Notes on Stay with Her: Chapters 8, 9 & 10

[stefanie_bean]

Stay with Her starts to rapidly diverge from canon about this point. The Chapter 8 title, "The Butterfly Effect," refers to "the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state." (link) It refers to the analogy of how something as tiny as the fluttering of a butterfly's wings can theoretically lead to massive perturbations in complex systems (like weather systems, or the plot of LOST.

In other words, small canon divergences in these three chapters will lead to huge changes down the road. As the Wiki page says, "A very small change in initial conditions [can create] a significantly different outcome."

That's where I wanted to go with SWH: to change just a few, seemingly minor elements in the first few days of Season One, in order to reap the rewards down the line.

So far, the major divergences from canon are as follows:

Hugo doesn't move to the caves with Jack; he stays on the beach with Claire, and they get more than a little "shippy."

By the time of "Confidence Man," 1x08, Hugo and Claire are close enough that Charlie isn't able to talk Claire into moving to the caves. Thus the empty-jar peanut-butter scene never happens.

Because Claire doesn't move to the caves, she doesn't have her nightmare of Locke with one black and white eye; and she isn't attacked at night by Ethan while she sleeps. (She's sleeping alongside Hugo, and even Ethan isn't brave or sneaky enough to attack Claire while she's on the beach.)

Also, Claire's presence on the beach results in another canon divergence with major ramifications. Because Claire vouches for Sawyer, Jack and Sayid believe him when he freely tells Claire that he doesn't have Shannon's inhalers. Thus Sayid doesn't torture Sawyer. (This also means he and Kate don't kiss, which makes the onset of a Jack/Kate relationship smoother and less troubled.)

I'll be honest; I hated that torture scene, and the kiss between Kate and Sawyer at that point just seemed like more gratuitous torture-softcore. I also hated what torturing Sawyer did to all three men. It poisoned the well of their relationships with each other throughout the rest of their time on-Island. Further, it made Sayid leave the beach camp out of guilt over what he'd done.

It's important for Sayid to leave and "map the Island." In SWH, he does it with a clear conscience and a genuine desire to explore. Finally, he doesn't go alone. Scott and Steve get to do something besides serve as the punch-lines of a joke that went stale pretty quickly, and it will become clear in the next chapter why companions on this trip were important.

Also, finally, when Sayid leaves for a week with better motives and in a better frame of mind, this can only benefit the Sayid/Shannon relationship. A stronger Shannon/Sayid bond can possibly have significant "butterfly effects" later on, when the Tailies show up.

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Some points about Ethan:
In-show, we weren't shown much of Ethan as having any particular interest in Claire, until in "Raised by Another" (1x10) he showed up on the path, hung up Charlie to die, and snatched her. I wanted to introduce a bit more build-up to Ethan's stalkerishness, as well as fleshing him out a bit more as a character. In-show he always seemed to have more than merely a scientific interest in Claire, and I never believed (as Alex did) that he was going to kill her. Force her into labor, certainly. Maybe even perform a c-section.

But kill her, no way. Claire was too valuable as "breeding stock," for one thing. I also have strong head-canon that Ethan wanted her for himself, as evidenced in that scene where he takes her out for some fresh air, and acts like a socially-immature teenage boy on his first date.

Later, in-show, we see that Ethan is a genuine piece of work, a real mess. His father and probably his mother are both killed in the Purge when he's a child. At age eleven, he serves as junior hit-man assistant to Ben in "Dead is Dead," when he and Ben go to kill Rousseau. Ethan's heartless sociopathy becomes clear when Ben isn't approaching Rousseau fast enough, and he volunteers, "I can do it if you want me to, Ben."

In-canon in Season One, there was a lot of emphasis on Smokey as a source of terror, but other than his attack on the pilot, Smokey isn't the one directly attacking the beach campers in the first few weeks after the crash. SWH reflects that. At the end of Chapter 10, when Ethan once more tries to get friendly with Claire, Ethan represents the biggest danger to both Claire and the rest of the survivors, not MiB.

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One reason Claire is so easy to kidnap in canon is because she's highly isolated from other women on the beach (except for a few short scenes with Shannon and Kate.) Some of this was no doubt due to production requirements, in that Claire's actress Emilie de Ravin wasn't in a lot of scenes at first. Some of it was probably because writers seem to have difficulty writing nuanced female-female character interactions. Often, male characters' issues and drama take precedence and thus dominate precious screen-time. For instance, we see way more screen-time of Charlie agonizing over, well, everything, and it isn't until 1x10 that we see anything in depth about Claire's dilemma, or her internal feelings about it.

In SWH, I wanted to quickly embed Claire into a context of other women, with main characters like Kate, Shannon, and Sun, as well as the women "red-shirts." This reflects a strong belief of mine, that women don't live by romance alone, and that even the strongest romantic bond needs soil in which to root. That soil is made up of positive interactions and friendships with other women.

Further, in a "primitive" situation such as the survivors experience in the early part of Season One, the buddy rule is a really good idea. Claire is shown alone a lot in-show; I wanted to fix that. When she's hanging out with other people, it's way less likely she's going to get preyed upon by Ethan or Smokey.

It also takes off the pressure of a Hugo/Claire relationship, and makes Hugo way less of a "white knight" always rescuing Claire as "damsel in distress." If Claire's hanging out with a good group of women, a lot of problems get headed off at the pass.

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Last but not least, a few words about Hugo and Claire as a budding couple. I've been dumpster-diving in old archives of very early Season One LOST discussion, and I'm not the only one who got seriously shippy feelings about Hugo and Claire in the first five episodes. It was never a huge ground-swell, not by a mile. "Imaginary peanut butter" put the kabosh to it, but I always thought that with a few tweaks here and there, it could have easily happened.

The actual "butterfly effect" for them came back in Chapter 7, when Hugo decided to "make his own luck" and paid Claire an early-morning visit the day after Boone stole the water, and Jack made his "live together or die alone" speech.

By necessity Hugo/Claire is a slow-build ship no matter where it happens, whether in canon after the finale, or in a canon-divergent story like SWH. I'd argue that SWH is going to show an even slower build than a post-finale ship, because both Hugo and Claire have brought a lot of baggage to the Island after the crash. Hugo's been hospitalized, with all the attendant stigma; he still has the curse delusion; he's been recently dumped by Starla. Claire's been dumped, too, as well as having to make one of the hardest decisions of her life virtually alone. Having a crazy stalker-psychic doesn't make it easier.

They're not Kate and Sawyer; they're not going to have rushed, impulsive, emotional-devastation sex. This was one good thing about the Charlie/Claire relationship in-show: it was very chaste, including the kiss scene. Nothing else would have been believable at that point in both characters' lives. I always laugh when I read old forum posts like, "Claire was so mean for not having sex with Charlie!" I want to shake someone and say, "Look, she already has a baby; she doesn't need another one right now, especially if *on-Island conception is fatal.*

It's been fun to write Hugo and Claire's tentative approaches, their worries about being misunderstood, the insecurities, the gradual blossoming of feelings. As their trust grows, so does desire.

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Final notes about the titles:
The Chapter 9 title is from "You Can Relax Now," a 1986 song written by Susan McCullen, covered by Shaina Noll on her Songs for the Inner Child album (listen here; hopefully the link will stick around awhile.)

The Chapter 10 title is from the late Therese Edell's song of the same name, "Moonflower," from her 1978 album From Women's Faces (listen here.)