TV: Humans: Revisited.

Warning: Spoilers.

Since the last blog post, here, on the Channel 4 show Humans it has been renewed for a second season after doing quite well. I have been begrudgingly watching along, to see if it gets better as I loved the Swedish original and also to see if it has gotten any worse with its misogyny. I am starting this post before I have watched the last 3 or four episodes of the show, that conclude tonight, as I wanted to discuss one of the things that had happened in a previous episode that I feel was utterly indefensible. I have yet to see what consequences, if any, this act has resulted in but I will find out later and include it in this post.

Amongst all of the shows more science fiction side, not necessarily relevant to this post, and amongst the chances it’s made to the original which I find each are bad decisions is this overwhelming need the writers, mostly male, seems to have had to increase the sexism depicted in the series. As I mentioned before I understand its attempt at realism and its need to create a new show that isn’t just a shot for shot remake to the original. I just find it baffling, each episode that the strongest differences that are included are moments of sheer misogyny. What an odd thing to want to contribute to a show that has so much potential, especially for a show that is exploring what it means to be human, how we treat other people, and what influence technology and AI might one day have in our lives.

The biggest, most staggering, moment for me was one that took what was an implied naughty suggestion in the original and made it what amounted to a rape scene. In the original it is a sexist joke that the father has a chip that can make their robot, Anita, into a robot that can have sex - and simulate the touches and noises that are associated with it; the father doesn’t use it but keeps it instead of throwing it away, and it is later used consensually, or as consensually as you can get with AI, between the son and Anita. However, in the remake they decided to have the father cheat on his wife, that annoying nagging robot hating wife, and the whole act was disgusting. First we have the scene where Anita teaches him how to install the sex chip, making her a complicit factor in her sexualisation and literal objectification. There is flirting on his end, him asking her about her experience of sex & sexuality but ultimately it is his decision and he is the one who takes the lead and has the power. After getting her into the right settings he then immediately has sex with her but it definitely did not seem like consensual sex, between two people in love or who want to just have fun.

No, it was a blank faced, submissive Anita who simply lies still as an object while the father has sex with her. She isn’t active, she isn’t playing a role other than thing and the whole scene is awful to watch. Afterwards, realising what he has done, the father tells her to clean herself up and Anita, emotionless, leaves to do so. But before she goes he orders her, for she is his owner and she has to do what he says, to delete what he just did from her memory. The whole scene is very abusive and that alone feels like the equivalent of drugging a woman so you can rape her, and then if she remembers telling her to just forget about it. For the rest of the episode it goes unmentioned and only comes up again when they are checking her memory for unrelated reasons and the father has a worried moment that they might find out what he did.

In the next episode the daughter discovers that someone had used her sexual settings and is disgusted; she tells her mother and her son, realising that it was his Dad, covers for him and says it was him. Rightly the mother is disgusted by the fact that he had sex with their robotic nanny, someone who is a member of their family, and that has issues with understanding and consenting to sex in the form she is in; though it goes unquestioned when the son points out that he couldn’t possibly because he needs to be 18 to do it which he isn’t. Instead of sitting him down and trying to deal with it straight away the Mum sends him away, tells him to go to his room rather than being quick to let her son know that what he supposedly did was wrong. I can’t imagine being a mother & being confronted with something like that but sitting them down to talk to them about a revelation like that would surely one better done sooner rather than later?

Then when the father comes home his character continues to be one I find utterly revolting. Initially he allows his son to remain as his cover, yes he lets his wife think that his teenage son is a pervert rather than admitting his mistake – his son understandably isn’t too happy about that. Later the father finally reveals what he does to his wife and the whole scene was a car crash that made me gasp again and again at the ridiculous justifications he came up with. In the end the scene devolved into him thinking that because Anita is a Synth that it’s not cheating and then turns around and blames his wife for working too much. The fact that she works a lot -though it is only shown once in the entire first season, in the first episode and you never see her at work again - is constantly used against her, along with other little things to point to her being a Bad Mother.

The most baffling and ridiculous thing about this whole scenario however is the father’s assertion, one he makes repeatedly, that Anita is not human so therefore it doesn’t matter what he did. He agrees that it was perhaps disgusting but that really because she’s only a human he should be able to have consequence free sex with her, as though it doesn’t matter to his wife. Why then if she is such a nothing-ness robot did he want so much to have sex with her then? We could see his sexual frustration before he did it and he had plenty of time to stop and leave her alone but he didn’t. He decided he wanted to sleep with her & he turned around and did it. So why now this insistence that she is a pointless inanimate object? As though that makes it better somehow?

Moreover, the show spends an episode or two shunning him, showing him for the disgusting man he is but then very quickly forgets it as he is needed to help the family in the more science fiction aspect of the show. Even Anita rushes to his aide to justify his behaviour by, when she is back to her old self, saying that she could tell that he hated himself before he had ‘finished’; clearly he didn’t hate himself enough to leave her alone in the first place, or own up to his act. Plus he certainly doesn’t seem to think of her as just a robot, not a sexual being, as when he finds out that she has had previous owners he makes comments complaining about how many owners has she had and how many have gone tinkering around in her, perhaps being jealous at the fact that she might have had sex before him; which apart from being just so creepy is so possessive of what he tries to defend as a literal object.

