like his entire life.
Inspired by his visit with Wolfgang, Lito makes a magnificent apology to the barman, then swaggers into Joaquin's place 'to get my friend back.' Joaquin begins to beat the tar out of him, but then Wolfgang returns the favour. As well as making a nice change from Sun doing all the fighting, it showcases a different style, Wolfgang having all of the brutality with none of the grace. Lito and Dany return to Hernando and the three are reunited.
Will Gorski (Chicago)
Diego sees Will kissing air, in one of the few lighter moments of 'We Will All Be Judged...' and then suffers through Will's conspiracy theories as his partner works some off the books contacts, partnering with Nomi to discover the existence of the Biologic Preservation Organisation, a sinister multinational who sound like they've escaped from the pages of the X-Men. He also finds security footage, showing the lobotomy victim receiving a package with a suit and a gun and suddenly seeming to come to life again. All this is too much for his captain, however, who suspends him.
Will revisits his dream of the girl being lobotomised, the girl he has been trying to find for most of his career. Once more she warns him not to look at Whispers: "That's how he found me." Jonas visits Will, who apologises for getting him caught. Jonas tells him that Angelica believed that love between members of a cluster was the purest form of all. He also reveals that all the members of the cluster were born at the same moment.
In 'What is Human?' they continue their discussion, Jonas suggesting that far from a new evolution, Sensates probably predate the declining empathy that has made 'normal' humans the most efficient killers ever. This is an interesting statement, as an increasingly small number of the Sensates have not killed anyone yet. They also discuss conflicting allegiances, which becomes important as Whispers prompts Jonas to bait a trap, apparently specifically for Will.
With one episode to go, there is a lot for Sense8 to wrap up, and it's hard to see how much mileage it would have as an ongoing serial. Like True Detective it is so caught up with the specifics that trying to move the same characters to a new situation would likely not work. I guess they could reboot with a new cluster, perhaps crossing over some of the original characters for continuity? That would allow a season which didn't have to reintroduce all of the old concepts, and given that it is the big set pieces in 'We Will All Be Judged...' and 'Just Turn the Wheel...' that are the first to really pull it all together, that could be a big advantage.
* I'm trying to be city specific, as no one country is a single cultural milieu, but much of Riley's stuff seems to happen in rural Iceland, with just the concert in Reykjavik (or possibly Reykjavik is even less urbanised than I imagined.)
Capheus (Nairobi)
Capheus decides to step away from Kabaka's business, despite the fact that it will mean no more medicine for his mother. He makes up with his friend and partner Jela in a scene which contains one of the most succinct pieces of relationship establishment I have ever seen:
Mrs Jela: Hey shithead! It's motherfucker!
Jela: How’m I supposed to tell them apart if you keep calling all my friends motherfucker? Oh. It’s this motherfucker.
Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to see Van Damn retire; the Superpower gang want him to hand over Kabaka's daughter to them for revenge, otherwise they will kill his mother. What is already a tough choice is made more so as Capheus reveals to Riley that when he was a boy his mother gave birth to his sister, only to be forced to give her up to an orphanage for lack of food.
In the end, he makes the only choice he can, and goes to confront the gang alone, fully expecting to die. In the absence of the girl, they produce a bound and beaten Kabaka and order Capheus to 'be a man' and kill him. Fortunately, this triggers another share with Sun, and all kinds of rowdiness ensues. Capheus flees with Kabaka with the gang in pursuit. Will helps out when Capheus visits and admits he believes he is about to die, but it is Capheus who faces down the leader of the Superpowers and brings Kabaka home to his daughter.
Sun Bak (Seoul)
As we surely all suspected, Sun has a chance to establish her prison yard chops when she trips the bully who keeps stealing her trainer's work. In the ensuing confrontation at the painting wall, she drops half a dozen of the bully's crew before the guards subdue her. In solitary, she receives a paintbrush as a token of regard from the other inmates.
Hope arrives in the form of her father, who explains that he has decided to come clean, having realised that his daughter is important to him, regardless of tradition. Her lawyer visits, and she agrees to let her father do this, despite the consequences for her brother. A day later, her brother comes to tell her that their father has apparently committed suicide in remorse and she attacks him, knowing that he killed their father to save himself.
 |
| This, right here, is shit about to get real. |
Nomi and Amanita are truly thunderstruck by the violence that they witnessed in the murder of Dr Metzger, opening the montage of pain in 'We Will All Be Judged...' They fall back to Amanita's family home, where Nomi and Will work the case in part of an ongoing collaboration between her hacker smarts and his cop skills. She loses her tools, however, as Whispers brings the heavy crew to their hideout and this is where Sense8 really gets to play with its concept.
