How do Reavers pilot ships, them being insane cannibals and such?
POSTED BY: chrisisall
UPDATED: Thursday, December 2, 2021 20:06
VIEWED: 48258
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OMFG! so many things to respond on...where to start. this is a thoroughly interesting thread.
Quote:
Makes me wonder about how alike the words 'River' and 'Reaver' are. Maybe River was going to help destroy the Reavers. Just wash them away.
i thought the movie
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was implicit about River's purpose. the way i see it is this - the Alliance created the Reavers by accident so they black out the project by telling everyone that that particular project was a failure and no one looks twice at the planet Miranda. so while Miranda is off the radar, the Reavers are not. they are in fact pushing in towards the core planets a little more each year (as Zoe mentions in one of the episodes) so Alliance has to do something about it lest they be caught in thier own web of lies. the Alliance undergoes another "secret project" the one that alters River from a regular genius to a psychic-Reaver-killing-machine. River and whoever else was part of this second project was meant to wipe out any evidence of just how wrong the Miranda project went.
River is psychic. the episode Objects in Space suggests that she can empathize, literally feel what she's reading (ie: the scene where she's watching Wash and Zoe make out in the cockpit). there's lots of references in the series where she claims to be hearing screaming. i think she's sensing the Reaver's during these instances.
also, Simon has trouble finding a treatment for River. there's mention that her body adapts to them too quickly. i think this was an affect of whatever was done to her. she's meant to immune to contagion so that she doesn't turn when she goes up against the Reaver's.
i'm sure there were more reasons why i thought this. i hadn't questioned the assumtion at all until now. that's just how i saw it. maybe i'll have more insight when i go see it again tonight!
Mal: "We've done the impossible and that makes us mighty."
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I think they pilot easily by using the controls. Insane is not stupid. Insane is insane. Sometimes insane is very very smart. But it's still insane.
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Okay, I think I have it.
Select to view spoiler:
PAX is a prion, an infections "rogue protein", like the one that causes Mad Cow disease.
It comes in two forms: a normal form that can be transmitted as an airborne vector. That's the version that led to the peace-out disaster on Miranda. But by the time our BDHs showed up, the air processors had been shut down, the environment was stable, so there was no PAX around.
But there's also a mutated form of the PAX prion, which is only transmissible by ingestion. This is the form that produces ultra-aggression, to wit, Reavers. And here's the kicker: it's only spread by feeding infected tissue to non-infected individuals - which is why it only affected one in a thousand Mirandans.
That gives us the means to create more Reavers -- force a captive to eat a chunk of your flesh. Hence the facecutting. (Perhaps the prion actually encourages its hosts to cut themselves as a way of spreading itself! Other pathogens can and do change their hosts' behavior for their own benefit.) It also means you can't get it just by proximity to a Reaver.
Now we know why the guy in Bushwhacked turned into a Reaver. He was either deliberately fed some infected flesh, or got some infected blood in his mouth and swallowed it. It was more than just a psychological infection -- it was physical as well.
Now... does that, or does that not, explain just about the whole Reaver phenomenon?
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y'know, i know reavers piolot their own ships, but i can't just see them at the controls... seriously. Try and picture a dude with his face all cut up up 
I just can't see them sneaking up to destroy serenity either...
Just give Jayne a stick!
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I think the guys with the hands of blue may have something to do with it. Perhaps they control the Reavers minds somehow, thereby giving them the ability to fly spaceships, etc. They're like the hitmen for the Mafia, doing all the dirty work....but, then again, maybe not. Just my 2 cents.
Everyone dies alone.
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Pax is Prion. Kudos to doncoat. I've been posting pax is a prion everywhere, but I assume doncoat camee up with it independently, so kudos to him/her/it.
It's the only sensible solution.
Here's a subject for future debate though. I think the mutated Reaver prion is interesting. Do people eat reavers? I guess maybe Reavers make you eat their dead or something.
Anyway, I posted this before here and on IMDb since I have pneumonia at the moment and can do nothing but lie in bed and post on boards because my head is to foggy to work.
here's what I came up with.
Reaver prion is just the Pax prion. People who encounter reavers get the prion much more readily. There is nothing about a prion that would lead me to believe it has to be ingested, like mad cow disease. Just as there are many venues for a virus, there are many for a prion, potentially. We know about BSE, aka Mad Cow, so that's logical, but others are certainly possible, and this is so called speculative fiction, so here I am speculating.
