Planting The Bug
Episode 4 of Omniscient begins with reporters swarming Dani’s house as he comes out and tells them he lied about blaming the company for his Father’s murder. Leaving the scene with the reporters buzzing and desperate for answers, he approaches Nina and scolds her for not telling him about her plan beforehand. At work, Nina learns the machines talk to one another with no human interaction. Knowing that the Main Computer speaks a different language, Nina heads out to the city outskirts and talks to Judite about what she’s found, begging her for help and to head into the tech firm and bug the system. Reluctantly, she agrees to help. Nina and Vinicius grow closer together after this, hooking up before he eventually turns the conversation on the topic of her brother, who happens to be living in the sandwich van he’s working from. Outside the company, Vinicius asks Nina whether she’s okay and tries to get her to open up. She remains guarded though, and goes on to give Judite instructions on how to carry out the hack inside the company, including infiltrating a group and planting a bug. Judite takes a big risk and heads in, placing this disk under the desk while Nina tries to track her progress from the bathroom. Breathing heavily and ever-aware of the drone watching her, after the meeting Judite admits she wasn’t able to finish the job and begins panicking about her fingerprints and suspecting she’ll be sussed out and reprimanded. That evening, Vinicius and Nina head to a meditation class together where the group take it in turns to tell their stories. Vinicius becomes distracted and heads off to a strange place inside his head before Nina takes her place inside the circle and relays her inner-demons. She follows her Dad from room to room, before the murdered figure on the floor transforms into the various different people in her life, including Olivia, Judite and Daniel. She manages to spook everyone in the room but as she comes back to her conscious self, Vinicius pretends that everything is fine. Nina attempts to find a work-around to Judite’s issue, taking up woodworking to fix her problem, while Vinicius arrives at her house later that evening and lets her know he got the job. At work, Nina puts her skills into action and fishes out the tracker Judite hid in the wood while Vinicius heads in to investigate the anomaly Carolina mentioned. As he does, he finds the area Nina glued over and as he pries further, finds the hole and realizes she was inside the room. As he sighs, he seemingly knows she’s up to something, leaving big question marks hanging over Nina and whether she’ll solve the investigation or not. Given the amount of emphasis Vinicius has had in the story, I wouldn’t be surprised if either him or Ricardo are the ones behind the murder. For now though, the show keeps up a good dose of mystery and the editing during the segments involving Nina studying allow the artistic elements to shine too. The scenes with Judite trying to bug the room were pretty intense, while the reveal at the end was a nice touch too and certainly leaves scope for this to progress in an interesting direction going forward. For now though, Omniscient continues to deliver the goods. While it may not be the best sci-fi show of the year, it is a solid one nonetheless and has enough intrigue with the story to keep you coming back for more.
