Summary
“Suspicion” proves a fitting title as Mia takes her investigating to Lorenz’s home, and more worrying information about Jasper is revealed.
This recap of Biohackers season 1, episode 3, “Suspicion”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Check out our spoiler-free season review.
As is becoming a trend, Biohackers episode 3 opens in flashback, returning us to the scene of the crash that took the lives of Mia’s parents. We see her dig the shattered glass from the wound that left the scar Jasper was questioning in the previous episode, and see her beat a rock harmlessly against the driver’s side window. Suddenly, we’re back in the present-day, as Mia stares at Lorenz so intently she snaps her pencil. You’ve got to hate it when that happens.
With her new backstage lab access, Mia tries to use her keycard to access the archive, but she’s interrupted by Monique. The classic bluff — “I’ll just tell Lorenz…” — gets her inside. The archive is full of glass-fronted storage cabinets, like a freezer aisle for human DNA. Mia types various names into the archive computer but gets no matches — as Monique interrupts and explains, only the DNA samples are kept here, not corresponding charts. Those are kept with everything else at Lorenz’s house.
Jasper is up to no good — we see him filling a syringe with a suspicious-looking blue liquid — but Mia’s none the wiser as they go on a date to a “hacked version” of a harvest festival. Chen-Lu, Lotta, and Ole are also in attendance, as is Double Felix, much to the latter’s dismay. Jasper skins up and shares the joint with Mia, both of them spreading fluorescence over each other like they’re finger-painting little kids. High as kites, Mia and Jasper cycle down the street and laugh at chocolate ice cream.
Jasper takes Mia back to Lorenz’s house and she blags her way into using the bathroom. The crib is absolutely ridiculous, full of austere modern art and glass walls and so much wood. Mia, probably far too high for this reconnaissance mission, wanders into Lorenz’s office, where Jasper inexplicably leaves her to her own devices. She accesses Lorenz’s computer and tries to brute-force her password to no success (“It was worth a try,” she mutters, after typing in “B*tch”.) By the time she leaves, Jasper has gone walkabout, and the place is lit an ethereal blue. He’s downstairs in the lab, where Jasper has a tank of mosquitoes that he has modified to transmit viruses more efficiently. He explains how creatures that have been modified have red eyes so that they can be identified. “Aren’t you worried about a pandemic?” Mia asks, not unreasonably given the current climate. Jasper explains all the viral antidotes are stored here as well, then he has a mild panic attack and needs to lay down. Mia springs into action and gives him a pill concoction from Lorenz’s bathroom cabinet, but he says he can’t go to the hospital. He instructs her to call Niklas instead, which she does. He reiterates that Jasper can’t go to the hospital.
Niklas arrives promptly in Biohackers episode 3, and he and Mia carry him upstairs and dump him in a bath of cold water. Niklas explains that Jasper has Huntington’s and that if the hospital finds out he’s helping himself they’ll close down the lab and he’ll die. With Jasper chilling, Niklas explains that Jasper has been working on a gene treatment for years, alongside Lorenz, which Niklas sees as essentially blackmail. He reckons that if a treatment is developed she’ll charge a million Euros for it, essentially prohibiting those who need it from using it. Nonetheless, Niklas calls Lorenz for help and forces Mia to talk on the phone despite the fact she’s determined not to in case it has repercussions. They have to synthesize the antisense strand since Jasper apparently went too far with his gene vector. In other words, they need to make an antidote.
Mia, smart as she is, messes this up, so she needs to turn to Chen-Lu for help, who is understandably frantic about the legal implications of meddling with the human genome. Mia, at least, is the one who pumps the syringe into his veins, which prompts another flashback. In this one, young Mia’s grandmother tells her that she’s coming with her, “far, far away, to another place.”
Chen-Lu and Mia share a hug of thanks, which even the emotionally repressed Chen-Lu gets pretty involved in. That leaves Mia and Niklas to discuss how Mia isn’t really a careerist nutcase like Lorenz after all since he can’t help but see the similarities. She tells him he’s dead wrong, though. Jasper wakes up right on time to break up the argument, apparently “all good”, and Lorenz arrives home, prompting Mia to “clean the library”. She has one last root around, finally finding and unplugging the internet router. Lorenz would like to speak to her in private, which doesn’t bode well.
Apparently, whatever is going on with her and Jasper, he should have let her in — what happened has to stay between them, for obvious reasons, since this kind of medicine doesn’t happen anywhere but here. Mia claims to have sent her an email relating to the trial, but the WiFi is down, obviously. Mia peers over Lorenz’s shoulder while she accesses the computer, and Lorenz notices the fluorescent patch on her arm. “It’s from a party,” Mia explains, and Lorenz snootily responds, “You have time for that?”
Nevertheless, Mia bolts back to Lorenz’s now unlocked computer and looks up the info for Ben Engels, which is related to something called Project Homo Deus. She prints the file off, and predictably the printer is out of paper. She hastily replaces it just as Lorenz notices Mia’s missing and sets about looking for her. Mia also pulls up the Emma Engels document and prints that as well, but she’s forced to try and cancel it halfway through. She leaves, and the remaining pages slide out, to be found by Lorenz when she returns. Niklas, though, wise that something’s amiss, sneakily grabs the pages. He confronts Mia about them but she isn’t exactly forthcoming, so he keeps them and drives off.
Left to her own devices, Lorenz finds Mia’s fluorescent fingerprint on her router cable. Oops.
Biohackers season 1, episode 3 cuts once again to the train, where we see that Jasper is also aboard, apparently without the knowledge of Mia and Niklas. And he isn’t alone — he has his disease mosquitos with him. As “Suspicion” ends, he twists off the lid of the jar they’re in and leaves them to do their work.
