Max Riemelt wears a Casio World Time

Sense8 introduces Wolfgang Bogdanow with his hands on a safe, a cheap digital Casio strapped over a black glove as he works the lock. Max Riemelt plays Wolfgang, a Berlin locksmith and safecracker raised in a crime family, a man who answers most of his problems with a gun. The watch is a Casio AE-1200, the World Time, and it is the blacked-out version, not the silver steel one most people picture when they hear the model. It has the specs that made the AE-1200 a cult favorite for the money: around thirty dollars, a ten-year battery, water resistance to 100 meters, an LED backlight, and a printed world map that reads out thirty-one time zones.

On Wolfgang the choice fits. He has no use for anything precious and every use for something he can wear through a fight, and Sense8 hands him plenty, including a restaurant shootout he walks through with the room burning behind him. A disposable Casio comes out of a night like that better than anything worth stealing.

Wolfgang is one of eight strangers who wake up sharing a single mind across the planet, a cluster scattered through Chicago, Nairobi, Seoul, Mumbai, Mexico City, San Francisco, London, and his own Berlin. He is the one who holds to his home city while the other seven live out their days on other continents. The world timer on his wrist is built for exactly that gap, a map of foreign cities worn by the one man in the cluster already standing in all of them at once.