I’m so glad to hear that you’re in the downward spiral. Misery Shameless fun loves company!
I did watch the show Spartacus, so I am familiar with Seppius/Seppia. I love them so much, I just wish there had been more.
I didn’t know that, about the show’s creator confirming, though I never doubted that they were intended to come off as incestuous. Still very good to know.
I wrote these forever ago, but I did a big analysis of Seppius/Seppia while their episodes were airing:
Sally Sitwell and George Michael’s teacher (Heather Graham’s character) both have the same coloring and the same hair. Rita has different hair but the same coloring and looks the most like her, in my opinion.
The only exception really was Tracey and Maggie Lizer – but they make sense as exceptions. And Rebel too, if we’re going to count season 4. But Rebel had to have red hair because she was the daughter of Ron Howard, which was plot relevant.
You have no idea how much I’m into the headcanon that Michael’s crushes have all been a series of Lindsay look-alikes, but he actively seeks out women who aren’t anything like her and all of those relationships fail horribly.
And all of his relationships fail horribly anyway because he’s pseudo-married to Lindsay is kept busy/fulfilled by that relationship in most ways.
It’s hard to reach the end, I know. But I actually think it’s a blessing that the show ended when it did.
Spoilers, if they can be called that, for history and The Borgia Apocaypse:
Neil Jordan wrote a script for a movie to end the series. It’s called The Borgia Apocalypse, and it’s terrible. I’ve repressed most of my memories of it, but for Ces/Lu shippers it could not have been worse. Lucrezia is afraid of Cesare and I think plots to kill him? All along Neil Jordan hadn’t wanted to write the relationship as explicitly incestuous, and then they forced him to do it (the network, but probably mostly Francois lol), so The Borgia Apocalypose almost seemed like his revenge.
It’s sad the show doesn’t have a proper ending, but there would not have been a nice ending for Ces/Lu no matter what, whether it was angst and unhappiness, Cesare’s slow syphilitic decline or his sooner-rather-than-later death in battle.
But the chance for more of season 3 Ces/Lu in season 4 is a thing to mourn indeed.
I’m totally living for The Force Awakens right now, and I have been channeling a lot of that energy/excitement into speculation. I know a lot of us are invested in the question of Rey’s origins – who her parents are, why she is on Jakku, etc. – so I thought I would share some of what I have learned recently in my investigating around the internet. There’s information here from official twitters, cast interviews, well-respected fan resources, and quotes from the novelizaton and the official screenplay. Bear with me, this will be kinda long. And I will be sourcing some things but not everything (because I’m lazy), so it’s up to you whether you trust me.
I felt particularly compelled to write this all out after I learned a few tidbits that rendered some popular theories obsolete. Though it is of course important to note that nothing is really set in stone until we’re in the theater watching it happen on the screen in front of us in Episodes VIII and IX. (Episode VIII begins filming next month! So the screenplay for VIII has been done for a while, probably before a lot of the scenes in TFA were cut – a lot of them were said to have been cut within the last month before release. But that doesn’t mean that things can’t change during filming of VIII.)
Rey Solo?
Firstly: Kylo Ren and Rey are definitely not twins. Rey is 19, Kylo is 29-30. Rey’s age of 19 is revealed in both the novelization and the script. Kylo’s age comes from Pablo Hidalgo’s twitter. His twitter bio says not to cite his tweets as canon, however he is probably just watching his back. He is considered an authority – he has an official role with Lucasfilm as a “keeper of the canon” – he belongs to the “Story Group”, and wrote the Visual Dictionary for TFA.
I think we can also eliminate the possibility that Rey is a Solo at all. There is a famous Star Wars spoiler/leak site makingstarwars.net, and I read an interview with the guy who runs it. He has sources from everywhere including people very close to production. (It was incredible – he started forming relationships with people at different companies just in case their company was the one that ended up being hired to work on the movie.) In the interview he stated someone in-the-know told him that Rey wasn’t a Solo:
Once, I was buying something at [a coffee shop], and I said, “Okay, I need to know if Rey is a Solo,” and they wouldn’t tell me. So I was like, “If she is, get me an espresso shot.” They’d laugh—but when they came back, I knew Rey wasn’t a Solo.
Of course, that information might purely be based on what happened in the movie – indeed, the movie does not reveal Rey to be a Solo, but the movie doesn’t actually reveal Rey’s parentage at all – so anyone who had seen the movie or had access to the content of the movie would probably say, “I’m not sure”, so this informant probably had more information than we have, including, potentially, the definitive identity of Rey’s real father.
Also, casting for Rey advertised the character as being potentially bi-racial, which would rule out Han and Leia as the parents. Of course, that was a long time ago, and a lot could have changed since then, even Rey’s parentage.
This is just an opinion post from another fan speculating, but I think she makes some really good points here about Rey not being a Solo, mainly that if Rey were a Solo, that should have been revealed before Kylo killed Han, because that would have had more emotional/dramatic impact. (Rey having random parentage should have been established in the first film as well, in this case not to upset fans by holding off on a meaningless secret that is haunting everyone.)
Rey Kenobi?
One of the big points behind the Rey Kenobi theory is that you can hear Obi-Wan saying, “Rey, these are your first steps” at the end of her “Forceback” – the vision she has when she touches Luke’s lightsaber. For a long time I suspected that Obi-Wan’s voice was a flashback, and she had heard these words while she was training with Luke as a new Jedi initiate, before Jakku. However, as you’ll see below, I have moved away from the idea of Rey ever having been a part of that. I think Obi-Wan’s ghost is there in the present speaking to her. But what I learned (maybe what I kept forgetting?), is that you can also hear Yoda during the Forceback. JJ Abrams brought Frank Oz in to record new lines (though they ended up using old lines instead) – so Yoda’s presence in this was important. So I think it’s just a case of the old Jedi masters helping out Rey and the new Jedi.
And it is very subtle, Obi-Wan’s voice. I wouldn’t have even known about it if I hadn’t seen it on the internet. If it’s an actual hint, why not make it more obvious?
