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

:: Sunday, July 28, 2002 ::

The Merry Wives of Farscape (407)

There was laughter, there was shouting, there was Maayan jumping up and down barefoot in the garden.

And now there are bagels and the second viewing.

Later {waving}

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:: fialka 10:57 AM [+] ::

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May I just say?

I now have broadband. And it is WHOOT.

(I also have custody of Maayan and cofax for the weekend, with Marasmus to join for the nail-biting download session tomorrow. Which is also whoot. All but the biting of nails, of course {g}. Wish us luck, you jammy North Americans. Cross your fingers and think of blog.)

Serious thoughts tomorrow. Right now the joys of Morpheus are being explored.

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:: fialka 4:05 AM [+] ::

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One mac. Three writers. Oi.

This was meant to be a three-headed monster post, but M is only awake at 2am and C only on Mondays and I appear not to be awake at all. Also, there is London to be seen and Galaxy Quest to be watched, and, well...things to go, places to do. Plus, the weather is nice. In England that's not to be wasted indoors.

Oh yeah, and I need to do laundry, too. Isn't that what you all wanted to know? {g}.

Spoilers for 406 following now. No black-font, because I dislike huge holes on my blog.






So far, NE appears to be following my usual pattern of didn'tlikeitonfirstview. I'm only on the second viewing (things to do, remember?) but I already like it a lot more. There's a post in there about expectations informing enjoyment and the fact that if it weren't for videotape (or in my case downloads) I might be quite unhappy with the season so far. As it is, I'm not. I'm rather enjoying having so much to chew over each week, though the fact that for once in my life I'm not watching alone six weeks after everyone else probably contributes largely to that.

So, because laundry must be done and there's a new Stoppard at the National I'd like to see (and three other people casting hungry eyes at the mac), I'm going to confine myself to one short theory. Well, relatively short.

It's the peanut brittle theory. Which is, in short, that Aeryn (you knew it was going to be about Aeryn, right? {g}) is in pieces as much as she ever was after Fractures, it's just less obvious. The sharp edges have worn away, but the pieces still aren't coming back together to form a whole woman. Not yet, perhaps never, because whenever something is smashed to bits tiny pieces are lost.

(Pause to smack cofax, who is leaning over my shoulder as I write. About to poke my theory to shreds no doubt.)

So. Peanut brittle. Brittle pieces. Thesis, antithesis, no synthesis yet. What I'm seeing is fragments of Aeryn at different stages -- old PK Aeryn in the way she bats John's hand away, the nearly-human Aeryn so deeply in love. Aeryn looks at John like her dead lover come back to her, John looks at Aeryn as if he's still waiting for her to come home. Both so invested in the idea of the other that they can't see the real person before them. I think I said that before, and I suspect I'll say it again before this is done.

I don't want to pick sides in the argument, throw blame at one or the other. So much love, and yet they're just not understanding each other. John has no idea who Aeryn was in TJohn's arms, Aeryn has no idea how mad he went with missing her. Until they can tell each other those stories, there's no way to start again, to come to each other as who they are now. And that's what needs to happen, or they need to accept their time has passed, and move on. Because John is no less broken than Aeryn. Not in pieces, but he's been chipped away like a piece of flint, until only the centre is left. Aeryn might be in shards that no longer meet at the edges, but John has become an arrowhead. Dangerous. Sharp.

I agree with cofax's theory that the fact she'd conceived somewhere along the line went out of Aeryn's mind the moment she joined the assassination squad. PK!Aeryn took over, and as a soldier she's trained to ignore the existence of those few cells even knowing about them. Let us not assign the human emotional weight of bearing a child to a woman whose only function in the process was going to be biological, who would never raise or even know the child she bore. In fact, most of this season seems to be cautioning both us and John not to assign human motivations to Aeryn's actions at all.

And that alone may turn out to be the key to understanding her. Thesis -- the soldier. Antithesis -- the lover. Synthesis almost achieved in Icarus Abides, then everything blew apart. Synthesis, I believe, is what she's still searching for, but it can't happen through John. That's something Aeryn has to achieve on her own, through understanding, not just through love.