When a normal human encouters a reaver, they may be exposed to the airborne pax, as it was on the planet. Casual exposure is probably not a problem, many airborne agents are actually carried in water, or in other ways requiring more exposure, so that the numbers of the infectious agent would overwhelm the victim.
The Pax then has one of two effects on you.
1) You become a reaver
2) You become placid, unable to fight, and the reavers eat you.
By this model, reavers identify potential reavers right away, by their agressive response. Probably killing lots of reavers. That's okay with reavers. More food for the rest of us.
When you become placid, you only lose ability to fight, you are slightly weakened, it would take weeks to months for you to lose the will to live, remember. So fighting reavers is close to impossible, because it would be like taking a valium before charging, or rather moseying, into battle.
Okay, %wise there is a slight adjustment. We have some scientist saying reaverization is very rare .1%. In reaverland that number would likely have to change, I'd like it more up around 10%. There are many ways to do that.
1) getting raped by a reaver is a much more traumatic and effective way to get a reaver prion overload
2) copying doncoat's idea, it may have mutated.
This is a minor but necessary adjustment for the pax prion, because the race won't survive on .1%. It's also the scientist on miranda was way underestimating the reaver count.
By now of course, everyone reading this post has realized the singular flaw with this scenario. Or what would be a flaw, if it weren't for a truly appalling reality.
Oh, Someone else go ahead and say it for me :)
*evil grin*
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Quote:
Originally posted by Diego:
We don't know what the population size of Miranda was and that will make a huge difference in how many individuals a tenth of a percent adds up to. If the initial population size was large enough then your right that the question is moot.
The exact lines from the movie... "There's thirty million people here and they all just let themselves die" and "about a tenth of a percent of the population had the opposite reaction to the Pax" and "(Mal:) This report is maybe 12 years old." By this logic 12 years prior to the events of the movie, there were 30,000 reavers.
BUT...
The quotes above are from the shooting script, but I could have sworn that the actress stated, "about ten percent had the opposite reaction to the Pax." Occassionally, changes are made to the shooting script on set, so it's possible. But to verify, I'll have to go see the movie again (9th time.)
Incidentally her (Doctor Caron's) speech is a bit longer in the script. Some cuts were made.
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Spoilers
Okay, me again. Nothing to do but post.
Anyway, doh! I didn't see the invisitext until now, between the bars. Everyone who is reading this thread has already been spoiled anyway. so, sorry for not saying it before. There I said it. Spoilers. always. Anyway.
"If it generated a serious enough chemical imbalance, it could become a genetic effect, and be passed down to any offspring a Reaver has"
I gotta disagree with this. I don't mean to be a dick here. I'm new to this board, y'all know that already though. I saw the series, movie. saw the series again, gonna see the movie again, it rocks. Anyway, no, I know a lot about genetics. This won't happen. Mutation that causes change is a stem cell mutation. chemical mutigens would almost exlusive cause some sort of regular cell breakdown, only an infected embryo could be affected in this manner and it was be mad unlikely. Like on a level of an actual monkey flying out of my actual butt. Then all reavers are descended from that reaver, which isn't what we see. Okay, but you know I'm on the prion train here.
I assume everyone is familiar with prions and how they work cause you're all sci-fi fans here, but for the uninitiated here's a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion
Okay, that was wikipedia's entry which is also google's first match, so I'm feeling lazy, sue me.
"The example of serial killers who have high IQs is a good one."
Okay, I really don't mean to annoy people if I know arguments, so guys, please don't take it personally. My favorite character is Jayne, okay, so I have issues. Anyway, I don't know who originated this idea, but it's a media fiction.
Technically speaking Ted Kazinsky was a terrorist, not a serial killer. He derived no pleasure out of the bombings and did it to forward a political agenda, he was an ecoterrorist. But that case aside, have you read or seen any interviews with regular serial killers? These guys are not just dumb, they're subhumanly dumb. They're non-functional morons. I don't mean they're like people with downes syndrome, I've worked with people with downes syndrome and serial killers are way less functional. But this is aside from the case. Reavers are savages. They clearly replace indians, as much as it pains me to say it, because it's a western. This role was the role of indians in the westerns. I don't think the portrayal of reavers is meant in any way to be a slight against native americans, I'm not implying any such thing.
