The Peripheral – Episode 7 “The Doodad” Recap & Review

The Doodad

In Clanton, Ella Fisher is doing chores around the house when her eyesight wavers at the start of The Peripheral episode 7. She asks if anybody is around and finds Reece, one of Burton’s friends. She tells him to take her to the doctor, as she seems to have lost her eyesight again. As they drive away, Bob watches and follows them in his own car.

In London, after declaring she wants to stretch her legs, Lowbeer tells Zubov she would like to conduct her interview with the three people in the peripherals outdoors. Flynne wants Wilf to join them. Lowbeer allows it.

Tommy goes to the police station and asks to see the evidence he logged in after the accident. He asks about the weaponry the old man was carrying but the only evidence was his wrecked car.

Lowbeer takes them to a Met Police training facility called the Zoo. She tells Conner and Burton they need to go on an exercise. With a flick of Lowbeer’s hand, the debris in front of them turns into a tall building. The two boys head towards the building along with Lowbeer’s subordinate Beatrice. Lowbeer tells Flynne she has another test in store for her.

Beatrice tells the boys the rules. They need to advance from floor to floor while getting rid of all obstacles until they reach the roof where a surprise awaits. Conner asks if she’s human. She retorts that she’s special. The exercise begins with six armed guards being formed around them. They easily take them down. Beatrice says the next floor will have twelve and the third floor would have eighteen. Conner and Burton get ready to face the rest.

Tommy finds his car in a junkyard along with Bob’s Glock and the sonic gun, which he calls a doodad. Sheriff Jackson calls him to Corbell Pickett’s place.

Meanwhile, Bob enters the medical centre. He takes Reece down. Dee Dee tries calling Tommy but can’t get through. She and Ella come out of the doctor’s room where Bob holds them at gunpoint.

Ossian and Ash talk about how the inspector sampled their DNA. Zubov calls Ash and asks her to access the peripheral’s point of view. She refuses since the inspector would know if they were to attempt it. Ossian tells her they should be packing up and leaving. Ash replies that they would lose everything, including access to the stub and what’s inside Flynne. Ossian says it might not be worth dying for but Ash doesn’t want to run away.

Inspector Lowbeer tells Flynne about the Aunties at the Met — data sorting algorithms who found out information about her life in Lowbeer’s timeline. That version Conner didn’t lose his limbs. This means the R.I. opened the stub at least a decade before what they’d been assuming. She says the Jackpot seems accelerated in Flynne’s timeline and suspects the R.I. She says that Conner and Burton took part in the war as common soldiers without any haptic technology. Burton did not survive.

The Flynne in Lowbeer’s timeline got married to Tommy. The inspector wants to know more about Flynne, the one sitting in front of her. She asks Flynne to take part in a test where she will ask questions and Flynne must answer as quickly as possible.

Conner and Burton continue their upwards fight. They make it to the roof where Beatrice reveals the surprise — they fight until only one of them is standing.

Lowbeer questions Flynne. Her greatest fear is her mother dying. Her greatest strength is that she doesn’t know when to give up, her greatest weakness is the same thing. If she could turn back time and change what happened, she wouldn’t. When Lowbeer asks if Flynne would have her sever the connection between their worlds, she says no. When asked why, Flynne hesitates.

Lowbeer allows Flynne to ask her three questions. Her biggest fear is the past. It refers to where Flynne is from. The third question is whether she actually has the power to cut the connection, but Lowbeer avoids answering and takes her leave.

On the rooftop, Beatrice takes both Burton and Conner down.

All three of them wake up from their peripherals to find a message from Reece about taking their mother to the doctor.

Tommy reaches Corbell Pickett’s house. He follows bloody footprints to find Mary Pickett’s body and sees Pickett and Sheriff Jackson talking ahead. Jackson tells Tommy that Bob turned up here, killed Mary and stole one of their cars. He wants Tommy to arrest Burton. He makes up a story about how Burton and his friends got into the drug trade and crossed the wrong guy. When Tommy calls him out on his lies, Jackson tells him to step out of his fairy tale world and see reality for what it is, that they both really work for Corbell. When Tommy refuses to arrest Burton, Jackson lays out the consequences where Tommy not only loses his job but also gets arrested.

Beatrice gives Lowbeer her summary of Conner and Burton’s exercise. She says while Burton is predictable, she would turn to Conner for help. When asked why, she says she doesn’t know as the decision was made well below any level of consciousness. Beatrice declares that Cherise Nuland is here to visit Lowbeer.

Tommy sits in his car, frustrated about the situation he’s landed himself in. He looks at Bob’s Glock and sonic gun.

Burton realises something is wrong when their haptic technology can’t read Reece’s vitals. He, Flynne and Leon rush towards the hospital.

Cherise Nuland meets the Inspector. She marvels at Beatrice, who is revealed to be a peripheral. She then talks about how many koids have been made to resemble a missing personal connection, for example, siblings. She hints that Beatrice was modelled after Inspector Lowbeer’s daughter. Lowbeer asks Beatrice to power down and erase the last five minutes. She asks Cherise why she is here. Cherise says something has been stolen from her and she wants the law to help.

Ash and Ossian talk about stealing something. In their encrypted language, they talk about getting access to the bacteria. As Zubov arrives, they continue talking about stealing it from under his nose. Unfortunately for them, Zubov has decrypted their language and knows exactly what they are up to. He deliberates on destroying them or keeping them alive and then threatens Ossian’s life to get Ash to spill their secrets.

Ash reveals that Aelita planned to download the stolen R.I. files into Burton’s haptic implants, storing them in the stub where they’d be untraceable. But since Flynne posed as him, the headset transformed the data into bacteria that began to colonize her brain. Ash says they were planning on giving the data to the neoprims so they can burn this world down and build a new one. Zubov warns them not to betray him again.

Cherise tells Lowbeer that it was human nature, a natural tendency to act against the collective good, that led to the Jackpot. She makes a case against Zubov and the others for stealing the R.I.’s data about a neural adjustment mechanism. In the wrong hands, she says, it can be deadly. She tells Lowbeer that the stub too was created by the R.I. and it would be immensely dangerous once in the control of Klepts like Zubov. She wants Lowbeer to destroy the Zubov and the Fishers.

Ella finds out that Bob is doing everything to protect his own daughter. She tries to make him see the third option — killing himself.

Burton stops the car near the hospital and they all get armed. Leon connects to Reece’s body with the haptics, getting it to twitch. Bob gets up to check and Burton uses the opportunity to shoot him down.

Tommy comes back to meet Sheriff Jackson and Corbell Pickett. He points Bob’s gun at the Sheriff, drawing up a tale about how Bob could have killed Jackson and Pickett. He shoots Jackson with the Glock and then takes down Pickett with the sonic gun.

The Episode Review

From the delightfully fascinating Beatrice to the reveal about Ash and Ossian, this episode had a fair number of moving pieces. The peek Inspector Lowbeer gave us into Flynne’s alternate version’s life was thought provoking. What does it say about haptic technology that in one timeline it crippled Conner for life while its absence in the other led to Burton’s death?  Given this whole situation, the irony of Cherise’s dialogues on technology in the wrong hands is not missed.

However, while there is a mounting feeling of intrigue and suspense in this episode, the pieces are still not quite coming together. We now know about the bacteria in Flynne’s head but the significance of this stolen data, and its supposedly world-ending properties, is still unclear. The excitement that normally accompanies the second to last episode of any season of TV is woefully missing.

Like the rest of the show, Episode 7 is leisurely paced and packed with conversations — some scintillating but some entirely unnecessary.