How Electric Dreams updates Philip K. Dick’s Cold War stories

Between his first published story in 1952 and his death in 1982, Philip K. Dick produced dozens of novels and more than a hundred short stories. Moving past famous works like A Scanner Darkly or The Man in the High Castle, Amazon Video’s anthology show Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams delves into the author’s extensive back catalog, adapting 10 of his lesser-known works for television — and collecting the original stories in a new book.

Electric Dreams is full of classic Dickian themes: psychic connections, absurd consumer technology, and the blurry line between artifice and reality. But the show’s creators — Battlestar Galactica showrunner Ronald D. Moore, Justified producer Michael Dinner, and Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston — take an expansive view of adaptation. Each episode features a different writer / director team, with a wide range of styles. Some installments add new detail to existing stories, while a couple are practically original teleplays, with only brief nods to Dick’s work. Most mix a few elements of his tales into something new — updating technology, expanding bit characters, and changing major plot points.

The episodes stand on their own. But alongside the original stories, they illustrate how different writers and directors translate classic — but also historically specific — visions of the future. Here’s how Electric Dreams handles the changes.

Spoilers ahead for all episodes of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, and 10 short stories from the 1950s.

Directed and scripted by Dee Rees

Based on “The Hanging Stranger,” 1953

In “The Hanging Stranger,” a man emerges from work to find a stranger hanging from a lamppost. His fellow citizens find this totally unremarkable, and are baffled by his questions. Soon, the man realizes they’ve been possessed by aliens, and that the body was bait. By showing his shock, he gave himself away.

“K.A.O.” adopts the striking central imagery of “The Hanging Stranger,” but not its alien-invasion plot. It’s set in a hyper-consumerist future where one man hears a strange request in a presidential speech: kill all others. No one else mentions it, and when a KILL ALL OTHERS billboard with a hanged man appears soon after, his friends and wife seem unperturbed. As his paranoia builds, they begin to suspect he’s an “other,” although nobody can actually explain what that is.

Rees’ story is more explicitly political than Dick’s: it’s about authoritarian violence that spreads under the surface of polite society. But both capture a protagonist’s experience in pointing out a seemingly obvious problem, only to find that nobody else has even noticed it.

Directed by Alan Taylor, scripted by Kalen Egan and Travis Sentell

Based on “Foster, You’re Dead!,” 1955

P. K. Dick’s stories are timeless, but they were also written against the backdrop of the Cold War and its nuclear arms race. Cross that with ‘50s consumerism, and you’ve got “Foster, You’re Dead!,” where fallout shelters are the latest suburban must-have amenity. The young protagonist’s father is convinced that shelter designers are playing up new threats to spur sales. But the boy agonizes over his status as a shelterless social pariah, as well as his potentially impending nuclear annihilation, and that destroys his relationship with his father.

“Safe and Sound” wraps a new set of cultural anxieties around the same intergenerational conflict. Instead of a boy yearning for a bunker, there’s a girl who wants a surveillance-friendly smartwatch called a Dex. Instead of trumped-up nuclear threats, there’s endless propaganda about terrorist attacks. Instead of “keeping up with the Joneses”-style peer pressure, there’s digital FOMO. And instead of simply becoming alienated from her mother, the protagonist gets tricked into indicting her as a terrorist figurehead. It’s Philip K. Dick by way of The Circle crossed with Mean Girls.

Directed by Tom Harper, scripted by Jack Thorne

Based on “The Commuter,” 1953

The Electric Dreams episode “The Commuter” keeps the same high-concept premise as its namesake story. A train station visitor asks for a ticket to Macon Heights, a station that doesn’t exist. The station attendant investigates the issue, and finds that Macon Heights nearly existed. It was a planned suburban community that fell through at the last moment. But when he ventures down the line and jumps off the train between stations, he realizes that the town is very real, and that its sudden existence is subtly changing the rest of the world.

The episode builds this idea into a story about whether it’s better to erase past regrets, or to accept the messiness of real life. The town isn’t just a break in reality; it’s an idyllic haven for the bereft and damaged, complete with a mysterious creator who draws people under its spell. And the adaptation is somehow even more mind-bending than Dick’s original story. Harper’s adaptation drifts into dreamlike surrealism as its protagonist agonizes over whether to keep the changes Macon Heights has created in his life, or find a way to reverse them.

