I gotta throw mine in with Ketsu here. I didn't think much about it before, but the other day I realized that this absolutely bones some characters. If Miku, Luke and Claire all dropped from the game-- Steve would be completely reset to last July, when I apped him. I don't like that the only other option than that is to drop him myself.

She has a point with the intergalactic war and all, and I don't see why there needs to be anything in place to make them "forget" another character was here. Or any excuse for why characters disappear, either. It's a big ship, people can disappear all the time, all that really needs to happen in Stacy announcing that so and so has returned to the pods. The characters know there's no way to find whoever in the pods and no way to open them, so they could just deal with it from there.