I was really excited to watch Stan's original Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams but after watching the series I feel like they should have taken PKD's name out of the title.
After realizing they changed a lot of the endings to his original stories it made sense why the plots of the episodes felt misguided and confusing. PKD is a very clear cut writer, granted his novels such as Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep? are a little "Inception-Like" in that some things are left a little unclear but for the most part he has very concise and clear endings to his stories because he's trying to convey a meaningful message.
Many of the episodes of this series use his source material extremely loosely and seem to use the film adaptations of his books as inspiration more than his actual books making them feel more like general sci-fi themed stories than true PKD ones. I also can't help but think of Black Mirror while watching and it feels as though they're simply trying to recreate the feeling of that.
I appreciate the way they use 70's iconography and keep the future looking gritty and focusing on the negative applications advanced technology can have as well as the benefits. The bleak outlook he always had on literally everything especially relationships is also quite prominent. On a whole it sort of does feel like Philip K. Dick but it really could have done a lot better if it had simply stuck to the source material and kept the endings true to them. For instance "Impossible Planet" had a much better ending in his story than the show tried to come up with, I get that the creators want to have some fun but if you're taking directly off of a master and then only changing a few things around you're going to fail since it was already great to begin with, that's why it's so well known. As they say, if it ain't broke don't fix it.
After realizing they changed a lot of the endings to his original stories it made sense why the plots of the episodes felt misguided and confusing. PKD is a very clear cut writer, granted his novels such as Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep? are a little "Inception-Like" in that some things are left a little unclear but for the most part he has very concise and clear endings to his stories because he's trying to convey a meaningful message.
Many of the episodes of this series use his source material extremely loosely and seem to use the film adaptations of his books as inspiration more than his actual books making them feel more like general sci-fi themed stories than true PKD ones. I also can't help but think of Black Mirror while watching and it feels as though they're simply trying to recreate the feeling of that.
I appreciate the way they use 70's iconography and keep the future looking gritty and focusing on the negative applications advanced technology can have as well as the benefits. The bleak outlook he always had on literally everything especially relationships is also quite prominent. On a whole it sort of does feel like Philip K. Dick but it really could have done a lot better if it had simply stuck to the source material and kept the endings true to them. For instance "Impossible Planet" had a much better ending in his story than the show tried to come up with, I get that the creators want to have some fun but if you're taking directly off of a master and then only changing a few things around you're going to fail since it was already great to begin with, that's why it's so well known. As they say, if it ain't broke don't fix it.