The Free Union

Your mother. You love your mother. You find her sexually attractive. You watch her by the pool and you masturbate.

What a quote to start off a series, hey? As with anything even moderately related to the work of Philip K. Dick, the name of the game is dystopian future. And the first installment of anthology series Electric Dreams doesn’t disappoint. With so many big hitting adaptations in the mix (Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly), we can say from first impressions that this one has flashes of Blade Runner in the sense that it hinges on a very much ‘us’ and ‘them’ premise.

‘Us’ in this instance – as in Blade Runner – are ostensibly the cops. The Free Union. I always squint when organisations contain words like ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ in their title. Remember the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea? A great bunch of lads. Democracy coming out of their ears. So this is a bit like that. The ‘them’ are a group of underground, ostracised Replican- I mean telepaths, nicknamed ‘Teeps’. One Teep, Honor, is picked out to help The Free Union find the titular Hood Maker – a shadow-y, unknown presence who has been developing, well, hoods that block the Teep ability to read minds. She is treated with disdain from all angles, very much like officer K in the year of our Lord 2049.

I won’t go any further than that and recommend you just watch the show. If you’re wondering what the regal fox stuff around the outside is about, there’s a passage in the show where Honor uses the phrase repeatedly to overpower a suspect attempting to block her reading his mind using the old pangram ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog‘.

You don’t see any visual references to The Free Union, so I lifted the basis of the design from a hand-drawn protest sign saying ‘Telepathy: Keep an Open Mind’ that appears briefly on screen. The lighting is murky, but it features coloured and non-uniform lines like this. Which sort of reminded me of a taste wheel.

So nuts to it. A taste wheel it is for no reason.