:: a toe in the water... ::

:: Friday, May 31, 2002 ::

No rest for the weary...

Not this week. But in the fun news, The Max Factor now has a blog (see left), I'm in the middle of another successful Farscape indoctrin- er, marathon for a friend, and I just made my first music video. Now if I could only find a programme to compress it to less than 40mb without making it into a blurry thumbnail, I might be persuaded to share.

One more week to pack, then we're off flat-hunting in Leeds. {gulp}

And now, back to the next box...

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:: fialka 12:42 PM [+] ::

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There's a reason babies don't work on tv...

And that's because real babies are non-stop WORK the minute they start crawling around. You can't take your eyes off them for a second once they walk. Let me introduce you to the 19-month-old who can get out of a lawn chair, down the drive, through a *very* small hole in the fence and halfway down the road before his mother and I can get the frelling gate *open* to chase him.

Yes, my beloved godsons and their parents were just over from Czech. 19 months and 4 years old. The baby never stops moving. The toddler never stops moving *and* he never shuts up. My partner and I were run into the ground in 24 hours. How their parents cope day in, day out, is beyond me.

This is reality, and this is why babies don't work on TV. Because the precious buggers aren't real, and the real buggers aren't precious, love them as we may.

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:: fialka 7:22 PM [+] ::

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Still thinking about the hive mind, which is probably dangerous.

But I have packed most of my clothes, and that comes down to just two suitcases, plus a medium-size box of coats and shoes. As opposed to 28 banana boxes of books. You can see where my priorities lie. {g} Tossed all my 'flopping round the village' clothes, kept everything that screamed 'out on the town in a whimsical mood'.

New life. Yeah, bring it on because this year SUCKED.

Anyway, back to collective unconscious, which is more interesting than the state of my house: Suela/Cofax says she's been told she's writing like me in this last one, which I have on the beta table right now. (I'm not sure about the style, if it really is like mine, or if it's just that I tend to be very distant, and she needs to be distant here or we'd drown.)

However, I found this hysterical, because my first thought when I finished Unbeknown was 'wow, that sounds like Max.' You know, you beta 600k or so of someone's work, you might subconsciously pick up a few stylistic quirks. But it's also just the way that story came out, all by itself. It's choppier than I usually am because John is so removed from himself by now, so tired. And I have Max's latest on the beta table as well, and it's suddenly occured to me that the structure is very Max, but the prose is very cofax. In fact, more like cofax than cofax is now {g}.

So yes, there's a point to be made that the three of us are influencing each other whether we intend to or not, because we're so closely involved in each other's work. There's an XF beta-group a few people now writing Farscape belong to, and that did have something of a 'house style' at its height of productivity. Dark and spare, though each writer's voice was/is still very distinct.

But it's not just styles, it's tiny things, like cofax mentioning Sebaceans and copper blood, which we've never discussed. It is in the snippet I had here, however, and we must have been writing them at about the same time. Mayaan's snippet had some stunning echoes of Max's Aeryn, yet I don't think Mayaan has even read Ghosts. And a couple of people I don't even know have recently put out stories with details I used in the unfinished one, and that's been hanging on my hard drive for months.

I don't remember this happening with XF. Mind you, we're smaller here but still the hive mind is very strong. {g}

I am thinking that a lot has to do with the show itself, and how fully drawn the characters are, despite the lack of pre-show historical detail. We know some pertinent points, but on Farscape the why has never been as important as the how. John has a very distinctive voice – get it right, and it's going to sound familiar. Aeryn has certain givens in the way her mind works, a 'default' setting based on her life before Moya. Also, she still has only a rudimentary emotional language. Put those together, and it gives her a certain dissociative quality that a lot of writers have been exploring since Fractures. These things are so built into canon you can't escape them, but the details -- especially in anything set post DWTB -- are ours to invent. And that's where a lot of cross-pollination is happening. The stories are all very different, but there are these…things. These thin tendrils. And I'm quite sure they're all utterly unconscious.

