Almost Human

Tha Trailer

Looks kinda interesting...

ALIEN RAPTOR SAYS "RAWR!"

Lilli Taylor is the shiz. Where she goes, so goes my army.

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The men behind Fringe are involved looks sweet.

All of time and space, anywhere and everywhere, any star that ever was. Where do you want to start?

Yeah, need something to fill the void. Perhaps it won't suck, lol.

ALIEN RAPTOR SAYS "RAWR!"

Interesting.

"You can reply to this Message!"

I'm looking forward to this. Karl Urban deserves a nice success after the disaster that was Dredd.

Home of CBR Rumbles-in-Exile: rumbles.fr.yuku.com

But it's premiering on Fox, and we all know how fox handles new shows, no matter how good they are

Yes, but I think Americans are spoiled by shows that get more than one season. There seems to be this idea that a show is only good if it has two or more seasons, rather than one. I say if a show can accomplish what it needs in one season, without it cancelling midway, then I find that successful.

Anyway!! I am so watching this Monday.

I never really tire of the Future cop with robot genre. The only issue is that the genre is so niche that it tends to clash with previous creations. Making people think that the idea is a rip off of another/

You know the pilot was Sunday, right?

I do worry that this is all a bit shallow.

That, and I'm amused at how cross eyed Lilli Taylor was on the monitor screen at the start. She's giving a surprisingly flat performance, but I'd have never picked her for this kind of a show. She strikes me as one of those actors who are fantastic when they have a holistic understanding of a character and time to develop a character, but can't cope well with the JJ Abrahms model show, where no-one has a very specific idea of what's going on.

I know I'm suppose to find the standard issue police robots creepy, but they're pretty cute. Partly because they're so bloody flimsy and vulnerable. Dorian's a keeper. D'awwh.

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Karl Urban was awful last night, but this wasn't helped by the fact that his character is so factory stock it might as well be a robot. The pilot is so horrendously derivative, and the supporting characters are nearly all archetypes. Minka Kelly's Designated Love Interest (who of course is significantly younger than Urban's White Male Hero) particularly grates. Michael Ealy's robot with the soul of a real boy is fantastic, though.

Coming up tonight: sex bots ! [[Sarcasm Mode. Yaay, because that hasn't been done before.]]. And what's particularly problematic (and a symptom of how bro-y the show is) is that the sex bots look to be entirely female, which is just dumb and a clear indicator that the plot is just an excuse to show a lot of scantily clad women.

It looks like Gina Carano's robot head is in a box, though, so that's something to look forward to.

I'm actually really hoping that they'll run into a sex bot version of Dorian, but I know that's utterly impossible. That'd be the kind of story I'd be interested in seeing them tackle.

Of course, what we're going to get is evil sex dominatrix robot that's the second coming of Joanna Cassidy's Zhora — you could see some clear plastic raincoat wearing sex mannequins in a display, in the first urban sprawl they showed us.

Speaking of Urban, some of the faces he pulled were awful. He's such a cartoon in this role. He's matching Dorian's performance energy for energy, which I feel is probably a mistake. Then again, I'd not take my opening shot straight out of a Tom Clancy game, so what would I know?

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Was this at me? Of course I knew, I was on tumblr

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Ugh, I am actually disappointed that the s3xbot was deactivated. She was pretty much an innocent in this scenario. Why the issue of human skin/dna on a bot so extreme that a bot has to be destroyed?

edited 18th Nov '13 8:03:19 PM by Bunai

Yeah, I really wish they had given some explanation for that. It didn't have to be a logical one; lots of regulations are poorly thought-out. The only thing I can come up with is that the law was put in place because with their current tech, the only way they can make realistic bots using human DNA is to take it directly from humans, but that doesn't make sense because the cops had clearly never seen this before. Maybe it's just to avoid a Blade Runner replicant scenario.

My only explanation is that this was probably the fifth episode of the season, and that the episode order was changed. I assume there was some justification for the DNA thing in an earlier episode, and we'll just have to catch up to it.

