Just binge-watched the whole season of this. I quite liked it. Sure, it covered ground that other stories have done before, but I think it covered it more intelligently and engagingly than most, with really good character writing and an effective, nuanced handling of the issues. For instance, it was so refreshing to see a character actually say to the secret oppressed group on the run, "Tell your story to the press, the publicity will protect you." That is so right -- it can't be as easy for the state to go around sending secret hit squads after aliens/robots/superhumans/whatever or dissecting them in secret labs if they go on TV and present themselves sympathetically. At the very least, there'd be controversy and investigations and the government's ability to act would be limited.
I'm actually disappointed that the season ended with the secret
not getting out, the consciousness program not being released. I want to see that change in the status quo and its ramifications. Hopefully they're saving that for a later escalation and we'll see it before the end of the series.
Did the uncut UK version ever explain where "Anita" took Sophie at the end of episode 1?
I don't understand why people were reacting with looks and gasps of horror when the idea of screwing a synth was brought up. They're designed to be smoking hot stunners with all the necessary lady holes and sex protocols for Christ sake. "OMG, I can't believe he banged the gorgeous sex-bot."
Well, the issue with Joe and "Anita" is that she wasn't purchased as a sexbot, but as a caregiver for the family, children included, and that the others in the family had bonded with her. So there was more emotional complication to the act than there would be with, say, Laura using a vibrator. And that's on top of the mess that Joe and Laura's marriage was already in. The issue wasn't that he had sex with a synth, it was what that represented about their problems.
One issue I've always had with shows/films about AI is the way they very often conflate self-awareness with emotional awareness. Why would the synths feel emotions just because they're sapient, self-aware beings?
Well, the real reason is for audience identification. We feel emotions, so if the AIs are to be sympathetic and comprehensible to us, they need to as well. (For all that TNG bought into the conceit that Data had no emotions, it was always pretty obvious that he did, even if they weren't as intense as the human kind. He had hopes and regrets and affinities and dislikes, even if he didn't cry or laugh.)
But there is a valid explanation for it, which is that you can't really separate emotion from conscious thought. Emotion means motivation. They're both from a root meaning "to move." Our emotions are what motivate us. They're our impetus to act and to react. Any mind capable of more than following rigid programming, any mind capable of making choices, needs a reason to favor one choice over another and an incentive to make any choice at all. That's the role emotion plays. It's intimately tied to self-awareness too, because our emotions tell us about our own mental state. They tell us how we are reacting to things or what we're motivated to do. If you know that your situation is affecting your mental state in a negative way, then you know that you feel bad. If you know that your cognitive processes are compelling you to obtain something, then you know that you feel desire. And so on. Feeling is not separate from thinking, it's another layer of thinking.
Is it me or does Leo look like Benedict Cumberbatch's raggedy younger brother?
Looks more like Merlin's raggedy slightly older twin.
But really, Colin Morgan is a pretty amazing, very intense actor. I think he was sometimes wasted on
Merlin as the nice, funny hero.
And yes, Gemma Chan is really striking and does a great job playing a synth. I actually quite liked Anita, even though she was a much cruder persona than Mia. I understand the dramatic reasons for having the sapient synths act more human, but I would've preferred it if they'd still been distinctly inhuman in their sapience.
I like the family dynamics laid bare by the presence of the synth. The wife is not very sympathetic (IMHO). The son covering for the dad...and he dad stepping up to take responsibility, I thought that was all very moving.
Laura started out unsympathetic, but ended up becoming the most sympathetic and sensible one in the family. I really love that growth process, the way she went from feeling dismissive and threatened to bonding with Anita (even before she met Mia) and developing respect for her. So much character growth in the family in just eight episodes, Laura most of all.
How has the cop been able to hide all this time? Edna picked out Niska in one second. Don't they have company physicals or something?
Well, she faked a scar and devised a way to fake eating and drinking. Presumably she found other ways to pass as human.
I think it would've been harder for Niska, who was new at it. I wasn't convinced that contact lenses would be enough. Wouldn't synths smell different from humans? And they wouldn't sweat or get flushed. And I'm not sure about breathing. Odi's and Max's vocal glitches suggested synthesized voices rather than breath-created ones, but Mia did inhale sharply when she awoke.
I'm not entirely clear on how Max got fixed at the end, and Fred didn't. Some sort of reset button? Computer magic?
The program they activated together was the code to instill sentience in a synth. Max's sentient root code was degraded and he needed a new infusion of same. But Hobb's reprogramming of Fred was on top of his existing root code. The Elster program wouldn't have been designed to erase such an addition.
By analogy, giving someone a blood transfusion will replace lost blood, but it won't cure a bone marrow disease. Maybe if they crashed Fred's consciousness and reinstalled it like with Max, that would clear the Hobb code, but that seems like a very risky thing to do.
I do wonder about the long-term plans for the world in this show. The pro-human movement marching in the streets certainly has a point. What future is in store for humanity when synths can take so many jobs? But once Pandora's Box has been opened, there's no going back.
I'm with the pundit on the news show in the beginning. Freeing humans from menial labor frees us to do more creative things with our lives, to spend more time with our loved ones. We already have much more leisure time than our forebears did, and it hasn't harmed us.
Really however empathetic Mia and co are, Karen is right, synths with consciousness and free will do potentially mean the end of humanity (as we know it) the question becomes, do we step aside gracefully or do we fight back?.
Humanity as we know it has ended several times before, as new technologies or social systems have transformed life radically. Every major innovation has been condemned and warned against as the imminent destroyer of all things good and righteous, but we've just adapted to the change and kept on going. The assumption that change to something new would just mean the end of everything is simply a failure of imagination.
The real truth about what lies ahead can probably be found in the lie Hobb told to Fred about his motivation, when he said that eventually humans and synths would grow closer together, would intermingle and become parts of a greater whole. Yes, humanity would change, but change is the basis of life's continuation, not a threat to it. (And if synths are the offspring of humans, and if we created them in the image of humans, doesn't that make them part of humanity already?)
