Thursday, April 23, 2015

17 to 01: What Are Little Girls Made of?


Wow, this episode, so theme. Much relevance. Many social message.

Lots of firsts, in this episode.

TW: More discussion of misogyny

3 comments:

SkilTao said...

The cave set is just that one cavern with those two walls reused RELENTLESSLY. "The captain is radioing to tell me my partner just died! I should turn my back on the cave, clearly this window is more menacing."

I notice that the "blank" robots are sized to fit through the doorways, and a robot built to exterminate a people might be built larger than those people.

I guess Kirk can't dodge out the door because that'd mean abandoning Christine.

Ruk is the best at everything except knowing what phasers do.

Pants seam is split to fit over the boot. Happens in real life, where it also looks silly.

Hard to tell if it's subtlety or the actress just can't stand still, but the ingenue twitches a bit during Christine & Corbie's first embrace (which is exactly as awkward as Andrea's and Kirk's later) and she emotes a bit when she questions Christine later. I think she right from the beginning understands and dislikes that she's second fiddle (which makes me wonder if she skipped the black undershirt that day on her own initiative). I like how the ep points up how both women are getting wronged by Corbie.

Replication scene: rib cages are weird, man.

Dinner scene: ...where did that food even come from? Oh hey, I forgot that robot Kirk questions Corbie's sanity too! You're right about this scene being cut well -- I didn't realize the split screen was synched so perfectly because there's only one reaction per cut.

Corbie mentions artificial organs, I think, so the androids' necks may be genuine points of weakness.

Programming:
-Andrea tried to slap Kirk because that's what she was told to do last time, and nobody told her that it *isn't* part of the "Kiss Kirk" macro
-She's being obliging to Kirk because she has been obliging their guests from the beginning and nobody told her to stop
-Ruk rates the relevance of data by its recentness, and Kirk talking about ancient stuff changes the "file last modified" date
-I don't think Kirk had any plan for his conversations with Andrea and Ruk other than to test the limits of their programming
-I think Andrea's interaction with the Kirk bot was a failed reverse-Turing Test, like she expected only humans to exhibit non-compliance
-I don't think Andrea's reasoning had reached the "suicide pact" stage yet

VanVelding said...

I guess it makes sense that Ruk would be bigger than normal, even if that shouldn't matter to robots.

I hadn't thought about it from the perspective of Korby screwing over both women, but he totally does. Man, fuck that guy.

The reverse-Turing Test makes a lot of sense. I like that, along with most of your programming suggestions.

SkilTao said...

Thanks--spending a week on network and driver issues really highlighted how tortuous it can be to make a computer understand what you want.