A brilliant finale let down by an artificial twist
As any scholar of humanity’s impending doom will tell you, an artificial, self-improving superintelligence is unlikely to have strong feelings in any direction about humanity. This was the central conceptual weakness of the finale of the third series of Humans
(Channel 4). An all-knowing superbeing, V (Will Tudor) teed up series four with his interest in uniting humans and synths, but in doing so became the locus for some silliness that partially let down an otherwise dramatic and emotional hour.
One of the big twists of this thoughtful, well-acted drama was that V inhabits the body of Odi, the malfunctioning, preppy-looking synth – synths are “synthetics”, aka humanoid robots – from a couple of seasons ago. Unable to cope with his burgeoning consciousness, Odi had sent himself back to the great Jack Wills catalogue in the sky in season two. It was a sad demise, but not half as sad as last night’s death of Mia (Gemma Chan). Kneeling to help the thug who’d attacked her remaining synth brethren, Mia was felled, brutally and fatally, by another thug. Subtle but affecting, Chan has been outstanding from the very beginning of this series in a role that hugely restricts her bodily and facial expressiveness. If it weren’t for Chan’s similarly outstanding colleagues, who provide a cast of anxious synths and conflicted humans, it would be hard to imagine how the show will cope without her.
This episode saw the enaction of Operation Basswood, the secret government scheme to kill off the (largely peaceful) synths with sudden power surges through the national grid. It was the kind of murderous institutional mission creep that should make any member of our species shudder, provided it’s depicted plausibly enough, and depicted plausibly it was: harried officials, quashed dissent, public caprice, and a compassion vacuum that was later filled by the synths’ leader, the noble, passively-resisting Max (Ivanno Jeremiah).
Unfortunately this agonising, touching climax was followed by some mumbo-jumbo from Odi about how the unborn baby of human teenager Matti (Lucy Carless) and the formerly half-synth Leo (Colin Morgan) was a half-human half-synth who would “change the course of history”. It seemed like we were supposed to see the baby as Christ-like. Viewers may indeed have muttered “Jesus Christ”, but only out of irritation with this overblown plot development.
If Nando’s: A PERI PERI Big Success (Channel 5) had been a meal, I’d have sent it back to the kitchen. Mild where it should have been spicy, spicy where it should have been mild, and altogether lacking in grilling, the documentary was entirely unsatisfying.
The sheer and sudden ubiquity of Nando’s, the ostensibly Portuguese inspired purveyors of choose-your own-spice-level grilled chicken, is worth examining. That was the basis of the show, but over the course of an hour it offered little that didn’t fall into the categories of either “already publicly known” or “boring”.
Take the long, long minute or so in which we were invited to ponder why Nando’s, which was founded in South Africa, chose to expand into the UK. The first answer we were given? That British people like chicken. (The others: we’re anglophone and like spice.) Breaking: restaurant executives display basic business acumen.
Having promised, Panorama-style, to “reveal how they lure you in” and show how Nando’s “ruthlessly protects its brand”, the narrator introduced us to normal restaurant practice. We learnt that the menu is divided into sections to make it easier to read (cunning!), and that it uses adjectives such as “succulent” and “crispy” to describe the food (sinister!).
In the way that undercooked chicken sometimes has some edible patches, there were some points of interest. Paying at the till before you eat means that diners can leave when they like and don’t have to squabble over a bill; spice customisation makes people feel invested in their food and encourages men to compete.
But there was a sickly glossing-over of the plight of the chickens that feed Nando’s diners (they’re not free range), and not a single mention of Nando’s tax affairs. In 2014, it was reported that the chain reduces its UK corporation tax bill by up to a third by using companies in Malta, Guernsey and the Netherlands. The practice is legal but interesting. Yet none of this came up, despite the fluff and waffle elsewhere. Maybe the documentary’s makers were just too chicken.
Humans ★★★★
Nando’s: A PERI PERI Big Success ★★