A Short Review: Beyond The Aquila Rift- Mind-Bending at Its Best.

Aloha Steemians. This is my first post on OCD. With everything going on with the blockchain, I thought it might be much preferable to bring something refreshing to the table. And so I bring to you a short synopsis/review of Beyond the Aquila Rift.

Poster

Among the releases of the year 2019, Netflix’s animated Drama Sci-Fi Horror mashup series Love, Death + Robots consisting of 18 episodes was a unique gem. It had a nonlinear story set, and every episode was like its own animated short film with separate animation styles for each one. Among them, one was "Beyond the Aquila Rift". Actually the seventh episode with a 17 minute duration. Its plot goes something like this-

!!HEAVY SPOILER ALERT!!

A spaceship, The Blue Goose, hauling cargo, comprising three crews was getting ready for its hyper jump through a surge point gate (an interstellar traveling method, much like a wormhole of sorts). When at the end of the queue nearing its jump, the crew went in their cryo sleeping pods to sleep as no human can withstand a faster than light hyper-space jump being awake.

The Blue Goose

Two of them, Thom, the captain and Suzy, in charge of charting plots, suddenly wake up in their ship. As they try to recover from it and are confused about their whereabouts, the door of the ship opens. As the depressurization settles, there stands Greta, Thom’s once lover, greeting them. She explains to them that there was a glitch in the ship's plot routing matrix and the Archangel dispatch, the gate sent them way out of their original course. They are in Saumlaki Station, Scheder Sector. Suzy finds that hard to believe and nauseates as she tries to get up and so is put back in her sleeping tank.

Saumlaki Station

The plot thickens from there. Through the course of the episodes next several minutes, Thom and Greta rekindle their old passion for each other. At some point, Thom finds out some misalignment in the story Greta keeps telling him. It makes him paranoid and when he asks her again, she denies it at first but then she says that his suspicions are true and they are not where she told him. They are 150,000 light-years away from Earth. The routing error took them far beyond out of their course.

This shakes Thom to his core. He is confused and in utter disbelief at the same time. She then suggests him to wake his crew up. He then wakes Suzy up telling her all about the errors and asks about what she can last remember. Suzy describes to him about the gate and their hyper-jump and then recalls some dreams, dreams like this one where Thom is waking her up. She then notices Greta and becomes hysterical, trying to say to Thom that Greta is not what he thinks she is. Tells him, again and again, to really look at her. She then tries to stab Greta with the sharp end of a statue laying nearby and grazes her neck creating a slick wound. Suzy then is put back again in her sleeping pod.

Greta

Later, when Greta and Thom is in their bedroom making love, he notices that the wound from earlier on her neck is completely healed. He then becomes sure that Greta is what Suzy was implying and asks to know again what the real truth is. she doesn’t disagree and say he might not like the truth, asks him to reconsider in tearful eyes. But she caves in to Thom's demand and tells him to really look at her while trying to comfort him by telling she really cares for all the soul who get lost up in here. The frames shake out of proportion and then reverts backs to reality revealing where he really is.

He wakes up for real this time and finds himself in his broken tank. The outside world is reddish and is covered all over with a gooey, thick spider web like substance. His eyes are inhumane and his hairs are very long implying the time that has passed by. Many wrecked ships lay in the web and he notices a silhouette is nearing by. When the shape which moments ago looked like women comes out of the shade, seeing it, he loses his mind. And we all get to see it with him. Greta is an alien who looks like a giant deformed spider and the place he is in is her hive. Not being able to cope with the reality, he goes mental.

alien Greta

In the next shot he is again waking up from the tank just moments before Greta entering and welcoming him, which was the second scene of this episode. The scene implying that he was again put back in the simulation created by the alien. When the camera pans out, the actual scale becomes exposed. They are in an asteroid covered with the web with many crashed ship in it.

This episode was based on the same name story of the same name book written by Alastair Reynolds. The animation quality is top notch, vivid, much Like Final Fantasy: Kingsglaive. Giving it a dead space and Star trek like vibe to it. Background Music too was through the roof. The song playing in the background when Thom and Greta were making love, I kept it in my playlist for days. I would suggest anybody reading this to watch it as its only around 15 minutes.

So that is it for now. I never get any comments or feedback which might help me improve my writing skill. So any would be much appreciated. Thank You for reading this. Keep believing on this platform and we will come back stronger.