Finale Interruptus: Case File #011 - Almost Human

A Cop and His Robot

In 2048, being a cop has become such a dangerous job that being human is no longer enough.

Technology has advanced faster than society's ability to control it. Criminal organizations have access to weapons and equipment that law enforcement can barely keep pace with, crime has increased by 400 percent, and every Los Angeles police officer is required to have an android partner.

For Detective John Kennex, that's a problem.

Kennex, played by Karl Urban, has good reason to distrust machines. Seventeen months before the main story begins, his squad was ambushed during a raid against a powerful criminal organization known as InSyndicate. When Kennex tried to save one of his wounded men, the MX android assigned to him calculated that the officer's chances of survival were too low to justify the risk. It abandoned the man.

Kennex tried anyway.

The resulting explosion killed his partner, cost Kennex his leg, and put him into a coma. Worse, fragments of his memory surrounding the attack are missing. By the time he returns to duty, he's walking on a synthetic leg, undergoing illegal treatments to recover those memories, and carrying considerably more emotional baggage than the LAPD-issued android he's expected to work beside.

His reunion with the department's standard MX model does not go well.

Kennex eventually solves that particular personnel problem by shoving the android out of a moving car.

Captain Sandra Maldonado (Lili Taylor), who knows Kennex well enough to recognize both his value and his volatility, comes up with an alternative. Buried among the department's obsolete equipment is an earlier generation of android: the DRN.

The DRNs had been designed to work with humans rather than merely alongside them. They were given something approaching emotion, intuition and empathy. Unfortunately, those qualities also made them unpredictable. The entire line was eventually decommissioned in favor of the colder, more reliable MX models.

One of those discarded DRNs is Dorian, played by Michael Ealy.

And with that, Almost Human finds its heart.

Created by J.H. Wyman, fresh from Fringe, and executive produced by Wyman, J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burk, Almost Human premiered on Fox on November 17, 2013. On its surface, it was a futuristic police procedural: give a familiar cop-show story some androids, holograms, genetic engineering and other technological complications and see what happens.

But the relationship between Kennex and Dorian immediately gave the series something more interesting to explore.

Kennex is the human being who has lost part of his humanity. Dorian is the machine who appears to possess more humanity than the machines that replaced him.

Dorian jokes. He gets offended. He's curious. He worries. He wants to be useful, but he also wants to be valued. Where an MX calculates the statistically correct response to a situation, Dorian sometimes makes the irrational choice because it is the compassionate one.

Kennex, meanwhile, is irritable, isolated and perfectly willing to antagonize almost anyone around him. His artificial leg is a constant physical reminder that technology is literally part of him whether he likes it or not.

Naturally, the two become partners.

And gradually, friends.

That relationship allowed Almost Human to operate perfectly well as a case-of-the-week series. Each new crime could introduce another disturbing extrapolation of contemporary technology while Kennex and Dorian supplied the banter and character development that held everything together.

But Wyman was also leaving things lying around.

There was InSyndicate, the organization responsible for the ambush that nearly killed Kennex. There was Anna (Mekia Cox), Kennex's former girlfriend, whose role in that betrayal was far more complicated than he initially understood. There were the missing pieces of Kennex's memory.

And there was the Wall.

It was simply part of the landscape at first, another unexplained feature of this future Los Angeles. But Almost Human would eventually begin dropping tantalizing hints about what might exist on its other side.

This wasn't necessarily meant to become another Fringe, with viewers needing diagrams and conspiracy boards to follow the mythology. Wyman said as much while promoting the series. But he also acknowledged that he liked planting things that could become important later.

Karl Urban was even more explicit.

Before the series premiered, Urban was asked whether Wyman actually had an overall plan for where Almost Human was going.

“Most definitely,” he replied. “The thing is mapped out.”

“Most definitely. The thing is mapped out.” — Karl Urban on J.H. Wyman’s larger plan

There was, in other words, a larger story waiting behind the weekly investigations.

Fox gave us thirteen episodes of it.

Just not necessarily in the order Wyman made them.

Broadcast Out of Order

If there is one thing guaranteed to make veteran science-fiction fans nervous, it's the phrase “Fox aired the episodes out of order.”

Ask a Firefly fan.

Almost Human suffered the same indignity, although what happened is more complicated than the comparison suggests.

The thirteen episodes produced for the first season had production numbers that provided a straightforward sequence. After the pilot came “You Are Here,” followed by “Arrhythmia” and “The Bends.” Instead, Fox premiered the pilot and jumped directly to the fifth-produced episode, “Skin.”