That’s not conclusive evidence against the Rey Kenobi theory, but it knocked the theory down a few pegs for me.
As for the question of Rey’s accent being British, like Obi-Wan, whereas Finn, played by a British actor, had an American accent in the film, in my opinion this is about Finn, and not Rey. The First Order seem by-and-large to have British accents – Hux, Phasma, other bit parts. I think Finn having an American accent is to distinguish him as not being like them in sort of a subtle way. I also read on reddit that John Boyega said he tried his own accent and there was a consensus that it didn’t work.
Rey + Kylo’s Turn/
Kylo Sparing Rey /Kylo Leaving Rey on Jakku:
According to Hidalgo, Rey was left on Jakku before Kylo turned on Luke and destroyed the new Jedi. Rey was left on Jakku when she was about 5, which would be 14 years before TFA begins. Hidalgo states clearly that Kylo’s turn was more recent than 14 years ago. It’s up to interpretation, but my impression from Hidalgo’s tweets were that Kylo’s turn was more like 5-10 years ago.
I, like many others, had assumed that Rey being left on Jakku was a result of what Kylo did to the new Jedi. It looks like this is most likely not the case. Most likely Kylo was not the one who left her on Jakku – even if he decided to save her before he started destroying everything, it’s unlikely he would have planned that 4+ years in advance, right? However, it is possible that Luke had a vision of the future (or a possible future) and sent her away well in advance of that future happening. I can’t think of who else might have had a role in doing this aside from Kylo or Luke (presuming we can take at face value that Han and Leia don’t know who Rey is). But the warning could have come from someone dead – Yoda or Obi-Wan, etc.
REY’S FORCEBACK:
Rey’s Forceback is a huge source of speculation, and I have been forced to conclude that JJ and others failed a little, because it ended up being more confusing than revelatory. I think what they were trying to show ended up being misleading, or wasn’t meant to be particularly important and ended up raising a thousand questions and theories.
Originally, a large thread of the Forceback showed the journey of Luke’s lightsaber, but many pieces of that were cut. Leaving the narrative of the Forceback very jumbled.
But it does begin with Luke getting his hand cut off by Vader, the moment when he loses the lightsaber. We don’t see Vader and Luke, as was originally intended, but we hear Luke’s screams, Vader’s breathing, not to mention the hallway matches. There is a rough transition as the walls become the ground and Rey is watching a new moment. I feel like it’s pretty safe the assume that the scene of Luke and R2 next to the fire is the burning of a Jedi temple where Luke had been training the new generation of Jedi (the script says as much).
1. The “Warrior”/Kylo Saving Rey:
The scene after this is a battlefield, and there’s no transition plus it’s raining in both parts, so I posit that it’s the same night.
This moment has become infamous: Rey is lying on the ground, a man known as “Warrior” in the script (and Hidalgo implies the identity of this man/warrior is of no real importance, killing one theory that he was the former Master of the Knights of Ren) moves towards Rey and raises a staff of some kind as if to swipe, and then is cut down by Kylo.
After this, Rey stands up and is facing Kylo, and he is flanked by the six other Knights of Ren. What’s interesting about this part is that it almost seems as if Kylo can see her, and he begins moving towards her, but I’m guessing he’s reacting to something else. It seems like maybe he hears or senses something and then starts moving towards it. This may not be significant (a running theme of this Forceback analysis.)
In the novelization, this scene precedes the part where Luke is with R2, in the movie the part with Luke and R2 comes first. I’m not sure the significance of the switch.
Here is the moment from the novelization:
Onto the wall, which had become the ground. Not the adamantine ceramic she had just seen, but dry grass. Nearby, a lightsaber slammed into the ground. A missed thrust, a statement of power—she didn’t know, couldn’t tell. A hand appeared to pull it upward.
Day became night, sky ominous and filled with rain, cold and chilling to the bone. She was standing, she was sitting, she was looking up—to see someone, a warrior, take the full force of the lightsaber. He screamed and fell.
Battlefield then, all around her. Putting a hand to her mouth, she rose and turned. As she turned, she found herself confronted by seven tall, cloaked figures, dark and foreboding, all armed. Soaked and shivering, she stumbled backward, turning as she half fell. Firelight illuminated her, firelight from a distant, burning temple.
The seven vanished. A sound made her turn, and she blinked in surprise at the sight of a small blue-and-silver R2 unit. A new figure appeared. Falling to his knees, he reached out to the droid with an artifice of an arm—metal and plastics and other materials with which she was not familiar. She blinked and both were gone.
Here is the moment from the screenplay:
We follow Rey and she runs down the corridor, but it all TILTS – TURNS – and she lands on the
WALL – which is now the GROUND – dried GRASS.
She turns to look – we PIVOT – and see a BURNING TEMPLE AT NIGHT. We PAN to:
R2-D2 – who watches the flames – and a MAN appears (LUKE, whose face we do not see). He falls to his knees, reaches out to the droid – with a MECHANICAL RIGHT HAND.
We PUSH IN ON REY as RAIN BEGINS – and DAY TURNS TO NIGHT – and she LOOKS UP – we TILT UP –
To see we’re LOOKING UP AT A WARRIOR as he is STABBED BY A FIERY LIGHTSABER! He screams and falls to the ground – we FOLLOW HIM, revealing Rey again, now in a nighttime battlefield. She gets to her feet, frightened by what she sees. We PIVOT AROUND HER to REVEAL KYLO REN, and the six other KNIGHTS OF REN, who flank him!
Neither source gives away any enlightening details. But notice that neither one mentions the Warrior being about to attack Rey. Much has been made out of Kylo Ren potentially saving her in that moment by killing the “Warrior” and preventing his attack, but I am forced to conclude that whatever the Warrior was doing, it doesn’t really matter. This is simply a vision of Kylo and the KOR killing, and that’s the takeaway.
2. Rey Being Left Behind on Jakku:
It’s hard to give up the idea entirely, since it seems so very much like the Warrior is attacking someone on the ground.
