Screens: Fox
Almost Human Waits One Whole Episode To Bust Out A Sexbot Storyline
But it has some problems.
As soon as Fox announced that it was going to air a futuristic series in which robots are an integral element, we could have probably all predicted that a sexbot storyline would appear somewhere in the first season. That producers managed to hold it until the second episode shows an admirable restraint! Or, the purpose of this latest episode was mainly to introduce us to the charismatic sexbots who will recur later in the season.*
So in the future, sexbots are totally legal (as long as they're licensed!), yet from what I can surmise from this episode, human sex work is not, which I guess makes a kind of sense. If a john (or jill, let's not be sexist) is into anything that really shocks the conscience or poses a threat of bodily harm, a human prostitute might balk and/or involve authorities, whereas a sexbot is up for whatever!
But here's the moment that took me all the way out of the episode.
Sex robots are legal at this moment in time and yet a news report about them tries to capture readers' attention with a headline that obscure? Hello, what company is announcing this new line? Other than its newness, what makes the line notable? And don't even with the "Massive realism improvement over earlier models" subhead below: if a robovag feels less like a rubber glove than the 1.0 design, you put that right up top!
Look, if a semi-legitimate news aggregator like PerezHilton.com ran a story with the headline "Robot Handjobs Are Real & They Look AH-MAZING! Let Science Virtually Varnish Your Flagpole HERE!" six days ago, I feel pretty confident in predicting that, thirty-five years from now, there will be no such thing as NSFW, even on what is apparently a mainstream news site, and that a business story about a new line of sexbots will be illustrated with a 3D GIF of the company's CEO taking a new model out for a test run, because how else will potential customers know the sexbots are any good?
Seriously, once this "news" appeared on screen, I couldn't stay on board with anything else that happened in the rest of the episode. I mean, we're already on what is at least the second generation of sexbots and they haven't been covered in artificially cultured human skin this whole time?! That's something we already have now! Sure sure, burn victims, but once all of them have been taken care of, I'm pretty sure that medical breakthrough will be co-opted by the pornographic-industrial complex, for the good of moneyed perverts the whole world over.
* HAHA that was totally a joke and then I went to look up Ella Thomas's name and saw that Vanessa, the sexbot she plays, is coming back in Episode 5!
I hope her wig's agent negotiates it a solo credit next time!