And now I turn you back to Maayan , who is murmuring interesting things in the corner.

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:: fialka 12:32 PM [+] ::

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405 comments, better late than never. Spoilers ahoy!


Hmm. I've watched this {cough} times now -- though I had to *bring* it to people, which is my excuse and I'm sticking by it {g} -- and my feelings have changed quite a bit from that first viewing, half awake as dawn was coming quite annoyingly through the curtains. Maayan, btw, is a saint, dragging herself out of bed to watch with me because I could not wait one more minute. And she let me steal her blanket.

I like to say I have no expectations, but obviously I do, and my first viewing of Promises suffered a bit from Milagro syndrome. That's when you have to wait so long for an ep, and you're so excited about it that it couldn't possibly live up to expectation. On first view I was, like a lot of people, confounded, slightly disappointed and very squicked out.

The last, I expect, is the metatextual point. DK & Co have set out to completely unsettle us this season and it's working quite well, thankyouverymuch. I did enjoy it much more on the noon breakfast viewing and by the time I got down to K's that afternoon and watched it with her, I was ready to bear DK's child. Since my two are driving me nuts at the moment, that's saying a lot .

Promises manages to spiral the Farscape universe around to bring us back to the familiar with everything different, breaking molds without breaking character, setting up The Great Mystery which I suspect will -- characterwise -- be the driving force throughout the rest of the season, if not all the way to the end of the show. TPTB have done an excellent job of sweeping everything off the table and setting it with serving platters whose covers have yet to be lifted, but there's some really interesting aromas drifting around. From a metatextual point of view, the writers have given themselves an incredible smorgasbord to draw from over the next two years. I'm expecting a few more of those adventures -- Chiana's for sure -- are going to come back to bite Our Motley Crew on the arse.

So what *did* everyone do on their summer vacation? So far, the only one who's turned in his essay is John. (Just to switch metaphors before I do that one to death {g})

First let me say that I think at this point, everyone's acting out of character. I mean that in the sense that we all, when pushed, do unexpected things, things which might surprise those who know us well. I do not mean that the writing breaks character, which is just bad writing and a different thing all together. Chiana's freaked, D'Argo is way too happy (what? killing Machton Tal was psychic Prozac?) and Rygel offering to torture Aeryn -- even as a horrifyingly unfunny joke -- is just way beyond even Rygel's monumental selfishness.

Very unsettling, yes. And that's even before Harvey/Aeryn.

As I said, I think that was the point.

With Farscape, I'm inclined to take all confusing situations and seemingly out-of-character actions as done with deliberate intent on the part of TPTB, as clues dropped in a season where we've got tons of clues but no way to tell which ones are important, which are real. The questions just keep bringing up more questions and I doubt we're going to get any answers to the big ones soon. So for now, I'm going to accept everything on face value and assume that when the clues are contradictory or confusing, they are meant to be so, and some of the information we now have will ultimately turn out to be not or only partly true.

So...

Appearances are deceiving and Occam's razor has a dull edge in the UT. Farscape's told us that before. But for now, having nothing to sharpen it with, I'll rely on the simplest explanation. And since Maayan has done a wonderful analysis from John's POV, I'll go for the next biggest question: Aeryn. What the frell is going on with her? What's with the suicide attempt, if she wanted to live badly enough to make a deal with -- of all people -- Scorpius?

I think first, there's a lot of separable issues here. A huge difference between being willing to commit suicide if necessary and being suicidal. Aeryn *was* suicidal for quite some time after TJohn died, but the rest of her actions in Promises -- not just the deal with Scorpy, but the way she speaks of having envisioned a different way of coming back, suggests that at some time over her summer vacation she had made the decision to come back to Moya. In other words, to return to John. To live, not merely exist.

In the early seasons, Aeryn was very much afraid of death, even while her soldier's training had taught her to embrace it. I'm trying to recall if she was still so afraid in S3, after she had actually died, and I think not, but I could be wrong. At any rate, she has no fear now, and again, I don't think these two things are as at odds as they appear on the surface. Wanting to live and being afraid to die are two different things. Aeryn wants to live, but if her life can buy a higher purpose, she's willing to give it. It's what she's been trained to do; no surprises there. The only thing that's changed is her definition of 'higher purpose'. It was the PKs, then it was John, the crew, Moya. The question now is whether protecting them is still her highest purpose, and I think it is.