Then it aired episodes six, seven and eight.

Only after that did viewers finally see episode three.

By the time the season was finished, the production sequence of 1 through 13 had been broadcast as:

1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 3, 10, 2, 9, 4, 11, 12, 13.

That looks less like a television schedule than somebody dropped the episode list on the floor and picked it back up.

1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 3, 10, 2, 9, 4, 11, 12, 13.

And for a series whose principal character arc involved two reluctant partners gradually learning to trust and care about one another, chronology wasn't entirely irrelevant.

Kennex and Dorian could appear increasingly comfortable together in one episode, only for their relationship to seemingly regress when Fox subsequently aired an installment produced much earlier. Other details could similarly appear, disappear and reappear as the broadcast order bounced around the production schedule.

It is tempting, therefore, to diagnose the patient immediately: Fox sabotaged Almost Human by doing to it what the network had notoriously done to Firefly more than a decade earlier.

The people making Almost Human, however, complicated that diagnosis.

J.H. Wyman acknowledged before the series premiered that some of the early episodes would air out of production order. His position was essentially that those installments were sufficiently self-contained that the rearrangement worked, although the series would eventually reach a point where the remaining episodes needed to be shown sequentially.

J.J. Abrams went further.

Asked about the unusual ordering while the series was still airing, Abrams defended the decision, explaining that once the producers began looking at the completed episodes, they found that changing the order actually benefited the run of the show. He did not regard Fox's rearrangement as something that damaged the series.

That doesn't mean viewers imagining continuity problems were hallucinating them. Production order still gives us clues about how the characters and their relationships were originally developed. But it does mean the familiar story of clueless network executives randomly scrambling another science-fiction series against its creators' wishes doesn't quite fit the evidence.

More importantly, it probably doesn't explain why Almost Human lasted only one season.

What the unusual broadcast order may have done was obscure something else about the series.

For much of its run, Almost Human could be watched exactly as Fox appeared to want it watched: as a futuristic police procedural. Tune in this week, watch Kennex and Dorian investigate the latest technologically enhanced murder, enjoy their increasingly entertaining odd-couple relationship, and come back next week for another case.

But scattered through those cases were pieces of another story.

The raid that destroyed Kennex's squad wasn't simply an unfortunate event in his past. InSyndicate was still out there.

The woman Kennex had loved hadn't merely left him. Anna had betrayed him.

Kennex's memories of what happened weren't complete.

And occasionally Almost Human would point toward something much larger than any of them.

Somewhere beyond the familiar streets of 2048 Los Angeles stood a Wall.

There were people on the other side of it.

And apparently, they weren't supposed to come back.

The Case That Never Closed

Before John Kennex ever met Dorian, someone tried very hard to kill him.

The opening minutes of Almost Human throw Kennex into the middle of a disastrous police operation against InSyndicate, a sophisticated criminal organization whose capabilities rival those of the authorities pursuing it. Kennex's team is overwhelmed, his fellow officers are slaughtered, and the explosion that nearly kills him leaves seventeen months missing from his life.

But the physical damage is only part of what Kennex brings back with him.

His memories of the ambush are fragmented.

That becomes important because one of the faces buried among those fragments belongs to Anna, the woman Kennex had loved.

Anna wasn't simply Kennex's girlfriend who happened to disappear around the time everything went wrong. She was working for InSyndicate.

Kennex had been sleeping with the enemy without knowing it.

That revelation gives the pilot something considerably larger than its weekly police case. Somebody had gotten close enough to Kennex to infiltrate his life, InSyndicate possessed weapons and technology capable of devastating an entire police tactical unit, and Kennex couldn't completely remember what happened.

His obsession with recovering those memories is strong enough that he resorts to an illegal procedure known as a “recollectionist,” using technology to force damaged memories back to the surface despite the danger to himself.

What he remembers is enough to establish Anna's betrayal.

It isn't enough to finish the story.

That distinction matters because Almost Human never presents InSyndicate as though the organization ceased to exist after the opening episode. The attack is the event that created the John Kennex we meet in 2048. It cost him friends, seventeen months of his life, part of his body and much of his ability to trust anyone.

It also left him with questions.

Who exactly was Anna within InSyndicate? How long had she been using Kennex? Was their relationship entirely an assignment, or had some part of it been genuine? What did InSyndicate actually want from the police operation that ended in the massacre? And what else remained inside the portions of Kennex's memory he still couldn't recover?

Those are not incidental details attached to a villain who has already been defeated. They are pieces of Kennex's origin story.

