Elias didn't move. He sat in the dark, staring at the cabin door. He had told them to leave their emotions there, but he knew the truth: once the flight is over, you have to open that door and pick them all back up again. And they always felt twice as heavy as when you left them.
“Airspeed’s decaying,” his co-pilot, Miller, whispered. Her knuckles were white on the yoke. This was her first trans-continental flight since her father’s funeral, and Elias could see the tremor in her hands. [S9E5] Leave Your Emotions at the Cabin Door
Only then did Miller let out a sob that shook her entire frame. Only then did Sarah, standing in the galley, lean her head against the cool metal of the exit door and weep. Elias didn't move
The plane hit a pocket of dead air, dropping five hundred feet in a second. Screams erupted from the cabin. Oxygen masks tumbled from the ceiling like yellow plastic ghosts. And they always felt twice as heavy as when you left them
For twenty minutes, the aircraft was a metal tube of absolute, practiced coldness. No one cried because no one had the permission to. They were all holding their breath, suspended in a vacuum where emotion had been surgically removed.