neat stuff, sick. not possible to properly review episode without spoilers, as tends to be the case with the series. The topic for this week is genetic engineering, eugenics, genetic diseases, and that sort of thing, probably most famously covered in science fiction by the movie "Gattaca".
the initial conceit is what may be some manner of minor post-apocalypse, in which soldiers with combat-enhancing implants hunt down and kill shrieking deformed monster-people called "Roaches". Then one of them hits the protagonist with an electronic tube with green lights, and stuff starts changing for him.
the big reveal is that there are no "Roaches", at least in terms of what the soldiers see; their implants directly affect their cognition (all their senses, not just sight) so that they see designated people they have to kill as shrieking monsters. they are actually killing normal civilian people who are "genetically inferior", pre-disposed to genetic deformations, diseases, illnesses, mental disorders, that sort of thing.
rather than handle the situation in a soft bigotry type of way like in "Gattaca" (where these types of people are tolerated but essentially second-class citizens) or trying to gently exterminate this via eugenics programs, the people in this episode have gone a seemingly overly complicated path to exterminate people with inferior genes, while also fixing the supposed "problem" of soldiers in war being hesitant to kill their enemies, ending up going out of their way to avoid actually hitting their opponent.
by literally dehumanizing their opponent, the soldiers can kill their enemies mercilessly with no lingering effects of PTSD or combat fatigue or mercy to their enemies.
while an interesting conceit, the execution seems troubled, with it taking just a bit too long and in a roundabout way to get to the big reveal, and then having to have it all explained in two separate Expo Dump monologues that end up leaving a small window of interesting self-reflection followed by heaping portions of fridge logic that linger long afterwards. Some of the major issues that you think up later; 1) Only the soldiers have the implant which makes genetic inferiors look like "Roaches". Thus, the other civilians in the area know that the "Roaches" are normal people who are infected. It seems highly likely that there would be a lot more people than the one supposedly crazy religious man hiding "Roaches" in their homes and keeping them safe, and that interactions between the soldiers and the civilians would eventually lead to the realization by one side or another that the "Roaches" aren't actually monsters.
2) The episode does a great job of avoiding any significant Nazi parallels, but I cannot imagine this situation they have of implanting soldiers to make them see the enemy as monsters would be universally accepted among all nations and/or fighting forces. It would seem that having one nation and/or one army going around mass murdering civilians in a European country they deem to be "genetically inferior" would not be a situation that would escape notice of other countries, who would most likely end up eventually uniting and attacking them to stop them.
3) Given the level of technology they have, it would be utterly impossible to keep something like this a secret.
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