Okay here I go. Spoilers ahead, obviously. So the juxtaposition of old versus new, past versus present comes up constantly throughout the show—more than I realized as a naïve teenweeb.
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Spike’s eye thing is the most obvious example, where he just straight-up tells you the metaphor. “One eye sees the past, one sees the present.”pic.twitter.com/905KuEuBLA
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It's implied that he lost his eye back when he was with the crime syndicate, or possibly in faking his death to get out. The fake eye represents his past. But Faye and Jet are also torn between the past and present.
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In “Ganymede Elegy,” Jet confronts his ex-gf and she criticizes him for acting like time stood still while he was gone. Big mistake, Jet. Time DOESN’T stand still. She’s moved on without him, has a new love. By the end of the ep, Jet gets the message.pic.twitter.com/HlWajJaHbc
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Then in “Black Dog Serenade” we learn that his arm is basically Spike’s eye all over again. The part of himself he gave up to the past, and an ever-present reminder of the unfinished business still waiting for him. He finally settles it, thwarting a reenactment of Con-Air.
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Also notable that his fake arm saves his life, stopping a bullet from the guy who (he thinks) took his arm to begin with. He’s righting a wrong of his past by finally confronting it.pic.twitter.com/wOxQjmScEe
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Then there’s Faye, who was literally left in a refrigerator for several decades after a space shuttle accident. She spends most of the series running from her past, then becomes obsessed with recovering it.pic.twitter.com/8XxAOI5Tmh
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She, too, acts like time stood still, and in “Hard Luck Woman” she returns to her childhood home expecting someone to be waiting for her, and to finally find belonging. Big mistake, Faye. Time DOESN’T stand still.pic.twitter.com/rZY6vhJrgw
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But the whole show explores this idea of the past catching up with you. In “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the gate company gets bitten in the ass for screwing over their engineer decades earlier. The old man chess game with Ed, a kid, also feels like a striking dichotomy.
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In “Wild Horses,” everyone’s ships get hacked because they all have modern tech susceptible to attacks. In the end they’re saved by Doohan, a stubborn old man in a NASA space shuttle. Revere the past.pic.twitter.com/pyrfZiAeWS
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“Sympathy for the Devil” opens with a flashback to Spike’s eye operation. Then we meet the villain: an immortal murderer trapped in the body of a kid. Time DOES stand still for him, and he’s an abomination. With a magic bullet, Spike puts him out of his misery, literally.pic.twitter.com/M3aAFgWpbm
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Spike unfreezes the kid’s clock, granting him sweet catharsis. In his dying breath, he asks Spike if he understands. Spike gives a dismissive “As if” and then does the finger-gun “bang” thing he does again at the end of the series. This is only ep 3, and Spike doesn’t get it yet.pic.twitter.com/rWNMFCdDN0
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In the final episode, Spike finally confronts his past life, which, since time hasn’t stood still, is now different. For one thing, brooding bird enthusiast Vicious has taken over. Vicious, btw, is all about telling the old order to fuck off.pic.twitter.com/QULtgmj9Un
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Things might’ve turned out differently if Spike had stuck around instead of putting his entire life on ice. In the show’s final shootout, Spike’s friend Shin says in his dying breath, "I was waiting for you to come back and take over.” Vicious did before that ever happened. Oops.pic.twitter.com/tSTQF4AAFx
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In other words, time kept moving without him. As a result, now Shin, Lin, Julia, Mao, Annie, and a whole lotta other people are dead. Things were left to go bad.
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Side note: In “The Real Folk Blues Part 1,” Faye sees a lonely old woman muttering to herself, "So there’s no place for me after all….I don’t want to live a life where I’m always in someone’s way.” Then we find out it's the TV guy’s mom.pic.twitter.com/rlGzvL7Ct4
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On the surface this just seems to mirror Faye’s deal. She wants to belong. But it’s also an old woman who feels like she’s been thrown out. There’s no place for her anymore. :(((
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Anyway, so then there’s “Toys in the Attic,” the “Alien” episode. We learn in the end that the monster aboard the ship was a fancy lobster Spike acquired, put away in a secret fridge for safekeeping, then forgot about for a whole year. Big mistake. Time DOESN’T stand still, Spikepic.twitter.com/eovKXi4ktt
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There’s a heavy cost for ignoring your past. It all but literally crawls up and bites each of the characters on the ass. Oh, except the kid, who is suspiciously immune.pic.twitter.com/qEPz1WW7Pg
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Ed’s an interesting character because she doesn’t have the same baggage the other characters do. Quite the opposite—she has virtually no firm identity or roots. She uses a made-up name, drifts, and mostly exists in cyberspace as a disembodied avatar.
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I don’t think she's “left things in the fridge” like the other characters. Rather, *she’s* been left in the fridge—by her dad. It’s not entirely clear where she takes off to in the end, but I don’t think it’s necessarily to find her dad. It’s just the symbolic “moving on.”
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Or “moving forward,” rather. Her leaving is another assertion that time doesn’t stand still. While her dad is MIA, shes will continue to grow up.
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Oh P.S. it’s also really ironic that Ed’s dad’s mission is to meticulously document the constant changes to the Earth’s topography while letting his daughter grow up without him.
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End of conversation
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