September 12, 2016

Planetarian

Damn, that was depressing.

Posted by: Mauser at 08:40 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 LOL?

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at September 14, 2016 06:36 AM (XOPVE)

2 Well, the good thing is it's only 5 episodes. But the story (spoilers ahead) follows a "Junker", basically a scavenger who is raiding a city that was struck by a bioweapon 30 years earlier. It's a "Sarcophagus City" because it was abandoned in such haste, and it's patrolled by robotic defenses.

While evading a trio of trash-can sized machine gun bots, our hero ends up in a department store that has a planetarium on the roof. The staff left during the evacuations, and left behind a little robot, whom they told they were going on a vacation. In the 30 years since then, with spotty electricity, she's been waking up for a week every year, getting ready to greet the guests who never come. Until our hero shows up (and curses his timing when he learns this).

The poor little bot is not exactly an AI, but she is somewhat adaptable. When the department store's floral department won't respond to her request for a bouquet, she fashions one out of junk laying around the place. But she's unable to understand anything that's gone on outside the realm of he planetarium, mostly because she keeps trying but can't connect to the central database. She does her best with her program, but she's just an economy model.

She's adaptable enough that even though he's not actually the 2,500,000 visitor, she decides to give him the special show. Since it's nearly dark, he gives in and stays for it, only the projector isn't working. The little robot is very dismayed that the show can't go on. She's put in a repair request and everything. He volunteers to fix the projector, for reasons he can't really define, and eventually, she makes her presentation, and he is deeply moved. (The world has been blanketed by a persistent rainstorm for most of his life, but he saw a star once.)

Then the emergency power that has been her main power source finally fails. This pretty much seals her doom, but she doesn't really acknowledge it. When he coughs,she thinks he is ill and offers to walk him back to his car, if it's within 3 km of the store. For some reason, he agrees. He wants to save her, somehow, but her limitations make it very difficult.

When they get near the containment wall around the city, the situation gets worse. There's a robotic tank near the breech. He orders her to stay put, and goes to sneak up on it and shoot a grenade at it. The grenade is a dud, and the tank opens fire on him. During the battle, she walks up to the tank, and it blows half of her body away. She thought the tank was acting against its program, and didn't respond to the shutdown signal she sent it, so she was walking up to it to shut it down manually. Not a good plan, but it did give him the opening to deliver a fatal shot. She is too badly damaged to continue operating, but she still has the optimism that someday she might be rebuilt, or reactivated in a different robot body. She fades out as her power dies, and tells him how to remove her memory card. About the only thing missing from this shutdown sequence, where she shows him holograms of her happiest customers, is a rendition of Daisy. (And I confess, I was thinking of the space liner from HHGTTG waiting for civilization to rise again so that there will eventually be the requisite lemon-soaked paper napkins.)

After the credits, they try to give the slightest glimmer of how as other junkers find in laying in the dirt outside of the city, and he says he's not a junker any more, but a "Starteller", but it's too little too late to save it. It's just a sad story of inevitable decay and the failure of optimism in the face of destruction.

Posted by: Mauser at September 14, 2016 06:39 PM (FZlSR)

3 I'm not sure based on your review whether I'll watch. I was going to, but tearjerker endings are tougher as I get older.

Posted by: topmaker at September 26, 2016 04:28 PM (6stZH)

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