After Rey sees the KOR, she turns, and suddenly it’s day, and she’s looking upon her younger self. Unkar Plutt, the junk dealer, is holding her arm. Rey is yelling at an unfamiliar ship as it flies into the sky, “Come back!”. She yells again, and it looks to me as if she’s saying, “Mom” (or “Mum?”), but it could also just be, “Noooooo”.
There’s something extremely important here that I didn’t realize until it was pointed out to me – during this part, Rey is looking at a younger version of herself. The present!Rey and young!Rey are both there. So Rey could not have been present during the part with the KOR because we would have seen young!Rey.
(There’s a theory that the KOR part takes place in the future. It’s an interesting thought but I think the evidence is against it. As I mentioned earlier, it seems like it’s a continuous night with the Luke/R2 scene, also I believe Hidalgo implied it was the past. The term “forceback” – used by JJ Abrams and others – also implies it was in the past.)
Which brings me back to the Warrior attacking the ground. Whoever he was attacking, we should have been able to see them, whether it was young!Rey or Luke or whoever. So that’s why I feel like I must conclude that the Warrior’s gesture is meaningless. And it was just badly done.
If Rey wasn’t present at the slaughter of the new Jedi, and was in fact left behind on Jakku years before, then there’s really no reason to suspect she was ever training with Luke as a Jedi.
The novelization again has everything ordered differently. In the novelization, Rey goes from seeing Luke and R2 to being in the snowy woods, then she has the flashback of being left behind on Jakku. (The movie’s order doesn’t make much more sense – if Rey being left behind on Jakku happened before the burning of the temple, why didn’t that scene come first in the Forceback? I can only assume it was for dramatic effect. Technically it was in a sort of order – first the Forceback narrative of Vader/Luke/Kylo, then Rey’s own personal narrative with her being left behind and then the vision of the future in the forest.)
The novelization has some very interesting details about the scene of Rey’s abandonment, though:
Then behind her, another voice.
That voice.
“Stay here. I’ll come back for you.”
She whirled, glazed eyes desperately scanning the dark gaps between the slender trees, trying to penetrate the darkness.
“Where are you?” She started running toward the voice.
“I’ll come back, sweetheart. I promise.”
“I’m here! Right here! Where are you?”
This indicates that whoever left her behind on Jakku 1) promised to come back, and 2) loved her (“sweetheart”). Why were these lines cut from the movie? Probably because they would have to give too much away with the voice???
It’s potentially important to note that the audio book of the novelization has those lines voiced by a woman.
One of my theories had been that Rey’s family gave her up in a different place or a different way, and then it was a third party who left her with Plutt on Jakku. But the novelization nips that theory in the bud.
I don’t like to think it was Luke who left her on Jakku, because that means he didn’t go back for her even though he knew where she was. (Unless he’s trapped on Ahch-To, which is possible, but not the impression the movie gave.) It’s possible that Rey being “sent away” at all is going to be shown to have been a bad idea, but I do think her being left there for so long will turn out to have been the result of evil intervention or unfortunate accident – her loneliness, her sense of abandonment, it’s all just too sad to have been perpetrated against her by one of our heroes. Opinions vary on this, certainly there’s some leeway – but it’s my impression that no one who meets her in the movie has any idea who she is. Han, Kylo, Snoke, and presumably Leia as well all know that Rey came from Jakku, yet they give no indication of knowing or suspecting her of being anything other than exactly who she appears to be. So, presumably, none of them were the ones to leave her there.
I know many people cite the “What girl?” from Kylo as evidence that he suspects who she might be. In my opinion, if that line (and the others like it) has meaning, it’s actually the opposite – Kylo is absolutely NOT expecting some scavenger from Jakku to be the “girl” he is concerned about.
As far as Rey’s memory goes, if she was 4/5 when she she was left behind, it’s quite possible she remembers very little from before that.
This might not be relevant, but the helmet that Rey has in her home and so cutely puts on belongs to a X-Wing pilot whose name was Raeh. So possibly Rey named herself, based on the name on the helmet. In which case, she might remember almost nothing. OR someone gave her the helmet and named her after Raeh.
Note the way she tells BB-8 that it’s her “family” that’s coming back for her – she doesn’t specify her parents or her mother. This tells me that her memories are vague.
So my prevailing theory right now is that Luke is her father, and it was her mother who left her behind on Jakku. Perhaps Rey’s mother had some kind of understanding with Lor San Tekka that he would watch over her. The Jakku triple-incidence (Lor San Tekka, Rey, Millennium Falcon) is just too much – there has to be some connection. And I think then Rey’s mother was either killed or kidnapped or got amnesia or some such thing, and so that’s why she never went back for her. I’m basing a lot on the novelization, but the words there seem so sincere. I have to believe that whoever left Rey on Jakku really did intend to come back for her, and not 15 years later.
It’s interesting to note that it’s the sound of Rey crying as a child that she first hears, and which draws her down the hallway and towards Luke’s lightsaber. But Rey being left behind on Jakku was only a very small part of the Forceback. To me, this indicates that her being left behind on Jakku does have a connection to the rest of the vision. Also, her vision is all about Skywalkers – Anakin, Luke, Kylo, and then her. It certain fits the pattern better if she’s a Skywalker too.
We also have to ask why the Force shows her these things. The Forceback doesn’t give her any information that aids her in any way. Not in this film, at least. So why?
And then, of course, the final scene of the Forceback, which is actually a Forceforward of sorts, in which Rey is in the snowy forest (Starkiller Base, one assumes), and encounters Kylo. (Though with Kylo wearing his mask, it’s more like their forest encounter on Takodana. But I can understand why they chose to presage the Starkiller Base duel over something that was only 10 min. away from happening, and of course they couldn’t show Kylo without his mask yet.) Just another indication that the details in the Forceback just don’t matter that much, and it’s more about the vibes.
Daisy Ridley Interview:
Daisy Ridley gave an interview in November here, which I’ll quote for you:
Q: Everyone wants to know who Rey’s parents are. Do you know?
A (Daisy): Yeah.
Q: Will the viewer know after the first episode or not necessarily?
A: Questions will be answered, absolutely. The main question will be answered.
