Sense8 — an exploration of what humanity could be.

*please note — major spoilers for Sense8 in this article, if you have not watched the show, please read at your own risk*

I have been umming and ahing about posting a proper article on Medium for a while. My first thoughts were to talk about my experiences in the autistic community but a detailed and completely honest take on a period of well over a decade that, at times, felt like flying through an asteroid field is something that I decided was not in the best interests of a community I still have ties to and care about. Or at least something I need to put on the back burner for a while.

Luckily, this year provided me with a much more positive topic to talk about. This year, I was able to finally hang out with these people properly:

Yes, it took me until 2023 to watch Sense8 properly. This is despite being hyped for this show since 2015. The Matrix is my favourite film of all time, Babylon 5 is one of my favourite TV shows of all time, the creative forces behind those universes combined should surely be able to produce something that rocked. Yet back in 2015 I did not have Netflix so I caught the first few episodes on other people’s accounts, definitely liked what I saw. Fast forward to 2023 and I managed to get hold of my own Netflix account and, of course, Sense8 was first on my to-watch-list.

So, what was it finally like to watch it?

Well, the first few episodes were a sort of re-watch, and I have to admit the show takes a while to get going. The first episode tries to set so much stuff up that it’s hard to really find any rhythm in anything. You have eight individuals, four male, four female (including a transwoman) based in San Francisco, Chicago, Mexico City, London, Berlin, Nairobi, Mumbai and Seoul, who start becoming psychically connected to each other. By sheer fluke we eventually find out that they were all born on August 8th, and the show’s wiki refers to them as the “August 8th cluster”.

By sheer coincidence, the first episode I remember really hitting me emotionally back in 2015/16 was the same episode I wound up watching on the evening of the local Brianna Ghey vigil in 2023. I remembered it well enough from first time around to know that it was exactly what I needed that evening.

There I was, still in female mode (because I still didn’t want to be a guy at that moment in time), munching on a Domino’s pizza and drinking red wine by myself. Plot is this: Nomi, the San Francisco transwoman and hacker has been taken into medical custody and told her brain needs to be operated on. Her transphobic parents are more than happy to go along with this but in the meantime Chicago cop, Will, is being warned by a more experienced sensate called Jonas that the procedure will leave her lobotomized and that he has to take control of Nomi’s body in the San Francisco hospital bed to help her escape.

In the meantime, Berlin safecracker, Wolfgang, is celebrating a big score with his best mate, Felix, and finds himself on stage singing “What’s going on?” on karaoke. Then we see every single member of the cluster singing along, sometimes appearing alongside each other, the tune seemingly reflecting everyone’s confusion, wondering what is happening to them but also, really bringing them all together for the first time. Given the headspace I was in at the time (and to an extent still am) “What’s going on?” was a good tune to be singing along to.

Oh, and after that, Will does succeed in helping Nomi to break out of hospital!

Regarding the tune itself, I’d always liked it. Prior to watching Sense8 I leaned towards the DJ Miko version (was rocking out to it massively in female mode at an LGBT club a month or two before I watched the show) but Sense8 gave me a new appreciation for the original, it just became a symbol of this group of characters coming together.

Nomi is probably a good character to focus on for a bit. In some ways for me she is the most relatable character of the sensates, both given her background in technology and her gender divergence. One of her more relatable points was the fact that she was the member of the cluster who actually struggled the most with being reborn as a sensate. This is because the trans community, like the autistic community, often relies on self-built identities and Nomi is initially scared that she is going to lose hers due to the appearance of all the people in her head.

When those people get her out of trouble twice though (second time around half the cluster bails her out, literally appearing alongside her to give knowledge and skills) she very much embraces being part of the cluster and her own skills become a valuable asset.

It’s not just her skills she provides but also her experiences as a transwoman. The show may have started up in 2015 but an early scene that would have been set circa 2010 showed an all too familiar scenario from a 2023 perspective of a transwoman being accused of forcing herself into female spaces. It’s only later on that we find that pre-transition she was assaulted in the male swimming pool showers as a kid. So you had an individual that had no reason to feel safe in male spaces but who people didn’t want in female spaces either.