Or I am once again talking out my arse? Quite possibly -- all my books are packed and I feel like my brain has gone with them.

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:: fialka 1:09 PM [+] ::

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I sometimes think the difference between writers and schizophrenics is merely that writers know the voices aren't real.

That's from an email I just wrote to someone who asked me who I wrote for. And I think…I write for silence. I write so the characters will shut up and let me have some peace so I can get on with the mundane things – dinners to be cooked, kids to be reasoned with, a house to pack. And yet…I like the company of John and Aeryn while I'm stirring the sauce, or carting piles of dren from the attic. I like waking up to the voices in my head, even if they do make me sad.

And when they finally do go away, I'm always terrified they'll never come back.



The wee fic is finished and posted. I'll wrestle with getting it onto the Leviathan archive later – my internet connection has been ridiculously dodgy of late and getting it to stay stable long enough to get through the interface is just not happening. Until then, it can be found here: Unbeknown.



Two lovely ouchy things to beta, a snippet on Mayaan's blog that just tears my heart out and tosses it all bloody in the corner, and I'm wondering…is there some kind of collective mind at work out here? Don't get me wrong, I love it (anyone who knows me will tell you I'm the angst!ho of the universe). But I've noticed that thin tendrils are beginning to extend from one story to another -- not that anyone is stealing or imitating, not at all -- but rather as if there's a truth we're collectively trying to outline via consensus. These are not the stories we'll get on the show, because meta-text has demands that limit what textual choices can be made and few of ours can fit into those constraints. They're the stories that might have been, if John and Aeryn were truly inadvertent outlaws in a vast section of anarchic space about to erupt in a long and vicious war.

I suppose it's rather the way the show refracts the same characters through each writer's prism, until a collective picture begins to emerge, but ours is a much larger canvas. Different, sometimes conflicting, stories exploring every possible outcome, every parallel universe. Until a pattern of 'most likely' begins to emerge. Until we arrive at some informal, broad-brush picture of who these people are, and what lies ahead, despite the cacophony of conflicting detail.

The difference, of course, is that we don't have to come up with complete stories. We don't have to know the end of the tale, or even the middle. A small moment, illuminated, adds as much to the picture as a well-drawn, definitive plot. Torch circles, eventually overlapping to fill in the outline of Aeryn, of John. To illuminate the background of the UT, and the others that stand against or beside them.

Which is, I think, what fanfic is all about.

And then again, it's nearly two a.m. and I'm probably just talking out my arse .

(Hmm. Edited a couple of bits for clarity later, but I'm probably still talking out my arse.)

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:: fialka 1:15 AM [+] ::

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Not the finished fic...

...which will appear as soon as the beta is back. Just another fragment, one of many cluttering up my hard drive, none of which seem to want to grow up to be full-fledged stories. I'm wondering if the problem is that Farscape is so well constructed, it's not possible to write anything over 10k unless it's got some kind of action. And my very packed brain has no room for serious plotting at the moment (hence the "real" novel gathering dust). So, fragments and snippets and tiny little fics.

I suspect there will never be a Farscape version of Arizona Highways, but that's probably okay, because we've got Max and she's taller than me so I'd never be able to top the bar she's set. {g}


This one is a post-ep for Relativity.


She is sitting on the floor of their quarters, wearily fumbling with her boots. He kneels before her, touches her hands. Tonight she has the hands of good old boys in the bars back home, knuckles scraped and swollen from someone's jaw, dirt beneath the nails.

He lifts one hand to his lips, kisses the welts. Let Mommy make the boo-boo all better. Of course, Mommy is the boo-boo here, so that won't work. But anything is better than nothing, even when he know that kisses won't help.

He doesn't look at her face. Better not to look, not to make her self-conscious. Not to see her determined not to cry, strapped in tight, as if for zero-G. He's the one who throws himself out in space, loses the rope, leaves himself to chance. To her, any chance he gets.

He lifts the other hand, kisses that as well. Her blood tastes of copper, just like his.

