ROUND TABLE - Mother Fear and Other Nightmares

[glennagirl.livejournal.com]

We have another Lifecycles Challenge coming up, this one is Fear.  As a prelude to that (although it's pretty far off yet), I was wondering about the things that our agents might be afraid of.
Illya has a thing about dogs, although I'm not sure it's actually fear.  We have, several of us, written stories with that as a theme or part of the story, but at the moment I can only think of the Bow Wow Affair.
We have that scenario in the THRUSH Roulette Affair where Kuryakin is 'conditioned' to respond to his worst fears.  I could still use some clarification on that one. Feel free to jump in any time on this.
Napoleon... Is he afraid of anything?  Commitment maybe?  What else?
So, there it is, ferreting out what gives the men from UNCLE nightmares is our topic of the day.

Comments

[vmccooley.livejournal.com]

Re: THRUSH Roulette. Dr. Ieato told Partridge that there wasn't time to do the regular programming on Illya, so I think they just bombarded him with images of Napoleon to make him believe that was what he feared.

[insaneladybug.livejournal.com]

Ahh. That could make sense. I've always been bewildered by that scene myself. I still don't get how just throwing all those images at him would make him think he feared Napoleon, though. That whole sequence was really quite poorly written. I'm sure some of the fiction writers here could take it and make it make so much more sense. (And be so much more angsty. I thought the resolution was kind of lame, too. Illya tries to kill Napoleon and his reaction to that is "... Wow"? And not even a very upset-sounding Wow? Um, okay. Even though the show didn't do a lot in the way of heart-to-heart talks and male-bonding, that seems a pretty terrible reaction from anyone after being told they almost killed their working partner of several years.)

[vmccooley.livejournal.com]

Partridge's scheme was definitely short on logic. Napoleon and Illya are amazingly adaptive. They didn't even bat an eye over the Gurnius insanity.

[laurose8.livejournal.com]

Just like to say, I do like the stories where Illya overcomes his understandable learned caution of, or is charmed by, dogs.

[jantojones.livejournal.com]

In 'The Apple a Day Affair', Illya hurries out of their vehicle to get out of the way of a dog. To be fair though, it was a big dog.

I've read a few stories which suggest a fear of dogs is as a result of Illya's early life. The Nazis used dogs to a very nasty degree as a way of controlling others. It would make sense for the man to be afraid, if the child witnessed the horror of a dog attacks.

As for Napoleon, many writer's myself included, have suggested he has a fear of being in water. I don't recall it in any episode, but it seems to be an idea which has taken hold.

[otherhawk.livejournal.com]

I imagine the fear of water is because Robert Vaughn can't swim so David McCallum tended to do more of the things in the water.

[jantojones.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten about RV and the swimming thing. That would certainly explain how it entered fiction.

[threecee.livejournal.com]

Maybe Illya came across this historical weirdness. For a young child the idea that the dogs actually understood and agreed with their Nazi masters would add to the terror.

A new book, “Amazing Dogs,” by Dr. Jan Bondeson, a senior lecturer at Cardiff University School of Medicine in Wales, reveals that Hitler supported a German school that tried to teach large, muscular mastiffs to “talk” to humans."^*

^*Dowd, Maureen "Hitler’s Talking Dogs" ,New York Times July 12, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/opinion/13dowd.html?_r=0 accessed 6/28/2015

[jantojones.livejournal.com]

They did a skit of that on Horrible Histories. It just further shows how deluded Hitler was.

[threecee.livejournal.com]

Problem was that he was so good at surrounding himself with people who were equally or more nuts than he was.

[glennagirl.livejournal.com]

I forgot about the water thing. Solo ended up in water a lot, makes you wonder about the writers. Illya did all of the involved swimming, but Napoleon had his moments getting dunked.

[otherhawk.livejournal.com]

One of the times I can think of Napoleon looking most scared - or at least upset - was in the Fiddlesticks Affair, when he was trapped in the room and unable to deactivate the mines before Illya should have set them off. So I'd say maybe helplessness? Not being able to act? Or is that just me?

[glennagirl.livejournal.com]

That's good, he tends to operate on a more emotional level at times.

[carabele.livejournal.com]

Fanlore has Napoleon afraid of submersion in deep water. This is of course related to RV's actual fears, though we never really see it in the series. (Though in THE YUKON AFFAIR he does seem to be a bit less "ready and willing" to do the deep sea scuba diving than does Illya.)