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silveradeptOkay, I finished the third "season" of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, (which, really, is the back half of a 14-episode Season 2, split in the middle for reasons) and I have hit one of the things that makes me grit my teeth in storytelling, because something that I could ignore came back and became central to the plot of this arc.
So, at this juncture, if you're not all the way through the third season, here is where you have to make a decision about whether you want to be spoiled. The grand majority of this post is devoted to Entrapta's characterization and motivation, as I see it.
AIGH, what the hell is Entrapta's motivation through season 2 and 3? So, there's one school of villainy that says villains are compelling because the objections they have to society are compelling. Magneto, for example, is putting action to the phrase "never again", attempting to prevent mutants from suffering the same things he went through as a survivor of the Shoah, and the narrative mostly says his methods are abominable and that makes him villainous. Readers who have suffered systematic injustice, however, would find Magneto compelling, and might agree with his methods, depending on where they sit on the scale of violence versus nonviolence.
That's not a thing that I key onto, but I do on something that's related. I need heroes and villains to have recognizable, logical motives for the characters. I don't have to agree with their motivations, I might not agree with their logic, and I may find them incomprehensible because I can't bend myself into that frame of mind, but if their actions follow their characterization, I'll accept it. Magneto works because Magneto wants to stop non-mutants from hurting and killing mutants, and based on his lived his experience, he believes nothing short of overwhelming force will work. I'd like to believe people are better than that, but I also live in these times, where it increasingly seems like that belief is foolish.
Anyway, for She-Ra, many of the characters, as I see them, have motivations that are all variations on the theme of "Believe me or not, I can and will succeed!" Catra and Hordak are out to prove they're second-best to nobody, Shadow Weaver, possibly Bow, and especially Glimmer are out to prove that they are the biggest badasses on the block, especially in their tactical skills, despite what everyone around them thinks.
Adora and Scorpia, instead, both have people they love and want to protect and would, given the opportunity, jump ship with their beloved (Catra, in both cases) and hightail it if they could and it was assured their side would win the battle. Their sense of loyalty to their friends keeps them both on the battlefield, but neither of them wants this war to go on for a second longer than it has to. (Bow might fit here, too, with his loyalty to Glimmer. Bow is complicated.)
The other Princesses (Mermista, Angella, Frosta, Perfuma) are protecting their lands and people from an invading force.
Entrapta's motivation, on the other hands, doesn't seem to have settled in any way past "wants to learn everything possible about the First Ones and Etheria." Which would be a perfectly fine motivation, except that Entrapta's character hasn't been defined enough, in my opinion, for that motivation to serve as a primary driver for her actions. Entrapta went through the first season as the "maybe-on-the-autism-spectrum?" character with quirks (tiny food and beverages) and a monofocus on the First Ones and doing experiments and gathering data on what First Ones tech was available. She seemed delighted and fascinated when a piece of First Ones technology contained a virus that turned the computer systems and the robots homicidal against humans. After the whole thing was done and the piece broken, Entrapta starts putting it back together with the hope of gathering more data from it. So she might have a certain disregard for her own personal safety in the vein of many movie scientists determined to get as much information and experimentation as they desire.
Later on, after Entrapta helps Adora and the Princesses rescue Glimmer from a Horde prison, Entrapta hangs back to try and help one of the Horde robots she's hacked (and named Emily), and is left for dead when a compartment closes and flames erupt from it. Catra takes advantage of this and Entrapta's curiosity to essentially spin a story that Adora and the others aren't Entrapta's friends, and Catra and the Horde are her best bet going forward. It's a bribe and a lie, and Entrapta falls for the bribe and accepts the story because it's what matches her observations about what Adora and company have not done, without ever coming to the conclusion that perhaps they think she's dead and it might be nice to try and make contact in some way. Because of Entrapta's maybe-autism-spectrum, being easily convinced to join Team Evil produced the first-season's Problem with Entrapta willingly doing things that have world-ending consequences and not seeming to notice or care that it would do so. Which, to put it mildly, is a really shitty thing to do with your single neurodiverse-seeming character, because it plays into the worst stereotypes about the neurdoiverse. But her characterization remained ambiguous as to whether she knew what she was doing and did it anyway, or whether she just did things without considering their consequences until she had to deal with them.
