Netflix's Another Life season 1, episode 4 recap: Guilt Trip

Niko is stuck in a dream loop due to a ship malfunction. On the latest episode of Another Life, she has to face her real and imagined nightmares to get out alive.

Niko woke up in the closing moments of the previous Another Life episode, to find her crew under attack by a mysterious being on the ship. In the fourth episode of the show, Niko is informed that the Salvare has landed on Canis Majoris, and was attacked.

The Mysterious Monster

With William offline, Niko tries to comfort an injured August when Cas appears. She’s been separated from the rest of the crew and is desperate to disembark, but Niko won’t leave August to die. August’s brother’s death a decade ago is still on Niko’s conscience, so now Niko needs to save August. Except, on their way to the medical bay, the creature grabs August.

Niko and Cas find the rest of the crew and she is determined to shoot the monster into space and head back to Earth. Her plan doesn’t work – Niko loses the entire crew to the creature, leaving her alone on the ship. Even without reading the episode synopsis, we can all guess that this is in fact a Soma-induced nightmare.

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The Salvare crew stand around Niko who is still stuck in her pod because of a glitch. The pod will shut down in 30 minutes, and if Niko is still asleep, she’ll be braindead. All other options also lead to death, so Zayn has to try their best to get Niko out.

Dream a Little Dream

Niko jumps from nightmare to nightmare, while Zayn tries to stabilize her and Cas and William brainstorm ways to get Niko out.

In the first dream, Niko faces Dubois after the tragedy on the Pilgrim – the ship she commanded on a mission that left 10 dead – before she lands up at the memorial for the Pilgrim crew, confronting the lives that were lost. Of course, her worst nightmare should be getting stuck in the 1950s and giving up on the Salvare mission (which is the next nightmare), but somehow Niko wants to hold on to this dream. Niko realises that she’s still asleep, but refuses to follow William out.

It’s only when the dream reminds her of the dire situation her crew is in does Niko finally snap out of it. The showrunners are desperate to make viewers believe that Niko is afraid that her family will forget her or never accept her, but there’s been no preamble to that. She misses them, which is understandable, but there’s no need for Niko to be forced on a ‘guilt trip’. In all honesty, Niko should really be focused on bigger tasks other than fictious feelings about her family.

The Pilgrim

Niko’s still not out of danger yet. She wakes up aboard the Pilgrim, where she was having a clandestine affair with fellow commander, Hudson (Louis Ozawa Changchien). He was one of the crew who perished.

With time running out, William goes back into Niko’s REM cycle. Niko’s been trying to get out, but she can’t. She and William have to work through several permutations to get her out. Niko tries to let herself die on the Pilgrim. That doesn’t snap her out of her Soma sleep. Then, she attempts to save the entire crew, but Jana appears on the wrong side of the airlock. Again, the cycle repeats. William asks Niko to get to the root cause of why she can’t leave.

It’s because Niko’s been hanging on to her guilt for too long. She made a decision that cost lives, including of the man she loved at the time, and she has to face that. Niko replays those fatal moments aboard the Pilgrim once again, watching as Hudson pleads for her to unlock the door, before he finally makes peace with his impending demise. With Zayn’s help, Niko is back up and running again.

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During this episode of Another Life, Michelle had discovered a moon that could be the source of vital nutrients the crew needs. With the mission taking much longer than expected and now that all the replacement crew are out of Soma sleep as well, the Salvare is running out of food. Docking on dry land and getting food is a high priority.

With Niko out of commission, the crew looked to Cas for guidance. Despite refusing to make the four lightyear detour to the moon initially, Cas finally relented. Now that Niko is awake, she is displeased with this decision. But William tells her that he’s picking up the transmission from the Artifact, but it’s coming from the moon. The moon has a similar crystalline tower – so did the Salvare just find the source of the communications and succeed in their mission?

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