Cassandra: The Mysterious German Artificial Intelligence Series in the Netflix Top
Cassandra is a German series that you should already be watching on Netflix, especially if you like suspense, mystery, and unexpected twists, and if you have ever wondered if Artificial Intelligence can be a danger to humans. The series stars Mina Tander, Lavinia Wilson, and Joshua Kantara and follows a family moving to a new home in search of a new beginning. At first, the house seems like the ideal place to heal wounds and move on, but things start to change, and not for the better, when Artificial Intelligence enters their lives.
It’s like watching a Black Mirror chapter but taken to the extreme. Cassandra is a story of manipulation, secrets, and death, which happens inside the first Smart Home in the country (or at least in the series timeline). And yes, there is a lot of fiction in this, but the AI theme is brought to an interesting and very dangerous place, which makes it much more dangerous than it should be. The brutal miniseries’s 6 chapters tell a story of obsession, secrets, and dangers that hide right before our eyes.
What is Cassandra from Netflix About?
The history of Cassandra begins when a couple and their two children move into a new house in a small community in Germany. This is a house from the 70s that has been abandoned for a time, but it also turns out to be the first Smart House in the place. The house has everything, large rooms, an indoor pool, a garden, an office for the father, and even a studio for the mother (Samira), who is an artist, as well as a huge server hidden in the basement, monitors everywhere and a strange robot that has been off for many years.
When the family decides to try turning on the servers, to see if the Smart Home and its virtual assistant still work, they discover that the technology is intact, and that’s when Cassandra, a kind of AI that can control everything in the house, appears in their lives. Cassandra seems to be the perfect element for the family, until she begins to manipulate things, cause problems among the family, and harass and threaten the mother. Samira tries to tell her family, but nobody believes her, so she begins to investigate Cassandra‘s past, the house, the creation of the technology that is there, and all the unexpected secrets that connect with her.
What Was the First Smart Home in History?
In the German series, the new family home is one of the first Smart Homes in the history of Germany, and little by little it is revealed that it is from the 70s. This is not a real house, but it has many references to those first smart houses that, as in the series, began to appear in the 70s, although they were different and less advanced. According to Medium, the concept of smart homes has been around for a long time and the former can be considered to have appeared when electricity was invented, but it all took off in the 1970s with the introduction of a system known as X10 which, as it says the site, “allowed devices to communicate through existing electrical wiring, which allowed remote control of lights and appliances. But early systems used to be unreliable and had limited functionality”.
Devices that turned off or turned on the lights when clapping, timers to turn on the coffee maker or turn off the television automatically, cameras to guarantee security and many other things were appearing, until, much later, Alexa and Siri arrived, who could connect with more devices and even allow them to handle certain things in your house from your phone. All this already exists, but Cassandra has a futuristic element, and it is the fact that the AI within this story can have a body, although it is that of a robot, and even seems to think on its own, and all that is due to a dark and terrible situation.
Who is Cassandra and Where Does She Come From?
One of the most interesting elements of the series is that Cassandra does not behave like an assistant, she seems to think on her own, feel, and even form links with the children of the family, and this is part of what leads Samira to question herself. and to seek the truth about its origin. Little by little, we discover that Cassandra is not what it seems and that its history is connected with that of the origin of the house and the first family that lived in it. Not much can be revealed because they would be spoilers, but Cassandra has an origin that makes her different from the rest of the virtual assistants, and also much more dangerous. The series begins with a car accident, and that is an important point in the history of this AI and the decisions it is making now that it is on again.
