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shallownessElectric Dreams
The Father Thing
Little Charlie Cottrell loves his father and he loves his basketball (zzz) and although he lives in modern times, with computers and stuff, his life is not that different from a child in the 1980s, or a 1980s movie where NASA swear those lights in the night sky were meteorites. There was a bit of a mysterious tension-causing secret between the mum and dad - it turned out that they were about to separate after I’d decided they weren’t.
Cue an alien (I presume they don’t have aliens on Stranger Things, but they definitely don’t have characters with little resilience named Phillip Dick). It did something to Charlie’s dad.
The kid playing Charlie was fine, it looked pretty dandy, they got the balance between powerless kid and kid with survival smarts down, although I wondered about the quick fix of the internet, but I just wasn’t particularly bothered. I laughed properly twice, but of course the selectively mute friend since his father had left the family found his voice and of course the aliens were really bugs who’d hatched copies of the humans they were replacing. I daresay this is yet another example of Dick seeming cliché when he originated the idea.
‘Matthew’ seemed to be in charge of at least a few of the other aliens and then they seemed to have a hive mind, but those two things led nowhere. As ‘Human Is’ also involved aliens replacing humans, even if it was in a different context, I suppose it was a good time for Channel 4 to have a hiatus between those episodes.
Autofac
It boiled down to this temple to consumerism humanity had created, this automated factory, vs. the remnants of humans in traditional post-apocalyptic look – Juno Temple being the revolutionary tinkerer with the hair that hadn’t seen shampoo, I guess. But she had a different accent from everyone else, which, as in ‘Human Is’, raises more questions than it’s worth. I also wondered how she saw the missile hitting the city if the war had been 20 years ago, but I didn’t come up with a plausible reason.
She was the centre of a lot of relationships with guys, very sure of herself, and I suspect I’d have got annoyed with her if she were around for more than one episode. Enter a robot (played by Janelle Monae, because of course, but it was enjoyable to see two women have the conversations that followed.) Emily’s dream was illuminative, she made her point to Alice, and I was right to be dubious about her lie to her fellow revolutionaries. I mean, it could have made Alice more malleable, but blackmail worked.
Watching Harvey play ‘the girlfriend’ was fun, but he was right about Connie being sweet on Emily. Big (phallic) autofac, and the weakest revolutionary got picked off by a scary robot – I thought ‘oh, they didn’t have any horror movies’ as they all split up.
And then Alice reminded us she’d said she was a simulacrum, not a robot, and we had reveal after reveal, to show what was flashback and what was dream of what we’d seen. Emily proved her assuredness had real basis – she was in one sense the creator, and I suppose they had laid everything out. I thought the ending was a little too pat. Little bits of it were more engaging to me than ‘The Father Thing’ because of the dynamics, although not the puzzle aspect.
The Father Thing
Little Charlie Cottrell loves his father and he loves his basketball (zzz) and although he lives in modern times, with computers and stuff, his life is not that different from a child in the 1980s, or a 1980s movie where NASA swear those lights in the night sky were meteorites. There was a bit of a mysterious tension-causing secret between the mum and dad - it turned out that they were about to separate after I’d decided they weren’t.
Cue an alien (I presume they don’t have aliens on Stranger Things, but they definitely don’t have characters with little resilience named Phillip Dick). It did something to Charlie’s dad.
The kid playing Charlie was fine, it looked pretty dandy, they got the balance between powerless kid and kid with survival smarts down, although I wondered about the quick fix of the internet, but I just wasn’t particularly bothered. I laughed properly twice, but of course the selectively mute friend since his father had left the family found his voice and of course the aliens were really bugs who’d hatched copies of the humans they were replacing. I daresay this is yet another example of Dick seeming cliché when he originated the idea.
‘Matthew’ seemed to be in charge of at least a few of the other aliens and then they seemed to have a hive mind, but those two things led nowhere. As ‘Human Is’ also involved aliens replacing humans, even if it was in a different context, I suppose it was a good time for Channel 4 to have a hiatus between those episodes.
Autofac
It boiled down to this temple to consumerism humanity had created, this automated factory, vs. the remnants of humans in traditional post-apocalyptic look – Juno Temple being the revolutionary tinkerer with the hair that hadn’t seen shampoo, I guess. But she had a different accent from everyone else, which, as in ‘Human Is’, raises more questions than it’s worth. I also wondered how she saw the missile hitting the city if the war had been 20 years ago, but I didn’t come up with a plausible reason.
She was the centre of a lot of relationships with guys, very sure of herself, and I suspect I’d have got annoyed with her if she were around for more than one episode. Enter a robot (played by Janelle Monae, because of course, but it was enjoyable to see two women have the conversations that followed.) Emily’s dream was illuminative, she made her point to Alice, and I was right to be dubious about her lie to her fellow revolutionaries. I mean, it could have made Alice more malleable, but blackmail worked.
Watching Harvey play ‘the girlfriend’ was fun, but he was right about Connie being sweet on Emily. Big (phallic) autofac, and the weakest revolutionary got picked off by a scary robot – I thought ‘oh, they didn’t have any horror movies’ as they all split up.
And then Alice reminded us she’d said she was a simulacrum, not a robot, and we had reveal after reveal, to show what was flashback and what was dream of what we’d seen. Emily proved her assuredness had real basis – she was in one sense the creator, and I suppose they had laid everything out. I thought the ending was a little too pat. Little bits of it were more engaging to me than ‘The Father Thing’ because of the dynamics, although not the puzzle aspect.
