This episode was all about Octavia and the Anomaly, so we don’t see anything of Sanctum or any of the potential fallout from last week’s episode. However, we do get some much needed background on this new stranger, Hope aka Dioyza’s daughter, and what her life was like living on the other side of the anomaly.
The episode opens with Octavia swimming in a deep body of water with a greenish glow. She swims ashore, removing her heavy fur that’s now soaked and useless only to discover that her arm is no longer withered or dying, but completely healed. But before she can think too heavily on how that could be, she hears distant screaming and knows that it’s Dioyza. She makes a run for it and finds Dioyza in a cabin about to give birth, despite having 3 months left in her pregnancy. When she confronts Dioyza about the impossibility of labour, she tells her that it’s been three months since she went through the anomaly, making her right on time to deliver. Dioyza passes out shortly after her daughter, Hope, is born.
Meanwhile in the present, Hope, Echo, and Gabriel surface from that same water, through the anomaly at the end of last week’s episode. Hope welcomes them to her home she calls “Skyring”, revealing that her memory is still intact. She runs off to the cabin she was raised in, looking for something urgently. Echo confronts her about Bellamy and Hope tells them that they were being chased by the disciples and they are the ones who took Bellamy to Bardo. But Bardo is across the anomaly or what Hope calls it as a bridge. She said that she made a deal with Anders, the head of the disciples to get her mother back by tagging Octavia. She leads them through a hatch in the floor to another spherical decoder, the key to the anomalies, but when she goes to look for the code that will allow her access to use the bridge and get her mother back, she sees that it has washed away upon re-entry. Without it, they are stranded.
Octavia tells Dioyza that she can’t stay there and she needs to get back to Bellamy. They fight and argue over this throughout Hope’s early childhood until Dioyza makes Octavia realise how futile and unrealistic that is. When Octavia and Hope are planting seeds out front, they discover a body in the ground. Octavia realises this is the perfect opportunity to use his suit to escape and she’s all ready to do it until she walks out of the cabin having already said goodbye to Hope only to meet up with Dioyza and a broken helmet. This ruined her last chance to get back to him and this is where she finally realises that. After this incident, she doesn’t try to go after him again, instead focusing on Hope. Hope tells Echo that she tried for 6 years to leave. She had been there for 10 years. Hope has been on this planet for 20 years. She’s frustrated by everyone’s insistence on this Bellamy character. Gabriel interrupts having come up with a theory on how to read the code on Hope’s scroll and tries using charcoal to reveal the previous pattern on the paper, but it doesn’t work.
Echo notices a strange warmth radiating in the hearth and she goes to investigate. She gets pushed by this man with wild hair and a medium beard with a very noticeable countdown tattooed on his arm. He escapes. Hope tells them that that represents how long he’s a prisoner for. She believes that without that code, they will be stranded for at least 5 years unless they go after that man. She informs Echo and Gabriel that when the countdown reaches 0, the disciples come to collect and when they do they can kill them and take their suits all the way to Bardo. They pursue him to a graveyard of bodies and Gabriel seems to recognise a Colin Benson or CB as his initials are from the wall below the hatch. He checks the skull for a mind drive leading him to believe that Eligius III was on this planet and that this must be Planet Beta. Hope informs them that Skyring is the place they send people who need to atone for their sins. It’s a place where the people who aren’t strong enough or devout enough go to.
They get back to the cabin where Gabriel grabs a tablet he and Russell had worked on with a sole purpose of reading mind drives and gives it a shot with Colin Benson’s. They see Becca on it. It reveals that an Eliguis transport crashed on Planet Beta and Colin Benson was the sole survivor. Upon looking at more footage with crazy-ish ramblings from Benson, he catches a glimpse of the anomaly glow rising out of the lake, through the window. He runs out to get a pen or charcoal, anything to write the code down knowing that he’ll see it in the footage after spotting the green glow, but when he returns, the prisoner is back and he’s holding the tablet in his hands. They try to reason with him but he won’t listen. He proclaims that he serves his master for all of mankind and then smashes the tablet on the ground, shattering it and their hope to get Bellamy and Dioyza back.
The anomaly rises from the lake when Hope’s about 10. Dioyza tells them to hide while she goes out to investigate. She is confronted and captured by the disciples, but is able to tell Octavia to hide Hope as they go to search the cabin. She tucks her away under some floorboards and tells her to not come out no matter what she sees or hears. They come in and Octavia struggles, but they manage to restrain her and escort her out to Dioyza. They put helmets on their heads as per instruction claiming that the boss wants them to keep their memories intact. After that, Hope is all alone.
