Main cast: Henry Douthwaite (Thom), Madeleine Knight (Greta), Rebecca Banatvala (Suzy), Delroy Brown (Ray), and Grahame Fox (Dispatch Voice)
Directors: Dominique Boidin, Léon Bérelle, Rémi Kozyra, and Maxime Luère
Okay, confession time: when it comes to illustrations and animations, I’m not too into the whole anime and cartoon-y aesthetic that is adopted by many animated films and comics these days. I’m more into the realistic proportion kind of art, and holy crap, Beyond the Aquila Rift is beautiful to behold.
I always have a soft spot for beautifully rendered men with fabulous beards, and I think I am going to have a hard time choosing between Thom and Joel from The Last of Us as the hottest guy in animated media. The fact that, if I would squint a bit, Thom looks just like Hugh Jackman doesn’t dent his appeal one bit.
There are four directors for this one, so I guess it must be a combined effort of the geniuses of the land to deliver that scene between Thom and Greta, that comes complete with stand up shagging, thrusting buttocks, perfectly rendered nipples and chest hair, implied banana munching… I tell you, if Mass Effect: Andromeda had that kind of quality scenes, people would make fewer memes of that game and more happy fan art.
Not that the scene is perfect, it’s just near perfect. They could have given Thom a bit more cake, if you know what I mean.
Oh yes, the story. It’s based off Alastair Reynolds’s short story of the same name, so folks that have read the story would be in a less advantageous position as they know already the twist that is to come.
Thom and his crew mates Suzy and Ray are waiting for the queue of space ships slowly moving down the line to use a surge point gate, one of those fancy sci-fi gate-like devices that let ships make the jump across vast distances to their destination. The Blue Goose is on its way home after a successful freight run, and there is an “uh-oh…” kind of foreshadowing when Suzy uploads a new course that incorporates a short cut to tell the surge point gate AI where they want to go.
The three of them get into their surge tanks as their ship approaches the gate, fully expecting to wake up later to make a short trip back to Earth.
Well, hold that. Thom wakes up to learn that somehow, The Blue Goose has been sent to the wrong destination. He learns that he is at a station called Saumlaki Station. It’s not so bad. He bumps into an old flame, Greta, who shares with him that she ends up here the same way: somehow, there is some miscalculation that occurs at random times, and some lucky ships going through the surge gate point would end up here.
As Thom rekindles his relationship with Greta, however, he will learn that things are not what they seem, and the situation is far more complicated, even horrifying, than Greta lets on.
Because this episode is only slightly below 17 minutes, they have to remove quite a number of details from the original story. This is fine with me, but I also feel that by removing the reason why Thom is the one that wakes up first, the folks behind this episode may leave some viewers scratching their head. They also change how Thom discovers that things are not what they appear to be in Saumlaki Station, but that’s okay, given the time constraint.
I really enjoy this episode, and I don’t just say this because of that scene. This episode is paced just right, and I like how there is an escalation of tension that is still effective despite things taking a pause for that scene to take place. Some people may go eeuw at the gratuitous explicitness of the shagging, but come on, this is high art. This is what Mass Effect: Andromeda should have looked like, I tell you, and if it had, I might even buy that game and sit through the super basic story, even more basic characters and dialogues, and banal open world elements.
Oh, and I love the detailing of the creature at the denouement. It is so lovingly HR Giger-ish, and the architecture of the design actually explains a lot about why certain scenes are included the way they are in this episode.
In this, at least, the episode adds some new flavors and food for thought even to folks that have read the short story, while staying true to the spirit and intention of the source material. That’s what I personally consider a good kind of adaptation.
This episode is also worth watching again to spot the clues planted in the episode with regard to the secrets held by Saumlaki Station. Fortunately, it’s a nice episode to watch a few times for this purpose, because of how successful it is in blending together erotica, suspense, and horror.
The fact that the horror here isn’t the creature, but rather, it is from the realization that we are all mere insignificant specks in the unimaginably vast, cold, and alien void that is space—that’s icing on the cake in every wonderful way.
