Didn’t stick the landing – Chap. 5, Act 4, Strip 22

Yes, young Padawan, you still have a lot to learn. When Mopey reached the platform just seconds too late, but still in time to see the train pulling out of the station, there wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in her mind that Dr. Dutchman Fu was on board that train – after all, if you’re living in a B-movie world, what’s the point in barely missing a train if it isn’t carrying anything important? If it doesn’t matter that you missed it, you could just as well have been in just in time, couldn’t you?

But, apparently, only the Professor is allowed to draw that sort of conclusion from the similarities between his reality and a movie plot – Mopey is seemingly still susceptible to the randomness of a unscripted (and unrehearsed) world.

And in that world, Dr. Dutchman Fu just happened to be in the restroom when the team crashed the station. Statistically, that was likely, given how much of his time he spends in restrooms, and how surrounded by temptation he seems to be in that particular train station.

And naturally, our friends didn’t waste a thought on checking the restrooms, since they didn’t even know of their existence – nobody ever has to use a restroom in a B-movie world, so usually there aren’t even any. I think the last time a restroom showed up in this comic was in the second chapter, and only because somebody got murdered in one. No idea why Dr. Fu is such an exemption to that otherwise ironclad rule – but I suspect he picked up the habit in some B-comedy he might have worked in earlier.

And yeah, Dr. Fu’s henchmen have been ret-conned to Quebecois trappers. When I originally wrote the chapter, Ukrainian cossacks seemed like a sufficiently harmless, random choice – I didn’t expect the area to turn into a hotspot so suddenly. But right now having Ukraininan villains might read as some sort of political commentary without being intended as such, therefore the change. And, since it’s still a B-movie comic, it can be easily explained in-universe with being an artefact left over from a shoddy script rewrite. XD

More on Thursday.

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