Your Forma

Episode 4

As Your Forma's anime concludes its “first” arc, I'm left wishing I could like it more, but the brutal amputation of the story's true beginning, an entire novel's worth of content, leaves this adaptation kneecapped from the outset. It can't be good that someone like me, a veteran watcher of this genre of sci-fi anime, has to keep pausing to parse explanatory dialogue that does anything but. On the surface, Your Forma's world is very interesting. Instead of a futuristic setting, it appears to take place in a world a little sideways to our own, an England where Queen Elizabeth was presented with a trio of super-advanced RF Model Amicus androids at her diamond jubilee. I sure don't remember anything like that happening in our 2012, though I recall at one point she was gifted a gold-plated Wii console, which I guess is kind of in the same ballpark?

The vast majority of this episode comprises an extended expository plot dump where both main antagonists explain their connections to one another, and their respective plans, in exhaustive detail, to a conflicted Cyber-inspector Echika. While conceptually interesting, from a world-building perspective at least, it's all so terribly dry. The central conflict now is what to do with the only surviving RF Model Amicus, Echika's partner, Harold. His two brothers are now deceased, and Aiden Furman, whom his face was modeled after, intends to leak the details of his unique programming to the world. Apparently this will be a Bad Thing for Harold, as when Lexie built her trio of “children,” she used somewhat non-standard methods – “Next-Generation Versatile AI”– to build their brains.

When Lexie explains the RF Models' minds are essentially “black boxes” (a term in AI computing where an algorithm outputs response “Y” when fed data “X,” but the computational method remains too complex/obscure for human comprehension), she reveals this is because she based them on real human minds. The Your Forma system like Echika uses has collected data about human thought processes all along. It's almost a given that someone would use such information to model a duplicate human mind. While standard Amicus models only act like they are thinking, it seems RF Models like Harold, because they are as complex and inscrutable as any biological human being, have the potential to equal them. Perhaps, like a human, the only way to know them is to befriend them?

Should the International Ethics Committee catch wind of this development, Echika realizes, they'll shut Harold down. She's reached the point now where she values him as much as any human colleague – perhaps more – so she's willing to side with Lexie and suppress the truth behind the RF Models. Even more concerning is Lexie's insistence that the Three Laws of Respect that govern Amicus droids “don't exist,” but standard Amicus are too stupid to question them. This suggests that Harold could potentially learn to ignore them and become dangerous to humans, and this perhaps contextualizes how his actions in the second episode put Echika at risk. She seems willing to forgive this, however, stating that he's “the first person I've ever wanted to understand.” Her subsequent offer of an “equal partnership” with him is framed almost romantically.

Unfortunately, all of this development falls completely flat due to the almost total lack of context to their relationship. It's almost as if the first volume of a novel series is somehow important to establishing character motivations and relationships, and shouldn't be skipped from an adaptation, but what do I know? This episode is all telling and no showing, which probably wouldn't have been such an issue if the story had been adapted competently. As it is, I find it hard to really care all that much about Echika and Harold. They seem like reasonably complex characters, but I feel like I hardly know them. Lexie and Aiden I care even less about, but they're not the focus of the show. Your Forma will need to work extra hard in its next arc to maintain viewer interest, as judging by this first (second) arc, it's barely succeeding.

Rating:

Your Forma is currently streaming on Samsung TV+ in the U.S., YouTube, and other services worldwide on Wednesdays.