Trapped in an alleyway by two federal agents, Nomi asks for help and Sun hops in with her usual extreme badassness, while Will provides expert analysis on the agents' tactics. Nomi then hops a bicycle until she can find a car. "But I can't drive!" she protests, before finding herself experientially in the passenger seat. "I can," Capheus assures her, and he can. This is a scene that could only happen in Sense8, and manages to top both the orgy and the 'What's Up?' scene for proof of concept.
Nomi retreats to her old apartment, having used Will's badge number to put out a BOLO reporting her last seen boarding a flight to Australia. Amanita finds her there - not sure how or why they let her go yet.
When Riley collapses, Nomi works to keep her off the radar, knowing that if she is discovered, Whispers will trace the entire cluster. Will joins her to work out what to do, but Jonas visits them both and tells them - prompted by Whispers - that Whispers knows, he is going to Iceland and knows that Will will not be able to resist going there as well.
Kala Dandekar (Mumbai)
Nomi describes the dislocation following Metzger's death as akin to being in a cinema where everyone else is laughing but you don't get the joke. This segues to Kala, watching an apparently hysterical movie with her family, but in tears from the communicated grief of Wolfgang. Later, she asks to have the wedding in her own temple, which prompts her Papa-gi - Rajan's father - to seek her out there and ask her to call the whole thing off. He does not approve of religion, as was noted earlier, and rather than see this as an out she takes umbrage at the attack on her faith and refuses to cancel the wedding at his say so. Before he can press his case, a masked gang deliver a run by stabbing, leaving him bleeding on the pavement at Kala's feet.
Kala gives her statement to the police, omitting the specifics of Papa-gi's visit. As he is in a coma, Rajan's mother feels able to ask Kala to pray with her.
Later, Kala visits the temple again and is greeted as the hero who lured the enemy to be killed. She rejects this, and Will steps in to help her run off the fanatics.
I'll be honest, this is the segment that is most dragging, and Kala only really kicks in when she interacts with the other Sensates, like watching Van Damme movies with Capheus or being all awkward with Wolfgang. In a way, this is because she is the most normal, and the only Sensate to show any significant revulsion of violence. Even Riley is afraid of violence, but not notably shaken by it, and Nomi's reaction is a bit of a one-off. This is made explicit when she watches Lionheart with Capheus and comments that the film is violent. 'Life is violent,' he replies, and while he is a good man with a heart as big as outdoors, that it his truth and why he is able to channel Sun without being wracked with guilt.
Towards the end of 'Just Turn the Wheel...', she asks Sun how she deals with emotional turmoil. Sun tells her that to seek to avoid feeling is to know death, and that she puts all that she cares about into her fists and fights for it.
Riley Blue (Iceland*)
Riley and Will share a moment, and a kiss; a touching scene nicely offset as Will's partner walks in on him. Getting settled in Iceland, she visits an old family friend, Sven, who offers to drive her anywhere she needs to go.
In 'Death Doesn't Let You...', Riely visits the scene of her childhood encounter with 'the hidden folk' and encounters Yrsa, an older Sensate who works with BPO, but does her best to conceal undetected Sensates from notice. She wanted to scare Riley away from Iceland, with its high volume of DNA researchers per capita. Ojnce one Sensate is found, BPO can then trace the psychic connections to others. When their meeting crosses with Riley's visit with Will, Yrsa derides love within a cluster a 'pathological' and a form of extreme narcissism. Learning that Jonas is talking to Will, she cuts the meeting short, telling Riley that Jonas is a hunter, working for Whispers to find new clusters. This seems odd given that in episode 1, Whispers was unable to interact with the visiting Jonas and told Angelica that he was looking forward to meeting him.
Riley next visits a graveyard, where we learn that she was married to a man named Magnus who once picked her up from school on a pony, before he died, along with their newborn daughter Luna. She discusses loss with Capheus, and provides the episode title: 'Death doesn't let you say goodbye.' She then attends her father's concert, but the music triggers birth memories for all of the cluster, ending with Riley remembering giving birth to her daughter as the car her husband was driving them to the hospital in went off the road. She suffers a violent nosebleed and collapses.