----

He leads her barefoot to the showers, turns the water cool the way she likes it. He's a steaming shower man himself, but that's one small indulgence they're never going to be able to share.

"Crichton, what are you doing?"

"Earth custom." He takes the bottom of her shirt in both hands. There's a question in her eyes, but still her arms rise above her head.

Aeryn docile. That's a flavour of her he hasn't tasted yet.

He smiles and leans down to kiss the tip of her nose. It's further away than it should be and for a moment he wonders if this whole thing with Xhalax has made her smaller somehow. Then he looks down and starts to laugh. She's barefoot, that's all, and he's still wearing his boots.

"I think I forgot a step."

She waits while he strips down, arms folded beneath her bare breasts, oblivious to the picture she makes. He's never known a woman who wasn't either consciously posing or slightly embarrassed to stand before him undressed. Aeryn is neither, she's just Aeryn with half her clothes not on, still trying to figure out what's going on inside his head. Some of which is already obvious, but fortunately he's learned to ignore that.

He reaches for the button at her waist and starts to slide the leathers down her legs.

"Crichton, what are you doing?'

"Oh, come on, Aeryn. Surely I don't have to tell you that."

She puts a hand on his shoulder to steady herself as he kneels to get the rest of her clothing off. Damn leather trousers look great on, but they don't exactly fall away without a lot of help.

"Peacekeepers never undress each other?" It's an honest question actually; she's always gotten out of her clothes so fast he never had a chance.

"Yes. I guess."

"But they never shower together?"

"I can bathe myself." Her face is serious but there's the faintest tilt to her eyes. So many moods to her since they stopped fighting fate and let it have its way with them. At least, he likes to believe it's fate. He can't hate the wormhole that brought him here if it brought him this as well.

He takes her hand and backs into the shower, tugging her along with him.

"This is a custom of your species?" Her voice is deep and flat, which means beneath the bravado, she's a little bit scared. "Not just one of your odd habits?"

"It's just something we do. Water conservation."

He tips his head back and lets the cool water flow over his hair and face, washing away the stench of Old Faithful. Aeryn hasn't seemed to notice how bad he stinks, but then she's had a lot on her mind and she's pretty ripe herself.

Score one for the human. Her sight might be sharper and her ears better trained, but when it comes to the olfactory nerve, John Crichton wins the race.

She's undone her braid while his eyes were closed and he's sorry he missed that. Such an antiquated gesture, the woman taking down her hair. So completely affecting, still, a hundred years later in a galaxy far, far away.

"Your turn," he says as she steps towards him. She lays her head on his shoulder instead, slides her arms around his waist.

"Baby? You okay?"

She sighs against him, her skin hot despite the the cool water flowing over them. He can't believe he ever thought she'd be cold-blooded. Being inside her is like being inside a volcano, slow and molten until it erupts.

"I love you," she says softly.

"Oh, baby, I love you too." He holds her tighter, not quite sure his knees can take this. She's never said those words first.

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:: fialka 11:26 PM [+] ::

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Wow. I finished a fic.

An itsy bitsy teeny weeny procrastinating-from-packing-the-library fic, but...actually finished. Yay me.

And now I have to go back to it...sigh. Only 339 books to go. (Yes, I have a database. No, please do not ask.)

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:: fialka 10:38 PM [+] ::

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Quiet night, 3:26 am…

…and this is going to get posted tomorrow because I'm downstairs, curled on the couch with a red wool blankie and the new toy keeping my thighs warm (probably not good for the processor, but hey, it's a wood-burning stove and I ain't chopping wood in the middle of the night).

I didn't really intend to use this blog for anything but Farscape, but I feel compelled to shout out a great big WHOOT to France. Not that I thought the election would go any differently, but for answering the alarm. How nice to see a country wake up and smell the coffee, while America rolls over and goes back to sleep. (Four months in the county of pregnant chad makes me wonder what 'Le canard' made of *that* debacle. Should have thought of it at the time; I could have used a laugh.)