Through both parts of Season Two (Season 2 and 3), the showrunners don't give us any other motivation or reason for Entrapta to keep forging ahead with things that will hurt people and cause damage, continuing to point at her monofocus on scientific progress and data as if that were sufficient reason that she continues and gesturing a bit at Catra keeping information out of her hands and continuing to manipulate her into thinking the Horde are her friends to try and cover the rest. This lack of work backfires spectacularly, however, when we find out the reasons why Hordak is trying to build a portal device. He hasn't exactly made it a secret that he wants to conquer Etheria for the Horde, and for the first two seasons, he's mostly been the Big Bad whose reasons exist but are not known to characters.
There's probably a related post to this one about how She-Ra and the Princesses of Power sets itself up as a technology-versus-magic show, with the colorful magic being the superior situation compared to the dark-palette technology wasteland. Adora and Entrapta become foils in this perspective, because Adora is raised in the tech world and needs to learn how to wield the most powerful magic granted by the sword of She-Ra so she can save the world, and Entrapta is the character that has an innate connection to the magic and is researching the tech to meld them together in ways that make them both far more powerful. There's an argument to be made here that Entrapta is the real Greater Scope Villain of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (much like she was a villain in the original She-Ra) because she's Adora's real foil, not Catra.
In any case, up to a particular point, Hordak seems like a conquering person who came to conquer with his technology, and the power of the magic stops him, and that's what we get. The portal machine is a thing that Hordak's working on, but his reasons aren't made clear until he explains them to Entrapta. You see, Lord Hordak is a clone of Hordak Prime, an insterstellar, interdimensional Emperor-General, and Lord Hordak is hoping to open a portal so that he can let the rest of the Horde, the armies and fleets of Hordak Prime, through and they can conquer the planet like they have so many others. Lord Hordak was hoping to deliver the planet gift-wrapped to Hordak Prime so as to prove he's not a worthless clone, but the Princesses and She-Ra have made that difficult, so he's hoping, at the very least, to open a portal so that he can send his coordinates to Hordak Prime, who can then go to work on figuring out how to open a stable portal to Etheria or to drag Etheria out of its pocket dimension (the one that She-Ra Mara put them in, trying to seal Etheria away from the Horde before attempting to break the She-Ra line so nobody else could try to undo what she did) back into the one the Horde is in, leaving Lord Hordak the simpler task of holding out against She-Ra until Hordak Prime arrives and Lord Hordak can prove he's not worthless because he brought him a jewel for his world-conquering crown.
Hordak says, in so many words, "The reason I want the portal is so I can summon someone to conquer and possibly destroy the world and enslave everyone on it." Entrapts says "Sure, no biggie, let's keep working on making the portal device work." Which fits in with the idea Abigail Nussbaum suggested about Entrapta being fully aware of her own consequences and going ahead with it anyway, but generally needs the viewer to remember they concluded back in the first season that Entrapta is a sociopath who just doesn't care who gets hurt, so long as she gets her data. And that "doesn't care who gets hurt" includes not having a self-preservation instinct of any sort. The whole thing would be made more believable if Entrapta has been consistently characterized as someone who believes they have it all under control, and so she won't suffer an consequences from her actions, even if everyone else might, but no, she's being played off as someone for whom the idea that she'd destroy herself along with everyone else doesn't enter into her mind.
So if we (grudgingly, because there's no other model that makes sense) accept the Entrapta-as-sociopath, with no sense of self-preservation, and a monofocus that overrides everything else, while cursing out the poor decision made to make a neurodiverse-seeming character into said sociopath, we can at least get to the point where Entrapta constructs the portal device, despite knowing what purpose Hordak intends to use it for and the very real likelihood that Entrapta herself would become a prisoner (even if she would get to work on what she wants to) and destroyed if at any point Hordak Prime found her useless or a failure.
