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Five years ago, fans of Netflix’s Sense8 — a show about eight adults, telepathically connected and called sensates — were gifted something that almost didn’t exist: a satisfying ending.
The two-and-a-half-hour finale, which got the green light following intense backlash from fans over the sci-fi opus’ cancellation, premiered on June 8, 2018, officially wrapping up the fantastic, sometimes nonsensical, but altogether moving story. And it did so at a curious time in LGBTQ+ rights history.
Just imagine it: Call Me By Your Name had just come out to critical acclaim, and on the small screen, RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 10 had just premiered. But at the same time, the US government had just withdrawn protection for trans students under Title IX and would soon reverse a 2014 Justice Department position that protected trans adults from employment discrimination. Around the world, governments were enacting homophobic policies in countries like Indonesia, Tanzania, and Chechnya.
Given this, Sense8’s heartstopping, euphoric, and very queer finale came at a time when the idea of global interconnectedness among the LGBTQ+ community felt extremely urgent.
Five short years later, and despite the show’s problematic racism, this vision of a queer revolution — a world built on trans joy and radical empathy — is more important now than ever.
Amor Vincit Omnia
Sense8 is the queerest creation of trans sisters Lilly and Lana Wachowski (so far) alongside J. Michael Straczynski.
Transness, really, undercuts the show’s episodes, not just in terms of gender identity, but as a prefix (“trans-,” after all, means going across).
Sense8 is helmed by trans sisters and includes a trans actress playing a trans main character, but the show also crosses borders of geography, sexuality, and species: the sensates are what the show calls Homo sensorium. They feel each other’s emotions and appear in each other’s lives when they are needed. For them, joy, anger, pain, grief, and passion are not singular journeys but rather shared experiences. They also share this with their non-sensate loved ones.
Nowhere is this transgressive message clearer than in the show’s finale, aptly titled Amor Vincit Omnia, or “Love conquers all.” It conquered a series cancellation, after all — an all-too-common fate for LGBTQ+ shows. And in the story, the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and after that, the sensates come together for the last battle to be won: Nomi Marks and Amanita Caplan’s wedding on the Eiffel Tower.
As Sense8’s grand exit, the wedding brings together the show’s bloated cast for celebration and ties off the last of the show’s loose ends before it ends with a bang (literally, via fireworks, but also metaphorically, via the show’s last and best psychic orgy). Sun Bak is exonerated; River El-Saadawi leads BPO into a better, non-murderous era; and even Nomi’s mom Janet has her redemption moment, finally accepting her daughter for who she is.
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True, the finale is a narrative mess, but it’s hard to care about that when the show offers up so much more by way of inclusion, sensuality, and shared joy in its hard-fought finale.
The Importance of Trans Joy
Despite recent wins for WLW couples on-screen, seeing a relationship like Nomi and Amanita’s still feels like a novelty. It’s not every day that we get a dorky action-adventure sapphic duo (except, maybe, Cosima and Delphine of Orphan Black).
In the end, Sense8 shows us Nomi and Amanita not just alive and well — they’re getting married, and it’s a happy ending for sapphics featuring a cis woman and a trans woman who have survived two seasons’ worth of sci-fi madness. And, like the show itself, the couple almost didn’t make it here.
In one of the finale’s action sequences, there’s a brief moment, as Nomi and Amanita’s van is racing away from gun-toting bad guys, where the two hold hands desperately. Crouching on the van floor, they chant, “Eiffel Tower, Eiffel Tower.”
It’s easy to overlook it in the chaos of the gunfight and car chase, but it’s a reference to a promise they made earlier on in the finale. On the rooftop of their safehouse, Nomi had said:
“I’m going to marry you — I can’t believe in a future where that doesn’t happen. Because a future where we can’t enjoy the Eiffel Tower and kiss in front of tourists is no future at all. And as impossible as that future might seem right now… impossibility is still just a kiss away from reality.”
The finale wedding gives us just that: an impossibility turning into a reality. It feels like a trans fairy tale, complete with weed fairies. But in a time of moral panics about LGBTQ+ people and a wave of anti-trans bills seeking to eliminate trans individuals from public spaces, the fairy tale feels necessary.
(The scene immediately prior, where the bad people go up in flames, also feels necessary, but that’s just me.)
Amanita and Nomi’s wedding, as well as the trans joy it encapsulates, is important because it reminds us that there is a future to fight for, an impossibility that is just a kiss away from reality. And while we’re crouched in a van to avoid getting hit by bullets, it’s the vision that has us holding on to each other and chanting “Eiffel Tower, Eiffel Tower,” until we make it there.
The Power of Radical Empathy
Having hope for an impossibility is half the battle, of course. The other half is actually getting to that reality, and here Sense8 once again shows us how: through radical empathy.
Though the science is murky, sensates are a species of human described to be a more evolved version of us. They are emotionally, psychologically, and physically connected. Riley Blue puts on her headphones, and everybody enjoys the music; Kala Rasal gets shot, and everybody falls.
Because they inhabit each other’s spaces, there is no room for doubt about what the other is feeling — they just feel it, validate it, and are instantly there to help in times of need. By default, sensates challenge the culture of individualism and self-interest.
But more than the clusters, we see empathy from their non-sensate friends and family as well. From Amanita to Lito Rodriguez’s partner Hernando (and later, Dani) and Kala’s husband Rajan, these are people who choose to be there, who want to be a safe place for their loved ones to land, despite the extremely weird and dangerous circumstances they find themselves in.
When viewed like this, it’s easy to see why the cast had become so big in the first place: the sensates couldn’t have won that war alone. To take down the corrupt power structures of the BPO, they had to use everybody’s strengths and work together, sensate or not.
And because of the way the series was shot, the feeling of connection extends to us, the audience, wherever we may be (though maybe not quite to the same physical extent). A bad guy suffocates Riley with a plastic bag, or hired goons try to hang Sun by the neck, and it feels like we’re struggling to breathe on the sofa; Capheus Onyango feels wonder at riding a plane in Riley’s consciousness, and it’s like we’re flying with them; Kala and Wolfgang Bogdanow share their first kiss before a big fight, and we yearn, fearing for his safety the way she is.
The power (and beauty) of Sense8’s radical empathy is that it’s not just for the sensates. It’s a utopian vision for everybody—if we choose it. It’s an invitation to choose connectedness over isolation, caring over self-centeredness, and, in the face of differences, celebration over hostility.
A Collective Fight
For a show about Homo sensorium, a whole different species from us, Sense8 is deeply, wonderfully human. And its choice to lean into joy is one that we should follow.
After all, it’s easy to be cynical and give up in the face of a shadowy, powerful organization like the BPO. It’s harder — but more important — to have hope and stand with others, especially in the fight for trans rights and LGBTQ+ equality.
That’s possible by believing in a future of trans joy and having the radical empathy that compels us to put in the work. It’s the kind of connection that Lilly Wachowski refers to in a recent interview about The Matrix and how we are all Neo: “Our connectivity is how we beat the machine.”
