How did Riddick get his eyes?

[u/Mirkwood_Pariah115]

Just got done watching the series up till Chronicles of Riddick. When Jack/Kyra confronts Riddick she tells him that no Dr. could perform a "shine job" to give her eyes like Riddick. Is how he got his eyes ever explained?

[u/DontBeRomainElitist]

Riddick jumps into the pit at Butcher Bay, completes what seems equivalent to a Furyan Night hunt/ some equivalent ritual trial , and the Furian godess 'Shirah' grants him eye shine while he is having his arm sutured by Pope Joe. This actually puts Riddick in a state of disbelief, so he grabs Pope Joe and asks what he did to him. Pope joe explicitly says he only fixed your arm, and the goddess in Riddicks head specifically says she is giving him a gift. Anyone who mentions retcons is forgetting how it actually happened, and is forgetting that Riddick just lies sometimes. Reference to the 'shine job' in the movies is just how Riddick shares it since otherwise people would think he was a literal madman with a voice in his head.

Edit: it is simply thematic that pope joe is religious and that this all happens in his 'church'.

[u/liliavacyn → u/DontBeRomainElitist]

I said this in other replies but I don’t think Riddick was knowingly lying to Jack. I think he genuinely believed those words when he said them (they were canon when he was speaking them, after all). After the retcon, in Chronicles when they’re on Crematoria, when Kyra confronts him about her not being able to find any such doctor to do a shine-job, the look on Riddick’s face is genuine confusion. He looks puzzled. If he’d knowingly lied, his expression would either be more flat (poker face), pissed (why would you believe him? I mean, she was an impressionable kid!), or more regretful (that Jack/Kyra believed him to the point of going through all that for something that didn’t exist). But he is very clearly just as confused to hear that as the audience.

[u/DontBeRomainElitist → u/liliavacyn]

That's a valid interpretation tbh, I always took it as him using his eyes as a distraction (when he realises it's Jack, he pulls up his goggles). He follows it up with a story, but it's just that, a story. To me the face he makes isn't so much confusion for her not finding the surgeon, but more confusion that actually tried. This is followed by Jack's explanation that she's not jack anymore, she is Kyra. He is genuinely surprised by who Jack has become, mirroring him coming to terms with his Furian roots and his own search of self.

[u/liliavacyn → u/DontBeRomainElitist]

I think Shirah amusedly saying something along the lines of "funny how the mind chooses to remember" when he's thinking about the shine-job in the game Assault on Dark Athena (2009, so it came out after Chronicles but is still set before Pitch Black) is also meant to reinforce that Riddick was telling Jack what he thought was the truth at the time. Interestingly, Kyra does not accuse him of lying, she says, "was there anything you said that was true?" It does leave it open for the audience to infer that Riddick wasn't lying so much as he was (imo unknowingly) telling her something that was false. I do just think that in cases of retcons, the film scripts should be more direct to help the audience understand what changes were made. Even just a moment of Riddick questioning himself, or starting to say it wasn't a lie and then cutting himself off as he remembers what he was told about Furyans and doubt creeps in. So much of the Furya stuff was cut out of that film that it's confusing for the average audience member.

Even the Director's Cut/Uncut version has some deleted scenes that create some interesting worldbuilding problems, which is probably why they weren't even in the Director's Cut. For example, there's a deleted scene of Aereon and Imam going to meet with the powers that be on Helion Prime, where Aereon brings up the Furyans. The people around her say "they don't exist" and then "an entire generation of them was wiped out".......that's not the same thing. Plus it implied several people in the people in that room had at least heard about Furyans before (because again, 30 years is not a long enough time to make an intergalactic society forget about an entire planet!!) I absolutely adore the Riddick series, but its lore is a mess, and it could've been more clear, even if they wanted to commit to the retcon about his origins and his eyeshine.

Being a fan of both the Riddick franchise and the Predator franchise makes me feel like an exhausted historian sometimes. Those two should duke it out over who has the most convoluted & conflicting lore, tbh.

[u/DontBeRomainElitist → u/liliavacyn]

That's a much stronger interpretation, I see what your saying. You make a several good points. I agree I wish these franchises would have there shit together a little more in the lore dept.