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I tend to agree with MSG, that her Reading capabilities are limited somewhat, more like knowing intent and that sort of thing.

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Here is my theory; at the time Simon was thinking "Okay, she's attacked Jayne and she's jumping out at me and kind of startled me and the crew is really freaking out. What should I do?" hence she wouldn't have known if he was going to make her sleep or not, so she took him out as well.

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Originally posted by Smaug:

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I tend to agree with MSG, that her Reading capabilities are limited somewhat, more like knowing intent and that sort of thing.

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Plus in Objects in Space.. we clearly see River being able to read emotions, words, thoughts.. down to the very specifics. What isn't shown is if she can read ANYTHING that might be buried in their.... or just what is forfront on someone's mind.

Smaug

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1. River can project her thoughts, dispayled in the BDM during the escape when she calls Simons name and her lips aren't moving.

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she needed a little time to mentally recover after testing this new psychic skill, so she could not read simon thus subdued him quickly

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Originally posted by Smaug:

But at the very end.. Mal says.. "But I suppose you already know what I am going to say."

To which River replys "Yes, but I like to hear you say it".

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
I am interested in the idea that “her ability to read minds is keyed to the strength of the emotion behind the thought, the stronger the emotion the is easier it is for her to read.“

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
The obvious problem with “telepathic River” has always been the events where she clearly has been surprised e.g. by Dobson in the pilot, the Alliance assault troops at the end of the BDM, and even by Early in OiS (she did not warn Simon before Early boarded Serenity). The strength of emotion idea might provide an explanation.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:One problem I can see is that in “War Stories” River had to look round an object to see Niskas troops firing at them.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
My other reason for believing that River possesses enhanced intuition, rather than some paraphysical sense, is that I think it fits better into the ‘verse. Joss has clearly gone to some trouble to keep the ‘verse free of FTL travel, time travel, mystical anything, aliens, AIs, nanotech, and all the other trimmings that typically show up in space opera. Having gone to all that trouble, I find it hard to believe that he would create one solitary telepathic character, and then put her near the centre of the show.

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Originally posted by Xeyra:


She wasn't so much surprised by the troops when they broke down the wall, even if she wasn't facing them.

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Originally posted by Xeyra:
That's what I think. Doesn't mean it's shared by all. :)

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
Considering the Miranda recording; it is not clear to me that River being able to predict Dr Carons words in a recording is evidence of telepathy. For one thing, if you know a few words from a sentence you can often then predict the next few. River might then be able to reliably predict Dr Carons next syllable, which would be the only ability she needed to lip-synch with her.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
It is possible that this copy is what River was looking for on the Cortex after she escaped from the storage locker.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
Notice as well that most people would only remember the gist of Dr Carons report – they would not remember the exact words, and so no telepath could read them in their minds.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
There is of course, the incident with the key Parliamentarians. I am inclined to turn this argument around, and say that it is evidence that River is not a telepath. If she was known to be a telepath, then having her encounter people with sensitive information in their heads would be an obvious security risk, even to a non-professional like Dr Mathias, or the MPs bodyguards. Dr Mathias, above all people, should surely know what River is capable of.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
All it takes is for someone important to suppress a reaction when Pax is mentioned, and you know what to look for.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
A telepath could only tell you what the key minds intended to do, not what they would do if XYZ happened. A telepath could not tell you what you needed to do or say in order to have them obey your will – in the same way that River knew what to say to have Jubal Early (and the rest of the crew) obey her will in OiS.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
Now there is a quote that clearly describes me

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Instead, she was posing. (Very unRiverine I should think, although it must be an image that launched a thousand screensavers.)

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Originally posted by Xeyra:

And until Joss comes out and says "River Tam can/cannot read thoughts", we're free to make our own minds about things.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:


The best evidence for River being a telepath, I think, is in the BDM, when we see her mouthing Mals words as he speaks them “the thought crossed my mind”. The important thing is the timing. How the discussion went, Jaynes point about what they might have to do with River, and even Mals response, could all be predicted, at least by River. But to mouth those words, at the exact moment Mal spoke them, is a lot harder to explain. If River is not a telepath, the best explanation is games with time cuts in the editing suite, and I do not like that kind of explanation.

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Originally posted by Smaug:
This is a question about River's abilities at a specific time in the movie.

she does her ninja/assasin thing and makes her way to the bridge. In the process of doing that.. she takes down Simon.. and the shot of her looking down upon him with the gun.

I realize Joss did that to keep us on the edge.. and guessing what the )(#*$)#($* is River doing.. and what is she capable of. Once we find out what she is doing.. my first thought is that she had to take out Simon because she read him at the time that even he would have tried to subdue her. However.. they have a brief conversation and River says that she had to show them.. and Simon says something like.. "you could have just asked"... while nursing his soar throat. To which River replies "I didn't know if you were going to put me to sleep". Or something to that effect.. I may not have the exact wording right.

Anyway... but that is the question.. How could River have NOT known what Simon was thinking? Wouldn't she have known weither or not he would have tried to subdue her and put her to sleep?
Smaug..