What I got from this ep, from the show in total so far this season, is that nothing really matters to John anymore, not even the wormholes, getting home. His affect is very yeah-what-the-frell, his wit painfully sharp. Live, die, doesn't really matter, though he's not suicidal and he'll try to survive as long as he can. His decision in the time away seems to be that the only thing that matters is Aeryn. She's still his guide, not in a sappy romantic sense, but in the sense that she's his constant in a universe that has become utterly confusing. Friends disappear and return different, enemies masquerade as friends, and John has been thrown into the centre of an intergalactic storm that he can't control and doesn't completely understand. The moral code he arrived with is in tatters and the one he's been forced to adopt to survive is not always acceptable to an essentially gentle man. What to hold onto to guide him when he cannot see his way clearly? Aeryn.

In this, "Aeryn" is no longer a person. She's a concept into which John has invested all that is good in himself, all of the original John Crichton that's left, his ultimate guide in any decision-making process. What do I do here, in this untenable situation where each choice is worse than the last? Simple. Whatever protects Aeryn. Whether she's there or not, whether she wants it or not. Whatever it takes. And really, he's been that way since Nerve.

That's the impetus that drives him through every minute of Promises. Whatever it takes, because if she dies she takes with her all those beautiful things -- love, hope, tenderness -- that are part of the original John Crichton. Without them he's no better than the PKs -- a soulless killer. And if protecting "Aeryn" means subverting the real woman's autonomy, strapping her down, so be it. What.Ever.It.Takes. It's not about being with Aeryn in a romantic/sexual sense any longer (though of course he wants that too). It's about preserving those essential pieces of himself, about remaining John Crichton in the face of a universe that wants him to be something else.

I don't think this is because John can't live without Aeryn -- he knows he can. He may not like it, but he can. It's not because she's all he has -- he has his wormholes, the others, Moya, himself. It's not because she makes life worth living, because if anything Aeryn makes John's life more painful, more complicated. It's simply because he *loves* her, and it's through loving, through how he loves, that John holds onto what it means to be John Crichton, son of Jack and Leslie, a nice guy from planet Earth.

But is he still John Crichton without Aeryn Sun? Without the person beside him, yes, I think so, but possibly not without the concept. As long as he believes Aeryn is alive somewhere the concept functions to guide him whether she's with him or not. Even to protect himself is by proxy protecting Aeryn, protecting his ability to love, preserving himself to find and protect her again.

But -- and here's where Maayan looks at me like I've got a hole in my head {g} -- what if a similar impetus is driving Aeryn?

In DWTB, John asks her if she loves "John Crichton. Not him, not me, John Crichton." "John Crichton" becomes at his request no longer an individual man, but an entity. A concept embodying, among other things, Aeryn's only real experience of loving and being loved. Without "John Crichton" to guide her, Aeryn becomes nothing more than a heartless killer, cannon fodder, once again.

Looking at her looking at John in the docking bay, all I can say is Aeryn hasn't forgotten how to love and she hasn't forgotten how much she loves "John Crichton". In fact, she seems finally to have fully embraced it. Her mistake may be that she also seems to have conflated the two individual men.

At which point I have to ask myself if Aeryn is speaking the truth, insofar as she's speaking at all, and I'm going to believe she is until proven otherwise because she always has before. In the past, Aeryn's withheld things for only two reasons -- because she doesn't understand herself enough to verbalise it, or because she believes it's too dangerous to be known. I'm thinking of Mind the Baby in particular, where she made a horrible deal to keep John and D'Argo alive (and yes, herself by proxy because they're also dead without her) because it was the only option she could see that would allow her to do so. She believed that John, if he'd known what she was doing, would not have let her, or would have gone off half-cocked and got himself killed. Which I tend to think is exactly the fear that's silencing her now.

