Omniscient
Created by Pedro Aguilera
Written by Pedro Aguilera, Guilherme Freitas, Ludmila Naves, Maria Shu, Thais Fujinaga
Directed by Júlia Jordão
Starring Carla Salle Sandra Corveloni, Jonathan Haagensen, Guilherme Prates, Luana Tanaka, Marcello Airoldi, Marco Antônio Pâmio
Nina’s city is one of the safest places on Earth. Despite being a major metropolitan area, Nina’s police force has an investigative arm of just one person. Her employer, a company called Omniscient, makes little drones smaller than a housefly, and each drone is assigned to an individual in the city, and reports back if the individual engages in any criminal activity. Nina (Carla Salle) is working as an intern in Omniscient’s programming department, a promising career start based on Nina’s strong programming skills and the fact that her father (Inácio, played by Marco Antônio Pâmio) is the retired head of the company’s maintenance department, a much-beloved figure with the company.
Omniscient promises both security and privacy, claiming that at no point can any human see what the drones see. While the population is seemingly willing to accept this trade off, it’s apparent without being obvious that everyone seems to be aware of the exact location of their drone at any given instant, and glance apprehensively when engaged in any activity that might be deemed criminal. Serious crime is nearly non-existent, but the trade off is that the social approbation of trivial crimes has increased. Littering could make you unemployable.
But the system is seemingly infallible, and people adjust to it, or move outside the metro area into the wild areas where there are no drones. Yes, there is an option, although Omniscient would like to end it.
Nina is in the final stages of her internship, hoping to land a permanent position. She has specialized in improving the code for the drones, making them more resilient and reactive when confronted with vagaries such as extreme heat or cold, turbulence, electromagnetic fields, and so on.
The day she tests for her position, Nina returns home to find her father dead on the floor in the kitchen, shot in the back, a clear case of murder. His drone didn’t report it (an AI-type distinction is needed here: murder is a crime, getting murdered is not) but what of the drone for the killer? Why didn’t it report the crime?
Nina and her brother, Daniel (Guilherme Prates), seek answers. The city’s detective, Judite Almeida (Sandra Corveloni) becomes a critical factor in their search.
The system isn’t infallible, although the ways Nina finds around the system are both clever and credible, and of course the killer found a way around it, too. Nina must also outwit her friends and bosses at the company, who will not be overjoyed to learn someone gamed the system and killed someone—especially a company icon like Inácio.
I’ve developed a fair bit of respect for Brazilian SF offerings. They’re uniformly intelligent, well-directed, with at least solid acting and arresting set design. Omniscient has all of these. I do recommend turning off the English dub for the show (it’s dire) and listen to the original Portuguese as spoken by the actors, and just use the subtitles if you need them. The actors are good, and a lot of the show is in the voice tones.
This is a six parter, averaging about 45 minutes each, and at the end you’ll be wanting more. I strongly suspect a second season is planned.
Carla Salle will remind the viewer of Úrsula Corberó Delgado, from the Spanish hit series, Money Heist. Not just the haircut; she brings the same combination of innocent sensuality and hard-bitten determination to the show that made Tokyo such a winning character. Salle has a solid cast backing her.
Now on Netflix.