Your Forma

Episode 10

As disappointed as I am to say it, I'm not entirely surprised that we're back to bland standard Your Forma after last week's uncharacteristically compelling episode. The moment supposed protagonist Echika Hieda appears, any sense of engagement in this show dissipates for me. It's such a shame, because she has an interesting character design, and they way she poses suggests some kind of underlying personality, but in terms of story function, she achieves essentially nothing. She's kind of just there to pretend not to be into Harold, and to react to whatever other characters say. So far she's almost totally failed to advance the narrative by any of her own actions, and you could probably remove her from every scene in this episode and nothing much would change.

At least Harold's story remains fairly intriguing, as we follow up on last week's traumatic flashback with his visit (along with owner Darya) to deceased Detective Sozon's family home. It seems like two and a half years have passed since The Nightmare of St. Petersburg and Sozon's horrific death. While Sozon's brother welcomes Harold, his mother Elena's reaction to his presence in her household is starkly different, to the point of abusive. In a way, her negativity towards the “thing” that failed to protect her beloved son is understandable. She refuses to perceive Harold as a sentient being, nor can she rationalize that, as an Amicus with (supposed) hardwired limitations, he was unable to cause harm to the perpetrator to protect Sozon. Perhaps Harold turning up to the house wearing Sozon's clothes didn't help either?

The background plot barely inches forwards, with Echika and Harold's investigation into the “Tosti” AI programs and their (probably fake) creator Alan Jack Lascelles, now led by Inspector Fokine, the guy who sucks lollipops constantly. Bigga has now been offered a substantive post as police consultant, and a brief cutaway focused on the port on her neck. I assume this means she now has a Your Forma of her own, when I think before, she probably didn't. As usual, the show thinks little of leaving out great chunks of backstory without modifying later events to accommodate.

Bigga seems to have developed a huge crush on Harold, gifting him a new scarf. When he doesn't wear it the next day, she's worried she offended him, or that he didn't like it. I wonder if the scarf he wears instead perhaps belonged to Sozon, and that's why he prefers that one? He may also not want to lead Bigga on. A scarf is a fairly intimate gift after all, and we know Harold only has (robotic) eyes for Echika.

What gives Bigga hope is the intriguing concept of a human-Amicus marriage, a seemingly rare occurrence in this society. We meet a female CEO who ordered a bespoke male Amicus droid from a specialist company, and she was able to specify the precise parameters for her “life partner.” While Echika and Harold's reactions to this couple are more muted, Bigga's eyes sparkle and her cheeks flush. I guess she's what Futurama's lovably blunt droid Bender might describe as a “raging robosexual”. This could be material ripe for juicy exploration, considering all of the potential social, legal, and ethical implications of human-Amicus marriages, but disappointingly, Your Forma seems disinterested in exploring the subject, at least this week. I guess we've kind of been cheering on Harold and Echika's tentative relationship for ages now, but we know he's not like other Amicus droids, in that he seems to be more sentient, more human-like. Other Amicus are more limited, more… robotic. Maybe that's how the CEO lady likes them? Probably less trouble than real men…

Your Forma descends into Black Mirror territory with this episode's other main plot, which involves the digitization of dead humans' minds. I assume this involves the memories recorded in their own personal Your Forma? The idea of a digital version of my mind persisting after my death, vulnerable to exploitation, uncontrolled copying, alteration, and abuse by soulless megacorporations is the stuff of pure nightmare fuel to me. I know people often laud the Black Mirror episode "San Junipero" as a rare positive installment of that show, but its vision of a digital afterlife hosted on Amazon (or whatever company's) cloud servers gives me the heebie-jeebies.

For now, Your Forma treats this technology as a matter of course. Obviously, it's disturbing when the police receive a phone call from the voice of Sozon, who died two and a half years previously, but there isn't much exploration of what dead people digitization might mean for society. Perhaps I'm being too harsh, and future episodes will cover this stuff. The idea that Sozon's mother may have commissioned a digital copy of her deceased son is unsettling enough, but when we learn that a shady third party, Alexei Abaev, armed with legal power of attorney, picked up the disc containing Sozon's AI personality, that's at least an intriguing hook for the future. It looks like the murder and subsequent dismemberment of an Amicus robot, Nightmare of St Petersburg-style, is merely a copycat incident that probably has some kind of link to Abaev. Who knows what the motive for any of this is?

Sadly, the visual production seems to have taken a leisurely plummet off a cliff, with multiple instances of off-model characters looking particularly poorly-drawn, especially Sozon's mother. Your Forma's already not a great-looking show, with a predominantly gray, boring color scheme and lack of directorial flair to liven up the lengthy dialogue scenes. Without the admittedly cool-looking brain dive sequences to liven up the mundanity, apart from hints of interesting but barely-extrapolated world-building, this episode sadly errs on the dull side.

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Your Forma is currently streaming on Samsung TV+ in the U.S., YouTube, and other services worldwide on Wednesdays.