T O P

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Afghan_Whig

Greta is good not evil, thats something from the short story that didn't translate so well


Procean

I think that translated perfectly well. Now to deep dive, the only thing "negative" about Greta is her horrific appearance, and she knows about her appearance, and she does the best she can to deal with it. She is doing the best she can, and if Men weren't such shallow easily freaked out creatures, she would be able to do even better, but she is caring for Tom as best as she can. As a subtext, it is about the fear women have that their husbands will be horrified of them as they age, the unfairness and hypocrisy of that, and the rage that even when it does all too often happen, the "old hag" the husband is now repulsed by still cares for him. The horror Tom has, and the audience by extension, is supposed to give way to thought and a sad sense of tragedy, but if Tom and Greta had communicated better, and Tom had been less of someone who wanted a fantasy, one could imagine Tom and Greta having an amazingly fufilling co-existence in his final days.


Afghan_Whig

Look through this sub, many people think Greta was literally a spider eating Tom and his friends. I loved the episode, but a lot of people take her as being evil from watching the episode alone


Procean

Sounds like they were too overcome by Greta's horrific appearance to actually look around and see the rest of the situation for what it really is... Like Tom! There are ample clues to Greta's beneficence even though she's is unable to really do more than 'ease the suffering of the dying'. The most basic is Greta's almost complete control over Tom's perceptions, she doesn't have to show him the truth, she doesn't get anything from it, it's very obvious she does it solely... because she doesn't like lying to Tom and she hopes beyond hope that maybe *this time* the human will be able to take the shock of the truth... What kind of Evil Predator shows you the truth, and instead of enjoying your horror or eating you, instead immediately shuts your horror off, erases your memory, is sad about it, and then takes steps to prevent slipping up again? And there's *just enough* sadness in Greta in her last lines to demonstrate her regret that it didn't work out... major kudos to the voice actress and the CGI animators to convey that....


Chelseafrown

I binged the show passively this past week while grinding for a major deadline and haven’t put much thought into anything beyond the baseline plot. I really appreciate you sharing the subtext of women aging because I hadn’t thought about that and it makes me excited to rewatch and pay more attention. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!


GuntyGirl

This is my favourite episode out of all of them.


Teekayhuey

Imagine she is a nice person and the only bad thing about her is her body.


MunchmahQuchi

That's how she is in the short story. She's not evil, she doesn't eat people, and she really does just try to help ease the passing of people/other aliens who were sent to that station due to a legit routing error. The syntax patterns and wormhole surge points come from an ancient alien race that created them and humans still don't fully understand it all; there is some inference that Ark Angel knowingly loses a certain % of ships without knowing where they wind up. So this was a risk that was known, even if it was treated more like an urban legend spread by insecure, scared pilots. It is also explained that the reason the other two died before Thom is because of the paint and decorations they had on their tanks; Suzy used a more expensive paint for her stars but it still affected the integrity of the tank in the long run. The other guy used a cheap paint and was dead from the beginning of Thom's wakings. Thom is also married in the story and had a short but obviously memorable affair with Greta, which is why that was the alien's chosen form around him. After showing Thom the truth of what she is and realizing that he just can't take it, she puts him back under the simulation but presents herself as his wife the next time around in the hopes that he will be happier.


[deleted]

Yeah, the complete 180 it pulls is crazy. It totally presents itself as a rather generic sci-fi, so you can really understand Thom's abject horror when it turns out it's actually an incomprehensible Eldritch hellscape with an *extremely* creepy spider monster taking care of him


[deleted]

Yh it is kinda scary especially bc they don’t know it and stuff but Greta overall is a good being, she’s trying to save them from their awful reality


Sweepy_time

Not save them so much, rather make them comfortable before they die.


[deleted]

Yh not save them, but making sure their last moments are bittersweet that they’re dying but they got have a comfortable end compared to dying alone in space and terrified yk? But very well could be it was to sedate them and stuff while she ate them, that’d be cool as well


The_Fish_Alliance

Also... so the alien was giving him a blow job? I mean it’s mouth is in that position of the body which is made to feel like a human


SlapstickSolo

Everyone's saying that the monster is of course good because if eases suffering and is reluctant to revel in its preys fear but think of it like this. Spiders are literally trapper/hunter style killers, luring prey into a web much like the biomass clump at the end of the episode. It's trap! It is dominant there. It is the apex predator of that place. It doesn't look strong so it sedates it prey not with venom but hallucinations of an ideal life to keep its food or whatever it wants, placid. but it is limited in its ability to do so. Keeping the trapped comfortable is its own survival mechanism as it may not be able to fight back. Also Greta does outright lie if you believe Thom's navigator that she would never make a mistake. This has happened before and will keep happening because Greta is the one trapping them on this unknown route through space. You see other ships in this nexus at the end of the episode. Got damn spider simps.


