From: Mistral mistral@centurytel.net

Fiona Moore wrote:

...

But *does* Avon like him? He's polite to him, yes, but so would you if

you

...

were somebody's guest (at least I'd hope). When Mellanby dies, Avon's

hardly

...

shedding any tears-- his response is a bit callous even by Avon

standards.

Avon goes past polite - he's interested in Mellanby (and not just those bits that might help him survive).

Hm, really? He doesn't particularly ask Mellanby about his past or political affiliations-- Mellanby volunteers everything, almost as if he's trying to ingratiate himself with Avon. Avon's impressed by the gun-- but then, Avon would be :). He asks about the image amplifier, but nothing in that exchange strikes me as more than polite ("I'm sorry" *is* really the only civilised response under the circumstances)--also given that Avon is a computer programmer before anything else, his interest might well be professional. His "I never comment..." still strikes me as a little bit pointed, sort of an "I plead the Fifth," as it were.

Expecting him to shed tears over someone he's known only a day is a bit unrealistic IMO, particularly since he appears to be the type to shut off his emotions in a crisis.

True, but what happens is, he comes in and finds Mellanby dead, and upon ascertaining that this is so, his first response is to shout "Orac!"-- he seems more concerned about getting Orac back than taken aback at Mellanby's death. His one comment on Mellanby is "He got away from here after all"-- which is a little bit sarcastic under the circumstances (frankly, I'm surprised Dayna didn't clock him one for that).

I think not only did Avon like Mellanby, but also that Mellanby was exactly the kind of person Avon might have been friends with in better circumstances.

Leaving aside the question of whether or not Avon does have friends :) (channelling Killer here), at best Mellanby is like Blake-- and at worst, Mellanby is the anti-Blake; a man who started a revolution, then sold it out, and spent the rest of his life hiding. In the first instance, he and Avon would have been at each other's throats all the time :)-- and in the second instance, I don't think Avon would have been too sympathetic-- dishonesty is unlikely to be a sin in Avon's book, but he doesn't seem to suffer hypocrites gladly.

Remember, too, Avon doesn't get the full story about Mellanby-- he never witnesses the scenes betwen Servalan and Dayna, and Servalan and Mellanby, that reveal the most detail about his history and suggest that there's more to it than he tells Avon.

Fiona

The Posthumous Memoirs of Secretary Rontane Hiding from a bunch of angry revolutionaries at http://nyder.r67.net

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