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It very much grows on you. It begins goofy, and then it gets weird, then it's about relationships, and then science-fictional. Then you have tragedy, more science-fiction, and finally as kick-ass an animated fight as I've ever seen; it had that early Jason Bourne-y quality when it's not martial artists fighting, but hypercompetent (and in this case, cybernetically enhanced) experts trying to kill each other.

It doesn't stop being funny (although, caveat, there's a whole thread of stereotypical gay jokes that are probably unnecessary), but it does get more... existential over time.



Nov. 21st, 2016 05:17 am (UTC)
Which means, i guess, that project freelancer has reached bureaucratic nirvana. The purpose of project freelancer is to continue project freelancer.

Jut a clearer than usual example of the almost universal rule, I think *g*.

In their, well, not defense, but as a idiosyncrasy, I think Project Freelancer went off the rails in a particular way when the Director was faced with the possibility(?) of rebuilding Allison from his memories of her. But I'm unclear as to how, or to what degree, this influenced organizational behavior (aside from his personnel decisions). On one hand, from what we see of him after his ousting (and from Church's behavior) he's obsessed with Allison and with rebuilding her/bringing her "back." On the other hand, the missions we saw don't seem directly related to this goal; in fact, you could argue that he used the data from Allison's return to further the R&D goals of Project Freelancer, instead of the other way around (but which suggests the point of why he was torturing Alpha for, if he hadn't known it'd shed fragments; compliance? brainwashing? was he planning on making any number of copies of himself and then prune each into something manageable?).

I keep going back to Gendo Ikari.

It' also interesting to think about the timeline of the AIs. Who came first, Beta/Allison/Tex or Omega? Did the Director get Beta first, and that suggested the idea of getting Omega? The nomenclature makes me guess Alpha -> Omega -> Beta, but what Church said suggests Alpha -> Beta -> Omega. What if Alpha didn't shed Beta/Allison during deliberate torture, but the AI just shared Leonard's longing for her, and simply was in a position to forget more literally and efficiently than the human original could? (without, obviously, being able to excise his longing). That torture -> fragmentation situation would've given the Director the idea of doing it on purpose to get more fragments.

All the other fragments are parts of Alpha's personality or cognitive architecture; it's weird/fascinating to think that his memory of Allison was so important to him that it'd be one, and perhaps the first he'd shed. On the other hand, Allison-ex-Omega was still a fully formed individual... Even strong enough to deal with an AI. It was a human-level AI, for all intents and purposes (on the other hand, so was Church...)

The implied internal architecture is a pseudo-Jungian one with human-level anima/animus (Church/Allison) and a host of secondary modules (Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, etc), but that's a bit weird.

Ah, well, who knows. Maybe it's all explained in the S14 shorts I haven't seen. Or maybe the fragment "harvested" from Alpha is just a high-level description of a human-compatible "module", and it's the alien thing what "fixes" it by adding the actual AI capabilities. So Alpha shed his memories of Allison, and the alien thing "fixed" and turned it into a human-level AI. Then Alpha shed his wile, the alien thing filled the gaps to turn it into Gamma, etc.


cass, can you not

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