Well, our heroes have made it through the pain of having to accept such a shockingly mundane revelation as a deus-ex-machina, and now reap the rewards for their resilience: they get to gloat unabashedly into the general direction of Latho.

Mopey relives, in vivid flashback-colors, how she could follow her triumph unfolding on her cellphone…which has in general replaced observing reality as the preferred way to observe reality. In her defense, this sort of reality would have been difficult to observe in any other way. And with chaos receding, she discovered not only where she, her friends and their common enemy were located relative to each other – she also discovered that she and her friends had practically already surrounded Latho. Which goes to show that chaos can produce convenient coincidence as easily as the more frequently noted inconvenient variety.

And Biff and Snuka have reaped rewards of their own they now get to gloat about: just by organizing* their lives with the help of simple self-help platitudes, Biff got out of having to beat himself up. Which he would have had to do not only metaphorically, which is common, but physically, which is painful. And speaking of painful, Snuka didn’t receive any Gouda to the gonads, which is something he nearly always appreciates.

And while I dissed those self-help rules thoroughly already, I have to admit the following: if you actually follow these simple rules in real life, I can guarantee that you will never get beaten to a pulp by a younger and dumber iteration of yourself. And I can almost guarantee that you won’t be hit in the crotch by a giant wheel of Gouda.** And aren’t both of these things really desirable?

More on Thursday.

* I was going to write ‘reorganizing’, but I’m actually not sure whether Snuka’s live was ever organized to begin with. Biff’s live definitely wasn’t before he got those glasses, but had been ever since.

** Unlike alternate-reality clones, both crotches as well as Gouda do actually exist, so this sort of encounter can never be ruled out completely. I’m moderately confident, however, that such unfortunate incidents are reasonably rare. Population development in the city of Gouda shows no marked deviation from surrounding municipalities, and that would surely be the case if normal handling of Gouda would result in such accidents with any degree of frequency.