Sense8 - 'What's Going On?', 'Art is Like Religion', 'Demons' and 'W.W.N. Double D.'

The other kind of morning after.

With a four episode binge, I may get a little muddled here and I won't be distinguishing much between episodes as I give my recap. Sense8 specific terms are mostly explained under Will's header.

Capheus (Nairobi)
Thanks to the help of the 'Spirit of Van Damme Korea* Lady', Capheus is a local hero and the Van Damn is packed. His actions also bring him to the attention of the powerful Silas Kabaka, a crime boss who wants 'Van Damn' to work for him, offering a full regime of genuine AIDS meds in exchange for a simple bag delivery.

With Sun not in a receptive frame of mind, and not yet able to Share at will, Capheus is robbed, but through his own guts and running speed recovers the bag and thus passes Kabaka's test. He also gets to Visit with Sun and Riley, and it becomes apparent that of all the Sensates, he is the one most willing to just accept that this is what is, rather than thinking it is a trick or an hallucination.

While clearly not a gangster at heart, Capheus is drawn further into Kabaka's world because the crime boss appeals to his goodness of heart, by asking him not to run drugs or guns, but to transport his daughter to her leukemia treatments, shielded less by Capheus' as a fighter than by the anonimity of the Van Damn. The connection with the little girl - who wants to be Wonder Woman - is immediate and touching, but the truth of Kabaka is reinforced when, during his daughter's birthday party, Silas takes Capheus to watch him sever the hands of his previous top runner for betraying him.

"Do you come here often?"

Sun Bak (Seoul)
Sun finally gets to talk to her father, Kang-Dae Bak, who is trying to cover up the financial irregularities that the bank have wanted to talk to her about. With a little assistance from Will's police training she tracks her brother down in a sex club and drags him to their father's office. Kang-Dae confronts Joong-Ki, who has embezzled - and squandered - a heap of money from the company's clients and is about to be caught, unless - as their father points out and Sun is quick to understand - she, as the daughter of the family and thus overlooked in the public eye, were to take the fall.

This is a difficult decision for Sun. Her father and brother consider it a done deal, and because of this she is reluctant to take the fall. As they are both facing a decision, she and Capheus are drawn together to Visit, where he helps her to see that what matters to her is not that her surviving family are shits, but that she made a promise to her dead mother. Hence in 'Demons' she confesses publicly and, thanks to most of the money being unrecoverable save from her brother's nasal membranes, is refused bail, and in 'WWN Double D' is sent to prison, where she falls in with a group of women who, having all rebelled against their shitty male relatives see her as a kindred spirit.

"I pushed my father's wheelchair into an open elevator shaft. With him still in it."

She is assigned to 'female vocational training' and must learn to sew. When her teacher is bullied by the prison hard woman, one can not help but suspect that someone is going to be invited to stitch this sooner rather than later. Despite her strength, Angel appears in the aspect of Sun's mother to warn her of danger now that she is not free.

I realise I'm using a lot of images of Sun, but as the first few episodes were
heavy on Nomi's storyline, these are big on Capheus and Sun.

Nomi Marks (San Francisco)
Despite Amanita's pyrotechnics, Nomi is still in hospital, and Dr Metzger is keen to move up the surgery. At the last minute, however, Will is able to use his growing awareness of the connections that the eight share to pick the locks on her handcuffs and allow her to escape to the lobby, where Amanita gets her to freedom.

With the help of friends, they avoid the unmarked cars outside their place, but find it trashed and all of Nomi's equipment and journals stolen. Thus 'WWN Double D' sees them staying with Amanita's mother and putting together a black hat hacker rig with the assistance of Nomi's old hacker buddy Bug, a man for whom she - as the underage son of a wealthy family - took the fall in the wayback. Bug is an interesting and uncomfortable character, who having known Nomi as 'Mike' would obviously like to think of himself as an ally, but has no ability to do so and, needing what he can supply, Nomi has no space to call him on it.

