Saving just about the best till last, this, the tenth and last episode of the Philip K Dick Anthology was probably the most chilling and disturbing of them all. It started lightly enough as Philbert Noyce, a typical blue-collar assembly-line operative and his wife play tit-for-tat with interactive holographic advertisements but quickly gets darker as they settle down to watch a fawning campaign interview by their megastate Mexuscan's single Candidate, reminiscent of a recent Xi Jinping interview. Rather like the Chinese reporter who rolled her eyes Philbert is sceptical of this brand of one-party democracy but did she really intersperse the usual sub-Obama parodic platitudes with the phrase "Kill All Others"?
Philbert discusses his incredulity at this casual exhortation to ethnic cleanse with his two fellow workers on the production line but it's clear that they either missed the reference or can't get worked up about it, so long as they know they're not one of the "others" but when he later sees a neighbour set upon by a crowd of pedestrians for no apparent reason, repeat references by the Candidate on TV and especially the erection of a huge advertising billboard proclaiming the order with what looks a dead man's body draped over it for effect, Philbert snaps and rebels.
The viewer for a time is left in some suspense as to whether Phil is suffering some sort of persecutional delusion complex as he's made to submit to medical procedures at work including the wearing of a Fitbit type watch to monitor his behaviour but it's clear the worm has turned as he attempts to expose and lift the Candidate's hold over the sheep-like population. The bleak conclusion posits a chilling final image as "order" is restored.
Like so many of the episodes in this series I was impressed by the way the adaptations inserted topical references to the material further reinforcing Dick's presence and prescience of mind when he first wrote his short stories some 50 years or so ago. For the record Mel Rodriguez was great in this one as the little-big man who takes on the system while I also appreciated an edgy synthesiser soundtrack which accurately echoed Noyce's increasing paranoia.
I'm now working my way through a book of Dick's stories (none of which appear to have been dramatised in this series) and I'm not a great sci-fi lover but I can say there's plenty more good source material if a further series gets commissioned which I hope occurs.