I think it's blurred only in so far as Leo is not a normal human, he has some synth capabilities. But he is human in all other ways, and if you were dividing it purely into 'human' and 'synth' he would be firmly in the human category. Smint what makes him human is that he was born a normal boy, was completely human and living a normal life. Then something happened (probably drowning) and he died, or rather he would have died but his father used synth technology somehow to save his life. In that way it is akin to someone being given an artificial leg or having a shunt implanted in their heart or something, it doesn't stop him being human it just means he can do some things that ordinary humans couldn't do (like running the program in his head). He doesn't need to charge like the synths he needs to eat and drink and sleep and he is aging. The synths on the other hand will have been built out of mechanical parts, it's just that Elster found a way to programme conciousness into them.

Interesting that Hobb said Elster would not have been happy with just 4 concious synths. We already know about police woman but how many more could there be? And would Leo actually need all of them to make the code work or would the group of 4 do? And do we think that Fred was actually destroyed? I'm not sure I do, or at least I think Hobb would have taken the code out of him first.

Don't know if you've seen Resurrection, but that WAP rally reminded me of the True Living group who had much the same attitude towards the Returned.

I'm enjoying Humans very much, so well acted and just creepy enough for my tastes.

True, but it does make think about the definition of "human" and whether humanity can ever be artificially created. For me, Niska is the most frightening as she's the sum of her life experiences and is, quite frankly, a nutter (although am secretly hoping for a run in between her and Vera)

As for Hobb, not sure whether he's saved Fred for good or evil reasons . . . jury's still out for me

Me neither. It's surprsingly good. I think it's down to the quality of the acting and production values.

I wouldn't stay with Niska in any house where there's knives or scissors, she scares the living daylights out of me!

OK, Leo's human

Do we know for sure how the other synths are formed? Are they dead humans who are converted to synths, cloned humans, or created completely from scratch? I mean, would you design Vera? (No offence to Rebecca Front!)


I don't think Fred was destroyed - I don't think Hobb would want the technology destroyed - I just don't know what he's going to do with Fred now he's saved him

How did Odi get moved?

How much is cop synth able to do with her synth brain? Is she just doing things like making phone calls to find out things just to cover as a human? Presumably she can look things up in her brain same as we've seen Max doing?

Probably still following George's instruction to hide.

When the guy who found him went off to meet Pete and bring him to the spot Odi forced himself to get up and walk away.

Yes, from what we heard tonight, it sounds like Elster worked to fix Leo once he was released from hospital brain dead, but it also appears that Mia was already conscious before the accident.

I think the best way to think about Leo's modifications is to treat them as a pacemaker type implant - it was suggested that he can die naturally in the future, which suggests the modifications were to keep his consciousness alive in a human body using some synth tech.

Glad we convinced you.

Not for sure, no. We were discussing how the advanced/concious synths may have been created earlier in the thread, one theory was definitely that they might have some element of dead humans in them. From what Niska said to George in this episode though it sounded more to me like it's just a lot of extra code.
For all the regular synths I think that they are supposed to be created from scratch.

I definitely felt like he wouldn't destroy Fred completely, but he did apologise to him before he started, and there was at least one other person in the room so he would have had to get them on board.


I assumed Odi moved himself somehow.

Not sure about cop synth's abilities, but it would make sense for her to use a phone (especially at work) because anybody could walk in on her mid-conversation. I thought it was probably some synth hacking/scanning overnight that meant she knew about the fight in the smash club though.

So Leo has died before and will die again.
We also have the mysterious 'Tom' storyline. Could Leo have been Tom in a previous life leading to the storylines converging?

No.

Leo has always been Leo.

Someone earlier in the thread suggested that Tom might have been a friend of Leo and he died for real in the accident but I doubt it.


Not sure exactly where they are going with the Tom storyline but I don't think it will link Laura to the Elsters.

But Anita hasnt always been Anita...

The interesting thing about this programme, it's so difficult not to project our human emotions and feelings onto the synths, even the non conscious ones, even as a viewer. When people are being rude to them etc, I find it difficult to switch off the 'he/she must feel hurt' response. It reminds me of being a child, where inanimate cuddly toys definitely had feelings, as far as I can remember.

Really enjoying the series.

Guilty! Because scientists in fiction have something of a tendency to take decisions that others might consider to have a degree of ethical ambiguity about them, and that would certainly quality as a major industry dirty secret but it looks like that's not it.


