Beyond Complicated

A series of photographs, forgotten moments suspended and brought back to life in the wake of Carla’s death.

Iris: ‘I just wanna say, ah, thank you to our new friends for having the guts to come all this way, make themselves a new life…’

Jean: *looks at Hailey and smiles*

Also - the show finishes on Jean and Hailey sharing a lingering moment.

***

I included the hug between Millie and Jean as well, and a couple of glances, because this show is just so delightfully multi-shippable. But I really do think that they’re edging down the path of a Jean x Hailey relationship, if (and please God it is) the show is renewed. Those shared glances, particularly choosing to finish on one, are the loudest subtext I’ve seen in a while.

And what about Jean’s sexuality? We haven’t officially had it confirmed, but… When Hailey tells Jean she loves her, Jean’s first instinct is to reach out and touch her - how many straight women do that, in that context? (It’s not like Hayley’s “just” coming out to Jean - and even that for many lesbian women doesn’t result in being touched by the receiver of the knowledge, she is actually telling Jean that she loves her. That’s a pretty huge thing for any straight woman to respond to as calmly and as acceptingly as Jean does.) So when we add this to Jean’s other comments throughout TBC:SF, I really cant help but think that she is also lesbian.

Millie’s tenderness with Jean <3 

Serena hasn’t met her before, but when she hears the name Alex Dawson in Albie’s one night, she knows exactly who she is. Alex knows all about Serena, too - and she has just been to see Bernie in Nairobi.

A pre-emptive fix-it for whatever Alex Dawson’s reappearance might bring - apply as required!

Millie falls in love and breaks away from her background.

headcanons: every one of your fics is full of your headcanons for the characters, no matter how seemingly improbable said headcanons are. your body of work is a big fuck you to the canon, and the readers are here for it.

pain is weakness leaving the body: you pick your favourite characters based on potential for pain, and how pretty they look while you’re torturing them. while you are capable of happy endings and even the occasional fluff, your readers must wade through an ocean of pain first.

more in character than canon: you have nailed down each character to their essentials, and it shows. no matter what else is going on in the fic, you will not tolerate OOC nonsense. you hate canon because it doesn’t know shit about the characters. fix it fics and AUs abound with you.

fluffy clouds of sugar: you write fluff. you have heard vaguely of pain but do not do business with it. no matter the canon, your fic is as sweet and soft as marshmallow. your readers teeth have long since rotted out. you are working steadily at their gums. some of them are considering making you pay for their insulin.

Aww, thank you Nonny-Mouse! ☺️ I may or may not be working on a Shetland (crossover) fic with @incandescent-justice (which is very exciting!), and I have another Bletchley fic and another Shetland I’m in the early stages of too. They’ll all be a while, though…

As for my favourite fics ever - what an impossible question! So I’m just going to pick five that I love, in no particular order, and for a couple of different ships/fandoms:

alone and adrift on a tide by @ylizam​ (Shetland post-S3, Rhona-centric)

she stops my bones from wondering just who I am by @slightlyintimidating (Holby, Berena but with Jason at its heart)

all i know is we said hello and your eyes looked like coming home by @missparker (Holby, Berena - standalone stories, chapter nine has always been one of my favourites)

her heart drinks wine by @ktlsyrtis and @belligerently (although honestly I could have chosen any of their collabs!) (Holby, Berena)

the world has no place in our bed by @daystarsearcher (Doctor Who, Kate/Osgood)

And a special mention for @incandescent-justice‘s new fic while the borders crumble, because Rhona is my biggest current problem.

Rhona licking her lips.

Harry was wrong to change the timeline.  It was understandable and in character that he would do it, and we were rooting for him, but it wasn’t right. 

I think, when people complain about Janeway in “Endgame,” what they’re really talking about is motivation.  There’s a saying that 99% of a story is motivation: if the audience doesn’t understand the characters’ motivation, the story will never work.

In “Timeless,” Harry’s motivation was clear.  He screwed up, big-time, and he just couldn’t live with himself.  He knew what he was doing was wrong, but he didn’t care. Like Annorax, he was obsessed, and would do anything to erase his mistake.  

