It’s tiresome being human. Terrible posture, the fuel that incessantly has to go in, the bodily waste that won’t stop coming out, reasoning skills stuck in the mire of feelings, being rubbish at fighting. But enough about me. One of the most touching aspects of the second series of Humans (Channel 4) is the human children who aspire to become, not train drivers or astronauts, but synthetic beings.
Sophie has taken to asking her mother for the milk in a robotically affectless voice, and continues breakfast in a monotone. This is accompanied by sub-Peter Crouch robo-celebration-dance gestures until even her long-suffering if sympathetic mother (Kathryn Parkinson) howls across the table for her one-time human daughter to knock it off. Sophie’s brother’s girlfriend even wears a robo-wig and green contacts in her quest to become what she isn’t.
But while some humans want to become synths, this series ended with a more bracing notion of transformation. All the synths in this near future gained consciousness after Mattie, a coding whizz, did something on her laptop that I don’t pretend to understand. Being all-too-human, I think it unlikely that a captivatingly surly teen from Enfield, rather than, say, computer geniuses from Imperial and MIT, would catalyse this revolution in robotics, but what do I know? Plus, near the end of this episode, when Mattie had killed off synths Mia, Hester and Niska by activating the microchips in their heads, would it really be so easy to bring them back, not just to synth-like life, but to quasi-human consciousness, seconds later?
All I know is that I liked the clever tee-up for series three. As suburban streets teemed with former synth-servants quitting their jobs and going rogue, we wondered what broken Britain will be like with this new influx of angry, possibly violent cybernetic lifeforms from outside the EU.
What I really love about Humans is the way it combines sophisticated philosophical meditation on our possible transhuman future with the kind of lo-fi sci-fi redolent of pre-Russell T Davies Doctor Who. I keep expecting Tom Baker to come into shot and fry a synth’s circuits by posing the Cretan liar paradox (roughly: “All Cretans are liars,” says a Cretan) or sucker them with jelly babies.
I enjoy Humans most, not for its dystopian musings, but for how Emily Berrington’s Niska runs, seethes and fights like a mashup of Carrie-Anne Moss in The Matrix, Terminator 2 and Wildstyle from The Lego Movie. Berrington was great fun as the Aussie fluffhead in Outnumbered, but she has more fun here as a newly conscious synth who is incessantly angry about the denial of human rights to her and her kind. No wonder her human German girlfriend wants to take Niska back to Berlin and jump her bones. Do synths even have bones? I don’t really know.
As for Carrie-Anne Moss, the poor love, she got out of The Matrix to become in Humans an artificial intelligence expert for the questionable Qualia corporation (run by a brainiac whose business model involves selling bereaved parents synthetic upgrades of their dead children). Her season two ended in heartbreak. If it’s difficult and fun to play a running, fighting synth such as Berrington, how much more difficult it must be for Moss to perform a two-hander with the disembodied cyber-memory of her dead daughter talking at her through a computer. Near the end of this episode, Moss realised, the voice from the computer was no longer merely that of her daughter. Yes, the program carried all the dead girl’s memories, but now it had evolved and become a different entity. It was time for the resulting lifeform to leave and live in some nether region of cyberspace. But still, no wonder Moss sobbed, bereft over losing a daughter not once but twice.
And then there was poor Karen, the synth whose human cop boyfriend Pete got terminated in the penultimate episode. Grieving with minimal affect like a 1950s Englishman, she attempted suicide by driving into the sea. Until, that is, the child synth whom she had tasked with driving the car in which she was the passenger howled like a human terrified at the prospect of his own imminent death. The boy synth slammed on the brakes before the car hit the water (I’m not convinced he was tall enough for his feet to reach the pedals) and Karen sweetly gave him a cuddle. Like much of this series, it was paradoxically daft and simultaneously affecting.
It was thus that Karen decided to live, to be a conscious synth comforting another synth, both of whom are more caring and humane than, well, many flesh-and-blood humans I come across these days.
Which brings us to the finale of The Apprentice (BBC1), the series in which tyro robots of capitalism stamp on each others’ faces week after week in order to become the next Katie Hopkins and/or get more facetime with the putative master of the universe. When are they going to be made conscious? When is Prokofiev going to stop being tainted by association? Never, probably.
In last night’s final, Lord Sugar hired Alana Spencer, beguiled by the promise of her cake-making business, Ridiculously Rich. Good luck, Alana! You’ll need it to compete with my cut-price broken biscuit firm, Woefully Poor.
What remains? No more of this unspeakable reality show, fingers crossed. Lord Sugar must give up this TV lark and stand for office. Think about it: only the one-time Labour-supporting peer could topple Corbyn to lead the party back to electability.Only Sugar could truly shake up the Westminster establishment whose current frontwoman apologist is Theresa May. Stranger things have happened in politics this year. Reader, why are you pointing at me like that? What do you mean, “You’re fired”? OK, it’s a bad idea, but I’m only human.
