Should You Watch Sense8? The Answer’s About as Clear as This Show’s Plot
For a while I avoided watching Sense8. It’s a show created by a trans woman and her brother and another guy; it features a really diverse cast of mostly people of color; and it even has a lesbian couple made up of a trans woman and a black cis woman (Jamie Clayton and Freema Agyeman). It should’ve had me hook, line and sinker. But that trans woman who created it and wrote it, Lana Wachowski, comes with a lot of baggage, and by baggage, I mean “racist behaviors and actions.”
Before we talk about the actual show, I do want to spend some time talking about why I was initially reluctant to watch it. Like I said, Lana Wachowski (and her brother) have done some pretty racist things in the past. First, when they made their epic sci-fi film Cloud Atlas, where each actor plays multiple roles throughout time and space, they made the shockingly racist decision to use makeup to put actors Jim Sturgess and Hugo Weaving in yellowface. Seriously, it’s painful to look at pictures of the makeup from this movie. I don’t know how they thought it was okay.
Then, at this year’s Trans 100 event, Lana was the keynote speaker. Her speech started on a rocky foot when she talked about how, when filming this very show, she was in India and people stared at her hair (which is a brightly-colored version of dread locks). Trans POC attending the event started to get uncomfortable at this point. It got even worse when Wachowski tried to equate gender and race, and then started to seemingly blame Black Americans for holding back the rights of trans people. This pattern of actions made me reluctant to get too excited for this show.
So, if you know about those things and decide to not watch Sense8, I’m not gonna blame you. If you did watch it and want to talk about it, Aja, Gabby and I had an awful lot of feelings that we want to share with you.
There Will Be Lots of Spoilers
Things We Liked
Mey
So, Sense8 is basically a show about eight strangers — a white cop from Chicago named Will, a white lesbian trans woman/former hacker from San Francisco named Nomi, a Korean martial artist and daughter of a super powerful businessman named Sun, a Kenyan bus driver named Capheus, an Indian pharmacist and bride-to-be named Kala, a German safecracker named Wolfgang, an Icelandic DJ named Riley and a Mexican actor named Lito — who all start to develop a psychic connection. They start to get hunted down by this mysterious guy named Whispers who seems to have lots of money and lots of international power and who really doesn’t like the Sensates (that’s what they’re called). I think that was the plot.
The dialogue in this scene is literally “She said no problem using her back entrance.”
It was nice seeing such a diverse cast. Like, it wasn’t just one character of each race or ethnicity, they each had supporting casts around them. I especially loved Lito’s supporting cast and definitely Nomi’s. I even spotted trans actor D-Lo, an activist and writer who played a friend of Nomi’s who helped them escape.
Honestly, there are some good, and even great moments. Right away we see Nomi and Amanita having sex, I don’t think I have to tell you how revolutionary it is to show an interracial lesbian couple, where one of the women is trans, fucking on a mainstream TV show. A couple other early scenes with Nomi are pretty powerful as well. When Amanita defends her at Pride in the flashback scene and when she gives her own speech about her feelings about Pride, I was genuinely moved.
Ugh, look at these TERFs trying to ruin a great afternoon.
Gabby
The love thing between Nomi and Amanita hooked me right away. Like it’s already been stated above how revolutionary it is to see their love on screen, but let’s add to that for a minute. I hear so many lesbians, not in my Autostraddle groups, but like just out in the world, talking about how they’d never be able to date or love a trans woman. They talk about trans women with the same disregard and hatefulness that has generally been reserved for bisexual women. All of it is gross. And this opening sex scene between Nomi and Amanita was like a huge beautiful fuck you to all those hate-filled feelings and ideas about bodies and who’s allowed to be a lesbian and who’s allowed to be a woman, you know? And they love each other. It wasn’t just some curious, fetish-baiting fuck session. They love each other and I believe them. So I kept watching and you should start.
I wasn’t really sure what the rules were for what my screengrab could show from this scene, so this is what I went with. (Ed note: Nailed it! I even brightened it up for you!)
Mey
Another highlight was watching Sun kick some serious ass, and just be really awesome in general. I did like the show most of the time when she was on screen. I was already a big fan of Doona Bae, the actress who played her, from the awesome Korean Monster Movie The Host, so it was fun watching her be the most kickass character on this show.
