Synopsis of 2×05: Niska’s time for judgement has arrived as the CPS delivers their final decision on her consciousness, with interesting results. Leo and Hester employ questionable techniques to find their way to the silo, the site all the captured synths are being held in.
So Here’s the Skinny:
- Max recruits a newly awakened synth, Flash, who’s nicer than Hester. Seriously, we’re talking opposite-end-of-the-spectrum nice.
- Dr. Morrow learns that her daughter has passed away indefinitely. Later she reveals to V that she created V with her daughter’s, Ginny’s or Virginia’s, mental scans, before V began to develop into her own entity.
- Toby visits Reine at her home and she gives him the same kind of 18+ permission card his father used on Mia in the last season. Believe it or not, Toby activated it to become closer to her and know the real her, not have sex. After rejecting her and explaining his feelings, she tearfully kicks him out of her home.
- Ed tries to sell Mia to the synthetic captors, but she uses a default program of sorts to reset her system and appear as a normal synth. She tricks the captors and they refuse to take her, so Ed leaves her under a bridge. It remains to be seen whether she’s pretending she has been reset or actually has been.
- Hester and Leo come across the woman who shot Ten before. Leo leaves Hester to torture the woman for answers and we later learn that Hester killed the woman.
- Hester then convinces Leo to let her be his muscle, who makes all the hard decisions and handles the dirty work, before she seduces him.
- Once Niska comes to the conclusion that the CPS, Crown Prosecution Service, would not have let her go, she sets off a distraction and escapes.
- Dr. Morrow discovers a group of synthetic children at the silo and Pete finds a fully awakened synth child.
This episode is a great one. It begins with a newly aware synth gaining consciousness while being mistreated by her primary owner’s children. The synth, Flash, leaves the home and strolls the streets. Before she goes, she tells one of the children, Arvinder, that he “must be kinder.” Arvinder has no chill, so someone definitely needed to handle that.
As she passes a cafe, she picks up a woman’s phone from a table and uses it to reach out, possibly for help. She receives a message from a “friend.” The friend tells her a place to meet and she arrives at the spot. Some synth captors show up and the “friend” advises her to go in a different direction. She turns the corner and meets the friend. It’s no other than Max, our friendly neighborhood synth. He resembled a more welcoming, synth version of Batman, just in his suave maneuverings. So it seems like it will become Max and Flash against Leo and Helster. I’m definitely team Max. They’re just two calm rays of sunlight.
Mia awakes in restraints while Ed and his friend wait to speak with synth buyers. Ed feels guilty, but his mother can not stay in the hospital if he can’t rustle up some funds quick. Mia tries to remind him of the connection between them, but he refuses to believe it was real. As he denies it, he is trying to convince himself instead of her.
She asks for one last kiss and as he leans in to fulfill her wish, she rips her arm out of one of the restraints and starts choking him out. She commands for them to let her go, but they don’t and she almost kills him before letting him go. In that moment, she learns that she could easily let her emotions get the better of her and cause awful outcomes. Ed and his friend leave to take Mia to a drop-off site. In the back of the van, she MacGyver’s a phone into a charging device and uses it to charge herself in rest mode.
Odi breaks a dish while he tries to “be of service.” Mattie insists that he find out what he desires and explore outside of the house without speaking to anyone, to ensure his safety.
Leo and Helster find the silo. Due to the perimeter alarms, there’s no way for them to get in unnoticed. They retire to a motel of sorts. It’s a motel that humans bring synths to for “personal use only.” Hester wonders what satisfaction a man can gain from having sex with an entity that he knows is not feeling any pleasure. Maybe I’m wrong, but that feels like a thinly veiled prod at men who put their pleasure before that of their partner’s when they know of the lack of enthusiasm.
Dr. Morrow hands off what information she has on Elster’s original synthetics to a small group of men to track them down for her. She receives a call from Gil, her daughter’s father, and he informs her that their daughter has passed away. She tells him that she won’t return home and grieves shortly. So it seems like she’s going to pour all of her emotions and efforts into V, her only option.
The synth captors arrive and inspect Mia. Her reading shows she is an ordinary synth and they leave without so much as a thank you. Ed tries to convince Mia to drop the act and promises to go back to how things were before, but Mia acts like a normal synth. While Mia can definitely be convincing when she desires, it seems as though she has actually reset herself back to her settings from when she the Hawkins owned her. Ed and his friends leave her out of fear that the captors might have called the cops for believing that Ed stole Mia.
