Almost Human's Identity Crisis

I've been enjoying Almost Human this season in the same way that I've enjoyed a vast number of entertaining-yet-average TV shows over the years: with amusement, a dash of fondness, and occasional cheering when the production team manages to turn out an episode that's more competent than usual. And yet with most of those other shows, I never finished up the first season with the sneaking suspicion that I had just been watching five different shows. 

I'm not even talking about the fact that the show was a mishmash of tropes I've seen a thousand times before, even though it was — the buddy cop aspects are pretty damn standard, and John's manpain and wobbly standing in the police department, and I can name at least three different movies/books/TV shows about a grumpy, robot-hating human cop who's forced to pair up with, surprise of surprises, a humanoid robot, and then they all end up learning valuable lessons about humanity. Sometimes the grumpy, robot-hating human cop is even cybernetically modified, too. We've all seen I, Robot, right? 

I will at least give Almost Human props for not being entirely about white dudes, which is more than I can say for a lot of sci-fi shows.

But anyway, that's not the point. This isn't just me having flashbacks to the ghosts of stories past; this is a narrative identity crisis. It's sort of like what I imagine would happen if identical quintuplets enrolled in high school under one name and all took turns pretending to be the same person. The superficial resemblance was there, but other concerns tended to vary wildly.

Okay guys, remember: we're in love with the quarterback, we hate science, and we have three things due in AP Lit. And I swear, Number 2, if you try and flirt with the TA one more time...

Which has made this season an adventure! Are we going to get the semi-serialized show that's focused on John's manpain, guilt, and the haunting flashbacks of his evil-ex-girlfriend? Is it going to be the entirely episodic John and Dorian hour? Are they going to try and beat John's heterosexuality into us again? Wait, is the serialization actually about Dorian's feelings of personhood and the evil agenda of the DRN's creator? Or is it about corruption in the police department? Are they going to remember that Detective Stahl is actually a person this episode? Do Dorian and John like each other tonight?

Or, as Flatmate Katie summed up: 

• the buddy cop show
• the sci-fi show with weird world-building
• the accidental rom-com
• which is different from the buddy cop show and has more to do with Detective Stahl
• at least, when they let Detective Stahl be actually interesting
• the show about Othering and what it means to be human
• which is different from from weird world-building sci-fi show
• the straight-up procedural
• which is also different from the buddy cop show

Some of these hiccups are probably at least a little bit due to the fact that episodes were aired out of order — although honestly, that wasn't too terribly noticeable — and some of them are due to the fact that the Almost Human writers seem to have the same attitude about their serialized story arcs as the Sleepy Hollow writers do about Katrina's backstory*. 

Namely, throw a lot of shit at the wall to see what sticks. 

So far, nothing has, although presumably if the show is renewed (hey, weirder things have happened) these dangling threads would come back. Possibly they'd even turn out to be connected; I could see the police corruption storyline being related to the drug cartel attack that took out most of John's team, and maybe Evil Robot-Making Dr. Frankenstein has something to do with whatever weirdo half-memory got planted in Dorian's head, and maybe at some point we'd actually get to learn what the hell the Wall was...

Also, hopefully the writers would step their game up and we wouldn't get any more episodes where the dramatic climax relies upon the stunning twist of OH MY GOD SHE WAS BLIND ALL ALONG, because I would describe that as less "poignant" and more "caused my roommates and I to burst out in hysterical laughter." 

(Yes, I know that Kevin McFarland of the AV Club liked that episode. Kevin McFarland of the AV Club is wrong.)

The problem is that of all the different iterations of the show —the quintuplets, so to speak — I'm only interested in a handful of them. The drug cartel stuff relied too much on flashbacks and John's guilt to actually go anywhere, and the "dead cop dad who was investigating corruption in the police department" was boring on Hawaii Five-0, too. Karl Urban and Michael Ealy have enough chemistry to carry the show between them, and I love them razzing each other, but I'm sick of shows where the male leads talk about each others' dicks and are crucial to each other's character growth and yet are still Totes Straight OMG. It doesn't help that the creators decided to throw (the criminally underutilized Minka Kelly as) Detective Stahl into the ring as John's love interest before they bothered to develop her as an actual character.