So Daisy says here, perhaps not unequivocally but pretty definitively, that by the end of the movie we would know who Rey’s parents were. Obviously, that didn’t happen. So something was cut. OR Daisy considers the hints that were in the movie to be enough to answer the question. The straightforward interpretation of the movie is that Rey’s parents are unknown, but that doesn’t count as answered question, in my opinion.
If something was cut, it’s hard to imagine an entire plot thread that revealed Rey being a Kenobi or a Solo or a Force child or a clone being cut. Too much would have to go in to making that resonate emotionally, and I can’t imagine a quick shocker fitting into the flow either. Much more reasonable for a short scene where Luke is revealed to be her father – perhaps a scene between Leia and Rey at the end before Rey leaves. I’ve seen a photo of a deleted scene of Leia and Rey having an indoor conversation:
The other possibility is that Daisy was mistaken somehow, or lied. Or somehow something about this is misleading. All possible, but not likely. The questions are straightforward, Daisy’s answer is a little strangely-worded but not particularly ambiguous, not cagey. And I don’t think she would lie, especially when the reporter gave her the out of saying “not necessarily”. She could always say, “I’m not sure I can answer that.” She’s been a part of the project for a very long time already, she’s practiced at what she can and can’t say.
My interpretation is that Daisy is saying that the answer is obvious enough – she’s Luke’s daughter. Though that’s a bit of a leap.
But this from Daisy comes closer to convincing me than anything else has.
It Is You
A lot has been made out of a line in the novelization. When Kylo is using the Force to call Luke’s lightsaber to him, and it flies to Rey instead, Kylo says, “It is you.” It seems incredibly significant – somehow, Kylo knows who Rey is. Combined with his weird flipout at hearing that a girl is with BB-8 and Finn, and his difficulty in believing that she really is just a scavenger from Jakku, there seems to be a good case building for the idea that Kylo knows Ren’s “real” identity.
Taken aback, he whirled—to see the weapon land in the hand of a girl standing by a tree. Rey appeared equally shocked that her reach for the device had exceeded his. She gazed down at the weapon now resting in her grip.
“It is you,” Ren murmured.
His words unsettled her: Not for the first time, he seemed to know more about her than she did about herself.
Well, Hidalgo addressed this on twitter, and said that Kylo saying, “It is you” refers back to the conversation he had with Snoke about an “awakening” they both felt. Rey using the Force/letting the Force in, etc., was that awakening, and this moment is Kylo acknowledging that, as he had already suspected, it was her.
I don’t know what to think. That’s a bit of a letdown, but it does make sense. It’s hard to face that things might be a lot simpler than they seemed at first. But I can guess that maybe that line was cut because it was confusing. So once again something that seemed really important is apparently not significant at all.
Though the idea of the awakening simply referring to Rey is interesting in and of itself. But I find it a little strange, because this conversation between Snoke and Kylo happens after the Rathtar scene. Rey hasn’t really done anything that had to do with the Force in the movie yet. The awakening conversation would make so much more sense if it followed the Forceback.
Rey and Jakku:
A question I see rarely discussed but which haunts me more and more is whether Rey has been on Jakku ever since she was born. I had always assumed she was dropped off there when she was 5ish, for whatever reason. Rey says, “I’ve never been off-planet,” but I assumed she meant, “I haven’t been off-planet since I got to Jakku”. However, there’s a tweet from Hidalgo where he’s joking/ranting about all the plot hole comments that get thrown at him, he says, “It says Rey’s been on Jakku all her life. YET WE ONLY SEE HER THERE FOR A FEW MINUTES. PLOT HOLE.” The tweet seems to imply that Rey has been on Jakku her entire life, and that the movie states this. In which case, if Rey is related to the Skywalkers, is Luke’s daughter, then why were Rey and her mother living on Jakku (presumably, according to the theory I wrote about above), and why does Rey’s mother leave? Where does she go? Does something happen that makes her feel like she was must go and help someone? But she leaves Rey behind for whatever reason? Is she Force sensitive, and senses something and that’s why she leaves? Was Luke ever living on Jakku? Jakkuuuuuuuuuuu. Why?
SO MANY QUESTIONS.
My other thoughts on why Rey is most likely a Skywalker are here.
On a Reylo note: Unlike many shippers I’m actually hoping that they are cousins, but I am as disappointed as anyone that there was no Kylo/Rey connection before he went darkside and she was left on Jakku. The idea of him sparing her, whether it was because she was his little cousin or whatever, was just too lovely.
It may not have been under the best of circumstances, but Kylo was her awakening.
As I mentioned here, I do think that Rey’s Force sensitivity has contributed to her success at certain endeavors, like piloting (like Qui-Gon says about Anakin in The Phantom Menace), languages, fighting, etc. And she had her “Forceback” when she touched Luke’s lightsaber for the first time. But in terms of feeling the Force, being able to call on it, etc., it really was Kylo that pushed her to it.
He demonstrated the power of the Force to her in a way she had never seen before, and then challenged her in such a way that she had to use it. Han, Leia, and Maz mentioned the Force to her, Luke and Obi-Wan had small roles in introducing her to it during the Forceback, but Kylo was her only model, her only Force-interaction. (And unlike a typical Force battle like we saw with Yoda and Dooku or the Emperor and Luke), some of Kylo and Rey’s interactions in the Force were connections – Rey having a vision of him, their two-way mind reading during the interrogation, potentially their struggle to accio Luke’s lightsaber.
And when Kylo says, “I can show you the ways of the Force,” Rey is reminded to use the Force. So he was her teacher, in a way. In a brief, accidental way. Like you said, his words gave her strength. And I think it was probably Kylo wanting to train Rey that made Rey want to train with Luke.
That’s why this relationship is so infinitely fascinating.
Remember way back in May when a savvy Anon told us about a show called The Frankenstein Code?
It involved twins named Otto and Mary who seemed very close. The premise is that Mary is dying and using the
Well, the show has been renamed Second Chance, and the pilot has been released. (The show premieres in January.)