The cluster member she relates the latter experience to is Lito, a Mexican actor, who is a closeted gay man living a double life, and whose boyfriend is getting increasingly frustrated at him doing so. Nomi’s advice? “The real violence is the violence that we do to ourselves.” Basically, it’s a waste of time trying to hide who you are. Advice my 2015 self would not have been ready for, I was still living a double life as a genderfluid individual back then. My 2023 self understood it all too well, living a double life eventually becomes more trouble than it’s worth.

The next character that it’s worth focusing on is Will. The guy that plays him, Brian J Smith, is actually the only member of the Sense8 cast I’ve met in real life. He was at a Stargate convention I went to circa 2010 as he played Lt Matthew Scott in Stargate Universe back then. In Sense8 he plays a Chicago cop who eventually gets suspended from duty because he concentrates on the concerns of the cluster rather than regular police work. By the end of season 1 he effectively becomes the team captain of the cluster.

This is where many Sense8’s more progressive viewers have an issue with the character. Will is a white male US cop and his being a cop is always portrayed as something to take pride in. I’m a centrist and certainly no ACAB but even I can understand how this portrayal can seem insensitive from a 2023 perspective.

Let’s face it, at one point, Nairobi bus driver, Calpheus, appears to him. We know that his bus is under attack from gangsters. He says to Will “I think I’m about to die.” Will’s response is “No one’s going to die today.” We then see him in Nairobi, in Calpheus’s place, shooting a Nairobi gangster at point-blank range! This saves Calpheus and yay, because we care more about Calpheus than a random Nairobi gangster, but after saying “No one is going to die today” it does look a bit off.

What Will displays here is what I would call “cop mentality” which is a variant of siege mentality. The trans community has a siege mentality. A lot of autism groups have siege mentalities. Police officers on both side of the Atlantic have also developed something of a siege mentality. A mentality that says “You have to prioritise the safety of your own people first.”

The trans community is genuinely under siege, there can be no question about that. I wouldn’t say the autistic community is under siege per se, but it’s certainly never been respected by mainstream society. Do the police have a similar justification for a siege mentality? Well, we certainly see that it’s there.

One of the first things we see Will do is save the life of a gangster kid. Most of his fellow cops (as well as a hospital worker) think that he’s crazy for doing so: “That kid might kill one of us some day and if he does, you’ll have to live with that.” Will brings this siege mentality to the cluster and, in doing so, he helps keep the cluster safe.

Yet, while I don’t want to delve too deeply into police brutality here, I think we know what police officers developing a siege mentality leads to. Dare I say if Sense8 was made in 2023, there would not be a police officer in the cluster. I don’t know how you’d bring Will’s skillset and attitude to the party otherwise though (as a private detective maybe?).

The thing is, if the ACABs got their way and police forces were disbanded, who would protect society from murderers, thieves, rapists etc.? The ACABs have this idea of community policing that isn’t accountable to the state, but I consider that idea to be half baked.

Why? Well, I am going to dip into my history in the autism community briefly.

Rewind back to 2015, I was giving presentations on autism to local police officers. The attitude from my late mentor was “the only way we’re going to improve things for our people is to get the establishment on our side.” I was also involved in a few autism groups. One of them had this guy who only briefly facilitated the group but even when he didn’t hold an official position in the group. fancied himself as a whistleblower and enforcer. He was more of an ACAB than I was and had no faith in the NHS either. But within that group he was someone who the more timid members felt would stand up for them if they felt they were being bullied by another member.

He was a good mate and had the best of intentions in what he was doing but, if you got on the wrong side of him, he was still ruthless. Fast forward to 2017, our mentor dies, a new facilitator and a whole load of new members come in and the new members accuse him of being the bully in the group, which he takes serious offence to.

