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damkiannaSo! It's been a while since I've done a catch-up post on TV; I don't have much to say about Sleepy Hollow (still enjoying it) or SHIELD (still enjoying it) or Major Crimes (definitely still enjoying it!); but idriya and I have also been watching Almost Human, and I think we're far enough into it now for me to be able to say, with relative certainty, I have no idea why I'm still watching this show. I don't hate it, I'm not trying to salt it and burn it with my mind like Revolution (or everything about Revolution except Nora, Charlie, and Rachel, anyway). But mostly it's just irritating me, when it isn't boring the snot out of me.
Let's see if I can break this down into a list.
:: The plots - mostly bore the snot out of me. I kept zoning out during the episode about the cop who died while undercover unauthorized and the department thinks he might have been dirty but his tragic widow just knows he was cleazzzzzzzzzz. I've seen this episode of EVERY police procedural! The least, the ABSOLUTE LEAST, that a show purportedly set in 2048 could do would be to have it be a lady cop and her weeping husband - never mind a dude cop and his weeping husband, or a lady cop and her weeping wife, about whom nobody comments because by this point in the future it's not worth comment! But: no. Sigh.
:: Seguing from that, the worldbuilding - mostly irritates me. You can tell this show's in the future because ... holograms, I guess? We already have drones, people seem to dress mostly the same way - aside from the robots, which are, you know, THE PREMISE, there's ... holograms, I guess. Every single episode, the mechanically cool female voiceover tells me that the leaps and bounds in technology have unleashed a quasi-dystopian flood of crimedoers! But (aside from the robots, which, PREMISE) I just don't find myself believing it. People already take hostages, kill witnesses, and blow other people up; cameras are already tiny; basically every cop show of the 2000s has done an episode on the sociopathic anonymous hordes of the internet. And compared to a show like Justified, the setting of Almost Human feels UNBELIEVABLY clean and moral - crime is something that individual bad people cause to happen, rather than systematic, chronic, overwhelming; an almost inescapable way of life. The voiceover seems to be trying to tell me this is going to be Justified-with-robots, Judge Dredd - even Banlieue 13; and then the show ends up feeling like CSI: Miami, clean clean clean.
In addition to having trouble buying the technology and the crime individually, I'm also having trouble buying the technology and the crime where they overlap. How are the police not fighting a constant war with hackers trying to disable or take control of MXes/DRNs/whatever the hell? Am I supposed to be impressed by people managing to avoid being identified through security camera footage, never mind that people ALREADY DO THAT on every crime show ever without needing digital disco-ball masks? How have they not already run into a "decommissioned" DRN who got stolen by a crime lord and then took over his operation, or hacked MXes who've been reappropriated into hench-goons? Hell, why were the gynoids in the sexbot episode not doubling as hench-goons, given that it ought to be easy to make them stronger than the humans they look like?
And: given the purported crimetopia, I am AMAZED that the futuristic police are still reading people their rights, having to fake that injuries were pre-existing when they want to beat people in interrogation rooms, and needing a reason to enter people's homes without a warrant. I'd think the rules would have changed; but tough-and-gritty Kennex seems ... well, stabler than Stabler, to put it as punnily as possible, and L&O:SVU is not supposed to be set in Crimetopia.
:: This is kind of a combination of worldbuilding and plot, but it gets its own bullet: the relationships between Dorian, the MXes, and humans. I don't even know where to start. For me, these problems start out persnickety but become more fundamentally frustrating the more I think about them. In the most recent ep, for example, a Dorian with a low charge should surely be turning off nonessential subroutines like humor, facial expressions, and anger, rather than losing control of them - which might sound persnickety! But it bothers me partly because I don't understand the rationale in programming terms and partly because I disagree with where it takes the narrative: that's what a tired human might do, but it's not what a low-charge android should do (and this is key) even if he is a person. This encapsulates perfectly one of the things that annoys me most about this show, which is its seeming inability to actually look at the line between "person" and "human". Because the writers want Dorian to be perceived as a person, they make him do things a human might do; because the writers want the MXes to be perceived as non-people, they make them do things humans wouldn't do. But on a show like this, that's not how personhood should work. The one thing I really liked about the sexbot episode was the scene with Dorian and the gynoid near the end; it was odd and calm and incredibly tragic, and neither of them handled it anything like the way a human would handle it, but! That didn't make them seem less like people. But I'm starting to think that scene was a happy accident, because nothing else this show is doing is anywhere near convincing me that they want to even acknowledge that line, let alone explore it.