Well, the trailer gave us a sense that the twins Mary and Otto were very close (we see them holding hands, they started and run a corporation together, and are conducting questionable experiments in an attempt to cure Mary’s terminal illness).
But now that I’ve seen the pilot episode, it’s even better than we could have dreamed.
Otto is a genius but very socially-challenged. (Surprise, surprise.) He developed his own language as a child and taught it only to Mary, and until they were nine, Mary is the only person that he would speak to. She’s basically the way he communicates to the world.
Now that she’s dying he’s desperate to save her. She’s willing to submit to her illness and die, except that she knows that Otto needs her and won’t be OK on his own.
The conversation included in the caps above was obviously pretty suggestive. There’s also another scene where Otto is reviewing footage and sees Mary staring at the main character, Jimmy, and he asks his computer what she’s emoting because he’s never seen it before. He’s fascinated/confused.
As for Jimmy, he was an old man who gets treated in Mary and Otto’s experiment. (Because of some rare genetic situation he’s an ideal candidate.) It’s not totally clear, but I think he just gets de-aged. It’s still his same body. So anyway, he has a family. A son, granddaughter, and a daughter. And they all think he’s dead. But he has to interact with all of them due to plot circumstances. I don’t know why they don’t recognize him (I’m pretty sure I would recognize a 30 year old version of my father walking around), but they don’t. So those interactions were pretty interesting. But now the son and daughter think he’s a long-lost brother, which is pretty amusing.
Anyway, I totally rec the show. It wasn’t bad and with all of this, it’s pretty darn good.
I pursued watching it after I received two separate recommendations for it about a month ago when the entire season was released. South of Hell is a southern gothic supernatural horror show about demon possession and a battle for souls. The lead character, Maria Abascal, is a demon hunter/exorcist. She is possessed by a demon named Abigail who was put inside her by her cult-leader/devil-worshipping father, Enos. Abigail feeds on souls but Maria, though not always in control, has her eating demons so that they can help people and get by. Maria is the main character, but David, her brother, is also a main character and he’s actually the narrator for the series.
They work together on the exorcism jobs, and David knows about Abigail and is there to help Maria with her. They’re on the run from their father who is rising up with dastardly plans.
David and Maria do not have a canonically incestuous relationship, but both of them accidentally end up in incestuous relationships with other relatives (so they have that in common as well as everything else!, and hey, maybe that says something about their relationship with each other?). But even though they’re not canon, they were definitely my favorite ship of the series. They both have love interests, more than one each in fact, which means right from the start it’s not an ideal non-canon ship. And despite both being main characters, they spend a lot of time apart. But they are close, and rely on each other. They both have a lot of issues and they need each other. They take care of each other.
Spoilers…
In a way they reminded me a lot of partners, like Mulder and Scully on The X-Files or something like that. Their first phone call is always to each other, they do a lot independently but start freaking out very quickly if they don’t hear from the other or don’t know where they are. Even though they both have their love interests, they choose to turn to each other when they’re theorizing or in trouble. (As you an imagine, the trauma they went through regarding their father and the early death of their mother bonded them closely.) You see how close they are reflected in a lot of ways: Maria wants to run but she won’t go without David; she tells Abigail that if Abigail hurts David then she’ll kill herself (which could kill Abigail too, though that part of the mythology seemed a little inconsistent); Abigail tells another demon that that is possessing David not to hurt David – “I don’t need Maria killing herself if David gets hurt”, which means Abigail, who knows Maria intimately, thinks that Maria would kill herself if something were to happen to David, even if it wasn’t Abigail’s fault; and there are also any number of scenes where they are very quick to hug each other, or hug each other about a billion times.
There were a few slightly suggestive things too. In the first episode, Abigail takes over Maria’s body in order to fight a demon. After Abigail defeats demons, she’s supposed to return control back to Maria, but in this scene she doesn’t, so David goes in to interfere. Abigail pushes David down to the ground and starts groping him. She’s talking about killing him but what she’s doing with her hands is very sexual. In episode 2, a girl David hooked up with thinks that Maria is David’s wife/girlfriend, and in episode 3, a guy that Abigail hooks up with while in control of Maria’s body assumes that David is her boyfriend/husband. Which was hilarious to me, it happening both ways. David also shows a lot of antagonism towards the guys circling around Maria, particularly Revered Bledsoe, who has been trying to get Maria’s help to take care of a demon in his daughter Grace.In 1.06, Maria had been about to have sex with her neighbor/love interest Dusty, when she had accidentally said the name of her boyfriend who was killed by Abigail, which killed the mood. David arrives just after that, and Maria puts on a robe over her underwear to go to speak to him, but barely has the robe on when she first comes out.
And in 1.07, when David is possessed by a demon and Abigail is speaking to that demon, their body language conversation is just the tiniest bit flirty. What’s really hilarious is that when Maria wakes up after that, she and David are semi-spooning on the couch. The two demons cuddled up together? IT’S SO WEIRD.
The demons aren’t really like that, so I guess Abigail and the other demon just secretly ship David/Maria. As they’re waking up, David narrates: “They say siblings are the friends God gave you.” I actually am not sure if I’ve heard that before or not but I like it. He also adds: “They are the only ones who can truly see the person you are inside.” Which is a very powerful statement. David is secretly still possessed when he says that , but it’s sort of confusing because the demon is guiding is behavior but it’s still sort of him? It’s not like it is with Abigail.
As for the other incest. Well, first there are a mother and son who worshipped the devil and they both volunteered to be possessed by demons. When the son dies, the woman strokes him and calls him her beautiful boy or something like that, then she straddles the body and says, “There’s always a place for you inside of me,” and sucks the demon out of the son’s body. Like with David’s demon there’s a blurring here between the hosts and the demons.
