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Originally posted by Misguided By Voices:
As I recall, River was mind reading the crew, and as a visual interpretation of this, we saw River walking around the ship. That may have been where her mind was, but her body was elsewhere.

Jayne was in the kitchen, so I'd say River wandered over to his room, got the combination out of his head, opened it up and stole a shiny.

She clearly didn't recognise it as such on her "concicious level" (the twig), but I'm thinking some heavy duty Manchurian Candidate hard wiring was involved and it some how kicked in a bit to send her off to locate a weapon.

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Originally posted by Ranger:
I think the key to this is in who River gets readings on. She gets input from everyone but Kaylee. In the end, she finds the gun, which is the thing which changed her relationship with Kaylee....This is her mind trying to understand her relationship with Kaylee.

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Originally posted by ljosalf:

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That leaves me most suspicious of Book.

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exactly!!

"They say the snow on the roof is too heavy. They say the ceiling will cave in. His brains are in terrible danger."

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Originally posted by ljosalf:

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Originally posted by Ranger:
I think the key to this is in who River gets readings on. She gets input from everyone but Kaylee. In the end, she finds the gun, which is the thing which changed her relationship with Kaylee....This is her mind trying to understand her relationship with Kaylee.

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I have to disagree here. Too subtle; too static. It's clear that River isn't invisible for real but only because no one expects her to be able to interact normally, and, so, they don't pay any attention to her. She walks past them all and no one acknowledges her presence. She is, after nearly a year aboard, alienated. No special powers required for that just plain human social interaction. From the commentary, we get that Joss wanted us to think that he would test the envelope, so to speak, by making us believe that River had discorporated and become Serenity when in the end he really had no intention of going that far out there. Psychic, mind-reading powers, OK. Destroying/creating matter; possessing inanimate objects, not so much. So, I don't think we are going to see super powers from River. Only, really well thought out, fallible, pushed mental abilities--like the mind reading.

So, I'm sticking with the gun getting to the cargo hold in a normal, everyday manner, and here are the people who did NOT put it there: Jayne (I believe him; there is evidence of the care he takes with his weapons sprinkled through several episodes), Mal (no point to him doing this; his is meant to be the audience's point of view), Kaylee (I except her character at face value; I just do), Simon (contrary to his personality and profession), River (just did not happen; what, she put the gun in the cargo hold and then rediscovered it? Nah, not buying it). Maybe not Zoe or Wash (They both appear to jump on the blame Jayne train only after Mal cuts Jayne off when he starts in blaming River as dangerous, leaving the impression with them that Jayne's done something else wrong in regards to River to piss Mal off.) Maybe not Inara (to what purpose?). That leaves me most suspicious of Book.

Besides, you get tension and a plot hook to boot. Whereas the issue of River working through her relationship with Kaylee is pretty much resolved by the end of the episode.

Ljosalf

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)

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Originally posted by Ranger:
I get everything you're saying here, but I still find it odd that Kaylee is the only one River doesn't get a reading from, then she finds the gun in the same condition it was in just before her relationship with Kaylee changed (fully loaded, safety off, which is how it was just before River shot the three guys in War Stories). But hey, that's half the fun of the show, trying to figure out what is up with (fill in your favorite charators here).

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Originally posted by obsessed:
I think she is picking up on what people are feeling at the moment.

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I'm also willing to believe that she might have kept the gun, left it out, and then happened on it again.

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She could also have just walked into Jayne's bunk and taken it. These theories make a lot more sense to me than Book leaving it out. ...if he has a violent past, then he would be just as careful as anyone else. We know he has knowledge of guns from his comments about the sniper rifles; he wouldn't be any more careless than anyone else.
I think it's more likely that it just got dropped when people were moving stuff. Maybe Jayne, Mal, or Zoe were cleaning their guns and dropped one without noticing, or maybe it was left unnoticed after one of the many firefights in the cargo bay. If it was dropped out of sight, it could have been bumped around when they were moving cargo and ended up in the open.

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Originally posted by SgtZook:
It's seems to me, that in the pilot episode, when Simon jumped the Allience guy, the big handgun slid away and nobody bothered to pick it up. Perhaps no one accounted for it, it got lost amongst the equipment, only to show up again in "Objects".

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