There looks to be a fair amount of pre-planning in this show. The first time Will sees a drone up close for instance, in season 1 with Beau, it comes down and looks at him like the one on the wall did, then flies away. We just didn't realize there was any significance to that at the time. They seem to be filling in the backstory in bits and pieces. Not always at the beginning of an episode where that information figures in either, the way you'd expect.
I'm guessing the droids are surrogate bodies and that sphere thing probably holds the consciousness of an alien. The procedure they performed transferred the information on the damaged one to a new one, something like that. But if one of them didn't die when a Host Unit was destroyed they wouldn't get pissed enough to nuke a whole city in retaliation. Remotely controlled hardware isn't as big a deal. They'd send us a bill or something. Either the raps are organic beings that never come down from their ship (afraid humans would kill them, can't survive the environment, whatever) or they're machine life forms, and those particular bodies may have been reconfigured to a humanoid appearance to make dealing with us a little easier. If Will and the rest make it to the resistance we'll get to meet their rap and find out.
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Motoko_Kusanagi (60)
8 years ago
That's a really good point about retaliation had the host been completely destroyed. I'm more open-minded now about the possibility of many alien techno-consciousnesses existing. It makes the question 'what they need humans for' more interesting. Maybe they are intent on creating a hybrid race using the modified human body as vessel. I imagine they could have ethical differences about their use/slaughter of humans as we might about "lesser" animals.
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chrisjdel (2714)
8 years ago
I think in this case it's more like the difference between us and people living in a primitive tribe. They're not any dumber than we are, what they lack (our advantage over them if you will) is knowledge.
Their reason for needing humans is an important unanswered question. We still don't know what they actually MAKE at the Factory. As for the people they pack in cryostasis pods and ship ... who knows where, if Will and Broussard are typical of the subjects on their do-not-kill list it seems like they're looking for soldiers. Both men are highly intelligent and well trained, the best at what they do. It's possible they need cannon fodder for a war they're fighting somewhere else. Or they want to breed an army to fight that war, using the best stock available.
Humans who have lived in their own civilization with all these ideas about rights and freedoms can only be molded so much. But a whole generation of children born and raised in military school type environments where they're taught loyalty and obedience from early on - they would make an ideal slave army. Perhaps the ones they abducted from Earth (in addition to supplying DNA) would become the instructors at those schools in exchange for being allowed to live, and even granted a reasonable level of comfort. If the raps are facing an enemy with a huge numerical advantage this would be an ideal way to level the playing field without massive casualties among their own kind. Human slaves would do most of the dying for them.
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