Ok Computer : Initially fun, and then Drib

‘Ok Computer’ is precisely the kind of series I would have imagined as a fourteen-year-old. Remember, for an Indian kid of the nineties, the Sci-Fi benchmark was Captain Vyom. The show’s biggest USP were sliding doors, which we later came to know were manually operated. We cannot imagine an incredibly slick Sci-Fi on a tight budget.

‘Ok Computer’ is purposely not slick. One way to think is that it is not that far into the future; 2030’s ish India cannot be drastically different than 2020’s India. It’s been five decades since the world learned how to make pothole-free roads that last for years. In India, we have roads that do not last a single rainy season.
The series plays on this ‘Indian’ factor. The Vehicles are electric, but we still have the Toyota Innova to contend with its 2015 looks. Coming back to the fourteen-year-old in me, the series has imaginable characters. For some reason, when we imagine Sci-Fi, we do not keep regular people in it. Everyone has to have a tinge of ‘over acting’ in them. Shaktimaan’s Gangadhar with ill-fitted spectacles has to keep chanting chaste Hindi, annoyingly textbookish. In the original Shaktimaan, i.e., Superman, Clark Kent has regular glasses and behaves reasonably normal. The characters in ‘Ok Computer’ are more Gangadharish.

Some details are well thought of, like the computer programmer having Hritik Roshan thumbs after overusing the mobile touch screen. Furthermore, even though the series is set a decade later, all the pop culture references are from a decade earlier. Again, something a fourteen-year-old would do. The series also critiques our current obsession with abbreviations really well. There was a time in history when we thought of a good name for an organization like the United Nations or the World Wrestling Federation. We simply took the first letters to form an abbreviation, the UN or the WWF, or something like the HDFC. Then we had the short-lived trend of numerical abbreviations, the 3D’s (Dedication, Devotion, and Determination) and the 4MV (Maharashtra Mandal’s Marathi Madhyamik Vidyalaya)

However, now the abbreviation itself needs to ‘mean’ something. The BRICS, The STEM fields, TIME, and so on. This series pays tribute to this trend by having an AJEEB.

So far, so good, but once the quirkiness wears off, the series seems to meander. It is all good until everyone has fun, but then the creators feel the urge to impart philosophy. A Deep and heavy philosophy. As a viewer, I got confused. Should I continue to watch as timepass fun, or should I start taking things seriously?
At one point, I thought about taking the philosophy seriously, but at the very next moment, I spotted a continuity error in a scene. One object, a fake bomb, kept appearing and disappearing between the scenes. After that, the series became a drag. Similar thing with the acting, some actors seemed deeply invested in their role, but some others were clearly not.

What began as a fun experiment to watch turned a bit sour. Probably one or two episodes too long. So long that I forgot that the basic premise was a Who Dunn’it murder mystery. And frankly, I didn’t care who the murderer was; even if an alien was caught for the murder, it would not have added any excitement.