What would you get if I, Robot and Judge Dredd had a little baby together? You would get the futuristic crime drama Almost Human!
This is the new show from J H Wyman and J J Abrams. Set in the year 2048 where technology has advanced at an uncontrollable rate which has led to crime increasing 400%. The LAPD has had to take measures to counter act this rise in crime rates, and the solution is to assign androids to work with every human police officer to help them protect and serve.
It starts with Detective John Kennex, played by Karl Urban, in control of an operation that goes very tits up. Everyone apart from him gets killed, he ends up severely injured and in a coma. After waking up and going through some kind of recovery (including a robotic leg), and some dodgy memory recovery sessions provided by an illegal doctor, which lead him to have flash backs and nose bleeds. He is reluctantly put back in the field, with his reputation tarnished.
Now, Kennex is your typical Maverick Cop type, he is a bit old fashioned and doesn’t trust or like androids, as demonstrated when he chucks his new android partner out of a moving car after visiting a crime scene of a security van heist in which four officers were killed. All he did was ask him a few questions about his shady doctors visits.
This heist is believed to be linked to the ambush Kennex was involved in previously, and the police chief asks him to look in to a bit more, but to keep it on the DL as he is the only one she can trust. This is also where his visits to the memory doctor (not his actual name) fit in, as he is trying to piece together who was involved, and how it all went so FUBAR. Was there a mole in the police?
Due to Kennex’s distrust and generally dislike of the new MX-43 droids, an older droid is taken out of ‘hibernation’. The droid in question is a decommissioned DNR series called Dorian (Michael Ealy), which was designed to be a bit more human by being programmed to feel. Initially Kennex distrusts Dorian just as much as any other droid, but as the episode progresses and Dorian showed more of his human side, he starts to warm to him a bit more.
I’m not going to go in to what happened in the episode any more, because I don’t to spoil things for anyone. So I will just sum up a few thoughts on it.
The episode as a whole was well paced, with a good amount of ‘action’ to start, whilst delivering a suitable amount of character building. The characters so far are likable, but not yet lovable.
The futuristic Los Angeles is a believable place (so far), and with a good amount of future tech-y things on show.
The most important thing is that I want to see more of it. I’m looking forward to watching the next episode, and hoping the series can continue with its bright start. I just hope it can keep its feet on the ground in terms of the futuristic parts. Because its not that far in the future, and I think if they pushed it much further it would start to lose that believable side for me.
Very enjoyable first episode! Bring on some more.
– Will
