Annotated 33-24
Brother Tom was at risk of channeling a bit too much Palpatine (“Everything is proceeding as I have foreseeeeen”) without the wrinkle of this mysterious nobody. It’s been a long time since he’s had to deal with not knowing something that could be important. Everything else in his life is going too right for him to be entirely worried about this mystery, and the fact that Homon’s helping his plans along puts him somewhat more at ease. But still, it gnaws at him. It should.
This bonding through drink probably counts as a callback to Tom’s negotiations with Iwatani. Looks like those are working out pretty well for the latter: Tom is now delivering on his promise to take one of Iwatani’s political rivals off the board, and he personally will not be around afterward to seize his side of the bargain. Indeed, since he foresaw his own death here, it’s hard to say why he made such specific requests of Iwatani, unless he just wanted him to worry and to understand that the Cultists were not his underlings. At any rate, you can’t have payoff on every apparent planting without getting predictable.
There is no way on Earth that Plato scholar HR Dedalus isn’t dropping a reference to The Odyssey in that final panel, there.
Dang, how did I forget this reveal? Yesterday I was thinking, “Is that Iwatani? Is it Ulak?”
Never thought Tom saw ‘everything’ as allot of his plans go up in smoke, just enough to give him a edge. Kinda like the death crystal episode of Rick and Morty.
Not to mention he just rambled that “it’s like a bed time story I’ve heard so often” and then follow it by telling how he had not seen anything in regards the person who made it all possible.
Had he seen this coming to happen, he probably would have been able to make reality to some degree too.
I’m a little lost – who all did Iwatani ask Tom to take out? The adventurers? And how do we know (at this point in the story) that Tom won’t survive?
Iwatani asked Tom to wipe out Pardo’s town and leave Pardo without a power base.
The readers did not, and were not supposed to, know the first time they read this that Tom was not long for the comic; the annotations on the annotated versions assume we’ve all read the entire comic once previously.