"I do care for you. I care for all the lost souls that end up here."
Thom attempts to come to terms with being stuck in a station lightyears away from his crew's charted course.
Henry Douthwaite voices Thom and Madeleine Knight voices Greta. Based on the short story of the same name by Alastair Reynolds.
Tropes:
- Adaptational Alternate Ending: The ending is slightly different from that of the short story — "Greta" takes on the appearance of Katerina, Thom's wife, and it is implied that this is a "happy ending" that Greta had to force upon him as he could not handle the reality of his situation and went mad.
- Adaptation Explanation Extrication: Alastair Reynolds' short story explains that the Aquila Rift is as far as ships can get, so being beyond it means they are where no one has gone before. note
- Adaptation Distillation:
- The details of the FTL network and what could have caused the navigation error isn't explained in the episode. note
- The episode doesn't mention Thom's wife.
- In the short story, Thom meets other people in the "station" during his stay, all of which turn out to be people he has met before in his life, although briefly. This is the Spot the Thread recognized in the short story, as opposed to a slip-up by Greta. In the episode, he only interacts with Greta.
- Alien Geometries: Significantly downplayed from the short story. The actual hive looks more like a neural net or a set of muscle fibers than the outworldly structure it is in the source material.
- Bait-and-Switch: The first thing we see when the monster starts Emerging from the Shadows is the light shining on what appears to be the breasts and limbs of a pale naked woman. They are most decidedly not the breasts and limbs of a pale naked woman.
- Bed Trick: Initially Thom is led to believe he's having nonstop sex with an old flame of his. The revelation of what he was actually sleeping with leads him to almost immediately undergo a psychotic breakdown.
- Collapsible Helmet: Greta's helmet collapses in her introductory scene.
- Color Motif: The station is tinted a calming blue, while the horrific reality is tinted red and black.
- Cosmic Horror Reveal: At first, it's just a story about going off-course in space and waiting for repairs in a remote station. The gradual reveal is the central point of the plot.
- Cosmic Horror Story: Thom is alone and lost in space in the hive of a psychic, insectoid alien that ambiguously claims to care for him. He ends up accepting the illusion of reality it offers because the real horror of his situation is too much for his mind to bear.
- Cryo Sickness: The ship's navigator Suzie gets "surge tank sickness" when she comes out of her months-long cryo sleep. Greta advises putting her back into the pod and letting her rest. Turns out this was just a ploy by the alien to get Thom's full attention.
- Cutting Back to Reality: Following the big reveal, Thom finds himself waking up in his pod and being welcomed to the station by Greta. For a moment, it looks like the whole thing was just a nightmare... but then the closing shot of the repair station flickers, and suddenly it's an ugly red-and-black alien hive floating in space.
- Dead All Along: At the end, Thom's fellow humans are shown as corpses in their ruined surge tanks. The reveal also means the real Greta is long dead, seeing as "several hundred years have passed back home."
- Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?: Only in dreamland, but the entity does make it clear that it cares about Thom.
- Downer Ending: Thom and the other members of his crew are lost in the abyss of space, caught in a spider-like colony with no hope of ever escaping or returning home. The only silver lining is that the alien keeping him in a false reality does care for them and wants to keep them at peace to spare them the horror. However, if Thom ever finds out the truth, his mind will be wiped and he'll go back to the beginning.
- Dress Hits Floor: The sex scene starts off with a shot of Greta's dress hitting the floor.
- Emerging from the Shadows: Greta showing her true form emerges from the shadows. And each time she enters the simulation, she does it in a similar fashion, coming out from a dark, mist-covered corridor.
- Excessive Steam Syndrome: There's a lot of steam coming from the spacecraft's door when it opens for Greta's entrance. It serves later to establish a parallel between the fake Greta first appearing from the soft white and blue steam, the colors of the simulation in which Thom is trapped, and the reveal of her true form, where she emerges from the shadows while the scenery is now brown and dark red, the colors of the reality.
- Fanservice: Thom and Greta have an admittedly tantalizing sex scene together. However, following The Reveal, it quickly becomes:
- Fan Disservice: Greta's human form is very sultry... but her actual form is that of an utterly nightmarish spider-like alien, with a head that sits at groin-level and has a big, gaping red mouth...
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: The station and Greta are a simulation to make it easier for Thom to transition to his new reality.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: The various glitches are long enough to pause them and check them up close for an even more disturbing effect.
