Almost Human - Recap: Dorian's Childhood Memories! Wait...

Episode 11 of Season 1 of Almost Human, “Disrupt,” centered around the concept of a “smart house,” a home secured by a holographic system that functioned much like the android robots aiding the police force. Having a personal digital butler is all fine and dandy until a super-hacker finagles a way into the system. Meanwhile, Dorian (Michael Ealy) butted heads with Rudy (Mackenzie Crook) after finding him tinkering away on his unconscious robo-brain. I’m all for any episode that has John (Karl Urban) and Valerie (Minka Kelly) working undercover as 2048 rave partygoers. Here is the Recap and Review of Season 1 Episode 11 of Almost Human, “Disrupt”!

To begin the recap, much of Episode 11 focused on Dorian’s concern over Rudy’s decision to invade his privacy as he recharged. While Dorian “slept,” Rudy began tinkering away on his internal processors. When Dorian awoke, however, Rudy was quick to come up with a cover-up. Allegedly, he’d decided to kill two birds with one stone and perform routine maintenance while Dorian slept. As John put it, think of it like having someone shave your face for you while you sleep. Creepy yet convenient! Dorian, meanwhile, was not amused. Perhaps more importantly, later in the episode Dorian seemed to malfunction, realizing that something Rudy had touched inside triggered odd childhood memories, small bits of visions, inside his processor. This would all be perfectly normal if Dorian was a human being like John, who’s been attempting to recall lost memories himself. Dorian the DRN, if you recall, had no childhood at all.

The central crime arc this week focused on a smart house hacker. A year before the start of Episode 11, a boy name Aaron was mistakenly killed by one particular family’s smart house due to some alleged malfunction. Having just hopped their fence in order to pass through for whatever reason, the boy was shot dead by the house’s laser technology. In the present, the couple received thousands upon thousands of death threats honoring the boy on the anniversary of his death. Before we knew it, though, the couple also suffered at the hands of their holographic computer butler, Sam, and the two were killed by their own home at the very same time on the very same night one year later. Later that evening, John and Dorian witnessed a massive citywide blackout orchestrated by a terrorist hacker group known as Disrupt. On the few screens left illuminated, Aaron was honored and the security system developers, Synturion, were publicly shamed.

At this point, we’d meet to new important figures in the investigation of the murder of this couple that tied back to Aaron’s death a year prior. First, John and Dorian met with the heads of Synturion. The woman in charge, Kay, was adamant that her system was developed with military grade technology that was expected to be un-hackable. As a young girl who’d experienced an assault after a break-in at her own home, she’s dedicated her life to protecting others using this new techonology. Valerie, meanwhile, had the uncomfortable task of questioning Aaron’s mother in order to see if she could be somehow involved. In truth, this just served as a heartbreaking scene that clued us in to the fact that Aaron was simply a kind computer geek without any friends whatsoever beyond those online. At this point, the reason behind his appearance in the family’s yard that night remained unknown.

Eventually, the blackout situation was tied back to a well-known terrorist organization known as Disrupt, who’d previously made a name for themselves condemning the danger technology brings in the wrong hands. For example, the threat of the Synturion smart houses. By tracing online video footage to the name of a master hacker most likely hired to do the deeds, Kennex and Stahl were off to seek out CrispinX, a man who, according to Rudy, threw notorious raves to celebrate his master hacks. Rudy used to be a decent hacker himself back in the day, if you were wondering, though he never got up the courage to weasel his way into one of these events.

Stahl and Kennex undercover as futuristic rave-goers was probably the most entertaining part of the episode. Though, the rave itself was a total bummer. What originally seemed like a sea of partiers actually turned out to be a few rooms full of virtual reality aficionados manufacturing a fake party. Behind it all, they found CrispinX, their esteemed leader. Neko was promptly arrested and taken in for questioning, not to mention the fact that he had a long list of illegal hacks traced back to him. Basically, it looked like Neko was going to be serving some serious time for orchestrating the blackout, but he denied being any part of the murders. In fact, he was adamant about the fact that Disrupt would never do such a thing either.

Another murder-by-smart house situation arose tipping the team off to the fact that this was indeed not a repeat accident but a planned act of vengeance. The next victim, a man who was suffocated to death using the fire prevention system meant to protect him in case of emergency, was the legal partner of Kay, the woman in charge of Synturion. Unfortunately for the hacker, leaving a trail is never good when trying to erase your footprints. Dorian and John managed to connect a duplicate email, a message with a very candid photo of Aaron attached, back to the murder of the couple that kicked off the episode. If the photo was truly candid, they could trace back the social networking tags attached to discover who it was that was cropped from the right side of the frame. “Do you feel safe?” read the only sentence captioning the picture. At this point, we could ask the hacker the same thing.

Neko the super-hacker ended up being an amazing help. In exchange for immunity, he agreed to hack into Aaron’s tablet in order to trace his communications on the Internet. Before long, he managed to crack the code surrounding the photo that had been circulating, a code that led straight back to a girl named Emily. Emily was a master hacker in her own right, and like Aaron, had very little friends outside of the world behind her computer screen. It seemed the team had their true target narrowed down thanks to some help from Neko, but a new message tracked in the system eventually tipped them off to the fact that Kay, the head of Synturion, was to become Emily’s next victim.

Valerie managed to deduce that Emily was hacking the system of Synturion from inside the building. As Kay finished her business upstairs and began to realize that she was coming under attack by her own program, Dorian and John made their way into the unsafe floors of the Synturion offices. The most interesting part of the final fight sequences was probably watching Neko battle Emily for control of the system from afar. John, cleverly deciding to fight fire with fire, suggested they create their own holographic army to battle the “Sams” around them. Thus, Neko duplicated John using the camera technology in the building, and John acted as his own personal holographic firing squad. Meanwhile, Dorian managed to render the final android out of commission by the main servers and located Emily. While the girl knew that Dorian, a DRN, would never let her harm herself, she held a gun to her own head and threatened suicide. She loved Aaron, but now realized that killing other would not bring him back. He was coming to see her the night that he was killed, a trip Valerie later noted was probably to assure Emily that she wasn’t alone in the world. In the end, the story was tragic, of course, but Emily still committed the crimes and was arrested.

Episode 11 closed with both a moment of closure and one of curious new beginnings. First, Valerie sat down with Aaron’s mother and revealed the massive amount of messages of support that had been sent Aaron’s way from lives he touched across the globe. On a show that is mainly about the dangerous threat of corrupt technology overrunning our world, this was a nice way to show that it can also do a whole lot of good.

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Finally, Rudy and Dorian had previously spoken about the strange childhood memory that had popped up in Dorian's head. Rudy recalled that he and Dorian used to speak before he was re-commisioned, though those memories were removed once he re-entered the police force officially. Rudy chalked up the childhood memories to glitches in interpreting past crimes. Later, however, Rudy informed John of the truth. Someone planted actual childhood memories directly into Dorian’s mind. Rudy closed the portal and removed what was purposely added, but we still don’t know who did this and why they did so.

What did you think of Almost Human, Season 1 Episode 11, “Disrupt”? Do you feel like this show is greatly improving now that the overarching plots are heating up? Are Dorian’s new memories connected to Insyndicate?

Thanks for reading my Recap and Review of Almost Human, Season 1 Episode 11, “Disrupt”!