- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
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- She/Her
By the way, there's a notable typo in the queue. The review up on Patreon is for SCP-5031, but the queue says SCP-5013
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Top Level Canon Reviews - relaunched!
- Thread starter Leila Hann
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- Review
All Night Laundry (chapters 3-5)
- Location
- Patriarchova
This review was commissioned by @skaianDestiny
The following chapters of "All Night Laundry" don't get any less mind-blasting than the first two. If anything, the more one learns about what's going on in the story, the harder it is to make sense of it all. For multiple reasons.
First - and with massive kudos to the author - this story succeeds where many others fail in portraying a "monster beyond human comprehension" as actually beyond human comprehension. The time-warping, observer-effect-feeding maggot entity that Bina eventually comes to call "the botfly" has rules that it works by, but the reason and method behind them remains totally opaque. At the same time, the botfly isn't infallible or invincible. It HAS limitations. You can learn over time what it can and can't do. It's just mindbogglingly hard to understand how and why it can or can't do those things.
Second, while Bina was introduced as an everywoman young adult protagonist, it becomes clear over time that she's much stranger than she initially appeared. It's not clear if she was always like this, or if being implanted by a parasitic outgrowth of the Botfly changed her...in part because the changes that this things make to the world are often retroactive. We get more interludes of Bina's childhood and teens as time goes on, and she's gotten up to some mightily strange things over the years even before Piotyr the dog starts appearing in her memories from before it was ever born and we see Bina's six year old self wearing decorated armbands to hide her alien parasite scars.
Is reality actually changing behind her, though, or is it just her memories? Is it some of both? Like I said, everything increasingly pushes up against the borders of human understanding.
And then, there's what Bina does during the events of her actual one-on-one time war itself. And ohhhhh boy.
Like, take this sequence from the end of chapter 3. After fleeing from Gregor (the botfly's murderous human lackey/worshipper who runs the laundromat), Bina finds herself hiding in an office trailer in the construction site out back. Inside, she finds the dead body of a construction worker who must have gotten in Gregor's way earlier that evening. And, when she tries to investigate, the body and blood start warping in and out of reality.
Interacting further - in particular, bringing her infected hand in contact with the crime scene elements - causes Bina to be transported back in time to the point at which Gregor - due to other transtemporal events that Bina's gambit with the botfly caused - was sent on the course that led to him murdering the man. Bina decides to try and save the construction worker by cutting a warning into the picture hanging on the wall, which leads to her discovering...this:
Until the moment that she involved herself with the events taking place around the laundromat, Bina was a person. From that moment onward - and, retroactively, backward as well - she has been thirteen people and counting. Some of them died very early on. Others have had partial successes, and left caches of supplies and information like this one for herselves.
On one hand, knowing that this was originally a quest, this is a really cheap way for the QM to throw the players a bone or drop them much-needed exposition when the circumstances wouldn't otherwise allow.
On the other hand, knowing that this was originally a quest, this is a completely fucking brilliant way for the QM to throw the players a bone or drop them much-needed exposition when the circumstances wouldn't otherwise allow.
And it doesn't stop at just quantum schizo-conversations written on walls. A minute later, when Bina's changing of the timeline in a way that effects her own past and future causes violent seizures from her brain glitching out while something (either the botfly, or a more natural cosmic force) drags her back to some version of the "present," she gets some...erm...help?
Notably, Bina-12 still has the magic scarf that she pulled out of a childhood memory and used to escape the Corpse of a Day. Presumably, she picked it up from the intertemporal void where she(?) left it. Or else there are several instances of the magic grandma scarf rather than just one.
...
After this whole incident, the comic shows Bina entering the office trailer and not finding any blood or body in it. And then having an epileptic seizure that she fortunately still medicates herself against using the medicine taped to the wall by all the mad scrawling.
I'm not even sure how many different Binas we've been following in the damned comic. At what points other instances of her might have branched off, and if we've occasionally alternated between several of them after those branching timeline points.
