‘The Peripheral’ Trailer: Chloë Grace Moretz Finds a Simulation All Too Real (VIDEO)

Virtual reality isn’t just the simulation it seems to be in The Peripheral, as driven home by Prime Video’s new trailer for the upcoming sci-fi series.

In the trailer — released today, Saturday, October 8, as part of New York Comic Con — Chloë Grace Moretz’s Flynne Fisher gets to try out the “cutting-edge VR” that her brother, Burton (Jack Reynor), is test-driving.

“It was like being there, in your body!” Flynne exclaims after stepping into Burton’s avatar.

But as she explores a futuristic London — a London “70 years from what you think of as the present” — Flynne realizes that the simulation has real-world stakes.

A synopsis for the series — which also stars Eli Goree and Gary Carr — explains that Flynne and Burton eke out a living in their Blue Ridge Mountains community by beating levels of simulation video games for high-paying customers. But when Burton gets the chance to beta-test a new simulation, Flynne gets involved in a mission within the simulation — a mission to steal a valuable secret from a corporation known as the Research Institute.

“When the assignment goes badly wrong, Flynne begins to realize the Sim is more real than she ever could have imagined,” the synopsis adds. “The London she’s exploring exists in the future, year 2099. And what Flynne has uncovered in the Research Institute has put her and her family in grave peril. There are people from the future who want to use Flynne for the information she’s stolen… and there are others who want Flynne dead.”

At Sunday’s NYCC panel, executive producer Jonathan Nolan (Westworld) praised The Peripheral’s mastermind, sci-fi author William Gibson, who wrote the 2014 novel of the same name.

“When I read the book [Gibson’s 1986 novel] Count Zero, it felt like a first hit of acid. I never experienced anything like the worlds that Gibson created,” Nolan told the crowd, per Deadline. “I’ve watched every filmmaker rip off all the ideas, myself included, from his works and no one actually had the guts to go and adapt from the source. For us, it felt like coming full circle.”

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Moretz, meanwhile, said she loved The Peripheral’s “sense of home and humanity,” which she finds lacking in other sci-fi fare. “No matter how far we go into the future, it always boomerangs back home,” she observed. “We just had so much fun figuring those little moments out and bringing the humanity in.”

The Peripheral, Series Premiere, Friday, October 21, Prime Video