Biohackers Season 1 is one of the fun shows where the cold open is a scene that actually
occurs towards the end of the season's timeline. So most of the events of Season 1 are the
lead up to that scene. And then there's the twist ending. Let's recap what we learned
from Season 1. One of the main characters is Professor Tanja
Lorenz. Her goal was to patent something very special in order to drastically change the
world. Lorenz goal was to effectively make humans immune from all genetic disorders and
disease. And she'd monetize that. The other main character is Emma. Emma's family
died when she was young, so she was raised in Sweden by her grandmother. And Emma goes
by a new name, Mia Akerlund, in order to keep her true identity secret.
Mia had a twin brother, Ben. But as children, Professor Lorenz experimented on her, Ben,
and 235 other children. Project Homo Deus. Mia was the only child to survive the project,
and as a result, Mia's blood is very special. She never gets sick.
But the experiment came at a cost. Her brother died from the project. During her brother's
funeral, Mia heard her father yelling at Lorenz. Her father tried to bring evidence of Project
Homo Deus to an unnamed journalist, but Lorenz chased him. Mia's father crashed the car,
and both he and Mia's mother died. But Mia survived. When Lorenz came up to the car and
grabbed the confidential information about Mia's brother, Mia played possum. So basically,
Mia grew up and her goal is to take down Lorenz. The first step was for Mia to attend the university
that Lorenz teaches at. Then Mia proved to be a special student. She got Lorenz to accept
her as a student assistant. And so, she got access to Lorenz's labs. And by chance, Mia
also started dating Lorenz's closest assistant, Jasper.
One of Lorenz's subjects bailed on a study, so Lorenz asked Mia for her saliva. That was
bad news because Mia's biometric data would have revealed that she was really Emma Engels,
the lone survivor of Project Homo Deus. So Mia changed her sample with a sample of her
roommate, Lotta. Unfortunately, Mia put the label on upside down, so Jasper was suspicious
that something had happened. Later, Mia conned her way into Lorenz house
by saying that she had to go poddy. Jasper had a health emergency, so Mia called Niklas
over to help. At the end, Mia printed out documents for Project Homo Deus, but she ran
out of time. So she left evidence in the printer. Luckily for her, Niklas had gone to the bathroom
and he noticed something was strange when Mia and Lorenz walked out, so he secretly
went into the study and retrieved the rest of the documents. That helped keep Mia's mission
a secret for the time being. Mia and Niklas then discussed her true past
and then went to a nursing home and asked Dr. Arnold Schumann about Project Home Deus
since his initials identified him as the lab technician of the project. Dr. Schumann told
Mia that the children in the experiment were not born with genetic disorders. Lorenz had
intentionally mutated the embryos and then experimented on them with a gene therapy that
had previously worked on animals. Unfortunately, it didn't work on any of the children except
for Mia. Meanwhile, Lorenz had seen the glow in the
dark party stuff on Mia, and later, Lorenz saw the glow in the dark party stuff on her
router, so Lorenz became suspicious of Mia. Previously, Lorenz had just chalked up Mia
s biometric data as being flawed, but at this point, she realized that Mia may have switched
out her DNA with someone else's DNA. So Lorenz told Jasper to keep his eye on Mia as she
might be working with the Ethics Commission. Speaking of Jasper, Jasper s situation was
unique. Jasper has Huntington s Disease and relies on Lorenz to keep him alive. On top
of that, Jasper's connection to Lorenz allows him to research the disease in hopes of a
cure. So Jasper is thankful for that help, and he is very loyal to Lorenz. Jasper found
a bunch of documents about Lorenz in Mia s room, and then Mia admitted to him that she
had swapped out her DNA sample. So Jasper ran Mia s DNA from a strand of her hair and
told Lorenz that Mia was spying on her. Ironically, Mia showed up to Lorenz house right after
that phone call. And right away, Mia admitted to Lorenz that she was actually Emma Engels,
and to her surprise, Lorenz confirmed as much with a new sample. Lorenz was ecstatic as
it meant that Project Homo Deus had actually worked!
Mia knew from Dr. Schumann that Lorenz had actually mutated their genes before the Homo
Deus experiment, but she pretended that she didn't know that. Instead, Mia thanked Lorenz
for saving her life in order to stay on Lorenz good side. Mia s new goal was to find out
what mutation was made to her in order to figure out who the other Homo Deus children
were. But Lorenz was on to her. She saw Mia run off with her own DNA information.
Chen-Lu helped Mia isolate the mutation while Niklas fought Jasper and stole his Access
Card to the Excellence Center. Mia then stole the DNA samples for the Homo Deus children
and got on a train to Berlin with Niklas so as to give the information to her journalist
contact. But if Mia exposed Lorenz, it would be the
end of Lorenz s research. Her lab would shut down. Since Jasper relies on Lorenz to stay
alive, and since he had seen a receipt for Mia and Niklas's train tickets in Niklas's
trash can, Lorenz had Jasper secretly board the train and release his genetically altered
mosquitos. The mosquitos spread the Coxsackie virus which
causes people to have heart-attack like symptoms. But Mia eventually woke up since her DNA is
special. Mia escaped the train and went to Jasper s lab to create the antibodies. Jasper
showed up, and Mia told him the truth about Lorenz, but Jasper did not believe her. So
he destroyed his own sample of antibodies and left. But then Mia's roommates showed
up and they recreated the antibodies from the little bit that Mia was able to collect.
The police showed up, but Lotta pretended to be Mia, which allowed Mia to escape.
Mia went to the hospital and gave the nurse the antibodies, but the antibodies didn't
work because it was a mutated virus. Lorenz's antibodies were never intended to work. Lorenz
had created the problem as an opportunity to use her new gene therapy on them, Homo
Deus. In other words, the victims of the mosquitos became new test subjects.
And on top of that, Lorenz leveraged those victims as a way of getting Mia to come back
with the Homo Deus data and samples. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Jasper
had gone to Lorenz's house and found out that everything Mia said was true. So he called
out Lorenz. She ratted him out to the police, telling them that he let the mosquitos loose.
Jasper escaped, but Mia showed up. Mia gave Lorenz back the DNA samples in exchange for
Homo Deus. And she used it to heal Niklas and the other victims. Lorenz then destroyed
both the DNA and the data from Homo Deus. But Jasper had already copied the data. So
Jasper sent that data to Emma, and Emma finally met up with her journalist contact, who turned
out to be Lorenz's old friend, Dr. Andreas Winter.
When Emma gave Winter the Homo Deus experiment data, he didn't use it to expose Lorenz. Instead,
he captured Emma and took her hostage. And he already had Professor Lorenz hostage as
well. That is how the season 1 ended. Pretty good. Season 2 drops later this week.
But before we go, one thing that we glossed over is that Mia suggested that her roommates
find the cure to Huntington s disease since they're really smart and Lotta's family is
very wealthy so they could finance and benefit off of it. Let's hope they do, for the sake
of Jasper.