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Its not hard to see why Philip K. Dicks stories are adapted so often.
The ten stories adapted forPhilip K. Dicks Electric Dreamsare scattered across a number of collections.
In some cases, this offered insights into why certain changes were made from page to screen.
Heres a look at what changed and what was left intact when bringing each story into a new medium.
Very little remains of this story in the show, he admits.
Very little of that is adapted directly in the episode.
The episodes characters are also more questioning of their circumstances, with good reason.
What they used to call science fiction?
Autofac
After a devastating war, a surviving pocket of humanity must contend with a new threat.
(Here, Monae is playing an android who toes the company line basically, the antiCindi Mayweather.)
And Autofacs methods of delivery here include an abundance of drones carrying perfectly packed brown boxes.
Any resemblance to the company airingElectric Dreamsin the United States is, Im sure, entirely coincidental.
In both, the same method is used: entering the wordpizzleto bewilder the automated system.
Other expansions and alterations in the episodes script accentuate the themes of the story.
Grisoni refers to freely adapting the story, which is accurate.
Thats about where the similarities end.
(Theyre compared to Nazis and Bolsheviks at one point.)
Safe and Sound keeps that coupling of a satire of consumerism with widespread societal anxiety in place.
(Nobody knows where shes been, one of her classmates says.)
But here, too, consumerism is portrayed as exploiting human fears to sell products.
The endings are very different, but their critiques strike the same target.
Expansions fill in the backstory of the family before catastrophe struck.
However, theres a greater sense ofwrongnessfrom the fathers duplicate in the story.
In the episode, a lump occasionally moves under Evil Kinnears skin; thats about it.
The setting is far in the future, to a point where Earth is a distant memory for most.
(Even someone who remembers it refers to Carolina rather than either one of the Carolinas.)
The amount of money she offers them is absurdly large, and they set off on their voyage.
Or is the illusion all that matters?
In both the episode and the story, its explained that she has very little time left to live.
The most jarring changes involve the bond between Irma and Norton, however.
In this case,it was Earth all along, whereas the episode makes a pretty convincing case otherwise.
Both story and episode concern themselves with Macon Heights, a mysterious town that shouldnt exist.
In the episode, Jacobson is the undisputed center of the narrative.
(Theres something disquieting about the racial subtext of this as well.
Wouldnt that cause Paines kids to cease to exist?
Its an ethical conundrum atop another ethical conundrum, without the time given to properly process them all.
Loyce flees to another town and notifies the local authorities, only to learn that theyve also been replaced.
And since Loyce is a stranger in this new town, well … As the episode escalates, Philbert and his wife see a random person pursued by their suddenly murderous neighbors.
He and his co-workers debate what makes someone an other.
There are nods to current events throughout, from the normalization of the previously unthinkable to Farmigas swooping haircut.
But whats most fascinating about this adaptation is how it repurposes the subtext of Dicks story.
But in that story, theres at least the nominal idea that its villains are monsters from another world.
In Reess adaptation, theres no scene wherein Farmiga pulls away a human face to reveal something alien.
In this one, the monsters were us all along.
