Thirsty

March 9, 2018·24 min·2 clips

Matthew Leeds arrives at Station Blue with a throbbing headache and no water, tasked with restoring power alone in the Antarctic darkness.

The episode opens mid-descent, with someone dropping Matthew off at the remote Antarctic station and instructing him to restore power and prepare for scientists arriving in six weeks. Matthew wakes with no sense of how long he has been asleep, no water, and a flashlight as his only light source. His first priority is getting the generator running, but the building is dark, cold, and mostly unexplored. He makes his way through a long dormitory hallway, a mess hall, and an oversized cafeteria kitchen, noting the station's scale relative to one person occupying it. The kitchen triggers a memory of his father's church — austere, institutional, and associated with pressure. Matthew's backstory emerges: his father is a high school teacher who wanted to be a college professor and pushed his son toward academia. Matthew, a C student who wanted to drop out and work construction, eventually left home after graduation. He spent years doing seasonal labor — salmon processing in Alaska, ski resort work in winter, farm work in between. A job fair visit, prompted by his father's cold suggestion, led him to an unmarked table where a man and woman were recruiting for contracting work in remote global locations. Despite lacking academic credentials, Matthew's willingness to work and travel got him a passport request and a laptop application to fill out. Before completing the application he noticed a program labeled P.R.S. in the corner, which the man quickly closed. A year passed before they called — the original hire had dropped out, and Matthew had less than a week to reach LAX. He learned only at the end of the call that the destination was Christchurch, then Antarctica. He sold what he needed to, packed immediately, and left the next morning. Back in the present, Matthew finds the power controls on the third floor, restores electricity, and locates a drinking fountain. He reaches the camera room and reviews feeds from across the station — kitchen, hallways, gym, a rec room with an Elvis cardboard cutout. He notices the second-floor cameras are all password protected. While cataloguing the feeds, he realizes one camera is not in the main system. A separate, older computer — running what appears to be Windows 97 — hosts a single program also labeled R.S. Its single feed is trained on the door that was not on his map.

As heard by us

Altitude, thirst, and a strange job memory make the station quietly ominous.

Station Blue's "Thirsty" opens on altitude headaches, a dry throat, and that off-balance first day inside an Antarctic station, where the sun never quite gives up.

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Why you'd press play

You want Antarctic dread that starts with thirst, then keeps tightening around the edges.

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