Then Almost Human largely puts them away.

That's not necessarily bad storytelling. A thirteen-episode first season doesn't have to resolve the conspiracy introduced in its pilot, particularly when its creator believes he is constructing a world capable of supporting multiple seasons. In fact, holding Anna and InSyndicate in reserve makes considerable sense if they are intended to become part of a larger mythology later.

And there is evidence that “later” was very much part of the plan.

Before Almost Human premiered, Karl Urban confirmed that J.H. Wyman had mapped out a larger trajectory for the series. Urban knew where Kennex was going, even if he deliberately avoided learning every detail Wyman had planned for the other characters.

That makes what Almost Human doesn't tell us more significant.

Had Fox ordered a second season, Anna could have returned.

Kennex could have recovered more of the missing ambush.

InSyndicate could have emerged from the background.

Or Wyman could have taken all three in a direction nobody outside the writers' room ever knew about.

What we cannot responsibly do, more than a decade later, is write that missing season for him. Fan theories can connect the dots any way they like. Unless Wyman or somebody else involved in the production eventually reveals the plan, there is a line between what Almost Human established and what we merely wish it had explained.

The established facts are tantalizing enough.

Kennex was betrayed by someone he loved.

A powerful organization massacred his team.

His memory of the event remained incomplete.

And after using those mysteries to build its protagonist, the series ended before it could return to them.

But InSyndicate wasn't the only unexplored corner of the world J.H. Wyman had created.

There was another mystery Almost Human didn't hide inside John Kennex's damaged memory.

It put this one on the horizon.

And built a Wall around it.

What's Beyond the Wall?

Every dystopia needs a boundary.

Sometimes it's there to keep something dangerous out.

Sometimes it's there to keep people in.

And sometimes a television series gets canceled before anybody bothers to tell you which one it is.

Throughout Almost Human, references are made to something called the Wall, a monitored barrier separating the Los Angeles inhabited by Kennex and Dorian from whatever exists on the other side. Like much of the show's world-building, it initially sits in the background. Nobody stops the story to give viewers a history lesson about when the Wall was constructed, why it was necessary or exactly what territory lies beyond it.

People living in 2048 already know those things.

We don't.

That's usually a good way to build a fictional world. Characters don't explain commonplace features of their own society merely because an audience 35 years in their past happens to be listening.

But eventually Almost Human starts making the Wall difficult to ignore.

The biggest clues arrive in “Unbound,” an episode involving an extraordinarily sophisticated android known as Danica.

Danica isn't an MX. She isn't a DRN. She's something considerably more dangerous, a military-grade killing machine whose capabilities exceed the technology Kennex and Dorian ordinarily encounter.

While investigating her origins, Dorian raises a possibility.

Could technology that advanced have come from the other side of the Wall?

The response from robotics expert Luther Estes is revealing. He doesn't dismiss the idea because there's nobody over there capable of building something so sophisticated.

His objection is essentially the opposite.

Anyone intelligent enough to create technology like Danica, he suggests, wouldn't remain on the other side willingly.

One word changes the entire question.

Willingly.

Willingly.

Suddenly the Wall doesn't sound quite so much like a defensive fortification protecting civilization from whatever monsters might be lurking beyond it.

It sounds like a border between two populations.

And perhaps not everyone got to choose which side they lived on.

We also learn that the Wall has its own security apparatus. When authorities believe there may have been a breach, the possibility is treated seriously enough to involve a Watch Commander. Whatever is supposed to remain beyond that boundary, crossing it isn't regarded as an ordinary immigration problem.

The series never supplies enough information to tell us why.

Was the territory beyond the Wall a lawless zone created as crime overwhelmed conventional government?

Was it where criminals and other undesirables were exiled?

Was it an impoverished district physically separated from the technologically prosperous city we normally saw?

Was the Wall protecting Los Angeles from the people outside?

Or were the people outside being kept away from everything Los Angeles possessed?

Almost Human never answers any of those questions.

And that's where we have to resist doing the show's work for it.

Fans have spent years constructing explanations for the Wall, some of them quite elaborate. It is easy to combine a few lines of dialogue with the show's themes of technological inequality, corporate power and social instability and produce a perfectly plausible Season Two storyline.

Plausible isn't the same thing as canonical.

What the series actually establishes is much smaller—and much more intriguing.

There is a Wall.

There are people beyond it.

Movement across it is controlled.

A breach is considered dangerous.

And someone capable of constructing extraordinarily advanced technology might exist on the other side, despite the suggestion that such a person would not choose to remain there.