So I mentioned Dusty, Maria’s main love interest. He is their neighbor and aggressively pursues Maria by being a ridiculous nice guy who is always there at the right time to say or do the right thing. Maria is very reluctant to get into a romantic relationship with him because of Abigail, not only this huge secret but the fact that Abigail had killed the only other man she had ever loved that way. Maria begins to give in, and goes on a date with Dusty, and then almost has sex with him like I mentioned. They kiss a few times. And she tells him that she’s only ever felt that way once before (with the guy who Abigail killed). Well, it turns out that Dusty is actually Enos, Maria and David’s father??? I guess the real Dusty gave up his body to be possessed, and so Enos possesses him but Enos is also sometimes in his own body. This was never adequately explained. Even though it’s such an out-there twist, I do feel like it was planned from the beginning because Dusty never felt quite right. He was too perfect but he lacked something interesting to make him a legitimate love interest, so I kept waiting to find out what his deal was, and his deal was that he was her father.
This show did something that I’m not sure any other show has ever done before. They aired their regular season of 7 episodes, and then made an 8th episode which was only available to download online (through iTunes, I think?). The 8th episode, you find out at the very end of the episode, is only a dream. It’s a satisfying conclusion to the season and resolves much of what happened and then turns out to just be a dream. So it’s hard to know what to think about a lot of what happened in the episode. But anyway, in the dream she is speaking to Enos and he tauntingly says (I’m paraphrasing), “They say girls all marry their fathers.”
Obviously that’s a majorly messed-up situation, and while the fact that it’s messed-up wouldn’t necessarily stop me from shipping something, I can say in this case that I don’t ship it. Maybe if Enos had been a different kind of character, it might have been more interesting, but as written/presented it’s just horror.
But there was one incestuous relationship in the show that was presented more romantically. I mentioned Reverend Bledsoe and his daughter, Grace. Well, David is left in charge of Grace after he and Maria save her from her demon. And he and Grace have romantic feelings towards each other. They knew each other in the cult and so their shared memories form a basis for them to begin a new friendship. David turns away from the girl he had currently been seeing in order to be with Grace (which was a risky proposition, because this other girl knew a big secret about him). David and Grace have sex, and David tells the other girl that he’s in love with Grace. Bledsoe, Grace’s father, forbids the relationship, but of course the kids don’t listen. In episode 1.06, Maria, Grace, and David find out that they share a mother. David and Maria’s mother (who was an angel who became human to be with Enos) left Enos for Bledsoe and had Grace before killing herself (which she hoped would take the target off everyone’s backs).
The timeline is a little unclear here. Grace was raised in the cult, but somehow their mother had a baby and no one noticed? If she ran from the cult, why would Grace end up back there? Maria is the younger of her and David, and she remembers her mother and what she looked like, which means David definitely did, and he knows a little more about the circumstances of their mother’s death than Maria does, and yet no one knew about the baby. But not matter.
As you can imagine, this is shocking news for David and Grace. They’re given a little while to be confused and frowny, but then the action picks up and David gets possessed. Possessed!David has a conversation with Grace in which he says, “I still love you…………….just in a different way,”, and it seems like Grace is maybe just a tiny bit disappointed? But there weren’t any angsty romantic scenes, just everyone being bummed out. And since David was possessed, it’s hard to know how he really feels.
Bledsoe knew the whole time that David and Grace were related. He told them not to be together but he was rather permissive about it in my opinion. If he really wanted to stop them then he could have told them the truth, and not had them spend all that time together.
The three siblings are supposed to form a kind of trinity – angel (Grace), demon (Maria, though really it’s Abigail), and human (David), which can defeat Enos.
For a while I thought Bledsoe was Maria’s main love interest. I still think that there was a charge to their scenes and that before all the big reveals their relationship seemed to be on a sort of typical romantic path, but nothing really happened between them. However, there was a demon going around who could make herself look like anyone, and she kept taking Maria’s form, and while she was doing that the demon put the moves on Bledsoe and they started making out and stuff. Then Bledoe started saying, “We can’t, it’s wrong,” or something like that, but he couldn’t stop the demon at that point. But the other showed up at that point. So that was stepcest of a sort.
And then there’s Bledsoe/Grace. His entire motivation the entire series revolves around Grace and making sure she’s safe. In the dream sequence, he trades his soul to have 30 minutes alive again (oh yeah, Enos kills him, I should have started with that) in order to save Grace.
The show has a lot of intriguing ideas and a good premise but the execution was…so/so. It was obviously made on a lower budget. There were scenes where you couldn’t tell that, and scenes where it couldn’t have been more obvious. I think the way they chose to show a lot of things ended up making it look cheap. (Supernatural has always been the best at avoiding looking cheap by showing very little.) The sound editing is particularly bad – there was always something about the voices that didn’t sound right. The show never really took advantage of the most interesting ideas it presented. I don’t think it was as bad as some people are saying, but it wasn’t great.
I can’t find anything about a season 2. I’m guessing there won’t be one, but you never know.
During Christmastime I love watching Christmas movies. I watched one particularly not-great one called Angels in the Snow, about a family stuck in a remote cabin during a blizzard. There are a teenaged brother and sister in the family (Alex and Jennifer), and of course they bicker and aren’t very nice to each other and don’t support each others’ interests. Well, their family is in trouble – the parents are on the verge of divorce, the children aren’t happy. So, it being a Christmas movie and all, some help comes there way in the form of the Tucker family, who crashed out in the snow and take shelter with them over Christmas. The Tuckers are the perfect family. And the teenaged brother and sister, Robbie and Lucie, get along perfectly and support each other and are always kind and respectful to each other. Alex immediately likes Lucie, and Jennifer immediately likes Robbie.
Well, all of this description was to get to one hilarious part. Alex and Jennifer are standing next to each other, and Robbie and Lucie are a little ways off. Robbie and Lucie are laughing with each other and getting along. Jennifer turns to Alex and says, “They’re brother and sister and they actually like each other,” in a sort of skeptical almost contemptuous way.
And Alex says, “I’D LIKE YOU MORE IF YOU LOOKED LIKE THAT.”
Which is so hilarious. Because he’s saying two incestuous things at the same time. He’s saying that if Jennifer was prettier he would like her more, and he’s saying that maybe the reason Robbie gets along so well with Lucie is because she’s pretty. (And this is followed by a Lucie and Robbie hug for no reason other than that they like each other so much.)
