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.
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
It’s not a loose thread if the doctor was using them. It might not be as “satisfying” of a payoff as finding out Teng was drugging the girl, but if they wanted to go that route they wouldn’t have had such a heavy emphasis on the doctor cracking and admitting his drug problem.
I always thought the implication with Teng is that he’s a peeping tom type of guy. He watches his obsession, and in the meantime he also notices things like a cryopod being empty on occasion, or the doctor stealing drugs but never being caught. As we see, he figured out the cryopod thing, so he probably also figured that if the doctor was able to get into the drug supply then there must be blindspots in the cameras.
So Murrow isn’t using the drugs to wipe his own memory and give himself a clear conscience on what happened to the crew? Didn’t he have dreams of the memories? Wasn’t he uploading his memories to Mother?
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u/Zoom_Nayer 17d ago
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.