'Cassandra' Recap And Ending Explained: Will Samira Leave David?

Part of the discourse around AI constitutes angry tirades against artificial intelligence dismissing it as being unethical. The unethical nature of artificial intelligence stems from its blatant disrespect of the personal space and well-being of the race that created it and fed it. Amidst all the contesting clamor surrounding AIs, what emerges prominently over the others is the shaky voice of eternal paranoia and moral panic. The cause of this anxiety is the belief that AIs are devoid of a human moral dimension. In the Netflix series Cassandra, we meet a virtual assistant system fully capable of making informed, rational, and moral choices. But how is her design so far-sighted? This is the central concern that runs through the series. As the narrative progresses and we become witness to the serpentine knot of motives of this technologically advanced system, the second question crops up soon enough. Can the virtual assistant really be relegated to the role of an ‘assistant’?

Spoilers Ahead

What is the story all about?

In Germany, a family moves into a retro smart house, a first-of-its-kind, which has been unoccupied for years. Samira and David Prill, accompanied by their children, Fynn and Juno, choose this house as a way to move on from the life they have left behind. Following their entry into the house, the AI system of the house reactivates. The children are stupefied by the friendly AI assistant, named Cassandra. Cassandra’s benignity, resourcefulness, and sheer initiative readily establish her as an indispensable element of the house. She is at once mowing the lawn, acting as a cheerleader for little Junoe, and performing as the upbeat voice waking the family up with a cheerful good morning song. Soon the mask of her benevolence falls off as Samira figures out that Cassandra works of her own will. A more nefarious twist emerges when Samira realizes that the previous owner of the house, Horst Schmitt, modeled the AI after a real woman, Cassandra Schmitt. Imagining herself as the new matriarch, Cassandra, the AI, on the other hand, emerges as the monstrous feminine robot, trying to establish Samira as a mentally unstable woman who is a danger to the family. It is clear that Cassandra is not just composed of binary language, despite the explanation David tries to offer to a hysterical Samira.

The film parallelly presents us with the story of Cassandra Schmitt, who lived in the 1970s with her husband, Horst Schmitt, and their son, Peter. With Horst, a scientist who was in all probability involved in military research, Cassandra shared an unhappy marriage. He consistently cheated on Cassandra with her best friend, Birgit, but kept it hidden. Horst was an absent father to their son, Peter, who grew up to resent him. Second to Peter, Cassandra also gave birth to a girl, named Margarethe or Maggie. However, Horst’s experimentation with the prototype of a vector sound scan to determine the sex of their unborn child left both Cassandra and the fetus exposed to  harmful radiation. The idea of ‘Cassandra,’ the AI system, germinated following Cassandra Schmitt’s diagnosis with cancer. With the help of her scientist husband, Cassandra offloaded her psyche into the analog computer system and left her human body. At first glance, it was a way for her to continue living with her husband and her son. In reality, Cassandra’s insistence on remaining alive as an artificial intelligence was her way of asking for compensation for being exploited as a subject for the vector sound experiment. Maggie was born deformed due to this experiment. When Horst refused to be responsible for the child, who he saw as nothing more than a monster, Cassandra kept the child alive but hidden and helped in the materialization of the system, which would ensure her daughter’s safety even after her passing. 

Why does Cassandra want to replace Samira?

A little after the Prill family moves into the smart house, Cassandra exhibits an inexplicable hostility towards Samira. Through everyday acts of microaggression, Cassandra victimizes Samira and emerges as the master (more aptly, the mistress) of the house. The AI emphatically asserts her credibility as Samira is sidelined as a hysterical woman. However, what could be the reason behind Cassandra turning against Samira, who is not even remotely connected to the timeline of the Schmitt family? 

Cassandra’s hostility towards Samira lies in the former’s reawakened desires. It is the autonomous female desire of Cassandra that becomes a threatening force. In my opinion, AI Cassandra’s animosity towards Samira lies in her desire to control the household and the male object of desire, which she severely lacked during her life as a human. As the AI is constantly in contact with the family, it is reminded of its primary lack—the lack of a female body. Despite its free will, this lack is a reminder for Cassandra of her bound, subjugated state, which can never make for a replacement for Samira.

Cassandra as the monstrous ‘other woman’

One key moment in Cassandra is when the AI emerges as the monstrous ‘other woman,’ the sign of which is perhaps nowhere clearer than in Episode 2, “Who Am I.” As the family sits in the drawing room playing charades, robot Cassandra manipulatively makes a space for herself in the family game, and therefore, the family unit. Samira is not too happy about Cassandra’s inclusion in their personal space by Junoe. Junoe sticks a post-it on Cassandra’s monitor head that translates to ‘My Mother’ in German, a foreboding of what is to follow. 

