Almost Human—the cloning one

The challenge of making a good sci-fi show is taking thoughtful risks. That doesn’t mean the story has to be so complicated it leaves the dumb masses behind, but without a future where technology has changed morality, you’ve got another generic cop show with electric cars and quieter guns.

The drugs-are-bad episode, terrorism episode, heist episode and fuckbots episode were decent but not nearly as interesting as they could’ve been.

And now the cloning episode.

The plot we got was a literal genius who was faking being good in the eyes of the world but was really a villain, because he killed the doctor who helped clone him a few times. The story involves him and his clone family trying to kill a witness to the crime, a ditzy broad who looks like a 1980s Madonna and who is psychic from a brain-boosting process (a story in itself). The tight-(hair)-bunned cop-boss character is explored a little more but that’s really the only thing new.

A better plot would have had the good guy be likable while an unseen killer picked off the clones, causing the good guy to expose him-selves to the cops. Why was cloning conveniently made illegal 20 years earlier? Why did this guy clone himself, was it to beat an incurable disease? Do clones have legal rights? Is killing a clone considered murder?

This is the first episode where we really see Dorian’s awesome robopower as he catches up to a speeding electro-van and flips it like a cheese omelette (causing it to explode, even though it has no gas engine).

We the audience were kind-of prepped for this when earlier an MX-43 bragged about being able to lift a metric ton. I didn’t like this new information because it made Kennex look ignorant. If you didn’t know your robot buddy could lift a car, you might call in human first responders, needlessly putting them in the line of fire.

The MXs are as useless as stormtroopers. They’re supposed to provide a cold, glaring contrast to “crazy” warm Dorian, but their design is not well thought-out.

If an MX-43 can effortlessly carry a metric ton, they should all be walking around with 200 extra pounds of body armor, especially since every episode the bad guys get the jump on them. MX headwear is clearly not bulletproof, as their heads always get blown apart like rock candy.

It’s not necessary to build humanoid robots so that their recording devices are fragile chips of glass in their rock candy skulls…the head should have sensors-only while recording modules used as evidence should be heavily shielded in the robots’ torsos.  Sorry for the nerd shit, but it has to be said.

I don’t care about the hot girl cop, do you? We’ve seen McCoy break into a cold sweat in a showroom of fuckbots, why would he care about a human woman? (Prediction:  later in the season, when he’s ready to close the deal, the evil Insyndicate girlfriend will come along to ruin everything).

We also learned this week that Dorian has a giant robocock. The patrol car cop-buddy banter gets amusingly gayer every week.

Almost Human Episodes — the drugs one and the Die Hard one

I am a fan of Almost Human.  Like I said before (but it’s new to you) since I have no future, shows about the future are always amusing/entertaining.

No sooner had I written about the fuckbots episode when another appeared! While not quite a Die Hard ripoff, the episode where terrorists take over a building ripped-off Die Hard, though done well enough.  Halfway through the terrorists thew some poor Asian (Lou?) out the window before (mercifully?) shooting him in the face.  Pretty hardcore for regular TV.

Dorian proves his metal mettle at the end by taking out those bastards.

 

The drugs episode was OK, kind of a letdown after the hostage tension of last week.  The British nerd tech gets an increased role.  He looks awfully like a living model of the mascot of this comic strip. 

For the libertarian-minded, allow me to answer the question why 35 years in the future drugs are STILL not legalized, taxed and regulated:  because our esteemed government–among others–would come down on the show for not parroting the Party Line, which is Drug Prohibition and driving tanks through people’s front doors is the only way we’ll stop drugs.

Dorian’s fight with the Russianbot was OK.  The bots seem to be stronger than humans but not by much.  

I thought it was cool when McCoy put a round through that evil cop’s head.  That should ALWAYS happen to shit-talking villains in custody.

