Better Than Us – Season 1 Episode 3 Recap & Review

Prying Eyes

We begin episode 3 of Better Than Us with one of the synthetics glitching out on the street before cutting to Georgy who awakens to find Arisa playing with Sonya on the rooftop. She tells him the synthetic is now theirs but, less than amused, he contacts the authorities to take the bot away. Spying him from a distance, Georgy’s wife Alla sees Arisa bundle into Georgy’s car and immediately assumes she’s her ex-husband’s lover. Determined to find out the truth, she heads inside the house and bugs the place while they’re out, setting up cameras to spy on him from afar.

Meanwhile, forensics appear at the morgue, along with a suspicious Detective Varlamov who mentions the convenience of the fire. As he digs deeper, he notices the computer chip still inside the android – immediately noticing this is a copy-cat’s doing and not actually The Liquidator’s handy-work.

Georgy drops Arisa off with some engineers who tell him she may have a malfunction given she isn’t registered to anyone. While Sonya laments her Father’s plan, eventually running after Arisa as she’s taken away, prompting the bot to charge forward and save her from a speeding truck. This happens to be enough to let Arisa come with them for now.

Viktor continues negotiations around the future of Arisa, with his Father-In-Law Losev giving him a few days to find the bot or look for another job. As the pressure begins mounting on them, Detective Varlamov is convinced there’s more to the Sergey story and refuses to let it go. He arrives at Georgy’s and asks Sonya where her Father is, learning he’s not actually home, only Arisa is.

As the media and police begin building more evidence toward the arson attack at the morgue, Egor takes his Grandfather’s aging android to the Bot group and is pressured into cutting his chip out. As the group celebrate Egor’s victory, they string up bots by the neck and throw them off the roof as the Liquidators hack communications and appear on billboards, speaking their propaganda through loud-speakers.

As Georgy heads home, Varlamov accuses him of tampering and concealing evidence while a drone whizzes around the house searching for clues. Georgy reluctantly allows him to do so until Arisa interjects and tells him he needs a court order to do that. Managing to rid themselves of him for now, Arisa unnervingly asks Georgy to play a game, with cryptic clues in the oven to begin with.

As the episode ends, we see Igor dressing a bot up as Arisa in a bid to fool the investors.

Once again Better Than Us delivers a well-paced episode, this time with more screen-time for Detective Varlamov. His steely determination certainly makes him a compelling character and the continued storylines progress well here. The Liquidator demonstration is arguably the best part of the episode, despite the bot’s similarities to Odi in Humans and this, combined with the solid special effects, make Better Than Us an intriguing and nicely developing series.