While the heroes are busy discussing Biff’s grand idea…or, perhaps, just recovering from the shock that she had an idea in the first place…evil!Gregory is putting his goggles to good use again. Good thing that the original Gregory isn’t able to see this, it would drive his frustration sky-high. He was frustrated enough that evil!Gregory got to profit from the goggles basic protective capabilities. If he knew that evil!Gregory can even access advanced, undocumented features of the goggles – features original Gregory was entirely unaware of – he’d go into conniptions.
The rest of the strip is mostly taken up by a philosophical exchange on the nature of evil. Two distinctly different schools of thought on evil clash, let’s call them pragmatical evil and orthodox evil. Evil!Snuka likely has had a somewhat similar upbringing as the original, and is thus firmly within camp pragmatism – a childhood on the streets would have left him little alternative to pragmatism, and it would have easily become a life-long habit. As far as he was concerned, it would have made the most sense to eliminate the heroes for good in their moment of helplessness – a low risk operation with a high gain in ruling out any future problems for good.
The evil!Professor*, however, is more of a proponent of orthodox evil. While he can and will acknowledge the basic rationality of evil!Snuka’s approach, he still feels that Snuka’s bereft upbringing has permanently robbed him of an ability to appreciate the finer things in life. Victory is more than the mathematical result of comparing two scores – it must be savored in order to experience it fully. Therefore, the Professor is deeply opposed to dealing death quickly and at the first opportunity. In order to truly destroy an opponent, they must be broken psychologically as well as physically, so it’s necessary to beat them down several times over, crushing their hopes over and over again, until death can be delivered as a sweet relief to them. That, in the Professor’s opinion, is the grand masterpiece every practitioner of evil should properly aspire to.
Snuka, for his part, has a pretty good counter-argument in the very poor historical track record of this orthodox style of evil…but, I guess, orthodoxy wouldn’t be orthodoxy if it was open to counter-arguments…
More on Monday.
*Assuming there is any other kind.