Objects in Space
POSTED BY: Da
UPDATED: Monday, April 5, 2004 12:10
VIEWED: 9786
PAGE 2 of 3
Quote:
Originally posted by ljosalf:Quote:
That leaves me most suspicious of Book.
exactly!!
"They say the snow on the roof is too heavy. They say the ceiling will cave in. His brains are in terrible danger."
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I think Ljosalf is getting pretty close to the truth. There is no way Jayne is responsible for the gun being there, and no one else would have any motive for doing it either...except Book. Other than why Inara is on Serenity, Book's story is the one with the most holes. And this is the first time anyone has said anything about Book's "I don't care if your innocent or not" pronouncement that has made sense to me. It was referring to Jayne and not River.
But this brings me to something that has bugged the hell out of me from the first time I saw "Ariel." This is not really off topic, since it relates a bit to what Ljosalf said about Book figuring out that Jayne attempted to sell out Simon and River. Did Joss really expect us to believe that no one overheard his accusations and threats to Jayne?
wo men ren ran zai fei xing.
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Quote:
Originally posted by ljosalf:Quote:
Originally posted by Ranger:
I think the key to this is in who River gets readings on. She gets input from everyone but Kaylee. In the end, she finds the gun, which is the thing which changed her relationship with Kaylee....This is her mind trying to understand her relationship with Kaylee.
I have to disagree here. Too subtle; too static. It's clear that River isn't invisible for real but only because no one expects her to be able to interact normally, and, so, they don't pay any attention to her. She walks past them all and no one acknowledges her presence. She is, after nearly a year aboard, alienated. No special powers required for that just plain human social interaction. From the commentary, we get that Joss wanted us to think that he would test the envelope, so to speak, by making us believe that River had discorporated and become Serenity when in the end he really had no intention of going that far out there. Psychic, mind-reading powers, OK. Destroying/creating matter; possessing inanimate objects, not so much. So, I don't think we are going to see super powers from River. Only, really well thought out, fallible, pushed mental abilities--like the mind reading.
So, I'm sticking with the gun getting to the cargo hold in a normal, everyday manner, and here are the people who did NOT put it there: Jayne (I believe him; there is evidence of the care he takes with his weapons sprinkled through several episodes), Mal (no point to him doing this; his is meant to be the audience's point of view), Kaylee (I except her character at face value; I just do), Simon (contrary to his personality and profession), River (just did not happen; what, she put the gun in the cargo hold and then rediscovered it? Nah, not buying it). Maybe not Zoe or Wash (They both appear to jump on the blame Jayne train only after Mal cuts Jayne off when he starts in blaming River as dangerous, leaving the impression with them that Jayne's done something else wrong in regards to River to piss Mal off.) Maybe not Inara (to what purpose?). That leaves me most suspicious of Book.
Besides, you get tension and a plot hook to boot. Whereas the issue of River working through her relationship with Kaylee is pretty much resolved by the end of the episode.
Ljosalf
The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)
I get everything you're saying here, but I still find it odd that Kaylee is the only one River doesn't get a reading from, then she finds the gun in the same condition it was in just before her relationship with Kaylee changed (fully loaded, safety off, which is how it was just before River shot the three guys in War Stories). But hey, that's half the fun of the show, trying to figure out what is up with (fill in your favorite charators here).
Traveller, if you go to Sparta, tell them you have seen us lying here as the Law commands.
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I would like to address the "why River didn't get a reading from Kaylee" thing.
Here's the deal. (In my opinion.)
River is wandering through the ship, present but practically invisible, from a social standpoint. Yes, a lot of them glance at her, but no one tries to engage her in any way. (Hell, she's halfway to being the ship already, or a chair... one of those folding ones that occasionally snap closed on people and pour soup in their hair.) 
She's empathic to the point of psychic ability and she's picking up on each person's strong underlying emotion/thoughts/etc. The things people are holding in. The hidden.
