River's abilities

POSTED BY: Smaug
UPDATED: Saturday, July 29, 2006 12:05
VIEWED: 7079
PAGE 4 of 4

ASARIAN

Saturday, July 29, 2006 11:54 AM

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Originally posted by Xeyra:

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
Considering the Miranda recording; it is not clear to me that River being able to predict Dr Carons words in a recording is evidence of telepathy. For one thing, if you know a few words from a sentence you can often then predict the next few. River might then be able to reliably predict Dr Carons next syllable, which would be the only ability she needed to lip-synch with her.

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You make a good point. I have a friend who tends to mouth as we speak, sometimes, though not with so much accuracy as River. Still, I do believe River does that because she already knows the message and what the doctor is saying because of having read the secret from the parliament men's minds. Read the message. Known about Miranda and seen the bodies and known about Reavers, even if the knowledge was buried within her (burning up her brain) because she saw it in the parliament's men's minds. That's how I interpret it. That's how I see and explain this.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
It is possible that this copy is what River was looking for on the Cortex after she escaped from the storage locker.

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Actually, it seems to be clear enough that she was looking for the location of Miranda in that scene. Even Mr. Universe, the hacker supreme, didn't seem to even know about Miranda, so I doubt such a transmission was hanging around in the cortex to find. Not to mention River wouldn't really have had time to do such a thourough search of the cortex for a message, hear it, and then search for Miranda's location. But it's an interesting theory, nonetheless.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
Notice as well that most people would only remember the gist of Dr Carons report – they would not remember the exact words, and so no telepath could read them in their minds.

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I guess this would depend on the members of parliament. Maybe they had good memories or maybe they saw the transmission so many times they could recall it by heart, like we usually do with a poem we love or with a letter that has touched us deeply, whether positively or negatively. You don't have to have a photographic memory to remember something so clearly (my mother, for example, still remembers quite a lot of meaningless things she learned in school, like names of train stations and such, and can quote quite a few things by heart, word for word).

Something like Miranda is not something you forget easily, not when you're responsible for the death of 30 million people. Even ambitious and power-hungry old men blink when they exterminate a world... Besides, our memories aren't usually lost, they're just put into storage, buried under new information, but even if twelve years have passed, they would remain in there, somewhere, and River saw them.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
There is of course, the incident with the key Parliamentarians. I am inclined to turn this argument around, and say that it is evidence that River is not a telepath. If she was known to be a telepath, then having her encounter people with sensitive information in their heads would be an obvious security risk, even to a non-professional like Dr Mathias, or the MPs bodyguards. Dr Mathias, above all people, should surely know what River is capable of.

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I think this speaks more about Dr. Mathias pride than anything else. You have to consider that Mathias is a scientist who seems to think River is his "star pupil", a prodigy, which is why she seems to have been shown to the Parliament men ("show me off like a dog").

What does this mean? Well, Mathias's greatest sin is pride, says the Operative. A scientist with a pet project that he headed and was so ingrossed in he didn't think of how wrong it was (he doesn't really seem to care when he describes what's being done to River when he's talking to Simon).

Would a man like this really stop to think that putting a member of his project, especially one as gifted as River, was going to be dangerous to the m

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