My main problem with Humans is that, along with it just being a worse show in terms of writing, dialogue and direction in comparison to its original, it doesn’t live up to it’s potential. As a concept, though one I find a bit done to death, I think AI and the question of what makes us human is one that could be utterly and thoroughly explored. Though the problem is that because TV and films are just so heavily written and directed by men we never truly get the full spectrum of what we could get with these films. We get a very limited one that focuses on the male perspective and frames the women’s stories as almost primarily ‘gets hurt by men’. My life as a woman and as a person is so utterly not defined by the things men may have said or done to me and I really think all writers need to see and understand this. Especially those writing worlds that could be so different from ours because even for a near future Humans ignores so many social issues that it could have explored that it’s just so disappointing.

Take for example something that a We Are People protestor says at a rally, he complains about the fact that humans wouldn’t need to look after their kids or make meals for them because they can just get Synths to do it. But that ignores the fact that we already have a lot of women who get left with the majority of domestic care, or that nannies exist already or that people hire maids and butlers and all the rest. I would like to hope that the show is using the Synths to make a point about how we dehumanise certain aspects of our population to do labour that the majority of men don’t want to do but it doesn’t mention it. It doesn’t highlight how it’s women who now don’t have to do so many domestic chores – though I highly doubt that poor women’s lives have gotten any different. It doesn’t look at racism and how those in poorer countries might get replaced by robots.

The show acts as though it exists in a microcosm, though one that clings to its misogyny, and that everyone leads similar lives. It doesn’t really deal with the fact that the dehumanised Synths are replacing dehumanised people in dehumanising jobs, bar making a jab at human women as I mentioned in the previous post on Humans. It just seems like such a shame episode to episode that it aims to be a show about how family life might be affected by robots, as mentioned in an article in Digital Spy, but actually goes about doing everything but. The issues the family has mostly seem to revolve around an unruly daughter, a working Mum, an unfaithful Dad, and an angry and sexually inappropriate son; all of those issues can exist without Anita being a Synth. However the focus on science fiction is one of the few things that saves the show as, perhaps despite its best efforts, it heavily focuses on a conspiracy style plot to give consciousness to Synths and the effect that might have on the world as a whole.

Which again treats humanity as though they are all violent men who are not capable of empathy; they act as though if robots all got the ability to be sentient that they would take over the world but that even if they didn’t humanity would destroy them anyway because ‘we’ can’t handle anything being bigger than us. This conveniently forgets that people who aren’t straight white men already live in a world where we are treated like we are lesser, that we don’t hold as much power as others, and that we already know what this feels like and haven’t turned around and murdered everyone (remember all those violent genocides committed by female feminists? Yeah me neither). It is this constant insistence that men are all that humanity is made of and that no one would be kind to these robots and that we would all, women and children alike, turn and murder sentient beings.

The entire series, despite it being only two episodes shorter than the original, has a surprisingly lack of storyline; by this I mean if you watch the original first season there are so many more characters, plot lines, and issues explored that it baffles me that the remake ignored so many opportunities to really explore certain aspects of the world that has been created. For instance as we see many characters blended together we get weird mismatches that those who have only seen the remake perhaps don’t realise are so short and underdeveloped. So for those who haven’t read my Real Humans post, that is here, I will explain one of those storylines that I was waiting for and that was but a fleeting moment. One of the subplots that carried over was a male character who has a wife whose wife leaves him for her Synth, or hubot as they are in the original; though the circumstances are very different in the remake – in the original the character is abusive and that’s why she leaves him – the general gist of the storyline is still there. We still see her dating the Synth, we see her acknowledging the fact he is attentive which is something that her ex was lacking, and we see her change his programming to make him better in bed. It is the latter that perhaps seems like it was finally acknowledging the idea that male Synths might be used for sex.

However what we don’t see, and that is explored a lot more in season one though perhaps more in season two, is a lot more of that side of the story. For instance when the woman in the original takes her robot boyfriend to be modified we see her do it, in a brothel, and we are exposed to how her request for him being better in the bedroom is compared to a man asking for his robot to be given the ability to feel pain for his BDSM abuse. Then we get a full, developed storyline of her feelings about what she’s done, how it affects their relationship, and how it changes his personality. Yet in the remake all of that is discarded with as she is a much more minor character; instead we are given one scene and one scene only in all of season one about the danger of this whole affair.

We see her ex-husband get a call and go to her aid because her Synth is banging on the door that she has put a chair under and she is scared. Her ex arrives and immediately begins a threatening affair with the Synth, prepared with a crowbar in case he doesn’t listen to him. Then the Synth says that he needs access to his wife so he can ‘penetrate’ her, robots that aren’t sentient don’t really have a sense of humour or an ego so the show instead did it for him – allowing him to grandstand about having sex with this man’s wife. After beating the robot the wife immediately runs to his aid, gently touching his face and tells her ex to leave. Then that’s it. That whole storyline gets shortened to one, barely examined scene that in fact makes the fact that a robot is trying to rape his wife all about the ex-husband who is offended by this fact.

For me it felt like a long trend of ignoring nuance, weird dialogue, messy plot and characterisation that made watching the first season not enjoyable at all. I did watch it because I loved the original, I’d hoped it would get better but when you’ve seen it done before and done much better it can make it a chore to sit through. I hope that if the show, which has already done well enough to get a second season, finds its feet that it explores more of what it was lacking. I hope that the writers realise that women exist outside of the men in their lives, that they have ordinary bad things happen to them that aren’t inflicted on them by men, and that even as robots we are interesting people to be explored too. I don’t know if I’ll tune in next season but if I do I hope I won’t be disappointed.