Spoilers for the ending of the movie. Well, it turns out that the Tuckers are all dead. But it’s a nice movie so they are angels and not ghosts. So they basically just came to show our main family how to be a family again, and then they’re off to heaven. Which means Robbie/Jennifer and Lucie/Alex is not endgame. And really nothing actually happened between either couple except for a few smiles. So Robbie and Lucie were just there to bring Alex and Jennifer closer together.
Although I haven’t read anything from the Expanded Universe, I have heard a little about Jacen and Jaina. Based on what little I know, I agree that the character of Kylo Ren was probably inspired by Jacen, and the relationship between him and Rey reflects/will reflect Jacen and Jaina’s relationship. There are just too many parallels, and as you said, the writers working on the trilogy are most likely familiar with the Expanded Universe. But maybe this was always going to be the story told about the third generation, because I can’t think of anything more dramatic or fitting. So maybe part of it was coincidence.
I know some people like the idea, but personally I don’t want Rey and Kylo Ren fighting to the death. My hope is that he’ll come back to the light – long before his death if we’re lucky. And that’s my expectation as well, because 1) when we meet Ren he’s already dark, but still feels “the pull of the light” – he’s ripe for overcoming the dark side and that’s the most dramatically satisfying conclusion, 2) this is Leia and Han’s son! He’s not going to turn evil and die evil too. The different with Jacen is that there was another brother, so Jacen was more expendable. Perhaps I’m overestimating this idea, but I really do think the writers of the new trilogy feel like they owe the fans of the original trilogy some shimmer of a happy ending for the main heroes. Leia’s only child going darkside and killing Han (after killing a bunch of other people), and then playing a part in a resurrection of the Empire, the taking down of which was her life’s work? That COULD LITERALLY NOT GET ANY WORSE.
I do think there’s a chance that if Snoke is Darth Plageuis, who could “influence midi-chlorians to create life” and “keep the ones he cared about from dying”, maybe Ren will bring Han back from the dead, but maybe has to go full dark to do it or I don’t even know what. Anyway, I’m definitely allowing for something like that which is both a “stays dark” and “is redeemed” at the same time.
The most interesting question to me is whether Rey and Kylo (I can’t decide whether to call him Kylo or Ren so I’m just going to alternate, lol) will turn out to be twins. I think not, but the Jaina/Jacen parallels are interesting. While it doesn’t look very likely right now, in this universe anything is possible. Another set of surprise twins would be a nice echo of the original trilogy (and the tendency to have twins is passed hereditarily, so it’s not like it’s crazy). Cousins doesn’t seem like a tight enough relationship for the best kind of drama – I mean just think about how much more intense it would be if Rey and Kylo Ren were twins! And yeah, Adam Driver is 10 years older than Daisy Ridley, but he doesn’t look it. Wouldn’t be the first time an actor played a character 14 years younger than they actually are (Rey is canonically 19 according to the novelization).
When I think about scenes like Ren carrying Rey to the spaceship, or Rey staring at Ren after he took off his helmet, I can’t help but think that these instinctual reactions to each other make more sense if they’re siblings. The cousins thing really only pays off when I think of Luke’s child vs. Leia’s child, or the grandchildren of Anakin facing off against each other.
It’s just really weird thinking that in the books Bart and
Cindy accept each other as siblings while in the movies they’re husband and
wife at the end. I was somewhat disappointed that we didn’t truly see the
reconciliation between them in the book when that relationship was so central
and important
I think we saw Bart and Cindy accept each other as siblings
in the movie too. Bart calls Cindy his “sister” during that scene in the
kitchen when he attempts to apologize for beating up her “boy toy”. While he’s
not being entirely honest in that scene – he says he beat the boyfriend up to
protect Cindy, obviously he was more motivated by jealousy and antagonism
towards her showing any sexuality, even though that’s not something he has
faced and it’s probably not something he realizes – I still think “sister” just
sort of slips out casually. It’s obviously a huge moment for Cindy to be
acknowledged by him as his sister in an intimate conversation like that, and
from the expression on her face she considers it a significant moment. It’s
followed by her hitting on him, which is why this is my favorite movie ever.
Also, when she implies that he was jealous, he basically says, “there’s too
much incest in this house already”, equivocating a sexual relationship between
him and Cindy to what is between Chris and Cathy.
Also, I feel like when Cindy runs into Bart’s arms when she
comes back after Chris has died, it’s sisterly. She’s not running into the arms
of the lover who is always there for her – Bart has never been that – she’s
running into the arms of her brother, someone who is experiencing the same loss
that she is – the loss of a father. And then they start making out, which is
why this is my favorite movie ever.
That being said, I agree. I always agree with any criticism
you make of the books, and particularly with this one. Bart and Cindy’s
relationship was central to Seeds of Yesterday (and extremely ambiguous), and
yet they reconcile off the page, so far from Cathy’s ken that she had no idea
it even happened until she saw them on TV getting along. Honestly, I found it
very strange. And my favorite explanation, my personal headcanon, is that their
reconciliation was at least somewhat romantic in nature and Andrews wanted to avoid
stating that explicitly. (Perhaps because she didn’t want to share what Cathy’s
thoughts on that would be, though most likely because she was trying to limit
the already plentiful amount of incest in the series). My other thought, which is
similar (and I believe we’ve speculated about it before, based on at least a
tiny amount of evidence), is that there was plans for a book after this one
which would focus on Bart and Cindy’s romantic relationship and their minor
reconciliation at the end of SOY was just so that Cathy could die in peace.
And of course there are the obvious incest vibe Andrews set
between them but never truly went there. I actually like that the writers toned
down the redundant hatred going on between them in the book(one if the many
thing that make the movies superior than the books).Why do you think the
writers decided to have them end up together instead if following book canon.
I agree 100% that the cycles of hatred and lashing out
between Cindy and Bart in the book were redundant. The same things seemed to
happen over and over again without anything changing. The movie established the
same dynamic but in a much more sensible and palatable way. Of course partly
this was because Bart/Cindy was not only canon but endgame (literally married
endgame *squeeeeee*). But also it was because in the book it was just too much.
