Date: 25 May 2013 20:50 Title: Chapter 5 - Ensign Jennifer Crossman
I haven't seen this particular event to which you are referring, but it's obvious that it affected Jennifer, if only peripherally. Taking the life of another is only one of many morals that crumble during war. Some of the smaller ones might not seem like such a big deal to others (like lying to Degra in order to get much-needed intel, I imagine), but what we are willing to do and the impact that has on our core beliefs affects each person differently. You captured that so well here.
Author's Response:
I wanted Jenny to be a little bit of a differing viewpoint. After all, not everyone is horribly shell-shocked, but that doesn't mean they're unaffected. For her, it's not nightmares or the feeling that someone's mother is gone because of her actions. It is, instead, that her moral compass has been tampered with. What will she do if asked to do something like this again? Her integrity is another casualty of the war.
Thanks for reviewing.
Date: 25 May 2013 20:40 Title: Chapter 4 - Ensign Charlotte Lilienne O'Day
What an awful position to be put in. Not a warrior, or even a soldier, but to be forced to defend one's self and then come to find you've killed someone's mother. But that's true for anyone who dies in battle - they were someone's son/daughter, mother/father, sibling, cousin, etc. No matter the reason a soldier has for snuffing out the life of another, there will always be ripples associated with that death that will affect countless others.
Author's Response:
Yes, and Lili understands this, but it's all too hard to come to grips with, anyway.
Unlike most others, she's essentially drafted for this role. Maryam is brought in with the original crew and Jenny (next chapter) is hired as a result of the events of Where No Gerbil Has Gone Before. Archer and Reed are of course canon. But Lili is hired by Chef Slocum because he likes her cooking (he has gone to her restaurant in San Mateo) and has observed her performed three essential tasks - sous-chef work like chopping, making desserts and sauces and taking responsibility by cleaning up - all while telling him that she's tired of the business aspects of owning a restaurant and wants to quit. For him, she's an ideal helper, and two nonessential people can be offloaded in favor of two more MACOs as the predecessor steward, Preston Jennings, is moved over to Navigation, Maryam moves to Communications and everyone is shoehorned around in favor of making the ship more experienced and military.
But Lili's instructions are minimal (she can barely fly a shuttle if needed in an emergency) and so - for this to happen in her life - it's you and me in that situation.
Thank you for your review.
Date: 25 May 2013 20:34 Title: Chapter 3 - Crewman Maryam Haroun
That was painful to read, jespah. Talk about misplaced guilt! Of course it wasn't her fault that Hawkins and Hayes died, but she was trying to do everything to help her crew with the war effort - from switching to comms to praying for everyone's safety.
Obviously she took this very hard, and personally, but I wonder if she had been able to pray and those folks died anyway, would that have been worse? Would she have felt the failure was not hers, but God's? Same song, different lyrics...
Author's Response:
I think Maryam kind of can't compute what would have happened if she'd prayed and they had still died. But there were other casualties on the NX-01, and she and Azar and Ramih were able to pray, so she's seen that happen as well. I'm not so sure how she rationalizes those in her head. Did they not pray hard enough? Were they not sincere enough? Were others like Jane Taylor and Liz Cutler somehow unworthy of love and prayer and Allah's intervention? I'm not so sure, and I don't think she's so sure, either. Thank you for your review.
Date: 25 May 2013 19:00 Title: Chapter 7 - Conclusion (Filmmaker Carlos Castillo)
Very nice takeaway, and fitting that it's posted on Memorial Day weekend. Nicely done, all of it. *applause*
Author's Response:
Oh, thank you so much! :)
Date: 25 May 2013 08:14 Title: Chapter 6 - Lieutenant Malcolm Reed
You know, you're making me wish I gave Enterprise more than a passing viewing with these pieces.
Author's Response:
I am honored! :)
Date: 25 May 2013 08:09 Title: Chapter 4 - Ensign Charlotte Lilienne O'Day
What a beautiful person, and what a terrible pain to carry.
Author's Response:
Oh, thank you! Lili is one of my most fully-realized characters. She can be happy and philosophical and goofy, too.
