One young woman walks through the woods and sees
everything as graphs, equations and angles. Another woman stands in a concert
hall and sees sound waves and harmonies which she uses to create music. They
are both awed by their vision – until they collapse and apparently die.
John wakes up from another nightmare about his girlfriend
and Insyndicate – and when he wakes up he writes himself a note “Anna had something
for me?” when he gets a call from Maldonado about the case. Both women went to
the same Academy – one is in the morgue but the woman in the woods is still
there.
He arrives on scene and complains at Dorian for telling
Maldonado where he was while Dorian asks why John turned off his locator chip
for 2 hours that morning (because that’s not creepy at all). Detective Valeria
Stahl is also working the case (she gets to work a case rather than just
provide computer support for John and Dorian!) and is with the other victim in
the morgue. Both women have dilated pupils and small DNA-locked canisters
(Valerie and John assume drugs), both of which are empty.
At the police station, Maldonado tells Valerie that both
girls were “chromes” (genetically engineered) and she wants Valerie to be
liaison with the parents because she’s a chrome as well – though apparently she
doesn’t get on very well with other chromes.
The examination does find that the girls were on a drug
but they don’t know which kind – though it’s surprising they were using drugs
since, though chromes experiment, they don’t become addicted; they also find a
third girl who drowned but may have had the same drug in her system – she went
to the same school and all three were friends (insert creepiness at how easy
the police track their social network connections).
John continues to have minor flashback to the Insyndicate
raid – and his hand starts shaking. He takes a small pill to calm it –
witnessed by Maldonado on the CCTV (which she’s apparently watching for
funsies).
Dorian confronts John about the drug – a memory enabler – and he questions whether John is seeing a recollectionist (like he was in the pilot). Dorian recites a list of all the negative side effects of the drugs John is taking but John insists all is well
John and Dorian interview the parents of the girl who
died previously – Lila – and find she wasn’t a chrome, she was a “natural” but
gifted anyway and she was let in on scholarship since her mother could never
have afforded it. She believed that everyone was covering up her daughter’s
death, especially since if she took drugs she would have done so with friends,
but her friends denied even knowing her. Of course, her friends are the two
girls who just died. The recordings she got from a private detective that she
shared with the police proving the friends were actually her friends were also erased
at the police station. John suspects a dirty cop.
Valerie goes to the school to investigate and talks to
the only other natural in Lila’s grade who is surprised to see a chrome as a
police officer (Valerie puts in detective, but it’s clear that chromes are
expected to do bigger and better things than become police). Lila tried very
hard to compete with the other chromes and fit in but the other natural girl
feels intensely out of place and unable to keep up despite her grades.
Interviewing two chrome kids is less helpful – they’re
arrogant and condescending and evasive when it comes to talking about drugs.
They do find the drug in Scarlet’s (one of the girls) room
Apparently the drug is tailored specifically to her DNA,
suggesting each dose is designed to the recipient. They also find the drug is
extremely complex and designed using very high tech, rare, expensive and
regulated equipment. Tracking down who owns the equipment in the city the find
a recently deceased man whose son, Julian, was expelled from the academy.
The device also has a safety feature that backs up copies
of every drug it creates to a cloud which Dorian accesses and confirms is
definitely the machine responsible and that while Lila died after taking the
drug once, the two more recent victims had been using it for some time and
seemed to have been deliberately overdosed by their dealer – as he tells John
while driving but John is busy having another flashback (or pill induced memory
flash) – and crashes the car, only Dorian’s intervention stops it being into
oncoming traffic. And gets Dorian’s ear damaged which he angrily snarks about.
They go to see Julian and his very elderly mother (who
appears catatonic) and they discover the printer – but Julian starts babbling
about seeing their words and Dorian notices his dilated pupils, he’s already on
the drug. He calls the drug Verrol and how it expands the mind to realise your full
potential – and he claims his machine was hacked and someone messed with the
doses, it wasn’t him. They arrest him because his story isn’t all that
plausible.
At the police station they check Marshall, one of the
arrogant chrome kids, since he’s a computer science student. Valerie also finds
the last texts Scarlet sent – to her father; she’d been avoiding him and was
upset about him “taking care of something”.
