Does Humans's Joe Really Deserve To Have Anyone As A Champion, Never Mind Mia?

Who here predicted what Karen's secret was going to be?!

YOU WILL NOTICE MY HAND IS NOT GOING UP. (Well, you won't. But it's not.) Other than with procedurals that are explicitly mysteries, I usually don't try to "solve" the stories on TV shows; after the stomach-bag reveal earlier this season, I figured Karen was like Mia, but maybe that she had been part of a separate experiment based on the fact that neither Leo nor any of his surviving synth relatives ever made any reference to one of their number who was missing. But WOW.

I can't really improve upon George's reaction when Niska calls her "Beatrice": "Oh, David. What did you do?" I understand the idea of trying to compensate Leo for the loss of his mother (even before her actual death) by creating a synthetic nanny and some playmates for him -- the little we've seen and heard about Elster made it pretty clear even before this week's episode that he might be likely to focus on practical outcomes more than unquantifiable emotional consequences. But resurrecting, in robot form, a troubled woman who took her own life, and proudly presenting her to her bereaved son as a wonderful surprise, is PRETTY FUCKED UP. And given how much, by this point in the series, we've gotten attached to the synth characters (on which more below), seeing Elster react to Leo's horror by angrily turning on New Beatrice as though any of this could possibly be her fault advances the season's counter-narrative on Elster: clearly, he had lots of books smarts and ingenuity and, in a limited way, some good intentions, but he also made some extremely selfish decisions that he evidently didn't think through, and which traumatized his children, both biological and synthetic. Even the way he disposed of Beatrice/Karen was cruel: she wouldn't have had to steal a dead girl's identity and try to build a life without any guidance or skills (recall Fred's description in this episode of Elster as a man who didn't care to teach his creations much) if he had killed her, as he told the other synths he had.

That said, now that we know there's going to be a second season, I would love a flashback episode to Elster, George, and Hobb in the early days of synths; based on what we've seen, the three of them came to have very different relationships to synths as time went on, and it would be fascinating to get an idea of how men with those varying perspectives worked together, or how they've evolved since then.

And what's Karen's deal now?

First of all, I'm referring to the idiosyncrasies in Karen's manner. She obviously has consciousness, but where does she fall on a scale of Max to Mia? Humanlike behaviour seems like something she doesn't bother with when she's not actually in the presence of humans; when she's alone, she's as stiff and blank as any regular synth. (And should Pete maybe have noticed something was up with her when she showed up for work every day in exactly the same sweater and pants.) Is it just that being cast out from her true fellow synths means she never cared to act human except when she has to -- the inverse of Niska faking her lack of affect at the brothel in the season's first two episodes?

But I also mean, what is Karen's endgame? When she reunites with Niska, she explains her belief that after Elster removed her from the house, her fellow synths abandoned her; Niska tells her that Elster told them all that Beatrice/Karen was dead, and killed himself the same day. Even after Karen finds out that she's been nursing the wrong grudge this whole time, she has no interest in joining back up with her family, as Niska proposes. And once she learns from Niska that they may be on the verge of conscious-synth reproduction -- something Karen says is a threat to humanity -- she puts her own suicide plan on hold in order to track down the rest of her siblings and get them swarmed by a SWAT team, basically. Presumably she's made a deal with Hobb that if she collaborates with him he'll destroy her as Niska wouldn't, not knowing what Hobb did when he was directly ordered to destroy Fred. I just don't see why Karen's heartbreak over the mess her existence has been would result in her turning on her fellow conscious synths -- who, like her, never asked to be built -- as opposed to the humans who spawned Elster. (Then again, I almost always think humans aren't targeted for death more often; an insufficient number of murders perpetrated against humans by animals is one of the reasons I had to stop watching Zoo.)

Does Joe really deserve to have anyone as a champion, never mind Mia?

