Ghost Station

“The protesters outside are getting louder. Their chants are still faint, but somehow clearer than before. Or maybe that’s just Ophelia’s guilty conscience.”

Ophelia’s guilty conscience will be the true ghost haunting her in the mysteriously abandoned planetary station she’s assigned to work in, and where she eventually gets stranded after some strange happenings. Ophelia is a therapist in need of a therapist (like most therapists): traumatized by both her father’s actions during her childhood, when he went on a killing spree, and by the recent suicide of a patient, she blames herself for both events, and accepts a job to help a crew in an unknown alien planet to atone for her past mistakes.

But when she wakes up in cryosleep, her mind is awake before her body, leading to some moments of terror where she must reassure herself that everything is fine and normal. Things get more serious when she realizes no one came to release her (“The first deep pang of dread reverberates within her, like the toll of an ominous bell. Did Nova screw this up? Mistakes, miscalculations do happen with cold sleep”), and even worse, when she manages to set herself free, there’s no one to greet her. There’s no one around at all (“The only sounds are the deep thrum of the engines beneath her feet and the hushed susurration of the environmental system, pushing warmed and breathable air out into the room. It smells of burning dust, hot metal, and old meal-paks. Where is everyone?”).

This is when Ophelia realizes that the scenario is even worse than she had imagined. She’s not alone in a ghost station, awakened before time just to realize that the rest of the crew is dead. No. It’s much worse than that: the crew is very much alive. They’re just playing a very serious, elaborate prank on her. She’s not alone in a ghost station; she’s stuck in a normal one with a bunch of pricks.

Ophelia’s new work colleagues hate her guts, and the relationship between them is the beating heart of the story. And it’s easy to understand why they don’t jibe with her: first, she’s a newcomer in an old crew that already treat themselves as family. Ophelia is an intruder. Then there’s the fact that they had just lost a crew member in their last mission, and Ophelia insists it’s because of a mental condition – a suicide-inducing paranoia formed by spending too much time in space – some of them don’t even believe it’s a real thing. And the worst offender: she’s rich. Ophelia comes from a famous family that owns one of the most important companies in the galaxy. They look at her and see someone who could probably buy the whole crew, their ship, the station they’re going to work in, and even the planet without breaking a sweat. You can certainly get where they’re coming from.

But don’t worry, we can still empathize with Ophelia because she isn’t actually rich: she’s basically a bastard in her family, which despises her. She knows they couldn’t care less if she died. They’re more of an enemy than an ally to her. So, Ophelia is hated by everyone because of her family, and she can barely leverage any benefit from her bloodline. Her family is all headaches and trauma.

Her new team, however, doesn’t know that. They see her as an enemy at worst, and as a nuisance at best. An atmosphere of paranoia is formed after we notice the crew is always talking in private channels, never allowing her to be part of the conversation – probably because she’s the subject of it. So, she must navigate this hostility to help them while, at the same time, having to deal with the weird shit that starts to happen at that alien planet: the crew gets sick, with rash, headaches, strange nightmares, and even a lump appearing in their arm. Ophelia is equipped to deal with mental issues; this is well above her skills.

As a therapist, Ophelia is at least self-aware. She starts to have a thing for her team’s leader, Severin, and she chastises herself: “Wanting— needing— to be needed, relied on by authority, is her weak spot. It’s what both motivates and terrifies her, which, in psychotherapy world, makes her double the mess.” She’s quick to rile up, too, which makes her a good target for the more belligerent members of the crew, who despise her even without knowing what her father did. Ophelia can’t wait for them to find out.

And it’s interesting how she doesn’t even try to make things easier. Her ego always gets in the way, pushing her to always have the last word, to not let any provocation go unanswered. We’re reading Ghost Station, and saying “Jesus, girl, let it slide, you’re just making things worse,” but Ophelia can’t.

The alien planet reinforces the tension by being this inscrutable thing, holding the ruins of a long-lost civilization. The crew spots some alien towers in the distance, for example, but they know better than to get near them. They don’t know a thing about the planet, you see, except that they’re paid to work there, and the last crew seems to have left in a hurry, leaving tons of personal belongings scattered around. Ophelia feels that there’s something off with it as soon as she lands: “This planet is a graveyard, forgotten and abandoned to the weeds and time. It should be sad. Or perhaps a warning that everything ends. But standing here, rather than just reading about it, the eeriness is what rings through to Ophelia.”

The reason they accept the job is the reason why people nowadays also accept the most dangerous jobs with ridiculously low pay: capitalism sucks. It’s either that or starving. They hate Ophelia for a good reason, you know. She’s not just rich; she represents their everyday plight, the reason why they’re on an alien planet collecting random stuff for a meager pay, having to look for even more shadier jobs on the side, too. If they’re going to die, it’s not for a good cause; it’s to fill the pockets of Ophelia’s family. If you were in their shoes, you would hate her, too.

But when shit starts to go down, Ophelia breaks as easily as any one of them. Haunted by past traumas, she is easy prey for a force that plays with memories and identity. This is psychological horror at heart, so her weakness is by design, reinforcing that paranoia: she may be infected, too, she may be the one who snaps, just like her father did many years ago. Maybe we’re following an unreliable point of view that withholds information from herself, blocking memories, repressing thoughts.

The suspense and horror of Ghost Station, then, work pretty well, playing with the hostile dynamic between the characters. If there’s a place the narrative slips up, however, it’s the ending – the epilogue more specifically, rather than the climax – which feels very rushed, trying too hard to solve the characters’ problems. We don’t buy it to the point where if it had a last-minute reveal that it was all a dream, although still frustrating as this type of reveal usually is, it would at least have made more sense in terms of tone and atmosphere.

But despite its weak epilogue, Ghost Station is still a very effective sci-fi horror narrative that goes places with its alien theme and plays well with the central character dynamics – besides, of course, reminding us of why we should hate a certain type of rich people. And that “certain” is me being kind here.

January 18, 2026.