Gillian Reviews “Dimension 404”

Dimension 404 is a six episode scifi anthology series by Rocket Jump airing on Hulu.

Ok, so this isn’t the Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits.  The show is more akin to Black Mirror but with a lot less depressing consequences.  Its episodes are centered around modern tech culture and pop culture with a scifi wrench thrown into the machine.

I’m going to be honest the first two episodes felt mostly average.  Rocket Jump has made a lot of really smart and cutting edge shorts.  I just didn’t feel these first two episodes live up to what I know Rocket Jump can produce.  Even Patton Oswalt doesn’t elevate the second episode, Cinethrax, above good.  From Wikipedia, I can see the first two episodes had several people working on the story and writing the episodes.  The rest of the series has just one writer per episode.  It looks like a case of too many cooks in the kitchen on those first two episodes.

The third episode,Chronos, is absolutely fabulous.  A procrastinating physics student discovers that her favorite ’90 cartoon seems to have been erased.  And then the main character from said cartoon appears in real life leading to an adventure through time.  The writing of this episode is really good which can be be hard when time travel is involved.

The fourth episode Polybius is based on the creepy pasta about a video game cabinet from the ’80s of the same name that had some unusual effects on players.  It’s set in the ’80s, the one episode not based in modern times.  Another solid story but it does lean on the video game tropes a little hard.

The fifth episode, Bob, is tied with the third as my favorite.  An Army psychologist about to head home for Christmas is tasked by the NSA to help the giant brain they’ve hooked into the internet with some performance issues.  I especially love this episode because Jane the psychologist is shown talking to her wife and daughter at the beginning and no one ever says anything about it.  There’s never a scene where she gets mistaken for straight.  Also, I love how much diversity there is in this episode.  Jane is played by Constance Wu.  The NSA agent who picks her up is a woman, going by her actress’s nationality she’s Chilean.  The Director of the NSA black site is a white woman and the technician who tends to Bob is black, played by Malcolm Barrett who also plays Rufus on Timeless(another show I love).  The only white man of note, in this episode, is the terrorist Bob is trying to track down.

I really like this series and hope they continue it. There’s one more episode left in the series to air on April, 25, on Hulu.

Rating 4/5