Amanita and Nomi's battle cry is 'What Would Nancy Drew Do', so they clone Metzger's phone and place a call to his mysterious boss, Dr Matheson, who immediately realises who Nomi is. They also meet a survivor of the procedure planned for Nomi, a man in an apparently catatonic state. When Metzger interrupts them breaking into his place, however, the catatonic lobotomy victim appears with a gun. Moments earlier, Jonah warns Nomi that 'Whispers' is coming, and as the man kills Metzger and then himself, we see the mysterious man who came for Angel in place of his reflection in the mirror.

This scene had a lot in it to love; ironically more than the Nancy Drew movie.

Kala Dandekar (Mumbai)
Wedding plans move on apace, with only passing reference to Kala, despite her fiance's insistence that he wants the wedding to be a visible bond, and that he should be bound to her as much as she to him. This move against Hindu tradition is given a darker slant, however, when a monk at Kala's temple hints that Rajan and his father want to completely overturn Indian tradition and outlaw the temples. On a rooftop, and simultaneously in a Berlin Karaoke bar, she comes face-to-face with Wolfgang and a connection is made.

Haunted by this, but not sure what to make of it, she gets most of the way through her wedding, but then Wolfgang appears and tells her she doesn't love Rajan. He then reappears in 'Demons' and their connection develops. He tells her it was love at first sight for him and he believes it is the same for her. She tells him she is sure he is a demon sent by Ganesha to test her. Later, in 'W.W.N. Double D.', she talks to him about science and faith, and how she once, as a child, climbed into a float in the shape of Ganesha to look out through his eyes.

Aml Ameen has the best face. His smile is infectious, and his
scowl terrifying.

Riley Blue (London)
Avoiding her temporary flatmates' noisy sex, Riley walks the streets of London to her happy place overlooking the city to get high. She's sort of background in 'What's Going On?' and in 'Art is Like Religion' she only really comes in to connect with Capheus.

In 'Demons', Riley and Will make the first almost deliberate connection, although she retreats from explaining why she dropped out of their last link (due to a drugs shootout) to a cop. When the dealer Nyx catches up with her and tortures her to reveal the hiding place of the money and drugs she genuinely ditched out of panic, Will has a major freakout in a cop bar, punching out a couple of other cops as he Visit-Shares to get Riley away from her attackers. Her story starts to come into focus as she Visits with Sun and explains that she saw what she thought was one of the Hidden Folk as a child, who told her she was a curse on her loved ones, and thus blames herself for her mother's death. Sun encourages her to go home.

Riley hops on a plane and flies first class to Iceland, the first real indication of the wealth of her own background. "You are lucky," the Visiting Capheus notes; "Privileged, not lucky," she notes, but he urges her not to dismiss the wonder because of that. She is met by her slightly otherworldly father who plays the ukulele at the terminal, but over breakfast a barely-seen, perhaps-imagined figure tells her she should not have come home.

Wolfgang Bogdanow (Berlin)
Wolfgang and his partner Felix shift half of their diamonds to philosophical Jewish jeweler Abraham, whose mother survived the holocaust. Wolfgang gets a chance for a bit of development here, mostly by comparison to Felix. Felix is the fast-talker and thinks of himself as a dealmaker, much like Capheus' friend Jela, but Wolfgang listens and understands people; Felix wants to live large now they have money, Wolfgang doesn't want to change who he is. At a karaoke bar, Felix sets him up to sing 4 Non Blondes' 'What's Up?' and triggers the episode's set piece and one of the absolute standout scenes so far.

This conversation is also taking place in the rain, and the intercutting is spot
on.

His main appearance in 'Art is Like Religion' is showing up at Kala's wedding, wet, naked and full frontal; so that's something you don't often see on network TV. In 'Demons' he shows that his pronouncement that Kala doesn't love Rajan is not merely down to some egocentric assumption that she must love him. 'You wanted me to say it,' he tells her, and it feels like this is a facet of the Sensate bond, as well as another manifestation of his listening persona.

