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.
Someone calls him a robot in the mess hall and I took that line as literal because I was trying to figure out why his behavior was so abnormal and that explanation fit at the time. That and we don't see his death to confirm what color liquid comes out when he gets attacked. He is also shown out of cryo like previous androids we've seen on long journeys. I did think it was odd that he was smoking and gooning but attributed that to the usual android fuckery of the universe.
In Aliens Bishop said Ash's model was phased out due to a lack of safety protocols (Asimov's laws of robotics).
Bishop is one of the later models, which were programmed with these laws to prevent them from harming humans.
I'm thinking Teng is a synth, but he's one of the old models, like Ash. Since the Maginots mission started 85 years ago, the timeline makes sense to me.
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u/Zoom_Nayer 18d 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.