Aja
Sun was one of the most perfect depictions of a tough, feminine fighter I think I’ve ever seen. Her performance refuses to even acknowledge the existence of a “fighting fuck toy” trope — she’s too incredibly intelligent, beautiful and lethal, and while I’d have loved for the show to do more than hint at her complexity, there’s no question it exists. On a material note, Sun’s baller shower is baller. I want her Seoul apartment.
Look at how cool Sun is.
Gabby
Also, can we give a shout to Capheus. He’s driving a van around Nairobi to stack up funds for his mom’s HIV meds. He’s got the best damn smile. Also, his van is called the Van Damme, as in Jean-Claude Van Damme, who sucks as a person but made the most amazing/ridiculous action movies in the ’90s. Capheus’ accidental rise to a super hero in his village is one of the best moments in this series. Like he’s such a dreamboat, I’d marry him and help him drive his Van Damme Van.
No one messes with the Van Damn or Capheus.
AND Lito’s telenovela action save-the-girl scene was my favorite. I know, I know. It’s against my feminism to like anything about this scene but it was still so fun. I’d watch his telenovela about being a gay action hero with a sexy nerd boyfriend and a live-in beard. I like when bad guys get their asses kicked, y’all.
Mey
I also kinda loved Daniela, even though I know her character and storyline is full of problems. She was pretty much the only part of the show that made me laugh, and the only character I really cared about. She was just so fun and weird and seemed like she would be cool to hang out with, even if she would fetishizie me. Lito and his boyfriend were pretty cool too. Maybe we should’ve just watched a telenovela instead of watching this?
Aja
Dani is a total babe, and she came in swinging hilariously and hot, with no regard for anything beyond her own immediate desires, and then they turned her character into a punching bag with the word martyr scrawled across it in Sharpie. Hernando is a dreamboat. He’s just a dreamy gay dude with healthy boundaries and positive attributes, like making homemade ceviche and having a conscience and digging cool art. He made me want to go to Mexico City and be his friend, and then they turned his character into one of these things: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. While I’ll never not love Lito’s bizarre pre-filming tics like going POP! POP! POP! or grinding sharp-cornered movie trailer cabinetry (which looks…painful), Dani and Hernando were highly enjoyable characters who didn’t need him, despite the show desperately trying to convince us otherwise.
Look at this cute, terrific, beautiful, amazing, weird gay/beard family.
Riley’s dad, Gunnar, was a lovely character. You can tell he’s an IRL musician, but in a good way. (I didn’t know but had a feeling after watching; then, looked it up).
Gabby
Sense8 is just so damn cool to watch. I’m not a sci-fi geek like Star Trek and Star Wars. I’m a sci-fi geek like The 5th Element and District 9 so Sense 8 hits me where I like to be hit, ya know? It’s trippy. These characters are shifting into each other’s dimensions and lives. There’s a huge mystery surrounding what’s happening to them and who they are; I like that stuff. Keeps me interested. It’s like Orphan Black but with a diverse cast, more sex, and a bigger budget.
Mey
I say that I love sci-fi, but I think it’s really more that I love sci-fi movies, comic books and books. I like the CW’s The Flash and iZombie shows, and I loved Agent Carter, but other than that I’m not sure if I’ve ever really gotten into a sci-fi TV show? So I think that was something I struggled with. Like, there were moments that I liked, and some parts where I was into it, but also lots of times when I just struggled to pay attention. I think I would have liked it better as a movie or trilogy of movies.
Also, did you catch Geena Rocero in the opening credits?
Yay! Geena Rocero!
Aja
I’d feel okay saying that I’m a sci-fi lite kind of gal when it comes to television; I like The Walking Dead and Twin Peaks, and I definitely enjoyed Lost, but I can’t get into a thing like Heroes, True Blood, or Doctor Who. Aside from more or less renaming telepathy linking an international ensemble cast by birth date, I can’t say Sense8 had any real compelling point (let alone something original to say in that genre), but what they did incredibly well was make it easy for the audience to bounce around with the Sensates in a believable way. That can’t have been easy. The most incongruous aspect of the show wasn’t being jarred by our characters switching up time zones and languages, it was the story lines they’d been given to work with, which brings us to…
Things We Didn’t Like
Mey
Let’s see which stereotypical characters we can check off: Korean martial artist? Check. Kenyan woman with AIDS? Check. Mexican drug lord (that’s what Dani was implying her father is, right?)? Check. Indian woman in an arranged marriage? Check. (Aja: Manic pixie dream girl with substance abuse issues? Check. White savior cop? Check.) Just having a diverse cast isn’t enough, you need to have well-thought out and well-written characters. The stereotypical nature of all these characters almost cancels out their diversity.
