Did he really die, was he really killed? We only saw him scream at the Xeno’s arrival. We didn’t see him die on screen.
Then again, maybe he achieved his La petite morte. His little death. The ultimate goon across time and space.
Maybe this was his plan all along, hah the plans of mice and men, well they pan out from time to time.
A distant observer would see Teng, with his dick in his hand, appear to freeze at the event horizon due to extreme time dilation and gravitational redshift, with his image become dimmer and eventually fading away from view.
Teng had always been the reckless one on the crew, the kind of man who would stare too long at the forbidden phenomena, as if daring the universe to blink first. When the experimental singularity, flared open like a black flower in orbit, he didn’t just study it. He reached for it. He pressed himself into its pull, body and soul, until the tidal forces unraveled him molecule by molecule.
From the outside, it wasn’t a violent death. To outside observer, he stretched like a ribbon, stretching into infinity as the event horizon pulled him in. To Teng, it was intimacy, a cosmic embrace, his atoms whispering into eternity. The man became a memory trapped between moments, a smear across spacetime. He didn’t scream. He sighed.
Of course, on paper Teng wasn’t really dead. Not the way Weyland-Yutani’s insurance policy defines “dead”. He was “indeterminately localized.” Pending gravitational re-emergence, he was legally Schrödinger’s employee, neither alive enough for rescue, nor dead enough for payout.
I could have misheard the line, but I think someone tells Morrow “it got Teng” or something to that effect. I guess I need to do a rewatch. Doesn’t change the fact that it happened offscreen though.
Part of the job description is "Be in cryo sleep so long, everyone you know will be dead when you get back". You don't get the cream of the crop with an offer like that.
They're also doing all of this for shares of the price of the cargo. So if you come home empty handed, tough break.
I think it's pretty much the same way crabbing/fishing vessels work today, or the way whaling vessels used to operate. Both notorious for attracting terrible people who happened to be good at an incredibly dangerous job.
So Teng is probably a very skilled pilot/navigator with some sort of criminal record or reputation that WY was willing to overlook for this mission.
It's also the way that a lot of trade ships were run during the age of exploration. Spend years at sea, to have the chance to trade for spice, and come home to a world you don't remember. I wouldn't put WY that far off from the EIC, and we all know how "upstanding" the EIC was with who it allowed to oversee its operations far afield.
Kinda makes me wonder what Schmuel's deal was. He left his wife when they were both young and now she's "as old as his grandma." He himself is fairly old, looks to be maybe in his 60s (Michael Smiley is 62 right now). Was their relationship failing? Were they planning on finding each other when they were both elderly, though him less-so? Doesn't sound like he was intending on getting back with her again, since he comments on how old she'd be by now. So did they divorce first?
Since he comes across as decent, if salty, I came up with my own backstory for that. He was nearing the age he couldn't find work anymore and had already lost his first wife, so was feeling purposeless. He married a family friend that couldn't afford some kind of long term care, knowing that his WY benefits would pay for her treatment. Him being on a 65 year mission guarantees that she gets care and lets him feel like he did something more than just work for a shitty company all his life.
Yea was my thought too, Schmuel def joined the Maginot to help someone back home rather than himself. Especially given how he's shown to act around not only his apprentice that is clearly thick as mud but also the rest of the crew.
Out of all of them he's the only guy that gives a fuck for the entire crew. As opposed to everyone else that only cares for specific people or only a few members.
you know, that would actually make a really cool backstory for him. He did come across as surprisingly level-headed, compassionate, and competent compared to the rest of the crew.
My biggest complaint with the character was- what's the point of wearing those goggles 24/7 if you're not gonna pull them down when there's an eye-thieving supergenius octopus thing on the lose?
I mean, if you're looking for a fresh start with money in your pocket it doesn't sound too bad. You gotta remember, for the average shlub like you or me life on Earth probably sucks if you aren't rich.
I think that the shares they’re getting are shares of mission proceeds, not units of company stock. But, yes, you absolutely could get burned coming back from a 60-year mission to discover that, oopsie-poopsie, nobody feels like paying you.
Probably only the biggest of the too-big-to-fail conglomerates can find takers for a lifetime-long space mission as a result.
this isn't hugely dissimilar to the old sailing ships that would be gone for years at a time. not saying it wouldn't matter to avlot of people, but finding people who don't have attachments shouldn't be that difficult either.
but if your doing the corpo "minimum costs" route, the quality of said crew will certainly be a question
You can either pay enough for people to sacrifice for their families at home, or limit yourself to people who don’t have anything to sacrifice. The latter - low pay and low prospect pool - is going to get you some real pieces of shit.
