Almost Human Review: Where The Soul Is
Miranda Wicker
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After a three-week break, Almost Human made a strong return tonight to finish out its first season.
As only the second episode so far to air where it was originally intended, the sense of urgency felt throughout this installment was immediate and continued through its final moments.
In what may have been the show's best episode yet, Dorian met his creator and we began to see more of this futuristic society in which John Kennex and company live. Almost Human Season 1 Episode 9 featured an XRN, a machine Dr. Nigel Vaughn created after the DRNs were decommissioned and his robotics license was revoked.
This synthetic is unlike any other, and the fact that Dr. Vaughn wants to create an army of them makes for an interesting setup for the remaining four episodes.
Without the logical thought of the MXs and seemingly without Dorian's synthetic soul, the XRN is a vicious and deadly machine whose purpose is destruction. After her creation, she killed 26 police officers in three days before she was finally flanked and her body was destroyed. But not her head. That went into an evidence locker.
The same evidence locker Insyndicate wanted to break into in the pilot episode.
Ah, Insyndicate! It's been a few episodes since we've heard that name! But we may not hear it again since it wasn't determined tonight if Insyndicate was somehow behind the XRN's escape from the evidence locker and theft of the microprocessors needed to create an XRN army.
Is Dr. Nigel Vaughn working with Insyndicate? Is he working by himself while Insyndicate continues plotting whatever nefarious schemes they may plot? Will our heroes face a two-front war in the first season's final episodes?
Yeah, I don't know. It could be any of those things or none of them. With the way this show is progressing, I'm certainly not able to guess very much about how the next few weeks will go down.
What I do know, or rather what I saw coming, was Dr. Vaughn's double dealing with the police. That was clear from a mile away in heavy fog and a blizzard.
If a mad scientist offers to help you "destroy" one of his own creations, there's almost no way you should trust that that's what he actually plans to do.
In this case, Dr. Vaughn did plan to destroy his creation, but neglected to mention that he was the one who sent her on her path of destruction in the first place. Or that her death was sacrificial and not because he legitimately thought she was bad for the rest of the world.
The reasons why or how she became so destructive also remained unclear.
Was Danica simply programmed to be a mercenary? Did Dr. Vaughn's motivations when creating her synthetic soul really affect her outlook? Or was Dr. Vaughn lying to Dorian about the fact that they share the same synthetic soul?
There I go again with the questions I can't answer.
Part of me thinks that the XRN and Dorian do share a soul, because that contributes to the show's overarching idea of what it means to be human.
DNA can be isolated under a microscope, you know, hair color, eye color, height, weight, ethnicity. The fundamental basic data can be traced to individual chromosomes. But the soul, that is who we are. It is our passion, our pain. Why we laugh, why we cry. Why we strive to be better. DNA, it's the data, but the soul? It's the story. It is the essence of life.
Nigel Vaughn
The soul, Dorian's specifically, is what makes him so unique. Dorian's synthetic soul, like its non-synthetic counterparts, has the capacity for both good and evil. The humans in that world understand the duality of man, but for an android like Dorian, who has been programmed in a certain way and given a soul, that understanding is less clear.
Because Danica and Dorian share a creator and are in so many ways exactly alike, she serves as a warning for Dorian regarding what he could become.
The thought that he is capable of that sort of chaos and destruction scares him. It scared the DRNs before him who took their own lives rather than risk malfunctioning and taking the lives of innocent people.
It's such this abstract world which J.H. Wyman has created and pondering it is both fascinating and futile.
Regarding this world of Wyman's, there is a wall around the city, much like Divergent or The Hunger Games. While they fight their own wars against crime inside the city, there are supposedly far worse crimes occurring outside the city's walls.
And now Dr. Vaughn is among the ranks of the criminals who live outside the city. Did he join Insyndicate there to build his army?
Time will tell. But Maldonado and John won't be happy they didn't listen to Dorian. (At some point they'll learn to listen to him, right?)
What did you think about Almost Human Season 1 Episode 9? Are Dorian and the XRN the same? How did you like John Larroquette as Dr. Nigel Vaughn?
Miranda Wicker was a Staff Writer for TV Fanatic. She retired in 2017. Follow her on Twitter.
