A blonde cyborg assassin with a grudge? Now that’s a femme fatale
FOODIE FLOP OF THE NIGHT: Fast food fan Ewen wanted £100,000 to launch a restaurant offering fishfinger sandwiches, on Million Pound Menu (BBC2). But he failed to drown them in tomato ketchup first — a basic mistake. A good sarnie is meant to ooze.
Sci-fi is this year’s trend on the small screen. After the success of the robot cowboys in Westworld, a genre that was once confined to juvenile shows such as Doctor Who is now regarded as serious and even high-brow.
David Morrissey’s crime thriller The city And The city last month on BBc2 was a complex political allegory with literary overtones. Sci-fi standards are much higher today than they were three years ago when Humans (c4) made its debut with a tale about android slaves that develop emotions.
The challenge for Humans, now in its third series, is to use its head start and stir up moral conflicts about technology that we’ve never imagined before. Set in a parallel universe, it has a brilliant cast — colin Morgan as the half-human droid leading a rebellion, Katherine Parkinson as the radical lawyer who sees robots as our equals.
But the show’s return was hugely frustrating. The latest plot is so laboured, it could be lifted from a Seventies futuristic serial such as Logan’s Run: the ‘synths’ are being hunted and lynched by gangs of vigilante humans.
The dialogue is cheesy. The first 20 minutes consisted entirely of actors looking meaningfully at each other while explaining what happened last time, and spouting mechanical dialogue: ‘The people chose their leader wisely,’ intoned one.
Worst is the gimmick that ‘synths’ have expressionless faces and voices. This was wonderfully creepy when there was only one android character — the outstanding Gemma chan as a household drudge with a soul.
Now they’re all doing it. All this toneless chanting has the effect of making the show look like a school Shakespeare production.
Humans hasn’t run out of juice yet. it has an outstanding character in Niska (Emily Berrington), the blonde assassin cyborg who owes no allegiance to any group, biological or bionic — all she cares about is repaying grudges with extreme violence. There’s a Hollywood blockbuster in that.
And because it is well established, the show is able to attract cameos that add to its sense of reality. News readers Alastair Stewart, George Alagiah and Huw Edwards delivered a set of bulletins at the opening, a slick way to bring us up to speed.
for more innovative sci- fi, mixing psychological drama with time travel and the Boy’s Own theme of a landing on Mars, the low-budget french adventure Missions (BBc4) had more to offer.
Each of its ten episodes is less than half an hour, so the cliffhangers and twists come thick and fast. it opened with a flashback: a Russian cosmonaut in a rackety old Soyuz craft was wrestling the controls as he plummeted out of control through the Earth’s atmosphere in 1967.
We leapt forward 50 years, to a race between two billionaires obsessed with being the first to set foot on Mars. The nuclearpowered ship from Zillion (for which, read Google) was the winner, except that it didn’t so much touch down as slam into the Red Planet at 10,000 miles an hour.
On board the other ship, the all-french crew are going to pieces. The captain is sleeping with the psychologist, the first officer has fallen in love with the computer and the billionaire (don’t mention Elon Musk) is scarily gung-ho.
And then, on Mars, they meet the Russian cosmonaut . . . and he’s not a day older.
Witty, melodramatic, knowing and pell-mell, this is irreverent sci-fi that isn’t afraid to send itself up one minute, and scare your socks off the next. And that’s how the genre should be.