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Dec. 10th, 2011 11:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedantherAs the only surviving episode of the SF anthology series Out of This World, "Little Lost Robot" is an important piece of television history. Sadly, as an episode in itself, and particularly as an adaptation of the Isaac Asimov story, I can't say it's much good.
For a story that depends on them, the robots are a great disappointment. They're very obviously men in suits: big, clunky suits that make one wonder what use such a lumbering machine would be. They never travel above a stiff-legged shuffle, even when they're supposedly racing to the assistance of a man in mortal peril. (Feigned, fortunately for him; I find it hard to believe they'd have reached him in time.) The whole plot depends on the idea that the robots are identical and indistinguishable in appearance and action, but in group scenes no effort is made to have them move in unison.
The author of this adaptation, apparently feeling that the original story was insufficiently dramatic, has added a subplot in which the human characters worry that the "lost" robot, with its non-standard programming, might become a danger, might even be the seed of a robot rebellion. This despite the existence of Asimov's famous First Law of Robotics; at the beginning of the episode, a concern about the alteration of the robot's programming is met with a reassurance that the First Law still renders it incapable of causing harm to a human being. There's never any further discussion of how the First Law might have been weakened or overruled; by the end of the episode, the characters seem simply to have forgotten that there's any such thing as the First Law. So does the scriptwriter.
Another aspect in which this adaptation seems to feel the original story was lacking is in the matter of romantic action. For Susan Calvin, a woman whose main character trait is that she gets on better with robots than with other human beings (and that other human beings get on better with robots than with her). Annoying, but by the time it becomes obtrusive it's hardly the worst of the episode's problems.
Not recommended.
I do, however, recommend the Youtube channel I found "Little Lost Robot" on. (Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lost_spook, who found it first.) It's stuffed with classic British TV SF, not all of which can be as disappointing as this. (Two... no, three words: Nigel. Kneale. Eeeee!)
For a story that depends on them, the robots are a great disappointment. They're very obviously men in suits: big, clunky suits that make one wonder what use such a lumbering machine would be. They never travel above a stiff-legged shuffle, even when they're supposedly racing to the assistance of a man in mortal peril. (Feigned, fortunately for him; I find it hard to believe they'd have reached him in time.) The whole plot depends on the idea that the robots are identical and indistinguishable in appearance and action, but in group scenes no effort is made to have them move in unison.
The author of this adaptation, apparently feeling that the original story was insufficiently dramatic, has added a subplot in which the human characters worry that the "lost" robot, with its non-standard programming, might become a danger, might even be the seed of a robot rebellion. This despite the existence of Asimov's famous First Law of Robotics; at the beginning of the episode, a concern about the alteration of the robot's programming is met with a reassurance that the First Law still renders it incapable of causing harm to a human being. There's never any further discussion of how the First Law might have been weakened or overruled; by the end of the episode, the characters seem simply to have forgotten that there's any such thing as the First Law. So does the scriptwriter.
Another aspect in which this adaptation seems to feel the original story was lacking is in the matter of romantic action. For Susan Calvin, a woman whose main character trait is that she gets on better with robots than with other human beings (and that other human beings get on better with robots than with her). Annoying, but by the time it becomes obtrusive it's hardly the worst of the episode's problems.
Not recommended.
I do, however, recommend the Youtube channel I found "Little Lost Robot" on. (Thanks to
lost_spook, who found it first.) It's stuffed with classic British TV SF, not all of which can be as disappointing as this. (Two... no, three words: Nigel. Kneale. Eeeee!)
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Date: 2011-12-10 05:17 pm (UTC)Still, I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I'd rather be able to satisfy my curiosity and see if things were good/rubbish/whatever than just wonder. There are few things that don't have something worth looking at in them. (Although there are some candidates...) And I have this thing about old sf and showing previous decade's paranoias, and which bits are baffling now, and which bits are still worth thinking about.
Level 7, as I said, was... well, beat me over the head with a cricket bat with the anti-Cold War stuff but, hey, you can't say 'Destroying the world with nuclear weapons is a bad thing' often enough, really. And they had so much trouble condensing the book, even with an extra ten minutes, you need to keep an eye out for how much time is passing. (I don't know whether I imagined it, but I think someone right at the end referred to what happened 5 minutes previously as being 'years ago'. But I was a bit tired.) And some rather 1960s things, generally. But even painted in with fairly broad strokes (and it is), there's some nice psychological horror/sf going on, and some cool visuals (I loved the air supply/plant room) and the way everybody has something that causes them to crack and show their humanity. David Collings is just the most human person who sees the stupidity and the horror of it first. Ha. Also, nobody was evil.
But I was a bit tired and I might just have liked it because of the David Collings stuff (especially when his hand didn't want to be there any more). But I don't think so.
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Date: 2011-12-10 05:42 pm (UTC)Remind me; which one is Little Lost Robot? Isn't that the one when the climax of the story is when one of them doesn't move identically with the others?
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Date: 2011-12-11 02:42 am (UTC)The scene where they finally get it, because it moves and none of the others do, works okay. But all the earlier scenes where they all move together, and the humans are going "I can't tell them apart", fall flat, because they're blatantly all making slightly different motions, starting and finishing at different times. (I guess standing still in unison is easier to choreograph than moving in unison, but still...)
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Date: 2011-12-11 02:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-11 09:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-11 11:10 am (UTC)