He leaves (and is eventually banned), and some of the veterans who had looked to him for support and still didn’t trust the new management didn’t feel as safe anymore which led to further conflict.

This is just within an autism group which is relatively small compared to a town or city. If it proves impossible to agree on how to regulate a group even on this scale, then how are you meant to build a community police force that will make everyone in an entire town or city feel safe?

Fast forward to 2019 and I gave what would turn out to be my last autism presentation (lockdown effectively broke that team up) and in the last few years, from what I have heard from autistic individuals, it is as if the local police have forgotten everything I taught them about autism! I am also not that naïve in that I realise that in some parts of the US the trans community has already been effectively forced under house arrest by some ridiculous new laws, and I cannot rule out the possibility of the UK going the same way.

Yet would a community-based rather than state-based police force do any better at understanding autistic people? Would a community-based police force protect gender divergent people effectively? Quite frankly, I don’t have enough faith in humanity as a whole to be sure it would. Would rapists find it harder to infiltrate a community-based police force? I don’t know.

In that context, Will is as good a police officer as can be imaginable, he’s a good strategist, relatively sensitive, determined and protective. Yet he has more respect for the law than Wolfgang and Sun, for example. It’s certainly hard to imagine any of the other characters in a leadership role though Riley was good at stepping up when Will was incapacitated.

Taking a timeout from characters for a bit, you have the enemies of the cluster, BPO (Biologic Protection Organisation). In season 1 this is an organization that neither we nor the cluster know much about. The enemy we do know about is an individual called “Whispers” who turns out to be a sensate working for BPO called Milton Brandt. He sets the authorities on the cluster and turns out to be the main force behind trying to get Nomi lobotomized. At the end of season 1 he kidnaps Riley and forces Will to fly to Iceland, backed up by the rest of the cluster (he’s the only one physically there but the rest of them can give him their knowledge and skills) to try and rescue her.

He rescues her but makes eye contact with Whispers in the process which is a “doh” because that means that Whispers can psychically link to him and surveil him that way. To get Will and the rest of the cluster out of that hole, they investigate who BPO actually is and try to use the link between Will and Whispers to their advantage.

BPO turns out to have been founded in 1952 and was initially formed to promote better relations between sensates and homo sapiens (the scientific term for sensates is “homo sensorums” — they’re a different branch of humanity whose existence is known about by the powers that be but kept secret). The aspect of this history I have trouble buying into is the idea that the event that turned the powers that be against sensates, and different sensate clusters against each other, was 9/11.

Now anyone old enough to remember the 1990s will tell you that 9/11 changed the world. It broke the world that I grew up in. Yet BPO was founded in 1952 during the early stages of the Cold War. The reason for governments turning against sensates was that they were now seen as potential security threats, but why would the governments of 2001 be more concerned about that than the governments of 1952?

Either way, the August 8th cluster doesn’t become aware of the suspicion between different clusters till Riley DJs a set in Amsterdam with the hope of reaching out to other sensates in another of the show’s “beautiful” moments, in Will’s words. It was them deciding to stop running from BPO and, well, host a party. Slight problem, not only did BPO gatecrash said party but other clusters became suspicious of the August 8th cluster’s motivations, suspecting that anyone wanting to reach out to other clusters must be on BPO’s payroll.

They still manage to earn the trust of other clusters but as we are moving on into season 2 it’s time to focus on the main characters again.

Will absolutely hates having to run and hide from BPO…”I’m not a fugitive, I’m a cop” but for Riley it’s become a way of life. When we first meet her as a DJ in the London club scene, we assume she’s British but while she’s been in London for a significant length of time it turns out she’s originally from Iceland and she’s forced to leave the UK after getting involved with some dodgy geezers.

