Aeryn takes a long pause with hard eyes, asking permission of both of them to go on with this: "Could you have kept your promise?" She's near to tears. So is he. They don't speak. Her death is a wall between them and the only thing they can hold, which is each other. John finally breaks the circuit, turns back to the screen, and she joins him; they watch the Drak in silence. It's harder to look at that stuff directly, when the heart that loves whispers "Live, live, live," to the thing it loves, every second of the day; to say, "Do you love me enough, does your friendship mean enough, does our 'family' mean enough, that you could take me out?" Rygel 1, Aeryn 1, John 0. Of all the icky things in this episode, John's the only one that gets to ignore the question. Even though we all know the truth: his love will always be greater than his strength. It has a name. You know its name, and you know the hateful face it wears. The minty taste of killing what you love most. (It's a regularly recurring motif, "Aeryn in specifically physical, mortal danger," and I think it has less to do with fairy tales and boy stuff than it does with this: the only thing that trumps survival, in the Hobbes world they all live in -- which, not for nothing, but he wrote about mostly in Leviathan -- is love. You'd save Aeryn before yourself in a second, which means that's the question they have to keep asking; it's the worst thing imaginable, and it's got your DNA.) As much as he's the only family he has left, she's already the star he steers by, because she's the closest thing to home: It's symbiosis. So he ignores it all, like a good boyfriend, and stands side-by-side with her, and not face-to-face. The answer means something to her, but nothing to him. It's not a question that makes sense to a John Crichton: you know his favorite character was Data -- and Aeryn's as close as he'll get to consummating. "You know, all things considered? There are worse ways to end a day," he says without looking at her. So she turns to look at him instead.