Hey Frankie - now, I know you're very wedded to your jellyfish character, but I'm just going to say this outloud... I don't think it makes enough sense that this plastic surgeon would befriend a jellyfish and I don't think the surgery on the jellyfish is close enough to what this guy does to restore his confidence. So - how about this: I think it makes more sense if the sea creature the surgeon encounters is... a mermaid. Perhaps she is a mermaid with a hook in her mouth/tail etc. and he repairs the damage and makes her look beautiful again - I can see how you could more credibly communicate their growing trust - more so than a series of knowing looks between a man and a jellyfish... This leaves you with the problem of the lightbulb... or maybe not: so, in his cabin, he's lying on the bed looking up at the central light (this is at the start of the story) and you use this light to transition from the cabin to the lights above the operating table in a flashback to the surgery that went wrong - you use it to go back and forth in the timeline - including at the end, when, happy with this treatment of the mermaid, he lies back on his bed, looking up at the ceiling light - we transition from it to a time in the future when he's back in the operating theatre and working again.
For me that jellyfish is just not sentient enough or complex enough (or beautiful enough!) to inspire the surgeon's return - and I can't past the idea of a lightbulb that we've seen as being 'dry' and subscribing to human logic suddenly being able to illuminate underwater! What do you think?
OGR 25/01/18
ReplyDeleteHey Frankie - now, I know you're very wedded to your jellyfish character, but I'm just going to say this outloud... I don't think it makes enough sense that this plastic surgeon would befriend a jellyfish and I don't think the surgery on the jellyfish is close enough to what this guy does to restore his confidence. So - how about this: I think it makes more sense if the sea creature the surgeon encounters is... a mermaid. Perhaps she is a mermaid with a hook in her mouth/tail etc. and he repairs the damage and makes her look beautiful again - I can see how you could more credibly communicate their growing trust - more so than a series of knowing looks between a man and a jellyfish... This leaves you with the problem of the lightbulb... or maybe not: so, in his cabin, he's lying on the bed looking up at the central light (this is at the start of the story) and you use this light to transition from the cabin to the lights above the operating table in a flashback to the surgery that went wrong - you use it to go back and forth in the timeline - including at the end, when, happy with this treatment of the mermaid, he lies back on his bed, looking up at the ceiling light - we transition from it to a time in the future when he's back in the operating theatre and working again.
For me that jellyfish is just not sentient enough or complex enough (or beautiful enough!) to inspire the surgeon's return - and I can't past the idea of a lightbulb that we've seen as being 'dry' and subscribing to human logic suddenly being able to illuminate underwater! What do you think?