Almost Human

With Agents of Shield (wow, the last post here was about its pilot) having shown a lot of promise, and, several weeks in, having yet to deliver a really solid, exciting and entertaining episode, I've basically put it on the back shelf. I'll be happy to pick it up again if I hear it gets good, but I think that without Joss Whedon actually running the show (and what I suspect is a ton of meddling on the part of ABC to keep it bland) it's not going to live up to the expectations we had. I mean, Dollhouse seemed pretty crappy at first, but as the executives gave Joss more control of the show (due to its impending cancelation,) it managed to do some fantastic things before it burned through its fuel.

Before I begin to talk about the pilot to Almost Human, I wanted to mention a certain show that really proved the "give it a chance" mentality can sometimes be right.

Fringe was the first show to come out of JJ Abram's head after Lost, and it hit a bit of a rocky start. It felt pretty much like an X-Files clone with less of a sense of humor about itself. A big part of that, I think, was the religious devotion to keeping it a case-of-the-week mystery show. As anyone who saw Fringe in the later seasons, the idea of that show being a string of stand-alones is utterly absurd.

I actually gave up on Fringe once or twice in its early seasons, but I think somewhere in late season two, the whole show seemed to click into its appropriate groove, and it became something really unlike anything I'd seen before. (I will admit that not everyone might be ok with all the massive upheavals the show went through in its later seasons, but I think they managed to keep the show interesting, even if it sometimes didn't feel like the same show.)

So, Almost Human.

This is one of those shows where the pilot was pretty underwhelming, but I nevertheless will be following it to see how it develops. It is a Bad Robot show, though it was not created by JJ Abrams (who is probably busy being emperor of the nerds and making new Star Wars and Star Trek movies.) The show was instead created by J. H. Wyman, who had served as an executive producer on Fringe. Merely having that connection suggests that we could see some really interesting Sci-Fi mythology develop.

Yes, this is a cop show, but then again, so was Fringe, so I'm confident that after a few seasons, we might get past the procedural, case of the week stuff. In the meantime, I hope that we'll get the kind of Star Trek/Buffy the Vampire Slayer model, where each episode is an opportunity to play around with a funky sci-fi concept and the philosophical ramifications thereof.

So far, Almost Human finds itself aping many of the Sci-Fi of the 1980s (a popular source these days) for its aesthetic. So far, I'm not very impressed with the look of the show, as it's clearly trying to be Blade Runner (many, many references there) but it feels more like Hill Valley in 2015 in Back to the Future II. The main police office, where every digital display is blue for some reason, is almost nauseating (and blue is my favorite color.)

Personally, I think the 80s Sci-Fi style is a little played out. It's driven by nostalgia, but when you consider how a lot of the computer systems that looked futuristic in the 80s would be laughably outdated today, it doesn't feel believable as a destination we could arrive at somewhere down the road from 2013. Given the level of comfort we in the modern day have with computers, it doesn't feel like in the future all things "technological" necessarily need to call attention to themselves. It's a shame that the current look of the show (and it's just the pilot, so this could evolve) comes off as so rote, because the premise holds a lot of promise.

Our lead is the very 80s-sci-fi-ly named John Kennex, a badass cop who spent almost two years in a coma after his entire squad was killed during a raid. He's lost a lot of his memories from that event, which he is now trying to recover through some black-market biotech - the very stuff that seems to fuel the gangs that he's been fighting.

In a semi-dystopian future, these biotech-backed bad guys have become so dangerous that cops are now assigned an android bodyguard. These androids are totally logical, like Data without the charm, and they have no sense of empathy or the ability to simulate it. During that infamous raid, it was one of these androids who refused to help Kennex's buddy (calculating that the guy was going to die anyway,) and indirectly caused both Kennex's coma and the loss of his leg.

With all of that in the past, the department wants Kennex back, but after he pushes his new robo-partner out of a moving car, they instead give him one of the older models that had been discontinued, and that's how we get Dorian.

Dorian, of course, is the "inferior" model that actually acts like a human, and claims to be a sentient, empathetic person, even if he is a robot.

Kennex isn't having it, of course, and does everything he can to ditch the guy (except pushing him out of a car,) but after the two of them uncover a plot to wipe out the entire PD with some kind of chemical agent that will kill them all gruesomely, and there's a big shoot-out, it looks like we've just got our series team assembled.

The pilot is a bit generic, and I'd like to see the world fleshed out with a little more than just CGI shots of hover-cars and such flying overhead. There are some good hooks for series-arc mythology here, such as Kennex's mysterious, apparently turncoat girlfriend. Likewise, I'm sure that the "Syndicate," (or is it "Insyndicate?" I couldn't quite tell) is more than just some criminal gang. And there's probably something sketchy going on with the androids as well.

But at the moment, with only this episode to go on, it feels like we're in a well-worn road. One of the biggest dangers in genre entertainment is getting too bogged down in references. This, actually, is my biggest complaint about Abrams' Star Trek reboot, the second film being a particularly egregious offender by being a stealth remake of Wrath of Khan. Yes, if you've got a Sci-Fi show, people are going to appreciate themes or motifs that refer to their old favorites (I caught a bunch of Blade Runner and also a bit of Total Recall in there,) but the best goal is to try to come up with something we haven't quite seen before. Other Bad Robot shows have done this. Lost did it, and Fringe did it. That's why I'm holding out hope that Almost Human will become a great show.

Will it take a season and a half to do it? That's a possibility, but I'm hoping we don't have to wait that long.