Inter title of British tv series. Wikicommons. Some rights reserved. No sooner had the latest Channel 4 Sunday night drama serial, “Humans”, captured one of the largest audience shares for drama the broadcaster has enjoyed for many years than the rumours of a sequel started to spread. Sure enough, before number seven of the eight episodes had aired, a re-order was confirmed. Perhaps equally predictably, the quality of episode eight plummeted, as enough loose ends were left unresolved to pull in the potential returning viewers (but also enough to drive away those who felt this artificial process had gutted much of the dramatic tension so carefully developed over the run of the show).
This is a shame. Thanks to some nifty casting and contact lenses (allowing the “synthetics” to look human, whilst for the most part behaving robotically), and a handful of promising story-lines, “Humans” (adapted from what sounds like a more complex Swedish original of which two seasons have already been broadcast) tapped fortuitously into a current anxiety, voiced (if that is the right word) by Stephen Hawking, about the dangers of allowing IT to create robots who will want to take control (think HAL in Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece, “2001: A Space Odyssey)”. The synthetics are another version of the replicants in “Blade Runner” (Ridley Scott’s 1982 film version of a Philip K. Dick story). Sensibly, David Ely, in his brilliant 1992 novella “A Journal of the Flood Year” had the sense to make his futuristic robots non-humanoid, even if that means no beautiful temptresses like Alicia (“Ex Machina”) Vikander.
If I had a frisson of anxiety about the fact that the Swedish evil genius robot designer David Eischer had been converted into David Elster (!) by the British producers, I suppressed it, and enjoyed watching the different characters and various intrigues develop. All the more disappointing, then, when the writing, directing and plot finally ran flat in the final episode: we even had a virtual “tree of life” (perhaps a nod to 1985’s “Edge of Darkness” by Troy Kennedy Martin) round which the synthetics gathered in their search for consciousness. (A far more intelligent nod had been in the opening titles, which might have been lifted whole from an Adam Curtis documentary series).