Kaylee doesn't do hidden. Kaylee is a wide open friendly book with fuzzy animal patches on it. Therefore there's nothing to uncover.
River looks at everyone and sees what's underneath, so it makes sense that she'd look at Kaylee and see... more Kaylee.
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Every well-bred petty crook knows that the small concealable weapons always go to the far left of the place setting.
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I want to thank you for all of your ideas. As I am now ready to start watching the series, again (Boy I need to get out more), I will keep your ideas and theories in mind and respond back when I have more insight. Not that anyone can have a complete insight to River (based on the Joss commentary) I don't think anyone does.
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I hope she does the soup-thing. It's always a hoot and we don't all die from it.
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As I've posted on another thread, the readings River gets in her wanderings are all about personal regets. Simon regrets the good life he had to leave behind to save his mei mei; Jayne regrets both being stupid, and getting caught at it; Book regrets that at some point he didn't care about justice; Inara regrets pressuring someone (her doctor? Her Priestess? A lover?) to tell her the truth about her condition/situation; and Mal regrets having lost his faith.
Zoe and Wash are too lost in ecstasy to regret anything, so River gets no clear reading past pleasure; and Kaylee, well, she's a total innocent. No regrets.
I could be wrong, of course, and this doesn't answer the "where the Gorram Hell did the gun come from" question. Unless, of course, Book's real regret is the necessity of setting Jayne up...
"You can't enslave a free man. The most you can do is kill him." -- Robert A. Heinlein
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>As I've posted on another thread, the readings
>River gets in her wanderings are all about
>personal regets. Simon regrets the good life he
>had to leave behind to save his mei mei; Jayne
Maybe this has already been extensively discussed but I haven't seen it mentioned so I'll say it: People keep saying River does readings, but I think that's a slightly inaccurate word. It looks to me like River isn't reading people, but having other peoples' experiences. This is most obvious in OIS, when River is observing Wash and Zoe -- the camera shows us an arm on a sleeve, then cuts back to River and we hear a loud rustling of fabric, then see River grab her own arm. Nearly the entire episode is about River experiencing other things (Joss even comments on how River 'experiences' walking down the stairs). So the inner monologues we get might not be thoughts they're having, but just some verbalization of their states of mind. This fits in pretty well with every fact I can recall about River -- for example, Simon says the operation removed the part of her brain that lets her ignore experiences. This makes sense, if she's an experiment no one wants her to have the ability to shut it off.
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I think that River kept the gun from 'War Stories'.
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Beatle and ARP,
I think you're both on the better track here. I certainly don't think that River picks up on regrets. She picks up on the feelings that are the most raw at the moment.
Simon reflects on the good ole days at the academy on Osiris and even mentions later that he would be there right now if they hadn't messed with River.
Jayne glances at River and then his most raw situation is that he turned traitor on Mal so of course his statement is perfectly logical.
Book I think is referring to Jayne but I can't be positive of that one.
Zoe and Wash are enthralled in each other so of course their feelings are very deep and very much on the surface.
Mal and Inara are discussing something that is killing them both. They want to be together but neither has the guts to actually say it out loud. Inara's comment is to Mal to admit his feelings toward her. Mal's comment is that no matter what he does she's leaving anyway so it doesn't mean a damn thing.
River could absolutely could have kept the gun from War Stories because I don't think that anyone remembered to take it away from her. Still doesn't explain why she put it in the floor of the cargo hold only to rediscover it as a twig later on. But it is River so who knows.
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I hope she does the soup-thing. It's always a hoot and we don't all die from it.
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Is the gun that River shot in WS the same she held in OIS? If it is, then that would help with the explaination. And make me feel she kept it.
If it is the same from WS, she must have kept it. She took it from Kalee, so did Kaylee have the gun from Jayne(any clear shots of Jayne having it before Kalee, or if it was in the pile of guns before Jayne 'dressed up' to help in WS)? Because Mal makes it clear it was Jayne's gun.
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