Away Season 1, Episode 4 recap: Excellent Chariots

Away Season 1, Episode 4 recap: Ram gets seriously sick.

The opening of Away Season 1, Episode 4, is probably the closest this season will get to being a horror film. A manic Ram makes his way through the ship looking for something as his eyes go wide, and he inches closer and closer to the airlock while speaking to people that aren’t there.

He’s in the midst of a hallucinogenic spiral of some sort, triggered by his high fever. When he breaches the door close to the airlock, an alarm goes off, and the crew rushes to his side. Ram has with mono, which is incredibly contagious.

The entire crew begins a course of antivirals, and each one dons preventative gear, including masks and gloves. With Ram quarantined in his quarters, there is an eerie parallel to this episode and our real-world circumstances right now.

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Emma is the one who decides she will risk infection by administering Ram’s antivirals and taking care of him. She feels it is her duty as the commander. Despite her insistence, Ram tries to make her promise him she’ll shoot him out of the airlock if he doesn’t recover. He’s terrified of getting someone else on the crew sick. He fears someone dying because they get infected by him.

At one point, Ram panics in his half-sleep-half-wake daze and falls out of bed, seriously wounding himself. A deep cut in his back causes him to bleed heavily. Again, Emma steps up to take care of him and stitch the wound. She orders the rest to stay behind. But none of them listen to her. Ultimately, all of them enter the room to help Ram. It’s a mark of how far this crew has come on this journey.

Even Misha — who was most against getting close to Ram — comes in at the last second to staple his wound shut, much to everyone’s chagrin. Poor Ram. But hey, it does make the injury stop bleeding.

Through flashbacks and a discussion with Emma, we learn Ram’s fears stem from an incident that happened when he was a child. He became deathly ill, and his brother Rohit (Anantjot S Aneja) refused to leave his side. Tragically, Rohit caught Ram’s illness and did not recover. According to him, everything changed between him and his family after Ram died.

That’s why he and his remaining family members are so estranged. They even told Ground that the only conditions they would want to hear about Ram’s status in space are his death.

At the end of the episode, Ram tells Emma that all of this, coupled with his brother’s story, has made him realize if he can find a woman who stands by him as Rohit and Emma did, he will never let her go.

Away Season 1, Episode 4 recap: Lex begins acting out.

In Episode 4, Lex starts acting like a typical television teenager. She lashes out at Dr. Putney — who is both her and her mother’s therapist — after she discovers her mom told him she recently got a C on a science exam. It’s not like Lex to get anything less than an A, and Emma grows concerned she might be struggling with everything going on between Emma being in space and Matt still in recovery.

During a phone call with Emma at school, she even accuses her mother of caring about nothing but school. Before they can have much of a conversation, the signal dies out. A boy named Isaac Rodriguez (Adam Irigoyen) overhears the convo and tells Lex where she can find a better signal in the future. He has some experience with long-distance phone calls as his father was in the military and frequently went overseas.

Obviously crushing on Isaac, Lex and Cassie google him later to learn more. Lex discovers his father died overseas. Instead of attending her rescheduled science exam, she blows it off and finds Isaac in the parking lot. He’s busy loading a dirt bike into the back of his pickup truck.

I’m guessing that Lexi feels a bond to Isaac after learning he lost his dad. He has likely dealt with some of the things she’s going through right now. She asks him if she can tag along to wherever he’s headed. The two spend a normal, fun afternoon riding dirt bikes together.

Away Season 1, Episode 4 recap: Matt must make a difficult decision about his future.

Matt is inching closer and closer to a hospital checkout date and is eager to return home with Lex. He meets some fellow patients during group therapy and even confesses to having his first erection since all of this happened. While he’s still working on regaining full use of his left hand and walking again, if Matt passes his upcoming tests, he can go home, although he will continue physical therapy for years to come during outpatient sessions.

Everything is ready to go when Matt has a one-on-one conversation with a fellow patient named Travis Parker (Jamie Nieto) who wound up bucked off a bronco and received long-lasting damage because of it. Travis advises Matt to fail one of his tests so they can see he’s improving, but not enough to go home. Matt is in one of the world’s best rehab centers. Why give that up so soon when he hasn’t reached his ideal recovery spot?

Travis warns that when he leaves, he’ll be getting less PT, only an hour a day or so — he’s heading toward “plateau city.” The way he sees it, they’re part of a system, so they need to learn how to work it to their advantage. Of course, they’re ready for Matt to go home; it costs thousands of dollars to keep every patient there a day longer than necessary.

He even demonstrates the progress he’s made with his hand, adding it would not have happened had he left. Matt seriously considers taking Travis’s advice. Even Emma encourages him if he thinks it’s the right thing to do. His only concern his Lex.

When he tells her his plan, she tries to seem supportive, but then she blows off her science exam right before Matt is due to take his own tests. It serves as a sign to him that his daughter needs him more, and he passes his tests with flying colors. He’s going home early, after all.

Next. Teenage Bounty Hunters: What we want from S2. dark

Find out more about Away‘s impressive soundtrack at Men’s Health.

All ten episodes of Away Season 1 are now streaming on Netflix.

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