America. Sigh. How to piss people off, that's me talking about America, but the thing is…I don't live there anymore and I probably never will again, but it's where my consciousness was born. Not political consciousness, that was born in Paris, fed on baguettes with butter and bottles of under-ten-franc wine. But I grew up in so many different parts of America. The danger, to assume it's all one huge country with similar ideas. The different regions are as different as Europe, if Europe were united by a common language and cable television.

And after nearly ten years in ex-Socialist countries I stand absolutely by the right of critical speech. I have friends who stood in front of tanks, not knowing if they would get home to their children that night, because they wanted that right. Because they wanted the right to elect their government freely. So a WHOOT to France, and a poke up the butt to the Americans to make sure the next election isn't stolen, bartered or bought. They can't count you if you don't vote.

This is what comes of packing books for three days running, I suspect. Looking at the phases of myself. Five boxes of plays, filmscripts, theatre books (nothing published after 1990), three of feminist theory (nothing after 1994), three of 20th century history, socialism, eastern European politics (nothing after 1997), two of Native American politics and literature (nothing published past 1998), one media and one popular science (still hungry there). Looking through my non-fiction library is rather like looking through photo albums must be for other people – snapshots of a person growing up.

And then…"home". Nope, no concept of that anymore. Four months in the country of my birth couldn't make me any less of a stranger after all these years abroad. But I love the land and I love some of the people, and I love the ideal of America, even if the real place can never live up to what it pretends to be.

Now, if people would just *notice* that their civil rights are going down the drain under the guise of "protecting us against terrorism"…

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:: fialka 3:31 AM [+] ::

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And pretty aliens all in a row…

I keep sitting down to write and it keeps escaping me. All I get are images, slides of a stranger’s holiday flashed upon a wall.

I left for the weekend four months ago and now my desk is covered in dust. The Great Novel stacked to my left. Notes to myself, meaningless now.

Faith and Scully are dancing in the window. Or perhaps preparing to do battle. All the boys are lying in a pile and Buffy is nowhere to be found.

Lose a parent, gain a fandom. Aeryn and John have taken residence in my head. There are so many stories they want me to tell it’s as if they’re shouting them all at once and the microbes have failed.

She's looking up, unaware he's watching her.

The fire is low, barely enough to illuminate her face. John has an armload of wood, gathered from the small stands of birch. Enough for a bit of warmth, a speck of light against the dark.

Aeryn sits with her knees clutched against her chest. Her hands are soiled, dirt beneath the nails, and her hair lays tangled down her back. The cut along the edge of her jaw, received when they landed, doesn't look like it's going to heal any time soon. John wonders if he should worry about that. If anything happens to her now, if she gets sick, or badly hurt, they're completely frelled. The small medical kit they brought from Talyn won't help if Aeryn's body can't adapt to the vast plethora of new pathogens on earth.

He should have thought of that, but it's too late now.

He lays the wood on the fire, gives her time to bring her mind back from the vast distances of space. It's a disorientation he knows too well, the vertigo of different stars.

"You doing okay?" He lays a hand on the side of her face and she turns toward it, nuzzling her cheek against his palm for a moment before moving her head away. She picks up a few sticks, laying them on the others in a crosshatch pattern, the way he taught her two nights ago.

"Not too much," he cautions. "We don't want to be seen from the road."

She nods and hugs her knees again. He sits behind her, embracing her with his legs, buries his face against her hair. He feels her sigh against his chest and for a moment it's okay, it's all breathless wonder. He’s really home, and she’s really here and it's going to be all right.

It has to be all right.

He starts to comb the tangles from her hair, fingers gentle as he can make them. She shivers, hard.

"You cold?"

"No."

He's missed the sound of her voice. So much he almost doesn't realise he didn't hear the inhaled click that signifies the negative in Sebacean. She's speaking English. Simple words he taught her. Sun. Gun. No.



