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

[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.