The Testee Has Become the Tester – Chapter 8, Act 1, Strip 15

The testing sequence to which Mopey alludes occurred in this strip, with Gregory as the subject of the test, rather than being the one administering it.

And, yeah, Gregory is kind of out of his depth with his current function as a scientific assistant. He kind of moved up into that slot within the team hierarchy due to the vacancy occurring at the very top – when it comes to this type of hierarchic organizational structure, the old chestnut about a rising tide lifting all the boats actually holds true. But of course Gregory’s academic career was interrupted at an early date when he suffered a fatal accident, and the various events that happened since then definitely left him with little time to pick it back up again – even discounting the administrative difficulties that would have been involved with getting a “deceased” status in his student file reversed. Fortunately, B-movies are generally very vague on the subject of academic qualifications, so he should be able to get by on improvisation and imitation. Especially since, as the example linked above amply demonstrates, Professor Dr. himself often resorted to those time-honored methods.

And I do see some definitive value in Gregory’s line of inquiry, and have to disagree with Mopey on that point. Not that I’m trying to defend the quality of the scripts around here (which would be quite a challenge), but I think Mopey is overlooking how big a part zombies have come to play, over the last decade, in popular culture in general. These days, they really could show up in pretty much any plot in any genre – and so, making doubly sure that the mysterious meteorite is not a zombie at the same time does make perfect sense. In how far this specific set of tests actually helps with that would be more questionable – but it has the absent Professor Dr.’s scientific authority behind it, which was absolute within the fictional universe, so that’s not really a question anybody is going to ask.

More on Monday.