That’s it.  I’m not going to start writing about The Blacklist, though I watch that one and Person of Interest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Almost Human’s fuckbot episode

Almost Human aka The McCoy Show didn’t screw up the fuckbot episode too badly. I enjoyed it but am not ready to start calling the Obamabot 5000 by his RoboChristian name, even with his testicle scanners at maximum.

The ep did a nice fakeout at the beginning, when the expected lone loser soliciting a fuckbot proved not a client but an investigating inventor taking the law into his own hands and resulting in his doom. (Later the ep implied both the obnoxious cop and the genius limey tech both indulged in fuckbottery, the latter just for “conversation.”)

Most of the hour I thought the women were being kidnapped by the Future Albanians and fitted with some kind of brain transplant which made them servile fuckbots like the meat puppets in the novel Neuromancer but non-consensually, a far more horrifying (and interesting) idea. But alas, the mob was just using the kidnapped broads to siphon off their lovely skin.

But I just didn’t buy that the fuckbot industry was not able to create realistic human skin. In less than 10 years medicine will be 3-D printing replaceable human organs; can’t see how creating skin would be a problem fifty years from now.

Other random nouns:

* Why don’t any of the androids have superpowers?

* In the show’s world there are two major manufacturers of fuckbots. The idea that either could go bankrupt is ridiculous, but a story was required.

* I liked the concept of the DNA bomb. I’ve exploded a few of those myself.

* Thank you writers (so far) for not implying (future) global warming has destroyed earth.

* The McCoy Show takes place in the Fringe universe, or at least one where Massive Dynamic exists. Oh, J.J. Numbnuts, you’re a crafty one! Will you be using whales in the next Star Trek movie or mix it up and put them in Star Wars 7?

* A commenter elsewhere suggested that the fuckbot episode was really the fourth or fifth along in the season, obviously shown to lure viewers with its saucy subject matter.

* Since we’ve learned our esteemed “freedom-loving” government is spying on all of us all the time in 2013, what kind of tyrannical monster must the federal mafia be in 2048?

* I was mistaken about one thing from my initial post about the show. The criminal gang is not called ‘The Syndicate’ but
Insyndicate (why doesn’t anyone calls them “In-Syn” for short, or better yet, IN-SYNC)?

* Yeah, McCoy Kennex was upset about his GF being a member of In-syn, but he shouldn’t have erased his vmail.

* Calling a deadly gas in the first ep “Myklon Red” sure was creative. Sounds ominous for some reason.

* Expect to see an evil Dorian later in the season, perhaps running In-Syn. Just a guess.

Here’s the official website and a wiki for Almost Human. I do like the show and if anyone’s listening, this is no time to play it safe with the storyline.

 

I Almost Like “Almost Human”

Pretty sure I’m not the only one calling this “The McCoy Show.”

My expectations lowered considerably when I saw J.J. Numbnuts had something to do with it.

I only saw the first episode. McCoy Urban is always likable but so far this show is thin on plot and fat with clichés both sci-fi and regular.

* If crime is “up 400%” in any city, isn’t that more along the lines of a national emergency requiring the National Guard or something?

* Why in 2048 would human cops ever be involved in a shootout?

* Why are the MX androids so useless? Why aren’t there useful drones like in Black Ops II (which takes place 20 years earlier)?

* I saw ONE flying car, and it was so far away it wasn’t clear what it was.

* Why are the cops the only ones with androids? Wouldn’t every civilian have an android bodyguard? Shouldn’t there be robots everywhere à la I, Robot?

* Where’s the gay marriage? It’s normal in the future.

* Nothing in this future looks lived-in.  Even the slums low-income areas look too sterile and clean.

* The Obamabot 5000 that McCoy revives to be his partner is capable of taking offense at words, proving that in the future, liberal race-baiters will still have job security.

* The Syndicate, so far, is a gaggle of retards who get into shootouts in a future world of (presumably) infinite surveillance.  Shouldn’t they already be caught and/or mostly hackers instead?

