What do I know about this series going into it?
Never heard of it.
Recap
We open on the living room of a untidy house. A man slides into view a la Tom Cruise in Risky Business. A second copies him. As they turn around, I discover they’re Daniel Radcliffe (who’s having trouble maintaining an American accent), and Steve Buscemi. They celebrate being bachelors – but after a few moments Radcliffe decides he’s not that thrilled with being a bachelor and goes home to wait for his wife “Freya” to come back.
At Radcliffe’s house, Freya enters wearing stereotypical post-apocalyptic gear, along with their unnamed friend. She and Radcliffe (“Sid”) agree to have a baby.
During their conversation, there’s a mechanical roar from outside. An army is marching through the desert, led by an old-style box-shaped television on a rolling base. The woman on the TV screen keeps ordering its minion to move rocks out of the way because the base isn’t all-terrain. They’re headed toward Boomtown and plan to kill all the humans.
“Oh my god,” says Radcliffe. “John Christ was right.”
The television, NeuralNet, delivers a threat: if they don’t deliver John Christ, Boomtown will burn to the ground.
Steve Buscemi, who’s wearing a sort of mayor hat and whose name is Mr. Rubinstein, is all in favor. But Radcliffe gives a rousing speech about how we can’t not care what happens to other people because that’s how we ended up in the apocalypse in the first place.
Christ – sorry, John Christ, as the show insists on calling him every time – is for some reason in the local jail; Radcliffe goes and releases him. John Christ plans to broadcast some kind of satellite signal that will shut down NeuralNet.
The humanoid robots break into the city and the firefight begins. Radcliffe’s - I should start calling him Sid - Sid’s friend “Scraps” tells him to “go feral” to help defeat the robots. Sid doesn’t want to for fear of what the neighbors will think, but Scraps convinces him, in response to which Sid tears off his clothes and goes mad.
The humans start off handily defeating the robots, because NeuralNet never programmed them to duck.
The head minion, “Tai”, had said earlier while marching through the desert that he wants to get Freya back; now that he’s in the city he has his chance to confront her. She recognizes him and drops her guard, and he punches her through a wall.
While the battle rages, Rubinstein covertly approaches NeuralNet to cut a deal for his own safety. “I can be a repairman, or you can torture me in a maze, or we can do sex stuff,” he offers. She counter-offers: I’ll let you live if you stop talking.
Back to Tai, who is complaining about Freya as if they’re best girlfriends and roommates who had a falling out: you’re a bad friend, you don’t like my food, you didn’t mention my new haircut, etc. Standard complaints but given an I-am-a-robot twist. Freya is apologetic, and he tries to shoot her, but Linda from the HOA jumps in the way. Her dying wish: “Protect… the… HOA…”
Freya is furious. She throws shade at Tai for being a bad friend himself, and he explodes into two halves twitching on the ground.
Meanwhile, offscreen, the battle has gone badly. A lot of humans are being shot. John Christ is still distracted working on the programming of the satellite. Sid started tearing robots apart with his bare hands but then gets distracted by just humping them. So Freya grabs Sid and forces him to retreat to the junkyard, where Mr. Rubinstein has changed back to the side of the humans for no apparent reason.
John Christ finishes programming the Neural Net destroying signal, but grandstands instead of pressing the activation button. NeuralNet takes advantage of the opportunity to throw a rope around his legs (how?) and then roll over his skull, crushing it. I guess it’s less lumpy than a rock?
With no way left to destroy NeuralNet, the humans are trapped in the junkyard awaiting their doom. But rescue comes in the form of the top half of Tai, who has switched sides to join the humans. He climbs up to the satellite dish and realigns it, while Sid and Freya volunteer to go out into the firefight and press the button. Freya does so, a beam comes out of the satellite, it hits the television, which rumbles, shakes, and… simply shuts off.
Tai and Freya reconcile, him for trying to murder her and she for telling him hard truths he needed to hear. One year later, Freya has become the head of the HOA, and she and Sid have a baby girl.
Unresolved questions
Why and how did Morris die?
How did the robots gain the upper hand in the middle of the fight?
How will humanity recover from the apocalypse?
Have any humans survived outside of Boomtown, or is it the only settlement left on the planet?
She wants to kill all humans. This is where the humans are. What exactly were you expecting? Why were Sid and Freya separated at the beginning of the episode, and how did they make up?
Ratings
Story: 3/10. Minimal story necessary to service the jokes. A few plot holes but they were mostly deliberate in the service of comedy.
Writing: 5/10. The best parts of the script were the ones involving community satire transplanted into a post-apocalyptic wasteland with a robot war. The rest of it was disappointing. The show has a propensity towards explaining (and sometimes reexplaining) jokes. In particular nothing that NeuralNet said or did was funny - which is a shame, because I discovered only afterward that she’s played by the great Lolly Adefope. She had been made completely unrecognizable and deserves far better material.
Production: 6/10. It’s hard to judge the production values of a series that is of deliberately substandard quality. The cliched costumes and bad special effects were part of the point – especially because the special effects that were not meant to be bad were genuinely pretty good. There were a few bad line readings also.
In particular I was mystified by Daniel Radcliffe’s accent. I know he can do an American accent – he did in “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” – but in this case I couldn’t tell if he was trying to do one and failing, or not trying to do one but accidentally slipping into it thanks to being surrounded by Americans, or if it was a deliberate joke that went over my head.
Characterization: 3/10. Nobody had any depth to them. I don’t understand why Rubinstein turned coat a second time; there was no comedic justification and only the flimsiest of character justifications.
Clarity: 7/10. It’s important to hew as closely as possible to genre conventions when you satirize it, and the show did this quite well. This had the side effect of making the situation extremely easy to grasp.
A few important things remained a mystery to me at the end, like where the robots came from, who John Christ is and why he starts the episode in prison, and how humanity ended up in its current state. But none of them impacted my understanding of what was going on.
Closure: 9/10. Really this deserves a 10, but there were so few plot threads that needed closure I am loath to give it any higher.
Do I want to watch the series now?
Ehhhh… not really. I would be surprised if the rest of the series did any more with the premise than this episode did. The setting provided enough depth for a 20-minute satire and not much more.