And I'm happy to be wrong because otherwise we would have hordes of robots rampaging around, looking to 'use the most efficient method of integrating fresh neural tissue'
On the other hand I suspect the magic code has some as yet unspotted downsides in addition to the danger for the inferior fleshy bags of mostly water.

I wonder if Odi is now someone's new item of stock for a smash club.
And I don't think Fred was destroyed, I suspect the apology was for melting the outside and leaving the internals intact (the brain bits at least).
Now that we know this is Professor Hobbs from the original dev team I understand his drive to get a close look at these rare specimens which if I understood correctly were created without him being involved.


I think that would be a bit too much of a stretch - so I'm wondering if the link is the theme of buried memories and whether one can choose not to remember. From the reaction it does seem likely that it involves a death (and possibly even the blame for it). Plus the 'experience shaping a person' bit.

I would send my synth back if it ironed tins of tuna.

I did say earlier in this thread I thought Leo is a hybrid part synth part human.

He drown and they did say last night he was brain dead and his father took him home to die. Nothing was ever heard again. So did he actually die or not? It would seem not as he grew up.

So therefore he could age normally but have synth tech Incorporated into him. I am assuming brain as he was brain dead.

Now here is something I am confused about? If Mia/Anita is only fourteen what age was Leo when he drown? He looks late 20s(perhaps I am being harsh), therefore when he drown he would have been a teenager not a boy.

This would turn out to be very expensive as they will play back your instructions to the army of lawyers and analysts who would then conclusively prove that this was exactly the set of actions you had requested and the only reason your subsequent profane expression of surprise was not taken as an instruction was because the robots has been pre-programmed to block instructions relating to anatomical procedures if they involve the word 'sideways'.

You should have paid for the extra alcohol warning nag function! And the 'not doing obviously wrong things' module, a bargain at £££ per month...

Yes, I thought it was quite a good working theory, definitely the sort of thing sci-fi mad/genius scientists would do

I do wonder why Elster decided to hide only part of the magic formula to give any synth consciousness in each of his conscious synths. We can assume that he wanted it to be found and used (otherwise why hide it in them at all), so why not give each of them all of it and make it easier for them to spread it around?


It might well be too much of a stretch, just suddenly occurred to me as an idea. But really there is no reason the Tom story needs to be linked into the Elster story at all. The family are already connected because of Anita/Mia.


No, what they said was that his father took him home into private care (after he was pronounced brain dead) and two weeks later reported him as dead, had a funeral etc. But clearly he did not die because his father saved him by making him part synth. But of course he could not tell the world that, or even have him miraculously recover because then doctors would have wanted to run tests on him, so instead he faked the death and kept Leo hidden.


Not harsh, the actor is in his late 20s They didn't actually say Mia/Anita is 14, I'm pretty sure that what was said by the lady checking her out was that she was "at least" 14 (though someone may now watch last week's episode back and prove me wrong), so she could be much older.

I was wondering whether Tom and Laura were brother and sister - and she was responsible for something happening to him/his death

Still can't get my head around the Leo/Mia relationship.

If Leo was a child when he died, did he know Mia then or meet her later? Did she exist as a person before she became a synth or was she built as one of the cognicent synths and that's how Leo knew her? Did he love her? Did/could she love him back, or was it all just simulated?

Re Mia and Leo..they clearly had a loving relationship, as implied in the first episode before the conscious synths were kidnapped. They must've just met because Leo's dad created them, or at least that's what I gathered. I hope they do manage to recover Mia.

I think Mia will return when they need her the most.

Why have no other synths realised that the cop synth is a synth? I thought they were aware of each other. Surely one of them would have raised the fact that she is a synth?

Good point - given she doesn't hide her signal by wandering around covered in tinfoil, perhaps she does 'share' but with either only a single message, the robot equivalent of "don't tell him, Pike" or "pretend I'm not here" or even "He is coming, Call-Me-Kenneth will save us all"...

Or she's a different and more recent design that has inbuilt shielding so nobody can detect she's a machine, and presumably also some fancy fake-heartbeat thing?
Part-woman, part-machine, a hyper-alloy combat chassis, microprocessor-controlled ... but outside, it's living human tissue: flesh, skin, hair, blood ... that might be a garbled quote from somewhere

Why did Vera not spill the beans about Niska? She had run the checks which proved that Niska was not human - did she just accept what she was told about Niska not being a synth, on the basis of believing what her primary user told her?