And then the tail end of the portal arc sabotages the Entrapta-as-sociopath characterization, or at least the part where she seems to have no sense of self-preservation. While with Scorpia, Entrapta runs simulations on what the portal device might do if it's activated, after it's already been constructed. All of those tests come back "world goes boom, space-time might go boom, too, sucks to be you," and Entrapta decides that perhaps it would be a good idea to wait until the tests say the world isn't going to shred itself if the portal opens, and heads up to tell Hordak to not start the machine. (Catra does it anyway, because she's been raised in an abusive environment and Adora succeeding is her trigger, so she'll do extraordinarily, world-endingly stupid shit because it means she wins and Adora loses, but that's a different post.) If, up to this point, Entrapta had been portrayed with even a shred of self-preservation or empathy for everyone else (there's a possibility where she might be waffling on building the portal device, but it's in the context of her improving Hordak's Darth Vader-esque life-suit to be better than it was, because she thinks of Hordak as a friend, even when he's explicitly said his goal is to conquer and enslave everybody), I suspect we would have gotten some amount of characterization where Entrapta is loath to do something that potentially big and destructive without having a good handle on what happens when it goes supremely sideways (instead of fixing each problem as it arises with the activation of the portal machine as if it were steps in a quest) and she has to be convinced to go forward with it. As it is, instead, it seems like Entrapta grows either a conscience or a sense of self-preservation right before something's going to happen that really will destroy or enslave everything, and she's only doing it because the data says so. It's way too late for this shift in character to seem realistic or reasonable!
Which gives me an even greater grump that when the portal activates and everyone around it is caught in a cross between the Lotus-Eater Machine and the Bubble Universe episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Entrapta is remarkably casual about the fact that she's deduced that the cause of all the things that are causing this universe to collapse are the result of an opened portal ripping its way merrily through time and space and that someone has to stay behind in the collapsing universe to remove the object creating it from the portal device. She doesn't do anything else about it other than deliver this information to Adora and then fade away into the destructive light.
So which is it? Is it Entrapta who doesn't care about her own destruction, or the one who does? And really, if she's been all about the data the whole time, why haven't we seen or heard her doing more than just talking into her pocket recorder about her observations? The data does no good to be collected if it can't be exported and recalled and used to further advance ideas and plans. It seems like Entrapta's Lotus-Eater situation of endless study would be severely disrupted by the end of her existence, and that she should be a bit more active in trying to prevent (and possibly be frightened of) her impending nonexistence.
Which is to say, for all of this, what the hell, Entrapta? And moreso, what the hell, showrunners?! If you want Entrapta to be someone who doesn't care about anything but study and tech and learning, to the point of not caring about others' lives or her own, you have to actually show that. You can't let her exist in the contradiction of "she doesn't fully grasp the implications and likely consequences of her experiments, she doesn't really care about those consequences and implications, so long as she gets to run experiments, and she's also capable and competent enough to run those experiments and think through some of their possible consequences before the experiment actually happens."
If she's supposed to be a villain, or a good person in an evil situation, then let her, and give her a motivation that makes sense for her to follow. Whether it's "she doesn't actually give a good goddamn about anything but herself and her data," "she genuinely believes the things she's doing will be used to make a safe and prosperous planet, and Catra keeps the truth from her," "she's playing a long game where she hopes to get to the real villain and use her position of trust and power to stab him fatally in the back, so long as she can avoid giving her real position away to the paranoid Catra, the deeply suspicious Lord Hordak, and the remarkably off-balancing Scorpia, who has a weapons-grade ditz smokescreen to hide that she's cunning and smart when she needs to be."
Entrapta is already a giant plot point, and because of that, when her characterization is so teeth-grindingly awful, she throws off the storytelling. For the Season 3 arc, someone needs to make a decision about what Entrapta's characterization is and then situation her motivation in that character.
(I'll bet there's some fantastic fic that explores this situation, regardless of how it resolves it into something coherent, because this snarl is the sort of thing that fic is made to unravel and re-knit. As well as, I suspect, a lot of Adora/Catra/Scorpia in various permutations of that triangle.)
So, at this juncture, if you're not all the way through the third season, here is where you have to make a decision about whether you want to be spoiled. The grand majority of this post is devoted to Entrapta's characterization and motivation, as I see it.
AIGH, what the hell is Entrapta's motivation through season 2 and 3? So, there's one school of villainy that says villains are compelling because the objections they have to society are compelling. Magneto, for example, is putting action to the phrase "never again", attempting to prevent mutants from suffering the same things he went through as a survivor of the Shoah, and the narrative mostly says his methods are abominable and that makes him villainous. Readers who have suffered systematic injustice, however, would find Magneto compelling, and might agree with his methods, depending on where they sit on the scale of violence versus nonviolence.
