Karl Urban plays a cop in a cyberpunk city who hates androids and he’s assigned an android partner to work with. Over the course of the series, his character gradually learns to accept and respect his android partner. Except you’d never know that watching the show as it aired.
Fox aired the episodes out of order so Karl Urban’s character constantly jumps between respecting the android and being a jerk to the android from episode to episode. With no continuity, the show had terrible ratings and was cancelled after one season. I hate that all streaming services and even the DVD kept the incorrect airing order. None of them use the production order, which is how it was intended to be watched:
| Episode | Airing order | Production order |
|---|---|---|
| Pilot | 01 | 1 |
| Skin | 02 | 5 |
| Are You Receiving? | 03 | 6 |
| The Bends | 04 | 7 |
| Blood Brothers | 05 | 8 |
| Arrhythmia | 06 | 3 |
| Simon Says | 07 | 10 |
| You Are Here | 08 | 2 |
| Unbound | 09 | 9 |
| Perception | 10 | 4 |
| Disrupt | 11 | 11 |
| Beholder | 12 | 12 |
| Straw Man | 13 | 13 |
It’s a shame too, because throughout the season there are references to “The Wall”. They keep mentioning how no one crosses The Wall. And yet in the very last scene of the last episode… someone crosses The Wall. I would’ve liked to see where they took that storyline.
I don’t even get why they would do that? Who makes the decision to air episodes out of order and what’s the logic behind it?
I think the idea (stupid as it was) was to front-load all the “action heavy” episodes to air first to try and capture the audience. Then all the “boring” episodes could air once the audience was hooked. Except that doesn’t work at all with a show that has a coherent plot. The execs must’ve thought it was just a police-procedural with random cases and never bothered to actually watch the show to see if that was true.