The Electric State premiered on Netflix over the weekend, and… well, it’s not great. Joe and Anthony Russo’s latest sci-fi action movie loosely adapts writer-illustrator Simon Stålenhag’s 2018 illustrated novel of the same name, but failed to inspire the kind of quiet reverence and wonder as its source material. For all the grandiose special effects and the exorbitant budget poured into its production, the Russo brothers’ film is, as Polygon’s own review puts it, “devoid of majesty.” It certainly doesn’t help that the previous adaptation of Stålenhag’s work, 2020’s Tales from the Loop, is a bona fide masterpiece.
Based on the 2014 illustrated novel, the eight-episode miniseries by writer-showrunner Nathaniel Halpern (Legion) and executive produced by Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, The Batman) centers on the citizens of Mercer, Ohio, a fictional town built adjacent to the underground research facility known colloquially as the Loop.
Told as an anthology, Tales from the Loop revolves around the intersecting lives of a small handful of characters, most of whom are related to one another. It’s a soft sci-fi series whose priorities lie not in loud whiz-bang special effects or climactic confrontations, but in the more quiet, subdued lessons of ordinary life refracted through the prism of speculative science and technology.
Take for example the fourth episode, “Echo Sphere.” Throughout the series, audiences learn that several of the astonishing scientific discoveries seen in the town of Mercer are the product of the work of the Mercer Center for Experimental Physics, while dozens more anomalous wonders are scattered around the town’s periphery, their origins unknown. The episode centers on Russ (Jonathan Pryce), the enigmatic founder of the Loop, who takes his grandson Cole (Duncan Joiner) to see one of these aforementioned relics. The “echo sphere” can predict how many decades a person will live by how many echoes can be heard after they speak into it. When Cole shouts, the sphere approximates he has about another six decades ahead of him, but when Russ meekly utters a “hello,” the pair is greeted with little more than deafening silence. Life is long, until it isn’t.
Photo: Jan Thijs/Amazon Studios
The closest analog to the series’ human-centric take on science-fiction isn’t Black Mirror, The Expanse, or even Stålenhag’s own original novel, but Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1989 television miniseries Dekalog, which explores the inner lives and daily dilemmas of a community of neighbors residing in a Polish housing project. If that comparison sounds like a stretch at a glance, it isn’t; Reeves himself cited Kieślowski’s miniseries as one of the principal inspirations behind Tales from the Loop’s conception.
“There is something about each of them being these separate ruminations on the commandments, and they’re held together by this one holder, this one box, but each of those stories is a separate experience,” Reeves said in an interview with IndieWire. “And I think that in our own small little way, this idea of a sci-fi show that came from this very unexpected path […] it’s just a unique experience. I don’t know if I’ll ever be involved in anything quite like it again.”
The result is a show that epitomizes Kierkegaard’s oft-quoted yet seldom understood saying, “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” Tales from the Loop is a story about how, no matter how hard we might try, there are questions in the universe for which there are no answers. Instead, it’s the process of learning to live with and love the questions themselves that ultimately sets us free from them.
If you enjoy thoughtful, emotionally riveting science fiction like 2021’s Station Eleven, I urge you to set aside the time to watch through Tales from the Loop. Unlike The Electric State, it perfectly captures the spirit of Stålenhag’s original art while bringing something to the source material that’s entirely its own. What at first might appear to be a pointillist collection of stories, when viewed in close proximity, forms a satisfying whole. Or, to put it another way, a perfect loop.
Tales from the Loop is available to stream on Prime Video.
Content shared from www.polygon.com.