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The new show from Fringe showrunner JH Wyman – currently about to shoot its pilot and currently going by the name Human – is a bit like Blade Runner would have been if Deckard and Batty had been partners, learns Joseph McCabe
“I’m really concerned with technology and humanity right now, and that scares me,” says Wyman, in the midst of promoting Dead Man Down , the Colin Farrell-Noomi Rapace thriller he’s written. “I’m very, very interested in examining that – where the line is, the singularity, what’s going to happen to us in the future.”
“I started [writing it],” he laughs, “because I kept getting texts from my daughter, who’s 21. I said ‘F**k, call me.’ I don’t want to hear a beep, I want to hear her voice.
“I started to just get worried. Because doing my research on Fringe allowed me to meet some very cool people who are strange, advanced thinkers. And there are some cats up in San Francisco – very, very wealthy people – who are billionaires, who don’t want to die… There’s a great documentary called The Transcendent Man . It’s Ray Kurzweil’s story, the guy who invented the Kurzweil organ. It talks about how, literally, in 35 years you’ll go to your doctor and he’ll say, ‘You have lung cancer. I’m going to write you a prescription.’ You go down to the pharmacy and they give you a silver pill of your own DNA, and then you are going to take it. It’s filled with hundreds of millions of nanites, little tiny computers. They’re specifically programmed by the pharmacist to go and find your cancer, and then they eat it away. It’s gone by dinnertime. So essentially we’ll live to 350, 400 years.
“So it’s about humanity and connection. I’m always writing about the same thing – that life is all about the connections that you make. Period. That’s kind of what JJ’s consumed with as well. We both really like the idea. And that’s kind of where it’s set.
“If you can imagine that in Blade Runner ,” adds Wyman, “Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford were partners, you’ll understand a little bit more. But it’s much different than that. Because there’s a great mythology, all about outer space and the planet and what’s going to become of us.”
Joseph McCabe
