Thom

Thom demands Greta to take him out of the simulation.

**Thom**, voiced by Henry Douthwaite, is a character in LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS, appearing as the main protagonist in the first season episode titled "*Beyond the Aquila Rift*".

## History

As the Blue Goose heads towards the surge point gate in a long queue, Thom, the captain, looks outside and laments on the queue. As they get closer to the gate, Thom checks with Ray and Suzy to see if the ship is ready to enter the gate. They all enter their surge tanks in preparation for the faster-than-light journey.

Thom and Suzy wake up in the ship - having been docked in a repair facility instead of its destination - and are greeted by an old friend of Thom's - Greta - who explains that they're in Saumlaki Station in Schedar Sector, that was a routing error in the ship's routing plot, and that Arkangel Dispatch must have had a glitch in their syntax launch patterns. Thom and Greta puts Suzy back into her tank after she collapses from surge tank sickness. Greta discourages Thom from trying to wake up Ray, before escorting him outside the Blue Goose and into Saumlaki Station.

A while passes, and Thom is now in the station's bar. Greta - now dressed in an alluring night dress - walks towards him and sits down on the sofa next to him. They admire the view outside the bar and she leans towards him to tell him a secret: that she was hoping to bump into Thom again after the fling they had together four years ago. They then proceed to have sex in Greta's cabin.

Some more time passes, and Thom is sitting on Greta's bed. His mind continues to be troubled by the events that had folded. Greta confesses that she hasn't been completely honest with Thom. She admits that they're not actually in Schedar Sector, and that the routing error has taken him far beyond what she originally let on. She gets out of the bed and presents a holographic map demonstrating that Saumlaki Station is, in fact, 150,000 light-years from Earth.

Thom - upset by the news - asks Greta how long he and his crew were in their tanks for. Greta responds that - in subjective time - they were in their tanks for only a few months, but several centuries have passed back home on Earth. Thom struggles to come to terms with what Greta just told him, and yells at her that he may as well be dead. Greta tells him that he is still alive, and that she ended up in Saumlaki Station in the same way he did: a routing error. She tells him that it's always the same routing error, and that it has brought everyone to the station. She then suggests that he should wake up his crew from their tanks.

Thom wakes up Suzy and asks her to recall the last thing she can remember. Suzy describes Arkangel in unpleasant terms, then dreams: dreams like the encounter she is in right now. She notices Greta in the corner and asks Thom who she is. When Thom responds that it's his old friend Greta, Suzy immediately counters this by stating that it's not Greta. Suzy yells at Greta demanding to know "what" she is, implying that she might be aware of the true nature of Greta and the environment the Blue Goose crew are in.

Suzy screams at Thom to look at Greta, before lashing out at Greta. Suzy snatches the statue from Greta's hands and attempts to stab her with it. Suzy manages to scrape Greta's neck with the statue, but Greta successfully counters her by injecting a tranquilizer needle into her chest. Suzy is knocked out, and Greta leaves Thom to take Suzy back to her tank by himself.

Back at the cabin, Thom observes Greta's neck as she sleeps, and notices that the cut Suzy inflicted on her has disappeared. He then says to Greta that Suzy is right about her, and that she isn't actually Greta. Greta - realizing that she can no longer hide the truth from Thom - responds to him by telling him that his entire surroundings is just a simulation being fed to his mind, and that he is still asleep in his tank.

Thom demands the whole truth from Greta, who resists by telling him that he is not ready. Thom tells her that he wants to see the station - and Greta herself - for what they truly are. After a tearful Greta continues to resist an increasingly angry and aggressive Thom's demands, she eventually caves in, but not before telling him that she does cares for him and that she cares for "all the lost souls that end up here". Thom stares into the camera, anticipating the world outside of her simulation.

A severely-thin, unfed, malnourished, and unkempt Thom wakes up in his tank and is greeted with the horrifying reality that his body was in for all this time: a graveyard of spaceships scattered throughout a hollowed-out asteroid, all held in place by the mesh of organic webbing that covers the insides of the asteroid. As he speechlessly looks around his surrounding and spots the long-dead bodies of his crew, he hears the being that had pretended to be Greta calling out to him from inside the back of his wrecked ship. He looks inside to see a silhouette of what appears to be a busty humanoid female figure walking towards him, before the silhouette walks into the light and reveals "Greta" in her true form: a giant spider-ant alien creature with many eyes. As the creature continues to crawl towards a hysterical Thom, she stares down at him and eventually places his mind back into her simulation, and in the process, erasing all his memories up to the point he woke up in the tank in the simulation.

In the simulation, Thom is in his tank once again. The liquid drains out of the tank and Thom wakes up. He gets out of the tank and is greeted by Greta once again, but in her simulation form. Thom asks what happened and Greta lies to him by saying that they're in Saumlaki Station, before remarking that at least there's a friendly face in the far-away station, echoing what Thom had said in the previous simulation.

## Trivia

* In the original story which the episode is based on, Thom had a wife named Katerina. Katerina does not make an appearance in the Netflix adaptation, nor is she even mentioned.
* Thom's physical appearance mirrors to Liev Schreiber (*Scream*), Tom Hardy (*Venom*), and Jon Bernthal (*The Walking Dead*).