It’s only then we find out why she left Iceland in the first place…she’s the only one of the cluster who was ever a parent, albeit briefly and lost both her husband and newborn son in a car crash and was told she was “cursed”. If Will’s the team captain then she very much becomes the vice-captain if not acting captain in the early part of season 2 because she’s the one that knows how to hide. She makes Whispers and us think that she and Will are still in Iceland only for us to find out that all the Icelandic stuff in the background is fake and that the couple are actually in Amsterdam.

She’s also the one best at reaching out to people and her musical background certainly plays a part here. Even in the first episode, the rhythm from what she’s listening to in London inadvertently helps Wolfgang crack a safe in Berlin. Every major musical moment in the show is initiated by her, she’s the one that seems to connect people.

Calpheus is a bus driver in Nairobi. The bus he drives is more like a van, called the “Van Damme” as in Jean-Claude Van Damme, his idol. The first time we see him business isn’t brilliant. When the Van Damme is attacked by a local gang who steal medicine that Calpheus needs for his mother, he decides to go after them, only to have to beg Sun for help in fighting them.

Sun is a businesswoman in Seoul working for her father’s company and the business world in South Korea is portrayed as very patriarchal. As a kid/teen she used to take part in martial arts competitions but that side of her now has had to settle for underground fight clubs where she mainly fights men. Calpheus begs for help during one of these fights.

The result, from the perspective of everyone in Nairobi, is Calpheus appearing to pick up martial arts skills out of nowhere to beat the gangsters and get the medicine back. Of course, we see that Sun is controlling his body, and somehow continuing her own fight in Seoul. Bottom line though, it makes Calpheus look like a local hero and suddenly the Van Damme is a lot more popular.

Fast forward to season 2 and the guy who played Calpheus was switched out for someone else. I’m not going to speculate as to why, there’s plenty of speculation elsewhere and I don’t think how the character is portrayed is affected that much, even if his journey takes an unexpected turn.

That journey starts with an interview by a local female journalist in which she calls him out for his idolization of a white European action star who often plays white Americans. Calpheus says he admires Van Damme because, to him, he personifies courage. “So if it’s about courage then it’s about white courage.”

Now, I’m a middle class raised white guy so you can take what I say with a pinch of salt here, but the idea of “white courage” is ridiculous and Calpheus proves how ridiculous it is! He is a black Kenyan guy who idolizes a white Belgian guy. Yet who out of his cluster does he consider to be the “spirit of Van Damme”? Sun, a Korean woman who is nothing like the “muscles from Brussels” stature wise but her ability to fight at multiple levels is beyond question.

Calpheus must have impressed the journalist because he’s sharing a bed with her soon enough and I guess on that note I’m going to have to address the elephant in the room. Sex. Sense8 is sex-heavy, there’s no way round it. Will and Riley quickly become a couple, Wolfgang and Mumbai scientist Kala are in an odd triangle with Kala’s newlywed husband, Lito and Nomi are in their own relationships with homo sapiens partners and Calpheus and Sun have respective homo sapiens partners by the time the show wraps. There are also these psychic orgies going on.

These scenes aren’t intended to be pornographic, they’re intended to say “sex is part of human existence, deal with it.” Are they necessary? Debatable. I don’t consider any of the characters to be particularly hot, these are all people I’d want as friends rather than partners, you could have edited the sex scenes out and it wouldn’t affect my enjoyment of the show one way or another.

For those who are completely asexual, the sex scenes are outright off-putting. For me as someone who is simply in my early 40s and long-time single, they’re take it or leave it. Sex isn’t what I watch any TV show for but, for once, I’m happy that these eight characters all find someone special, and there aren’t many shows I can say that about. Did this have to happen for the show to work? Not really. The fact that they were able to “ship” all the characters without anything looking cheesy as hell is a big win however.

Going back to Calpheus. Well, things take an interesting turn when his new girlfriend persuades him to go into politics, and I was surprised that they went down that route. Yes, the Kenyan political establishment is portrayed as corrupt and an idealist like Calpheus would have been a breath of fresh air, but this guy is a fanboy, a bus driver, a devoted son, maybe even a local cult figure after his battles with gangsters but he is not a politician! I kept expecting someone like Wolfgang to visit and say “What the fuck are you doing? This isn’t you!”

