Humans: Hollyoaks with hard drives or smart political sci-fi?
From Black Mirror to Westworld, television drama is asking some difficult questions about modern technology, morality, sex and freedom at the moment. Namely, have we slid far enough into the abyss to start banging robots yet?
Humans box set review: sci-fi invades a domestic setting – and grows increasingly terrifying
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Series two of sci-fi drama Humans (Sunday, 9pm, Channel 4) might have the answer. A woman in one of those tight leather jackets favoured by 18-year-old baristas is in a trendy Berlin club. Her glassy stare and stiff arms suggest another mashed-up tourist, stumbling around Alexanderplatz. But wait, hold on: now she’s doing a very slow, single-handed version of The Robot in front of a speaker. And now she’s talking to a friendly lesbian with a top bun. Now they’re going home together. Oh look, and now she’s covering the robot power button punctured into her stomach with a plaster...
The first series of Humans covered everything from sex and housework to memory and freedom as a group of “synths”, working within the human world, gradually achieved sentience, using their newfound intelligence to instigate a rebellion against their makers. As season two opens, Niska, played by Emily Berrington, has unplugged herself from the mainframe long enough to enjoy a European mini-break and wake up her cyborg siblings, pausing occasionally to lounge on the sofa with her new (human) partner.
It would be all too easy to dismiss Humans as Hollyoaks with hard drives; a glossy-haired look at what happens when androids become able to think for themselves. Its synths resemble the final round of a Topshop casting call and the plot is often soapier than a foam party. Yet there’s more to it than that. The show lightly brushes against many contemporary issues: a newly awakened synth who was working in a Bolivian coal mine is said to have “hidden on ships and lorries” to get to England. He is, in that sense, our first sci-fi refugee. God help us if the Daily Mail get hold of the story; Jack Straw will probably want to start measuring the diameter of his metal dental frame to guess just how old he really is. Gemma Chan’s beguiling performance as a mopping waitress in a seaside cafe screams silently of the poor working conditions in our service industry; while a human father (Tom Goodman-Hill) getting made redundant to increase the efficiency of a small packing warehouse can’t help but remind viewers of the drone-tracked ruthlessness of Amazon and its ilk.
Which isn’t to say Humans is merely earnest. The plot still gallops along like Champion the Wonder Horse. Over its 45-minute running time, we see Niska inch further towards free will, while the other liberated synths run around gently rusting industrial sites looking by turns stiff and seductive. Hester, a synth from a nuclear power plant, goes rogue and narrowly avoids setting off Nottingham’s own version of Three Mile Island, while the inevitable star-cross’d love story between synth Anita (Chan) and human-synth hybrid Leo (Colin Morgan) bounces on like a ball bearing dropped down a fire escape.
Does Humans succeed as sci-fi? Well – in the sense that all good science fiction uses a flimsy filter of androids, aliens and fluorescent goo to stare down the U-bend of contemporary politics – yes. It examines immigration, consent, workers’ rights and morality, all through the extended metaphor of robots. Sexy robots. The sort of sexy robots you’d be happy to encounter on a dancefloor in Berlin.