Character and plot details emerge for The Wachowskis’ Netflix series Sense8

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

As Andy and Lana Wachowski prepare for the Summer release of JUPITER ASCENDING, they are already at work on their next project, the ten episode Netflix series SENSE8. Previously announced last year, very little was known about the show aside from being a global tale about interconnected characters. That vague plotline drew comparisons to CLOUD ATLAS but now we have a more detailed idea as to what SENSE8 is all about.

TVLine shared the new plot description for the series:

The sci-fi drama will focus on eight people scattered around the globe who are connected by a shared — violent — vision. (Because it’s never a vision of kittens, is it?) Each episode — shot in the UK, Seoul, Mumbai, Nairobi, Berlin, Mexico City, San Francisco and Chicago — will follow the characters’ separate stories, even as one entity tries to bring the octet together and another tries to kill them.

Similar to ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT’s recent season, each episode will standalone but watching them in different order will likely overlap the plot in different ways, giving SENSE8 a more interactive nature than a traditional series. The character descriptions were also revealed:

closeted Mexican telenovela hunk, an Icelandic party girl, a German safe-cracker, a Korean businesswoman, an African bus driver and a transgender American blogger (a la Lana?). Perhaps most intriguing, though, are Jonas, an apparently magic African-American who appears to all of the “visionaries,” and his evil counterpart, Mr. Whispers

Like all of the ideas from The Wachowskis, SENSE8 is ambitious and original. The question becomes whether it can live up to that potential or if it will crumble under its own complexity. We will all find out when it hits Netflix later this year.