In fact, the Bina who appears in person to give "our own" Bina some information in person to her childhood self attending her grandmother's funeral in India not long after this in the comic might be the instance of her we WERE following up until the previous retcon.
Or else that part is just an epilepsy vision as her mind tries to process information from multiple sets of memories, and for some reason imagines it happening as a meeting during her childhood. Who can even tell.
The author/QM must have had one hell of a spreadsheet to keep track of this. Possibly one that exists in more spatial dimensions than the typical software can support.
...
All that is just a couple of scenes from late chapter 3 and early chapter 4, by the way. There's plenty of more sanity-blasting setpieces, this is just the most extreme and illustrative one.
With my description so far, I might be making it seem like "All Night Laundry" is just some nerd's mental masturbation about time travel. I will now take this opportunity to assure my readers that nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, this story's commitment to the human element is not only an important part of its themes, but also the anchor that keeps the reader hooked and invested through even the most baffling mind screws.
Ironically for a story about time travel, this is very much a "coming of age" narrative. Unusually for those, though, it's a grandparent rather than a parent who Bina needs to live up to. To the point where her retconned memories about her grandmother and her retconned memories about talking to herself may actually just be the same thing in different guises. Notably, the memory/dream that she got the scarf in back in chapter 2 comes when Bina is a hapless victim, and it has her grandmother as the wise mentor figure. The next big childhood flashback/dream/whatever comes when Bina has just made the proactive decision to save the construction worker and knowingly change the timeline despite her own fear of the consequences...and this time, the vision has an older version of herself stepping into the wise mentor role after her grandmother's death.
If anything, Bina's parents are portrayed as a coddling, pacifying, neutralizing influence that she needs to push back against in order to get in touch with her grandmother's power, bravery, and self-reliance.
...
I don't think it's a coincidence that Bina is the daughter of small-business-owning immigrants, who sent her to get a four-year degree in a subject Bina rarely even sees fit to mention to the reader. The embodiment of the appearance-obsessed, desperate-to-assimilate model minority stereotype. Bina's grandmother who stayed in India, meanwhile, was a fiery investigative journalist well into her old age, and who fought against her daughter's desire to raise Bina in the liberal mind prison. With the subtext of the botfly embodying millennial lethargy and despair (literally forcing its victims to sit in place amidst a frozen landscape and stare at a screen forever), Bina only stumbling into it because of her parents setting her on this course in life is...well, yeah.
Now that I'm thinking about it from this angle, I wonder what the story is getting at by making the botfly's most prominent minion - Laundromat Gregor - also an immigrant to the west who has a strained relationship with his small business owning family. Or what the symbolism is of Bina kinda-sorta psionically adopting an uncorrupted version of the mutant zombie dog that Gregor works with. Yeah, the story is definitely going somewhere with this, but I don't yet know where.
...
Another area where the story makes sure to stay human and heartful and not just get lost in the high concept scifi weeds is with the introduction of new character Kendra. A traffic cop who Bina meets when she wakes up after her quantum paradox-induced seizure in Gregor's captivity, awaiting their turns to be fed to the botfly.
This sequence presents new kinds of challenges for both Bina and (presumably) the quest participants at the time. Getting Bina's fellow captive to help her would ordinarily be simple enough, given that "locked up together in a serial killer's basement" is the type of situation that encourages erstwhile strangers to cooperate. Unfortunately, Bina is still having aphasia issues in the wake of her recent seizure. And, bringing us back around to the high concept stuff a bit, she's been informed by her future/alternate selves that due to a combination of structural damage and high energy timeline fuckery, the laundromat is going to collapse on top of them within a few minutes of Gregor leaving them alone.
So, getting Kendra to both understand AND BELIEVE this, and thus modifying the timing and nature of their escape accordingly, is both harder and more urgent than it would otherwise be. Good thing Bina also packed herself a lockpick in one of the envelopes she taped up to the wall behind that framed picture, because without that fortuitous "coincidence" it would have been a very hard sell.
