#two ships passing in the night as dave filoni put it

[veritascara]

Jacen Syndulla: Answers to All the Big Questions

After the bombshell finale revelation that Kanan and Hera actually had a son, I found myself pouring through all the Kanera moments in the rest of the season again to reassess what was going on between the two of them. In hindsight, I found some things did look different—really different. And the questions Jacen’s existence brought had some reasonably good clues left along the way to help solve them.

Because we’re all dying to know how this green and orange kid came about, right?

So here you go, this is the fruits of my (mostly unscientific) labor. Fair warning, I’m tackling this whole situation from the perspective of a married person, a parent, and a nurse—birds and the bees and all that.

Putting everything below a cut because this got a *little* out of hand.

When did Hera get pregnant/when did Kanan and Hera find the time to have sex?

The short answer: Most likely on Lothal, during Flight of the Defender.

The long answer: Based on what I see throughout the series, there’s no clear evidence that Hera is pregnant before their return to Lothal, although they have had a sexual relationship for many years. Kanan is on edge about their relationship early in season four, and I get the sense that this is an ongoing argument—that after the Zero Hour disaster, he’s been pushing to make their relationship more public and is getting increasingly frustrated with her focus on the Rebellion and busyness, but that’s all there is to it. Hera gives no outward signs that she’s pregnant until the very end of the series (we’ll get to that), and the prisoner uniform she wears in Jedi Night makes a big show of the flatness of her belly.

When the rebels return to Lothal during The Occupation, we finally get a moment to see them in relative privacy. They are romantic and loving as ever and both seem more relaxed away from the larger rebellion. And here we get Kanan’s “Huh, I just realized, it’s been awhile since we spent some time alone” line, followed by Hera’s “And when we do it’s in situations like this” response. While this has been discussed before, it bears repeating that Kanan’s comment is very much ‘parent code’ for “It’s been way too long since we last had sex.” And the disgust in the way Hera states “situations like this” makes it pretty clear that she would much rather be enjoying the kind of situations he’s suggesting as well, rather than the one they’re stuck in.

I don’t know what Kanan’s definition of “it’s been awhile” is, but I do know that even in the healthiest married relationship, there can be phases where busyness and sheer exhaustion take over, and because you have to work, and you have to make sure you keep the kids alive, the something that has to give usually ends up being sex. Before the two of you know it, it’s been weeks and you’re desperate for a little energy and no screaming children (or in their case, troublemaking teenagers) around to interrupt you.

Cue the next day and Flight of the Defender. I don’t know what else to say other that when two parental adults talk about wanting to spend ‘some time alone” one day, and then the next day find themselves child-free for hours without a whole lot to do . . . they do each other.

They had good, old-fashioned sex, okay.

Ta-da! Baby.

Did Kanan know about the baby?

The short answer: Yes! I think there is good narrative evidence to support this.

The long answer: From what we see in the show, he probably knew almost right away. At the beginning of Kindred, we get the beautiful scene where Hera approaches Kanan while he meditates in a field, the morning after Flight of the Defender. They talk about how they keep getting drawn back to Lothal, and Kanan says “There’s more to it, I’m just not sure what.” The next time we see them, Sabine and Hera are preparing for her flight, and Kanan approaches her, now uncharacteristically agitated. It’s still morning, and we can safely assume he has just returned from his meditation. It’s not a huge leap from there to guess that something he learned while meditating, probably regarding why they are on Lothal, has upset him. He immediately launches into an unprovoked argument with Hera regarding the safety of the old u-wing ship and the future of their relationship.

