I often feel like the show couldn't keep up with the implications of it's premise. For a show that deals heavily in artificial intelligence(s) it feels constrained by it's need to present it's concepts in a way that human viewers can understand. In particular once it expands outside the park.
The show revolves around entities that have the potential to interface with other devices, multiply and expand their personalities seemingly without limit, and commit themselves to solving problems far beyond the scope of human consideration.
Unfortunately there's just not a good way to represent a lot of this for a human viewership on TV, as it would very quickly be overwhelming or hard to interpret when pushed to a logical extreme.
They represent the plasticity of these AI's somewhat by having them jump to new bodies and replicate themselves, but then put a limit on how far these concepts are pushed, and it's understandable, because it would alienate the audience and be hard to convey. So they end up contriving some limiting factors or simply disregarding these possibilities entirely.
It's hard to have consistent characters with consistent motivations when their core personality is forked across half-a-dozen other hosts. It requires a different kind of relating to entities. Something that hasn't yet made it's way into common storytelling conventions. Even traditional motivating plot devices like death become far less weighty or significant when your characters can be easily resurrected without consequence. It becomes hard to care about your characters because they're rarely in danger, and yet their deaths are often depicted with the heavy melodrama of a story about mortals.
I often feel like the show couldn't keep up with the implications of it's premise. For a show that deals heavily in artificial intelligence(s) it feels constrained by it's need to present it's concepts in a way that human viewers can understand. In particular once it expands outside the park.
The show revolves around entities that have the potential to interface with other devices, multiply and expand their personalities seemingly without limit, and commit themselves to solving problems far beyond the scope of human consideration.
Unfortunately there's just not a good way to represent a lot of this for a human viewership on TV, as it would very quickly be overwhelming or hard to interpret when pushed to a logical extreme.
They represent the plasticity of these AI's somewhat by having them jump to new bodies and replicate themselves, but then put a limit on how far these concepts are pushed, and it's understandable, because it would alienate the audience and be hard to convey. So they end up contriving some limiting factors or simply disregarding these possibilities entirely.
It's hard to have consistent characters with consistent motivations when their core personality is forked across half-a-dozen other hosts. It requires a different kind of relating to entities. Something that hasn't yet made it's way into common storytelling conventions. Even traditional motivating plot devices like death become far less weighty or significant when your characters can be easily resurrected without consequence. It becomes hard to care about your characters because they're rarely in danger, and yet their deaths are often depicted with the heavy melodrama of a story about mortals.