Beyond the Aquila Rift

Thom (Henry Douthwaite), captain of the Blue Goose freight ship, completes a routine mission alongside his crew, who give the ship a new course as they're lined up at a space gate, then prepare to enter stasis for the return trip home. Sometime later, Thom awakens to find Greta (Madeleine Knight), an old flame from his past, who tells him that he's in the Saumlaki Station; a routing error centuries earlier accidentally left the Blue Goose hundreds of thousands of miles away from Earth. While Thom and Greta get reacquainted, it's subtly hinted that things aren't what they seem. Growing frustrated after ultimately realizing that what he thinks is the station is actually a giant simulation, Thom forces Greta to show him what reality looks like now, though a tearful Greta claims that he won't be able to handle it.

Based on the short story of the same name by Alastair Reynolds.

Tropes:

• Adapted Out: Thom's wife Katerina, as well as the other people on board Saumlaki Station are not present in the episode which instead focuses entirely on Thom, Suzy, and Greta.
• 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's implied that this is a "happy ending" Greta had to force on him, since he couldn't handle the reality of his situation and went mad. Here, she just restarts the simulation and appears to Thom as Greta again, this time without his shipmates and leaving the two of them alone.
• Adaptation Explanation Extrication: Alastair Reynolds' short story explains that the Aquila Rift is as far as any spaceship can go, so being beyond it means that Thom and his crew are where no one has gone before. ^note The Aquila Rift is a wall of space dust just outside the "Local Bubble," the remnant of a million-year-old supernova that left the area around Earth mostly dust-free. The FTL network ends at the Aquila Rift; it is as far as humanity can travel.
• Adaptation Distillation:
  • The details of the FTL network and what could have caused the navigational error isn't explained in the episode. ^note It's implied to be the result of Ray starting, and then aborting, a navigation recalibration. He was told to do the recalibration by Thom as busy-work due to them being delayed in the queue for the FTL technology, but a sudden opening in that queue lead to Thom making the doomed call to abort the recalibration, leaving things in a worse state than before.
  • The episode doesn't mention Thom's wife.
  • In the short story, Thom meets other people in Saumlaki Station besides Greta during his stay, all of which turn out to be people that he has met in his life, although briefly. This is the Spot the Thread recognized in the short story, as opposed to a slip-up by Greta.
• Alien Geometries: Significantly downplayed from the short story. The actual hive looks more like a neural net or set of muscle fibers than the outworldly structure it is in the source material.
• Bait-and-Switch: The first thing we see when "Greta's" true form starts Emerging from the Shadows is the light shining on what appears to be the breasts and limbs of a naked woman. They are most decidedly not the breasts and limbs of a naked woman.
• Bed Trick: Initially, Thom is led to believe he's having nonstop sex with an old flame. The revelation of what he was actually sleeping with leads him to undergo a psychotic breakdown almost immediately.
• Collapsible Helmet: Greta's helmet collapses in her introductory scene.
• Color Motif: Saumlaki Station's interior is tinted a calming blue in the illusion, while the horrific reality is tinted orange and black.
• Cosmic Horror Reveal: At first, the episode is a story about a space crew going off-course and waiting for repairs in the remote Saumlaki Station. The gradual reveal is the central point of the plot.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Thom is left stranded in space and stuck in the hive of a psychic, insectoid alien that ambiguously claims to care for him. He ends up accepting the illusion the alien offers because the real horror of his situation is too much for his mind to bear.
• Cryo Sickness: Navigator Suzy gets "surge tank sickness" when she comes out of her months-long cryogenic sleep. Greta advises putting her back into the pod and letting her rest, but this turns out to be 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 Saumlaki Station by Greta. For a moment, it looks like the whole thing was just a nightmare... but the closing shot of the repair station flickers, and suddenly it's an ugly alien hive floating in space.
• Dead All Along: At the end, Thom's fellow humans are shown as corpses in their destroyed surge tanks, although the exact point Suzy died is unknown. This reveal also means that the real Greta is long dead, seeing as "several hundred years have passed back home."
• Did They or Didn't They?: Thom is seemingly stranded in a remote space station and hooks up with Greta. Except "Greta" is actually a spider-like alien who has been placing illusions in Thom's head to distract him from the fact that thanks to his ship's routing error, he's doomed to spend the rest of his life in her hive. Although Greta can control her human form remotely, there's a non-zero chance Thom actually did unknowingly have sex with the real Greta.
• Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?: Thom has sex with "Greta" in the illusion, but she does make it clear that she cares about Thom and everyone who journeys to the hive.
• Downer Ending: Thom and the other members of his crew are lost in the abyss of space, caught in the lair of a spider-like alien with no hope of ever escaping or returning home. The only silver lining is that the alien keeping him in his false reality does care for them and wants to keep them at peace to spare them the horror of their situation. However, if Thom ever finds out the truth, his mind will be wiped and he'll go right back to the beginning.
• Dress Hits Floor: Her and Thom's sex scene starts off with a shot of Greta's dress hitting the floor.
• Emerging from the Shadows: Greta shows her true form this way. Each time she enters the simulation, she does it in a similar fashion, coming out from a dark, mist-covered corridor.
• Excessive Steam Syndrome: A lot of steam comes from the spacecraft's door when it opens for Greta's entrance. It later serves 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 brown and dark red, the colors of reality.
• Fanservice: Thom and Greta have an admittedly tantalizing sex scene together. However, following The Reveal, it quickly becomes horrifying.
• Fan Disservice: Greta's human form is very sultry... but her actual form is that of an utterly nightmarish spider-like alien, with a multi-eyed head sitting at groin-level and a big, gaping red mouth.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Saumlaki 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 be paused and inspected up close for an even more disturbing effect.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Greta tries to ease Thom into his situation to avoid this, as she's learned that doing otherwise results in mental breaks and potential suicide. In the short story, she even has Thom try (and fail) to break the news to Suzy as a way of easing him into reality.