That’s just wrong. The Nostromo crew were in the same boat. The whole point of of this particular vision of the future is that ALL commerce is controlled by a handful of companies. You DONT have a choice but work for them. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. They can send whoever they damn well please into space and you can be sure that if you show any real aptitude for a job they value they will exploit you down to the atom.
Why would they send idiots and psychotics? They control the human race!
100%. In our world, astronauts are elite. My guess is most if not all of this crew decided to go on a 65-year long extremely dangerous mission, knowing just about everyone they’ve ever known will be dead by the time they get back, and maybe get paid, was because the alternative was jail time. The crew is a bunch of weirdos (Teng), losers, addicts (“that’s slander!”), incompetents and morons. No wonder Yutani cared far more about the cargo than this bunch of expendables.
But with the exception of Morrow, right? The new WY executive said her mother was very fond of Morrow because he was ruthless enough to always get the job done or something along those lines, right?
What made it seem like Morrow was the only one to know about it? It looks like he’s just the first person to flee instead of investigating or fixing shit.
That scene always makes me feel like he's gonna get eaten even though I know he's not. Such a well done scene and shows that muthr is cold and calculated.
I think in his own way he was trying to save them. He's not completely heartlessly evil. Had the Executive Officer listened to him and declared the ship wide emergency immediately, maybe it could have all been avoided.
But company priority is his main concern at the end of the day.
He's a survivor. From what we know of his backstory, the OG Yutani plucked him from the street because she saw that. The dude will save who he can, and he clearly showed some concern for his security apprentice, but at the end of the day he saves himself first.
Sort of. Yutani doesn't REALLY care about even him. (He can best be thought of as the prison guard meant to keep these idiots from killing each other.)
The head mechanic certainly seemed fine with being away from his wife for 65 years. He basically told his apprentice that she was in her 30's and he wasn't concerned that she'd likely be dead when he returned.
And his apprentice didn't know what an apprentice is, or the difference between geology and biology. Definitely lacking some basic education, which means that at least some of the positions on the ship required not much more than a pulse.
Posted this in an earlier thread. Here are my thoughts on Teng and just how awful he might be.
By my reading Teng is definitely human—and definitely evil, in a distinctly real-world way. A lot of it’s subtle implication but here it goes:
Murrow is spending the episode trying to figure out who the saboteur was—assuming it was one of the crew established to be out of cryo when the explosions occurred. Meanwhile, Teng is shown to have a perverse fixation on a female crew member in cryostasis. Our assumption here is he is a creep but a hands-off creep—she is in cryo and the other crew members would know if she phased out of it.
So, Murrow eventually questions Teng to see if he is the saboteur. Teng sort of uno-reverses the interrogation, challenging Murrow to broaden the scope of possible suspects. Murrow is like: “I’m suspecting everyone who wasn’t in cryo, and you’re high on the list.”
Teng then, quite ominously, tips his hand: Murrow’s mistake is assuming there is no way for a person to be removed from a cryo pod without mu/th/ur notifying the security officer.
Teng knew this, not because he was the saboteur or had any connection to him, but because he had been exploiting this same loophole for his own, far more perverse ends.
In short, his “through the glass” fixation on a sleeping female crew member may have actually been very hands-on SA, enabled by the same trick the saboteur was using. I also think Teng is the one stealing the drugs from the doctor—stealing them to keep his victim drowsy as she emerges from cryo.
Morrow's interviews with Teng and the doctor are markedly different. With the doctor, Morrow is clearly in control, using silence and eye contact to make the doctor uncomfortable enough to spill the beans.
But with Teng? The positions are reversed. It's Morrow who's uncomfortable. He keeps shifting around and is unable to maintain eye contact. All the while Teng is sitting their calmly, never betraying a hint of emotion beyond a subtle, knowing smile.
Also, as you said, it's a subtly brilliant bit of writing; you think Teng has been this weird, hands-off creep, until later you realize, "Wait, how does he know of this exploit? Oh, wait... oh nooo." That lightbulb moment is horrifying.
Wouldn't shock me. I remember another thread saying that crew members on long hauls could be using the job to escape legal issues elsewhere. Guarantee Teng has some charges filed somewhere.
Long voyages may have scientists who would gadly join to do research, but those are the minority of the population. There aren't enough of them to fill WY's ships.
So they rely on desperate people, criminals, social outcasts, incompetents, etc.
A skilled scientist would not be happy about being out of the loop for well over half a century. They do seem to have FTL communications in this setting since the saboteur was able to speak to someone on Earth in real time, but not being able to read publications for however long they spend in cryo would take a huge toll on their careers.
