The mirror crack'd

James Jordan · 01 Sep 2000, 13:23 · from urth-v0029.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "James Jordan" <jbjordan at gnt.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) The mirror crack'd
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2000 13:23:02
Message-ID: <urth-v0029-0206 at digest.urth.net>
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Ellis" <tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk>>
> House, no doubt with the best motives in the world, doesn't want its
> little boy to grow up and leave home. Doesn't it strike you as just a
> teensy bit suggestive that House wants to 'save' the boy in a deep
> freeze? With the preserved bodies of his parents?
>
> Suppose he did hide in the freezer. Would he ever have been able to open
> that great heavy door again? Wouldn't he find, if he did, that he was
> entombed under the rubble of the collapsed house?

Two really good points. Thanx.

>
> As upsetting as the story's ending is, at least it ends with the boy
> still alive. The hideous Anti-Claus he's shacked-up with isn't the sort
> of human contact any of us would wish for him, but at least he's out in
> the real world now. He's escaped one gaoler, he can escape another.

Awww. You beat me to it, but I was going to write Anti-Santa!


> One more thing. I may be reading too much into this, but:
>
> At the start of the story, we're carefully primed with the information
> that Mouse has a small but deadly built-in blade. Background colour, or
> Checkov's Gun? At the end of the story, Mouse is under the boy's pillow,
> the place traditionally reserved for weapons to fend off attacks in the
> night.

One more from me. A variety of bad as well as good characters are generated
by House, and one of them is Jesus. Moving into the real world means they
boy can meet Jesus as well as bad characters.

JBJordan


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