He had wanted to show her so much. Wanted to do simple things. Walk by the sea. Buy a hot dog and eat it, legs dangling off the edge of a pier. Lick the mustard from the corner of her mouth.

She forgot at the stand, asked him to explain why this dog looked nothing like the furry things he had sketched for her. It took him a moment to hear what the other people on the boardwalk heard, to remember how utterly strange her speech must sound.

"What the hell kinda language is that? She from Mars or someplace?"

A pair of good ole boys behind them, sharp glint to their eyes saying they were not always so good. Aeryn's hand left his and he hugged her close, before she could do something that would get them both locked away. She was already white around the mouth, the babble of an interested crowd too much for her microbes to translate.

"Speech impediment," John said quickly, guiding her away.

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:: fialka 11:15 AM [+] ::

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The Blog is back. All hail the Blog.

Nearly four months across the pond, but I'm finally home. Now {rubs hands together}. Dog. Oh yes, they do finales well. And I've been sitting on all this for nearly two months so I'm afraid it's going to get looooooooong.

I think I watched DwTB with almost everyone I managed to visit, plus a few times alone -- close to a dozen times over the last two months, maybe embarrassingly more -- and I'm still finding layers, details, clues, resonances. Still fascinated by every frame of it. That's brilliance, and the more I try to pull it apart, the more impressed I am by how well it hangs together (as opposed to, say, The Locket, which I adore for the story it tells, but which admittedly falls apart the minute I begin to think about it).

While my emotional reaction has changed (um, like, I can actually *think* about the motivations behind that last argument instead of just choking up and screaming at both of them), it's still hard to separate the story clues from the artistic details. I'm not convinced TPTB knew where they wanted to go in S4 when they wrote this (which is no complaint), but they certainly left themselves a well-fertilised field in which to sow whatever seeds they decide to use next year.

It may be that there really are no answers right now, that the importance of certain things will only be established later as the writers go back to this ep looking for ways to go forward, and that very few of what seem to be deliberate clues will lead directly into the first story we'll get in June. And while it's fun to speculate a bit, I find myself unwilling to make real predictions about what DwTB is meant to tell us about S4, partly because I don't want to get too attached to any one idea about how it's all going to play out and partly because I hate, loathe and despise the idea of a pregnant Aeryn Sun. (No, I'm not bitter about XF. Much. {g}) Babies on genre shows are a bad bad bad idea and I'm just praying they don't really intend to go there.

Sigh. In DK I trust, at least for now. I'll pass out asbestos blankets later, if necessary.

And actually, I hadn't seen the pregnancy thing coming, myself. A lot of people seem to be interpreting Aeryn's interaction with the child on the carrier as evidence of foreshadowing, but I had interpreted it as Aeryn seeing herself as a child of the PKs, as evidence that she had not lost her new-found ability to act with compassion. She couldn't return to being the emotionless soldier, even though at the end of The Choice that was clearly her intent. She's come too far to go back now.

And I'd just rather not think about that for the moment. So...

Title. It's John, right? It's always John. (jes sayin', not complaining {g})

But maybe not. I think you could also relate this to Aeryn. She wants both bones -- John-past, who she finally allowed herself to love with all her heart, and John-future, who will wait for her to be ready for him again. It's not being near John Crichton she can't bear as much as this present, this limbo in which she can neither grieve nor forget. There's no healing for Aeryn when the man she's mourning is alive and in pain, staring at her with so much desperation in his eyes. And if she cannot heal, she cannot dare to love him again.

Like John, she needs to choose, to go forward or to go back. But which bone does she really want? John chose Aeryn, but Aeryn *couldn't* choose between the Johns, that's why she finally allowed the coin to choose for her. She let fate decide, much in the way she let it decide which John would be the "real" one, by dint of allowing fate (or chance) to choose which one went with her on Talyn. Using a coin might be new to her, but letting outside forces think and make decisions for her is certainly not. Free choice is too new a skill for her to employ right now, too painful in the face of directly conflicting desires, and therefore I don't fault her for not being able to do it. In the midst of that kind of grief, all one clearly knows is that one isn't thinking clearly right now.