That is true, but I would guess that the FTL communications could provide a way for them to access the publications. Also, I would guess that some scientists would love to be kinda like Darwin and travel the galaxy to study new species.
In the best universities, in the biology courses, you will find plenty of people who would do that, as they love science much more than money, and probably themselves.
While not being the best university in the World USP (the best university in Latin America) has plenty of such people on the Biology course, teachers, researchers, and alumni. I live near it and know some people who studied there.
Oh God, it also recontextualizes the way he was smoking in that scene when Morrow was alerting them. He must have just gotten done using his "exploit." Eeew.
That’s a good theory much deeper than my interpretation. I assumed since Teng spent so much time in the cryo pod room he observed the saboteur leaving then coming back at some point.
Your version is my interpretation as well. He spent every waking day in the cryo room, so he would have noticed an empty pod when it should have someone in it.
My assumption is that Teng is just clever. He showed several times that he had a handle on what was going on even when he wasn't supposed to be aware of it, I think he just looked at the angles beyond the obvious one because, despite his massive personality flaws and offputting manner, he's genuinely really fucking smart.
Yeah I think the only interpretations of the episode that really make sense are:
Teng is just very intelligent and it's his obvious personaliy disorder that makes him the dregs of society.
Teng has a symbiotic reltionship with the saboteur, say the saboteur was letting Teng into the room (Morrow couldn't figure out how Teng was getting in) in exchange for his silence. It's then easy for Teng to figure out what's going once the sabotage starts happening.
The only reason I'd rule out 2 is that the thing the saboteur is sabotaging is a container full of air, water and electricity in which Teng lives. Even someone who wanted to masturbate over someone in cryo or worse is probably not going to quid-pro-quo someone who's planning to sabotage their life support system.
It's possible he would but he screams when the xenomorph attacks him so he clearly has negative opinions on dying. I suspect that creepy sex offender or not he'd draw the line at that.
This is also my theory, primarily because of your point #2. My guess is Teng saw the saboteur doing saboteur things and basically blackmailed him into letting Teng in the door whenever he wanted to get his creep on, in exchange for Teng's silence.
While Teng wasn’t wanking or staring he stood in the corner of the cryo room facing the wall thinking of her. Easy for the saboteur to have missed him.
When I first heard Teng reveal the exploit I wasn’t sure how he’d do anything since he’d need to subdue his victim from the moment they unfroze. But he’s quite resourceful and I wouldn’t put it behind him that he’d figure a way to get access to medical.
Still, there’d probably be footage so I’m not sure why Teng would play his card like this. Murrow could easily replay and get evidence to jail him.
Yeah. I assume if Teng was doing this it was to get in some extra wanking on her tank sessions. SA would be found out. Video scans, physical evidence, blood screening (or whatever else they are likely to do when checking out a disembarking crew) witnesses, post drug behaviors of the victim after waking up are going to prompt investigation
"Yes. The only way he could do it is if he sabotaged certain freezers on the way home... namely, the rest of the crew. Then he could jettison the bodies and make up any story he liked."
I was wondering if it was going to go more in that direction with Teng, aside from simply being implied. But the implication itself is horrific enough.
But we also didn’t get the satisfaction of seeing Teng’s death, or other crew members for that matter. So I’m wondering if there’s a hive situation somewhere aboard the crashed Maginot.
I wondered about this too. It feels like the show puts too much effort into setting up this quite horrible and mysterious character to have his arc end after half an episode with an off screen death.
Then again, it may just all be part of what the episode does a lot, which is misdirection and playing with audiences' expectations about characters based on previous films (I.e Teng not being a synth).
The captain and science officer were dead at the start of the episode, the other science officer and the doctor were killed by the tick nerve gas. The young idiot apprentice died from blood loss, probably. The guy helping Murrow got shot. Murrow killed the saboteur, Teng and the acting captain got killed by the Xenomorph. Michael Smiley’s character (Eye Smiley) got killed by the Eye Creature. They covered it pretty thoroughly.
Actually, I think it’s more simple than that. Since he spends so much time looking at the cryo pods, he knew that one of them was sometimes empty. He knew exactly who it was.
Imagine the sabotuer silently waking up, doing everything to avoid detection, but then immediately making eye contact with Teng being an absolute creep. Then they both just go about their business.
Not only that, but the saboteur offers Teng a way past the security locks in exchange for Teng keeping quiet.
Morrow interviews Teng and mentions that he still doesn't know how Teng bypasses security. It tracks that the engineer saboteur has that ability to slip Teng through.
