Like most modern television shows, Humans (2015) is a program with a multitude of woven plot lines. Each has been treated with its own slow-burn over the first four episodes, revealing tiny bits of information and detail with each installment to keep the intrigue brewing. It’s now evident that the slow, calculated pace of the season’s first half was intentionally designed to polarize the increasingly chaotic, actionable direction of the latter episodes. With the inevitable human-Synth conflict inching closer, the program is ramping up its narrative and breaking many of its characters away from their unique, established comfort areas where they’ve spent the first four episodes.

The Hawkins family took the biggest hit in this episode. After Mattie (Lucy Carless) figures out the adult mode on Anita (Gemma Chan) had been activated, she automatically blames her horny brother Toby (Theo Stevenson). Of course, Joe (Tom Goodman-Hill) was the real culprit, and in an episode that started with Joe and Laura (Katherine Parkinson) discussing taking Anita back to the shop, Joe is the one evicted from the house for robot-cheating on his wife with Anita.

As Kyle Fowle of EW says, “For many of the characters on Humans, the status quo has changed. They’re all headed in different directions, meaning the future is unpredictable. It’s an exciting place for the story to be with only three episodes left in the season.”

The Hawkins family is split up, and that dynamic will change all of their lives. But they’re not the only ones turned in a different direction.

Good old Pete (Neil Maskell) not only continued his hardcore anti-Synth character development, but it turns out his partner Karen (Ruth Bradley) is not only a Synth herself, but a conscious one. How she fits into the larger picture of conscious Synths is now one of the show’s biggest mysteries, and raises questions about just how many sentient AI are really out there. Clearly it’s more than just the handful the show has been following to date, and that has huge implications for the series. And why is she a detective? How did that happen?

The episode introduced the anti-Synth protest group We Are People (WAP), a collective determined to make people realize the dangers of allowing Synths to replace the things in our daily lives which promote general interpersonal interactions. It’s particularly poignant for Pete, whose wife left him for a Synth, as she relished the way he provided for her without needing anything in return, and without living at the whim of emotions. She was more keen to be emotionlessly involved with an empty robot than deal with the flaws and complications of humanity - a depressing yet believable byproduct of living in a Synth-riddled world. Pete is down to one friend in the world. What happens when he finds out she’s actually a Synth will be interesting.

The big picture of Elster’s secret code hidden within Leo (Colin Morgan) and company received a lot of attention, and is critical to the overall intention of Humans. It’s revealed that Elster boiled down human consciousness to “17,000 pages of code,” a notion that George (William Hurt) finds simultaneously amusing and incredible. After a visit with Niska (Emily Berrington), George discovers the marvelous and terrifying reality of AI consciousness, the concept of which was the reason for his departure from the Synth project in its early years. That, and the creepy Hobb (Danny Webb) was also part of that original science gang. Seeing that this technology came to fruition changes George’s situation dramatically as a man of science.

What’s next for Leo now that he’s been unable to locate Mia within Anita is another directional shift for the show. Until this point, he and Max (Ivanno Jeremiah) have been trained on that goal. Mattie seems determined to pull Mia out of Anita one way or another - will she succeed? And when will we find out what happened to them all in the past, during these drowning flashbacks we keep seeing?

It’s a great move for Humans to use the post mid-season episode to shift the direction of almost all of its characters. With only three episodes left in the first season, there are numerous new mysteries to follow, which will certainly be engaging enough for audiences to want to finish out the season. Humans has held true to the questions and concepts it raised at the beginning of the season, and we’re seeing them flesh out and build upon themselves with each installment.