Beating The System
Episode 3 of Omniscient begins with Nina and her best friend Olivia getting up to sing karaoke. The rest of the candidates follow suit, and while they enjoy the dancing and drinking, Nina heads home to finish her project while Dani arrives and tells her he keeps dreaming of their Father. After seeing how awkward passion and romance is with the drones buzzing around, Nina tells Dani she hasn’t given up, especially as she’s working with Judite to get to the bottom of what happened to their Father. Heading to work, Nina shows off her experiment which sees five drones working together but increasing their spacial awareness to avoid bumping into one another. Unfortunately the increased awareness also makes the drone slower, consequently resulting in the experiment being a failure. She beats herself up about it but Vinicius offers her words of encouragement and admits that she’s currently 2nd in the rankings. The candidates continue on to their next assignment, which sees them tasked with one on one conversations with criminals. All of these men and women are seemingly against the System and after telling their stories, Nina heads home and learns that their Father’s cause of death has been listed as “natural causes”, which of course is not correct given he was shot in the back. She takes this evidence to Judite who also realizes this has all been faked. Telling Nina to remain vigilant, our protagonist heads home and attempts to remain calm before her big test the next day. Olivia’s test surrounding physical attacks has some major bugs though, as Nina shifts uncomfortably while watching. Olivia heads home empty-handed while Nina learns she got the job and passed the test along with fellow candidate Silvio. At home, Judite heads over and helps her create a circuit-board; their self-proclaimed “pandora’s box”. Blindfolding herself, Nina outsmarts the drone by using exposed lighting to confuse the nano-bot and create the dummy circuit board she needs by touch and memory. At work the next day, Nina is called into the office because Dani has taken matters into his own hands and attempted to sabotage the company. That evening, she sits him down and talks cryptically about what she’s doing in terms of finding out the truth and promises him she’ll get some answers, which is where the episode ends. The bizarre musical choices return this episode and it does contrast with what’s happening on-screen, at times diminishing the tension. It’s something old shows in the 70’s and 80’s had issues with, particularly Doctor Who which utilized a very similar musical score during investigations. In terms of the story though, there’s some good stuff here and the building mystery and slow untangling of the intricate knot built by the presumed invincible System is a really nice touch. The tasks here do feel a little similar to the structure seen in fellow Brazilian series 3% but there’s enough differences to keep this one unique and it certainly sets things up nicely for the second half of the show.