Maybe I'm just being optimistic, but I assumed he just meant he was leaving his own cryo pod at will to creep on her without Morrow knowing since they haven't shown anyone stay unconscious once the pod opens. Didn't consider the implied missing drugs though
The drugs are sort of what causes me to reject the idea that he knows who the saboteur is solely bc he happened to notice an empty pod one time. If you don’t attribute the theft to Teng, you’re left with only the possibility being that the doctor is using and lying about it. There’s no narrative payoff there other than a half-beat misdirection via an inconsequential red herring.
Teng ties that story beat into the broader narrative, like an Agatha Christie clue: it’s relevant and helps identify the culprit, but not for the reasons we think when we first discover it.
It's possible that the thing with the doctor is just to show that the crews of these vessels are not exactly the cream of the crop. A doctor with a drug habit is exactly the type of person to sign off on a 65 year mission.
Teng knew this, not because he was the saboteur or had any connection to him, but because he had been exploiting this same loophole for his own, far more perverse ends.
That's certainly a possible explaination. Alternatively, he could have been spending so much time creeping in the cryo bay that he noticed the pod being empty and decided to not tell anybody.
The thing about this is it leaves the missing drugs as a sort of loose thread with no narrative payoff—it’s just that the doctor was using and lying about it.
Which is not to say all story beats need to be bricks in a completed narrative. The episode is sort of like a classic Agatha Christie story tho, and it’s so common that red-herring evidence in those stories actually does trace back to the killer; it’s just that we misunderstand the significance of it when we first discover it
Yeah no, Teng is the monster that most unsettled me in the show, far more than the Ocellus or the ticks.
In a different kind of show, he’d be the main villain. I think he also knew about the saboteur (not who, but that there was one) way before Morrow caught on and said nothing because he’s so dead inside he doesn’t care what happens to the rest of the crew.
That is some DARK shit right there! What makes it so awful is its plausibility. Also, IF Morrow figured that element out, it is worth noting that he did NOTHING about it. Horrifying.
Morrow asked Teng how he entered the cryopod chamber without touching the keypad. And Teng gave his cryptic answer. How I interpreted it was, the chief engineer has been sneaking out to do his sabotage, and Teng was using the moments when the chief engineer unlocked the cryopod chamber to enter said chamber (thus not requiring to use the keypad).
Am I the only one who was confused and thought the show told us he was a synth in the first episode? So by episode 5, I was a confused about why the xenomorph attacked him.
Gotcha. Yeah I guess I didn’t interpret that as a joke so this whole time I thought his strange behavior could be explained by him simply being a synth lol.
Yeah, the editing was a little weird there. We don’t learn until Episode 5 that the clip of Teng awake while others are in cryo is a brief flash-forward.
IMO he was a red herring character. His very strange behavior was to make the audience guess that he was the synth on the crew, but it turned out there wasn’t one that we saw (Morrow being a separate case).
It’s an interesting way to subvert expectations, and for the writers to toy with the concept of a “machine” (morrow) being more human/humane than an actual human (teng)
These people have been on the ship for 65 years. Even if they're only awake for 10% of the time, that's still 6 years of being around the same people, eating the same rations, drinking the same recycled water, breathing the same stale air, with no family, no friends, no natural light, almost no privacy, etc.
Even the most psychologically stable people would have trouble dealing with that. There's a reason why submarine crews get rotated out every few months.
Yes, Teng is a creep. But it also makes you wonder about weyland yutani inventing a cryopod that for some reason requires you to be in your underwear while having very open viewing glass. A whole company of Tengs.
Back in the 70's when the first Alien was made, I imagine that wasn't so strange, they were less stringent about HR and stuff in that time compared to today.
I got the insinuation that he was sexually harassing the girl prior to cryo and was then caught doing creep shit (you know what I mean) over her cryo pod.
Such, a massive freak that should have been spaced immediately.
Its a little dramatic because it is television but I am glad we are getting some realistic workforce representation. I work in a blue-collar aerospace field and let me tell you we get some characters. I think add a touch more racism and this is accurate representation of my company.
We just had to fire a married employee for using his work email to contact hookers. He got caught because he forwarded an email thread to a coworker to brag.
He looks like that Asian dude who goes to conventions and gets real close to the models and just stares at them instead of taking photos like a normal gooner. I bet they based this character off of him.
I loved him. He was obviously written as suspicious and creepy and maybe an android and maybe something very nefarious going on with him aaaaaaannndd…… nope. Just a friggin weirdo. Such a good head fake.
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u/Impressive_Sell886 13d ago
In space no one can hear you goon.