Better Than Us – Season 1 Episode 8 Recap & Review

The Mid-Season Finale

We begin episode 8 with Victor’s wife Svetlana reading a speech for the Early Retirement Project to her bot son. As Victor himself arrives, he discusses the speech with her before leaving. It’s here she turns to her son and promises they’ll be rid of him soon.

While Sonia and Alla take Arisa to Cronos to dress her up in new clothes, Georgy finds a strange man asleep on the bench outside. He warns him that Arisa will kill them all. He phones through to Detective Varlamov and tells him what he just witnessed while Alla and the others discuss matters with Victor.

Georgy speaks to Egor back home who tells him he doesn’t want to leave for Australia, he wants to stay for Jeanna. His Father warns him against getting too involved with her, given her ties with The Liquidators. It’s here we learn the mole inside The Liquidators has fed back Bars ‘plan to Gleb, advising him he needs to kill them in order to finally silence them.

In an interesting turn of events, Arisa tells Alla that she lied to Varlamov and she has actually killed two people, admitting to murdering Sergei. It’s here we cut back to the hospital and find the other worker admitting as much to the Detective. Alla begins to get nervous, telling the bot to bring her something from the shop while she speeds off, back home. Varlamov teams up with Georgy as they head off to the department store to try and find Arisa, who is AWOL since initially arriving earlier in the day. As they check the security footage, Arisa arrives back home where Alla tells her she’s dangerous and broken.

Bars learns the hard way that he needs to follow orders, as Gleb shoots a gun next to his head, prompting him to fall in an open grave. As Gleb warns against a rebellion, a digger scoops up a mound of dirt and drops it on him. As he returns back to the bar, he learns the truth about Stryga and hits him repeatedly in the head with a pole, killing him instantly. He tells Jeanna there’s no one they can trust now, blood covering his face.

As Egor heads to the bar, he finds police at the scene of the crime. As they head off, Egor attempts to sneak past the police, eventually running up to the bots by the ambulance to be sure it’s not Jeanna that’s been killed.

Back at Cronos, Victor enhances his robotic son to please Svetlana and it’s here we learn he’s seen the security footage from the child, in particular her promises to be rid of him soon. As his wife returns home, he confronts her over the footage and rips her wig off, staring her dead in the face. He asks who the real competitors are but she refuses to tell him, eventually informing her she won’t host the show.

He decides to take drastic measures and scrap the bot child instead to teach her a lesson but as he gets into his car, he finds Arisa sitting in the back seat watching him. She tells him she needs to remove the main threat to the family, and proceeds to start choking him out until he presses an alarm and stops Arisa in her tracks.

With Arisa finally going off the deep end and embracing her murderous tendencies, the ending leaves things wide open for where the series may go from here. The various different power plays and intricate relationships work really well to add some depth to the show and the longer Better Than Us goes, the less its felt like other android-centric stories. In a way, this feels much more geared toward the espionage/thriller genre, with the various players dancing around Arisa as the central character.

Quite where this sci-fi thriller is likely to go from here for the remaining 8 episodes remains to be seen, but for now there’s enough to make Better Than Us a highly enjoyable watch.