Firefly (TV series)/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

*** The Operative does mention her 'deteriorating mental state' at the beginning of the movie, and the shooting script has him saying [[It Got Worse|she got worse]] after being shown off to Parliament, but I didn't think that ever implied that her issues were caused exclusively by the Miranda secret. They stripped her amygdala, that's bound to mess anyone up.

*** The way I always saw it was that when River said "I'm okay" she didn't mean that her schizophrenia was completely cured, but that the immediate severe psychosis she had been undergoing for much of the film had been resolved, and she was back in the state that she was in during the series. In all likelihood, the use of her trigger, combined with the very recent and ''very'' close encounter with Reavers would have brought the memory of Miranda to the forefront of her mind, where it tormented her and drove her into deeper psychosis, and she was unable to repress it (mutilated amygdala and all). She was also not lucid enough to clearly enunciate her problem to the crew (if you listen to her statements, its clear that she was talking about Miranda and the Reavers all along). Once she made them know what she knew, it was no longer the focus of her entire mind, and she was able to return to her previous state (albeit with any mental blocks to her combat abilities removed). Quite possibly, River knows all manner of secrets that would render her incoherent if she were forced to lend all of her attention to them.

** The experiments conducted on River clearly loosened her grip with reality, but "insane" is not a binary state of being. For most of the show her state of mind was generally a bit nuts, punctuated by some extended lucid periods from time to time, depending on what medications Simon was treating her with, and other internal and external factors. It seems pretty evident that the Operative's trigger (the subliminally-embedded Oaty Bar commercial) was a massive trauma (when she regains consciousness on Serenity, her first conversation involves begging Simon to kill her). That initially drove her even more crazy, but the jarring loose of the memory of Miranda (an unintended side-effect of the trigger) gave her something concrete to focus on to face and eventually resolve the larger trauma (though we don't know how "cured" she is, just that after the battle with the Reavers she experiences an unusually long lucid period).

 

== Reavers in General ==