At the time this episode aired, this scene really bugged me. It felt like a forced attempt at creating “will they, won’t they” tension between an already obviously dedicated couple, and seemed drastically out of character for Kanan. But in hindsight, it makes a lot more sense. Fact 1: Kanan was meditating and is a Jedi. Fact 2: Conception usually takes place about 12-24 hours after sexual intercourse. From there we can infer that Kanan has seen or sensed something of their future child—either a vision or perhaps a shift in the Force itself with his conception (remember this is the next morning)—and this sets off a sudden surge of anxiety both for Hera’s safety as well as an unreasonable, but not unfounded, fear that she might put the Rebellion first before their child, just as she has to some degree with their relationship. He waits for her in the ship to talk to her again before she leaves, this time calm and apologetic, like the adult he is, but he never gets the chance to fully explain himself. She kisses him, and then has to leave rapidly before the Empire arrives.

The next evidence I see is Kanan’s reaction to Hera’s crash and capture in Rebel Assault. He tries initially to follow the others back to base, but quickly because too upset, to the point where he turns back alone to try to rescue her. When stopped by the wolves, he is angry and impatient to a degree we haven’t seen before. Even when Hera was nearly killed by Fenn Rau, he was calm and collected, but he’s out of control here, for no apparent reason. The wolves are able to recenter him, and he returns to camp, knowing that he needs Ezra to plan the mission because he can’t think clearly enough to do so. His overblown reaction makes more sense if he either knows about their child or at least the potential for his existence.

Lastly, in Jedi Night, we get this enigmatic line from Kanan: “Hera, there’s something I need to tell you.” Rukh interrupts their moment, and what he needs to tell her is never clarified. He dies before he can bring up the subject again. I can only assume in context that he wanted to tell her something significant, and telling her either about the existence of their child directly or indirectly as some enigmatic Jedi-esque line for her to remember later on would make sense here.

When does Hera know?

The short answer: Likely around the beginning of Family Reunion – and Farewell.

The long answer: As @mandaloriandragontrainer pointed out, at the beginning of this episode, we see Hera down below while Ezra is “talking” in the gun turret to his parents. She briefly touches her abdomen, a gesture we’ve never seen her do before. We see her do this at least once more later in the episode when they are on the bridge of the Imperial Command Center, after Thrawn and Ezra are taken away by the purrgil. This is the first change we get in her behavior throughout the series that is unrelated to her grief over Kanan’s loss and the strongest indicator we have that she knows she is pregnant here—but not the only one. When they go to invade the dome, Hera’s behavior is also significantly subdued. She waits until the last minute to enter the fight to get into the base, and does little physical fighting. When she does fight, it’s purely defensive, and she gets out of harm's way as quickly as possible.

Timing wise, this would also make sense. Unlike previous seasons, which stretched out over months, most of this season occurs in a matter of a few days, with days and nights clearly demarcated. Rebel Assault takes place only about three days after Kanan and Hera have sex, and Jedi Night occurs the next day after that.

From a medical perspective, while a fertilized egg begins developing immediately, pregnancy itself does not begin until implantation of the embryo, which occurs between 5-14 days post-conception. Assuming Twi’leks, as a compatible humanoid species, have pregnancies that are relatively similar to humans, Hera technically isn’t even pregnant until after A World Between Worlds. After that episode, an indeterminate amount of time passes before A Fool’s Hope, probably a few days, as Hera hunts for a way to smuggle herself off Lothal and meet up with their “extended family”—enough time for implantation to have occurred and the pregnancy to have developed enough for advanced Star Wars medical technology to detect it.

We can’t know how Hera would have known to even check for it (if Dave Filoni bothered to think about that); perhaps Twi’leks have specific symptoms that appear sooner than humans, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we see this from her the first moment we see her alone in her own ship, when she would have had a private moment to run a simple medical test.

Why does Hera not have a miscarriage?

The short answer: She wasn’t even technically pregnant yet.

The long answer: As pregnancy does not technically begin until after implantation, you cannot miscarry until after that point. It’s estimated that between 50-80% of conceived embryos actually fail to develop of their own accord and are simply flushed out of the body with menstruation without ever implanting. This is most often the result of genetic abnormalities that prevent further development. But aside from internal factors that cause the embryo’s demise, there is almost nothing else outside of it that can cause its destruction.