That's not a thing that I key onto, but I do on something that's related. I need heroes and villains to have recognizable, logical motives for the characters. I don't have to agree with their motivations, I might not agree with their logic, and I may find them incomprehensible because I can't bend myself into that frame of mind, but if their actions follow their characterization, I'll accept it. Magneto works because Magneto wants to stop non-mutants from hurting and killing mutants, and based on his lived his experience, he believes nothing short of overwhelming force will work. I'd like to believe people are better than that, but I also live in these times, where it increasingly seems like that belief is foolish.
Anyway, for She-Ra, many of the characters, as I see them, have motivations that are all variations on the theme of "Believe me or not, I can and will succeed!" Catra and Hordak are out to prove they're second-best to nobody, Shadow Weaver, possibly Bow, and especially Glimmer are out to prove that they are the biggest badasses on the block, especially in their tactical skills, despite what everyone around them thinks.
Adora and Scorpia, instead, both have people they love and want to protect and would, given the opportunity, jump ship with their beloved (Catra, in both cases) and hightail it if they could and it was assured their side would win the battle. Their sense of loyalty to their friends keeps them both on the battlefield, but neither of them wants this war to go on for a second longer than it has to. (Bow might fit here, too, with his loyalty to Glimmer. Bow is complicated.)
The other Princesses (Mermista, Angella, Frosta, Perfuma) are protecting their lands and people from an invading force.
Entrapta's motivation, on the other hands, doesn't seem to have settled in any way past "wants to learn everything possible about the First Ones and Etheria." Which would be a perfectly fine motivation, except that Entrapta's character hasn't been defined enough, in my opinion, for that motivation to serve as a primary driver for her actions. Entrapta went through the first season as the "maybe-on-the-autism-spectrum?" character with quirks (tiny food and beverages) and a monofocus on the First Ones and doing experiments and gathering data on what First Ones tech was available. She seemed delighted and fascinated when a piece of First Ones technology contained a virus that turned the computer systems and the robots homicidal against humans. After the whole thing was done and the piece broken, Entrapta starts putting it back together with the hope of gathering more data from it. So she might have a certain disregard for her own personal safety in the vein of many movie scientists determined to get as much information and experimentation as they desire.
Later on, after Entrapta helps Adora and the Princesses rescue Glimmer from a Horde prison, Entrapta hangs back to try and help one of the Horde robots she's hacked (and named Emily), and is left for dead when a compartment closes and flames erupt from it. Catra takes advantage of this and Entrapta's curiosity to essentially spin a story that Adora and the others aren't Entrapta's friends, and Catra and the Horde are her best bet going forward. It's a bribe and a lie, and Entrapta falls for the bribe and accepts the story because it's what matches her observations about what Adora and company have not done, without ever coming to the conclusion that perhaps they think she's dead and it might be nice to try and make contact in some way. Because of Entrapta's maybe-autism-spectrum, being easily convinced to join Team Evil produced the first-season's Problem with Entrapta willingly doing things that have world-ending consequences and not seeming to notice or care that it would do so. Which, to put it mildly, is a really shitty thing to do with your single neurodiverse-seeming character, because it plays into the worst stereotypes about the neurdoiverse. But her characterization remained ambiguous as to whether she knew what she was doing and did it anyway, or whether she just did things without considering their consequences until she had to deal with them.
Through both parts of Season Two (Season 2 and 3), the showrunners don't give us any other motivation or reason for Entrapta to keep forging ahead with things that will hurt people and cause damage, continuing to point at her monofocus on scientific progress and data as if that were sufficient reason that she continues and gesturing a bit at Catra keeping information out of her hands and continuing to manipulate her into thinking the Horde are her friends to try and cover the rest. This lack of work backfires spectacularly, however, when we find out the reasons why Hordak is trying to build a portal device. He hasn't exactly made it a secret that he wants to conquer Etheria for the Horde, and for the first two seasons, he's mostly been the Big Bad whose reasons exist but are not known to characters.
