It can feel impossible to escape the unrelenting coronavirus news cycle now. Push notifications from news apps, social media updates, and daily Covid-19 discussions with family, friends, and work colleagues can feel overwhelming.
Finding distractions during this uniquely difficult time, then, is vital to maintain a sense of normality and break up the deluge of bad news. With lockdowns enforced across the globe, many of us have turned to television as part of our new daily routine. In a way, it’s unsurprising that we’re adding small screen downtime into their schedules – TV productions are becoming movie-esque in their scale and, as more streaming services enter the arena, there’s more choice on offer than ever before.
Above all others, it’s sci-fi shows to watch that gifts us the best form of Covid-19 escapism. Through its exploration of parallel universes, scientific and technological advancements, time travel, space traversal, and the distant or very near future, science fiction can tell stories that other genres can’t and delivers a welcome respite from the seemingly never-ending talk of a pandemic.
“There are some shows you watch and forget.
There are some shows you really like, talk about with a few friends and then forget
And then there are some shows you get completely obsessed with – and you can’t just stop thinking about them.”
So, today we are going to discuss some of the best sci-fi shows to watch that fall in the third category and will make your boring lockdown time to be filled with exciting memories.
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Dark
Dark is a German web television series. It is having an IMDb rating of 8.8 out of 10. The show can be watched on Netflix. It has three seasons in total. The plot of Dark is mind-bending. It is so complex, it is hard to actually put it down in words but suffice to say that if time travel and paradoxes intrigues you, prepare to be dazzled.
Imagine:
You get lost in the night and go to sleep in the forest near your town. When you wake up, you realize thankfully that you are near your home and walk towards your house. As you go inside, you feel something different. But that’s okay, it’s your home, right? Your parents are not at home. As you tell the lady in the house that it’s your house, she looks at you, puzzled. Even as it slowly dawns, you realize, heat rising in your body, that you have traveled 33 years back in the time. What do you do! I found this one the most puzzling, helpless situations a child (or even an adult) can find themselves in.
You have a crush on a girl. She has a younger brother, a sweet boy you are fond of, but you never paid that much attention to him, but you get along fine. What if you find out that the boy actually is your father? Umm What!?
This is just the beginning of the show. Like really. And my descriptions don’t do justice to the sheer brilliance of Dark. It gets way more complicated with more characters and timelines coming in. But the show increases its complexity without getting too dense. Usually, when a story gets too wide or deep, it falters because we stop caring about the new characters. But that doesn’t happen in Dark – because all characters are so strongly interconnected.
That’s the true beauty of the show. It discusses the most complicated time travel theories, multiple timelines, God and the demons and the apocalypse itself. But it remains rooted in powerful emotions of love – love which makes it so endearing. The love between Mikkel and Ulrich, between Jonas and Michael, Jonas and Martha, Katharina and Mikkel, and so on.
Watch it for the sci-fi, watch it for the time-travel, watch it for the heart-breaks. But most importantly above all this, watch it for the love, which endures across timelines (and worlds also, in season 3).
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Osmosis
Osmosis is a French-language Netflix Original series that was released in 2019 and is having an IMDb rating of 8.8 out of 10.
Launched in March 2019, it is an eight-episode series. It takes place in the offices of a technology company in a near-future version of Paris. Life is a lark, in 2020-something France: people either ride bicycles or are chauffeured around in Porsches, use tiny gadgets to relive the past memories, and spend hours in virtual reality boudoirs, getting off with VR partners they meet on dating platform Perfect Match.
Osmosis, the dating-cum-biotech startup at the center of the plot, is out to get Perfect Match: where the latter provides users with empty gyrations and skin-deep pleasure, Osmosis promises to give them glamour. A soulmate for life. True, absolute love. How? Brain implants.
Esther Vanhove, Osmosis’s ennui-prone co-founder, has designed swallowable nanobots that nestle up in a person’s skull and scour their neurons to work out who their ideal partner would be. Users can see their soulmate’s face just by closing their eyes and are even provided with said soulmate’s location to precipitate an encounter.
Esther’s first subject is her brother and co-founder Paul – an energetic, tech-bro foil to Esther’s haggard angst. When Paul meets his girlfriend, Josephine, thanks to the Osmosis gizmo, and has even convinced her to swallow the device too. This activates a premium feature, allowing them to lollygag together in Osmosis’s sex sim; it is also Paul’s not-so-subtle way of proving to Josephine that he is her Osmosis-sanctioned soulmate as much as she is his.
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Westworld
Westworld Is a Park Without Limits. It was released in 2016 and it has 3 seasons while the 4th season is under casting and will be released soon. It is produced by HBO and can be watched on Hotstar in India.
Westworld is an exclusive theme park where those who can afford a ticket can live without limits. Partners Arnold Weber and Robert Ford created life-like robots that pass for humans who are called hosts. The hosts allow guests to live out their fantasies, but they cannot harm humans in the park.
These are some of the sci-fi shows which are a must watch and will take you to another world.
Keep reading Awareearth – Entertainment for more such exciting articles and stay home stay safe.