(I'm basing this assumption off IMDB's decision to credits this episode as both second and fifth episode this season, and from knowledge about problems with the running of the show back of house).

edited 19th Nov '13 12:29:24 AM by Nicknacks

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Does the DNA thing really need an explanation though beyond the fact that it's obviously illegal and the standard protocol is to have the illegal android destroyed? I mean if we're willing to accept that some regulations are poorly thought out, do we really need an "as you know" scene where the regulations are spelled out for the audience?

edited 19th Nov '13 9:03:17 AM by Sayer

I am guessing FOX wanted to air an 'exciting episode' for the sake of momentum. Hopefully this won't affect the current storyline too badly, usually the first five episodes of any show is still character building. Though I do see this affecting Johns personality, being seen going from 'hard nose' around Dorian to 'not such a jerk' in the next episode.

Skipping 2,3,4 makes me think it will be shoved into some kind of flash back inset episodes.

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I can only hope that they air each episode and then I can later purchase them to watch in the correct order. The viewers who are not into character development will not be sticking around, it is the growing fanbase that will.

edited 19th Nov '13 11:28:41 AM by Bunai

I don't know. Kennex was already well on his way to "not such a jerk" by the end of the pilot. That was the point of the "I should acknowledge that you saved my life" and the "You're not like the rest" not to mention no longer requesting "quiet mode" or referring to Dorian as "synthetic."

I was actually pretty thankful that they got that bit of the character development over so quickly. When they have it go on for multiple episodes, it just makes the ornery character seem like an ass. This way it's established that while Kennex is ornery and has his issues, he isn't an ass, and he does alter his perceptions when presented with new evidence.

I'd blame TV tropes for the fact that, as I watched the pilot, I couldn't help dissecting the show rather than just passively enjoying it- but I have been like that long before I found the site. I still managed to enjoy it a bit, but I want to post my observations here anyway.

First, there were so many clichés here. Even the ones I didn't see coming (only because I was intentionally not looking for them) still made me groan eg. I didn't try to guess who betrayed the cops and it turned out to be the ex-girlfriend. Really? We didn't even get a motive, just the main character getting even more miserable. Also, did they have to make the robot Black? Could they have been any more unsubtle about the parallels to the androids being effectively a slave race? Finally, I was very unimpressed with the looks and sound of the future. I know this is running on a TV show budget and is only 35 years in the future, but it looks just like today. They couldn't even invent new fashions or slang? Though I suppose they could in later episodes.

That said, I DID like the acting. This was a convincingly gritty cop show. The action was good, and there were clever bits like the bioweapon created specifically to target the cops' defenses. So, right now I'm kind on the fence on the show. I think I'll watch a few more episodes then decide if I'll continue following it.

Ramblings
It's nice to see a character "spring back" after a rough introduction but (imo) I would like to see a build to that spring moment. Now I am sitting here speculating (hard) if the three skipped eps had a hand in this, because the therapy sessions were pretty heavy in the pilot alone.
Where does Johns humor come from? Did Dorian have a play in how to get him to relax that much?

Going with episode 5 was a decent start if they plan to go forward with 6, 7, and 8. I think they could get 2, 3, and 4 in there if they put them after episode 7. Though it greatly depends on the mood setting of these upcoming episodes.

I don't care if I end up bored as I don't know what while watching the first three episodes of any show, I wanna see how the characters are before a show gets to its mid point. e.g. The first few Lucky Star episodes are panned as being boring and reviews of 'not worth watching', but then as the season went on if you went back to watch the early episodes you can see how stable they were in building up the later episodes.

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In my mind this series' backbone is how John and Dorian interact first, while the plot is second. The show doesn't have to compete with Agents of Shield, just let it be a sci-fi dystopia with the characters to fill it in.

Ahh. I want to talk about the episode next Monday instead of gripping about FO Xs handling of things.

