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.

I've never seen Sean Maher in anything else, but Simon seems very... either asexual or sexually repressed, not sure which. He doesn't so much ping my gaydar, but my gaydar is famously broken. He's beautiful, but not so much sexy. (To me.)

He seems straight but kinda dumb and terrified with Kaylee, not gay, to me.

Oh, I'm definitely getting a hint of queerness off Simon. Whether it's Simon or Sean Maher though, I don't know. I've never seen him in anything other than Firefly.

I think I've gotta roll with the repressed angle on that one.