Stand by for technical difficulties (in the show. The blog is fine.)
So, our episode today is mostly dealing with what was proposed earlier: building a tidal generator to power the school, if not the town. We get a lot of slice of life business with salvage operations, and while all the necessary bits and bobs for the generator itself seem to be in order, there’s one sticking point of a missing piece: batteries. Evidently, after the power grids started failing due to plants getting submerged, there was a huge scramble for batteries, meaning that even the difficult salvage seems to be lacking any sort of energy storage devices.
Now, leaving aside that you could jury-rig a battery or capacitor with some scrap metal, salt water, and knowhow in the real world (maybe, despite being able to do resin-based production for machine parts, a non-industrial battery bank would be too unreliable or dangerous. I doubt the size is a problem since they have big drums), this does provide something of a conundrum, since the point of the generator is moot if its power output is extremely unreliable, and you do need some manner of storage to smooth out production spikes into a level available draw. This issue is not resolved, and when the episode ends I’d say that they don’t even have a path towards resolution in mind.
If that feels light, it’s probably because more of the episode is focused on moving along down the rabbit hole of what (and who) Atri is. Seeing her antics, our lead and the cute redhead begin to question whether she’s really a Humanoid as they know it, or if in fact she should be regarded as fully human, seeing as she has come out the other side of the Uncanny Valley. This is deepened when the shady lady returns and holds the cute redhead at knifepoint to force our lead to transfer Atri to her, since she now needs all the money or is at least willing to take it. Atri… punches her out of the way, which comes across as a violation of the laws by which humanoids should operate.
I touched on Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics when doing writeups on Metallic Rouge. It’s debatable whether Atri’s behavior (non-injuriously striking a human who was acting as a clear and present danger to the life of another human) would be a strict violation since “Don’t Harm humans” and “Do not by in action allow humans to come to harm” are both parts of the First Law, but it’s certainly seen as beyond the pale in character and would probably get Susan Calvin on the case if it happened in Asimov’s stories too.
Later, when looking at the battery crisis, we find that Atri is desired by some insane collector who will apparently pay any price, thus promoting the dealer to do similarly. After the encounter, Atri asks to be sold, but clearly doesn’t actually want it, displaying very human emotions. She also offers her own internal battery, which naturally our lead refuses to do since that would be tantamount to cutting out her heart (not that he puts it in as many words) and he’s clearly starting to think of her as human.
Presumably, we’ll get the payoff for this setup next week.