Great sci-fi novels, stories and films have already tackled the scenario of robots rising up against their human creators. It took writers like Ray Bradbury - who insisted he wrote speculative, not science, fiction - to look at the domestic aspects rather than the violent, threatening ones.
In his famous story, There Will Come Soft Rains, he presents a house filled with robots who make the beds, hoover the carpets, toast the bread and make the coffee. The house springs into life each morning, making cheery breakfasts for the family, then cleans up after them, but one morning the people don't appear. There has been a nuclear war and the family have been reduced to shadows on the lawn, but the hi-tech house still ticks along nicely, until one morning when the bread jams in the toaster and starts a fire, and soon the house is burning to the ground, though still ticking, whirring and functioning as it falls, with its family scorched into the grass outside.
With such an eerie story as that, how would Humans (C4) compare? It's a new drama series which looks at robots who're brought into people's homes to make their lives easier. Like Bradbury's robots, these are concerned with kitchens, shopping and housework, not grabbing ray guns and blasting holes in The White House.
The Hawkins family are stressed. Laura, the mother, has a busy career as a lawyer and often has to leave home to tend to her cases. What a demon! How can she leave her little children? Her husband, Joe, simply can't deal with pouring out Frosties and loading the washing machine so he runs out to buy a "synth", a domestic robot who'll do all the housework for him, all the things his slatternly wife should be doing, if she wasn't so ruthlessly intent on earning, learning and living. Selfish woman!
Their synth, Anita, is gorgeous. She's slim, sleek and sexy. What a slap in the face for frazzled, hard-working Laura. After Anita has been unzipped from her storage bag, she sashays off down the corridor and slack-jawed Joe gawps at her bottom. Yes, he's eyeing up the android. And quite right. What else can a man be expected to do if his wife keeps going to work?
This irritated me. Why is Anita beautiful? If the synths are designed for manual labour and housework why not make them sturdy and plain? Isn't that more practical? Why make Anita a sexy babe-bot? Clearly it's just to antagonise the wife (and because this is TV, so we need pretty faces) so that when Laura does come home she'll be instantly threatened by this beautiful woman caring for her children and mopping her husband's brow. But by creating sexy synths, the show reduces the tantalisingly tangled issues of power and control down to some bitchy cat-fighting amongst women. It'd have been far stronger to see Laura threatened and disturbed by a lumpen, bland thing, not a supermodel. But TV wimped out and gave us sexiness, not substance.
There is clearly no logical reason why synths would be created as attractive humans. They're utilitarian. Consider the ones who were harvesting fruit. A human body is hardly the best design for clutching and picking. Did the inventor of the spanner design it as a clutch of fleshy fingers? No.
Any big issues here were shrunk by the show's surprisingly anti-feminist message. It was a blunt attack on working mothers. See what happens when you go off and work, and leave your husband unattended? A sexy robot usurps you and reads bedtime stories to your children. Foolish woman! Stay in the kitchen. Seriously, did the Daily Mail write this script?
Whilst it was a relief to see a drama which wasn't about crime, but there were so many flaws and irritants in this story. I suppose it's sci-fi for those who've never read Ray Bradbury or seen Bladerunner. But with its message that women should stay in the kitchen, Humans felt like it belonged in the 50s, which was the golden age of sci-fi, so maybe they know what they're doing after all.
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