Anyway. I liked the wolf analogy better. It can be plainly demonstrated in some species of mice that if you can completely block one neurotransmitter you alter it's behavior completely, and its behavior becomes like that of a completely different animal, say for instance, a cat. Yes, you can cause mice to become vicious cannibals.
So this is the reaver mechanism. In particular if you blocked serotonin in humans the resulting behavior might be very much like wolves.
Technically I guess reavers are "Pirates on acid"
The idea that a person would become a reaver from the experience is a sociological myth. It's one that persists in this society, so it's easy to believe it would persist in the (more primative) social structure of firefly settlers. I hope that this isn't an insult. I think it's intentionally primitive in its social structure. Without a chemical mechnanism reaverism would not spread, which we saw it do.
"There'd be a LOT of ugly-ass near-retirement age baby boomers running around today making present-day yoga classes a nightmare come true."
--- There's aren't?
I can see there's a protocol here where I have to learn the spoiler trick. I don't know the spoiler trick so forgive me. Or not, your choice.
This is a spoiler
There was my logical test. I'll see when it posts if it worked.
I hope by the time I hit post that someone has posted the horrible reality.
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Okay.
I talk to much. You'll get used to it. Or not, your choice.
I agree that I recall 10% which would make me happier, but I am strongly suspecting I heard wrong because everyone else is disagreeing.
I disagree that social behavior is pure nurture. A lion raised by french girls will not behave like a french girl. These are minor social differences between american girls and french girls, tied to a very minor difference between a black person and a white one, these aren't statistically significant forces kicking around. Not like lions and reavers.
I actually have a very solid base to argue this until the cows come home, but nature/nurture is a big argument that I don't want to get into on someone's firefly board, but if you want to email me about it feel free. For the sake of the argument I'm just going to stick to my guns, mental state, not cutom, is at stake here, and it is 100% chemical, which is not to say genetic. I don't think it is genetic. A genetically normal human can be turned into a reaver.
While I'm disagreeing I don't think hands of blue or blue sun corp controls reavers. They created reavers by mistake. They noticed that mistake, didn't care about its effects on society as a whole, and look and said: Nifty!
Here's a little quote from one of our own people in the US govt, whose name escapes me at the moment. (I don't mean to bring US politics into this BTW, I'm hoping that everyone dem or rep can be appalled at this. I don't know the party affiliation of the official. The senator was a republican):
A pentagon offical trying to explain to the senate why they were using napalm after it had been disallowed. This is the gist of how it went.
Senator: Well you told us in compliance with the order to destroy non-conventional arms you had destroyed all of the napalm. Why is it showing up in Iraq?
Official: That's not Napalm, those are incendiaries.
Senator: What's the difference?
Official: Much higher temperature. See, when we said we destroyed them, we meant we emptied them out, then they were no longer napalm. See, napalm is an explosive device which is powered by gasoline. When we saw the two towers come down we thought, wow, that really works. Jet fuel is much more powerful, that would kill a lot more people. We should do that. So we took all our napalm and drained the gasoline and refilled them with jet fuel. Then we had to give them a new name.
Okay, end politics. Anyway, the point is I was stunned that we had someone, and that last part was an exact quote I'm pretty sure, someone in our govt. looked at 9/11 and said "We should do that."
So totally believable, someone looked at reavers and said "hey, that works." So they started work on intentionally creating the reaver.
The first experiments were a disaster.
The reaver agents wouldn't do what their masters bid, and some controllers were lost. Also to create a reaver meant 9 sacrafices, not that the blue hands cared. In addition, reaver agents were not capable of complex rational thought.
The brain must be physically altered they thought. So it would respond to code words, maybe so it could complete some rational thought.
This whole discussion thread is leading to an obvious conclusion. River isn't immune. There's only one reason why River can go into a whole room full of Reavers and be unaffected. I think a couple of people almost said it but instinct prevented them.
Select to view spoiler:
River is a Reaver.
with a few upgrades maybe. I finally figured out the spoiler thing. It was over there on the left hand column all the time.
"When
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Why does being a sci-fi fan mean you automatically know about prions? I had to read up on them on that link you provided to find out exactly what they are.
I never said all Reavers come from one big Mamma Reaver. Read the whole thread.
Otherwise, yes, some good theories there.
"My God - you're like a trained ape. Without the training."
"Come a day there won't be room for naughty men like us to slip about at all..."
I know the secret.
http://www.theshadowdepository.co.uk/index.htm
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