The names she's withholding, her willingness to die or worse -- risk John's love for her -- rather than tell means this is BIG BIG BIG. The last time she played the "if you love me" card she was desperate and it was her last resort, and let's not forget it was a card John played first. I don't assume she's any less desperate now, though her reasons seems much clearer, simpler, at least to her. It's a bottom-line demand, and I think separable from her demand that John not hurt Scorpius *at that moment*, because Scorpius had not hurt her. (The ruthlessness of that demand may well stem from the fact that she's not well enough to assess the situation clearly, not able to take responsibility for her decision, and wants to make sure no one does anything rash until she can. But she's not completely on Scorpy's side either. She doesn't object, after all, to locking him up.)

Now, taking into account that it's called 'heat delirium' for a reason, and that Aeryn, if not delusional, is definitely not thinking clearly, wouldn't her attempt to kill herself read simply as protecting John and the crew from whatever vengeance Ullam wanted to wreak upon her? Yes, it's a horrible thing for her to do to John, in front of John, on the viewscreen no less, but she's not being manipulative. She's choosing to give her life so the others and Moya will be free.

And naturally John chooses not to let her. Perfectly understandable, but still wrenching her autonomy from her hands, because she's right -- it is *her* life to give if she sees fit to give it. And she obviously has information he doesn't have.

I should probably say here that I don't see Aeryn's actions as at all "manipulative" at any time, because I define that as someone trying to get what they *want* through subterfuge and indirect methods, not asking outright for what they *need*. Or possessing the fault of not knowing how to say it. Within that definition, Aeryn pulling the "if you love me" card seems fairly simple -- it's a way of telling John how desperate her situation is. Just as it was in DWTB. "You have to let me go because I'm coming apart", "you have to leave it there because something terrible will happen if I talk" -- these are not petty issues. She'd already said she really wanted to tell him, but she can't. If she's speaking the truth about that, then how is she manipulating him? Pushing him between a rock and a hard place, yes, but I'm not going to fault her for that any more than I'm going to whale on John for going all paternalistic. You don't stand idly by while someone puts a gun to their head. Finish.

I suppose it depends on whether you read Aeryn's refusal to talk as "Aeryn's done a bad thing and doesn't want John to know about it", or take that refusal on face value -- if it becomes known that she's named names (and it would) the consequences will be far greater than loss of her own life. Her actions prove she's more than willing to give that up. Which makes me think there's something else deadly important to her at stake, and that can only be John or her child, if there is one.

Again, there are two separable issues here -- whatever led her to assassinate a leader, and the refusal to name her compatriots even at the cost of her own life. Unless she's wrapped it all up in honour, in trying to reclaim her identity as the perfect soldier (which is possible, of course), all I can think of is her 'cause' must have a personal element. That to tell the names would eventually whip back to hit not just her, but John and/or the people aboard Moya. Or the...(sigh) baby.

Which might very well be her 'cause' worth dying for. To give her life in battle, sure she'd do that, especially in the emotional state she was in before she left Moya. I think that's exactly what she was looking for. But even in the throes of delirium, would Aeryn be willing to kill herself in front of John for a purely ideological cause? I'm really not sure, but we're given two diametrically opposed Aeryns in Promises -- the cold assassin and the loving, almost too-human woman -- and the only way to integrate them is to say no. It has to be about some thing, some *one* more.

Which is, unfortunately, looking very likely to be the case. The only certain thing I took from Aeryn's silence at the end was the fact that there must be or have been a baby, because otherwise her immediate response would have been, "What?" And while I don't really like the idea that she's had the baby and it's stashed or hostage somewhere (my money would then be on stashed because she seemed too calm at the end for it to be a hostage) that may very well be where they're going. The length of Aeryn's hair seems to have no other purpose than to clearly indicate a great deal of time has passed, a cycle, possibly more. Unless Dana Scully is Sebacean {g} and their pregnancies last fourteen months, that should mean the child, if it exists, is already born.

And now we come to that. I didn't see a smirk myself at the end, I saw stunned silence. That's Aeryn, always has been and probably always will be. Silent in the face of strong emotion. We saw it when she learned why her comrade had been on the Zelbinion in PKTG, when she handed the vial to Crichton at the end of LATP, when he asked if she loved this man at the end of TWWW. Crichton ambushed her, then didn't give her enough time to get past the shock of wondering how he knew enough to ask the question, to formulate a response even if she could.

