The episode depicts a world with rising tensions between ‘Normal’ humans and those with mind-reading abilities, the ‘Teeps’. There is a mysterious figure known as the Hood Maker who is secretly distributing telepathy-blocking hoods, frustrating the regime’s attempts to root out disloyal citizens using mutant mind-reading humans known as “Teeps' who, along with the new powers of the Anti-Immunity Bill, gives the state a free reign to root around in people’s private thoughts.
Richard Madden, playing the role of Agent Ross, is a Clearance Agent working for the state. He has been paired with Holliday Grainger as Robin, a telepath, to find (and destroy) the enemies of the Free Union.
like most 'Normals', Ross is wary of Teeps while Robin is wary of Normals. Together, they must learn to trust each other in their hunt for the Hood Maker. Understandably, I'm not really going into too much detail. I hate spoilers and so, I will not give any away in this article.
This episode has been compared to Black Mirror, but I've never seen that series, so cannot give an opinion on that. What I can tell you is this was a very well made, beautifully set & very well acted adaptation of what was a relatively short novel., crammed into 60 minutes of very entertaining and thought provoking television.
If the rest of the series is as enjoyable as the opening episode, I eagerly await next week's episode, Impossible Planet.
Electric Dreams continues Sunday nights on Channel 4 at 9pm.
If you've watching the series or are planning to do so, please do share your thoughts and views, below. I look forward to reading them.
Written by TonyMayhew on Sep 18, 2017
I also very much enjoyed this, definitely something a bit different, hoping that all stories are as good as "The Hoodmaker".
My only regret is that The Hoodmaker was an isolated story. I was pretty hooked by the story, setting and the characters from the start and hoped that I would get to see their characters grow over the course of the season. However, I'm okay with this being an anthology series. I was quite impressed with The Hoodmaker that I can't wait to see the next episodes.