A very quiet episode, on the whole, possibly promising more to come.
On the side of the case of the week, we have a teen Humanoid who wants to be a runner, but is frustrated because his humanoid specifications mean that he doesn’t grow into new roles as easily as humans do. This gets some insight into the setting, that humanoids seem to be made to exist almost entirely in line with natural humans, and that they at least can have biological bodies, since the doctor mentions the runner kid does.
We follow his struggle with his possible limits until his friend, with whom he was highly competitive, gets hurt in a volleyball accident and can’t run. The humanoid makes the track meet and, in desperation being cheered on by the friend he envied, manages to set a new personal best and bring home a win – the doctor seems to indicate that the idea of limits might have been what held him back, since the true extent is hard for anyone, human or humanoid, to know.
On the doctor’s side, he meets with an old friend (a humanoid who now takes the form of a busty knockout, much to the chagrin of the doctor’s helper girl and her crush) who tries to recruit him for a program. Said program would place the doctor on the oversight committee for MICHI, a super-intelligent AI who seems to oversee much of Humanoid development and who now has a “self-improvement” plan for Humanoids lined up. He declines, but it’s unclear how final that declining is. At the end, we briefly see MICHI incarnated with a body that looks like the spitting image of a younger version of the doctor, down to having human-style eyes. So, there’s probably something there. Who knows?
When you get down to it, this episode was for pacing. It was welcome that the story about the runner was primarily mundane. There was no criminal hacking and no heavy-handed moralizing, so presumably the show isn’t going to wallow in that too much. On the other hand, it was a slow-paced story mostly about characters we have never seen before and will never see again, and on the line of characters we will be interacting with… I am begging the assistant to turn out non-annoying. She can have a crush, she can even experience jealousy, but if she’s just going to be the wannabe clingy girlfriend this whole time, she’s going to get painfully annoying.
In a sense, this is paying off on one of the promises of the pitch, that this will be an anthology show. If that’s not up your alley, more power to you, but for my case… I accept it. Next episode, please.