- Go Mad from the Revelation: Greta is trying to ease Thom into his situation to avoid this, as she's learned that to do otherwise results in mental breaks and suicide. In the short story, she even has Thom try (and fail) to break the situation to Suzy as a way of easing him into reality.
- A Glitch in the Matrix: When Thom demands to see the place as it really is, he pushes Greta against the wall, causing the scene to partially flicker to reality.
- Here We Go Again!: The short ends with Greta once again awakening Thom, the monster seemingly resolving to try to ease him into it again.
- Impersonation-Exclusive Character: With the reveal that everything's a simulation, the only things we know about the real Greta are what she looks like and what Thom and Fake!Greta say about her.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: Thom never leaves his surge tank. Greta and the station are fed directly into his brain as he sleeps. When he's shown reality around him, it may be also a projection, since there is no sign of his tank anywhere around. And given the actual reality he finds himself in, the virtual alternative really is the only way he gets to keep his sanity.
- Lovecraft Lite: In a departure from the source material, the ending boils down to Thom being unable to accept he's stranded on an alien space station and how the Starfish Alien tending to him is hideous, despite it trying to slowly break to him for the entire episode (and countless previous attempts). The horror!
- Meat Moss: The real spaceship's surface is covered in this.
- The Mirror Shows Your True Self: While the reflections don't, a blink and you'll miss it pan shot reveals Greta's true form when it is diffused through a glass bottle in the foreground.
- Ms. Fanservice: Greta walks around in a tight cocktail dress, then topless in a thong. Becomes Fan Disservice when you realize she was a Starfish Alien the whole time.
- Musical Spoiler: The lyrics of "Living in the Shadows", which plays during the Thom and Greta's lovemaking hints that things aren't quite what they seem.
- New Old Flame: Greta was a former one-night stand of Thom's. Subverted and possibly invoked, since the monster is actively comforting him with images of her.
- Non-Malicious Monster: The space arachnid is utterly inhuman looking but humanly empathetic. It genuinely wants nothing more than to care for the ships that get stranded at the station. Or does it? When Thom is given his glimpse of the truth, he is himself cadaverous. Stick thin, gaunt, very nearly a corpse. Like his shipmates.
- Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Henry Douthwaite's British accent briefly slips out when Thom yells to Greta, "Show me goddamn it!"
- Organic Technology: The far-away base is in fact a net made out of old wrecks, Living Ships and pure, biological tissue, all resembling a neural net.
- Platonic Cave: This episode serves as a direct challenge to Plato's philosophy. When the captain wakes from his dream and finds out that he had been placed in a psychic trance by an alien life form so he wouldn't be scared of his new home, he ends up returning to the dream. Sometimes the puppet show is better than reality...
- Rule of Three: Greta emerges from a steam-covered tunnel thrice: first to greet Thom in the station, then to show her true form and then, in the end, when the simulation is reset.
- The Shadow Knows: In the shot where Thom says "So who is feeding me this fake reality, this fake Greta?", Greta's shadow on the wall shows her true form.
- Single Tear: Greta sheds a single tear before letting Thom see reality.
- Sleeper Starship: Space crews sleep in "surge tanks" during interstellar travel.
- Smoking Hot Sex: Thom enjoys a post-coitus smoke. While she doesn't have her own, Greta also takes a drag off Thom's cigarette.
- Space Isolation Horror: Thom is trapped in a monster's colony somewhere far away in space. Since he's beyond where anybody travels, he has no hope of rescue and can only choose to accept the fantasy provided by "Greta".
- Spotting the Thread: Thom realizes something is wrong when he notices that Greta's cut on her neck has disappeared.
- Talking in Bed: Post-coitus, Greta and Thom are lying in bed in their underwear, when Greta reveals that they're a lot further out from Earth than she told him earlier.
- Time-Passage Beard: Thom has a beard trimmed close to his face, but when he wakes up in the real world his beard is long and filthy, and his clothes are tattered rags.
- Visual Innuendo: The spilling champagne bottle as an innuendo for orgasm.
- Wall Bang Her: Thom and Greta have sex against a window of the space station, with the vacuum of the space on the other side.
- Year Outside, Hour Inside: Greta tells Thom that his trip to Saumlaki Station only lasted a few months but several hundred years have passed back on Earth.
- You Are Not Ready: Fake!Greta's response to Thom demanding to see the truth.
- Zero-G Spot: Thom and Greta apparently had sex in a hotel in zero-g - and Thom still managed to break the bed.
