What Is A Stub? The Peripheral Explained- Stitches In Time

William Gibson’s brilliant glimpse into a dystopian future is heady work. It requires a great attention span and some squinting to make the shifting time travel components work. What it doesn’t require is any patience, though. Against all odds, the ambitious series from Prime Video has made me a believer in finally developing Gibson’s work into worthy binge-able content. Gibson’s imagining of a future with ghosts of the past, and splinter timelines called stubs has endless potential.

The freshman season seems poised for greatness with an excellent cast and a fresh angle on the source material while still staying true to the core story. The future, the past, and increasingly paternalistic entities all work in concert to create an addictive world I willingly get lost in. It helps that this unique vision of the future comes with its own vocabulary and vernacular that is both familiar and foreign.

Polts are poltergeists or ghosts of those who lived in the past and found themselves in the future. Flynne is a polt. Peripherals are robot bodies waiting to house the consciousness of people who jump into them via virtual reality headsets like Flynne’s. Between all the possible double dealings, stolen goods, and death by bees, there are clues to what is really going on. The biggest hints from the names themselves. The most important of those being a stub. Here is everything you need to know about the stubs in The Peripheral.

What is a stub in The Peripheral?

Think of stubs as the beginning of one timeline and the end of another. Like plumbing with elbow joints attached and continues, the stubs in The Peripheral veer off while not affecting the main stem before it. Essentially anything that creates a stub can only alter the timeline and the events from that point forward. They do not affect anything that happened before the stub or anything that is not directly in front of it.

When Flynne entered Wilf’s timeline, first as Burton and later as herself, she created a stub. This is why Wilf calls her a stub in episode 2. Her being there has altered the course of her future, creating a new timeline she is on, but it does not change Wilf’s. A stub is a simulation or interaction in time that resulted in another reality. Like a new plant offshoot created when a cutting is made, reality branches off from this point to create a new set of circumstances. The original reality is intact, but an additional one is created alongside it. The new reality has zero impact on the current one except for learned insight.

Stubs are moments in time that define our existence. They are fixed points that should never be altered under any circumstances. When they are altered, they create a new branching reality. It’s the idea of stacked realities just waiting for decisions to be made that irrevocably change the trajectory of that timeline. The only difference here is that decision is always prompted by someone from the future meeting with someone in the past.

Stubs are essentially a way to get around any time paradoxes. Nothing that happens in the future can be affected by something in the past. At least not directly. The Research Institute can’t go back into the past and stop the Jackpot from taking place. Anytime something might happen that would change things, a new stub or branch in the timeline is formed. It allows for endless possibilities without ever actually changing anything. In all likelihood, those who control the stubs can live out their lives in peripherals in other stubs that are much more palatable than their current one.

The Research Institute and Dr. Nuland aren’t the only ones able to create and maintain connections to stubs. Lev, Wilf’s employer, uses his technicals Ash and Ossian to maintain his quantum tunnel with Flynne’s current timeline. This connection is tenuous at best, though, and is prone to hacking which Flynne’s people frequently do in the past. This is how Flynne is able to go back whenever she wants.

The stubs are how the future can communicate with the past. People or polts from the past are hired and placed into peripherals to perform jobs(usually criminal ones) and usually without realizing that they are doing real things. Then, similar to how Burton and Flynne first got involved, they are hired and jacked into the future, thinking it is all a simulation when they are active agents in the future.

Why are the stubs so important?

In addition to the stubs being filled with living people who have no idea they are one of the countless versions of themselves in parallel timelines, the stubs serve several significant purposes for 2100. Zev used his access to the stubs to kill off his family, including himself, in 2032. He claimed he couldn’t stand the idea that other Lev’s were running around in other stubs. This may be true, but Lev is a black hole of motivation, and I suspect there is more to this. Lev also indicates that the Klept uses the stubs as testing grounds. The stubs are simply a maze of lab rats.

Lev’s brother Aleksi has invested in a drug company in the future and uses the stubs as a place to test the drugs without consequence. Because no one is the wiser, the heavily regulated pharmaceutical industry can skip all the red tape and jump straight to human trials without risk. This significantly reduces the trial time without harming anyone in Lev’s timeline. Unfortunately, it also could mean trouble for Flynne and Burton’s mother, who has been taking some drugs given to her by Lev. We can only hope this medication is not experimental.

Judging by Dr. Nuland’s comments, the Research Institute has also been using the past as an etch, a sketch that keeps the future safe. It is an abundant, never-ending supply of test subjects and playthings to use and abuse. The only caveat is stubs can only be formed from known data points, so everything before the Jackpot is fair game. Everything after the digital collapse is safe. This is why the past can’t ever change the future. What the RI is up to can’t be good for any timeline. Almost certainly, they are trying to find a way to stop the Jackpot, which is good, but they are willing to sacrifice infinite numbers of timelines to do so, which is bad.

Is Lev a peripheral too?

One of the most critical conversations about stubs comes from Flynne’s research. She is intrigued when she learns about a man named Lev’s mafia-style murder in the past. She tells Wilf about it, and Wilf questions Lev, who has a response ready. Is it an honest one, though? Lev could be anywhere or anyone, for that matter. He could be a peripheral sitting in any timeline or one sitting in his own. We know the rich use peripherals often instead of appearing somewhere themselves. We have no proof that the Lev that meets with Wilf and Flynne is actually the real one. He could easily be a very old man using the younger peripheral, or he could be someone else entirely. We will just have to wait and see.

It’s questions like these that keep us coming back for more. Unfortunately, with just a few episodes left, The Peripheral has too many to answer, but I’m sure we will get enough to drive Season 2. New episodes of The Peripheral are out every Friday, and you can find all our coverage here.