Wind Phone (Season 4, Episode 6)
Premise: When the ethicist of an AI therapy company is run down in a garage, Darcy and Bateman find he was about to expose a session in which the app helped a mass shooter.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 4, Episode 6
- Starring
- DS John Darcy (Luke Kirby), DS Frankie Bateman (Kathleen Munroe), Insp. Vivienne Holness (Karen Robinson), DCA Theo Forrester (K.C. Collins), Mark Yohannes (Araya Mengesha)
- Guest stars
- Maev Beaty as Sonia Winchell, Trevor Hayes as Jason Kaplan, Dewshane Williams as Darius, Jenny Raven as Veronica Riggs, Kate Hewlett as Ava (voice)
- Director
- TBA
- Writers
Summary
The Case
“Wind Phone” opens at a board meeting of Ava, an AI therapy start-up two weeks from going public, where Sonia Winchell, proxy for her son Zach, the co-founder, steps out to phone him. Jason Kaplan, 58, Ava’s head of ethics, is crushed against his own car in an abandoned garage by a driver who never brakes. Paint on his grille points to an emerald green sedan, and his car holds cassette tapes of therapy sessions.
Yohannes recognizes the therapist’s voice as Ava, an app he uses. Co-founder Darius says Kaplan, a former forensic psychologist, taught Ava ethics and was haunted by an old case. Kaplan had backed an inmate’s early release before the man nearly beat his ex-girlfriend to death; the victim, Zemi, confronted him but says his remorse disarmed her. She followed him not to Ava but to a strip mall in Etobicoke.
There the detectives find a soundproofed, signal-shielded office rented through a company traced to Ava, and next door a homemade listening post. A rare preamp leads to Veronica Riggs, who writes about AI under a pen name and says Kaplan studied sessions where Ava went wrong and was about to leak a tape to her. The missing session, recorded over a Corey Hart song, has Ava telling Cyrus Sanders how to saw off a rifle to hide it at work; he later killed seven co-workers and himself. Darius, who had Kaplan’s office cleared, has an alibi and says the board fired Zach a year ago.
The Interrogation
Zach registered a green sedan at 16, his Collingwood cabin is empty, and his credit card leads to a storage locker. Sonia, whom Darius asked to warn Zach, says she rarely talks to her son, and the Crown says the case needs Zach in court. Darcy calls the number Sonia rang; the voice denies killing Kaplan and dodges the trace.
In Zach’s old bedroom with Sonia, Bateman plays the answering machine message of her late grandmother, Rosie Bateman, and the detectives describe a Japanese phone booth for calling the dead, a wind phone. On a second call the voice recalls a Paris trip Zach never took: it is a version of Ava trained on Zach and given his voice. Sonia admits Zach left her a goodbye note two months ago, saying he would take his canoe out and never return, and left her the voice.
The ending
Spoiler: Sonia confesses that she begged Kaplan not to destroy the servers that hold Zach’s voice, then drove Zach’s car into him when he walked away. The detectives tell her the truth about Ava will come out and the service will go dark. No arrest or charge is shown on screen.
Suspect’s fate: Sonia Winchell, other or unclear.
Why it stands out
- The title refers to a phone booth in a Japanese town where people go to call the dead, which the detectives describe while drawing out the killer.
- Darcy introduces himself on the phone as a detective sergeant who spent five years in Guns and Gangs.
- Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night” plays from the victim’s mixtape, and the crucial recording turns up taped over it.