This fits with the Harry we know.  Harry was a bright, high-achieving young man who sometimes struggled under the weight of his parents’ high expectations.  He had never really failed before, and it’s not surprising that he didn’t deal with it well, given how spectacular that failure was.  And while someone else might cope by trying to forget, turning to religion, or hitting the bottle, Harry decides he must fix his mistake, and once set on that path, there is no dissuading him.  We’ve seen this relentless, implacable side of Harry before, notably in “Resolutions” and “The Killing Game.”

The problem with Admiral Janeway is that her motivation just didn’t seem sufficient. It would take a lot more to drive Janeway to the edge.  She’s experienced in command, much more mature than Harry, and has endured many more losses.  She knows how to deal with failure and disappointment.  

And her motivation was much less than Harry’s.  Admiral Janeway did not lose the entire crew, as Harry did; she got most of them home.  And the ones we saw seemed to be living happy, fulfilled lives.  Tom and B’Elanna are still married, have good careers, and a daughter who is doing well in Starfleet.  Naomi Wildman has a bright, healthy little girl.  The Doctor has a new wife.  Harry has his dream job, captain of a starship.  Why would Janeway want to risk all that, when the alternative could be much worse?

Harry, on the other hand, had nothing to lose.  He’d already lost everything that mattered to him, and you got the feeling that if he died trying to fix his mistake, it would have been a relief.  

This, IMO, is why Janeway gets so much “hate” and Harry doesn’t.  Harry is given enough motivation that his actions made sense.  Unlike Janeway.

I mean, why did Janeway choose that time, when she’d already lost a third of her crew over the years?  She would lose only 22 more people over the next 16 years.  I bet Kirk, Picard, and most other starship captains lose a lot more than 1-2 redshirts a year. 

Grief, it’s all grief. It’s the same grief, in fact—we just are better, in fictional settings, at rationalizing extraordinary losses as requiring extraordinary solutions … particularly within the same episode. And little losses, over time, when they can’t fit in one episode, when they’re attrition, we accept as written off because the solution doesn’t come with the close of the plot.

But that’s not how neurotypical humans actually handle grief, on the whole.

Or rather: it is, because we don’t have time machines. We only have memories. We only have moving forward, or becoming unable to move forward. We only have degrees of pain becoming bearable over time, of ourselves becoming the people that pain has shaped.

What if you were responsible for all of it? What if, in every moment of the joy you had left, you couldn’t bear the fact that people you cared about weren’t there anymore, not because they had died over the years, but because they died on your watch? Because you decided to take a chance, or not to take a chance, and either way it still didn’t keep them safe? Because even the length of that “over the years” was your fault?

What if you could no longer bear the thought of “acceptable losses”?

And what if, in the depths of not being able to deal with that, you had a solution available to you?

We’ve seen this kind of grief in CPT Archer, after the Xindi mission. Hell, we’ve seen it as a mainstay of the Movie!Kirk character from ST2 forward. And ADM Janeway is hardly in the worst timeline, but the answer in “Endgame” is Chakotay, because of what is then happening to Tuvok. The answer is: she is not facing that loss rationally, any more than any of us actually do in life. It eats at her. She is grieving, and it won’t stop.

And, like Movie!Kirk, she is just crazy enough and just powerful enough to steal a starship and do it anyways. It doesn’t matter that the plot of that loss was already resolved. It doesn’t matter that it’s illegal. It doesn’t matter that she could go on with her career, as everyone else has gone on with theirs—as she has in fact done for years at that point.

But ADM Janeway is not the episode; she’s the problem to be solved in it. And because it’s set up that way, we go back to the point in time she is obsessed with, to the winner-take-all gamble she wisely chose not to make at the time, which set up her career as an expert in fighting the Borg.

The episode works because of her grief—and because CPT Janeway doesn’t let herself be replaced by that grieving future version. The episode works because Janeway does not “throw away her scruples,” because “the Janeway we know” and the Janeway that made and regretted those future choices finally work together in a way that morally overcomes the obstacle. And that’s Trek.

Ultimately we don’t value ADM Janeway’s choice because “Endgame” is set up to frame it as a problem to be solved, and the question is not whether she was right, but how we get from that officially bad decision to a good outcome. We were told Janeway was wrong, just like we were told that Annorax was wrong, and in the same way, and we had a conflict between Janeways just like we had a conflict between Chakotay and Tom Paris as to how the resulting situation could be salvaged.