In 2015, the first series of Humans (Sunday) was apparently Channel 4’s most watched home grown drama since The Camomile Lawn: a programme broadcast when Neil Kinnock was still the Labour leader and given a obvious ratings boost by the tabloid outrage about its many nude scenes (and by its many nude scenes). In the case of Humans, though, the British people can’t be accused of ulterior motives, because this is a winningly intelligent piece of sci fi that ponders, among other things, the nature of consciousness and the future of the human race.
Cleverly, too, it’s set, not in a domed city of jet packing commuters, but in a world very like our own. Except, that is, for the presence of extremely human looking robots, known as ‘synths’, who already do most of the manual work and now seem set to carry out much of the white collar sort too. The trouble is that five of them were secretly endowed with full human consciousness by a mysterious dead scientist called David Elster, and the first series ended with the creation and theft of a flash drive that could upload such consciousness to every synth on earth. If so, this might well lead to what’s known to scientists as the Singularity — and to generations of sci fi fans as Robots Taking Over the World.
The theft was carried out by Niska, who demonstrated her status as the most rebellious conscious synth early in the last series when she strangled to death an especially seedy client in the brothel where she worked. On Sunday, we first saw her hiding out in Berlin where she alternated between a lesbian affair and reading Hegel in a bid to decide whether uploading the consciousness data would be ethical.
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