I call Bart/Cindy “ambiguous” in the book, but without the
movie to compare it to, I would probably call it canon, just not canon enough
to be satisfying. I think it’s just so weird that Andrews didn’t go there with
them. She already had Corrine/Chris Sr., and Cathy/Chris. She already had every
single one of Cathy’s f—ked up relationships in Petals on the Wind. Where did this
cowardice come from? Because you can’t tell me Andrews didn’t ship it. She
shipped the sh!t out of it. So that’s why I maintain my headcanon that she had
plans for another book where they happened in a big way, or she left us just
enough to assume that they got together eventually, maybe after they got their
acting and preaching ya-yas out. Obviously the movie peeps agreed, thank the
Force.
I think the movie peeps decided to have Bart and Cindy end
up together in the most unambiguous way possible because 1) they are at the
very least semi-intelligent beings, and could see for themselves that
Bart/Cindy was just crying out be legitimized, 2) the story makes more sense if
Bart and Cindy end up together, 3) they assumed that was Andrews’ intention,
like I do, 4) they thought back end of the series needed a new romance to keep
it poppin’, 5) #1 again.
Anon:
Something I find interesting about “If There Be
Thorns” was how when Cathy asked Bart why he hated Cindy so much and how
he should love her because she’s his sister(after he tries to drown her) Bart
yells out that no he shouldn’t and how brothers shouldn’t love their sisters.
And then he turns to Chris and is like, “Isn’t that right, Chris?” So
I think that’s part of why he was so mean to her. It’s pretty interesting
because Cindy was always attached to Bart as a kid.
I actually don’t think I’ve ever thought of it that way,
Anon! That’s such a great observation/interpretation I’ve always had this idea
in my head of Bart pushing Cindy away because he’s drawn towards her. But that’s
a much more conscious idea (in terms of what’s going on in Bart’s head) and I
think a stronger explanation. I guess I always just took that line as Bart
taking any opportunity he could get to roast Chris, something he just said
because it was clever/stinging in the moment, but if I think of it as a concept
that Bart has internalized, something he truly believes – don’t love your
sister, loving your sister is incest, loving your sister is dirty – then that’s
absolutely fascinating. He refuses to love Cindy as a sister, right from the
start, for fear of committing incest, or at least of having a love that’s
wrong.
And it can be seen from the other side too – any romantic
inclinations he feels towards her means he must push away any identifying of
her as a sister. I can see this constant conflict within him.
I definitely pretty clearly see that going on in Seeds of
Yesterday – his fear of becoming Chris/Cathy, the loathing of incest that has
been instilled in him – all of that causing him to react violently to the feelings
he has for Cindy. And If There Be Thorns establishes that complicated dynamic
between Bart and Cindy (even more so in the book, with Bart identifying Cindy
as a sinful woman at the age of 2….never change VCA). But if we consider that
line he says to Chris as being important – perhaps even supremely important –
it just ties everything together so well.
I had really always seen that line as being about
Chris/Cathy and Bart/Chris, but taking it also at face value – “I shouldn’t
love my sister Cindy” – then it opens up a lot, particularly if that was his
motivation for attacking Cindy.
I always felt that the reason it was so much easier for
Cindy to accept and fully embrace her romantic feelings for Bart was because
she knew Cathy and Chris were siblings but that didn’t matter to her because
they were her parents and she loved them. Plus, they brought her into their
home and took her in when she had no one else. I also feel like in the movies
her asking them questions and saying there was so much she didn’t know was her
trying to get them to tell her themselves.
That’s a really interesting theory. I’ve spent some time
wondering about when Cindy figured it out. My impression was that Cindy didn’t
know in that scene when she says to Cathy and Chris that there’s so much about
them that she didn’t know, but it could go either way. I do really like the
idea that she was trying to encourage them to come clean with her about that
secret, particularly the gentle way she goes about it. There’s that scene in
the kitchen that I mentioned above when he implies there’s already incest in
the house and Cindy doesn’t appear to understand what he’s referring to, but
again, that’s not conclusive evidence. With Bart dropping hints left and right,
I wouldn’t be surprised if Cindy had figured it out a long time ago.
In any case, I agree completely that Cindy is able to
approach her romantic/sexual feelings for Bart in a much healthier and simpler
way than Bart is able to approach his own feelings, not just because Bart
suffered from mental illness and was manipulated by John Amos/the crazy
ramblings of Malcolm, but also because Cindy viewed Chris and Cathy’s
relationship in an entirely different way.
I’ve always thought it was really important that Cindy
belonged to both Chris and Cathy in a way that Bart and Jory never did. They
were both her parents, and she wasn’t just raised in a household where this was
going, but this was the relationship between her parents. So I think she would
have a much more nuanced view towards their relationship and towards incest.
And if she had known it was an incestuous relationship for a long time, she would
have had plenty of time to get used to it in a way that Bart never could have
because of his messed-up prejudices. And, as you pointed out, even though she
probably doesn’t remember, she was a child without a home and they took her in
(at great risk to themselves). Bart can’t believe their kindness and their
love, but Cindy knows it to be true.
I’ve also always figured that Cindy grew up realizing she
felt an attraction towards Bart. That didn’t mean she liked him – it’s obvious
at the beginning of SOY that Cindy has given up on having a brother/sister
relationship with Bart and that he’ll never be warm towards her so she has
decided to defiantly give back what she gets. But at the beginning of SOY when
she seems him on the tennis court and says he looks hot, and that he used to
look like “an ugly little cretin”, I don’t believe her. She always wanted to
take a bit out of him. And growing up having some realization of that probably
eliminated most of her feelings of repulsion towards the idea of incest with
him. When Bart says, “We were meant for each other,” she says, “I’ve always
known that.” How long is always? I’ve assumed it pre-dates the beginning of the
movie for sure.
Thanks to you both for the great thoughts and discussion. I’m
sorry I took so long to respond, honestly it was sort of a “saving the best for
last” situation because there’s nothing I love more than talking about Bart and
Cindy.
shipcestuous3 