That’s on hold until the next day because it’s quitting
time and Maldonado has invited John out for a drink to inquire as to his health
because she’s subtle like that. She warns him of the dangers of the memory
forces and adds advice that him focusing on revenge rather than focusing on his
recent successes (well, not so recent now but the damn episodes are out of
order) will break him – also if he can remember stuff they need to talk to
Internal Affairs again.
And John goes to see the recollectionist again – apparently something he’s doing far too often (which is laughable considering he hasn’t been seen since the pilot). He remembers the same disastrous ambush but this time also remembers, somewhat unfitting with the rest of the memories, Anna giving him a present, a Russian matryoshka doll.
He goes home and sees the doll. He takes it apart then
pulls up the gazillion notes he’s apparently made about his dreams and memories
of Anna. After staring mopily at them, he takes the doll to some future CSI
person who I think was supposed to be a character but they never developed her –
he wants her to check the doll for everything, off the books.
Back to the plot – John goes to see Scarlett’s father and
he summons a lawyer by hologram which is kind of nifty. He’s still a TV lawyer
though which means he’s not brilliant – and when he finally starts doing his
job he’s disappeared. Because TV crime programmes can’t have lawyers, they get in
the way of all the rights trampling. Scarlett’s father admits that his daughter
took drugs with Lila but that she wasn’t there when Lila died – he had Scarlett
lie because he didn’t want the scandal to follow her – he also used his
considerable amounts of money to make all the evidence disappear; but Scarlett
was furious at the lies, hence the rift. Also, Mrs. Haldman (Lila’s mother)
apparently was Not Pleased either and said they’d pay for it – which doesn’t
quite match with her previous statement.
While they were talking, the police searching Julian’s house have found an image stick, apparently. Alas, in whatever year in the future, clouds are still unreliable/unsecure enough that we still carry thumb drives, though with futuristic changed names. After questioning he admits that the stick contains the last thing Lila ever said to him; he loved Lila and he talks about how her mother pushed her too hard, always driving her and making her feel she wasn’t good enough. And the drug, Vero, while opening up vast potential for chromes does bad things to naturals: in her own words from the recording, it showed her all her limitations and how she couldn’t reach them, driving her to suicide.
They show the video to her mother though she still holds
that the drug was the cause of her daughter’s death – not high expectations.
When confronted about hacking the drug machine she has a truly awesomely epic
rant about the need for revenge and how it consumed her after Scarlett’s father
covered up Lila’s death. Of course this epic rant is not only epic, it also
far-too-neatly gels with what Maldonado warned John about revenge.
Story concluded, John has his little visit from Internal
Affairs as Maldonado said he would. The investigator questions him, pushing but
not that dramatically before John walks out which is apparently a thing he can
do without consequence
He goes home and mopes at his notes some more before removing
them all – but he gets a call from his CSI contact: the doll is a listening
device. And it was still listening as recently as 7 hours ago.
Ok, Almost Human has a problem. Apparently the show was
written and filmed completely out of order. So this episode – with John and
Dorian seemingly cold towards each other, with John returning to his mental
health problems we saw in the pilot that just magically disappeared for several
episodes? This was supposed to be episode 4, not 10
This doesn’t break the show – but it damages it. One episode John and Dorian are really friendly and close – then suddenly they’re near strangers next week and John is back to treating Dorian as only semi-human. John has magically got over all of his mental health issues, then next week we’re flashbacking to the pilot. John doesn’t care about his past for episodes on end and then suddenly it’s back down memory lane and a powerful obsession of his. It’s especially bad in a show that has so much character development and character relationship development because that excellent slow growth we’ve been shown is suddenly derailed.
This is also a problem with the world building – especially
after the huge revelations and developments in the last episode, we rewind
again to before they were revealed for this story.
Why do this? What good reason is there for this (and while “it’s Fox” is certainly an explanation, it isn’t a reason).
Of course with the genetics there are class messages here
– but touched on in a rather obvious and shallow fashion – I would much rather
have a nice deep look at Valerie’s past, her being a chrome, what that means,
why she’s in a relatively “low” position by their standard etc.
