Annotated 10-13
“I thought you didn’t like my spending so much time down here,” says HR. Carol, if you think he’s been down here a lot in the scenes we’ve done so far, you ain’t seen nothing yet. I mean yeah, that’s one way for him to browse his NSFW Frigg-Best scenes without employees interrupting, but still.
This must’ve happened overnight from HR’s perspective, because there’s no way he and Carol would only be finding out six hours after the fact otherwise.
Here’s an earlier draft of the ending panels that I thought might amuse you:
3. H.R. looks contemplatively at the tanks some more, seemingly his favorite activity.
Carol: I’m sorry.
H.R.: Don’t be. This is an opportunity to learn more about this world they inhabit… and the terms on which they inhabit it.
4. H.R. turns away from his (apparent) admiring understudy, who smiles gently as he goes. Despite his words, he seems in full emotional control of himself. But this is not happy news.
Carol: That’s a very zen way to look at it.
H.R.: Keeps me from crying.
Is that virtual world in the Community clip a reference to that Freakazoid! episode? There was a pterodactyl and everything.
I wouldn’t put it past Harmon or the team.
Both the Community episode and the Freakazoid episode and a lot of other things reference the 1991 VR game Dactyl Nightmare: https://www.arcade-history.com/?n=dactyl-nightmare&page=detail&id=12493
That is one hell of a deep cut.
I don’t remember this episode. Apparently I need to go back and watch the goodness and awesomeness that is Community.
It’s been so long I forgot that HR wanted them to die. And here I thought he manipulated Harky’s actions so that their corpses would be dragged away from Souf Karal to be burried in one piece and not dismembered or burned or dissolved in quick lime.
Does he want them to die on Earth, or just in Arkerra? I took this panel to mean they hoped a “game” death would cause them to disconnect, so they could be taken out of the tanks.
I wonder though – is that possible at this point? Eventually they go on living in Arkerra with no living form on Earth. Have their consciousnesses already irreversibly crossed over?
From what I recall his theory at this time in the comic was that their game death would enable being able to take them out
And that matches with the “precautions” against them being resurrected and how Bandit apparently just respawned and thought nothing of it.
And then it didn’t work.
HR’s comment that they’re “running out of time” might also be a concern about how long he can actually continue to keep their bodies alive.
If the readouts are measuring game activity rather than brain activity than I suppose the spike still makes sense.
[examines spikes in graph]
“Yep, they were definitely boning in there”
I never thought of that, amusing as it is.
Now I wonder where he got that giant magic book.
Was the “those brainwave charts are fake” a retcon? Seems a bit unnecessary that they would have been fooling each other…
They weren’t fooling each other– Carol was never anything but honest with HR (except about her growing doubts about the whole thing), though she worked with less and less supervision as his interest in his own company retreated. HR gave her some activity logs to monitor and told her they were brainwave activity. He may have felt he was just simplifying things for her, but letting her believe that the five were showing brain activity meant letting her believe that restoring their health was far more important to him than it was.
I won’t pretend we had that part of the story worked out at this stage (again, we were a long time figuring out how important Carol would be to the climax), so I guess it depends on how you define “retcon.”
I always thought the “these aren’t brainwaves” thing wasn’t to say “these are fake” but that “these are measuring something that isn’t brain waves.” Like, aethereal resonance or something. Was I misunderstanding?
Yeah, same. Like HR was tracking “game avatar motion” as a proxy for brain activity, figuring “that’s basically the same thing” when in fact it was not, they’re totes deceased, and you have a spurious correlation b/c Arkerra is actual for reals.
To me that is the only explanation for how HR could deal with this morally: “I didn’t kill them, they chose this, and look – they live on in a better (cooler, anyway) place. I gave them this. I am awesome, not unlike a god, actually. So, now, I want to try.”
At least, that’s what’s in my head.
No, that covers it pretty well. But the fact that they weren’t biological brainwaves and he told her that they were…
Thanks! I guess it turns out a bit confusing, when HR has tricked Carol into monitoring something that isn’t what she thinks it is, but it’s still something that is relevant to HR. Not in a bad way, really, I just overlooked something that would have made the finale better for me. Gotta go revisit it, but maybe I’ll just wait until we get there the natural way :D
I wouldn’t consider it a retcon. HR has great faith in his magic (if not so much his ability to control it) – he wouldn’t see the lack of brainwaves as proof that the Five are truly dead, not when they have character activity. But would Carol? Certainly, it’s not likely that she would betray his trust, especially if he was still confident that they were at least alive, but she would still likely find the lack of brainwaves to be incredibly troubling. So why trouble her unnecessarily?
I’d expect that the later decision to confirm that these were not, in fact, brainwaves, was more about showing Carol how bad her blind faith in HR was. Showing her that her faith in him was not, in fact, completely reciprocated.
The version of the dialogue that made the final panels is much better, gotta say.