A Love Letter to Sense8

There are shows you enjoy, and then there are shows that feel like they tilt your whole inner compass. Sense8 has always been the latter for me. Every rewatch feels like returning to a place that knows me better than I know myself. It’s tender, wild, generous, chaotic, and so full of feeling that I sometimes have to pause just to absorb what it’s handing me.

What still catches me off guard is how hot the show is — not in a cheap or empty way, but in that rare, charged way that celebrates bodies, desire, intimacy, and trust without shame. It treats connection like a language everyone deserves to speak. The sensuality is never separate from the emotional world. It’s woven into it. Heat becomes another expression of care. Sex becomes a form of presence. The cluster isn’t just a narrative idea. It’s a way of being seen.

And that’s the part that breaks me open every time. I see myself in each of them. Not perfectly, not literally, but in that instinctive way where you recognise your own soft parts across eight strangers. A piece of me in Will’s steadiness. A piece of me in Riley’s fragility. A piece in Sun’s fury, Lito’s theatrics, Nomi’s quiet strength, Kala’s longing, Wolfgang’s storms, Capheus’ hope. It’s like the show builds a mirror out of people rather than glass, letting you catch glimpses of yourself from angles you didn’t realise were there.

Rewatching it now, older and more weathered, I’m struck by how the series holds both the human and the Sensorium experience with equal affection. It says: this is what it is to be person-shaped and flawed and full of need. And this is what it is to feel beyond your own edges. To live with your heart plugged directly into someone else’s pulse. To be more than one thing at a time, and to be loved for it rather than punished.

The world of the show is expansive but intimate. Kind but never naive. It argues, quietly and constantly, that connection is not a weakness. That empathy is not an inconvenience. That joy is not something to ration. It treats humanity as something worth believing in, even when the characters have every reason not to. And it treats the Sensorium as the natural extension of that belief: a reminder that we are built for each other, that our lives make more sense when shared.

There’s always a point in the rewatch where my shoulders drop and I feel myself breathe differently. Like the show is saying, you don’t have to do everything alone. You don’t have to harden to survive. You can be held. You can hold back. You can want. You can want more.

That, I think, is the joy of Sense8. It’s beautiful not because it avoids the difficult parts of being alive, but because it insists that we can face them together. It shows a version of the world where tenderness has teeth, where care has weight, where people are allowed to be messy and complicated and still worthy of connection.

What I love most is how Sense8 feels like the blueprint for everything I try to build here. The queer joy, the strange magic, the sci fi stitched to the everyday. The way the show lets women be strong and flawed and incandescent without apology. The way it holds connection as something worth protecting. If this newsletter is my attempt to make sense of the stories that raised me and the futures I still hope for, then Sense8 is one of the clearest signals in that constellation.

So here’s to Sense8: a story that celebrates bodies and minds, earth and pulse, self and cluster. A reminder that being human — sapiens or Sensorium — is a wild, gorgeous, overwhelming thing. And that when we meet each other with openness, the world becomes bigger, softer, and far more possible than it was before.