There's probably a related post to this one about how She-Ra and the Princesses of Power sets itself up as a technology-versus-magic show, with the colorful magic being the superior situation compared to the dark-palette technology wasteland. Adora and Entrapta become foils in this perspective, because Adora is raised in the tech world and needs to learn how to wield the most powerful magic granted by the sword of She-Ra so she can save the world, and Entrapta is the character that has an innate connection to the magic and is researching the tech to meld them together in ways that make them both far more powerful. There's an argument to be made here that Entrapta is the real Greater Scope Villain of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (much like she was a villain in the original She-Ra) because she's Adora's real foil, not Catra.
In any case, up to a particular point, Hordak seems like a conquering person who came to conquer with his technology, and the power of the magic stops him, and that's what we get. The portal machine is a thing that Hordak's working on, but his reasons aren't made clear until he explains them to Entrapta. You see, Lord Hordak is a clone of Hordak Prime, an insterstellar, interdimensional Emperor-General, and Lord Hordak is hoping to open a portal so that he can let the rest of the Horde, the armies and fleets of Hordak Prime, through and they can conquer the planet like they have so many others. Lord Hordak was hoping to deliver the planet gift-wrapped to Hordak Prime so as to prove he's not a worthless clone, but the Princesses and She-Ra have made that difficult, so he's hoping, at the very least, to open a portal so that he can send his coordinates to Hordak Prime, who can then go to work on figuring out how to open a stable portal to Etheria or to drag Etheria out of its pocket dimension (the one that She-Ra Mara put them in, trying to seal Etheria away from the Horde before attempting to break the She-Ra line so nobody else could try to undo what she did) back into the one the Horde is in, leaving Lord Hordak the simpler task of holding out against She-Ra until Hordak Prime arrives and Lord Hordak can prove he's not worthless because he brought him a jewel for his world-conquering crown.
Hordak says, in so many words, "The reason I want the portal is so I can summon someone to conquer and possibly destroy the world and enslave everyone on it." Entrapts says "Sure, no biggie, let's keep working on making the portal device work." Which fits in with the idea Abigail Nussbaum suggested about Entrapta being fully aware of her own consequences and going ahead with it anyway, but generally needs the viewer to remember they concluded back in the first season that Entrapta is a sociopath who just doesn't care who gets hurt, so long as she gets her data. And that "doesn't care who gets hurt" includes not having a self-preservation instinct of any sort. The whole thing would be made more believable if Entrapta has been consistently characterized as someone who believes they have it all under control, and so she won't suffer an consequences from her actions, even if everyone else might, but no, she's being played off as someone for whom the idea that she'd destroy herself along with everyone else doesn't enter into her mind.
So if we (grudgingly, because there's no other model that makes sense) accept the Entrapta-as-sociopath, with no sense of self-preservation, and a monofocus that overrides everything else, while cursing out the poor decision made to make a neurodiverse-seeming character into said sociopath, we can at least get to the point where Entrapta constructs the portal device, despite knowing what purpose Hordak intends to use it for and the very real likelihood that Entrapta herself would become a prisoner (even if she would get to work on what she wants to) and destroyed if at any point Hordak Prime found her useless or a failure.
And then the tail end of the portal arc sabotages the Entrapta-as-sociopath characterization, or at least the part where she seems to have no sense of self-preservation. While with Scorpia, Entrapta runs simulations on what the portal device might do if it's activated, after it's already been constructed. All of those tests come back "world goes boom, space-time might go boom, too, sucks to be you," and Entrapta decides that perhaps it would be a good idea to wait until the tests say the world isn't going to shred itself if the portal opens, and heads up to tell Hordak to not start the machine. (Catra does it anyway, because she's been raised in an abusive environment and Adora succeeding is her trigger, so she'll do extraordinarily, world-endingly stupid shit because it means she wins and Adora loses, but that's a different post.) If, up to this point, Entrapta had been portrayed with even a shred of self-preservation or empathy for everyone else (there's a possibility where she might be waffling on building the portal device, but it's in the context of her improving Hordak's Darth Vader-esque life-suit to be better than it was, because she thinks of Hordak as a friend, even when he's explicitly said his goal is to conquer and enslave everybody), I suspect we would have gotten some amount of characterization where Entrapta is loath to do something that potentially big and destructive without having a good handle on what happens when it goes supremely sideways (instead of fixing each problem as it arises with the activation of the portal machine as if it were steps in a quest) and she has to be convinced to go forward with it. As it is, instead, it seems like Entrapta grows either a conscience or a sense of self-preservation right before something's going to happen that really will destroy or enslave everything, and she's only doing it because the data says so. It's way too late for this shift in character to seem realistic or reasonable!