That's it.

Unfortunately, we haven't found an interview in which J.H. Wyman subsequently opens his notebook and tells everyone what he intended the Wall to be. Nor has a lost Season Two bible conveniently appeared to explain what Kennex and Dorian would eventually have discovered.

What we do have is Wyman's own acknowledgment that he enjoyed planting elements that could pay off later, and Karl Urban's confirmation that the larger direction of the series had been mapped out.

That makes the Wall particularly frustrating.

It doesn't feel like an incidental piece of scenery that fans accidentally elevated into a mystery. Almost Human deliberately called our attention to it and then began supplying just enough information to make us ask questions.

The show simply ran out of episodes before it supplied the answers.

And here's the strangest thing about the end of Almost Human:

None of this comes crashing together in the finale.

Kennex doesn't discover a secret passage through the Wall. InSyndicate doesn't launch an invasion from the other side. Anna doesn't suddenly appear with the missing piece of his memory. Dorian doesn't uncover evidence that the entire society has been built upon some terrible secret.

The final episode is about a murder case.

And when the last scene arrives, Almost Human doesn't leave John Kennex staring across the Wall at an approaching army.

It leaves him standing beside his friend.

Straw Man

On March 3, 2014, Fox aired “Straw Man,” the thirteenth and final episode of Almost Human.

Nobody gets through the Wall.

Anna doesn't return.

InSyndicate doesn't make its move.

Instead, John Kennex and Dorian investigate a murder.

And strangely enough, that may have been the best possible way for Almost Human to unknowingly say goodbye.

The case begins with the discovery of a dead woman whose body has been stuffed with straw. The murder resembles a series of killings committed years earlier—killings for which a man named Nico Costa was convicted and remains safely behind bars.

That means either Costa somehow resumed killing from prison, somebody is copying the original Straw Man murders, or the police imprisoned the wrong man.

The old investigation has a personal connection for Kennex. His father, Edward Kennex, had been the detective who arrested Costa. But before his death, Edward had begun to suspect that Costa had been framed.

For a series that began with Kennex struggling to recover his own past, the final episode once again forces him to examine it. The new investigation ultimately proves his father right: Kennex and Dorian expose Glen Dunbar as the real Straw Man, clear Costa, and vindicate Edward Kennex.

It's a smaller mystery than InSyndicate.

But it's John Kennex's mystery.

At the same time, Dorian is facing a problem of his own.

His continued service with the police department is under review.

That has been hanging over Dorian from the moment Maldonado pulled him out of storage. He belongs to a discontinued line of androids whose greatest strength is also the reason they were discarded. DRNs were designed to possess emotional responses. They could empathize with human beings in ways the newer MX units couldn't.

They could also become unstable.

Dorian therefore spends the series proving that the qualities that make him less predictable than an MX are precisely the qualities that make him a better partner.

When his evaluation arrives, the people who have worked beside him support him.

Dorian passes.

If Almost Human had ended there, it would at least have completed one of the show's central questions. Dorian began the series as obsolete equipment retrieved from storage. Thirteen episodes later, he has earned his place.

But the show has one more scene.

Throughout the series, Kennex has struggled with the synthetic leg he received after the InSyndicate ambush. It causes him pain. It malfunctions. He complains about it. For a man already suspicious of technology, the artificial limb is an especially cruel joke: Kennex can't escape the technology he distrusts because part of his own body now depends upon it.

Dorian gives him a new one.

Not department equipment.

A gift.

Dorian has obtained a superior synthetic leg for his partner, one that should eliminate the problems Kennex has endured with the old one.

The gesture completes a transformation neither character would have admitted was happening when they first met.

Kennex began the series by throwing an android out of a moving vehicle.

He ends it accepting a gift from one.

Dorian began the series in storage, an obsolete machine that the department had decided it no longer needed.

He ends it having demonstrated something the more advanced MX units never could.

Friendship.

There are worse final scenes.

Kennex begins by throwing an android into traffic. He ends by accepting a gift from one.

In fact, if Almost Human had been designed as a thirteen-part limited series concerned solely with the relationship between Kennex and Dorian, the ending might almost have been enough.

But it wasn't.

“Straw Man” aired without the certainty that it would be the series finale. It was simply the end of the first batch of stories in a world J.H. Wyman had intended to keep exploring.

The Wall was still standing.

InSyndicate was still out there.

Anna's story remained unfinished.

Pieces of Kennex's past were still missing.

And the future that Karl Urban had said was “mapped out” remained somewhere beyond the thirteen episodes Fox had ordered.

