Author: Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy / Source: WIRED
The new Netflix original series Maniac stars Emma Stone and Jonah Hill as two dysfunctional loners who take part in a dystopian pharmaceutical trial. Fantasy author Chandler Klang Smith felt the last episode was weak, but otherwise she loved the show.
“The first nine episodes are my favorite TV drama of all time,” Smith says in Episode 335 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “And I would say that even including Episode 10, it’s definitely in my top five.”
The show leans heavily on dream sequences, which range from a Kubrick-inspired first contact scenario to an ultra-violent gangster showdown. That variety of characters and settings strongly appealed to science fiction author Rajan Khanna. “I’m always a sucker for alternate realities, and so it kind of fits into that vein for me,” he says. “The weirder the show was, the more I appreciated it.”
But Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley thought that some of the dream sequences felt out of place.
“The show kind of lost me with Episode 4, where there’s this—it’s sort of like Fargo or something—this lemur kidnapping adventure with gangsters,” he says. “It felt very disconnected from the rest of the story up to that point, and I felt like it just wasn’t as interesting to me as the more science fictional, conspiracy stuff that had come before.”
Science fiction author Matthew Kressel usually dislikes dream sequences, but found that Maniac ultimately won him over.
“Not all of the dreams worked narratively for me, but I really liked that the show was not afraid to use that to tell a story,” he says. “As I was watching it I was sort of iffy on it, but in retrospect, thinking about it now, I really enjoyed it.”
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