Aeon Flux season 3 episode 7 Chronophasia

Aeon’s mission in this episode is to find a baby, lost in a laboratory in the middle of a jungle. The first scene opens on her, screaming as she awakes, seeming to come out from a nightmare. Trevor is also looking at some virus in this laboratory. Aeon enters first in what looks like a huge abandoned research base. Inside she meets with a young blue-eyed, dark-haired teen boy, who leads the secret agent into a dark cave. There, Aeon finds what she believes is the baby she is looking for, but it is big, misshapen, and has a horrible carnassial dentition. She screams and the image shifts to the very first scene, when she abruptly awoke. This scene repeats any times she dies or is scared in the episode.

The first thing that came to me after having watched the episode, is a conversation I had with two of my friends about the subconscious in our dreams, in particular those that are about pregnancy, birth and babies. For me, this is what it is about in the episode. Aeon might have been infected by the virus in the air of the base and she is now captive to her subconscious (unor to the monstrous baby’s belly). She always awakes on a stone table in the base that looks like an operating table, and touches a viscous liquid all around her. All of those elements make me think about a delivery. Furthermore, Aeon passes through all the steps of pregnancy during the different scenes. In one scene she has symptoms that Trevor thinks are because of the flux. In another one she absolutely wants to kill the baby in the cave. In her last awaking, Aeon eventually gives up all resistance to this endless situation incarnated by the dark-haired boy who has followed her all through the episode. The last scene opens in a car, in a world that is similar to ours. The dark-haired boy is in the passenger side, wearing baseball equipment. He leaves the car to run towards a baseball ground, followed by Aeon, who is dressed in jeans and T-shirt and smiling at him.

We are never told what really happens in the episode, whether those fantasies are a product of Aeon or of the Evil force that is in the underground facility. However, several hints are given to make us understand we are in a dream-like atmosphere, where non sense coexist with sense. At one moment, Trevor makes Aeon eat pasta that looks like a brain! What is funny, is the fact that the viewer precisely witnesses the change in Aeon’s brain.  At first, the baby (who might be a failed experiment) is surrounded by a contaminated air, a virus that gets people “happy”. Finally it appears, in another of her fantasies, that, according to Trevor, there is no virus in the air. She somehow acknowledges (or is been pushed to do so) that being pregnant is not a disease. In her third “dream” she is told by Trevor that she is the most important thing to his eyes and that he is in love with her, symbolizing, I assume, her need to have a father for her baby.

I like the fact that motherhood is described not as something natural and instinctive to women but rather like something that is engraved in them under exterior pressure. Here, Aeon is almost forced to be a mother by this boy who says to her “I want you” and who manipulates her senses so that she eventually acknowledges him. As the title (which means “time-consuming”) suggests, Aeon is literally taken out of her life by motherhood.