Yet the cluster still supports him in these ambitions. We see them push Calpheus to the microphone during his first campaign speech. We don’t get to find out how far his political career went, we just know it got the attention of other Kenyan sensates, but it was an odd place to leave the character.

In the meantime, let’s look at Sun. Calpheus winds up returning a few favours by becoming her getaway driver effectively as she breaks out of prison. Why is she in prison in the first place? Remember how I said Korean society was presented as being so patriarchal? Well, she decides to take the fall for an embezzlement scandal involving her family’s company and goes to prison. Her father then promises to confess to his part of the embezzlement to get her released only for him to be killed, with her brother seemingly involved in his death.

The thing about Sun is that she seemed to set off the bloodlust of a lot of Sense8 fans…”beat him…to a pulp…” “let’s go kill your brother…”. I sort of get it, here is a woman who has always been told she has to be subservient and protective of the men around her, she uses underground fight clubs as her therapy, her brother in particular very much deserves an arse-kicking, but beating him up just when there’s a possibility of getting released from prison is really not a good idea.

Ironically, her brother, however, is the one who arguably comes closer to wiping out the entire cluster than anything BPO manages: he hires goons to take Sun out of her prison cell and electrocute her. The electrocution passes on to the rest of the cluster. Can you wipe out an entire cluster that way? I don’t know but you can certainly incapacitate them, and they are only saved by one of the friends Sun made in prison.

I guess from Sun we’d better move on to Wolfgang. In a way he’s Will’s reverse image, a Berlin safecracker and streetfighter, part of a crime family but his father was abusive and he’s clearly not tight with the rest of his blood relatives. If Calpheus takes inspiration from Van Damme, Wolfgang and Felix take inspiration from Conan the Barbarian. He doesn’t want anything to do with the family business, if anything he wants to show his family up, deliberately beating his cousin to a diamond heist, and when said cousin comes after him because of this, takes a bazooka to his cousin’s car as he escapes (with Lito having done a bit of blagging beforehand to set things up -“lying is easy, lying is what I do”).

Navigating the Berlin underworld leads Wolfgang to Lila, a slightly clichéd “femme fatale” Italian sensate. She’s cut a deal with BPO so that they leave her and her cluster alone while she sets up a sanctuary for sensates. She wants that sanctuary to be Berlin and wants Wolfgang to help her run it. Wolfgang has no interest in being King of Berlin saying that “We Berliners go to our knees for nobody.”

Cue what is effectively a psychic gangland-style rumble between the August 8th cluster and Lila’s cluster which ultimately ends in a stalemate. Lila plays damsel in distress as Wolfgang flees from the police.

Sun and Wolfgang are two interesting characters to compare. Both are fighters but their styles and motivations are very different. Wolfgang’s a street fighter, Sun’s a martial artist. Wolfgang fights to maintain his independence and get people to leave him alone. Sun fights…as therapy, as a coping strategy to deal with a society that won’t let her be a fighter. They’re the pair that seem to say the least to each other but also…understand each other the most.

I guess the only character we haven’t really covered is Kala. She sees her life as being in science and medicine, her family sees her greatest achievement as securing the hand in marriage of Rajan, the son of her company’s CEO, the guy every woman at her company wants -” But Ganesh, I do not love him”, not that she’d admit that to anyone but a god.

The wedding goes ahead but by then she’s already fallen for Wolfgang who psychically gatecrashes her wedding naked, saying “What the fuck are you doing! You don’t love him!” Fainting at your own wedding is a bit awkward!

Still, the wedding does eventually happen properly, and Kala then has to juggle her commitment to Rajan, her desires for Wolfgang and her science work, both for her company and the cluster. Yet given the mess she keeps making of not sounding crazy around Rajan, you would expect Kala to ditch her husband. Rajan even gives her enough opportunities to, but Kala insists on sticking with him even though she doesn’t truly fall for him till right at the end of the show.