The line the show does seem to be drawing is between Dorian and the MXes, and it's doing it in a way that doesn't work for me at all. The show is unclear about the rules that govern Dorian's behavior to a degree that makes me itch; he's "programmed" with "feelings", and so ... well, he just reacts to almost everything the same way a human would, I guess! HOW CONVENIENT. Dorian makes jokes, smiles and frowns at appropriate moments, is programmed to use slang, and has a working dick; definitely a person! The MXes are efficiently dick-free, do not waste resources on the zillion fake muscles you'd need to even approximate human facial expressions, and were not programmed to engage in small talk; so, in the end, who gives a shit if you throw one into high-speed traffic? Data's storyline on TNG did a thousand times better than that, and it was written TWENTY YEARS AGO. Have any of these people read Asimov? Because the point isn't to write less nuanced media about robots than the guy who did it in the '50s.
(To be fair, for all I know the endgame of this show is the glorious revolution of the MXes, and I'll have to eat my words. But at this point, introspection about who the MXes are feels like more than this show is ever going to give me.)
:: The emotional plotline - mostly bores the snot out of me, when I'm not bewildered by it. For the life of me, I can't understand where the slowly-developing buddy cop show I thought I'd be watching has gone. Maybe this is down to my complete inability to relate to stories told at a pace that isn't utterly glacial; but somehow I was expecting it to take like a season for them to work through John's issues with androids and with his leg and with Dorian as his partner, and basically all of that is already gone, done, solved. I was expecting it to be kind of a milestone for John to start thinking of Dorian as a person, for John to do things like go to his captain for favors on Dorian's behalf - for there to be a struggle for John to acknowledge that Dorian's personal comfort has value, even though Dorian is a machine. But: no. Somehow everybody is already on board the buddy cop train; John is comfortable fixing the sparks flying from his partner's head with chewing gum, John is comfortable going out with a partly-charged Dorian.
I'm guessing this is partly the show not wanting Kennex to look like an utter douchewaffle, and partly a consequence of their choice to make Dorian as human-like as he is - every plotline this show was ever going to have leads to John realizing that Dorian is a person even if he's not human, but he looks like more of a dick if he takes a long time to get there when Dorian's personhood is as obvious as this (so human-like! So easy to perceive!).
In my head, the Platonic ideal of this show involves a more unsettling Dorian, equally a person but not so human, and a longer struggle for John to really accept him, to wrap his head around the idea that Dorian can be so unlike a human in various ways but still be a person. The bubblegum moment from the hostage ep would have been harder for John; the olive oil moment with his leg would have to have come after more difficulty, a last resort when he didn't know what else to do about it; Dorian's desire for his own space would have been met with John trying to understand how that can even matter to a machine. There would be times when John would almost forget Dorian was an android, and then something Dorian did or said would abruptly remind him, and he'd be twice as much of a dick to cover up his near-lapse. And when John did get there, he'd be faced with the uncomfortable truth that if Dorian's a person - aren't the MXes? Aren't the sexbots? What makes them different? Is there a difference, or is it just that John wants to see his partner as a person but doesn't want to see sexbots as people?
Also it would be all shades of gray and there would be more women and John's ex-girlfriend who let him get blown up would not just be tantalizingly maybe-alive but actually show up and have a plotline; and while we're at it John would be Lena Headey and Dorian would be Kandyse McClure and Lena!John would still have an almost incapacitating thing for Minka Kelly.
But: that show isn't this show; and I have no idea why I'm still watching this show. For what it's worth, there are moments I've enjoyed very much, and I get what people who aren't me like about it! But it's just not doing it for me.
