INDEXING: REFLECTIONS episode #1, "Forbidden Doors."

[seanan_mcguire]

The first episode of Indexing: Reflections is available now! This is your talkpost and discussion zone. There will be spoilers in the comments here. As always on talkposts, I have partial comment amnesty, and will not be responding to everything

Comments

[geekhyena]

I really like Ciara - she seems sensible and the right kind of clever. I hope we see more of her!

[jenfullmoon]

Seconded, I do wonder if she'll pop up again or not.

[seanan_mcguire]

She's around!

[ext_3009759]

I blew through this first episode last night! I have to say that when I hit the end I was very sad. I can't wait for the next episode! (TWO WHOLE WEEEKS! At least it's not a month/comic style). I like Ciara and her story just feels ominous to me. She's lovely and seems like her relationship with her Bluebeard is under control. Which in Seanan's world usually means it's all going to heck in a handbasket at some point. I can't wait!

[kyrielle]

Agreed. Though I'm hoping that if she gets into some sort of trouble, the fact that she didn't "open the door" as it were means the team will be able to save her in a bit of poetic justice.

Still, I worry that she may not make it to the end of the tale.

[seanan_mcguire]

The two week gap seemed like the best compromise.

[gement]

I'm pondering rag-tag bunches of misfits.

- Brementown Musicians (type 130) - Group of animals standing on each others' shoulders impersonate a loud and terrifying human to scare off criminals.

- The Six Servants (type 513A) - one can lift anything, one can swallow the sea, etc., and they each cross an individual challenge to meet the objective.

These are just the ones that spring to mind from my own childhood. Anyone have others to add to the list?

My source for codes since I don't own the tome:
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimmtales.html(Edit: Yes, Wikipedia has the list too, but didn't help me match up the names I remembered

[lilisonna]

If I were the Agency, I'd have swapped out the key for one that didn't work. Ciara may be great at not peeking, but why take chances?

Also, I apparently have a thing for subverted Bluebeard stories. Ciara's and Ursula Vernon's short story both make me super-happy.

[deor]

Agree on the X-raying, and wondering if the husband knows he's a potential Bluebeard. And if he's not hiding the bodies of his previous wives in the garage, just what is in there that's so private? Also, in his wife's place, I think I would put the key in my safe deposit box and the key to that buried under a flowerpot, so there's no chance in the world that I would open that door on impulse. Or sleepwalking. Or lose it.

[gement]

"wondering if the husband knows he's a potential Bluebeard"

That's nagging at me as well. I realized the flaw in my X-ray idea is that Ciara does not want her husband arrested, thank you very much, because she is happy in her marriage.

She's going on the assumption that he had to have been married to kill a partner, and maybe she has the Bureau's energy readings to back that up, and maybe the thing in the garage isn't criminal but he's just really shy about it? Which is a lot of maybes, but there are also a lot of things people do in garages that don't cause anyone harm, and she is just crossing her fingers really hard it's one of those. I can appreciate that stance in the absence of any other warning signs.

It doesn't seem like too much of an overprojection to observe that husbands who get physically violent at what seems like trivial things... might not need a first wife to open the garage to cross the line.

Which is all to say, I hope Ciara has a *really good* couples' counselor monitoring for signs of abuse and coaching anger

[bree_ramsey314]

I like Ciara too; I doubt her story is anywhere near as under control as she makes it seem, but then whose is? That's an area where Indexing is very much an analogy of real life; our life is our story, and we may think everything is under control, but life has a tendency to rise up and slap that notion right out of us. In the opening scene it mentions that this is Ciara's 'first day;' clearly this isn't referring to her first day with the ATI Management Bureau, so I'm assuming it means she isn't there just to review Henry's team, but monitor them as well

[jenfullmoon]

Ooooh, all of these are very good points! I'm wondering too.

Something that I was thinking about while reading this: how fairy tale can one choose to be? For example, Henry can't choose her looks, but she can choose to dress like an MIB rather than wear a stereotypical dress. How much flexibility is there? Ciara can dye her hair (and why does Bluebeard's wife have blue hair, anyway? Tried Googling for that and got nothing) but can't resist the pirate shirt. Sloane can sometimes choose to not poison drinks....

[anne_d]

About the blue hair and the pirate shirt - What if Ciara is really the Bluebeard, and her husband is the wife in this version, so to speak?

[bree_ramsey314]

It can't be ... I mean that would be ... devious. :P

Okay, I like devious, but if she's the Bluebeard, why does she have the key, and he's telling her not to look in the garage?

[lysystratae]

I get a giggle when Kindle tells me it should take 30 minutes to read; I spend far too much time jumping to wiki to look up fairytales I'm not familiar with to finish that fast :)

[seanan_mcguire]

Hee!