Refreshment, anyone?

[DavidG]

So thankful for the coincidence of Stu. (wait...) Of course the question remains of whether Chaz would have attempted the climb if Stu hadn't offered to spot.

My initial response was that of course he would have.

Ditto. He's come to the rock for a reason.

But then I wondered if, if he did, he would have pushed himself so hard. It's not like he has no sense of responsibility. He was probably going to be pushing the limit, one way or another. But Stu being there let him push it hard like that.

I'm not so certain that there is a difference. Stu being there means that the limits are different, not necessarily that they are harder to get to. Knowing there is a crashpad beneath him might alter the route he took up the face, but it doesn't mean he wouldn't push himself to his physical limit. In fact I think he's specifically come to the face to push himself to the very edge of that limit - staring into the abyss, if you like - it's just the injury I think is optional/incidental/whatever. Chaz does have a sense of responsibility, 'I am the monster the other monsters fear' sums that up, but he also has a need to engage in high-risk activities, pushing things to the very edge of sanity. The boundary between the two is probably negotiable depending on his mood and other context.

[el_jefe]

So thankful for the coincidence of Stu. (wait...)

Stu.  That thing we don't believe in?

I believe in Stu.

I think Stu may be Jimbo's brother. . .


A lot of feral anger there, that's for sure (back to Chaz). Not quite suicidal, but some folks get to the point where they want both the physical hurt and the shear exhaustion to drown out the emotional response. You start flipping the coin with fate a bit more aggressively. Among other things. Glad Chaz isn't much of a drinker, although that is often an effective therapy method.

[antongarou]

Tonight is content night, right?*flexes refresh finger*

[Edmund Schweppe]

Tonight is content night, right?*flexes refresh finger*

Maybe but maybe not.

Tonight does mark two nights since our last content. However, our ever-tricksy PTB haven't actually teased anything for this weekend, as is their wont when a DVD extra is imminent.

[DavidG]

I'm experiencing ECR even more now at the thought of August's episode being from earlier in the series. Feels like abandoning the team to their grief.

Just re-read the thread while checking on the new messages and noticed a couple of things:

It seems strange to drag us away from the grief over Daphne, but structurally Walking Back to Houston provides two things. First provides the PTB extra space between the death and the next story,  remember that the timeline caught up with the realtime clock in a way that hasn't happened in a long time (I wasn't aboard until after S1, so I don't know how close it ran then). That space gives time for grieving, but also for certain other developments to happen that might take a little while to bed themselves into a certain person's psyche.

Secondly it reminds us of the dynamic around Hafidha functioning normally, which we haven't seen in a long time, and particularly Hafidha functioning around Chaz. Heal one....

[DavidG]

He's come to the rock for a reason.

I was reading some B5 episode summaries yesterday and re-reading my line above sparked a different angle on the same thought:

'And the rock cried out, no hiding place'

Sometimes you can't hide from it any more and you have to go and stare into the abyss.