jack knowing she was being manipulated tends away from your opinion, not toward it. regarding her apparently absent plan, she may have been following nothing more than sound instinct. or nothing. i don’t think it’s clear at all.

doh! i hope you didn’t influence the story with that nanobot theory. darusha, don’t look.

good thing to think of, but i doubt, if things are that advanced, that anyone needs to get in jack’s drawers to make it happen. i do hope there are more attempts, regardless.

I suppose screwing a stranger could be the pragmatic thing for a spy to do, in a different circumstance, but in this case it was pretty clear that Jack was just letting herself be played, didn’t have any pragmatic purpose and was probably acting against her better judgement.

My thoughts on why this is dumb: In a world with so much micro-sized tech, a broom-closet encounter would be a perfect opportunity to plant malicious hardware on a person. They swapped saliva: That sounds like an ideal way to introduce microscopic tracking or recording devices, or to deliver tiny capsules full of poison that will crack open in response to a signal. Perhaps Pheonix has just delivered the very mind-controlling nanobots that create the zombies Jack is looking for!

I doubt any of those things is actually the case (since Jack is obviously going to be around for the whole story) but it seems like those are things that she would have thought of. There are a million and one reasons why Jack should be suspicious of a person like Pheonix. Jack puts herself totally in this person’s hands. She lets her guard down and gives complete trust to someone of whom she ought to be wary. Even if Jack hasn’t got any moral qualms with screwing androgynous strangers, she should still be smarter than to make herself so vulnerable to someone who is quite possibly an enemy.

i don’t think jack having sex with a stranger in possible enemy territory necessarily conflicts with her primary purpose, or proves her easily manipulatable where it counts. might be the best action she could’ve taken, serving both her immediate and long term wishes. my only complaint is that there was no wah-wah pedal guitar in the background… and maybe the word “panties” might have been used without sounding gratuitous.

Now I wonder, if Jack is so easy to manipulate, how far is she going to be able to get in cracking this conspiracy? If she’ll let the first person who asks put their hand down her pants, no questions asked (and while she’s in the enemy’s lair, no less) then any potential assassin is going to find her a very easy mark.