Reading Minds in 'Objects'

POSTED BY: nuclearday
UPDATED: Thursday, March 9, 2006 21:31
VIEWED: 10394
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REAVERREQUIEM

Monday, March 6, 2006 5:34 PM

In "Objects", I feel that River is, for the first time getting to know these people. The passions that drive them. Her powers are just developing into a tool of conscious control. By the time Serenity BDM* comes out she is using her powers as part of the crew to (with control) identify hazards at the vault in town.
I haven't spent much time in space. But out in the blue of the sea, I must assume is only a pale shade of being "Out in the Black". You have nothing but time, and all you do is think. As a reader, River has this crew to read. The mind never sleeps; you examine every aspect of life. Dreams, ideas, love, hate, past, present, fantasy. This was when she became self aware, a real person -focused. She is no longer in a swirl of changing consciousness, from one person to another, the past, the experiments. Passing ships...(passing planets?)
By the end of Objects she addresses the fears of the crew, gets rid of Early, …and saves the day. I wasn’t so much worried about what those glimpses meant to anyone but River. It was what she needed to know to act against Early when no one else could.

* I’m a little slow. BDM I have no Idea? Best Damn Movie?

"Somethings calling me back...theirs a light in the black and I'm ready to burn-I'm coming home"

NUCLEARDAY

Monday, March 6, 2006 8:32 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by ReaverRequiem:
I’m a little slow. BDM I have no Idea? Best Damn Movie?

Yeah, that's about right ;p Took me some time to figure it out when I first got here, myself. "Officially" stands for Big Damn Movie, referencing that line from Safe.

"What does that makes us?"
"Big Damn Heroes, sir."
"Ain't we just."

________________________________________________
You can take my hope when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

SPACEMANSPIFF

Tuesday, March 7, 2006 4:16 AM

OK, I'll toss in my two credits...

My favorite aspect of OiS is the ocean sounds. To me, they represent the rushing, pounding feelings of passion. We first hear it with the outward expression of love/lust between Wash and Zoe. But we hear it even louder, more forceful with the unrequited, bottled-up passion between Mal and Inara. Interesting, that...

The stick being a gun and where it came from always bothered me as well. It seems too over the top to think that River, as her disassociation from reality progresses in that scene, has the ability to *materialize* the gun from Jayne's room. She doesn't walk past the creew dorms, though, and she didn't have it with her throughout the scene...did she? Everone *does* ignore her...why? Does she have Plateau Eyes, too? There is also the fact that, when she re-enters reality, everyone on the ship is there in the hold with her...how much time passed?

To pull together several things that have been mentioned, it seems sensible that a "finished weapon" River would have no emotions of her own, no reality matrix of her own, which would lead to her not being able to perceive and interpret the world for herself. Her full intellect would go to reading others, reacting to others, and following out Alliance/Blue Sun (they are the same thing, as far as I'm concerned) programming.

Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?

LEEBO

Thursday, March 9, 2006 9:31 PM

Ariel is the show that really begins showing the many faces of River. This is around the point in the story where Simon began testing drugs on her. It's probably the relatively unfocused testing he was doing prior to the episode that gave her the ability to predict Jayne's betrayal ("You look better in red.") and the much more focused drug testing post-Ariel that give her enough command over her psychic abilities to pull off the stunts in War Stories and Objects In Space. Hence you can't really read it as being River's Point Of View throughout the series, I think River was a lot more "schizophrenic" before and less capable of hearing each person's individual voice as they are portrayed in Objects. I do feel that the drugs Simon gives her are responsible for her development. Hence the experience is as spooky to her as it is to you.

In Safe, for example, River doesn't realize that the little girl is Mute because she can't differentiate her psychic projections from daily life. Had it happened after Ariel, she probably could have determined that she knew things she couldn't and would have dodged the witch-hunt.

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