Directed by Julian Jarrold, scripted by Matthew Graham

Based on “The Hood Maker,” 1955

“The Hood Maker” is one of Dick’s many stories about surveillance and telepathy. A future government enforces loyalty with a group of telepathic mutants called “teeps,” who also pursue their own McCarthyite agenda. Then someone designs a tinfoil hat-like device called a hood, and uses it to block their mental intrusions. Meanwhile, the protagonist finds a way to weaponize his own memories. Electric Dreams makes one big, pivotal change: it turns the story’s villain into its sympathetic hero.

In Dick’s telling, teeps are arrogant, powerful figures who believe they’re the new master race. In Jarrold and Graham’s, they’re more like the X-Men: an oppressed minority with frightening powers, as shown in a brutal psychic interrogation scene reminiscent of the Black Mirror memory-reading episode “Crocodile.” The hoods strike a blow for freedom of thought, but also enable hate and violence against teeps. There’s an added romantic subplot between a police officer and his teep partner. And Dick’s concealable “hood” headband appears as a creepy-looking full-face mask. (This is apparently, according to the anthology notes, because Graham misread the story as a child.)

Directed by Peter Horton, scripted by Travis Beacham

Based on “Autofac,” 1955

“Autofac” is a spiritual predecessor of the “paperclip maximizer” thought experiment, or more recently, the game Universal Paperclips. It’s a neat battle of wits between a group of post-apocalyptic humans and an automated manufacturing system, which is slowly consuming the world’s resources to make useless consumer goods. The humans trick different autofac plants into cannibalizing each other, but just as they think they’re safe, they realize the factories can also reproduce themselves.

The original story focuses on the symbiosis between humans and machines, and the way automated rules can produce something uncontrollable. Electric Dreams, which features an entirely different twist, is more interested in imitation and disposability. “The factory thinks everything’s replaceable. It’s a throwaway culture,” the protagonist complains to a service bot, played by singer Janelle Monae in a toned-down ArchAndroid bodysuit. “Maybe it is replaceable,” the bot responds. When the humans sneak into the factory to destroy it, it emerges that the autofac takes this notion extremely literally.

Directed by Francesca Gregorini, scripted by Jessica Mecklenburg

Based on “Human Is,” 1955

P. K. Dick stories are full of unhappy marriages, but “Human Is” breaks that mold. An emotionally abusive husband visits a barren planet called Rexor IV, and when he comes back, he’s suddenly kind and thoughtful. While his wife deduces that he’s possessed by an inhabitant of that dying world, she falls in love with the Rexorian and refuses to turn him in.

With a few elaborations, including a climactic trial scene, that’s pretty much what happens in Electric Dreams. But the performances from series co-creator Bryan Cranston and The Babadook’s Essie Davis sell the relationship in a way Dick’s story doesn’t. The episode turns a lighthearted ironic-reversal sketch to a genuine drama about a woman who has to break her authoritarian, xenophobic society’s rules to be with the man (or alien) she loves. There’s also an extended visit to an artsy sex club, which may count as the season’s most random addition.

Directed and scripted by David Farr

Based on “The Impossible Planet,” 1953

In a distant future, a 350-year-old woman asks an interplanetary ship’s captain for a ticket to Earth, a place that most people agree doesn’t exist. She’s offering her life’s savings, so overruling his partner’s objections, he ferries her to an inhospitable rock with a single moon in a nine-planet solar system. It’s not called Earth, but the captain reasons she won’t know the difference — because obviously, there is no Earth, and this obscure planet is definitely not it. Can you guess the twist here?

Farr’s episode, where the woman convinces two sleazy tour guides to take her money, feels like it’s building toward the guides accidentally discovering Earth. But the actual revelations are more complicated. The episode implies that all tourism is some version of a grift, where guides are responsible for producing the exact experience that guests expect. But one of the guides, an unhappy young man with an uncertain future, looks exactly like the woman’s dead grandfather. As they drift closer to her destination, he’s drawn to her single-minded resolve to see Earth, even as he prepares her for disappointment. The episode ends on a note that’s significantly more confusing — but still more satisfying — than the original.