There was a time in my life when I used to watch Dr. Phil a lot -- I got hooked when he launched his series on the Dr. Phil Family, and then I kind of just...watched a lot of other episodes. It was on every day and I worked at home. If you're not familiar with the good "doctor" and his show, the topic of infidelity is one he addresses pretty frequently, but couples who appear have problems for all kinds of other reasons -- abuse between spouses, abuse of children, gambling, desertion, whatever. And while I enjoyed watching the show because it was scandalous and titillating, I finally had to stop because of one frustrating element in particular: Dr. Phil virtually never told any couple he thought they'd tried hard enough but that what they'd once had was irreparably broken now and that they should just stop hurting each other and get divorced, even though it would be clear to anyone watching that they really, really should. (Let's be real: if you're on Dr. Phil, your marriage is fucked, THE END.)

The reason I bring this up is: I'm just not sure Joe deserves to have a passionate defense mounted on his behalf by anyone, and I'm not sure what the show wants me to think of the fact that the person (or "person") who is sticking up for him the most is Mia. Even if you argue -- as several of our commenters have -- that as far as Joe knew Anita wasn't any different from any other synth in terms of her sentience, never mind her consciousness, and that if the factory that built her made Adult Options available then he might as well take them for a spin, Laura's reaction to his confession indicates that the two of them didn't have any sort of arrangement between them about Anita being a very detailed Fleshlight. The fact that all the other characters who know that Joe had sex with Anita/raped Mia don't consider it to be tantamount to masturbation, I feel, made it pretty clear that even in the world of this show, Joe is gross and Laura's response -- kicking him out of the house -- was reasonable.

It's certainly possible for a healthy couple to work through the emotional crisis that is an incident of infidelity and remain married (though I would think it would be confusing and unsettling for the kids to know that Joe was back in the house but sleeping on the couch, but I'm not a psychologist), and maybe Joe and Laura will get there when their lives are back to normal and their house isn't being used as a hideout for a bunch of sentient synths. But I don't understand what I'm supposed to make of the fact that the one trying to convince Laura to forgive Joe is Mia. To Laura, Mia says she doesn't want to be the reason the Hawkins's marriage fails, and urges her to tell Joe about Tom and about her bad relationship with their mother. To Joe, she says Laura loves him, and that Mia could tell he regretted having sex with her before he'd even finished. Mia even defends Joe to Laura for calling in a tip to the cops on Leo and Max. (Mia does not say anything like what Joe tried to tell Laura initially, and what some commenters have claimed -- that Anita was a sophisticated sex toy, which I think affirms both my and Laura's original view of the incident: that just because Adult Options were available didn't mean it was acceptable for Joe to take them.)

Is it because of Mia's programming -- to be a caretaker -- that she's trying to minimize the event so that she can recede from their lives again as unobtrusively as possible? Or are we human viewers supposed to be chastened that the most empathetic, forgiving person in the Hawkins house is one who wasn't born, but made?

How can three and a half robots break our hearts so much?

"Mary's in the next room. She is preparing Eggs Benedict. Your favourite. Waiting for you. She would not let me help because last time I overcooked the eggs. In Spain. Tarragona. It was extremely hot that day. You ate three oranges from a tree."

"You have died, George."

Just in time for Niska to discover how to have fun with Sophie, the story of her Smash Club massacre hits the news.

Leo cowers from Karen, telling her -- or mostly himself -- that she's not his mother, but ultimately, he can't resist her.

I thought nothing could be worse than Max faking us out with a cheery hello and then starting to twitch like we'd seen Odi do all season...

...but this is worse.

NOW WHAT?!

If I'm right about the bargain Karen's struck with Hobb and he doesn't honour it, then what? Will she change allegiance? And will we get to find out how she feels about Leo, her quasi-son? Has Mattie done anything she can be charged with? Will Leo be charged with anything, and if so, what's the detention situation for a cyborg? When is Joe going to get his comeuppance? What will it be? Will it be violent enough to satisfy me? Can Niska do it? AND CAN THEY FIX MAXIE?????