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Originally posted by Xeyra:

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
Considering the Miranda recording; it is not clear to me that River being able to predict Dr Carons words in a recording is evidence of telepathy. For one thing, if you know a few words from a sentence you can often then predict the next few. River might then be able to reliably predict Dr Carons next syllable, which would be the only ability she needed to lip-synch with her.

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You make a good point. I have a friend who tends to mouth as we speak, sometimes, though not with so much accuracy as River. Still, I do believe River does that because she already knows the message and what the doctor is saying because of having read the secret from the parliament men's minds. Read the message. Known about Miranda and seen the bodies and known about Reavers, even if the knowledge was buried within her (burning up her brain) because she saw it in the parliament's men's minds. That's how I interpret it. That's how I see and explain this.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
It is possible that this copy is what River was looking for on the Cortex after she escaped from the storage locker.

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Actually, it seems to be clear enough that she was looking for the location of Miranda in that scene. Even Mr. Universe, the hacker supreme, didn't seem to even know about Miranda, so I doubt such a transmission was hanging around in the cortex to find. Not to mention River wouldn't really have had time to do such a thourough search of the cortex for a message, hear it, and then search for Miranda's location. But it's an interesting theory, nonetheless.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
Notice as well that most people would only remember the gist of Dr Carons report – they would not remember the exact words, and so no telepath could read them in their minds.

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I guess this would depend on the members of parliament. Maybe they had good memories or maybe they saw the transmission so many times they could recall it by heart, like we usually do with a poem we love or with a letter that has touched us deeply, whether positively or negatively. You don't have to have a photographic memory to remember something so clearly (my mother, for example, still remembers quite a lot of meaningless things she learned in school, like names of train stations and such, and can quote quite a few things by heart, word for word).

Something like Miranda is not something you forget easily, not when you're responsible for the death of 30 million people. Even ambitious and power-hungry old men blink when they exterminate a world... Besides, our memories aren't usually lost, they're just put into storage, buried under new information, but even if twelve years have passed, they would remain in there, somewhere, and River saw them.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
There is of course, the incident with the key Parliamentarians. I am inclined to turn this argument around, and say that it is evidence that River is not a telepath. If she was known to be a telepath, then having her encounter people with sensitive information in their heads would be an obvious security risk, even to a non-professional like Dr Mathias, or the MPs bodyguards. Dr Mathias, above all people, should surely know what River is capable of.

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I think this speaks more about Dr. Mathias pride than anything else. You have to consider that Mathias is a scientist who seems to think River is his "star pupil", a prodigy, which is why she seems to have been shown to the Parliament men ("show me off like a dog").

What does this mean? Well, Mathias's greatest sin is pride, says the Operative. A scientist with a pet project that he headed and was so ingrossed in he didn't think of how wrong it was (he doesn't really seem to care when he describes what's being done to River when he's talking to Simon).

Would a man like this really stop to think that putting a member of his project, especially one as gifted as River, was going to be dangerous to the men who were funding his little experience? Maybe it's the crazy scientist stereotype, but Mathias really doesn't seem to think about that possibility (until the Operative points it out to him and he gulps and tells that even if she gleaned something, it's buried under the layers of psychosis).

So, yes, I do believe Mathias wouldn't think about the danger of parading a psychic in front of the minds behind every military, diplomatic and covert operation in the galaxy. Not because he didn't think River was not going to be capable of it, because she couldn't read minds in the true sense of the word, but simply because showing off his prize student was the most important thing to him.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
All it takes is for someone important to suppress a reaction when Pax is mentioned, and you know what to look for.

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You make a valid point but this is not a believable situation, I think, when only the parliament men are supposed to know this (since everyone else must have died in Miranda or turned into a Reaver). They really wouldn't comment on the PAX in front of River and Dr. Mathias, no reason for it. Classified information isn't discussed with subalterns...

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
A telepath could only tell you what the key minds intended to do, not what they would do if XYZ happened. A telepath could not tell you what you needed to do or say in order to have them obey your will – in the same way that River knew what to say to have Jubal Early (and the rest of the crew) obey her will in OiS.

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But now you're compartimentalizing the two. River is already highly intuitive. It's mentioned by Simon and in the R. Tam Session 1. You don't need to have one without the other, though. River can be a reader in the true sense of the word and still know/guess intuitively what someone might do with the knowledge she gleaned from them.

She's a psychic (Joss himself said so) but that does not need to involve only telepathy or high intuition. They're not mutually exclusive. So she can very well "tell you what the key minds intended to do" and extrapolate on "what they would do if XYZ happened". Which she does. That's why she's so dangerous.

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Originally posted by Cavalier:
Now there is a quote that clearly describes me

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Which is good. If we all believed the same things and agreed to everything, the world would be a boring place.

I think it's incredible the way Joss leaves things open enough for us to extrapolate and interpret them in our own ways, which leads to many different beliefs. Everyone has an explanation for something, and they can often differ. Doesn't make them less real to them.

And until Joss comes out and says "River Tam can/cannot read thoughts", we're free to make our own minds about things. And even if he comes out and 'kills' one of our pet beliefs, well, that may not keep people from believing. Human beings are, by nature, very stubborn. Like believing Wash is still alive and coming up with amazingly complex theories that prove it...

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