Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Almost Human - Unbound


After someone goes to a lot of trouble to get an apparently nonfunctional android into the police evidence locker, the Trojan Horse steals the head of a XRN (the protoype of an advanced military-level android whose entire run was decommissioned and existence was scrubbed after a 36-hour bloodbath that left more than two dozen police officers dead). After swapping the damaged cheap body for a shiny new one the XRN (Gina Carano) makes a visit back to its creator (John Larroquette) who also was the creator of Dorian (Michael Ealy) and designer of synthetic souls, before stealing enough advanced computer processors to restart her doomed race.

After Rudy (Mackenzie Crook) works with Dr. Vaughn (Larroquette) find a way to track the android which he affectionately refers to as Danica while admitting her creation was the biggest mistake of his life, Kennex (Karl Urban) and Dorian set-out to attempt to take the android down which means getting far closer to the homicidal robot than is prudent not realizing the Vaughn is actually the brains behind the entire operation. "Unbound" makes the best use of Carano's physicality for the various stunt sequences, but even as an android she comes off as more robotic than she should.

For really the first time the show makes a big deal of "The Wall" separating the city from the unknown chaos on the other side (and none too subtly as its mentioned at least a half-dozen times). Vaughn's introduction and escape over the wall (with the pieces necessary to build himself his own army of androids) provide an ongoing plotline for the series to explore and offer the show a new type of villain connected deeply to Dorian. While all that works, I have to question the timing of Vaughn's disappearance which immediately alerted the police to his real intentions when more subtly fading back into the ether after the destruction of Danica (and thus keeping his future plans completely under wraps) was still a very real possibility.

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