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Today, ladies and gentlemen, has been Fun With Plumbing. I have learned more than I really wanted to know about the general routing of our water system. On the bright side, I don't think any part of the house is going to flood and I have cleaned up most of the evidence of such (alleged) flooding. On the down side, we don't have hot water. On the bright side again, it is POSSIBLE to have hot water, at least in theory, but I am leaving the hot water heater shut off just in case the whole system drains out again tonight. I am too sleepy to care. I'm going to go to bed and worry about it tomorrow.
I watched tonight's episode of Almost Human when I took a dinner break from Plumbing Hell, in which the show managed to blow most of the goodwill it had garnered from the premiere in one failtastic episode.
Sexbots. Seriously? Did we have to go there so soon?
And even for a sexbot episode, this was a pretty irritating sexbot episode. I have to admit that I truly appreciate they threw in a couple of male sexbots in the showroom scene, not for objectification purposes but just, hey, your clients for sexbot services are not actually going to be 100% heterosexual males! And there were a few cute/funny bits, and a couple of genuinely poignant scenes involving Dorian's interactions with sexbot Victoria (I may be remembering her name wrong - Vanessa? Victoria? something like that). However, the episode was pretty toxic otherwise.
I know there are probably some people who are going ... yes, they're sexbots. It makes sense that they're sexy, objectified, scantily clad, and dumb. Which is true! But -- I'm sleepy; I'm having trouble articulating exactly what felt off about it -- the way they were presented subtly reinforced the message "this is okay" rather than "this is morally skeevy".
For example, you know what would have been kind of neat? If the sexbots in the warehouse had been naked, headless, and stacked like cordwood, thereby hammering home the point that their owners think of them as mindless things, no matter how human they look and act. Instead they were sexily laid out in lingerie with the camera lingering on them (and what sounded unnervingly like porn music playing in the background). We the audience are not invited to sympathize with them, but to lust after them.
Similarly, the scenes in which Vanessa/Victoria was clearly lacking in basic understanding of anything except seduction could have come off truly horrific -- she's not allowed to have opinions or hobbies or to know anything except how to be a good sex doll. And there are places where they tiptoe around the horror of this, with the hints that she's capable of feeling affection and concern for her fellow sexbots. But then it's just ... let's male-gaze her some more with the camera! Let's have Scientist Guy make some "funny" innuendo about sticking things in her ports! AARGH.
On top of being frustrated with the plot in general, I was mostly irritated with the character stuff this episode. I did enjoy some of the banter, but more of it felt forced, like the show is trying too hard for buddy banter and, instead, just making them look like jerks with no sense of personal boundaries. Kennex makes a joke about killing his previous partner with the subtext "this could happen to you!" and it's supposed to be funny? Why is Dorian prying into Kennex's personal life to the point of setting up dates for him?! I'm not pleased with Stahl being played up as sexy!coworker (long flowing hair! cleavage! lip gloss!) and it appears that jerk!coworker is going to be our go-to guy whenever someone needs to make a sexist or otherwise *ist observation. Awesome.
So basically, I still like Dorian and Lady!Boss, I would like to like Kennex if he would be a little less with the emo manpain and jerkitude, and I wish they would glam Stahl up a little less (compared to everyone else) and show her doing cop stuff a little more. I like the show enough to check out a few more episodes, but right now it's hitting an awful lot of my "things that irritate me in TV sci-fi" buttons without quite enough fun-happy to go with it.
I watched tonight's episode of Almost Human when I took a dinner break from Plumbing Hell, in which the show managed to blow most of the goodwill it had garnered from the premiere in one failtastic episode.
Sexbots. Seriously? Did we have to go there so soon?
And even for a sexbot episode, this was a pretty irritating sexbot episode. I have to admit that I truly appreciate they threw in a couple of male sexbots in the showroom scene, not for objectification purposes but just, hey, your clients for sexbot services are not actually going to be 100% heterosexual males! And there were a few cute/funny bits, and a couple of genuinely poignant scenes involving Dorian's interactions with sexbot Victoria (I may be remembering her name wrong - Vanessa? Victoria? something like that). However, the episode was pretty toxic otherwise.
I know there are probably some people who are going ... yes, they're sexbots. It makes sense that they're sexy, objectified, scantily clad, and dumb. Which is true! But -- I'm sleepy; I'm having trouble articulating exactly what felt off about it -- the way they were presented subtly reinforced the message "this is okay" rather than "this is morally skeevy".
For example, you know what would have been kind of neat? If the sexbots in the warehouse had been naked, headless, and stacked like cordwood, thereby hammering home the point that their owners think of them as mindless things, no matter how human they look and act. Instead they were sexily laid out in lingerie with the camera lingering on them (and what sounded unnervingly like porn music playing in the background). We the audience are not invited to sympathize with them, but to lust after them.
Similarly, the scenes in which Vanessa/Victoria was clearly lacking in basic understanding of anything except seduction could have come off truly horrific -- she's not allowed to have opinions or hobbies or to know anything except how to be a good sex doll. And there are places where they tiptoe around the horror of this, with the hints that she's capable of feeling affection and concern for her fellow sexbots. But then it's just ... let's male-gaze her some more with the camera! Let's have Scientist Guy make some "funny" innuendo about sticking things in her ports! AARGH.
On top of being frustrated with the plot in general, I was mostly irritated with the character stuff this episode. I did enjoy some of the banter, but more of it felt forced, like the show is trying too hard for buddy banter and, instead, just making them look like jerks with no sense of personal boundaries. Kennex makes a joke about killing his previous partner with the subtext "this could happen to you!" and it's supposed to be funny? Why is Dorian prying into Kennex's personal life to the point of setting up dates for him?! I'm not pleased with Stahl being played up as sexy!coworker (long flowing hair! cleavage! lip gloss!) and it appears that jerk!coworker is going to be our go-to guy whenever someone needs to make a sexist or otherwise *ist observation. Awesome.
So basically, I still like Dorian and Lady!Boss, I would like to like Kennex if he would be a little less with the emo manpain and jerkitude, and I wish they would glam Stahl up a little less (compared to everyone else) and show her doing cop stuff a little more. I like the show enough to check out a few more episodes, but right now it's hitting an awful lot of my "things that irritate me in TV sci-fi" buttons without quite enough fun-happy to go with it.
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I totally get what you mean about the episode. I felt the same way. It was such a male-gaze mess. I noticed the lack of female-looking android cops in the pilot and to follow that with an episode full of female sexbots, lovingly objectified by the camera, felt like a slap in the face. It's just so trite and lazy.
I give it a few more episodes but I'm not thrilled.
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Sigh, I haven't gotten around to Almost Human yet, and everything I'm hearing about it is just making me wish we'd had a third season of Sarah Connor Chronicles.
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Yes!!! And it was also gross when the female boss of the police "justified" the whole thing by saying something like how since the sexbots had become so common, sex crimes against humans were down 30%. This is giving a message about sex crimes in-real-life that I find unhelpful and un-credible.
>:-(