Oh good, glad it wasn't just me being obtuse.


I'd definitely say compassion. Because if anything what it did was raise more suspicions about her being 'human'. As Laura said when questioning Anita the next morning most synths are only capable of recognising extreme, very obvious emotions in people (she said something like they only respond if you're bawling your eyes out). Whereas Anita realised Laura was upset about not getting to put Sophie to bed even though the emotion she showed about that was quite subtle.

The show's not set in the future. It's a parallel present day.

Yes but that wouldn't necessarily work with Anita telling the mother earlier, that she (Anita) would be able to look after the daughter better than the mother could.

I'm not saying that Anita isn't a caring synth, but I feel she is hiding something.

Oh good point, I'd forgotten about her being told not to hack Anita.


I'd assumed he just meant things about George's late wife (such as the bee story), and things about George's extended family/friends (as when Odi reminded him of the names of the children who had been at the party where his wife wore a certain outfit), which were memories George didn't want to lose as his own mental health is failing. But I suppose he could mean secrets from the work he did with Elster as well. I would have thought though that in recycling a synth it wouldn't be the done thing for anyone to look through their memories and instead all personal data would be deleted as a first step (in the same way that you'd wipe a smartphone by restoring factory settings before you sold it second hand or binned it).


I thought that as one of the experimental 'advanced' synths Anita does have human emotion-the same as Niska does.

no that is right, what I meant was that within those 4 or 5 synths, they all handle their feelings differently.

That's just reminded me of that Charlie Brooker White Christmas (Black Mirror) special last Christmas, where a kind of sim replica of the character played by Rafe Spall (a digital "copy" called a cookie) is left to listen to WIzzard's "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday" for what would be the equivalent of a few million years! AARRGHH! It wasn't the real person, but it "thought" it was.....

Which in turn shapes the experiences - it's all quite circular and/or chicken-and-egg and I know I'd have turned out differently if I had the various super-capabilities, richer for one thing but probably also having to live abroad and permanently wearing one of my cunning disguises...


Good point - and oh dear, telling a teenager not to do something is practically giving it the green light!

She did say that after the accident. Tom Goodman-Hill wasn't particularly interested - but I might not be that bothered if someone said something similar to me as I don't understand computers/technology. It wouldn't particularly bother me (in that parallel world) whether my synth was sharing data or not when she's cooking and cleaning perfectly - and has just stopped my son being killed.


But when George was going to 'kill' Odi with the hammer, he said something about him knowing things that other people can't know. Why would he be bothered if the synth said stuff like a baby regurgitated on a jacket? Although he was using Odi to keep his memory, he was also prepared to smash him up when he realised he was broken so the memory comment was about other people finding out things, not about George having memories in Odi.

Niska doesn't seem human to me. I can't imagine that many humans who would set out to kill someone they know nothing about for no real reason - the odd psychopath maybe but they are not representative of typical human emotion. She seems like a machine that has been overpowered, like the nurse one breaking down the door (also not a human act).

Two points arise there.

Firstly you may know that you feel things but you have no evidence that other people feel things. Or to put it slightly less strongly, any evidence you might have would be based entirely on their behaviour rather than access to their inner experience, emotions or volitions which are sealed off. In that respect you are not capable of judging between a synth and a real human other than on the basis of performance or how they do things.

Secondly there is a quite persuasive tradition which suggests that feeling is epiphenomenal. It may very well be that the mechanics of decision-making actually take place independently of the emotion which accompanies them. As I understand some recent research using brain scans suggest that a brain makes a decision before this is actually registered by the consciousness.

But I don't think that Anita realised when she said that she could take care of Sophie better that it upset Laura. I think it also might be that as time goes on she is getting less robotic and more human.

There is clearly more to Anita than she's showing but I don't know if she's actively hiding things or if it's because of the memory wipe that was done on her. When she was Mia she had feelings and a personality, now because of being changed by the modders she has lost that, but I think it's more like it's been repressed, it's still in her. So it's almost like bits of her true self are leaking through subconsciously.


Oh, OK, sorry I misunderstood what you were saying.

Yeah good point. Okay it makes sense. It also makes me less easily happy about the synths existence. I want ones that make cakes not ones that can break a door.


