Power Plays
With the car upside down and Gleb still alive, episode 5 of Better Than Us sees Arisa damaged and motionless on the ground as our goon calls for help. Arriving back at the office battered and bruised, he requests more money as he relays the murderous rampage of the android in the previous episode. With cuts and bruises all over her, Arisa is brought back online where she immediately grabs Igor before she’s shut down again. With Varlamov determined to see Egor go down for the good, the other police officers try to talk him around the aggressive stance he’s taking with the case. He’s having none of it though and doubles down on his determined grip on seeing Egor take the brunt of The Liquidator’s work. It’s a bold tactic and one that certainly pays off, as Georgy comes and sees him, revealing the truth about Crono and what they were covering up with Sergey’s death. In order to let Egor go, Varlamov tells him he needs to write a letter of confession and go to prison for an unspecified amount of time. With the bot malfunctioning, Victor tells the team to have the Arisa-dummy jump infront of traffic before heading back to the drawing board, and the real Arisa. She tells them that she’s registered with a family, which prompts Victor to tell the team to bring her family into the office. En-route to signing the confession, Egor and Georgy are picked up by Gleb who takes them to the Crono boss. He offers Georgy a job while Egor sits in the lobby with Gleb, who reassures him he won’t be heading back to confinement any time soon. After making sure his house is free of bugs and cameras, the entire family reconvenes, at least temporarily until things die down. With Grandpa out the hospital, the family have a picnic together before Egor speaks one on one with his Grandpa. He spews the same rhetoric about bots taking jobs before being interrupted and told not to throw his life away for silly ideology or trying to impress a girl. As the episode ends, Georgy thinks over the shattered remnants of his family life and Arisa’s offer of being his romantic partner for the time being. As Cronos and Detective Varlamov both interrupt the familial plot around android Arisa, some interesting and thought provoking ideas come to the forefront here as the series progresses. The idea of love between man and machine is something we’ve seen before time and again but here it feels particularly intriguing given the time the show is taking to build these questions up in the background. The clever inclusion of Egor talking about jobs being taken and fear of the unknown are catalysts for many dangerous ideologies and it certainly works well here to give Egor’s character, and The Liquidators, more depth. With an open ending, who knows what direction the show will take next but right now, Better Than Us leaves the door wide open for the coming episodes.