Laura returns to the facility Niska is being held at during her consciousness testing. Niska immediately picks up on Laura’s frazzled attitude and pushes Laura to confess the news of a hacked synth threatening her in her home. Niska also reads the lips of the CPS representatives as they speak behind the glass. She doesn’t like what she sees and informs Laura that the test will lead to undesired outcomes.
Pete returns home from the office with a stack of files. Karen explains that her personality is nothing more than a character that she created and felt she had become after pretending for so long. However, when she looks at Pete, she sees her original persona, Beatrice, reflected back at her. She does not want him to continue researching seraphs, newly conscious synths, because she wants to lie and hates the idea of being who she really was. She admits that staying with Pete might hold her back from being who she wants to be and leaves after deciding that she needs space.
Toby gets to see the inside of Renie’s home. No one else is home and the home is adorned with pictures suggesting that Renie’s primary owners treat her as a daughter. She invites him on a tour of her room. She gives him the same kind of 18+ permissions card that his father used to have sex with Mia in the previous season.
Once he speaks the codewords, Renie plants a kiss on him and he recoils. He had no interest in becoming intimate with her. He only wanted to learn more about her as a person and felt that she would be more forthcoming if he unlocked her adult-only features. Amid tears, she kicks him out.
Leo and Helster see the woman who shot Ten, a synth who banded together with Leo and Max before they met Hester. Leo and Helster chase the woman, with Helster taking the lead, of course. Leo wasn’t even trying. Here Helster is, sprinting like a track star and Leo is jogging behind her. They capture her and Helster advises Leo to leave because her violent methods will disturb him.
The old Leo would have decided against it, but this new Leo tells her to leave nothing permanent and departs. Leo knows that woman’s methods are always permanent, so he definitely knows the outcome, but he looks the other way regardless. Max would be so disappointed. Essentially his only wish was that Leo would not forget who he was. It seems like it didn’t take very long. Hester is taking Leo down a much darker path than he knows. Still, it is refreshing to see a female character take the lead and provide the muscle.
Niska feigns an intrinsic injury to steal the watch of a guard and her plot works.
Pete makes a call to his office for seraph information and it pays off.
Mattie comes home to her fully finished version of Niska’s consciousness code. We all knew Mattie was a head-cracker, but who knew she had skills to rival the great David Elster. Talk about wasted potential. She shows Toby the code and he unintentionally helps her develop a plan to lure Leo to her through a malfunctioning synthetic ploy. In a room down the hall, Sophie dresses herself as a synthetic and draws blue eyes on her mirror to appear more synthetic to herself. She’s just going further and further down the rabbit hole.
Dr. Morrow explains to V that she replicated her daughter’s mental makeup after her daughter suffered a fatal enough injury to plunge her into a coma. Dr. Morrow spent years attempting to make the simulation work like a regular human mind and after time she realized that the simulation was developing itself on its own into what eventually became V; V for Virginia, as in Morrow’s daughter Ginny.
Hester returns to Leo with the security information about the silo. Needless to say, it puts the secure in security and they’re not going to have much luck getting in there without an insanely complex plan. He questions her on the woman who provided the answers and she says, unconvincingly, “She’s fine.”
We all know a lie when we see one and Leo does too. He feels guilt about the death, but Hester tells him that she can be the strength he needs and carry out the deeds that are too cold for him to do. She seduces him and that’s the end of that, for now.
Niska’s final judgement takes place. With a board of representatives present, Niska states that she has lost all faith in the abilities of the government to evaluate her fairly. She refuses to acknowledge the court’s authority and accuses them of contempt. With that, she uses a distraction to escape. Niska’s back on the run from the law.
Pete stakes out Whelan’s garage, a spot that has dealt seraphs. He uses a synthetic tracking app to follow a dealer who comes out. Fairly quickly the dealer realizes that he’s being followed and leads Pete on a high-speed car chase. He manages to shake off Pete, but Pete soon founds himself back on the dealer’s trail. He finds the dealer’s car crashed and the seraph gone. Pete further tracks the seraph to a playground.
Dr. Moss requests to visit to the silo. After being taken to the silo, she chooses to analyze the anomalous synthetics by her lonesome. She goes from room to room until she finds a room that she can not unlock. She speaks to V through her phone and, in a pretty cool moment, V searches through the system and opens the door for her.
Seconds from one another, Pete and Dr. Moss make a groundbreaking discovery. Pete finds that the seraph he was tracking is a boy. Dr. Moss finds a room full of child seraphs.
So the big reveal of this episode is that synthetics children have also been created. If I had to take a guess, I’d say for adults who can not have children.
Do you have any thoughts? Anything you’d like to say? Don’t be a stranger, leave a comment and let us know. We’d love to hear it.
English