Eden: Why the Robots Have Forgotten Their Human Origins
WARNING: The following contains SPOILERS for Eden Season 1.
The Anime series Eden finds the world populated by robots who have forgotten their human origins. Released in May 2021 on Netflix, the series takes place 1000 years after humans have vanished, essentially imagining what the world would look like without human pollution, violence, and corruption. The result is the eponymous Eden, a place that is as lush and beautiful as it is tranquil.
At the same time, the series shows that Eden is not wholly untouched by humans. The robots who roam this idyllic world were, in fact, manufactured by humans as part of a last-ditch effort to save the planet at a time when the climate crisis reached catastrophic levels. The initial plan to save humanity, also named Eden and established by a scientist named Dr Weston Fields, was to select 35,000 healthy humans who would be preserved in stasis pods while the robots reversed the uninhabitable conditions of the planet. By the time Eden takes place, however, that plan has clearly changed.
The robots in Eden have completely forgotten about their human creators. This is partially due to the sheer length of time that humans have been absent, but also because of an intentional effort to wipe out all human beings. The robot in charge of Eden, named Zero, rules with a fervently anti-human philosophy. Zero's power over the robots facilitates control over their knowledge and programming. This allows him to erase not just physical evidence that humans once existed, but to literally erase the memory from his fellow robots' programming. In the Netflix anime, in the event that a robot comes into contact with a human invention — a device, for instance, that produces a holographic image of a human, as shown in episode 1 — Zero's team of security bots seize both the invention for permanent elimination and the offending robot for forceful reprogramming. Once reprogrammed, the robots return to their default settings. This, for the most part, entails the harvesting of apples as a newfound source of clean energy, but, more importantly, results in the erasure of knowledge about humans.
Zero's anti-human programming in Eden is not actually his own, which means that essentially, a human is repsonsible for the species' erasure. Specifically, it is Dr. Fields' brain that has been stripped of its memories and emotions — of, in other words, its humanity — and ultimately computerized and downloaded into Zero's robot body. Dr. Fields blames humanity's ignorance and violence for the environment's decline, which contributed to his daughter's sickness. When she succame to her illness, Dr. Fields was blinded by grief and rage, deeming all humans, including himself, unworthy of salvation, a theme shared by many other Netflix Original sci-fi movies. In this way, Zero is really just another tool, just another robot, following its programmed protocol.
Zero is what makes Eden interesting and, conclusively, the perfect vessel for the show's cautionary message. Zero's manufacturing and programming are the result of human invention. That Zero ultimately remembers his human origins because of Sara, the show's protagonist and another human, gestures towards the paradoxical fact that humans are, in the face of global environmental catastrophe, both the problem and the answer.