Soap Opera Network Spoilers

The pilot begins with a long tease, in which you see a family eating breakfast, and you realize that something is weird about them but you don't know what. There's a long, slow build-up, in which we mostly follow the daughter of the family, Tina. She's an adorable little girl, who dreams about being a ballerina and picks up acorns, imagining them turning into beautiful trees.

So it's a huge shock when Tina's hit by a car, towards the end of the opening teaser. And an even bigger shock when everybody acts as though the biggest problem is that her head left a dent in the car's front bumper. What an inconvenience! "I'm worried about the car," says Tina's mom Susan afterwards. "She was pretty small. She couldn't
have caused much damage," says Tina's dad, David. Later, Susan goes to wash the blood and hair off the car's front bumper, and apologize to the driver for the accident.

This shocking event — a bright little girl being hit by a car, and everybody treating it as a minor inconvenience to the driver — resonates through the rest of the pilot, as we see how the Mechanicals are enslaved. They're constrained by Asimov's good old Three Laws of Robotics. They're destroyed if they show the slightest sign of emotion. They're even given a weird drug, called Compliance, to prevent them from having any nasty mood swings. They all have bar codes on the backs of their necks.

And yet, they're clearly people in every way that matters. They have family units, like Tina and her parents. They respond to things with real emotion. Their children have to go to school, so they can learn all the nuances of human society. (The high-end "Mechanicals" like Tina and her family have no metal parts — instead, they're more like cyborgs, with some silicon chips and plastic, but also organic parts grown from the DNA of John Does, and possibly federal prisoners as well.