Notes: Return to Xanadu, Ch 16

[stefanie_bean]

I'm a big fan of the domestic in fiction, of using small, mundane domestic details to bring out larger themes. Of course instead of two chapters, I could have simply written one sentence, "The crew drove to the Barracks in the VW bus," but part of the fun for me in writing RTX is showing how Hugo adjusts to his new status, his new on-Island life, and particularly his new abilities.


We already saw the Island changing on a small level in Chapter 11, when Hugo visited Sun's garden and saw it transformed into riotous, overgrown vegetation. This was a harbinger of what was to come in Chapter 12, with the party in the dimension which lies even beyond the Source, the place of the supernatural beings who come and go in between their realm, the Island, and even our world.

Hugo's gift of long life to Vincent, and of freedom from rot to the note posted at the Beach Camp both signify something very big about the right, ordered relationship between the Island and the Protector. The Protector's role is to preserve both physical life and the natural order.

We see this from in-show, when Jack and Kate find "Adam and Eve's" bodies in the caves (later revealed to be Mother and the Man in Black.) Jack quite understandably places the bodies as only fifty, seventy years old, because of the degree of preservation of the corpses and their clothes.

As I see it, the Protector is also there to provide balance. This is intimately tied up with fertility (symbolized by Sun's garden both in-show and in my fanfic.) But not fertility run rampant, though. The Island isn't a totally "natural" system. The boar haven't taken over the Island, as they unfortunately would in a genuine Pacific island situation. People haven't overpopulated the Island's small ecosystem (even before the pregnancy troubles started.) So something is keeping the Island balanced, or at least is supposed to, when everything works out properly.

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I've read some post-finale fics where Hugo, Ben, Rose, and Bernard are the only ones left on-Island. That didn't appeal to me; Hugo always seemed happiest in-show when planted in the midst of a busy social group. I first conceived the notion of a cadre of beach campers absconding into the bush in the story Girl Scout Camp. Add to that some of the "red shirts" who in canon got shot by the freighter mercs in early Season 4, over whom I waved the magic wand of Island healing, as well as "Rash guy" from the beach camp. Throw in Cindy, the kids, and a non-speaking Temple woman who's shown in-show with two more kids. Before you know it, Hugo has a mini-society all ready for him to get busy with.

Sure, it required playing fast and loose with some very minor characters, which suited me fine.

Also, the animals (Mikhail's cattle; Kate's horse, as well as Widmore's horse; the rabbits and chickens) needed an invitation to the party too. There were all kinds of production reasons which limited animals in-show, but fortunately fiction provides wider latitude. I first pointed to Claire's interest in raising chickens at the Barracks in "Acceptable Risk," the last chapter of Xanadu (my view of Hugo and Claire's relationship-building during their short stay at the Barracks in early Season 4.)

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On the topic of the "natural order," I wanted to make a few remarks about the pregnancy problems. It's generally thought that they started with the Incident, which is fine. However, as I mentioned, even before the Incident, the Island didn't get overrun. There are other forces involved, which I personified in the Hawai'ian crone-goddess of fertility, Haumea.

The truce between "the Hostiles" (represented by Richard Alpert) and the Dharma Initiative (by Horace Goodspeed) specified that no drilling over 10 meters was to take place anywhere. Of course, Dharma violated it with the Swan Station project, leading to the disaster of the Incident.

I played with the idea that the Incident literally angered her so much that she rained disaster on all women of the Island from that point on. Pele and her consort Kamapua'a might be modern, but Haumea is a chthonic force of nature who brings death as well as life: appropriate for a goddess of fertility, because outside of our high-tech medicine, pregnancy and childbirth are still dangerous and claim many lives.

So while the Incident and its sequelae could be explained by physics, in the RTX universe it's both: a disaster of physics, as well as the retaliation of an angry, unreformed, old-style goddess who eventually relents and stops killing women in pregnancy.

It just seemed a terrible mess to leave Hugo with. Interestingly, the canon itself points to an end to the pregnancy problems. This fan posted a fascinating theory which suggested that just as the Incident started the pregnancy problems, the implosion of the Swan Hatch at the end of Season 2 very likely ended them. Thus pregnancies started *after* the Hatch implosion were probably going to be OK. (This meant, however, that since Sun's pregnancy started earlier, Ji Yeon's placenta was probably compromised, and thus Sun did need to get off-Island.)

So far in RTX it's not been clearly stated when the pregnancy problems stopped, but it's obvious that a child conceived in December 2004 (thus born in August 2005) was fine. So it's reasonable to assume that the Hatch implosion would have satisfied Haumea (as well as ending the actual electromagnetic disturbance which interfered with human placenta formation.)

Comments

[inlaterdays.livejournal.com]

I do love these behind-the-scenes looks at your writing. I'm learning a lot about the show, too, (fan theories, speculation, details) which I didn't pick up on my binge-watch.

[stefanie-bean.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Yeah, these notes were probably more "meta" than earlier ones. The pregnancy issues, though, were a big deal in the show and needed to be dealt with in RTX.