Annotated 15-24
>HR may have set himself up for failure by telling us his plan, but he redeems himself a bit here by moving his Plan B into place (or, well, it’s probably Plan D or E at this point) and just giving us enough of a hint to guess at it.
Phil’s tongue-in-cheek ending to the scene, where we assign our greatest dramatic weight to what HR is ordering for lunch, still makes me chuckle. Yeah, the spice is a metaphor, but even so.
There’s a Sawatdee Thai in our area and numerous Sawatdee locations around the country (the word loosely means “Greetings and may blessings be upon you”), but I think the specific name “Sawatdee Bistro” is our invention. I didn’t really want to hear from any small business owners worrying that our associating their food with our villain would hurt their business. Sounds implausible, maybe, but there was that time I heard from a real person who had a name that I had assigned one of my characters, derived from a series of puns.
If last panel didn’t let you know shit was getting real, nothing ever will.
Like, fiery bowel real.
Now, just so I’m clear, HR and Carol both think the Five are still “here” and alive in the support tubes, right? I know Carol always thought this was about bringing them back out, but I’ve been unclear on what HR was aware of and what his goals were at this point, given what happens later.
Apparently Tolkien received a shocking letter from a guy named Samuel Gamgee who had heard that there was a character named after him in Tolkien’s book. He told the guy that he had invented the name without knowing that there were any real Sam Gamgees out there, but that his accidental namesake was a hero he could be proud of. He later joked that it would have been harder had the letter come from S. Gollum.
Hah, I remember that. It also turned out that “gamgee” was an old name for cotton wool — which I’m sure he knew.
Not only was Tolkien aware of what “gamgee” means, he explicitly notes in Appendix F that “no reference was intended to the connexion of Samwise with the family of Cotton, though a jest of that kind would have been hobbit-like enough, had there been any warrant in their language.”
What’s the metaphor?
I liked HR. He was the sort of character that I wish I could discuss with people. In the whole script he was the only one that got a glimpse of the sun outside the cave, and from the perspective of everyone inside it was increasingly obvious that it had broken him.
The specifics of his arc are so unspecific in that Lovecraft sort of way that even to a reader he looks like a standard “temptation of power” villain, but I think it’s as much about the irrelevance of everything in the cave as it is about the desire to be outside.
Clearly neither you nor Phil are actual fans of actual Thai food, because if you were actual fans of actual Thai food, you’d know that the appropriate way to place such an order is to ask for it to be prepared “Thai-hot”. (As in “mild”, “medium”, “hot”, “Thai-hot”. The Eleven of spiciness.)
I make it a point to not order ‘Thai-hot’ on my first visit to a joint. I’ll order ‘hot’ to get a feel for the local standards.
As a computer programmer, HR really should have recognized the symptoms of a nascent problem here…
It getting more taxing every time he does it is likely a sign of a memory leak or background threads failing to exit. Either that or he’s got an O(n^2) algorithm in there somewhere that’s not scaling well. If he’d clued in on that he might have been able to avoid the insanity caused by overheating his processor.
He really should have started by building some system-monitoring tools for his wetware to make sure everything was staying healthy.