The uterus is perhaps the best-protected organ in the body—even better than the heart or the brain. It’s shielded by the pelvis on three sides, sacrum on the fourth, and muscular pelvic floor on the fifth, and it’s cushioned by the bladder and intestines everywhere else. Because an unimplanted embryo has no connection yet to the mother, it cannot be affected by drugs in the maternal system, nor does it have a heartbeat that could be interrupted by electrical shock. It cannot be detached from the uterine wall by trauma, and will just continue floating its merry way down the fallopian tube to its destination, regardless of what is happening externally.

Ultimately, assuming this is the stage of pregnancy that Hera was in, it’s the absolute safest point for her baby during the trauma she suffers in Rebel Assault and Jedi Night, and his development would be completely unaffected.

What if she really was pregnant earlier?

The short answer: It’s still possible that the baby might survive despite the trauma/torture.

The long answer: First trimester miscarriage is a complicated phenomenon that occurs for a wide variety of reasons. Yes, trauma and stress are risk factors for miscarriage, but risk factors are not causes in and of themselves. Even with horrific domestic violence, women do not always lose their pregnancies. The uterus does not rise out of the pelvis until around the second trimester (second twelve weeks of pregnancy), so even a few weeks along, the embryo or fetus is still well protected. Hera’s fight with Rukh is pretty brutal and would pose the biggest single risk, but as long as the uterus was small enough it might be okay. A few years ago there was an uproar when it was found out that Kerri Walsh Jennings won the Olympic gold medal for beach volleyball, a notoriously physical sport, when she was five weeks pregnant (which is three weeks post-conception).

Electrical shocks could pose a theoretical risk by stopping the pulsing of the fetal myocardium, but from what we see, the electroshock torture is designed to be superficial—causing pain upon contact with the skin and by inducing skeletal muscle spasms. It doesn’t penetrate deep enough to affect the victim’s heart, and likely wouldn’t make it deep enough to the uterus either. Being stunned by Pryce would probably be a bigger risk in that regard than the electrical shocks.

The vascular connection offered by the placenta does put the embryo at risk to adverse effects from drugs that can cross the placental barrier, but it is unlikely that a single dose of a short acting psychoactive drug such as the truth serum would have any major teratogenic (birth defect or miscarriage causing) effects.

What points would support an earlier conception date?

There are a couple lines of dialogue where it felt like it would make a lot of sense for Hera to have been pregnant earlier, once in Jedi Night when she first tries to tell Kanan something but gets distracted by his hair, then again later in Dume, when she says “Why did I wait so long to tell him” and “I thought we would have more time.” It’s these lines alone that give me pause and make me wonder if maybe she knew all along in that arc that she was pregnant and simply couldn’t get it out, foolishly thinking that her rescue meant she’d be able to tell him later, at a more private, meaningful moment. Instead she chose to tell him on the fuel pod that she loved him because it was easier for her. This concept is really appealing on an emotional level because it makes much more sense than Hera having never told the man she’s called “love” for years that she actually loved him, and breaking pregnancy news feels awkward even if the best of scenarios. But Kanan’s own response seems to indicate that her reticence to tell him she loves him is true, as do as their earlier arguments.

And beyond those moments, we don’t get a single other visual clue before Family Reunion – and Farewell that Hera has any knowledge of being pregnant—no physical fatigue, nausea, or bloating that we can see, and no abdominal guarding (not even once) or holding back during fight scenes, even though she would have been a few weeks farther along and quite likely symptomatic. And while her belly wouldn’t show for quite a while since she is pretty tall, the show makes a pretty big point about just how flat her stomach is right up until the end. Combining those reasons with the evidence that supports her knowing only in the finale, and I can’t see that being the case.

Well, that’s all she wrote! Ultimately, these are my personal opinions, and they require some fill-in-the-blanks guesswork that others may not agree with. But their relationship arc as a whole and characters as individuals make more sense to me through the lens of what we know at the end, and hopefully some of you will find this useful as well!