Review: Biohackers, season 1

Biohackers is a German language thriller on Netflix. A young woman is on a quest to find out what happened to her twin brother. The trail leads to a famous scientist who is a proponent of genetic engineering, or biohacking.

Biohackers will resonate with Orphan Black fans. The stories are very different, but the science underpinning the plot is exactly the same. Gene modification, CRISPR use, bioengineering, even putting barcodes in modified DNA. #CloneClub members will recognize the science. I hesitate to label the series science fiction because it’s based on real science, but I’m sure many people will think of it as science fiction.

The series opens on a train where all the passengers in a car suddenly fall ill. A young medical student, Mia (Luna Wedler), attempts to save them all until she too falls ill. Soon she recovers while the others still lay comatose, including her new boyfriend Niklas (Thomas Prenn). Mia has some unexplained immunity the others don’t.

Then we back up two weeks to when Mia arrives at the university, a lowly Freshman.

Luna meets her new roommates for the first time. Lotta (Caro Cult) answers the door topless and unembarrassed. She introduces Luna to Ole (Sebastian Jakob Doppelbauer). Ole is into body modification. The third roommate is Chen-Lu (Jing Xiang) who is a genius with genetic plant modification. She has a room full of musical plants.

Eventually, all three of her roommates get roped into helping Mia with her quest.

Mia is interested in the biology class taught by Prof. Tanja Lorenz (Jessica Schwarz). Somehow this Freshman student is so well versed in the concepts and methods of genetic engineering that she makes herself known to Lorenz almost immediately.

Mia wants more than Lorenz attention. She wants to work in her lab. She follows the lab assistant, Jasper (Adrian Julius Tillmann). She flirts with him, mesmerizes him, and uses him to get nearer and nearer the secrets Lorenz holds.

Mia had a twin brother who died. Mia thinks Lorenz had something to do with it. She digs and digs relentlessly, taking dangerous chances to sneak into forbidden labs, She sneaks into Lorenz’s house. She uncovers a study that Lorenz did, appropriately called Homo Deus. (Homo Deus is a whole field of study.) She learns that she and her brother were both in the Homo Deus group.

The six episodes of the series charge through Mia’s race to gather the evidence that will paint Lorenz as an evil scientist experimenting with human lives. It’s exciting and suspenseful. It ends with a well-planned cliffhanger. Season 2 is already approved.

The series was created by Christian Ditter. I love these exciting stories based on current hard science, especially when the brilliant scientific minds are in the women characters. If you share that enthusiasm, I think you’ll like watching Biohackers.

Check out the preview.

Have you watched this series yet? What did you think of it?