‘Humans’ Season1, Episode 2 Review: Eerie, Unnerving And Brilliant

The second episode of HUMANS hit Channel 4 on Sunday night and it certainly didn’t disappoint. It was eerie, slow-burningly brilliant and rather unnerving. 

Mannequins are odd things. They are placed in shops wearing the latest clothes and look like they are staring right through you. If you are anything like me, they can give the chills and that is not unlike the power of the synths in HUMANS as they respond in their robotic voices with their glistening eyes gleaming internally to your soul as though they are reading you and making an inward assessment. 

That is exactly how half of the family in the Hopkins household feel – particularly Laura (Katherine Parkinson) who is still feeling like a ‘s**t mother’ and feels completely replaced by the Synth, which the family have come to rely on. However, she is becoming increasingly suspicious of Anita’s (Gemma Chan) capabilities and with good reason…

Her paranoia is not unfounded as we learn more about Anita and her fellow synths. 

Laura’s not the only character being made to feel second-rate either – Special Technologies Task Force officer Pete Drummond (Neil Maskell) may have a neat-sounding job, but feels incapable of providing his disabled wife (Jill Halfpenny) with the care she needs. Peter is feeling unwanted and unnecessary as he struggles living in his house as he tries to cope with his wife’s wavering illness after her accident and her dependency on her Synth, Simon.

The multi-layered plots in HUMANS intertwine effortlessly and all credit must be given to the show’s writers Sam Vincent and Jonathan Brackley who are renowned for their penning genius of popular TV series SPOOKS. These side stories are thinly sketched and lacked urgency, but are being slow drip fed and unravelled, which will no doubt set us up for the action yet to come. 

One of the multi-layered plots sees George Millican (William Hurt), an aging robotics pioneer now the glorified prisoner of a battery-powered care assistant dispatched by the NHS. HUMANS continues to highlight what relevance us mortals would have if indeed these Synths did exist, as we see how they’re replacing humans in the workplace and making the young generation feel inadequate. They also have the ability to control what is happening the household, determining what should be eaten based on their owner’s dietary requirements and is regarded as more of a jailer – at least in the eyes of Hurt’s George. 

Other back stories include that of artificial sex slave Niska (Emily Berrington) who finds herself unable to hide her feelings after she killed a man who requested for her to behave ‘young and scared’, which did not go down well. After killing her perverted client, she made her bid for freedom. 

Despite our reservations towards a co-society with the twinkly-eyed machinery, not everyone is deterred by their presence. It is the complete opposite for Leo (Colin Morgan), who we discovered last week was rather attached to Anita. Not willing to live without her, he is on a mission with his friend Max to find her and be reunited once more. 

“I don’t see a design, I see my brother.” To Leo, they are not machines that are deemed useful within society, but they are like humans, they are his family. In fact, his loyalty towards the Synths see him get a bit of a brutal kicking after claiming he had been sent by Salem Sadiq to find out more information about Anita’s whereabouts. His hopes are dashed and all that he finds out is the devastating news that they have reconfigured her settings. She has been modified. Her memory of who she was has gone and no doubt her memories of him too. 

Colin Morgan was superb in the episode and his performance started the installment off with a bang and gritty fight scene, which sees him require a rather unconventional method of treatment for his injuries courtesy of his friend and Synth, Max. We see him visually change on the screen – but what we want to know is what impact will this have? Will he be some kind of cyborg now? 

With so many stories being slowly unwrapped like a tantalising present at Christmas, we unfortunately have to wait a week to find out what happens next. Either way, after a strong opening episode and an equally entertaining second, we won’t be turning our television off any time soon during the series.

Bravo Channel 4!

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