Themes
In Televised Morality, Gregory Stevenson argues that this episode pays homage to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and its warning about the dangers of scientific progress without adequate ethical safeguards. For example, like Frankenstein's monster, Adam approaches a boy in the woods. The boy is playing with a cyborg soldier action figure in the park, shortly before Adam - a genuine cyborg - kills him. It should also be noted that Adam is the name given to the monster in Shelley's novel. In the scene that follows, Anya, Willow, and Buffy are watching Roadrunner cartoons in Xander's basement. As Wile E. Coyote's Acme technology once again backfires, Buffy complains, "That would never happen." Stevenson claims the irony is it does later happen: the Initiative's embrace of technology unfettered by moral guidance ultimately causes its own destruction.
Read more about this topic: Goodbye Iowa
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)