Imagine discovering a perfect replica of yourself or a field in which tractors float like hovercrafts. Now, imagine scenes so dull one can almost hear the extras yawning, and you will have some idea of how Amazon’s newest sci-fi series squanders its potential.
Adapted from a book by Swedish artist Simon Stalenhag, Tales from the Loop concerns the goings-on of a company town built over “the Eclipse,” an extraterrestrial ball rolled straight from the pages of Michael Crichton’s Sphere. Tending the enigmatic object are the employees of the Mercer Center for Experimental Physics, or the MCEP, the corporate mission of which is no less than “to unlock and explore the mysteries of the universe.” Though each of the series’s episodes brings a different character to the forefront (in the style of Lost or Orange is the New Black), “the Loop,” as MCEP’s facility is colloquially known, provides the show’s connective tissue in the form of the unexplainable phenomena that punctuate residents’ lives. Snow rises from an abandoned shack instead of falling. Time travel is so common it ought to come with a taximeter. For a lab in midcentury, semirural Ohio, this is one bizarre workplace.
Like most of the prestige dramas in its class, Tales from the Loop is exquisitely acted and filmed, with winning performances by Rebecca Hall and Jonathan Pryce and cinematography reminiscent of late-stage Terrence Malick. Less satisfying is the writing, primarily because showrunner Nathaniel Halpern seems determined to resist the genre flourishes that have made Stranger Things, television’s other saga of interdimensional intrigue, so much fun. Whereas the Hawkins, Indiana, of Netflix’s megahit is a minefield of evil white guys in lab coats, Halpern’s Mercer contains, through the three nonsequential episodes screened for critics, no one who could even be described as mean. The result is a supernatural drama in which the plotlines feel almost comically pedestrian. Yes, magical echo chambers and visitors from other realms cause occasional problems, but they’re nothing to lose one’s cool over. Especially when everyone in sight is so oddly, irrationally relaxed.
Of the episodes I’ve seen, the strongest by far is the pilot, “Loop,” in which Hall’s Loretta Willard confronts a younger version of herself whom “the Eclipse” has inexplicably summoned into the present. Playing opposite the talented child actor Abby Ryder Fortson (Ant-Man), Hall conjures the older Willard’s apprehension and grief with flawless technical skill, yet even her excellence as a performer can’t make up for the show’s refusal to engage with its own questions. How does young Willard, for example, not recognize that something is amiss on finding herself 30 years in the future? If old and young Willard now share a dimension, shouldn’t one of them be wondering why the neighborhood looks so different? Though seemingly minor, such errors strike at the very heart of the series’s ability to engage its audience. If the characters aren’t curious about how “the Eclipse” works and what its existence means, why should viewers be?
So indifferent is the show to the possibilities of its premise, in fact, that subsequent episodes struggle to justify their place in a paranormal universe at all. “Echo Sphere,” a tedious meditation on human mortality, spends so little time at the “mysterious structure” described in Amazon’s synopsis that I nearly wrote to the press office to ask about deleted scenes. “Parallel,” an alternate-dimension yarn that might have pondered the nature of identity, time, and matter, exhausts itself instead on the problem of who gets to sleep with the handsome foreigner. While other installments were unavailable at the time of this writing, one can imagine their story arcs easily enough. An intergalactic wormhole complicates a fast-food order. A husband and wife bicker about housework while the sky rains fire.
If Stranger Things’s imperfections have been veiled in part by the charm of its nostalgic setting, Tales from the Loop benefits, alas, from no such luck. Ostensibly set in 1953 (Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika is playing at the local movie house), the show does much with rotary phones but equips its characters with desktop computers, as well. Split-level houses abound, but so do anachronistically liberal attitudes toward sexuality and the environment, as when an uncloseted gay character bikes to work in order to “do [his] part” for the planet.
Where Halpern’s many technical props are concerned, similar confusion reigns. A number of the series’s robots and gadgets look like something out of the original Star Wars trilogy, while others are so strikingly reminiscent of Amazon’s Echo Dot one suspects the producers had a kind of ham-fisted product placement in mind. The result of such seeming contradictions is a program that isn’t sure where or when it is set. Though the show’s emotional identity feels well developed, its physical and intellectual spaces are incompletely mapped. In a sci-fi series, the latter is often more important.
Whether 2020’s homebound television viewers will flock to Amazon’s latest offering remains to be seen, but those who do will find something odd indeed. Beautiful and dull, stylish yet hopelessly lost, Tales from the Loop may be the highbrow disaster of the year.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