Interesting - I'm learning new things all the time from this thread. Who'd have thought a TV programme would introduce me to new concepts.

And yeah I am just basing my comment about her not feeling it on observation. We have to use observation a lot in life, when there is no definitive way of making a judgement. I used to assess people who had been arrested to see if they were fit to be interviewed. Whether the interview went ahead or not was based purely on the conclusion I came to from speaking to/observing the person. A couple of times I got conned into feeling sorry for people (usually drug addicts who can be incredibly maniupulative). I work in a different but related field now and there isn't a week that goes past when it's impossible to tell if someone is trying to decieve or has bought into what they are saying so much that they actually believe it. Human beings are complicated things. I think I'd have a reasonable chance of figuring out a synth.

good episode, is it bad that I kept thinking the kids should be more ginger with that mum and dad?

Hahahahaha - for some reason, I don't know if it was the colourscape at that particular point but when they had just had the car accident I looked at the parents and the three kids and thought what are the chances of none of them being ginger.

Fair enough, in that case I guess he must know something. It would seem I didn't get the point of that scene then because I thought that George was still trying to fix Odi with the hammer. The same way that I make some of my machines work by bashing them. I still don't see why some kind of memory wipe couldn't be done prior to sending him for recycling though.


I think Niska has had what amounts to a psychotic break.


Lol! That was one of the first things I said when the family was introduced in episode 1. How those parents could have two children with dark hair and eyes is a mystery. In fact during the first episode I kept waiting for some dialogue that would reveal them to be a blended family thinking that the older kids must have a different biological mother or father.

But we know from Mia that even when they do a wipe it doesn't get rid of the *whatever the technical blurb was that means Leo can read her code*.

True. I suppose it all comes down to what exactly happens in the recycling process, although George clearly wasn't willing to risk it.

The other thing I did think was that presumably Odi belongs to George. So why could George not simply agree to having the new carer synth but say that he wanted to keep Odi as a companion? If Odi was not having to run errands or be in charge of caring for George then it wouldn't matter that he was not working efficiently, he could essentially just sit around the house and chat with George.

Now you mention the name, I believe Mia was human and died in an accident and then was either transplanted into the Anita bot, or had her memories and or personality transplanted into the Mia bot. Meaning that she either is Mia, or that she has the personality and memories of Mia. Which as you say, might be being suppressed because of the modding.

Apologies for stepping back an episode but am I the only person watching who assumed Max was using a do-it-yourself defibrillator to revive a human Leo? It never occurred to me that Leo 'must be (part) mechanical' simply because an electrical current passed through his body. It's a fairly standard medical procedure, after all.

I am also slightly irritated at how slowly synths perform their duties. Obviously they wouldnt be as efficient as humans but, at the rate she moves, it would take a week for Anita to wash and iron for a family of five - not great value for £20k and is a constant reminder of why robotics isn't as prevalent in the real world as they are in this drama.

Well she remade the cake in the time it took for the mother to read the story. That was pretty quick.

I dunno, I took it to mean that he'd recognised certain key things and the approximate size of the code he was looking at. I can find changes quite quickly in chunks of code I've written/am familiar with, and I'm not even a proper programmer.

She might have been able to whizz the mixture up really quickly if she'd used turbo power, but cooking it any quicker would have been impossible, so that part was very unbelievable. When she was wiping the oven down she was being really, really slow. I'd have pushed her to one side and told her I'd do it myself.

I think if you look you will see 'Dr Max' attaching the wire from the light fitting to some connector thing in Leo's side - and I'm sure his eyes went slightly funny when he was zapped...?


You might think that - but I think it's the slow steady but above all precisely scheduled approach that makes it work - no pauses for crosswords or daytime chat shows, any interruptions don't suffer from 'annoyance delay' as you take a few moments to swear at the phone (etc).

And depending on what sort of cake and how hot the oven still is from the earlier charcoal, even a normal-ish cake can take less than 20 minutes so that part wasn't entirely outrageous.

Sorry, but I have gone back through the first episode and cannot find this converation where Laura refers to Anita as Mia. Could you enlighten me?

BIB - just like Stepford Wives then?

I'm impressed by the actors playing the synths but I would like to know who much of their movement and "expression" is actually CGI