I keep thinking back to Aeryn in LatP. Finally loved, in love, but so afraid to go forward, to accept the gift that John was holding out. Running away, doing willfully childish things, confused as hell. Was it fate or chance that Dregon pulled her from that cliff, that she was forced to stop running away from what she felt for Crichton and think about it? And even so, she could only get as far as knowing that she needed to make a decision. She still let the vial decide.

"Just tell me what to do and I'll do it" is so much a pattern with her that while I hated the coin toss, was furious at John for suggesting it and Aeryn for coming back to it after he'd let it drop, it had to come down to that. Kudos to CB, btw, because it's the look she gives John -- so utterly bereft -- that makes me forgive them for that, makes me understand how she, they, could stake everything they have left on something as stupid and arbitrary as the toss of a coin.

Which is, I believe, the point. They are *that* lost, that desperate.

So is it fate or chance? I think that's the underlying question not just of this episode, but possibly of the whole series. Was it fate or chance that brought John to the UT, put Aeryn in that prowler, placed Tauvo in John's path? (and for an excellent re-envisioning of that occurence and what might have been if only one detail were different, read KodiakkeMax's "In the Company of Ghosts".) Was it fate or chance that put Moya right at the end of the wormhole, and right in the middle of a rebellion as John arrived? Because if they are fated to be together, then Aeryn is right -- they *will* be together again.

Of course, if it was chance, they're both completely frelled. They are renegades, traitors who blew up a command carrier. The UT is no safer for Aeryn than for John, though she's better equipped to survive alone in it.

But...why, then, if she believes fate will bring them back together if it's right, does she say goodbye? All I can think is that the choice they finally tossed was no longer "heads, you stay; tails, I'll wait", but "heads now, tails never". That Aeryn was no longer leaving to get her head together and come back, but that they had given up on the future. That John had finally given up on *her*.

Ouch.

BTW, if I'm writing a lot of this from Aeryn's POV, its not that I love John any less, or that I think there is fault to be applied and it's his. Just that a lot of people have explained John's POV at length and quite well, but I haven't really heard Aeryn's side yet. So, I'm tossing this out there.

Like a coin, frozen in mid-air. Which is what brings me to the question of what is or is not "real" in DwTB?

We see the goodbyes as we saw the fantasies -- as a series of impossible vignettes. I'm not entirely sure that everything after the freeze isn't also John's fantasy, that we're not still hanging in mid-air. Then again, it may have just been artistic inspiration that made TPTB choose to overvoice the fantasy wedding images of D'Argo, Chiana and Rygel with what sounds like their farewell to Crichton as they all leave aboard the Luxan ship. Likewise the image of Aeryn in her prowler, a face John could not have seen. It was certainly affecting. But the images could also be construed to mean it was John letting go of the wedding fantasy, giving up that bone at last, juxtaposed against his fear of losing Aeryn forever, of being left utterly and completely alone in the UT.

So many...possibilities {/Sondheim}

Sadly, my instinct says it was probably "real" in the sense that all those people have actually left, and John's mind is putting its own interpretative spin on it, much the way the fantasy D'Argo blurs with the real D'Argo when he and John are arguing in the Luxan ship. The argument is real, even if John's visualisation of it is not. However, it's just that prior dovetailing of fantasy and reality that spins itself back around to make me wonder if John hasn't meshed the two even further and we're getting his greatest nightmare as he's standing there waiting for that damned coin to land. And what we'll see in the opener is John grabbing it out of the air, insisting they all have to stay together and starburst the hell out of there, desperately trying to make these things *not* happen.

Did I say I think this is a truly brilliant ep?