* Stop making so much of the Obamabot’s “relationship” with his “partner”.  Take a cue from Elementary and make it one element of a larger story.  

 

When I saw the plot of the second episode centered on fuckbots, I actually became less interested.  In “our” world, fuckbots—that is, androids exactly like real women, minus the insanity—would comprise the first trillion-dollar industry. Few men anywhere would be doing anything anywhere except staying at home fucking. The rest of human endeavors and achievement would grind to a halt.

From the McCoy preview, I think we just see the fuckbot factory. There won’t be any mention about the entire course of civilization being changed. If there’s any human male shown using the fuckbots, he’ll be portrayed as a scrawny nerd.

Attn show creators:  I was eager to see this show when I saw the preview two months ago.  Don’t fuck it up like I know you will.

 

 

 

‘Surrogates’ coulda been a contender

Surrogates is standard sci-fi action fare, so much so I’m not going to bother reviewing the plot. Bruce Willis is always likable, the limited action was decent, but I’ll be damned if I saw where they blew 80 million making it.

I’d never really thought about the possibilities presented by Surrogates: rather than having the entire world live in a computer simulation via the Matrix, turn the real world into a Matrix of sorts by having people cocooned at home, experiencing life via uplinked neural connections to androids that are perfect-looking idealized versions of themselves (or anyone else).

It’s a great idea for dangerous work (such as war) or play (extreme sports) but for everyday use seems kinda dumb. Why the hell would you pay for a younger, more fit robotic version of you to go to an office and sit in a fucking cubicle every day? That would mean you’d still have to dress and maintain your unit (ha) plus transport it.

I would hope by 2017 telecommuting is the norm. That and fuckbots.

Surrogates dabbles in these ideas but doesn’t take them far enough. Like the Matrix sequels, there’s a great story here waiting to be told, but the one we got wasn’t it.

Love poetry, or Trying to Turn Shit into Chocolate Cake

You can write love poems—even good ones—for specific women as long as you don’t expect the words to work. Because they don’t.

I have a friend who already has self-published one small book of love poems. The cover looks cool, it looks like a real book, but the poems within are the opposite of good: riddled with clichés and trite expressions like dead bats hung on a clothesline of pretension.

Worst of all, they beg.

A wise woman already knows a man who confesses to love her is completely vulnerable, no matter how tough he acts. Supplicating makes a man seem weak. Really, if you want to do well with women, remember they are Klingons at heart. The few that have hearts, ha ha.

Sad to say the woman my poor friend Can’t Live Without™ whom he’s known for years, is an Asshole, a sanctimonious, “spiritual” cruella who hates him for some reason he’s never quite explained. Judging from the fury of her words, you’d think he raped her and left her for dead; I think he deceived her about something, but nothing close to cheating on her.

I’d offered to edit his first manu, but halfway through he up and self-published it, full of spelling errors and all.

I suicidally offered to edit the 2nd one and heard nothing more about it. Then out of nowhere, last week he asked if I’d looked at it. When I told him I never got the file he flipped, then sent it.

Now I’ve flipped.

Love Manuscript #2, aka More of the Same, almost 140 pages of short-yet-hard-to-stomach poems. I don’t even envy the prodigious output, it’s all terrible.  I’m trying like hell to make his stuff work, but secretly I hope he ignores my editing. I love my friend and hate his needless suffering, and not because I have to suffer his poopoetry. If I could magically erase the cruella’s horrible personality and reprogram her or create a magical fuckbot in her image, I would. I’ve already dared tell him in a 500-words-or-less essay why I think this woman is a disaster, that even if she saned-up he still has no future with her and should be glad for it. But he can’t listen to reason any more than his poems can un-suck: the poor SOB is in love.

Some people are just fucking machochists, I guess. Like me, trying to turn shit into chocolate cake.

(If you ever find this blog, my friend, you’ll have to forgive me. You’ve suffered enough).