But the flashes of characterization she's shown — mostly having to do with her ambivalence towards her Chrome background, and its ambivalence towards her — are actually interesting, and make me hope that there will be a season 2, if only in the hope of more backstory. (Also so I would continue to be able to see Michael Ealy and Karl Urban's faces on a weekly basis.)

Also interesting:

• Whatever the hell is going on with Dorian
• The class stratification that's only sort of hinted at
• Chromes don't approve of Stahl being a cop; how do most cops feel about Chromes?
• so on and so forth
• The place of Synthetics and altered humans in this society
• The question of what personhood is, given ^
• how this ties into John and Dorian and Stahl's sense of self, what with the robot legs and android selves and genetic modifications and so on
• blah blah blah internalized discrimination?
• should androids without synthetic souls still be respected as autonomous beings?
• What's up with the other DRNs
• The Wall, mostly because I'm still trying to figure out what the hell it is, so obviously it must be a little interesting. (World-building!)

Could be interesting:

• Dr. Frankenbot's evil plan
• although seriously, would it kill the writers to give us a female-appearing Synthetic who's not A) a sexbot or B) the lone, dangerously unstable combat droid who gets sacrificed for her creator?
• Or at least to give us a reason why they don't exist, even if that reason is just "sexism"?

You know what would be kind of cool, actually? If the show were more about Dorian than John. Think about it: we open on Dorian's face, eyes closed, like he's sleeping — and then all of a sudden his eyes open like he's waking up from a nightmare. Cut to a shot from Dorian's POV, where we see Rudy leaning uncomfortably close to his face. Standing awkwardly behind Rudy, out of focus but looking sour, is John. 

Back to Dorian. "How long has it been?" he asks, and we pan out to see that he's lying on Rudy's table, wired up. 

You can still even work some of the cartel stuff, John's guilt, and his coma into it, but now we've also got the story of Dorian waking up to find that he's the last one of his model who's still a cop, most of his coworkers don't trust him not to break down just like the other DRNs, he's got weird shit in his brain, and his partner — who could maybe understand the shitty way it feels to walk into the bullpen and have to deal with the suspicious sideways looks — hates him, even though he didn't do anything. 

So he needles John constantly, still trying to figure out the balance of emotions and calculations, the almost part of "almost human," where the hell he fits between androids and humans, and every reluctant smile from John feels like a triumph, that he's made his partner think of him as more than a thing. And yet he still needs to remind John that he isn't human, that he's made of metal and wires just like the MX John had no bones about shoving out of a car. And he's still trying to help John figure out what's up with the cartel — that is, if John will actually talk to him instead of skulking off on his own — and with his own fake memories (and Rudy still tells John about that and not Dorian, and we get to go into whether or not that's a violation of Dorian's privacy, and whether Synthetics have a right to privacy), and it turns out that Detective Stahl also feels out of place, just from a slightly different direction, and...

Anyway.

At its best, Almost Human has been an entertaining show, but it's shown flashes of what it could be like if it were a more nuanced show, and I'm sort of sad that it feels like the creative team haven't really wanted to or been able to explore that. I don't really care if it's super serialized or episodic; I just want it to be well-crafted.

Alternately, I would settle for no nuance, as long as the women were still developed as characters and John and Dorian hooked up. 

Which, hey, could still happen. It's unlikely — because, you know, heteronormativity, and also because signs are not looking good for season 2 — but it's not like Almost Human has given much indication of knowing where it's going. 

*I would like to point out that I actually greatly enjoy Sleepy Hollow, but let's be real here, the writers/producers have two massive Achilles heels and their names are "Katrina" and "flashbacks."