The end of the show? Well, the episode that was meant to be the last episode of season 2 is called “You want a War?” The episode starts with the cluster trying to take down Sun’s brother once and for all, and eventually having to break her out of Seoul police custody. Once that’s done, things start getting messy for Kala. Rajan has got involved in a corruption investigation and tells his wife to flee to Paris. This is fine by Wolfgang who needs to get out of Berlin to avoid the heat on him so the pair of them hanging out in Paris sounds good to him.

Slight problem, Lila shows up and she’s cut a deal with Whispers. BPO agents swiftly show up, tase and abduct Wolfgang. The rest of the cluster move fast but other than everyone heading to airports and being ordered by Will to take blockers to hide their location from other sensates, we don’t know what exactly is going on until we see Will confront Whispers once more.

The meeting takes place in an interrogation room that we’ve been given to suspect is in London and the pair have only met psychically there before now. So both we and Whispers assume this is another psychic meet, so Whispers tries to “visit” Will to work out where he is “But you can’t because I’m really here.”

For a show that’s built on psychic connections, seeing the cluster and some homo sapiens allies physically in the same location is quite a flip of the script. Jonas, who has now apparently allied himself to Whispers, is also tracked down. We seemingly wrap season 2 with Calpheus driving a van through Westminster, in the back is the bulk of the August 8th cluster and a few partners and allies who now have Whispers in their custody.

The last words are Will’s: “You want a war? You got a war!”

Roll on season 3, right? Except Netflix will tell you nowadays there is no Sense8 season 3. It says that season 2 opens with a two-hour long festive special that wiki says was originally released in December 2016, the bulk of S2 was released in May 2017 and it wraps with a two-and-a-half-hour ep.

Of course, I knew going into this there were only two seasons of Sense8 but why cancel this sort of show? The short answer is money. A big theme of Sense8 is authenticity. Everything is shot on location and not like you get with a lot of sci-fi or superhero shows where somewhere like Vancouver impersonates some other city. If it’s set in Chicago, it’s shot in Chicago, if it’s set in Nairobi, it’s shot in Nairobi.

Most of the actors are from the same nation as the characters. OK, Riley’s played by a Brit even though it turns out the character’s Icelandic and the guy who plays Calpheus in season 2 is from Tanzania rather than Kenya but that’s still an impressive effort. On top of that, Nomi’s actually played by a trans actress.

Authenticity in the show also means the characters being authentic to themselves. In Lito’s case, this new-found authenticity costs him his acting career in Mexico, we end the show with him possibly on the path to a comeback as a character actor in Hollywood, but we don’t get to see how far that goes.

Ironically though, some critics say that authenticity is something that the show does not have, that the characters don’t feel real to them. What is reality to them though?

I am a disabled Brit. I doubt I’ll ever watch “I, Daniel Blake” though because, if anything, I’ve seen and heard too much of what that film is meant to portray in real life.

Regarding Sense8, there is enough in the show that feels real to me. I’ve already covered how Nomi is relatable due to her gender divergence. Thinking about it a bit more, the wider sensate network we see portrayed reminds me a lot of the autistic community. At its best it is awesome, but it also contains some slightly dodgy people as well as some outright villains.

The only nitpick I can make along these lines is that I don’t remember seeing a single disabled character. Now fine, as a disabled individual I don’t particularly respect my body, but it is a part of me. Having some idea of what I could contribute to a cluster would be nice.

Yet I do sometimes wonder how much “reality” people want. To me reality includes finding it increasingly hard to connect to people properly, being in my early 40s and having to make peace with the fact that no matter what gender I am, I’m not going to find anyone special, getting caught in the middle of fights between friends, friendships ending over politics and a constant sense of vulnerability at multiple levels. You don’t know if you can rely on police or health services to support you anymore. Who in their right mind wants to see more of that than what they’re already seeing?

