Well, this strip should provide an amount of relief to everyone who was worried that literally everything about Biff had been subject to massive change.
One thing, at the very least, has not changed: Biff’s inexplicable ability to cause fireworks incidents on December 31st (or whichever update day is closest to that in any given year =P) – in fact, this ability seems to be as pronounced as ever, and more inexplicable than ever before. Even while he’s anxiously* waiting for the outcome of the ray experiment, and seemingly fully concentrating on that, he somehow makes some of the guns on Admiral Watanabe’s flagship, probably cruising somewhere in the Pacific, misfire.
With the added mystification that Admiral Watanabe’s flagship actually only stocks HE, AP and APCBC ammunition for its main guns, and no fireworks shells. In fact, I doubt that anybody ever produced any fireworks shells for those 14″/45 calibre guns – which is too bad, since they would have been awesome! Normally, of course, the Admiral would have been pretty angry at this sort of incident – he is really strongly in favor of everything on his ship being ship-shape. But today he’s actually going to let it slide. He’s as unable as anybody to come up with a rational explanation how Biff manages to do this, but he’s rational enough to accept the basic fact. He’ll just add it to his long, long list of grudges against Biff, the team, and the world in general.
Given the length that list already has, a single new entry will hardly affect his emotional state – so he’ll likely have a good start into the new year, in any case. And that’s the same thing I hope all of you will be having: HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!
More on Monday.
* An eagerness solidly grounded in sober scientific curiosity, I’m positive. Even if it’s hard to tell, from the outside, from the eagerness which old-style!Biff would have displayed in the same situation – in that case, grounded in the hope that something might explode or otherwise do something spectacular and interesting.