‘Command Z’ Is a Welcome (and Very Weird) Surprise From Steven Soderbergh

Two weeks after debuting Full Circle on HBO, the ever-prolific Steven Soderbergh returns with Command Z, an eight-part comedic series about wormholes, ontological paradoxes, and the necessity—and limits—of using small steps to bring about transformative climate-change action. Running approximately 95 minutes in total, and available exclusively for purchase at the director's website (where it notes that all proceeds for the $7.99 affair will benefit Children's Aid and Boston University Center for Antiracist Research), it’s an overtly activist work that takes aim at those on both sides of the political aisle. At the same time, it delivers goofy laughs through its pointed time-travel conceit.

Created by Kurt Andersen, Sam Lowry, and Larry Doyle (and “suggested” by Andersen’s book Evil Geniuses), Command Z plays like a witty riff on 12 Monkeys by way of Soderbergh’s own Contagion, focusing on three working-class characters on a mission whose importance is as grave as its success is up for debate. In 2053, blue-jumpsuited Sam (Roy Wood Jr.), Jamie (JJ Maley), and Emma (Chloe Radcliffe) report for duty in their “office”—a dingy room accessed by a spiral staircase in the floor.

Each day, they arrive in yellow anti-contamination suits that protect them from what sounds like an outside world ravaged by all manner of environmental ruin, not least of which is intense flooding that has led to structural (and, presumably, cultural) divisions. Decorated with oxygen tanks, radiators, and a makeshift kitchen, this dour space is dominated by three armchairs that face a giant screen showing various video feeds. That display is their main focus, given that it’s the platform through which their boss communicates.

Sam, Jamie, and Emma have been brought here by Kerning Fealty (Michael Cera)—or, rather, the giant face of an AI version of Kerning, since the flesh-and-blood billionaire apparently perished years earlier during a flight to Mars. Kerning reveals that he has a possible solution to the present’s problems: use a wormhole that was created in 2023 to travel back to that “inflection point” moment in time (July 17, 2023, to be specific) in order to influence major figures to right their wayward courses, thereby repairing Earth’s ongoing disasters. This wormhole, which will only stay open for another 10 days, is located in a high-tech clothes dryer, and it also requires the concurrent use of a colored-cord headset and the ingestion of some gross liquid. People can’t directly journey through this portal, however; users are sent into the minds of anyone who was previously inoculated with nanobots, which—in one of Command Z’s many inspired gags—were disseminated to the populace not through COVID-19 vaccines but, instead, via hand sanitizer.

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Cheekily mixing and matching fact, fiction, and conspiracy theory, Command Z begins with Jamie trying out this newfangled technology, which makes them the de facto voice in their target’s head. Unsurprisingly, their first outing almost results in driving their host—who thinks he’s going mad—to suicide, although it works better during subsequent trials. In each of those instances, the threesome’s objective is to persuade a climate opponent to change, even if Kerning makes clear that “change” is a verboten word in this venture.

Among others, they set their sights on the likes of an oil company bigwig (Mike Houston) who’s planning to relocate himself and his family to a luxurious underground bunker, where the rich and powerful will survive the coming enviro-apocalypse; and a financial industry mogul (Liev Schreiber) whose cold-heartedness is monumentally severe, except when it comes to his beloved dog Benny.

Command Z is cut into bite-size installments, and that benefits its humor, which nicely marries socio-political sharpness and jaded absurdity. The show’s drollness is exemplified by Cera’s omniscient AI, whose motives are suspicious, enthusiasm is off-putting, and general efforts at being human and likable are awkward—such as his recurring attempt to come up with an introductory chime and/or catchphrase to signal his on-screen arrival. Sam, Jamie, and Emma, meanwhile, embody the show’s overarching cynicism, be it with regards to billionaire titans such as Kerning (who helped get civilization into its current calamitous predicament), men and women’s capacity for fixing their flawed impulses and behavior, or their mission’s feasibility. Their incredulity is then reinforced when, after triumphantly executing their objectives, they’re informed by Kerning and his computerized assistant Alice (Claire Kenny) that the global improvement they’ve wrought is minuscule.

Over the course of its concise and compact tale, Command Z asks whether small payoffs are worth such monumental work—a question it grapples with in jovial fashion, thereby allowing it to make keen comments about immoral conservative greed and self-destructive liberal lunacy without ever resorting to sermonizing. Corporations’ villainous passion for profit, social media’s knack for fostering violent discord, and organized religion’s fanatical self-interest all wind up in the satire’s bullseye. Simultaneously, it makes sure to poke lighthearted fun at itself. Closing-episode text cards, for example, inform viewers that they can learn more about time travel by watching The Terminator, about climate change by viewing Soylent Green, or about dogs by enjoying Snoopy Come Home.

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Best of all is when Command Z leans into the interplay of its stars, with Jamie’s innocent naivety meshing nicely with Emma’s angry distrustfulness and Sam’s seen-it-all weariness; Sam’s desire to complete this gig in time to go on an underwater vacation from Houston to New Orleans captures both his (and Jamie and Emma’s) blue-collar condition, as well as imaginatively fleshes out this ruinous reality. Soderbergh’s direction is snappy, playful, and efficient, and so too are the series’ scripts: Their ideas about how commercial, industrial, and technological progress will go off the rails—such as a VR suit that was designed to provide comfort and community, and instead led to Civil War-grade division—are amusing precisely because they’re believable.

Command Z is a vision of tomorrow trained squarely at today, its fantasy contending that the only way to save the planet, and ourselves, is to bring about whatever change is possible, and by any means available (short of murder, much to Sam’s chagrin). It’s a call to arms that’s all the funnier for being so prescient—save, at least for now, for a joke about the future’s annual “DeSantis Day Parade.”

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