MovieChat Forums > Äkta människor (2012) Discussion > Hubots don't seem that real

Hubots don't seem that real


Hi, I watched Humans first and am now getting around to seeing the original. I'm almost done with season 1, and I'm confused by all the people here preferring the Swedish version. I find the sentient hubots in the show not very human or sympathetic, especially the Anita/Mimi character.

In the U.K. version she is clearly programmed to be attentive and caring, and then when she's Mimi she is even more emotional like a real human being. But in Real Humans, she hardly ever says a single word, yet the son seems to be "in love" with her? And the lawyer mother wants them to treat her like a person, even though she doesn't act like one at all? She doesn't even act like a very good servient robot. It feels like the mother's sympathy comes out of nowhere, even later on when she is defending her so strongly to her husband when the military people are about to come to the house for her. And why do they keep switching her back to Anita so quickly? They end up learning almost nothing about her, it seems kind of cruel.

Same with the other hubots that are in hiding. Niska seems to be acting sort of independently, but most of the others just sit there, especially the black female. There is nothing about her that seems human, I'm not sure that she isn't just a regular hubot even though she's supposed to be one of "David's children"? And how can sentient beings stand to sit around for so long doing nothing, not even talking? If they have independent thoughts and feelings, boredom would be one of them.

Then there's the Bea character. She seems most human, until she falls in love with the factory worker and starts acting extremely irrational, professing her love to him even though the show hasn't done anything to show us they have a real intimate connection. In Humans it made more sense that her love grew out of the friendship she built with her partner at work (and they actually looked like a real couple), but here they hardly know each other. I think I'm also disappointed to not see what they did with the character in Humans. The extreme self-hatred she felt knowing that she wasn't human, to the point where she wanted to kill herself, made her so human...

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Well thought out observations. Congratulations. I saw the Swedish version first but think the British version was far superior. This is unusual, as I usually prefer the original Swedish versions of their shows.

The Swedish hubots seemed particularly strange to me as a good many of them were physically unattractive. I can't imagine anybody who had the skill and resources to build an android would choose to build an overweight, ugly one.

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