I must admit, I missed this first time around, but caught an episode when visiting relatives in the UK.
Not too convinced about the premise of the opening episode, with the implication that human cloning is somehow different, more complex and with the hidden imprimatur of the creator preventing a successful conclusion....it, ain't. If it's been done, it's been done and will turn out to have been no more complex than with any other animal. It's already been achieved with pigs and their physiology is remarkably similar to ours. What arises out of this is a profound and fascinating grab bag of ethical and moral implications, all of which the show seemed to side step, indeed it seemed more concerned with mid-market friendly metaphysical speculation on the nature of the soul - terror of the mid-west moral majority, perhaps?
For all the hype about an intelligent approach to real science that this show seems to have engendered on forums demanding it's return, I can't help thinking that it fought shy from dealing with the (potentially) terrifying banality of what cloning represents and how it has already become part of the everyday discourse of animal husbandry and research (witness the pigs that glow in the dark - I'm not kidding!). To have shown that human cloning was just as banal and all that that implied might have taken a courageous leap of faith that the producers were unwilling to consider. I do think it would have made for a far more interesting, if contentious, episode though. I'll bet HBO would have gone down that route.
Perhaps future episodes are better, I'm just not sure I can be bothered to find out.
Not too convinced about the premise of the opening episode, with the implication that human cloning is somehow different, more complex and with the hidden imprimatur of the creator preventing a successful conclusion....it, ain't. If it's been done, it's been done and will turn out to have been no more complex than with any other animal. It's already been achieved with pigs and their physiology is remarkably similar to ours. What arises out of this is a profound and fascinating grab bag of ethical and moral implications, all of which the show seemed to side step, indeed it seemed more concerned with mid-market friendly metaphysical speculation on the nature of the soul - terror of the mid-west moral majority, perhaps?
For all the hype about an intelligent approach to real science that this show seems to have engendered on forums demanding it's return, I can't help thinking that it fought shy from dealing with the (potentially) terrifying banality of what cloning represents and how it has already become part of the everyday discourse of animal husbandry and research (witness the pigs that glow in the dark - I'm not kidding!). To have shown that human cloning was just as banal and all that that implied might have taken a courageous leap of faith that the producers were unwilling to consider. I do think it would have made for a far more interesting, if contentious, episode though. I'll bet HBO would have gone down that route.
Perhaps future episodes are better, I'm just not sure I can be bothered to find out.