Written by Scott Clifford
Having a bullet with your name on it as a scary proposition. You can’t dodge it, and you can’t outrun it. You can only hope that the shooter misses you or that the wall you’re hiding behind is thick enough to take the shot. In Almost Human, John Kennex comes across a case where a man is murdered by a bullet that can follow its target in any direction. How do John and Dorian deal with this phenomenon? Read on and find out.
This week’s episode starts off in an anger management counseling session from the future. It is a future where the coffee is made exclusively by Keurig machines. John quips about how everyone around him has real issues in order to avoid dealing with his own problems. Then he meets up with Dorian, Detective Paul and Paul’s MX unit. That MX unit insists on a glitchy theory that someone shot him from miles away in the air (a statistical probably of .04%). Then the unit tries to tell John that he’s superior to Dorian and Dorian should be replaced. So John does what he always does to his problems. He shoots them.
After going through the usual “you’re too hot-headed” routine, the gang finds that the victim has a wife named Kira Larson. Dorian then deciphers that the bullet works by gathering data of a potential target through the city’s extensive surveillance network. Kira is afraid that a woman named Natalie forced her husband to do something against his will or maybe he was having an affair with him. Things get strange when it turns out that no one named Natalie works for the company that Kira points the gang out to. On the ‘B’ side, Maldonado tries to get information about John’s accident out of an imprisoned Syndicate member. The man offers to give up information if they let him walk. Maldonado refuses but it’s a tantalizing tidbit that has been needed for this entire season.
Things get interesting when John and Dorian ask Kira to confirm the information that she has on Natalie. As they talk, a bullet comes twists and turns the city skyline in order to get to Natalie’s skull. It’s a visually pleasing sequence that ends with Dorian calculating the angles on the fly and blocking the bullet for the victim. The bullet causes Dorian to forget how to speak English but otherwise he’s fine. Natalie is thankful but thinks that her husband was cheating on her. John goes to her husband’s safe to find that he was being blackmailed. Natalie escapes police custody into an underground Scrubber facility. John and Dorian rush to the scene and have to fight off black market gunmen in order to save her. They end up shooting the mysterious woman whose real name is Maya. To wrap things up, Natalie gives John a pen as a final gift for solving the case. Apparently, writing with a pen is rare in Almost Human. Who knew?
This episode had a lot of new information to take in. It’s pretty obvious that this was supposed to air earlier in the season in the original line-up. That being said, it’s strong, funny, and develops character relationships. It’s great to see that John is able to score brownie points with Valerie by writing her a love note with a pen. The antagonist of the episode is practically non-existent and everything gets tied up a little too cleanly for my taste. It’s still worth a watch though.
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