Almost…A Great Show

In mid-November, Fox premiered a new science fiction program called Almost Human, a story of a police officer in the near future paired up with an android partner. Detective Jon Kennex, played by Karl Urban, has a long history of distrust for the standard issue models of androgynous, emotionless android that the rest of the force utilizes from a traumatic firefight earlier in his career. As such, when his partner is replaced with an older, decommissioned model named Dorian (Michael Ealy) their initial friction is overcome by the fact that Dorian’s model was designed to emulate human emotion and behavior, described as having a type of synthetic soul. Together, the two take on a case of the week, investigating crimes oriented around the rapidly growing technology of the age.

The show is essentially a science fiction police procedural. In an era without much in the way of strong sci-fi on television, and having been a fan of Urban’s from Lord of the Rings and his portrayal of Judge Dredd, I gave this show a shot when it premiered and have kept up with it since. I’m not going to lie, though, it got off to kind of a shaky start. Urban’s character isn’t exactly breaking new ground being a cranky, hard as nails detective who resists new things. You know everything you need to know about him from essentially the first moments of the pilot, and he has not significantly developed since. The real gem of the show is Ealy, if only for how human his portrayal of Dorian is. Far from following the stiff, robotic delivery of Commander Data from Star Trek, if one was unaware of the show’s premise and simply jumped into the middle of an episode it would be possible not to realize he is playing an AI until you see the glowing lines on the side of his face when he is performing a computational process or accessing a server (one of the coolest effects on the show, by the way.) The rest of the cast is functional but not impressive, mostly from not having anything particularly impressive or interesting to do in the stories thus far besides being conveniently present when needed to shuffle the plot along.

Once past the pilot, the early episodes suffered from some less than inspiring plotting and technique. The fourth episode in particular ended on a very rough note, obviously having been rewritten and dubbed over with some bad ADR to change a scene where Detective Kennex shoots a traitorous Captain from another precinct, obviously trying to soften it from cold-blooded murder to more of a vigilante justice situation but, in doing so, frankly hurting the episode and taking away a chance for some interesting character development for John.

I came close to moving on, but what has kept me watching is the intriguing science fiction premises presented in a number of the more recent episodes, including witnesses who testify in court cases via hologram projector, “intimate robot companions,” and a man’s clones committing murders while he is in custody and, in doing so, damaging the case against him and nearly freeing him. The episode “Arrhythmia” is possibly one of the most interesting in this regard, presenting a case of illegal bio-mechanical replacement organs fitted with timers to ensure continual payments from the unsuspecting patients, with a sub-plot where Dorrian finds another android of the same model which has been forced out of police work. These give me hope that, as the series’ writers get their feet under them, this show has some real potential for interesting stories down the line.