Wolfgang Bogdanow (Berlin)
 |
| This is not what is best in life. |
Wolfgang's uncle visits and tells him that he must put an end to his rebellion; toe the family line, as he does not want to have to bury him.
Visiting a holocaust museum, Wolfgang sees various members of the cluster and has a rare clash with Will, who doesn't get Genghis-by-Conan references. Cousin Steiner visits Felix's hospital room and threatens to kill both Wolfgang and Felix if he doesn't get his diamonds. He arranges a handover and plans to counter-ambush Steiner, but is unable to get enough space until Lito steps in with an expert lie to put Steiner off his guard, allowing Wolfgang to take out Steiner and his thugs with a pistol and a rocket launcher, because the man has pizzazz.
He takes Felix from the hospital and secretly installs him in another, where his family have not influence, before going to deal with his uncle. Kala begs him not to and they kiss, but he says this is what he has to do, or his uncle will destroy everyone he has ever cared about.
Lito Rodriguez (Mexico City)
Lito is at first delighted to hear that Daniella has retrieved her phone and that Joaquin will not be releasing the photographs, but less so when she turns up to a late night meeting with a black eye to explain that in exchange for the phone, she agreed to marry Joaquin. This is too great a sacrifice for Hernando, who turns up on set to explain that he is leaving Lito, although he still loves him very much. "We will all be judged by the courage of our hearts," he tells Lito, quoting the film he is shooting and setting the title of the episode.
Lito gets drunk, insults a gay barman who hits on him and then visits a gallery where he had his first date with Hernando. There, he and Nomi discuss art and shame; his fear of exposure and the loss of his career, and her experiences as a shy boy whose father wanted him to 'man up' through the tried and tested method of institutionalised locker room bullying. Faced with his cowardice, Lito wallows in tequila and finally tries to end it all, but the gun he tries to eat is a lighter (providing a splendid moment of bathos at the end of an overwrought montage.) "Fake," he decides, like his entire life.
Inspired by his visit with Wolfgang, Lito makes a magnificent apology to the barman, then swaggers into Joaquin's place 'to get my friend back.' Joaquin begins to beat the tar out of him, but then Wolfgang returns the favour. As well as making a nice change from Sun doing all the fighting, it showcases a different style, Wolfgang having all of the brutality with none of the grace. Lito and Dany return to Hernando and the three are reunited.
Will Gorski (Chicago)
Diego sees Will kissing air, in one of the few lighter moments of 'We Will All Be Judged...' and then suffers through Will's conspiracy theories as his partner works some off the books contacts, partnering with Nomi to discover the existence of the Biologic Preservation Organisation, a sinister multinational who sound like they've escaped from the pages of the X-Men. He also finds security footage, showing the lobotomy victim receiving a package with a suit and a gun and suddenly seeming to come to life again. All this is too much for his captain, however, who suspends him.
Will revisits his dream of the girl being lobotomised, the girl he has been trying to find for most of his career. Once more she warns him not to look at Whispers: "That's how he found me." Jonas visits Will, who apologises for getting him caught. Jonas tells him that Angelica believed that love between members of a cluster was the purest form of all. He also reveals that all the members of the cluster were born at the same moment.
In 'What is Human?' they continue their discussion, Jonas suggesting that far from a new evolution, Sensates probably predate the declining empathy that has made 'normal' humans the most efficient killers ever. This is an interesting statement, as an increasingly small number of the Sensates have not killed anyone yet. They also discuss conflicting allegiances, which becomes important as Whispers prompts Jonas to bait a trap, apparently specifically for Will.
With one episode to go, there is a lot for Sense8 to wrap up, and it's hard to see how much mileage it would have as an ongoing serial. Like True Detective it is so caught up with the specifics that trying to move the same characters to a new situation would likely not work. I guess they could reboot with a new cluster, perhaps crossing over some of the original characters for continuity? That would allow a season which didn't have to reintroduce all of the old concepts, and given that it is the big set pieces in 'We Will All Be Judged...' and 'Just Turn the Wheel...' that are the first to really pull it all together, that could be a big advantage.
* I'm trying to be city specific, as no one country is a single cultural milieu, but much of Riley's stuff seems to happen in rural Iceland, with just the concert in Reykjavik (or possibly Reykjavik is even less urbanised than I imagined.)
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