purereflectionsworld

1) Did we spot any context clues to help us understand what Margo does all day in prison (like, when Aleida or Graci isn’t visiting)? I think we’ve seen newspapers, cassettes, journals, cards (Solitaire?). Wrenn said she thinks Margo watches a lot of Jeopardy. What else? I’m trying to think through what her life is like and, I suppose, what sort of purpose she might be able to eke out here.

2) Where do we think the show is going with Aleida’s life? I think the showrunners’ take below on Aleida (that she was previously 100% focused on Titan and her Earth life, and now genuinely invested in Mars independence) is WILD, tbh. I didn’t see anything in the finale or Coral’s performance to suggest that Aleida cared about anything other than minimizing loss of human life/stopping the bloodshed and the Titan mission. In my head, she eulogizes Kelly, makes sure Walt and the rest of the crew get off Titan safely, supports Alex as best she can, and then heads home. Career wise, she’ll obviously still be focused on the scientific discoveries (whether at Helios or elsewhere, I have no clue) but I don’t buy that she’d need or want to stay up there. Especially under the leadership of President Dale 🤢 and without her fam. Am I completely off base or missing something?

It’s not that I’m not glad Graci now has a relationship with Margo (and the tootsie roll prison visit shot was sweet), but man, their conversational scenes fell flat for me. Maybe if they had developed it over the course of the season — if they’d gotten to have discussions about Margo’s career and regrets and set up a storyline of Graci carrying her legacy forward in some way? Or alternatively, used those discussions to explore Graci’s complicated relationship with Aleida they set up in 5x01? It could have been more meaningful. Graci’s appearance in 5.10 just felt like a very heavy handed way of hammering home the point that Margo is powerless in her current situation, and bereft of anything meaningful in life except Aleida and her family. Which…was there a point to that? Maybe they should have just ended Margo’s story on a more empowering note at the end of S4, and had her offscreen in S5 with Aleida mentioning her fondly or her scientific legacy alluded to here and there.

I’m most shocked that this should have been Aleida’s season, and she didn’t even have an arc! She certainly didn’t have the career/job satisfaction arc I was expecting. Remember when she said she was unhappy in 5.01? Well, she’s still Helios CEO and she seems to have had a pretty fucking miserable time up on Mars and her only friend up there died and the showrunners are never going to convince me she wants to stay up there and support Mars after watching President Dale (barf) commit horrific war crimes…even though they don’t care about character this season, so they’ll probably have her do that anyway. Guess we’ll have to wait for S6 to see. She obviously didn’t have a personal arc. They didn’t explore her relationship with or feelings about being away from Graciana or Victor or Javi, with an ever-lengthening timeline, at all (zero moments with them after those half-assed scenes in 5.03. Zero. No vidmails. No reunion or anticipation of a reunion, if that’s even happening). I’m still sour that they more or less erased Victor and Javi from the show after they each appeared in 4-5 episodes last season — the lack of any real onscreen connection with them flattened Aleida’s character so much. She was also so upset about leaving Margo and no follow up on that either? No story line about her trying to carry Margo’s legacy forward in the ways she can? I could go on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1svBAOUD8U

Thank you for sharing this, Anon! I love her 🥰 And gosh, YES. Aleida’s personal relationships and friendships are my favorite thing to write in fic (including the 11k+ words of my early season 5 WIP). And they probably wouldn’t be if Coral hadn’t given me so much material in between the lines of her performance.