A long talk with Kala about faith and science leads Wolfgang to decide to travel to India. Felix is leaning towards coming too when they suddenly can't contact their buyer, but before they can leave, Felix is gunned down in a drive-by by the douchebag hardman cousin they sharked in the diamond robbery.

Lito Rodriguez (Mexico City)
Lito is seriously spooked by Joaquin, allowing Daniella to prove her worth by smoothing over a misstep with Hernando and drawing the odd trio closer together. In 'Art is Like Religion' he becomes distracted on set when he experiences Sun's PMS, becoming overwrought and hyperemotional. It's a bit of a caricature, but then I suppose he isn't used to it, and it's played for real emotionality instead of pure yucks, especially when Hernando has to talk him down when a Visiting Sun spooks him in traffic. He gets it together for a big action scene later, which is played out against a chase scene with Will as a full on gunfight, despite the deliberate presence of the wires for the stuntwork.

In 'W.W.N. Double D.' the relationship is really beginning to flower, but then Joaquin turns up and, in a struggle, steals Danielle's phone, which has pictures of Hernando and Lito together, because Danielle is really behind the times in terms of digital security.

Will Gorski (Chicago)
Will pulls in a favour to try to get to see Jonah. He fails, but Jonah is able to contact him and explain some of the basics of being a Sensate, in particular 'visiting' - where one Sensate appears to be where another is, even able in some sense to touch what is there, via the senses of the other - and 'sharing', where knowledge and skills are exchanged on a much deeper level. The former can be done intrinsically between the eight bound souls of a cluster, and with any other Sensate with whom one has made eye contact; the latter is reserved for the cluster. Through a mix of the two, Will is able to free Nomi.

With Jonah in federal custody, Will tries to track Nomi - including a tense phone call with her mother - and find out what happened in the abandoned church. The aforementioned chase happens when Will and his partner try to run down a witness, but end up in gang territory, Will's adrenaline apparently firing up Lito's perfomance. He meets up with Riley and they do a phone test to confirm one another's existence, and he is then drawn to aid her against her attackers.

'What's Going On?' (the episode is named for the lyrics of the core song, rather than the title) features one of the big moments of the series to date (and by to date I mean by episode 7). It eschews the viscerality of the fight scene from 'Smart Money's on the Skinny Bitch' and instead focuses on an emotional link, triggered when Wolfgang sings karaoke. Riley cues up the same song on her ipod, and it resonates through the cluster, leading to all eight singing in time (in particular Kala and Wolfgang.) There has been some criticism of the use of an American song for this universal moment, but I guess sometimes you're a slave to your audience and your influences.

'Demons' has a similar scene in the telepathic orgy in which Nomi and Lito javing sex at the same time triggers a shared experience which pulls in Will and Wolfgang. Will's apparent acceptance of the sudden appearance of sexy gay men in his mental space, despite his identity as a straight, white cop, is impressive, but the scene is more obviously service than the former, or maybe I just like musical numbers more than sex scenes. More poignant perhaps is Sun and Riley's moment of connection. "I thought I was alone," Riley admits. "So did I," Sun replies, but they aren't and - if I'm understanding the point of the show aright - neither is anyone else.

Meanwhile, 'W.W.N. Double D' - which I love as a motto - showcases just how good the show has become in the space of a few episodes at cutting back and froth between the different characters and stories, and at weaving them together (the main one I noticed this week was that the stolen diamonds were originally sold on the black market from Mumbai, with a possible link to Rajan, whom I guess might also be selling drugs to Kabaka?) It also manages a number of radical tonal shifts with aplomb, taking Nomi and Amanita from whimsically costumed housebreaking to deadly danger, and Lito's group from delight to desolation on a dime.

* I don't know if it's part of their intrinsic connection, but not having anyone mistake Sun for Chinese is a smart touch. It could get really old.