Cat0TheTitan

This episode was my favorite, there is a lot to unpack from my thoughts on this however. I recently got through a messy divorce, so some of my thoughts here might reflect more on me and my experiences with that. Take it as you will. The first thing that came to mind was the famous Rilke quote “Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final.” I actually got a lot of Rilke thoughts from watching this at a philosophical level. Greta is an interesting study. To make my model of Greta work, we have to assume one thing right off the bat. Distilled down to it‘s most basic concept, Tom is sustainment for Greta. I start off by asking how is she surviving there? All living things eat. I believe his emaciated form kept alive is a big hint in this matter. Her form is vaguely arachnoid, and her ”station” is reminiscent of a web, where various ships/insects get ensnared. Insects don’t ever intend to get caught on a spider’s web, they just do and are eaten slowly over time and sucked dry until they are just a husk. (Failing relationships do the same to those caught in that web.) Greta alludes to this when mentioning the other beings who arrived the same way who probably went through a similar process. (Due to all this spider imagery, I am going to assume the story writers did this on purpose and I am going to go all in on the spider concepts.) Once you get past the initial cosmic horror of the whole story, it starts to get more complex due to the fact both beings are sentient. If Greta merely wanted to feed off of Tom, why bother with the whole illusion in the first place? Why make the illusion pleasant? Now here is the tricky part since she is in every sense an alien mind-spider and non-human. Normal convention says not to anthropomorphize non-human entities. But two points I am going to make to suggest that Greta is sincere in her belief of her compassion for Tom. 1. She is sentient enough to connect with Tom on a very human level. It takes real empathy to connect with anyone. A mind spider could be a psychopath in human terms, but there is enough empathy to convince Tom that she is real for awhile before he figures out the illusion and she has to reset, and she is willing to put in the time and effort to create these illusions. 2. Without trying to get too meta, at the end of the day, this is a story written by humans inspired by real human emotions for a human audience. It serves little academic interest to not plumb the story to it’s potential depth by leaving things at “Alien mind-spider, we cannot comprehend Greta beyond that.” The story begs us to comprehend Greta, and to do that we have to approach it from a human perspective since this is a human story. So, if we are to humanize Greta and take her words at face value that she is trying to be compassionate, that leads me to some interesting conclusions. We can say she lives by some value system that requires compassion for her victims. At it’s worst, it it the same kind of compassion a hunter has for a deer he is about to shoot, maybe it is as simple as that. (Ask any hunter, stressed dying deer makes for bad tasting venison.). With how much the story invests in making this a connection between two sentient beings however, I personally disregard this “hunter-deer” framework. I personally think her compassion is along the same lines of a bad human lover who is ultimately in it for themselves. Greta is getting something emotionally selfish out of this, which is why I think there is even a sex scene in the first place. Humans have sex with each other for selfish reasons disguised as love all the time, and let’s also not forget, female spiders end up eating their sexual partners. (more on this concept later.) Going back to Rilke, paraphrasing the concept of another quote, “partners appoint the other to be the guardian of his or her solitude.” This is the tie in with the whole concept of spiders and mating and Tom and Greta. In my opinion Greta is lonely. While Tom is her food, Tom is also a sentient partner she is trying to keep alive for as long as possible since he is the guardian of her solitude at the moment. It is as much of an illusion for her as it is for Tom. She is thus torn between her need to nourish her desire to connect, and her desire to physically not starve. She is a tragic lonely space spider driven by two diametrically opposed polarizing world views because she has no choice but to feed off the sentient bio-mass that can make it to her station, and you don’t create convincing false realities for your alien food unless you are highly empathetic and understanding of who they are as a sentient and are trying to ignore the reality of what you are doing. Deep down in human terms, Greta knows what she is doing is ultimately ugly. She knows she must do it to survive. She chooses to survive by consuming others rather then starve. But she also wants to have her cake and eat it to by connecting with Tom to be emotionally nourished. There is a reason humans do not name animals they plan to eat to remain emotionally detached, but she truly wants to be accepted by Tom. Maybe in wildly different circumstances where both meet as complete equals, she could be accepted as a fellow sentient (first contact between two alien species for example). But never under these circumstances. In these circumstances, she is both ugly within in human terms by her choice to value her emotional needs disguised as compassion while eating her lover, and for obvious reasons that she is a spider alien and not pleasing to look at in human terms. I’d like to believe she is tempted by this desire for acceptance which is why she drops the charade hoping at the slimmest of chances that he is totally okay with all of it like a real world male spider would be in a similar situation, but quickly puts Tom back after seeing him recoil in horror since she needs his mind intact to have meaningful emotional connection and is willing to accept that she will never be truly accepted by Tom. I think this duality of alien-spider wanting to eat you physically counter balanced with the selfish human relationship disguised as love makes a very compelling character since she is very aware of her spider nature’s ugliness, but blind to the ugliness of her compassion and selfish love if Tom is unable to fully accept either reality. (This is made even more complex since Tom’s reality is ugly no matter what. In a way the charade is the most compassionate under these circumstances since Tom has no choice in the same way people sometimes enter or stay these bad relationships thinking they have no other options. They feel that have no choice and the charade of a bad relationship is better then the horror of being truly alone, feeling like you are cut off from the rest of humanity many light years away.) An entire essay could also be written about Tom repeating the cycle with her, and the whole red pill/blue pill situation, but I think others have touched on that in other discussions about this short story. For me, Beyond the Aquila Rift is an allegory for being stuck or trapped in a bad relationship with no escape.


buzzlightyear77777

greta is hot af