Ditto. I'd third or fourth it, but I'm no good at math. Seriously, the little hairs stood up on my neck and arms, reading that. Chills, the good kind.

I agree with your entire second paragraph, Zenkitty. It's very incisive and makes me nod a lot because it gets to the heart of something I always thought about that episode but never had the exact words to explain myself. Kudos.

The first paragraph, though, feels like conjecture. She very well could be referring to Mal, but I don't see any reason other than the viewer's personal taste why it should be so, just like the (frankly, extremely irritating to me) incestual subtext inserted in the exchange about the hodgeberries just prior to it. If you feel they make the episode richer, you're more than welcome to have those takes on it. I just don't see where there's anything to actually substantiate them.

Sorry if I'm feeling adversarial to anyone. The paradigm for interaction on this board is several orders of magnitude more polite than that of most others, so I'm at all times trying to balance my desire to get my point across firmly with a desire not to insult people, something I've never had to do.

I agree totally with Zenkitty. That was my interpretation the first time I saw it and the 30 or so subsequent viewings. Thank you for articulating it so well.

Mr. Broom, StY and I had this discussion while watching Safe last night. He's firmly of the same mind as you, and argued fervently from that point of view. I conceded merit in his every point, as I do to yours. He kindly afforded me the same courtesy.

When you get right down to it, unless the writer comes and tells us exactly what was meant--and it may not have been clear to him/her at the point of the writing, or it may have become fuzzy in the intervening time, or it may have been deliberately left obscure simply to promote speculation--it remains a matter of personal opinion. Which I'm fine with. Anyone's welcome to read any degree of sibling incest into the hodgeberry scene and attribute it to two young actors finding a moment of serendipity onscreen and letting it run, or to River's lack of internal governors generated by the Alliance experimentation, or to a previous incestual history between the characters, or to a playful mood by either the characters or the actors. Whatever.

To me it read as deep affection and a disturbing slippage of River's judgement indicative of the damage she'd suffered, but that's my own point of view. Someone upthread chuckled at the fact that it took this long for the Ender's Game connotation to surface, but actually it did come up earlier, either at the time of airing or dvd release, so this isn't the first discussion on whether the Tams sold River out, or were just oblivious. I like the discussion. I like sharing my perspective and seeing how many share it, how many disagree and to what degree. I don't feel a particular need for consensus. And I don't think the discussion's been adversarial, just discussatory, which, you know, right up my alley.

Yeah, I think I'm just prone to getting my back up over things I have unnecessarily intense love for. Like when I let my roommate read all my Sandman collections and he came out a bit critical on certain bits I loved. I got more than a mite touchy. Education in an English department has taught me that it's important to live and let live, but to be an academic you should be crotchety about it too.

Thanks, all. shucks Chills, even; cool.

Mr. Broom, no adversarial intent meant or assumed! I've been trying lately not to preface every sentence I write with "I think..." so perhaps I went overboard in the other direction, but of course my opinion is just conjecture. Unless the writer/creator tells us specifically what was meant (maybe even then), speculation is all we got, and one of the things I enjoy about this show is that so many things are ambiguous and open to different interpretations. Maybe River didn't know Mal was coming for them. Maybe she was thinking about home and Daddy, and that was all. My opinion is based on all the other evidence that we've gotten throughout the show that she is indeed psychic, and the way we've seen her express herself. (There's also the fact that I want her to have meant Mal.)

As for the Hodgeberry Love, I never saw anything incestuous between the two of them, in that scene or elsewhere, and still don't. The idea doesn't bother me, though, because there's no overt incestousness going on (which would be eww); just the hint of it is funny, like in the deleted scene from OMR and Simon's utterly shocked reaction there. I think the hodgeberry scene looked sexual mainly because River was feeding berries to Simon, and we as adults, seeing two adults doing that, associate that with sex. But River is very childlike in many ways, and that's something I've seen little little kids do with someone they love. They just associate it with caring and closeness, because sex hasn't even occurred to them yet. That's all I think that was.

Ooh, the authorial intent debate. My feeling tends to be that a text has to stand on its own merits - meaning that we can all interpret "Daddy" as whomever we like. Hey, if you can find support she meant Jayne, I'll buy it.

backs away from the authorial intent debate That way lies madness. Especially in a body of work like a tv show with multiple authors, some of whom may have had ideas that contradicted other writers' ideas.

"Just because you wrote it, how do you know that's what it meant?" One of my favorite quotes of all time, and I don't even know who said it.

"Just because you wrote it, how do you know that's what it meant?" One of my favorite quotes of all time, and I don't even know who said it.

Or what they meant.

The hodgeberry scene never struck me as incestuous either, but that's probably due to Maher never convincing me for a single instant that he or any of the characters he's ever portrayed were heterosexual.