She/adult/Russian.My edits | My text posts | Doctor Who sideblog
Current fandoms (January '24): TES, Doctor Who, Friends at the Table, The Magnus Archives/Protocol, Star Wars, Disco Elysium. Less current: The Untamed, Star Trek, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Marvel.Avatar: art by iguanamouth.Really bad at answering asks/replies (sorry!) Reblogs and likes are always welcome.
I'm watching ds9 and I'm so sorry people who are obsessed with secondary/supporting characters. I get it now I understand your pain I am one of you. every episode I'm like man I hope I see my guy garak this time. I miss my guy garak. and almost every time there is no fucking garak. just watched the ep shadowplay and when bashir MENTIONED garak I leaped into the air and clapped my hands and cheered. crazy behavior. good show though. I am enjoying it
the case that this episode shares the most obvious similarity with is "rolling with it" as both are in some way about gambling addiction, but I would also group it with "taking notes" (and maybe "making adjustments") under the heading of self-destruction for personal gain. the violin and dice guys both eventually found ways to offset the toll of their cursed artefacts to other people and almost solely reap the rewards, but that was explicitly impossible for our man darrien, he could only bet against himself.
"I had a couple wild years after I moved here. It was a weird time."
I'll fucking bet it was Celia, probably the understatement of the goddamn century. Like, the baby is interesting and all but when are we gonna talk about the interdimensional elephant in the room!?
having said that, and also acknowledging that unplanned pregnancies from casual sex are a real and common occurrence and it is very refreshing to see a never-married working mother portrayed without stigma, celia's exact word choice when talking about jack seems very deliberate. she doesn't know who his father is, she had "a couple of wild years," and she came out the other side of it with a child. none of those statements actually confirm that she was the birthing parent, and if jack is about a year old then he would have been born at the same time as the TTS voices started reading out cases at the OIAR. spooky baby question mark? celia is the adoptive mother to the antichrist?
celia ripley jumped dimensions, went kinda nuts for a few years and perhaps slutted it up (affectionate) for a while, had a child, and is now a happy working single mother who does the nightshift at the evil ghosts department of the civil service and goes out on dates sometimes with the cute obsessive nerd from work. also she maybe teleports in her sleep but don't even worry about it.
Ok, let’s look closely at Celia’s statement because Magnus Archives made it clear the exact use of language is important.
Spoilers..
Celia didn’t say she was a mother. She said she had a baby and she doesn’t know who the dad is
In Marked, when she woke up the side of the motorway, she tried to call someone to get help…
Which suggests to me - someone else is at home. Or at least there’s someone she could call for help. Because someone looks after that baby while Celia is at work
What if the baby is not hers? She’s raising Jack, possibly with someone else? And that’s why she doesn’t know who the father is - because she’s not the one that got pregnant.
When she says she had a wild couple of years, that could mean all sorts of things. It could mean a lot of drinking and drugs. It could also mean struggling through the end of the world. It could also mean coming through the new world and trying to find her place - fighting monsters here.
Because her date with Sam seemed to have an awful lot of digging about Sam’s background and the Institute and the cases.
Anyway. That’s my theory. She cares for Jack, but Jack is not her baby.
And my favourite theory right now is - it’s Agnes’ baby. And the baby is in hiding, safe with Celia, where whoever is using Agnes can’t find it…(and if it is Jack Barnabas’s baby that would explain why Agnes called it Jack)