Marian wrote:

I wrote:

...

Good point, Marian-- but I'd like to say that while that could be the

situation, but the girl's the same age as Dayna,<

It's some time since I watched Aftermath, but do they say there that she is Dayna's age? (I'm hopeless at estimating people's age but I think she may be a few years younger than Dayna, who must be twenty at least.)

Well, same age group, give or take a bit :-).

...

and if he was that tender-hearted and they did expose their superfluous

girls, why didn't Dayna have *lots* of little adopted sisters?<

Possibly Lauren was the only abandoned girl in that whole generation. :-)

Maybe one of the people who knows more about social sciences than I do could say something, but it sounds a bit weird to me to just abandon one girl in twenty years?

(IMO one of the most silly claims in Power is that the Hommiks abandon all their new-born daughters. That would bring the tribe to extinction pretty fast, especially when they run out of Seska to abduct.)

I haven't seen Power for a long time-- but maybe they were leaving them out knowing the Seska would find them, and then kidnapping them back when they were adults?

If Lauren is the same age as Dayna, that could indicate that Mellanby has abducted her. But that seems a risky business - if he'd been caught Dayna would have been left unattended and probably died, unless she was old enough to fend for herself. But in that case it seems strange that Lauren didn't run back to her family at the first opportunity. Maybe she preferred to stay with the Mellanbys rather than go back to her own people?

If she was a baby, she wouldn't know any other family, whether or not she was kidnapped. Anyway, the Mellanbys seem to have the population terrified of coming near, so would she ever have met them?

The phrase "adopted daughter" may also indicate that Lauren came along with her mother to live with Mellanby. Maybe he wanted a woman to care for the young Dayna and either abducted or more probably charmed Lauren's mum into coming and live with them.

Don't know-- the Sarran are afraid of people who come from outer space because of their prophecy, so they wouldn't be too likely to want to come by on their own :-).

The episode doesn't give us much clues. Actually, I've always wondered why Terry Nation brought Lauren into the story at all, as - apart from being pretty - her only function seems to be that her death provides extra grief for Dayna.

It could have been a deliberate reverse of those old colonial stories where a white man adopts a native child :-).

Maybe Terry Nation was getting fed up with writing for the show, or he was too busy with other projects, but to me both this story and Terminal feel rushed and not properly thought through.

Not IMO-- I think Terminal's one of the best stories *ever*! Creepy, well-paced-- almost like Blake's 7 does The Prisoner!

Jenny _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.