Not that I blame him for either. He may love Aeryn more than anything in his present universe, but he's not blind to her faults. And John has had months of heartache, of desperately needing to know, and he knows Aeryn's not going to talk first, since she almost never does. He's out of patience and it's not like she doesn't know where to find him when she's ready to talk. I don't see this situation as a manufactured (by TPTB) plot device to separate them, I think it's intrinsic to the possibility of their relationship having a future, and their inability to discuss the issue is intrinsic to who they are. Tragedy in the truest sense -- they are brought down by their own character flaws.

What I think is brilliant about this ep is that the decisions they're making are risky. Dangerous. The audience is offered the possibility of disliking the actions of either, of hating Aeryn for her silence or John for demanding too much of her. In my case, making them fallible only makes me love them both more, hope harder, and hold my breath till the next installment.

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:: fialka 6:23 PM [+] ::

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Here it is...Say Nothing.

Off to watch Season 2 DVDs with M and bite my nails till the ep is downloaded.

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:: fialka 9:54 PM [+] ::

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State of the Fi

Well, I still can't find my chequebook, but fortunately there's plastic. And we still have no bed, but fortunately there are convertible couches. And the broadband will be installed the 20th, the DVD will be converted to multi-region, and I'm going to Cambridge on Saturday to watch 405 and sob on M's shoulder. K's too, if she's there (casts a mighty eyebrow south). And then London. And C. And a birthday involving copious amounts of tequila. And all of the above and 406 {g}.

So things are looking up.

Oh yeah, and the Chi-fic is finished and out for beta. Now my teenaged son is about to drag me off to the internet cafe so we can shoot each other.

What I do for familial bonding {g}.

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:: fialka 10:10 AM [+] ::

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in which I unpack many boxes

Woke up with a fic a few days ago, and oddly, it didn't work. I say oddly because normally when I wake up with a complete vignette like that, it nearly writes itself. 'Unbeknownst' was like that. It took longer to find a title than to write the fic itself.

But this one was...just fnnh. Yah, okay, it's partly because it's a spec-fic based on the trailer. Hey, all the cool kids are doing it, right?

Right and trite. Deleted one and all. Tried again. Worse.

This morning Chiana came and tapped me quite rudely on the shoulder at seven a.m. This is unforgiveable, as anyone who knows me will attest. I do not do single-digit hours unless they are at the end of the day. Or I have sold my soul to the great god Employment. Neither of which was happening. But I dragged out the laptop and rubbed my eyes and had half a story before coffee.

Writing Chi. Whodathunkit?

And may I say writing Chi is far more challenging for me than writing Aeryn or John or even D'Argo. How does Chi think inside her own head? How do I write that when all my own references have to be abandoned, when there are common expressions she just can't say? As a writer it makes me look at my own reflexive way of constructing sentences, of the rhythms I use and the pat phrases I rely on to express certain things. They don't work with Chi. Aeryn's mind is as alien, but I guess I got used to writing emotionally disconnected after all the years writing Scully. Either that, or it says something about me that doesn't bear examining in public {g}.

Anyway, the Chi-fic is nearly done. Exactly the same story, told through a different set of eyes. And hopefully to be off for beta tomorrow and posted before Friday.

A wee taste for the impatient:


Peacekeeper tralk, Peacekeeper traitor. Deserter. Liar. Not friend.

That's all Chiana's thought since Aeryn first ran off and left John banging his head against the grille of her empty cell. Yeah, okay, so she ran off *with* John that time, or someone she thought was John. Chiana shudders at a memory she hasn't had in a while, her dead body crumpled on the floor of a dead ship. It's klempt, but she sometimes wonders. Who was the copy, the dead Chi or herself?

She wonders if Aeryn got herself twinned somewhere along the way. Chi hardly recognises the woman in the medical unit, curled up small and tight on the nearest bunk, tangled hair hanging over the edge.

Should her stomach hurt like this for someone she doesn't think of as a friend?

And now, off to look at the nine-course meal that's just landed in my inbox.

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:: fialka 1:22 AM [+] ::

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