good morning, today I am obsessed with salvor in 2x03 describing what happened when they induced gaal’s vision in 2x02 as “[hari] almost suffocated you and you encouraged it” because that is…not really what happened at all? like, technically, yes, he was the one controlling the ship’s systems, but it was gaal’s idea and he didn’t start until she indicated that he should. he was following her lead! this wasn’t “hari almost killed gaal and she allowed/encouraged it”, it was “gaal almost killed herself and hari enabled her”. which, sure, is arguably still not the healthiest dynamic, and it’s not unreasonable for salvor to be put off or concerned, but attributing all the agency and power in that scene (or in their relationship more generally) to him is not accurate.
gaal: the visions are unconscious, okay? I’ve always been asleep, or under stress. I—
[she breaks off, realizing something, and heads for a locker on the wall]
salvor: what?
gaal: [taking a mask from the locker and handing it to salvor, then climbing onto the central console to sit] in old synnaxian, the word for “prophecy” means “water takes them”. seers would submerge themselves. when they couldn’t breathe, their inner eyes opened.
[gaal takes a deep breath, looks at hari, and nods]
salvor: wait, gaal—
[hari nods back; the ship’s alarms start going off and the doors to the room seal]
computer: warning. fire suppression activated.
salvor: wait, what?
computer: venting all oxygen.
salvor: what are you doing?
hari: she needs to drown, salvor.
like, what happens here is that gaal has an a-ha moment, and she barely has to explain before hari has picked up what she’s putting down and jumped to help her (and she’s mostly even explaining for salvor’s benefit, I think; throughout the bit where she’s getting the mask and giving it to her, hari is in the background nodding along, and seems to have already grasped where she’s going with this). this is not “gaal is so devoted to hari that she’ll risk or sacrifice her life for him and his plans with a smile”, this is “gaal and hari are so in sync that he immediately understands what she’s planning and doesn’t hesitate to help her”. this is “even now, when they both feel deeply betrayed and hurt by and angry at each other, they still understand one another on a profound level and implicitly trust each other: he trusts her to know what she’s doing and what she needs/can handle, and she trusts him to help her do it without killing her”.
(or, put another way, it is “they match each other’s freak to a degree that is dangerous to themselves and each other”, which 1. is still not the same thing as “gaal is unquestioningly obedient to hari to the point where she will cheerfully allow him to kill her” and 2. is very sexy of them.)
I think it’s especially notable because literally the episode prior, when gaal and salvor were trying to figure out how to raise the beggar, this happened:
salvor: it’s about twelve meters to the hull, maybe another thirty to the bridge, another minute once I’m there for the reboot…and I am dead. I can’t hold my breath for that long.
gaal: you can if I’m down there with you. look, I don’t know how to reboot a ship, but I do know how to hold my breath. I can give you some of mine when we reach the bridge.
salvor: some of yours? what if you drown?
gaal: brain damage doesn’t set in for at least four minutes. you’ll have time.
so by 2x02 salvor has already seen gaal take a fairly cavalier attitude toward the prospect of drowning! there is precedent! and pretty recent precedent, at that—it’s not totally clear how far apart the two things are supposed to take place, but it feels like several hours, maybe? it’s been long enough that everything on the ship has dried out and seems to have been put into order/cleaned up after decades underwater, but it doesn’t seem like there’s been a lot more happening since then, and hari didn’t seem inclined to wait very long before finally hashing things out with gaal; I’d guess maybe half a day, at most? the point is, the two incidents are close enough together that it feels like a really deliberate choice to have salvor characterize the vision induction as something different and more sinister: not as another example of gaal being impulsive/acting on instinct even when it means risking her own life, but as hari being willing to risk gaal’s life and gaal being too naive or blinded by loyalty to see it.
idk I just find it so interesting (and lol if you think this post is overlong and rambly now, you should see everything I cut out of it). rewatching I am unsurprisingly very focused on the way that gaal and hari’s relationship and the balance of power between them changes from s1 to s2, and the way that so much of s2 really is both of them realizing how much their dynamic has shifted and learning to relate to one another as equals (especially gaal; I actually think hari recognizes and accepts this shift even before she does, which is perhaps not shocking given that she just threw everything off-course, tortured him—albeit unintentionally—for more than a century, and for the first 2.5 episodes of the season he’s dependent on her to go anywhere outside the ship). and meanwhile other people are just looking at them and seeing gaal as this innocent, powerless dupe hari is manipulating and exploiting. like, more and more I do think that “you have more agency here, gaal, than you realize” is kind of a thesis statement for their whole relationship arc.
(not least because lmao yeah, she also has more agency than you realize, old man, have fun finding that out the hard way <3)
