It’s also all too easy to get hung up on the show’s obsession with sex, a focus that it’s hard to imagine as anything other than a titillating talking point given the sheer amount of it across the season. This is all chewed through at quite a clip, and it’s easy to get so lost in how rote the setup is that you miss some of the later, more provocative implications. The thematic underpinnings of this plot amount to what is, if we’re being fair, quite a paper-thin clash between individual and collective personal agency versus group prosperity, and the uncomfortable fact that those who get to determine what’s in the best interests of the collective never seem to cede their individual rights when it comes to the supposed betterment of the group. She’s joined by the pencil-pushing Bernard Marx (Harry Lloyd) and the champion of free will, John (Alden Ehrenreich), who they bring back from among the “Savages” of zoo-like working-class America just so he can get the plot moving. That’s of particular importance to Lenina Crowne (Jessica Brown Findlay), who’s flirting with the idea of monogamy and thus becomes a protagonist. It’s a tale as old as time, and the attempts to spice it up here are mostly to be found in very lavish production and oddly long, explicit orgies, which at least plays into the idea of sex as a public service. As ideal as that might sound to some of us, the benefits come at the overall erosion of free will and self-expression, so, you know, swings and roundabouts. Brave New World depicts a simple, light-hearted and perfectly content society, where, through conditioning from the moment you burst into life in the test tube to your irrelevent death, no-one suffers, no-one complains, and no-one is ever alone. The population of New London is largely devoid of social ills because they’re all rigidly class-stratified and strung out on pills and mandated to have casual sex with everyone they can since monogamy is prohibited. The ideas at the heart of Brave New World, then, feel painfully familiar.
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