Directed by Jeffrey Reiner, scripted by Ronald D. Moore

Based on “Exhibit Piece,” 1954

While Electric Dreams is a positive tribute to Dick, it offers a bit of implicit critique as well, by adding some diversity to his scads of white male protagonists. Like about half the stories on this list, “Exhibit Piece” is about a world-weary everyman whose life spirals into absurdity. The man, a future historian, enters a virtual reproduction of 20th century life. Soon, he’s not sure which of the two worlds is real. He finally chooses to live in the past, only to realize he’s arrived on the eve of an apocalypse.

Electric Dreams splits the protagonist into two different characters, neither of whom is a white man. Anna Paquin plays a happily married future policewoman looking for the man behind a massacre, and Terrence Howard is a near-present-day VR game designer looking for his wife’s killer. The two keep waking up in each other’s lives, and each one thinks they’re a real person taking a virtual fantasy vacation. Unlike Dick’s story, the episode is very clear about who’s right, and the results aren’t happy.

Directed by Marc Munden, scripted by Tony Grisoni

Based on “Sales Pitch,” 1954

“Sales Pitch,” similar to “Autofac,” is about high-tech consumerism taken to a bizarre, illogical endpoint. A world-weary everyman (at this point, that description of a Dick protagonist should go without saying) is visited by an all-purpose robot appliance with an aggressive door-to-door sales tactic. It shows up in his house and refuses to leave until it’s proven its value, a task that’s only completed if it closes a sale. As it causes all kinds of problems to demonstrate how it would fix them, the man goes to desperate lengths to escape it.

This entire plot is summed up in a single throwaway line of dialog in “Crazy Diamond.” The episode is actually a neo-noir about a dying cyborg who draws a restless scientist into her last-ditch attempt at survival, as he waits for his home to crumble into the rising sea. But if nothing else, it’s got a disgruntled suburban protagonist straight out of a Philip K. Dick story — played ably by Steve Buscemi.

Directed and scripted by Michael Dinner

Based on “The Father-Thing,” 1954

“Father Thing” is one of the closest adaptations on this list, as well as one of the most straightforward episodes. It reverses the plot of “Human Is.” A boy sees his father replaced by a horrible alien doppelgänger, intent on colonizing the world. The original version doesn’t even feel particularly like a P. K. Dick story; the familiar premise could have come from any number of 20th century horror writers.

But that premise usually relies on young characters feeling isolated and mistrusted, leaving them with no choice but to act on their own. “Father Thing” decides this idea doesn’t really hold up in the internet era. So it turns out that lots of people have family members who are acting oddly, and they’re all complaining about it on web forums. A frame story has the tween protagonist recording a vlog about his experiences in fighting the alien invasion, then posting it online with the hashtag #RESIST. This, to put it mildly, is not one of the season’s high points.

Incidentally, the episode also features a character named Philip Dick. Unable to deal with the stress of his wife becoming an alien, he commits suicide.

Compared to its fellow anthology series Black Mirror, Electric Dreams doesn’t focus much on contemporary social issues. Many of Dick’s ideas work as well now as they did 50 years ago, but the show is still clearly influenced by modern culture. The existence of drones and smartphones is taken for granted, and virtual worlds follow current VR conventions. The episode with the clearest commentary on modern tech, “Safe and Sound,” will probably age fastest, the same way that Dick’s story about nuclear bunkers feels too dated to film today.

Electric Dreams reconciles the futures of two markedly different eras by staking out a middle ground between contemporary science-fiction tropes and outright retro-futurism. The costumes in “Autofac” look ‘90s-inspired, while “The Hood Maker” has a gritty Blade Runner feel. “K.A.O.” mixes present-day earbuds and smartwatches with vaguely 20th century costumes and sets, as well as a depiction of media and consumerism that predates hyper-targeted ads or ironic self-awareness. At worst, this makes Electric Dreams feel automatically dated, as The New York Times concluded. At best, it transcends the demand for strict “timeliness” in media, reminding us that people have been pouring their hopes and fears into science fiction for a long time.