Electric Dreams: Season 1

Here's Amazon's answer to Black Mirror, a ten-part collection of stand-alone episodes of science fiction based on the stories of Philip K. Dick. Right away, the immediate question is of course, how did they compare to Black Mirror? And I mean, truly, I think the best episodes of this show would be lesser episodes of Black Mirror at best. But! That doesn't mean this show is necessarily worse than Black Mirror as much as it means that these episodes aren't necessarily meant to look and feel like episodes of Black Mirror. And that makes sense. Where Black Mirror is about - loosely - "what happens when all this new technology we all use and love goes too far," Electric Dreams is much more of a mixed bag of far-future space travel and dystopian weirdness. One episode's got a straight up pig lady - not the point of the episode at all, just, a completely inconsequential character is a woman with pig ears, a pig nose, and pig hooves, and it's sort of tangentially related to the episode at hand, so hey, cool, whatever, great worldbuilding - but yeah, Black Mirror isn't touching something half that campy.

The other obvious question is, how do these episodes rank against each other? And you know what? I tried to answer this question, but just couldn't come up with a definitive ranking - me, a serial ranker. None of them stood out as excellent, none of them stood out as terrible - hell, some of them didn't stand out as anything at all.

That said, here's my best stab at arranging these episodes into, I dunno, call them "tiers."

Solid, memorable, impactful:

"Safe and Sound"

"Impossible Planet"

"Kill All Others"

"Autofac"

Something there, execution maybe slightly lacking:

"Crazy Diamond"

"Real Life"

Meh:

"The Commuter"

"Human Is"

"The Father Thing"

No impact whatsoever:

"The Hood Maker"

Meanwhile, here's a consensus of all the Internet rankigns I could find. It's hardly even a consensus - every episode on here was listed all over the place on various lists - but I rank-averaged all of them across every list and sorted them for whatever that's worth.

1. "Kill All Others"

2. "The Commuter"

3. "Real Life"

4. "Autofac"

5. "Safe & Sound"

6. "Impossible Planet"

7. "The Hood Maker"

8. "The Father Thing"

9. "Human Is"

10. "Crazy Diamond"

"Crazy Diamond," if you're wondering, is the one with the pig lady.

Anyway, that's Electric Dreams for you!