• A Glitch in the Matrix: Outside of the liquor bottle and the shadow shape. When Thom demands to see Saumlaki Station as it really is, he pushes Greta against the wall, causing the scene to partially flicker to reality.
• Here We Go Again!: The episode ends with Greta once again waking Thom, the alien seemingly resolving to try to ease him into the simulation again.
• Hope Spot: For a second or two, Greta's true form is hidden in shadow. The scant light playing across her body makes her look like an attractive (if slightly exotic) Green-Skinned Space Babe. Then she emerges into full view, and what looked like breasts and legs turn out to be the sensory bulges and folded pedipalps of a huge slimy space arachnid.
• Impaling Arthropodal Legs: Greta can cast illusions and disguise herself as humans, but her true form is a spider-like alien with pointy legs.
• Impersonation-Exclusive Character: With the reveal that everything's a simulation, the only things we know for certain about the real Greta are what she looks like and what Thom and the alien say about her.
• Infinite Illusion Ending: In the finale, Greta is forced to admit that Thom is in a Lotus-Eater Machine illusion created by her and tells him, in full Sincerity Mode, that he won't be able to handle reality. She is proven right when Thom finally strongarms her into showing him the real world, where he's an emaciated old man stranded in an alien hive and "Greta" is a spider-like Eldritch Abomination tending to the lost souls caught in her web, resulting in Thom going mad from the revelation. So, Greta puts Thom back in the illusion and erases his memories so that he believes that he's only just arrived at the station, indicating that he will spend the rest of his life in this state, and if he ever finds out again, she'll rewind him right back to the start all over again.
  Thom: Greta? Is that really you?
  Greta: [with a Broken Smile] It's good to see you, Thom.
• Ink-Suit Actor: The four characters are modeled after their respective VAs.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Thom never leaves his surge tank, as Greta and Saumlaki Station are fed directly into his brain as he sleeps. When he's shown the reality around him, it may also be a projection, since there's no sign of his tank anywhere around, and given the actual reality he finds himself in, the illusion 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 that he's stranded in an alien hive 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).
• Meat Moss: The alien's hive is composed of 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's diffused through a glass bottle in the foreground.
• Morphic Resonance: Saumlaki Station at the end is shown to be this, or at least in the "simulation reflecting reality" version. The station is shown with a bright blue entrance with a barrier of light, architecture, lots of small rocks, and large asteroids around. The reality? Station = main hive. Entrance = hive interior. Small rocks = debris from ships. Asteroids = ships ensnared in the hive.
• Ms. Fanservice: Greta walks around in a tight cocktail dress, then is seen topless in a thong. It soon becomes Fan Disservice when it's revealed that she was a Starfish Alien the whole time.
• Musical Spoiler: The lyrics of "Living in the Shadows", which plays during Thom and Greta's lovemaking, hints that things aren't quite what they seem.
• Navel-Deep Neckline: Greta's gold dress plunges down past her chest and hugs her curves nicely.
• New Old Flame: Greta was a former one-night stand of Thom's. Subverted and possibly invoked, since the alien is actively comforting him with images of her.
• Non-Malicious Monster: A possible case with the alien, which is utterly inhuman looking, but humanly empathetic. It genuinely wants nothing more than to care for the ships that get stranded in its web.
• 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 a hive 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 Thom wakes from his dream and finds out that he was placed in a psychic trance by an alien lifeform so he wouldn't be scared of his new home, he ends up returning to the dream.
• Rule of Three: Greta emerges from a steam-covered tunnel thrice: first to greet Thom in Saumlaki Station, then to show her true form, and in the end, when the simulation is reset.
• The Shadow Knows: In the shot where Thom asks Greta who's feeding him his "fake reality", Greta's shadow shows her true form.
• Sincerity Mode: When Thom finally demands to know what's really going on after being manipulated for most of the episode, Greta flat out tells him he's not ready to handle the truth.
• Single Tear: Greta sheds one before letting Thom see reality.
• Sleeper Starship: Space crews like Thom's sleep in "surge tanks" during interstellar travel.
• Smoking Hot Sex: Thom enjoys a post-coital cigarette. While she doesn't have her own, Greta also takes a drag off Thom's smoke.
• Space Isolation Horror: Thom is trapped in an alien's hive somewhere far away in space. Since he's beyond the point where humanity can travel, he has no hope of rescue and can only choose to accept the fantasy provided by "Greta".
• Spiders Are Scary: "Greta" turns out to be the human simulation avatar for a spider alien creature. It has numerous legs, way too many eyes, and the hive resembles a tangle of meaty webs. You can see others of its kind crawling in the hive. The sight of "Greta" horrifies Thom immensely.
• Spotting the Thread: Thom realizes that something is wrong when he notices the cut on Greta's 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 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" (which may or may not be another simulation), his beard is long and filthy, and his clothes are tattered rags.
• Unintended Destination: Humans can use apertures to achieve faster-than-light travel. Thanks to a billion-to-one spot of bad luck, though, a routing error sends the ship Blue Goose to as far as it can possibly go, an isolated area called Saumlaki Station, instead of their intended destination. The Blue Goose's captain, Thom, seems to rekindle a romance with fellow castaway Greta, but begins to uncover the Awful Truth behind the station.
• Visual Innuendo: The spilling champagne bottle is used as an innuendo for orgasm.
• Wall Bang Her: Thom and Greta have sex against a window of Saumlaki Station, with the vacuum of 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: Greta's response to Thom demanding to see the truth. She's unfortunately proven right.
• Zero-G Spot: Thom and Greta apparently had sex in a hotel in Zero-G, and Thom still managed to break the bed.