And I have lots of questions about the last moments of the tag, of course, because of the very cryptic message John receives. The old woman's first words -- "Be forgiving. Be kind." -- make perfect sense, but what about "Better angels"? I'm stuck for wondering what that means and I suspect it's quite important. And again, I'm wondering about "her life, her world, on her time", because Aeryn *has* no world and this is certainly not on her time and the syntactical structure as it flows into "you will know, Aeryn is with child" suggests the future (though the actress's emphasis, as well as the flow from B&W to colour suggests otherwise). It could mean she's pregnant now, but won't tell him until later, which at least implies the old woman forsees them together again at some point. Or she's not pregnant. Yet. (Please.) Which might be precisely why the old woman is so intent on forcing John to see his fantasy through to its logical conclusion. John has to make things right because it's *their* child that must be born (preferably after season 5 {g}). Which makes me wonder if FS is about to go all Campbellian on us. I rather hope not, as I've always liked the idea that John's quest was merely to survive in this universe, that he wasn't sent here to save it. Or worse yet, father the Messiah.

I see it now. D'Argo, Chi and Rygel as the Three Wise Guys, Aeryn as Mary, John as Joseph, and I guess that would make Stark God.

Oh frell, that sounds hideously Carterian {shudder}. I take it back. Please, DK, I take it back.

Of course I might just be twisting myself in a knot to hold onto my own thin hope that there's not going to be a frelling baby on another of my favourite shows. I mean, I half expected Anya to turn up preggers by now and I could probably live with that because she's a peripheral character and would be comically non-plussed about it. But Aeryn? No, please not.

(And the baby is Stark's? What the hell is *that* wild rumour all about?)

But again, we are back to fate or chance. Because if this child is (cough) fated to save the universe or some other such dren, then nothing can keep it from being born. If the old woman is going to such lengths to ensure that John goes after Aeryn, that implies its destiny is not immutable (and neither is theirs). It says the old woman, at least, believes in free will, in choice, and in chance.

Anyway John didn't seem to hear the old woman's words until Harvey unlocked them -- and did anyone else notice how that shot faded from black and white into colour on the last line? Symbol of life returning to John? (Which does not bode well for we-who-hope-never-to-see-a-Crichsunsprog {martyred sigh}) Or clue that Harvey is improvising, that it's not really part of the old woman's message?

Either way, why would Harvey want John to believe that Aeryn is pregnant? That would just put yet another person ahead of him in John's Elizabethan chain of being. Harvey already knows John believes he can't ever go home, so there has to be a reason he specifically wants John chasing after Aeryn, rather than licking his wounds on Moya. But what? What does Harvey get out of it, unless he only means to torture John a little further?

If Harvey is read as a fragment of John's own self, it could make sense to say that John so desperately wants/needs permission to go after Aeryn that he invents, via Harvey's gift, the perfect excuse to hunt her down and demand permanent inclusion in her life. I'm thinking there's not much doubt he'd consider the child his in *some* way, though the truth is it's not. John is the uncle, not the father, much as any naturally twinned brother would be. He didn't sleep with Aeryn and he didn't make that child. Still, as many have pointed out, John already has one genetic child in the UT, not gotten via sex with the mother, and whom he'll never be able to father. A child he indisputably thought of as his simply by virtue of the DNA contribution. It's quite likely that due to the odd circumstance of the twinning, he would also consider himself as having a father's rights and responsibilities towards Aeryn's child, and therefore both the right and the obligation to remain part of her life whether she wants him there or not. (I have massive problems with that scenario, but that's between me and DK. It does seem to be what John's change of attitude is based upon, however.)

It's also possible that his insistence on thinking of Talyn John as The Other Guy means he has enough distance to consider TJ as not-self, and to consider this to be TJ's child. Or will, once the first shock has passed. Certainly I believe that is how Aeryn thinks of it, if she even knows she's pregnant at this point. If there's anything *to* know. It's still as possible there's not, that Harvey and/or the old woman have lied to John, or we've all misinterpreted the time frame of that cryptic message. Just as it is possible that the nature of John's relationship to this child (and via it, to Aeryn) is something they're going to spend the next two seasons working out.