Surely someone out there has written some incredible ten-thousand-word meta about humanity, personhood, and why American media's perception and understanding of both mean that Dorian was always, always going to have a working dick. I just have to find it.
idriya and I have also been watching Almost Human, and I think we're far enough into it now for me to be able to say, with relative certainty, I have no idea why I'm still watching this show. I don't hate it, I'm not trying to salt it and burn it with my mind like Revolution (or everything about Revolution except Nora, Charlie, and Rachel, anyway). But mostly it's just irritating me, when it isn't boring the snot out of me.Let's see if I can break this down into a list.
:: The plots - mostly bore the snot out of me. I kept zoning out during the episode about the cop who died while undercover unauthorized and the department thinks he might have been dirty but his tragic widow just knows he was cleazzzzzzzzzz. I've seen this episode of EVERY police procedural! The least, the ABSOLUTE LEAST, that a show purportedly set in 2048 could do would be to have it be a lady cop and her weeping husband - never mind a dude cop and his weeping husband, or a lady cop and her weeping wife, about whom nobody comments because by this point in the future it's not worth comment! But: no. Sigh.
:: Seguing from that, the worldbuilding - mostly irritates me. You can tell this show's in the future because ... holograms, I guess? We already have drones, people seem to dress mostly the same way - aside from the robots, which are, you know, THE PREMISE, there's ... holograms, I guess. Every single episode, the mechanically cool female voiceover tells me that the leaps and bounds in technology have unleashed a quasi-dystopian flood of crimedoers! But (aside from the robots, which, PREMISE) I just don't find myself believing it. People already take hostages, kill witnesses, and blow other people up; cameras are already tiny; basically every cop show of the 2000s has done an episode on the sociopathic anonymous hordes of the internet. And compared to a show like Justified, the setting of Almost Human feels UNBELIEVABLY clean and moral - crime is something that individual bad people cause to happen, rather than systematic, chronic, overwhelming; an almost inescapable way of life. The voiceover seems to be trying to tell me this is going to be Justified-with-robots, Judge Dredd - even Banlieue 13; and then the show ends up feeling like CSI: Miami, clean clean clean.
In addition to having trouble buying the technology and the crime individually, I'm also having trouble buying the technology and the crime where they overlap. How are the police not fighting a constant war with hackers trying to disable or take control of MXes/DRNs/whatever the hell? Am I supposed to be impressed by people managing to avoid being identified through security camera footage, never mind that people ALREADY DO THAT on every crime show ever without needing digital disco-ball masks? How have they not already run into a "decommissioned" DRN who got stolen by a crime lord and then took over his operation, or hacked MXes who've been reappropriated into hench-goons? Hell, why were the gynoids in the sexbot episode not doubling as hench-goons, given that it ought to be easy to make them stronger than the humans they look like?
And: given the purported crimetopia, I am AMAZED that the futuristic police are still reading people their rights, having to fake that injuries were pre-existing when they want to beat people in interrogation rooms, and needing a reason to enter people's homes without a warrant. I'd think the rules would have changed; but tough-and-gritty Kennex seems ... well, stabler than Stabler, to put it as punnily as possible, and L&O:SVU is not supposed to be set in Crimetopia.
:: This is kind of a combination of worldbuilding and plot, but it gets its own bullet: the relationships between Dorian, the MXes, and humans. I don't even know where to start. For me, these problems start out persnickety but become more fundamentally frustrating the more I think about them. In the most recent ep, for example, a Dorian with a low charge should surely be turning off nonessential subroutines like humor, facial expressions, and anger, rather than losing control of them - which might sound persnickety! But it bothers me partly because I don't understand the rationale in programming terms and partly because I disagree with where it takes the narrative: that's what a tired human might do, but it's not what a low-charge android should do (and this is key) even if he is a person. This encapsulates perfectly one of the things that annoys me most about this show, which is its seeming inability to actually look at the line between "person" and "human". Because the writers want Dorian to be perceived as a person, they make him do things a human might do; because the writers want the MXes to be perceived as non-people, they make them do things humans wouldn't do. But on a show like this, that's not how personhood should work. The one thing I really liked about the sexbot episode was the scene with Dorian and the gynoid near the end; it was odd and calm and incredibly tragic, and neither of them handled it anything like the way a human would handle it, but! That didn't make them seem less like people. But I'm starting to think that scene was a happy accident, because nothing else this show is doing is anywhere near convincing me that they want to even acknowledge that line, let alone explore it.
