Almost Human
EliseI am DYING for some good genre television -- oh Farscape, I still miss you, and Battlestar Galactica, you also stay lodged in my heart. So I thought hey, Almost Human looks keen. It looks Blade Runner-ish and HEY that is Karl Urban's FACE (not to mention the rest of him, including his snarky mouth!). AND The Crystal Method are doing music, HELLO.
But.
But.
But.
See, no matter the shiny-rainy Blade Runner cityscapes we get in the pilot episode, it seems like the future is the present: it's dudes who get to do things.
There's potential here. LILY TAYLOR, hello. She is our police captain, Sandra Maldonado -- awesome, but so far she's relegated to staying inside and ordering guys to push buttons and deploy drones. MINKA KELLY, hello. She is Detective Valerie Stahl, but so far she's also relegated to staying inside and looking things up. She gets the bonus role of making eyes at John Kennex when he comes back safely from missions. She gets the double plus bonus of being the object of his male gaze, because he wants a lady with brown eyes and dark hair -- which seems to describe nearly every lady he's crossed paths with in the first three episodes.
Karl Urban and Michael Ealy are awesome; I like the snark between Kennex and Dorian, but it's disappointing that all of the cops in the field with them seem to be dudes. The MX police androids seem to be 100% male-faced. Why? Why, why, and why?
In episode two, "Skin," the sexbots are ladies (though my friend Jen says there was a boy bot on the screen for like half a second, so...yay?). I mean, we're not even going to talk about how problematic lady sexbots are, are we? Seeing only ladybots implies you live in an extremely stupid future. According to the way the episode plays out, it seems the trade is chiefly ladybots, because it's also ladies we're kidnapping and abusing for their skin. Pretty sure the sexbots in that club were also 100% ladies.
Dear Almost Human,
You can do better than this. 2048 doesn't have to look like 2013. This is science fiction. You can do ANYTHING. Bonus points for dressing our police ladies properly -- but how about letting them do stuff and things?
ever-hopeful,
me
