Cassandra’s attempts to conceal her human backstory only serve to pique Samantha’s curiosity even further, with ever more dangerous consequences for the Prill family.

Having enjoyed the opening episode of German A.I. thriller Cassandra, my concern was whether it really had anything new to offer to the genre aside from its retro framing device. As we move into the meat of the series this is still a fair question, but now the implausibility of the retro tech is starting nibble at my personal bungee of disbelief.

While it’s true that Hedy Lamarr came up with the principles behind modern Wi-Fi in the 1940s as a side hustle to her Hollywood acting career, in practical terms the technology didn’t become commonly available until the twenty-first century, plus anyone who owned an Amstrad 9512 Personal Computer Word Processor is also aware quite how bulky and useless computers were in the late 1980s let alone in the mid 1970s when the Cassandra Smart House is supposed to have been designed. Even in 2025, Cassandra’s A.I. skills would surely be welcome on any customer chatbot. I could have done with her last week, trying in vain to get a refund from Amazon for an undelivered tub of face cream.

Does it matter? Isn’t the series just asking the viewer to take the technology as read? You either buy into it or you don’t. The problem is, as the modern Prill Family find themselves ever more enmeshed in Cassandra’s vengeful web, even if we accept that Horst Schmidt (Franz Hartwig), back in the 1970s, came up with this kit decades ahead of its time, I find myself asking why Sam and David (Mina Tander and Michael Klammer) don’t just get it to a museum who would surely pay mega Euros for such groundbreaking computing technology.

I’m also struggling with how on earth Cassandra is powered without ever being plugged into the wall. Then there’s the matter of the internet. Without an interface to 5G or full fibre broadband and with the mobility skills of a 1960s Dalek it’s challenging to accept the robot as any kind of threat. Creator Benjamin Gutsche seems to be trying to dodge these questions in the hope that we won’t notice. Nerdy sci-fi addicts know our tech and we worry about this stuff. It’s amazing I can get to sleep at night!

If I seem to be taking it all too seriously, it’s because the story does have worthwhile nuances. Samantha’s gay son, Fynn, is caught in an unhealthy and abusive relationship with a closeted fellow student at his high school. As the drama cuts between the present day and the A.I.’s 1970s origin story, there’s an intriguing and at times disturbing thriller developing around the emotional inhibitions of an aspirational post-war German family.  All the script needs is a few expository lines from Gutsche to say: ‘It’s fine, I’ve got this’. Without at least a nod to its implausibility some serious storytelling is undermined by sci-fi laziness.

Verdict: There’s a lot to enjoy, but for Cassandra really to take-off I need to believe in all of it. Having said that, the hook at the end of episode three is a hair-raising one involving the Prills’ six year old daughter Juno (Mary Tölle) so I’m sticking in there for now! 7/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com