The line the show does seem to be drawing is between Dorian and the MXes, and it's doing it in a way that doesn't work for me at all. The show is unclear about the rules that govern Dorian's behavior to a degree that makes me itch; he's "programmed" with "feelings", and so ... well, he just reacts to almost everything the same way a human would, I guess! HOW CONVENIENT. Dorian makes jokes, smiles and frowns at appropriate moments, is programmed to use slang, and has a working dick; definitely a person! The MXes are efficiently dick-free, do not waste resources on the zillion fake muscles you'd need to even approximate human facial expressions, and were not programmed to engage in small talk; so, in the end, who gives a shit if you throw one into high-speed traffic? Data's storyline on TNG did a thousand times better than that, and it was written TWENTY YEARS AGO. Have any of these people read Asimov? Because the point isn't to write less nuanced media about robots than the guy who did it in the '50s.
(To be fair, for all I know the endgame of this show is the glorious revolution of the MXes, and I'll have to eat my words. But at this point, introspection about who the MXes are feels like more than this show is ever going to give me.)
:: The emotional plotline - mostly bores the snot out of me, when I'm not bewildered by it. For the life of me, I can't understand where the slowly-developing buddy cop show I thought I'd be watching has gone. Maybe this is down to my complete inability to relate to stories told at a pace that isn't utterly glacial; but somehow I was expecting it to take like a season for them to work through John's issues with androids and with his leg and with Dorian as his partner, and basically all of that is already gone, done, solved. I was expecting it to be kind of a milestone for John to start thinking of Dorian as a person, for John to do things like go to his captain for favors on Dorian's behalf - for there to be a struggle for John to acknowledge that Dorian's personal comfort has value, even though Dorian is a machine. But: no. Somehow everybody is already on board the buddy cop train; John is comfortable fixing the sparks flying from his partner's head with chewing gum, John is comfortable going out with a partly-charged Dorian.
I'm guessing this is partly the show not wanting Kennex to look like an utter douchewaffle, and partly a consequence of their choice to make Dorian as human-like as he is - every plotline this show was ever going to have leads to John realizing that Dorian is a person even if he's not human, but he looks like more of a dick if he takes a long time to get there when Dorian's personhood is as obvious as this (so human-like! So easy to perceive!).
In my head, the Platonic ideal of this show involves a more unsettling Dorian, equally a person but not so human, and a longer struggle for John to really accept him, to wrap his head around the idea that Dorian can be so unlike a human in various ways but still be a person. The bubblegum moment from the hostage ep would have been harder for John; the olive oil moment with his leg would have to have come after more difficulty, a last resort when he didn't know what else to do about it; Dorian's desire for his own space would have been met with John trying to understand how that can even matter to a machine. There would be times when John would almost forget Dorian was an android, and then something Dorian did or said would abruptly remind him, and he'd be twice as much of a dick to cover up his near-lapse. And when John did get there, he'd be faced with the uncomfortable truth that if Dorian's a person - aren't the MXes? Aren't the sexbots? What makes them different? Is there a difference, or is it just that John wants to see his partner as a person but doesn't want to see sexbots as people?
Also it would be all shades of gray and there would be more women and John's ex-girlfriend who let him get blown up would not just be tantalizingly maybe-alive but actually show up and have a plotline; and while we're at it John would be Lena Headey and Dorian would be Kandyse McClure and Lena!John would still have an almost incapacitating thing for Minka Kelly.
But: that show isn't this show; and I have no idea why I'm still watching this show. For what it's worth, there are moments I've enjoyed very much, and I get what people who aren't me like about it! But it's just not doing it for me.
Surely someone out there has written some incredible ten-thousand-word meta about humanity, personhood, and why American media's perception and understanding of both mean that Dorian was always, always going to have a working dick. I just have to find it.