I also felt like some of the scenes with Nomi were a little cheap. Of course I’m going to cry when her mom keeps on calling her by her birth name, but that doesn’t mean you earned those tears. Watching those scenes reminded me of watching Glee’s episode “Rumour Has It” and crying for twenty minutes when Finn outs Santana. I was angry that a show like this made me cry so much.
Ugh, Nomi’s mom was the worst.
I had a really hard time getting invested in most of these characters. I think a lot of that was because of the script, which I felt was stereotypical, generic and had weak dialogue. I even found it hard to get invested in Nomi and Amanita, and that’s a lesbian trans woman and a black lesbian played by Freema Agyemon, my favorite Doctor Who actor!
Aja
I’m always going to be unreasonably hard on San Francisco-based characters, and I wanted to be impressed with this couple for obvious reasons but it was hard to wipe the WTF?! off my face after their amazing hospital escape scene. Also their loft situation felt more Oakland than SF to me, and Riese thought it’d cost at least $5K/mo. – I’m gonna bet it’s worth almost double that! With hacktivist bank like that, they could’ve at least used their superpowers to keep the Lex open.
Being a former hacktivist pays for a really nice apartment where you can have lesbian sex and make inspirational vlogs.
Mey
I felt like the violence was weirdly gratuitously graphic? Like, there wasn’t enough enough of it to make it expected, but when it was graphic, it was really graphic. That bothered me. I really didn’t go into this show expecting to see arms get chopped off right on screen, but they went for it. Like, I loved Sun and liked Capheus a lot, but that scene where he was fighting those people with the machete really was too much for me.
Aja
Yes. This. I’m so turned off by: heist violence, macho violence, save-the-girl violence, drug violence, gang violence, and especially combinations of three or more of those things and THEY HAPPEN CONSTANTLY IN SENSE8.
Mey
Also I think if you’re not into the Wachowski’s style of philosophy-heavy and transhumanist filmmaking, you’re not going to like this. This reminded me a lot of Jupiter Ascending (which I did kind of love) and The Matrix trilogy in that it was about people who think they’re normal humans but are really so much more and meant for so much more and it’s all about the greater connectivity of humanity and the universe and all that. In the end, watching this show was sort of like listening to one of those dudes who gets a philosophy degree and then just tries to tell you all their “radical, mind-blowing ideas” at a party.
Aja
That’s the perfect way to describe it. Like that dude, or the kind of dude whose main beef with Mad Max: Fury Road is that “they never eat.” Your brain has to turn off because it’s just met a person who loves the sound of their own voice far more than they love authentic, shared human interaction. It does feel a bit like someone sat around thinking, “How cool would it be if I could have multinational telepathic group sex with all my closest friends and we’d never have to talk about our daddy issues (seriously over half the characters have daddy issues) because we just read each others’ minds,” and then they make the mind-being-blown sound out loud like in a cell phone commercial. I’m cool, and would actually rather have gone to see Mad Max: Fury Road five more times for a grand total of nine viewings than have sat through Sense8.
Gabby
The white savior stuff gets a little out of control. But there’s not much I didn’t like. I’m in agreement with most of what everyone has said so far.
Things We Sorta Liked/Sorta Didn’t Like
Mey
There was way more crowning than I was prepared for, but maybe that’s radical for a TV show?
Aja
That was such a genuinely lovely sequence, but I don’t know that it needed all that crowning. I’m good with crowning scenes through 2025 now. These things were more baffling than positive or negative: The singalong in episode four. WHAT IN THE WORLD. (I really hope there’s a screengrab for this!). That the sensate orgy is my wife’s Achilles heel for cheating, apparently. “Maybe because they’re still where they are it’s not that big a deal.” Huh.
This part of the show wasn’t weird at all.
Mey
I was not feeling that orgy. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like if I was having sex with my girlfriend and all of the sudden I was having sex with four men, I would freak out, not get more into it. But then again, that’s never happened to me, so maybe I don’t know how I would react.
All I’m saying is that the change from having sex with one woman to this would be a little jarring, that’s all.
Gabby
The orgy was bomb. The fight scenes are bomb. I think we need to watch this show as a group so I can pull you all into my lovefest.
Overall, even if Aja and I didn’t exactly love it and just wanted to start watching the new season of Orange is the New Black, all three of us agree that this does signal some good things for the future of TV when it comes to representation. So, what did you like, what did you hate, what did you sort of like and how did you feel about that orgy?