Humans Shows Why You Never Dip Your Pen In Silicone Ink

The thing about stories set in the dystopias of the not-so-distant future is that people are always learning, usually the hard way, that the reality they've accepted is freighted with unforeseen consequences -- you know, for the benefit of the viewer in the not-so-distant past, so that we can anticipate the problems they're facing now and avoid them ourselves. The latest episode of Humans is positively crammed with them: Jill's learning why you don't get too attached to a synth you can't afford to rent on your own; George learns there are probably better ways to dispose of your malfunctioning synth than abandoning him in the woods; Hobb learns you should be careful of whom you share your interesting scientific findings with unless you have a patsy synth at the ready that you're okay setting on fire in order to disguise your insubordination. But it is Joe Hawkins who learns the hardest lesson of all. As it were.

Let's be real: we've all been pretty certain Joe was going to try to bone Anita since the series premiere. We watched him build a case to justify it -- we saw him looking put-upon at Laura when he wasn't looking furtively at Anita -- so that by the time he directly invited Laura to sleep with him and she shrugged him off for work and he turned around to get Anita to put a digital tail on Laura and determine whether she might actually be out with some Tom, clearly he already had prevenge sex in mind. He sure knew exactly where that little Adult Options insert was!

As soon as Joe's finished abusing Anita, he realizes he's made an error -- not because he's paid another humanoid figure a kind of attention that, strictly speaking, he's supposed to reserve for his wife, but because it's occurred to him how easily he could be found out. A browser isn't going to cough a history back up after you've erased it (outside of a situation involving a forensic expert, that is), but Anita is so guileless that he's not sure she won't just say something about it in passing because she has no concept that he would want her not to. Joe orders Anita, "Delete this from your records and don't mention this-- I don't give you permission to mention this to anyone," but even then, he doesn't seem certain that he's sufficiently covered his tracks; when Laura decides that Anita requires a full diagnostic evaluation, Joe spends the entire session broadcasting guilt...

...because he doesn't know if the technician's about to announce to his wife something like, "Here's your problem: her primary user banged her last night." She doesn't, but the experience apparently scares Joe out of his complacency, and he uses the fact of Anita's real age as a pretext for returning her, only to get his motion voted down by every other member of the family, including his previously anti-Anita wife! Nothing to be done for it but countermand everyone else and go ahead and call for Anita's removal all on his own, as, I guess, he assumes is his privilege as a white man, forcing Mattie to grab Anita herself and spirit her away for her appointed meeting with Leo. If Joe had known where Mattie was going, he'd have probably tried a lot harder to stop her: Mattie and Leo spend hours in Anita's source code, trying to find the hidden Mia Mattie's already glimpsed. When they're frustrated in their efforts, Mattie brings Anita and sees what she can find in the report Laura and Joe brought home from Anita's diagnostic test.

And there it is: the family's shame.

Mattie accuses Toby of having figured out how to hack his way in to Anita's protected areas, which is partly the natural conclusion to jump to -- as a teenaged virgin, he's less able to hide his pervy intentions -- and partly giving him way too much credit; does she really think Toby knows how to bypass age restrictions? Toby protests his innocence, but not for long; as the truth of the situation becomes clear to him (and him alone), he decides to take his father's blame...but only long enough to confront Joe about it. Toby's righteous fury and legitimate disgust at how gross Joe is -- plus, probably, Joe's uncertainty about how long Toby's going to be willing to cover for him -- move Joe to a confession about the true identity of Anita's defiler, closely followed by the nahpology about having had "a couple of glasses of wine"; his scientist's curiosity ("I was mucking about and just-- I wanted to know what would happen if--"); his rationalizations ("I'm hardly a cheat!...She's a sex toy!"); and finally his implicit counter-accusation about her relationship with the mysterious Tom. The way you can really tell Joe believes he didn't do anything wrong is the sheer volume of different excuses he makes for himself -- that's exactly what innocent people do!

Unfortunately for Joe, none of these gambits is successful -- "It was an accident" is a particularly poor attempt at self-absolution given that Laura knows how many steps there were between Anita's factory settings and her activation just to turn on the oven -- and Laura kicks Joe out of the house. There are still three episodes left in which he might meet the same fate as Katherine Parkinson's last cheating TV husband (please, oh please), but short of that, three episodes to reflect on what he's learned.