It can be hard to keep an optimistic view towards the future these days, especially after watching The Peripheral, the new Prime Video series which depicts not just a bleak vision of 2032, but also leaps forward to a more dystopian take on the year 2099, following a global cataclysm that has decimated the human population.

However, talking to executive producer Jonathan Nolan, director Vincenzo Natali, and series stars Chloe Grace Moretz and Jack Reynor does offer a glimpse of hope, if only because of Nolan’s words during a recent press day for the series: “Humans are very, very good at surviving. We’ve been doing it for a very long time.”

The Peripheral, based on the novel by famed sci-fi novelist William Gibson, begins as Flynne (Moretz), a plucky young woman doing her best to help her and her family make ends meet in a rundown corner of Appalachia, gets a chance to demo an extremely advanced VR system that actually catapults her into the world of London after “The Jackpot.”

The Jackpot, Nolan tells Consequence, is “Gibson’s own take on the apocalypse. And, as with everything else that Gibson puts into his universe, he’s really thought it through, and it’s not any one thing. It’s a cascade of things, including a global pandemic, and its impact on culture is simultaneously massive but not fatal.”

Natali, who directed the first two episodes of the series, thus had two futures to establish visually — though only one of them had him concerned. “One of the parts I was most nervous about was not the distant future,” he says. “Because I knew that would be something amazing, and it would be easy for the audience to wrap their heads around. But I was a little bit scared about the near-future world, just because I was afraid we’d confuse people. Because invariably, if you’re in a rural environment, it looks a bit like the past.”