shallowness (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shallowness) wrote2015-07-04 08:25 am
shallowness) wrote2015-07-04 08:25 am
further in
Humans episode 2
The previously section and titles enlightened me that Elster is meant to have imparted consciousness to certain synths (to reboot the Matrix?) I didn’t grasp that the first time around.
This episode started off with lots of humans feeling obsolete in different ways around synths.
So Colin Morgan’s bit of scruff (Leo) considers the conscious synth who can’t fake it (Leo) his brother - and of course they have an inventor father figure - but does not, presumably, consider “Anita” his sibling.
That ‘memory’ (which Fred and “Anita” have) felt like a Blade Runner reference more than a plot point, although I’m sure it was a Significant Event.
We learned that Mattie is the smartest girl in the school, and up to more sophisticated methods of attacking synths than seen in the last episode.
I like the look at institutions forcing synths on people, and taking away their choice to make bad decisions and fail.
Ha, so there was a Synthetic Registration Act. Of course there was.
Presumably synths wouldn’t be police officers, ever, but what about other positions in the force?
Poor Niska.
Then there was a section where men and young men were stupid – Joe missed out on all the undercurrents around the synth, and homed in on the other stuff with his wife. I am not going to say that his daughter got all her smarts from her ma, because he was partially right, but he had a huge blind spot. Toby was stupid – okay, hormones were to blame, but he should have known there’d be synth programming to deal with what he was trying to do. But Anita absolutely diverted from programming there to have him be indebted to her. And then Leo’s stupidity and cruelty in making Niska stay in the synth brothel blew up. Her snapping was totally understandable and I was rooting for her to escape.
So Gepetto (William Hurt’s character) was in on the creation of the synths, adding a nice layer of irony to his misery at his gaoler/carer. (No offence to Rebecca Front, but she’s markedly different to all the other synths we’ve seen, which makes it a weird casting choice.)
Leo being a synth was a very neat twist, as he seemed, well, human. An advanced or experimental model, then, given the red liquid where Niska’s is blue?
The family psychodrama continued, with Anita giving herself away, but appearing to malfunction rather than giving away that she had a subconscious. I don’t know why she thinks ‘Back’ is a victory. Yet. So she has lost most of her memories, but not all, and is still reacting emotionally and in a way that suggests she has consciousness.
I like that I have (varying) degrees of sympathy for all the characters. I still think that in a show that references so much sci-fi, the characters’ genre-blindness is a bit glaring – there was plenty of speculative fiction out there to draw on and pause and think about instead of just reacting to synths’ effect as it occurs, although that’s...human nature.
The previously section and titles enlightened me that Elster is meant to have imparted consciousness to certain synths (to reboot the Matrix?) I didn’t grasp that the first time around.
This episode started off with lots of humans feeling obsolete in different ways around synths.
So Colin Morgan’s bit of scruff (Leo) considers the conscious synth who can’t fake it (Leo) his brother - and of course they have an inventor father figure - but does not, presumably, consider “Anita” his sibling.
That ‘memory’ (which Fred and “Anita” have) felt like a Blade Runner reference more than a plot point, although I’m sure it was a Significant Event.
We learned that Mattie is the smartest girl in the school, and up to more sophisticated methods of attacking synths than seen in the last episode.
I like the look at institutions forcing synths on people, and taking away their choice to make bad decisions and fail.
Ha, so there was a Synthetic Registration Act. Of course there was.
Presumably synths wouldn’t be police officers, ever, but what about other positions in the force?
Poor Niska.
Then there was a section where men and young men were stupid – Joe missed out on all the undercurrents around the synth, and homed in on the other stuff with his wife. I am not going to say that his daughter got all her smarts from her ma, because he was partially right, but he had a huge blind spot. Toby was stupid – okay, hormones were to blame, but he should have known there’d be synth programming to deal with what he was trying to do. But Anita absolutely diverted from programming there to have him be indebted to her. And then Leo’s stupidity and cruelty in making Niska stay in the synth brothel blew up. Her snapping was totally understandable and I was rooting for her to escape.
So Gepetto (William Hurt’s character) was in on the creation of the synths, adding a nice layer of irony to his misery at his gaoler/carer. (No offence to Rebecca Front, but she’s markedly different to all the other synths we’ve seen, which makes it a weird casting choice.)
Leo being a synth was a very neat twist, as he seemed, well, human. An advanced or experimental model, then, given the red liquid where Niska’s is blue?
The family psychodrama continued, with Anita giving herself away, but appearing to malfunction rather than giving away that she had a subconscious. I don’t know why she thinks ‘Back’ is a victory. Yet. So she has lost most of her memories, but not all, and is still reacting emotionally and in a way that suggests she has consciousness.
I like that I have (varying) degrees of sympathy for all the characters. I still think that in a show that references so much sci-fi, the characters’ genre-blindness is a bit glaring – there was plenty of speculative fiction out there to draw on and pause and think about instead of just reacting to synths’ effect as it occurs, although that’s...human nature.