Prime Video’s New Crime Thriller Falls Victim To A Growing AI Trend

Like numerous recent shows and movies, Prime Video’s Scarpetta stumbles when it comes to tackling the subject of AI by treating the emerging technology as if it were a solution to death itself. Murder mysteries rely on death being, by and large, a bad thing. This is hardly a controversial claim.

Whether they are light-hearted cozy crime novels like Agatha Christie’s Ms. Marple books or dark, grim psychological thrillers like David Fincher’s masterpiece Se7en, all murder mysteries eventually come back to the basic premise that a character is dead, which means they are no longer alive. Impressively enough, Scarpetta’s season 1 story manages to subvert this basic genre tenet.

Scarpetta’s Janet AI Isn’t Realistically Possible With Current Technology

The first adaptation of author Patricia Cornwell’s long-running series of psychological thrillers, the show sees Nicole Kidman’s eponymous forensic pathologist investigate a killing that bears an uncanny resemblance to her first big case. Since Scarpetta built her reputation on that haunting string of killings, she soon worries she may have caught the wrong killer.

By Scarpetta’s season 1 ending, the mystery of who killed the mutilated women in both of the show’s dual timelines has been resolved. Both killings were carried out by related but different killers, meaning Scarpetta was right to trust her gut all those years ago. However, this is not where the show’s indifference to the concept of death comes into question.

Instead, it is Ariana DeBose’s role as Scarpetta’s niece Lucy that arguably imperils the entire premise of the show, not that Scarpetta season 1 seems to notice this. DeBose is a talented performer who stunned audiences with her roles in West Side Story and Hamilton, and she does her best with the part of Scarpetta’s grieving Lucy.

Before the show’s story begins, Lucy’s wife, Janet Montgomery, dies of unspecified causes. To cope with her grief, Lucy boots up an AI program that she and Janet were working on during her wife’s life, allowing Lucy to converse with a likeness of her late wife. To be clear, Lucy isn’t having text conversations with a chatbot.

When viewers meet DeBose’s character, she is deep in conversation with Montgomery’s Janet via a video call, and it is only later that the show reveals this character on the computer screen is, somehow, AI-generated. Throughout season 1, Janet is portrayed as a thinking, feeling, independent approximation of a dead person who can converse with multiple people via video link in real time.

The show’s fictional AI seamlessly creates constant new video footage of Janet speaking and gesticulating in real time while also engaging in deep, emotionally complex conversations that draw on the deceased Janet’s unique memories. It should go without saying, but this is not remotely possible with current AI technology, nor will it ever be possible barring massive, almost inconceivable advancements.

Scarpetta’s Janet Storyline Jars With Its Realistic Tone

It’s not an exaggeration to say that, in Scarpetta season 1, Janet’s AI is a human being, for all intents and purposes. She can think, talk, emote, create novel ideas, draw new conclusions from old memories, and even move and physically express herself. Lucy and her late wife have seemingly solved the problem of mortality, creating an undying self.

In the world of the series, this should be the greatest technological innovation in all of human history. Scarpetta’s job could be rendered irrelevant since Janet’s AI would seemingly give Lucy the technology required to bring the consciousnesses of murder victims back online and just ask them who killed them.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, Scarpetta season 1’s story doesn’t focus on Lucy patenting this technology and getting down to the hard work of existentially eradicating death itself as a concept. Instead, she mostly converses with her impossible AI ghost wife and continues day drinking, since the Prime Video show seemingly has no idea how ridiculous this premise is.

Scarpetta’s AI Plot Highlights A Recent Storytelling Trend

Like a lot of recent TV shows, Scarpetta falls victim to a bad Hollywood habit of portraying “AI” as a convenient catch-all to explain what is otherwise outright impossible sci-fi technology. There is no AI that can bring a dead person back to life, and this writer is willing to venture that there never will be.

However, a lot of fatuous claims about AI’s potential have been given a lot of airtime in recent years, meaning Scarpetta season 1’s plot is not the first example of a project wildly overestimating the technology’s limitations. Only weeks earlier, Scream 7’s killer reveal relied on another fictional AI reviving the likeness of a dead person and flawlessly imitating them.

To say more would be to risk ruining Scream 7’s “Twist,” but suffice to say, the slasher sequel relies heavily on the idea that an AI developed by a single creator could generate realistic video footage of multiple dead people that recreates their exact mannerisms with no imperfections. It’s a little less laughable than Scarpetta, but still a fatal blow to the viewer’s suspension of disbelief.