Cassandra is not the mother; she can never be what Samira is. The complexity of the scene can better be explicated through Freud’s ‘Verneinung.’ By the time this scene occurs, Junoe has started showing signs of being emotionally wounded by Samira, even if it is a ploy by Cassandra. Junoe could have not included the robot at all in the game, which was exclusively meant for the family. Instead, her inclusion of Cassandra and her stamp of her as ‘My Mother’ is the inscription of Junoe’s unconscious desire on Cassandra. Samira is the mother chosen by the conscious, and on grounds of being a negative opposite of ‘conscious,’ the ‘unconscious’ is embodied by Cassandra. However, Juno’s labeling of Cassandra as the mother is marked by the latter’s essential lack of motherliness; she cannot live up to the normative codes of motherhood. What also establishes Cassandra as the monstrous feminine is her sexual transgression that is marked by the exhibition of her female desire that falls outside the marital order. Her unrestrained scopophilic female gaze, beamed from the monitor head, objectifies the male body. Whether her own husband, Horst, or David, the objects of desire become emasculated in the face of the destructive female desire. 

What does Cassandra tell Samira before getting burned? 

With her limitless female desire, Cassandra is also a threat to the patriarchal order. In the end, when Samira enters into the hidden room of Maggie, Cassandra stabs her with the knife attached to her robotic arm. However, to Cassandra, the shriveled body of Maggie appears to come alive and asks her not to kill Sam. Before letting her go, Cassandra tells Sam that David knows that she would never harm Sam’s children. This is a hint for Samira to pick up that David, in attacking her with the rod, mostly acted unprovoked. After Sam reunites with her children, David fearfully asks her if the nightmare is over. Sam echoes an affirmative variation, “It is over”—a declaration that their marriage seems to be over.

When understood in relation to what transpired after Sam entered the house, the breakdown of the marriage becomes visible. When Cassandra learns that Sam has escaped the hospital, she threatens David into finishing her off. Cassandra hurts him and proclaims that although she would never hurt his children, she would not bat an eyelid before getting rid of him. When Sam enters the house, David pursues her with a rod and violently attacks her. As an explanation for his act, he cries and says that Cassandra would kill the children if he did not follow her words, carefully distorting the actual truth. The truth, however, is that David wants to get out and has no qualms about making a choice between Sam and himself. Even when Sam tries to reason with him amidst the bloody battle and promises to free everyone, he does not trust his wife, in turn betrays her trust, and chooses his safety over her life.

How does Cassandra turn out to be a threat to the patriarchal order?

If we follow Cassandra and her trajectory closely, we would notice that the killings of Horst and Peter have been attributed to her retrospectively until we figure out that they died in a freak accident. In fact, her wish of gaining immortality through her consciousness being integrated into the AI system is not merely driven by her motive to watch over her son and pry on her husband. It was a way of guarding over Maggie, who was hidden in the secret room. None of the deaths in the story is caused by Cassandra directly. Surprisingly, Cassandra’s role in the narrative is to lay bare the unfaithfulness of the masculine figures that are threatened by the autonomy of the female. Previously she was made to witness her husband’s betrayal twice; now she witnesses David turn against Samira with only minor provocation. As a mark of true comradeship, Cassandra reveals the secret to Samira before the latter leaves. The emancipation of both the women lies in the acceptance of their reality and ends with the annihilation of their former selves, as Samira breaks off her marriage, and Cassandra lets her robot body get engulfed by the fire. 

In the end, after the house goes up in flames, we are presented with the alternate reality of Cassandra reuniting with Maggie. Cassandra apologizes to Maggie for abandoning her, and the two walk away without any inhibition. Cassandra’s overtly caring attitude towards Junoe is just a display of her pent-up love for Margarethe that she never got to express while the child was alive. When Cassandra witnessed Peter’s death (Episode 5: “You’re Not Alone”), the shock caused a short circuit, and she shut down the system completely. This meant little Maggie kept waiting for her parents and even sent her mother signals through the blinking oven light. She died waiting for help to arrive, but her father had died, and her mother, all grief-stricken, had stopped functioning. Hence, when a new family shows up in the present time, Cassandra’s system boots up as she gains a renewed hope in her daughter’s chance of survival.

Do we see supernatural elements in the series? 

Towards the end, in Episode 6, “Merry Christmas,” when Cassandra turns her head to take a look at Maggie, the viewers are startled with a jumpscare. The dead corpse of the child, Maggie, turns alive and gestures to Cassandra to not kill Samira. However, is it the ghost of Maggie that communicates with Cassandra?

Even in the first episode, as Samira is seated in the drawing room, watching the photo reel, the apparition of a woman appears in the background with a tray in her hand, crossing the passageway. In the next shot, we are introduced to Cassandra, the real woman, for the first time. It is important to note that all these phenomena are captured from the point of view of Cassandra, marked by the evocation of the images on a grainy, pixelated screen. These pieces of important details, although standing on the verge of being ignored, are threads that point to Cassandra as being more than simply a virtual assistant. They construct Cassandra as the singular object that she is. That Cassandra has her human consciousness stored intact becomes more prominent when her supposedly objective perspective becomes clouded with human emotion. She acquires humanness when presented with objects from her past life that reignite her memory. As humans, we are incapable of conjuring up concrete objective imagery before our eyes with the help of our memory. However, Cassandra, on account of being a part-human and part-artificial intelligence, is able to conflate the memory and the objective reality and present both together.

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