{shudder}. Jumpin' Jebuslug, I hope not.

Somehow, I think not.

Now, obviously Harvey wants John to stay in the UT, and what better way to ensure that than to make him believe Aeryn is carrying not-him-not-me-John Crichton's child? But, as I said before, it's not really necessary at this point. So...what? The answer changes based on whether you think Harvey is an independent entity derived from Scorpius' personality or whether you think Harvey is a remnant of the psychosis brought on by the chip -- in other words, that post-chip he's entirely John's creation and is in fact John's way of *not* having a real psychotic breakdown. By endowing Harvey with intuition and calm pragmatism wrapped in dream-like symbolism, John is actually able to protect one coherent piece of himself even from himself. Harvey becomes a repository for the memories John does not want to consciously touch upon, so that he can still draw strategy to help him cope and make decisions at
the most chaotic times, a personality to assign to his most unpalatable impulses, a not-me to react against as a way of remembering what he used to believe was right and good. If Harvey says do this, I must do the opposite. But Harvey can also be counted on to speak the bald truth, the painful truth, the one John doesn't consciously want to face: "What did you expect?"

Indeed. The question John is avoiding, even in fantasy, is whether *he* will ever fit on Earth again, and it's interesting that almost all of his fantasies cast him in a passive role -- I was especially intrigued by the one where he was eavesdropping on Aeryn and his father, and not least because there's no way Jack could have understood what she was saying {g}. Interesting too that John remembered this when they were buying the gown, but later ignored or forgot about it. Or was he also fantasizing that the frelling planet (at least his familial part of it) *had* somehow been given translator microbes? (Or was it just a writer's gaffe? Enquiring minds want to know...)

So, the old woman is possessed of a third eye, which refers to some kind of mystical vision in every myth about such things, very often to an ability to see the truth and/or precognition. And that eye flipped wide open and went bright blue when John demanded they go after Aeryn. It had opened slightly before that, but I believe that was the only time it was really obvious. I might be wrong. But it seems a deliberate clue, as much as Fantasy!Aeryn speaking Talyn John's dying words. The question then becomes -- a clue to *what*? (frustrational asterisks deliberate {g}) I think the idea of a psychic link between the two Johns is out, or Moya John would have had some idea that Talyn John was dead. But I wonder...what if the third eye was a lying eye? An eye that hypnotised, that overpowered, that inserted images, ideas? An eye that must either see inside John's fantasies (otherwise, how would the old woman know he was lying to himself?) or place them there.

If I'm going to really look at this from the other angle, I have to start wondering if none of it is about John. If it's all about Aeryn, about keeping her safe and alive so this baby can come. (If, when, not necessarily now!) That's why John has to be there, to protect her when she won't be able to protect herself. And why the old woman never tried to keep Aeryn on Moya, but planted those words to
make sure that even if John failed to hold onto her right now, she wouldn't remain alone.

I hate that whole idea, but it's logical. And though the show has always been all about John, it's not beyond TPTB to flip the storytelling aspect on its head, as it did with The Choice. Because any plotline about Aeryn is ultimately still about John.

The old woman obviously has her own agenda, and somehow I'm pretty sure it's not about John's happiness. We've seen celestial interference before (Moya's builders, etc), so it's not out of the question that she's some kind of godlike creature or fumbling emissary of the gods, sent to ensure x and y come to pass. In fact, I think it's quite likely she is that, though I'm hoping she's evil rather than good, just because that would be more interesting to unravel over time.

I think I have to go along with the idea that she is really present though, or no one else would have seen her. Though if she was a figment of John's imagination, then the entire episode is fantasy and none of it -- finding enough of Talyn to bury, Aeryn and the others leaving, Moya going through the wormhole -- actually happened. John is still sitting silently beside Aeryn in the window of the central chamber, doodling wormhole equations on his arms and dreading whatever is about to come next.

I could live with that, if it means Aeryn really isn't pregnant {g}.

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:: fialka 11:59 PM [+] ::

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