'The Peripheral': Future-set sci-fi series quickly finds its center

“The Peripheral” is about time travel and people who are electronically linked, about super soldiers and invisible cars, about androids and an inter-dimensional conspiracy. Even worse, its executive producers are the people behind the unfathomable “Westworld.”

So you’ve got to figure “The Peripheral” makes no sense at all.

Except it does, or at least as much sense as it needs to. Propulsive, imaginative and visually dazzling without being overwhelming, this adaptation of a William Gibson novel by the Oscar-nominated writer Scott B. Smith (“A Simple Plan”) is refreshingly clear and downright enjoyable.

It also splits its time between two realities — the southern U.S. in 2032 and London circa 2090. This way you get fights involving both surly good old boy hoodlums and Kung Fu robot assassins, the best of two worlds.

Doing most of the fighting is Flynne (Chloë Grace Moretz), a country girl who works at a copy shop and cares for her ailing mom while her ex-military brother Burton (Jack Reynor) lives in a trailer on their property. Burton plays virtual reality games professionally, but Flynne is actually even better than he is.

This leads to her trying on a new headset which transports her to a future London. Except this is the real future London, where Flynne gets enlisted in some corporate espionage she thinks is a game. By the time she realizes this reality isn’t virtual, all sorts of people both in London and back home want to kill Flynne.

There’s tons of pseudo-scientific cyberpunk gobbledygook, of course, but Smith keeps things moving and pretense falls to the wayside. Moretz first broke through as the deadly Hit-Girl in “Kick-Ass” and it’s pretty sweet to see her back karate chopping up the screen in a tight black Matrix-style outfit. “The Peripheral” is dead center fun.

Tom Long is a longtime contributor to The Detroit News.

'The Peripheral'

GRADE: B+

Amazon Prime Video