For nearly two months after “Straw Man,” that future was still possible.

Then Fox made its decision.

Interrupted

For almost two months after “Straw Man,” Almost Human existed in television limbo.

The season had ended.

The series hadn't.

Not yet.

Fox finally made the distinction official on April 29, 2014, when the network canceled Almost Human after its thirteen-episode first season.

It would be satisfying, at least narratively, if there were one spectacular mistake responsible for killing it.

There isn't.

The series had premiered strongly. Its November 17, 2013 debut drew more than nine million viewers and a 3.1 rating among adults 18–49. But those numbers didn't last. By the time “Straw Man” aired the following March, the audience had fallen to roughly 5.6 million viewers with a 1.5 rating in the demographic.

Those aren't numbers suggesting that nobody was watching.

They also aren't the numbers an expensive futuristic science-fiction drama necessarily needs when the network has other programs competing for the same space on its schedule.

And Almost Human certainly looked expensive.

Every episode had to create 2048: android police officers, futuristic vehicles, holographic interfaces, advanced weapons and whatever technological nightmare happened to be complicating that week's homicide investigation. This wasn't a contemporary police procedural that could put two detectives in an existing building, park a few cars outside and call it a precinct.

Fox also had other dramas waiting.

By renewal season, the question wasn't simply whether Almost Human had attracted an audience. It was whether that audience, the economics of continuing the series and the network's available schedule justified ordering another season instead of betting on something new.

Fox chose something new.

It's tempting to return to the scrambled episode order and put the entire corpse at the network's feet. Fox had done this before. Firefly remains the example science-fiction fans can recite from memory: episodes shown out of their intended sequence, viewers struggling to follow character development, and cancellation arriving before the series had a chance to become what its creators intended.

But Almost Human doesn't fit that story quite as neatly.

J.H. Wyman knew early episodes were being moved around and indicated that the arrangement could work because those stories were relatively self-contained. J.J. Abrams later defended the altered order more directly, saying that the producers themselves found advantages in the sequence.

Maybe the production order would have provided a smoother progression for Kennex and Dorian.

Maybe a different schedule would have helped.

Maybe stronger promotion would have helped.

Maybe nothing would have.

Television history is filled with successful shows that survived questionable scheduling decisions and unsuccessful shows that received every opportunity anyone could reasonably give them. More than a decade later, there is no responsible way to construct the alternate timeline in which Fox makes one different decision and Almost Human runs for five seasons.

What we do know is that the people making the show weren't treating those thirteen episodes as the entirety of the story.

Before the premiere, Karl Urban was asked whether J.H. Wyman had an overall plan.

“Most definitely,” Urban said. “The thing is mapped out.”

That may be the most tantalizing surviving clue of all.

Because whatever was on that map, most of us never saw it.

Perhaps Anna would have returned and forced Kennex to confront how much of their relationship had been real.

Perhaps InSyndicate would have emerged as the larger adversary the pilot appeared to promise.

Perhaps Kennex would have recovered the remaining pieces of his memory.

Perhaps Dorian's unusual humanity would have become increasingly important in a world replacing machines like him with efficient, obedient MX units.

And perhaps, eventually, somebody would have taken us beyond the Wall.

Those are possibilities, not answers.

That's an important distinction.

A canceled television series inevitably creates a vacuum, and fandom is very good at filling one. Plot threads become theories. Theories get repeated. Repetition turns them into “facts,” and before long the Internet can confidently explain a second season that nobody ever actually produced.

We aren't going to do that to Almost Human.

J.H. Wyman may have known what was beyond the Wall. There may once have been outlines, writers' room discussions or longer-term plans spelling out exactly where Kennex and Dorian were headed. Unless those plans emerge or someone who was there chooses to explain them, they belong to a version of Almost Human that exists only as an unfinished possibility.

What remains on screen is thirteen episodes about a damaged man who doesn't trust machines and a machine whose greatest strength is his humanity.

At least that story gets an ending.

John Kennex begins Almost Human rejecting the android assigned to him so violently that he throws it into traffic. He ends it standing beside an android he trusts enough to call his partner, accepting a new leg that Dorian has given him simply because Dorian knows his friend needs it.

The case is closed.

The friendship isn't.

Neither is the world around them.

InSyndicate remains somewhere in it. Anna remains somewhere in it. Pieces of Kennex's memory remain somewhere in it.

And on the edge of that world stands a Wall, guarding the answer to a question the series had only begun to ask.

Somewhere, there was an answer to what waited beyond the Wall.

We just never got to cross it.