Date: 25 May 2013 04:14 Title: Chapter 6 - Lieutenant Malcolm Reed
Reed voices the survivor's paradox: I feel guilty about surviving. Nicely visualised
Author's Response:
It always felt a bit random to me, why it was Hayes saving Hoshi and not Reed, and it's Reed before, with Hawkins. Trade their jobs and Hayes lives, while Reed dies. Thank you for reading!
Date: 25 May 2013 04:11 Title: Chapter 5 - Ensign Jennifer Crossman
What springs to mind, probably misquoted, is, "morals are the first casualty in war"
Author's Response:
Yes; Jenny isn't as traumatized, but it does not mean she's unaffected. And her unspoken concern is - what if I'm asked to do something like this again?
Date: 25 May 2013 04:09 Title: Chapter 4 - Ensign Charlotte Lilienne O'Day
Translating this into male or neutral terms - "This was someone's father/parent" - doesn't have the same connotations as robbing someone of their *mother*. Lifting the visor of your enemy and finding that they are a person is bad enough, that they were a parent is worse but that you have killed someone's mother? ...and yet with women in combat roles now...
Author's Response:
Exactly.
The way I name Xindi Insectoids is, I give them gender-neutral names (e. g. The One Who Fires a Weapon Very Fast) unless they've laid eggs, then the pronoun becomes a she (in canon, they are only one gender), like She Who Almost Didn't Breed in Time, or She Who Listens Well. And for this to be, immediately, known to be someone's mother, it's heartbreaking for Lili (who is not yet a mother) and hopefully it resonates more. Thank you.
Date: 25 May 2013 03:59 Title: Chapter 3 - Crewman Maryam Haroun
We think of the NX-01 as being in fights all the time but this crew probably signed on mainly for the exploration. Their reaction to combat would have run the whole gamut from traumatic sorrow, as here, to hard-nosed business
Author's Response:
They are all over the place, as they should be. They aren't all the same monolithic people, of course.
Date: 25 May 2013 03:54 Title: Chapter 2 - Captain Jonathan Archer
Very "Sixty Minutes" style - you can see Archer starting off by doing this as part of his official duty to cooperate and then translating his own shame at what they did into anger and refusal to go on. Nice realism
Author's Response:
YES! You caught that! Thank you.
Date: 25 May 2013 03:01 Title: Chapter 1 - Introduction
Nice start. make a good audio book
Date: 25 May 2013 02:37 Title: Chapter 6 - Lieutenant Malcolm Reed
That's Reed alright. Got Keating's mannerisms and tone down pat. Respect for his fellow officer, respect for the man who died...Reed in a nutshell.
Author's Response:
Many thanks - definitely aiming for accuracy there. Glad to know I succeeded.
Date: 24 May 2013 23:37 Title: Chapter 6 - Lieutenant Malcolm Reed
Poor Malcolm. It sounds like he's had a really, really damn rough time of it recently. I'm not up on Enterprise canon, but even so, just this snippets are good at giving us a look in.
Author's Response:
I just can't see him as not being affected. He and Hayes finally started to get along, and then this happens. This is, in part, Malcolm being self-sacrificing above and beyond most people, but it's also that he never got a chance to really have a normalized friendship with Jay. And now it's too late.
Date: 24 May 2013 16:59 Title: Chapter 6 - Lieutenant Malcolm Reed
Poor Malcom. He and Hayes were not the best of friends a lot of times but there was a clear level of professional respect and admiration between the two. He still blames himself for the loss and the wound still hasn't scabbed over yet. It's a sensitive topic and one Malcom hopefully finds peace with later on.
Author's Response:
Yes, and it's the coin flip that does it for me (and for him). It absolutely could have gone the other way (hell, I write something like that), and so Malcolm, who in canon is self-sacrificing to a fault, has some trouble reconciling all of that in his head. He thinks his life has been leading up to sacrifice in battle, and Hayes beats him to it. But that isn't Malcolm's destiny at all.
Thank you.
