Red Valley · Kontinue Productions

S3E5: 2043

November 19, 2023·22 min·1 clip

Armed corporate executives crash a secret cryogenic facility and start making deadly demands.

The episode opens with Clive Schill, a wealthy fugitive, arriving at a secret cryogenic facility hidden in a basement in Willimantic, Connecticut. He's paid twenty million dollars for a spot in what appears to be a makeshift bunker designed to keep a small group alive for a thousand years. The facility is run by a skeleton crew of engineers including Pam, Shelly, Bill, and security chief Josh, each with specialized roles essential to the operation. The location was chosen for its obscurity and features giant frog statues, referencing a local historical event where townspeople mistook fighting bullfrogs for an enemy attack. The basement contains jury-rigged cryopods powered by MBV cells and stores of 'heart's horn,' a mysterious substance crucial to their survival process. The operation requires precise coordination, with each team member serving as a backup for another's specialized knowledge. Their plans are disrupted when Rebecca Landry and Francesca Jones, armed executives from the Overhead corporation, force their way into the facility after their own cryogenic nest was destroyed by Aubrey Wood. Josh, the security chief, is killed in the confrontation, and the intruders demand places in the remaining pods. A tense standoff develops as the team explains that each person has an irreplaceable role in maintaining the facility during hypersleep. Francesca becomes increasingly unstable and threatening, leading Rebecca to shoot and kill her to protect the group's survival chances. Rebecca reveals that she's actually the CEO of Overhead and offers the group access to corporate resources that were set aside for the company's board of directors, who are now dead. The survivors dispose of Francesca's body and reluctantly accept Rebecca into their group. Pam shares the local legend of the Battle of the Frogs, where 18th-century townspeople armed themselves against what they thought was an attack, only to discover bullfrogs fighting over a drying pond - a story that serves as a metaphor for their own desperate situation. The group enters cryosleep with the plan to wake up in the year 3043, but something goes catastrophically wrong with their system. They awaken in 2064, having slept for only twenty years instead of a thousand, and discover that Shelly has died during the process. Faced with this devastating failure and the loss of a crucial team member, the survivors must evacuate the facility and confront an uncertain future in a world just two decades removed from their own time, rather than the distant future they had planned for.

As heard by us

A wake-up disaster turns into a tense, blackly funny scramble for control.

Red Valley keeps the future nasty and practical in this one. A wake-up gone wrong turns into a tense bargaining match over blood supply, dead bodies, and who gets to walk away. What works best is how the episode keeps the panic human.

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Why you'd press play

Play this if you like your sci-fi wake-ups messy, tense, and ruthless.

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