Better Than Us (humans)

Watching Better Than Us, or Better Than Humans, that is, Лучше, чем люди in Russian. Nowadays it seems to me that it’s rather easy to be better than humans: it is enough not to be humans. Hence, even a robot can be better, even if it’s the dumb, basic one.

As all TV shows, this one too needs to inject splinters of stupidity and inexplicable blindness into the characters in order to build suspense, sort of, and to avoid that plots and counter-plots get uncovered too soon, making the show shorter by reducing the amount of maybe-possible scenes.

Like the following spoiler — possible spoiler alert for those who are enjoying the show from the beginning: maybe it’s better you don’t read this.

Spoiler alert!

Varlamov had an hemorrhage because of the ingestion of warfarin — which a Cronos mole (a police man) slipped into his tea in order to make it impossible for him to intervene in the appointment Safronov (Сафронов) had with Bars. He made a colleague believe that the pills were good medicines, and the colleague agreed to put them in the tea. The mole and this very same colleague (whose name I can’t recall) go instead of Varlamov. The usual Gleb, the Cronos fixer, is there ready to shoot. The police man whose name I don’t remember calls the hospital and is informed that Varlamov was poisoned. Of course he realizes that it could have been the mole, the one he’s with in that operation, and asks him about it. And of course he gets killed. Later, the mole reported that Safronov killed the police man. And Varlamov as well as the police woman (Irina?) who is kindly worried about his health, believed him, despite they both know now that Varlamov was poisoned, and of course it’s impossible that it was Safronov — hence, there must be someone who did it, who could put pills in the tea, and that can be only a police man in the precinct. They don’t analyse this fact: it seems like it never happened. For normal people, it would be the first question: who did it? Who could do it? Then one would see something odd in the death of the police man allegedly by Safronov’s hands, and would think about a mole instantly.

The sudden realization of such a fact would have shortened the story making it impossible to build scenes which comes later. Hence, as usual, characters need to be stupid and blind sometimes, more than one would expect, in order to keep the story going.

To me, this kind of easy shortcuts are just annoying, but they are also way too common in all this kind of shows. Sometimes we can think better than the characters because we are outside the story, and we know things they don’t know.

But in cases like this, it’s different: the character knows very well what happened to him, and why (warfarin). A real character would think about who could do it the very moment he knows why he was in the hospital. And he would become suspicious.