Which gives me an even greater grump that when the portal activates and everyone around it is caught in a cross between the Lotus-Eater Machine and the Bubble Universe episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Entrapta is remarkably casual about the fact that she's deduced that the cause of all the things that are causing this universe to collapse are the result of an opened portal ripping its way merrily through time and space and that someone has to stay behind in the collapsing universe to remove the object creating it from the portal device. She doesn't do anything else about it other than deliver this information to Adora and then fade away into the destructive light.
So which is it? Is it Entrapta who doesn't care about her own destruction, or the one who does? And really, if she's been all about the data the whole time, why haven't we seen or heard her doing more than just talking into her pocket recorder about her observations? The data does no good to be collected if it can't be exported and recalled and used to further advance ideas and plans. It seems like Entrapta's Lotus-Eater situation of endless study would be severely disrupted by the end of her existence, and that she should be a bit more active in trying to prevent (and possibly be frightened of) her impending nonexistence.
Which is to say, for all of this, what the hell, Entrapta? And moreso, what the hell, showrunners?! If you want Entrapta to be someone who doesn't care about anything but study and tech and learning, to the point of not caring about others' lives or her own, you have to actually show that. You can't let her exist in the contradiction of "she doesn't fully grasp the implications and likely consequences of her experiments, she doesn't really care about those consequences and implications, so long as she gets to run experiments, and she's also capable and competent enough to run those experiments and think through some of their possible consequences before the experiment actually happens."
If she's supposed to be a villain, or a good person in an evil situation, then let her, and give her a motivation that makes sense for her to follow. Whether it's "she doesn't actually give a good goddamn about anything but herself and her data," "she genuinely believes the things she's doing will be used to make a safe and prosperous planet, and Catra keeps the truth from her," "she's playing a long game where she hopes to get to the real villain and use her position of trust and power to stab him fatally in the back, so long as she can avoid giving her real position away to the paranoid Catra, the deeply suspicious Lord Hordak, and the remarkably off-balancing Scorpia, who has a weapons-grade ditz smokescreen to hide that she's cunning and smart when she needs to be."
Entrapta is already a giant plot point, and because of that, when her characterization is so teeth-grindingly awful, she throws off the storytelling. For the Season 3 arc, someone needs to make a decision about what Entrapta's characterization is and then situation her motivation in that character.
(I'll bet there's some fantastic fic that explores this situation, regardless of how it resolves it into something coherent, because this snarl is the sort of thing that fic is made to unravel and re-knit. As well as, I suspect, a lot of Adora/Catra/Scorpia in various permutations of that triangle.)
no subject
Date: 2019-09-03 02:41 pm (UTC)Adding in the neuro-atypical piece makes it, as you note, that much worse. It's interesting that you use the word sociopath, because I was thinking that too as I was reading, but then worried I was being too harsh.
Science vs. magic. Sigh. We should be able to move beyond this boring, simplistic dichotomy in our stories.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-03 06:57 pm (UTC)Interestingly, at least, in She-Ra, the magic forces are the good guys, and the magic itself is Clarkian "sufficiently advanced technology" as well, which really puts it as "remnants of the superadvanced versus peak oil Space Empire" as the aesthetic. Only Entrapta, though, is at work applying the scientific method to the magic so it can be better understood.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-11 07:12 pm (UTC)I grant that I tend to take characters at face value when I see them onscreen (as opposed to in a medium where you can live in their heads) -- I just assumed she considered all other forms of destruction etc. up to the point of the portal revelation as, like, not bad enough enough that she couldn't still go on tinkering, whereas the portal revelation was like "welp game over, I'm not gonna get those quarters back".
Still no idea about the whole Hordak friendship though tbh. The interpersonal stuff I don't get at all. I'm curious to see what you'll think of the S4 handling of Entrapta, for sure.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-12 04:56 am (UTC)If the portal thing was the first thing that Entrapta did that had Apocalypse written all over it, I'd be more inclined to think she just got in over her head. But there's the end of S1, where they're doing stuff that threatens to blow up the world and she keeps going for the sake of the data. Having done it once already, she goes back to the well a second time.