Either way, 2017 saw Sense8 fans hammer Netflix into trying to get the show up and running once again. In terms of getting a season 3, they failed but they did manage to get this two-and-a-half-hour ep which was released in June 2018 — “Amor Vincit Omnia”.

Amor Vincit Omnia is a weird one to watch in a way. First up, it has the cluster interacting with each other physically more often than psychically, largely based out of Paris as they first work out how to free Wolfgang from BPO’s clutches while interrogating Whispers and trying to get to the bottom of Jonas’s seeming betrayal. You then get increasingly more of their homo sapiens allies (including Rajan!) showing up to help out and trying to understand what’s going on.

Then things take a twist when Lila shows up again when she gets involved in the exchange of Whispers and Wolfgang in a night club. The exchange does not go to plan and Lila makes off with Whispers and disappears.

What’s Lila’s plan? Well, she still wants her sensate sanctuary and if she can’t have it in Berlin, she’ll build it in her home city of Naples. She delivers Whispers to BPO so she can get her sanctuary. Of course this would basically ghettoize sensates and leave any sensate that can’t get to Naples at BPO’s mercy and so the August 8th cluster have to go to Naples to kick her arse.

The journey to Naples gives us one last great bonding scene with our cluster with the Depeche Mode tune “I feel you” and this time all the homo sapiens allies travelling with them are invited to the party because of headphones! Hearing this tune had me flash back to 2008 when I first heard it when I was still trying to work my female self out, she was active online at the time but that was really about it but yes, she was a presence even back then that I couldn’t ignore.

Likewise, sensates can’t ignore the others in their cluster and here they embrace each other for one last time before storming their enemy’s home city.

Once in Naples even more homo sapiens allies show up, leading to an expanded cluster that storms Lila’s fortress and the action wraps with Wolfgang using a rocket launcher to destroy the helicopter she’s trying to escape in with the BPO chairman.

That’s not the end of the show though. One of the new allies the team makes within BPO turns out to be the daughter of its original founder. She also turns out to be a French government minister.

Switching to another brief character study for a minute, Amanita is Nomi’s pre-established girlfriend. She’s played by Freema Agyeman who is best known for playing Martha Jones in Doctor Who. Yes, a British actress playing an American woman, no idea how that happened. Anyway, Amanita proves to be the best ally imaginable to Nomi, both as a transwoman and a sensate.

It seems she has a thing for the Eifel Tower, so strings are pulled so that the biggest, coolest wedding and wedding party imaginable happens in the Eifel Tower and pretty much every character we’ve come to know is invited. It’s seen as a symbol of a renewed accord between sensates and homo sapiens.

The show wraps with one last psychic orgy with even the homo-sapiens partners somehow getting involved.

The last line goes to Rajan (by now officially sharing Kala with Wolfgang in a threesome) “I never imagined such a thing was possible.”

That line probably sums up ”Amor Vincit Omnia”, an insanely paced two and a half hours that still doesn’t do justice to what could have been done with a full third season. We are not given time to answer some questions properly. Does Will ever return to Chicago PD and if not, where does his life go from here? Do he and Riley settle in Chicago or elsewhere? Does Lito’s Hollywood career get off the ground? What about Calpheus’s political career? Does Sun return to the business world (given that her brother gets arrested by the end of season 2)?

It also sums up a show that despite the nits that can be picked, works on so many levels. I can’t remember the last time I bonded with a group of fictional characters to this extent, living every moment with them. They proved to be the perfect escape from this broken world. These are the ideal group of humans in some ways, both racially diverse and philosophically diverse but they understand each other and don’t see each other as threats.

I can’t imagine them ever making a direct sequel centered round the August 8th cluster though, but I’d be curious about anything else set in this universe. A show set around a new cluster in 2023, mentored by Riley and Will? A show about the events of 1952 and the founding of BPO?

Anyway, even for me the ride is over now but still, to everyone concerned, thank you very much.