Summary
Young love built on trauma, untrusting friends, and the evil that surrounds Mia, it’s all getting to be a bit too much by episode four, “Forget,” of season two of Christian Ditter’s Biohackers.
This recap of Netflix’s Biohackers season 2, episode 4, “Forget,” contains spoilers.
Something has changed by the second half of season two of Biohackers, a development that is reminiscent of the first half of season one: Mia (Luna Wedler) and Jasper (Adrian Julius Tillmann) are once again in love. It makes little sense after she dumped him for his roommate, Niklas (Thomas Prenn). They have forgiven each other for the betrayal, the lies, and the cheating, somehow drawn together by their common enemies. Their experiences become intertwined due to Professor Lorenz’s (Jessica Schwarz) exploits. And by episode four, “Forget,” they trust one another again.
Their love also is built from Mia’s trauma, her lack of remembrance for her life before she was Mia Akerlund, when she was still Emma Engels. Jasper, who has known her for less than six months, is the person tasked with helping this family-less girl remember. Though he wasn’t the one that helped her discover Lorenz’s atrocities, he’s the one that pulled her out of darkness and that showed up when needed, even if there doesn’t seem to be a reason for her to throw Niklas to the side. Their love is simultaneously sweet and cold, bonded by one person’s perfect immune system and another’s failing one.
Outside of an initial, loving 15 minutes to begin this midseason episode, the rest of the 40 minutes drags. Mia and Jasper are just researching Andreas Winter (Benno Fürmann) and Wolfgang von Fürstenberg (Thomas Kretschmann) with the help of Chen-Lu (Jing Xiang) and Oli (Sebastian Jakob Doppelbauer). Chen-Lu and Oli remain committed friends in the face of imminent danger. They hack Winter’s car to give them previous GPS locations, and find that he spent time going to an abandoned shed on the Fürstenberg property.
To distract Winter, they recruit Lorenz, who used to have a fling with the journalist back at university. They go to dinner, and Lorenz alerts Winter that she knows what happened. Schwarz and Fürmann are wonderful in the scene, a chess match between exes in which neither knows what the other knows, and what they’re willing to do with such information. There’s a level of corruption and depravity between the two of them, a connection rooted in the idea that the ends definitely justify the means. They care deeply about science, but not just that, about furthering humanity through scientific risks. To them, the rewards will always outweigh the cost, even if Lorenz is positioned at this dinner as being on the “good side.”
“Forget” falters in its final scene, though, which shows Jasper showing up to the Fürstenberg mansion, telling the Baron, “We have a problem.” The suggestion that Jasper is in on this plot towards Mia shouldn’t even be a possibility. He’s flipped back and forth between good and evil multiple times since the first season. Not everyone in Mia’s life can be evil, and it’s absurd to think the audience will fall for it. And if Jasper really does turn out to be on the side of Wolfgang and Winter, then the progression of his and Mia’s relationship loses all meaning.
Cliffhangers have the power to keep audiences engaged, especially those bingeing a series that drops as a single piece of content, like the second season of Biohackers. It’s six episodes that you can watch continuously, over four hours of biological thrills. But there’s a cap on these endings before your audience loses faith that anything in this world is stable. It can’t be pure chaos or pure evil. And that absurdity pushes this fourth episode below the quality of the first three episodes of the season.
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