Date: 24 May 2013 16:45 Title: Chapter 6 - Lieutenant Malcolm Reed
I'm not that familiar with this series, as I've noted before, but from what I've seen, you really nailed Malcolm here. His speech, his mannerisms, his attitude, all of it. I could hear his voice loud and clear in this piece. Nicely done.
Author's Response:
Thank you. The way he talks, I call it hesitation speech. So there are occasional repeated words, whether that's for emphasis or nerves or whatever, he seems to do that. I also write Doug Beckett and Jay Hayes with hesitation, but for them, it's because they don't have huge vocabularies at their disposal.
Malcolm and Jay are the two canon characters who I really hear in my head. I'm glad you do, too.
Date: 24 May 2013 02:18 Title: Chapter 5 - Ensign Jennifer Crossman
Good old Degra. Had a liking for him. Better the devil you know and all that.
Author's Response:
Yep; I always liked Degra, too. I felt he was an engineer who had been thrown into the deep end of politics and it didn't suit him.
Date: 24 May 2013 00:06 Title: Chapter 5 - Ensign Jennifer Crossman
Huh. Having not seen most of ENT, I don't remember this incident, but it's interesting to think about having to come up with a thing like this, and how one might feel about it later, especially if no one asked you in the first place how you felt about doing it at all.
Author's Response:
The Strategem episode was weird; it was a complete deception of someone who Archer later could honestly call a friend. I doubt that anyone told Degra that he'd been deceived and kinda buffaloed. If Degra had lived, I wonder if/how that could have been brought up, and what he would have thought of humans.
I wanted Jenny to be a little removed (after all, not everyone gets PTSD, and I think it reduces its punch if it's something that everyone in the story gets). For her, this is more unsettling than anything else. Let's see how we can fool Degra and cheat into him helping us!
Yeah, I'd feel weird about it, too.
Date: 23 May 2013 20:54 Title: Chapter 5 - Ensign Jennifer Crossman
That was pretty sort of fascinating. The guilt, and the whole notion of it in the first place. Complex feelings. A little less traumatic than some of the prior.
Author's Response:
Jenny, I think, lets more things roll off her back. She's maybe a little privileged and is looking ahead to her future more than maybe the others are. She's the same Jenny from Where No Gerbil Has Gone Before. For her, war isn't exactly matter of fact, but it's more that she knows this is her job and this is just how it's going to be, yet she still feels guilty that Degra had to be deceived in order to successfully complete their mission, and that she was ordered to be a part of that.
Date: 23 May 2013 18:58 Title: Chapter 5 - Ensign Jennifer Crossman
Kind of a recap from a crewman's pov.
Date: 23 May 2013 18:57 Title: Chapter 4 - Ensign Charlotte Lilienne O'Day
And even better...you hit home with this one. In war, we are all victims-on both sides.
Author's Response:
Thank you very much.
Date: 23 May 2013 18:55 Title: Chapter 3 - Crewman Maryam Haroun
OK, now this grabbed me.
Date: 23 May 2013 18:54 Title: Chapter 2 - Captain Jonathan Archer
Sounds like...bitterness.
Author's Response:
Partly, and regret. I think Archer, in some ways, wishes things could be like they were before. And, of course, they can't.
Date: 23 May 2013 18:53 Title: Chapter 1 - Introduction
ok, simple, straightforward set up...
Date: 23 May 2013 16:05 Title: Chapter 5 - Ensign Jennifer Crossman
Another thing war makes you question: the need for lies and truth. Often in war truths are half-hidden are flat out ignored in favor of a lie that will get you more immediate results. It's nice to see someone acknowledge this, in a small way. War sucks and it sucks on all levels.
Author's Response:
I always hated that lie that they perpetrated in the Stratagem episode, and I had hoped that someone would feel the same way, that some of the great victory was achieved at the cost of morals and righteousness and, maybe, a bit of their souls. For Archer, it's about torturing the Osaarian. For Jennifer, it's about lying to Degra. For Lili, it's about becoming a killer. For Maryam, it's about not calling on Allah to help them in their darkest hours.
And all of these are lines that are crossed, and innocences that are lost, and none of that is ever coming back.