A plan two decades in the making
on July 22, 2014 at 12:01 amChapter: The Big Sleep
Characters: Head Alien, Jason Chesterfield, Joyce Brown, Mike Warner, Sal Walters, Steve Walkerton, Tony McHenry
And of course the villain gets to monologue his evil plot while the heroes figure out what’s going on. Look who’s getting fancy with panel layout?
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So it’s been a couple of years since I read the archives, but can someone refresh me? The reason Walky and Sal are not affected is because they aren’t normal abductees, right? They are actually part martian?
It’s because they’re too cool for school.
I don’t recall that Sal was abducted. She’s technically Sal Walters at this point, remember?
Walky has similarly been mindwiped.
Is that why there ends up being a ‘Walky is a little bit stronger’ thing (if I remember right)? He was abducted, plus the other reason they’re both special, but Sal wasn’t abducted?
I really can’t afford the time for another archive binge… :/
Head Alien intentionally left the Walkerton Twins non-zombied because they’re the strongest, and he wanted his strongest minions to join willingly– because zombies are not very useful for tasks that may eventually require thinking.
Not sure how Joyce being mind-wiped makes her immune to this… whatever it is, but I’ll roll with it.
Maybe when she had her mind wiped repeatedly, it also erased the mental program which would have also placed her in a coma.
But wouldn’t Head Alien have thought of-
Oh right, he’s an idiot.
He’s the type of guy who could miss a small but key detail like that.
Head Alien manipulates Joyce into voluntarily mindwiping herself completely, though this removes the Year Zero trigger in her mind…
Perhaps he did it just to make Walky feel miserable? The “first” scenes with Joyce and Walky together do gain more meaning with a bit of backstory revealed much later, and Head Alien would have a motive to break Walky’s spirit specifically…
The important thing to remember is Head Alien will always, always pick making his enemies suffer over the smart, practical option. Hell, he obtains friggin’ godlike power and basically just sits around for a while fucking with SEMME until he’s defeated.
Wack’d gets it in one, I think.
This is a plot to have a whole army of abductees take over the world. Maybe whether or not Joyce was one of them didn’t seem like a major concern.
When Joyce voluntarily mindwiped herself, it was a full memory wipe and she forgot everything about who she was (though this didn’t seem to effect functional things like speech and how to dress herself or tie shoes).
Whenever the others were mindwiped as kids, it was only a partial wipe of the time they were abducted, not their full memories. I think that might be the key difference.
Actually, I think I remember reading that after her mindwipe, she did need to have things like speech and walking programmed back into her brain by Doc. I cannot find that one off hand, because screw 4 years of archives, I need to wake up in about 4 hours.
I get the impression later that the mind-wipers have power level settings (kinda like the ones from MIB). Several people later get hit with them (including Grace and Tony) and neither one ends up a blank slate – instead it seems like they lost a few hours, maybe a couple of days.
I mean, the main use of the mind-wiper is removing an abductee’s treatment session. I think people would have noticed if hundreds of kids suddenly got reset.
Joyce clearly did more than that. She must have had it on the highest setting.
MINDWIPER™
Settings:
– Off
– “Did I leave the gas on?”
– Anniversary
– Important term paper/business report
– How to tie shoes
– Identity
– Saw pre-marital hanky panky
I think Jason should follow the First World War method of blocking chemical agents.
It’s pissing in a rag and covering your face with it.
I just really want to see a guy in a bow tie with a piss soaked rag on his face.
So why didn’t HA just give his minions the “nigh-superhuman powers”?
Seriously, they could use the boost.
Because he doesn’t care for his minions and he needed those kids so they could use their special powers to mentaly access Alien tech. Those helmets that Aliens wear are there to allow them to live on Earth (air is poisson to them), but it also allmost completly blocks their mental ability to interface with their own machines. So he needed somebody that doens’ have to wear helmets, human kids, and he gave them the ability to control Alien tech. Also he brainwashed them so they could be mindcontroled.
Hm, I just thought it was because The aliens were dumber than dirt. Makes sense though.
“you had your mind wiped, remember’?
Ah, yeah, sure. “That’s right, so I did, how could I forget that?”.
The layout is indeed stylish, and really nicely done: a solid alternative to the usual simple “caption voiceover.” This is a really good time to pull something like this, too, at a point where both threads of action are fairly simple and predictable, so experimentation like this isn’t too confusing.
….. Nope, still not very threatening.
Wait, Beef AND Walky were abductees? Huh, strange I figured being abducted was Walky’s ONLY qualificaiton while Beef has actual usable skills and talents.
At this point, as far as anyone knows, only Beef was an abductee.
Originally posted:
January 10, 2000
“Your mind was wiped though, remember?”
“Obviously not. Are you dumb or something?”
“………………Apparently.”