Summary
“Certainty” digs up plenty of damning information from the past as Mia and Niklas form an unlikely investigatory partnership, and Jasper goes digging himself.
This recap of Biohackers season 1, episode 4, “Certainty”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Check out our spoiler-free season review.
For once, we begin in the present day, with Mia waking up in Biohackers episode 4 to find the flat suspiciously empty of her eccentric housemates, and a topless Niklas calling her “Emma” rather than Mia. Obviously-a-dream Niklas berates her for not telling the truth to Jasper, who he promptly turns into. Then he becomes Lorenz as Ben Engels sits nearby. If it’s not a flashback, it’s a dream; this show just can’t resist a trope-y opening.
The real flat isn’t any less weird than the dream one. Chen-Lu has a date with Double Felix, who apparently is only interested in investing in her plants, but a bitter Ole has tickets for the Bundesliga and supposedly isn’t bothered by this obvious date (he clearly is). Mia, meanwhile, is still begging Niklas for the files back, but she’s getting ghosted.
At least Jasper is okay in Biohackers episode 4. Lorenz puts on her best concerned voice when telling him he didn’t have to come into work but then pushes him about the router and what Mia knows about their work. He realizes that she’s getting suspicious, so confesses to having reset the router himself, but this is a world-renowned scientist he’s talking to — the fact he thinks she’d buy that excuse is pretty perplexing. Shortly afterward, Lorenz tasks Monique with pulling up Mia’s CV and asks her if she’s noticed anything weird about her, which she apparently has.
Meanwhile, Mia goes to see Niklas to beg for the files back, but he’s not playing along unless she explains why she wants them so bad. Instead, she goes to the library and looks up Project Homo Deus, but no luck there either. Jasper sees her there, explaining that he’s doing research on how to put a synthetic virus into a mosquito (uh-oh). He also tells her about the router, and her maniac response totally gives away that she’s been up to no good. But he’s totally insistent he can trust her, which means he obviously can’t, and I suppose in a way we know how that ends up.
Nevertheless, Mia returns to Niklas with a confession about the papers: She’s Emma Engels, and Ben was her twin brother, but he fell sick and died when he was ten. Lorenz apparently did something to him, and their father found out — this was the argument we saw in a previous episode. He had evidence of what happened, which is why they were being chased, which led to the crash. Lorenz believes Emma Engels died in that crash. She went to her grandma’s and got her new name, but in the process, she lost everything, and she doesn’t know why — she suspects the answer is in those files, but if Lorenz finds out who she is, it’ll all have been for nothing. She has a journalist contact in Berlin who wants to help, but she needs proof.
Monique snitches to Lorenz about the conversation she had with Mia about off-site storage; in response, Lorenz requests Mia’s DNA profile. Later, when Jasper asks permission to leave, she shows him a 3D composite of Mia’s face assembled from her supposed DNA profile. Lorenz thinks she might be a spy sent by the Ethics Committee and wants Jasper to think about what’s at stake, even though he insists she’s wrong.
Having apparently teamed up now, Mia and Niklas head out in Biohackers episode 4 on the trail of the doctor who conducted tests at a fertility clinic Lorenz worked at — his name is Arnold J. Schumann, which Niklas recalls from memory after his “research”.
Both Ole and Chen-Lu return to the flat after both being let down with their respective endeavors — Ole was sold fake Bundesliga tickets, and Double Felix wasn’t interested in Chen-Lu’s project at all. They decide to watch the game on TV together. Jasper turns up looking for Mia, but obviously she’s gallivanting with Niklas, which when he calls her she lies about. Chen-Lu invites him in to watch the game, though.
On the train, there’s still tension between Mia and Niklas; the former insists she isn’t just using Jasper, but the latter isn’t convinced. He thinks she should tell Jasper the truth, but she reckons that’d be too risky, which given his treatment it’s difficult to disagree with. But Jasper might well be able to figure out the truth on his own, since while he’s sat watching football, he’s mentally running through all the stuff Lorenz told him about Mia’s suspicious behavior, including when she blatantly swapped her DNA sample. He excuses himself to go to the bathroom and snoops around in Mia’s bedroom, eventually discovering the hidden documents in the speaker.
This is intercut with Mia and Niklas arriving to see Dr. Schumann, complete with flowers, though the man clearly has some form of dementia. He’s deeply suspicious of Niklas, so Mia sends him for a little walk while she solicits Dr. Schumann’s expert opinion on Project Homo Deus. He happily tells her he has six children from three women, apropos of nothing, but she’s determined to get through to him. She says she’s Emma Engels and he insists that’s impossible; he recalls Emma and Ben being twins, and Mia presses him — quite cruelly, to be honest — into sharing what else he knows. They wanted to cure genetic diseases, apparently, but he says that Lorenz deliberately made subjects sick in order to test the research after its success on animals. The therapy didn’t work, though. None of the children made it, including Mia’s brother. Yet Mia survived. How that’s possible is something Dr. Schumann himself ponders, but Mia gets up and leaves without giving him an answer.
Jasper also leaves Ole and Chen-Lu strung out on homebrew. On the train ride home, Mia tells Niklas that she intends to make Lorenz suffer for the rest of her life, but she too wonders how she was the only one who survived. He says he’ll help her find out — if she wants. But she says she has to see Jasper first.
She does. He’s stewing in a bar, drinking, and asks her outright who she is for real. She admits to giving a false DNA sample with a convenient excuse for doing so, but he isn’t buying it. He walks off and leaves her to her fabrications, but a flashback to him poking around her room also reveals that he took one of her hairs to construct a genuine DNA profile. He calls Lorenz and tells her that Mia faked her identity and is spying on her. When asked what she knows, he says, “Too much.” Lorenz heads downstairs to find Mia on her doorstep. Lorenz greets her, but Mia responds, “My name isn’t Mia.” Another cliffhanger, and Biohackers season 1, episode 4 feels very much like we’re hurtling towards the finish line.