Saw the episode with the sexbots. Truly creepy; they were obviously referencing real-life crimes (White Slavery and Organlegging) there. The show remains gritty and surprisingly adult, aside from some moments of humor that worked really well (the giraffe, the dating site profile, etc.) The only thing I really disliked was the "death" of the sexbot in the end. Why was that necessary: Couldn't they have removed the stolen skin and given her artificial one? Yeah I get that it was done so Urban could experience more about 'robot death' but still, it felt forced IMHO.

Overall, the characters are growing on me, though they are still not very deep yet. I think I'll continue watching for now.

I feel it needs more justification in order to justify later narrative choices, and to be compelling to me — otherwise it seems incredibly arbitrary.

I can't intellectually understand why anyone would have a problem with applying human biology to a robot, beyond metaphorical miscegenation and other fantastic racisms. While there are clearly quite violent and illegal ways of creating a cyborg, I reject the idea that the creation of a cyborg would necessarily involve anything remotely traumatic as skinning a woman alive. (Not that a human donor should be required at all, given the "programmable" petri-dish DNA we saw in the pilot).

Furthermore, the cyborg's shut down in the coda was confusing to me. Why was that necessary?

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The gender dynamics in this show are very troublesome. In episode 2 the only women characters are either literally non-sentient sex slaves, victims of kidnap and murder, and the female cops play an entirely supporting role to the male characters, with one of them existing only to serve as a love/lust object to the white male lead (seriously, she has no characterization beyond "Smart" and "Likes Karl Urban").

There's not a single female police officer who goes out into the field with the male characters, either in the traffic stop or in the final climactic raid (which is just odd, because when rescuing women who have just been victimized by men why would you surround them with more men?). Hell, the Designated Love Interest is called "Detective" but she doesn't get to raid the skin harvesting lab while the other male supporting detective whose only characterization is "Douchebag" does.

Problem is, regressive gender politics aside, the plot of the cases of the week are kind of stupid. The Albanians need human skin for their sex bots, but they can't vat-grow it (despite our being able to grow meat today) and they decide to abduct perhaps the most media and attention grabbing victims (young attractive middle class women) to harvest their skin? That's just dumb.

Why would they bother? Remember, she's just a machine as far as they're concerned. She may look human and have certain personality traits designed to imitate human behavior, but in the end, she's still just a very well-built robot. I suspect anyone actually making such a suggestion would get a funny look and be asked "why would we waste resources doing that?" She doesn't even have the same level of humanity as Dorian, and they locked him away in storage for 4 years. I imagine that as far as anyone there other than Dorian is concerned, she's expendable - what possible reason would they have to fit her with fake skin and then...do whatever it is they'd do with her next?

My leading suspicion is that those laws are in place as a precaution in order to save themselves a lot of legal headaches and worse further down the road. Once you start integrating human DNA into robots, especially when you have the ability to program them with the level of humanity that Dorian has (or more - because lets face it, people are going to want to push the programming even further in the name of SCIENCE!), you start forcing people to ask "when do they stop being robots and start being people?"

Next thing you know, you have Ridiculously Human Robots running around that are as much human as they are machine that start demanding the same rights as naturally-born fully flesh and blood human beings, which has a dangerous possibility of leading down the road to a robot uprising, especially if those ridiculously human robots empathize with their less human brothers (such as the way Dorian empathized with the robot who got shut down at the end of the episode.). Next thing you know, you have society facing the fear of having a robot uprising on their hands.

So, yeah, I think that the laws keeping humans and robots from being integrated the way they talked about in the episode are most likely a way of ensuring that robots and humans remain distinctly different individuals by putting a line down that shall not be crossed for preventative measures.

But wouldn't they strip the flesh from her and repurpose her? She's expensive tech.

Given that this was actually episode five (my suspicions were confirmed) I'd wager that the female characters did have a fair degree of development, it's just that it happened in episodes that were superseded for broadcast. I'm willing to give the show the benefit of the doubt, though I do agree with your earlier post: this is a very bro-y show.

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