Nobody recognized the inspiration for Pardo’s speech in panel 3, which is shown above. I tagged in to write Pardo’s lines, and was maybe being a little unfair to 2006 Clooney by using (some of) his words… I get the point he’s making in that acceptance speech, and it’s true you can’t always follow the crowd. But there is a certain… infuriating self-satisfaction to Clooney’s sentiment, too, especially since the last fifteen years of history has shown how sorely influential liberals underestimated certain political cults.

What an art this art is. We slip into less extreme trapezoids, partly to accommodate the transition back to the capital and partly to centralize panel 2, with its Dutch angle and its tilty inserts for our four 8-O faces.

Syr’Nj in panel 3 has no rational basis to be more worried now than she was twenty years ago. But she has a bad feeling. Flo’s comment here:

This is honestly what’s been keeping me stuck for such a long time. How do we get Syr’Nj into the action quickly without making it Deus Ex Machina?

Eventually I reasoned that Syr’Nj is a natural worrier, and she knows how dangerous their situation is and there is just a point where she can’t sit by and not help fight herself, politics be damned.

She’s a woman of action, and always will be.