In which everybody has plans for the first day of school.
In the author’s note to one of her books, Connie Willis suggests that all the best stories with heartwarming/uplifting endings have a moment not long before the ending where it seems that every chance of a happy ending has been destroyed. Here we are now at that point in Rys’s story.
The horrifyingly plausible thing about Agent bar’Obin’s revelation is that although we know enough about Rys Lin pen’Chala before he fell into the hands of the Department to know he wasn’t the kind of person who would want to destroy a shipload of Terrans (including a friend) because one of them mistreated him, we also know enough about the Department to know that he might have become such a person by the time they were done with him.
PA: have a moment not long before the ending where it seems that every chance of a happy ending has been destroyed
In that, she is merely echoing Tolkien’s theory of eucatastrophe, a word he coined from the Greek for “good” and “destruction.” Here is only part of what he had to say about this word: “I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce).” –Letter 89
In his essay “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien declares its inverse, which is what Willis refers to: “It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance.”