“Icebreaker” is episode seven of season four of Sanctuary.
The episode opens in the dark, somewhere pretty cold, with an abandoned looking ship that looks to be frozen in the ice. There is a primarily British team aboard, along with Henry and Declan, and they need to get inside before the adverse conditions outside kill them all. The door inside the ship – an icebreaker, in the Bering Sea – is stuck, so Henry uses his HAP strength to pull it open. There is another HAP along as well, Alistair, who was met in “Animus”. Magnus is also flying out, but with a blizzard and subzero conditions outside, she won’t be able to fly out to tomorrow.
The icebreaker is Russian, abandoned and dark, miles from nowhere and frozen in the sea. Creepy conditions in other words. And that’s before the first dead body is found. With a gunshot wound. That Henry thinks was self-inflicted, with a rather new assault rifle. He also thinks that the icebreaker crew were Russian smugglers smuggling more than just Abnormals. Such as brand new guns, as more assault rifles are discovered. There are also more frozen corpses, nine in total, on the bridge, who appear to have shot each other. After which the ship ran aground. The ship had an apparent crew of ten, who would all appear to have killed each other or themselves in a Mexican standoff. The question is, why? They had a container full of Hollow Earth Abnormals, so where are they? This is channelling The Thing currently. The Abnormals are found – but they all look to be dead as well – at least, the ones found are dead. They also turned on each other.
So, they are stuck on an abandoned vessel with lots of dead things that appear to have massacred each other for some reason. Whatever the reason is, it’s probably not good. Henry certainly has a bad feeling. He mentions the virus that affected Magnus in “Requiem” but he doesn’t think it could survive on the surface. First, they need to get power before they all freeze to death. A manifest shows that all of the Abnormals on the ship are dead.
Magnus and Will turn up, Magnus having flown a plane through a storm that no-one else was willing to do in. The plane they used is now grounded without some minor repairs. Magnus says that there was a rumour that the smugglers had access to red list Abnormals before they got the Hollow Earth Abnormals.
They find something unknown and alive, or rather a lot of somethings, frozen into ice blocks. Magnus decides to defrost one of them in controlled conditions, so that they can at least find out what the Abnormals are. With the ship warming up, the blocks will start thawing, and it comes as no surprise when the first person dies. Then, the Abnormals are identified as being Magoi, from the episode “Kush”, which can alter the minds of people around them when they feel threatened (and that episode felt like it was influenced by The Thing as well). Which is why the crew killed each other. Magoi are also supercharged by contact with saltwater. Such as that which surrounds the ship. They also can’t risk the Abnormals getting back to civilisation either. Then one gets loose and things start falling apart. And the ship is sinking.
With mind-affecting Abnormals around, no-one can really trust what they are seeing. This seems like an episode in which it will be very bad to not be a member of the regular cast. And even those are not necessarily safe in this series.