So here the Professor is seen doing what the Professor does best: Scientific research – B-movie style. I tried to cover the core elements: meaningless gauges, electric discharges and torture in the name of progress – just what science is all about, in the mind of Hollywood scriptwriters.
The final line of today’s strip is actually a quote from H. G. Wells’ “The Island of Dr. Moreau”. In full, the eponymous character states: “To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter. The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature. I have gone on, not heeding anything but the question I was pursuing.” Dr. Moreau tends to get, unfairly, bunched up with other so-called ‘mad scientists’ in fiction, but he actually seems to be quite sane – he is just completely amoral in his pursuit of knowledge, that’s about all. He is not unaware of ethics, he just is convinced they don’t apply to him in his scientific research. (Unsurprisingly, all the movie adaptations turn him into a much less ambigous character, just a stereotypical ‘mad scientist’.)
Professor Dr. having this little Moreau moment concludes the second act of the current storyline, the killer zombie’s on the loose again, and, as in every B-movie, it now has to get a lot worse before it can get any better.
More on Monday, and please vote.