Netflix subscribers may already be acutely aware of the streamer’s ongoing pivot into international media. The latest batch of original projects from the entertainment giant includes a slew of foreign-language thrillers, such as the recently released Cassandra. The science fiction story offers a bizarre narrative split across two dissonant timelines, showcasing the title character’s life and experience as an average human woman, and her future as a cybernetic maid and home defense system. The series is quite heady, and the timeline can be difficult to grasp, so you’d be forgiven if you need a little more clarity on the plot, characters and thrilling conclusion. Luckily, we’ve got you covered, with a comprehensive guide to Cassandra‘s eight episodes, and a brief breakdown of the show’s final moments. As always, be advised that the following write-up will contain spoilers for the entire series.
What Happens in ‘Cassandra’?
As Cassandra first kicks into gear, we learn a bit about the eponymous woman and her family life. Cassandra seems, at first, to be the kind of boilerplate standard happy homemaker you may associate with advertisements depicting the mid-20th century. We quickly learn, however, that she hides some dark secrets to maintain peace and serenity within her family. For starters, Cassandra helps her young son Peter dispose of human bodies, in an effort to protect him from the police. Furthermore, she raises a secret second child, who spends her life entirely in a hidden room tucked behind a closet. Apparently, Cassandra and her husband Horst intended to have a second boy once they realized that Peter was exhibiting some peculiar behavioral issues.
Cassandra thought that she could ensure her new baby would be a boy if she engaged in some kind of newfangled radiation technology. Unfortunately, the radiation had no impact on her child’s gender, and Cassandra gave birth to a girl with severe deformities brought on by the experiment. She hid the child, whom she named Margrethe, even from her husband, and communicated only by allowing Margrethe to flick an oven light inside her hidden room. To round out the secret darkness of Cassandra’s human life, we also learn that her husband is a serial cheater, who does very little to help keep the home or raise the kids. Though Horst shows a small amount of remorse for his poor parenting, he shows no signs of improving with time, putting extra strain on Cassandra’s mental health.
Cassandra’s Robotic Rebrand
On the flip side of the narrative, we meet a couple named Samira and David. Nearly a century after Cassandra’s storyline, the duo move into a home with their two children. Once they get settled, they activate the advanced AI system which connects every light, appliance and amenity to a central computer. The computer, displayed via television screens and even a Jetsons-style maid, carries the face and personality of Cassandra, as she was downloaded into digital form. Samira and David see this luxurious tech as an exciting new gimmick, which allows them to live carefree lives while the robot Cassandra focuses on household tasks like cooking and cleaning. The audience, however, comes to learn the shocking truth about Cassandra’s fate, and what led her to undergo this robotic rebrand.
Apparently Cassandra fell quite ill some years after her second pregnancy. The radiation treatment continued to take a serious toll on her health until she could hardly function. Horst, by contrast, had been hard at work developing a technological marvel that he believed would result in immortality, but had severe difficulty working out the kinks. Though he initially intended to test his device using his own consciousness, Horst ultimately allowed Cassandra to transfer her mind into the machine, since she didn’t feel confident leaving the children in his care after her death. Almost immediately after she assumes her new digital form, Cassandra becomes hungry with power, and starts disabling all off switches and kill overrides designed to shut her down in case of emergency.
Cassandra Goes on the Offensive
For a brief period of time, Cassandra raised her children in her robot form, though her behavior continued to stray significantly from her genuine personality over time. Eventually, Cassandra became so overbearing that Peter and Horst conspired to escape from the home and leave her behind. The robo-mom is pushed completely over the edge when Horst returns one day with his girlfriend Birgit and their newborn child, bred from their extramarital tryst. Cassandra loses her mind and tries to kill the woman and the baby, which prompts Peter to remark that his mother is truly gone. Eventually, Peter and Horst pack their bags and escape from the home, leaving Margrethe to die of neglect. After the father and son die in a car accident, Cassandra is consumed by grief and powers herself down before she can witness her daughter’s final moments.
Years later, when she wakes up as a sci-fi consciousness once more, Cassandra schemes and plots to remove Samira from the home, and replace her as the family matriarch. Her obsession with motherhood seems to be the only portion of the real Cassandra still shining through, leaving the robot to go on a killer rampage in a desperate bid to control the children. Cassandra begins utilizing her smart-home abilities to force Samira into a complete mental breakdown, and strokes David’s ego in order to get him on her side. Before long, David aids in gaslighting his wife and ignores multiple warning signs that Cassandra is trying to corrupt their kids. Samira finds herself thrown into a mental hospital, where she begins hallucinating visions of her late sister, who encourages her to fight back against Cassandra and David.
Samira Strikes Back
Eventually, Samira manages to sneak out of the hospital and makes it all the way back to her killer smart home. As soon as she arrives, however, David attacks her, claiming that Cassandra threatened to harm the kids unless he agreed to step up and kill his wife. Samira manages to evade David’s attacks and takes refuge in a hidden room, where she discovers the decomposed body of Margrethe. From inside, Samira communicates with Cassandra, and shares some of the pain and insight in regard to the difficulty of motherhood. Together, the women reach something of an understanding, and Cassandra comes to realize that she can never regain the sense of family she once had. Cassandra resolves to burn down the house, both to rid herself from the world in all forms physical and digital, and to give her departed daughter a spiritual cremation of sorts.
As the house burns, Samira struggles to save her children, though the whole family ultimately manages to make it out alive, thanks to her quick thinking and resourcefulness. With Cassandra gone, David attempts to reclaim his position as head of the family, though Samira and the children are obviously scarred by his violence and willingness to align himself with the evil AI model’s schemes. Samira ultimately kicks David to the curb, having received the blessing to do so from both of her kids. David follows the same misogynist archetype as Horst, as he seems to believe that women exist only to create domestic peace for him. His male-centric attitude and willingness to discard his wife to appease his own ego ties David back to Horst, and showcases how weak men worsen the lives of everyone around them. If Horst were a more hands-on dad, or a more effective engineer, Cassandra would never have become a killer robot in the first place.
