Squad 128, you’re my best team
on April 20, 2016 at 12:01 amChapter: The Sensitive Scanner
Characters: Anthony McHenry, David Walkerton, Dina Sarazu, Joyce Brown, Mike Warner, Professor Doc, Sal Walters
Location: Big Boss's office
“Best.”
Dina’s a little petty! Â Probably correct, but petty!
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“You’re my ONLY team.”
“you’re my team with the least dead members.
i miss my son…”
“i mean, *nobody* here is stable, but relatively speaking…”
“No, I’m not … less biased”
The fact that Squad 128 is the best team speaks volumes.
You’ve gotta wonder what was wrong with Robin’s old team.
Too friendly and have a serious deficit in angst.
The team was led by one of those anti-sugar fanatics.
Every comment here so far has been gold.
Dina’s still salty about all those poo emoji-laced texts Joyce sent her.
Salt across timelines, now that’s the serious kind of salt.
Timelines AND time.
WARNING: may contain hyperdimensional tesserasodium
..wait a minute, how would those links even work on Semme’s 2003-era 28.8k dialup connection??
Slowly.
Honestly, I assumed all those dinosaur facts were what drove Joyce to instability in the first place.
And here I thought SEMME policy was to put unstable agents into the field.
Yeah okay so Dina is more stable. She is a member of SEMME. So she’s more stable than Mike, or Walky, or Joyce.
This is not a good comparison.
That’s like saying I’m less evil than Trump or Cruz, not setting the bar very high (or very low for a limbo contest).
She’s the most least unstable.
Squad 128 are always talked up as the best team, and frankly if they’re the best I don’t want to see the others.
The other squads are cannon fodder, they distract the aliens so the “best” squad can survive.
The funny thing is we have and they’re almost universally better than Squad 128.
The odd thing is that 128 doesn’t even have to be the best for the plot to make sense, so why does it keep getting brought up? What made that informed attribute necessary?
Well they are the team that gets things done, and I think that has to count for something.
Dear Big Boss, if you want to determine the psychological fitness of one of your troops, it might be a good idea to solicit the professional opinion of an actual psychologist.
Jeph Jacques hadn’t yet ruined things for all webcomics at this point, so Willis was able to let it slide.
What?
I really wanna know what the heck you’re talking about.
Jeph Jacques, at a certain point, started having some of his characters go to psychologists, the joke here being that until he did this webcartoonists were able to have their characters angst without worrying about what it would be plausible for them to do about their psychological health.
I really don’t like Walkyverse Dina that much, but I don’t think she’s being petty here, only afraid of losing Walky.
She’s barely even that. Mostly, she’s just correct.
I mean, I realize how the comic is trying to frame it, but no, Joyce very clearly isn’t stable. At all. Ever. She’s not even really stable in DoA.
Right, but that’s not WHY she’s saying Joyce isn’t stable. Telling the truth because you want to hurt others is still petty.
Or, if you’re taking your cues from Mike.
It was a loaded question and Dina should have known better if she didn’t have nothing to lose. Of course Joyce is not stable, ever. She’s still an enormous asset to the team and her very instability had saved the teams out of entirely hopeless situations. Being correct is not the same as being right, especially when it’s a personal bias what traces the line.
Do the other teams even have proper super powers?
Well, Robin has superspeed.
Some of them do? Jim from squad… whatever the fuck squad he’s in has that Tasmanian Devil thing he does, and I think Hooks was super strong or something.
If they’re an abductee, then they have some sort of super power, I think is the rule? Since that was the whole point behind the abductions to begin with.
…that’s what I want to say, but there’s a whole bunch of abductees who I can’t recall showing off special powers. Did Dina ever demonstrate any? She couldn’t take two normal humans she was right on top of. Did Joe? Can you fight [SPOILER]s by being a supernaturally good lay?
Joe got awesome mechanical engineering skills, as I recall.
Not even skills, he’s got a raw talent for building the impossible from random civilian market parts we had commercially available in this time period, let alone what SEMME could provide him.
It was decided at one point (if I can find that particular strip with the note, again) that all abductees had some level of super-strength, as I recall.
That includes Joe, even though he’d never really shown any indication of being stronger than any other abductee, and is shocked when (spoilers) he sees Sal leap from (more or less) the top floor of the SEMME building, through the window.
…then again, it IS Sal. Never mind. 😀
Joyce face in panel 4 kind of breaks my heart…
This is when it seems Dina is dead, but really she is in a cocoon under Jamaica Bay.Right?
The only thing that makes you guys the best as that the other crews are all redshirts.
I think this summarizes why SEMME took so long to end this; the team of the incredibly lucky but ineffectual manchild, his psycho-murderer sister, his cute crush who’s psychosis is too ‘useful’ to cure, and the powerless brit are, somewhow the ‘best’ team?
Oh, and Mike, but really, he feels more like an additional (and intentional) hurdle than a team member 😀
“They’re the best!”