Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 27 August

Limitless (Aronofsky/Handel, 2022-25)

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for unexpected new episodes dropping for shows I thought were all done. The other day, the four-episode season four of the Prime Video comedy Upload arrived — I thought it had been cancelled after season three — and two weeks ago, three new episodes were released of the Liam Hemsworth National Geographic documentary series, Limitless.

The premise for the show is deceptively simple. Despite already being a remarkable physical specimen, Hemsworth — Aussie actor best known as Marvel’s Mighty Thor — is concerned about living as long as possible. To spend as much time as possible with his kids, he tells us.

Each episode is themed around some aspect of mental or physical performance, often the kind that isn’t immediately obvious but can — we’re told — have influential long-term effects and there are cinematographically pleasing challenges involved.

The first is called Stress-Proof and is about learning to cope better with the deleterious impacts of modern life. Hemsworth trains with the Sydney fire brigade and learns to overcome his fear of heights in order to walk out to the end of a crane on top of Sydney’s tallest building.

Other challenges involve fasting — quite a big deal for someone who requires so much protein for his day job — extreme temperatures, raw strength and memory. This was quite a moving episode as Hemsworth discovers through genetic testing that he has a predisposition to early onset Alzheimer’s and the idea that his brain may fail him long before his body proves both upsetting and motivating.

The first season ends with a particularly meaningful experiment. Hemsworth spends a week with a community of older people but he has to wear an outfit that mimics the effect of ageing on his own body — as the week goes on, more weight is added and his ability to precisely control his movements and his senses is reduced. Handling the inevitable physical decay isn’t easy for someone who is so defined by their physicality, but it gets even more existential as he is asked to confront the concept of death itself.

That was a perfectly satisfying ending of Hemsworth’s longevity arc and the three new episodes — while entertaining enough in themselves — don’t add much to our understanding of either the affable Hemsworth or ageing. They are like the extra bonus episodes you might get in a DVD box set — he learns to cope with pain thanks to an extreme exercise with Korea’s special forces, interrogates his appetite for risk with a solo ascension of the world’s tallest climbing wall and tries to improve his brain power by learning a musical instrument.

Playing drums for Ed Sheeran in front of 70,000 Romanian fans may well be the scariest thing he’s done in the series.

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Where to watch Limitless