Just running away isn't possible, unfortunately, on account of maybe-Piotyr guarding the stairs. This thing seems much bigger than before. Apparently, every time Bina causes a time paradox, that dog monster gets bigger and more powerful. Which might imply that the botfly may actually be benefitting from what she's doing, come to think of it.
Chapter four ends with Bina and Kendra freeing themselves from their restraints, and then fleeing down the ominous hole in the basement floor to get away from Maybe-Piotyr just seconds before the building collapses.
Presumably, this hole (which Gregor left a ladder near) leads down to wherever he can access the botfly's extratemporal lair from. So, going down there is going to be dangerous, even without the ceiling following them, but they don't have a lot of choice.
Something that reassures Bina as she wakes up under the rubble (fortunately, the underground space they fell into is covered in a shallow layer of mud or water, so the fall doesn't kill them) is that she's now saved two people. The construction worker, and also Kendra. In her (mental?) conversation with her previous quantum fork, Bina was told that she doesn't always manage to save Kendra. Her last self did not. In the context of Bina growing to fill her grandmother's shoes, finding the power deferred for a generation, this is a really inspiring moment.
As for what Bina and her new friend finds underground beneath the laundromat and adjacent construction site, well.
...
Bina encountered a question before, possibly poised by herself, possibly by someone else. "What kind of maggot grows in the corpse of a day?" The underground discoveries to come seem to point to a related question. One that Bina might just be too afraid to think about asking.
"What kind of insect lays its eggs in a freshly-killed day?"
...
In the second chapter, Bina escaped from the corpse of a day. In the fifth, she explores its coffin.
There were indications all throughout the story that the construction site behind the laundromat wasn't just doing normal construction. Snatches of glimpsed documents and overheard conversations during the trailer-office scene. Strange details of the site layout and oddities mentioned by the botfly's imprisoned victims glimpsed even prior to that. Now, in chapter 5, it comes together.
The landowner wanted to put in a normal building of some kind here, but the construction crew punched through into a massive hollow space underground. A space that probably shouldn't have been able to bear the weight of the city blocks overhead, but seems to have been doing so anyway. The city government quickly took over the site and suspended further development until they could figure out just what this archae/geological site was, and then (implicitly) the national government took it over from them.
Beneath the breach in the floor of the construction site sits the rusting corpse of the sugar plant. The factory where the early twentieth century scientist performed her quantum electrical generation experiment, on a day that has since been dead and verminous with alien life.
How and why did the ruined factory end up covered up by a half-dozen meters of soil? Unknown. A century certainly isn't enough time for geological processes to do this, and it isn't just built-over the way that cities often build themselves over. Something weird happened with the factory. Either intentionally by the botfly (or, perhaps, the cosmic horror that seeded it there), or as a weird natural consequence of its presence interacting with terrestrial elements.
Something from down here made it up through the breach into the construction site. And somehow got the botfly's hooks into Gregor. Possibly using the dog as a vector, now that I think about it. Since then, Gregor has dug down from the laundromat's basement to create his own entrance to the buried sugar plant, and he's been using that passage to bring victims to a spot where the botfly can pull them into its lair from. This undermining, along with esoteric fallout of Bina's timeloop shenanigans, is probably what ultimately causes the laundromat to collapse into the ground when it did.
When it comes to exotic effects of time-warping on the material environment though, we haven't even gotten to the weirdest part yet.
It's improbably cold down here in the buried ruin. And, after a certain event involving a quantum-entangled television set, Bina realizes that when she exposes her botfly-wound, its eerie green light can reveal "cracks" in the middle of reality. These cracks in spacetime are the sources of the unnatural cold.
And...about it being so wet and muddy down here. The mud and water might have saved their lives from the fall, but Kendra points out that it's the middle of summer. And that it was a clear night. And yet, despite that, it is now raining cats and dogs, with the breach in the construction site overhead being the source of the water creating all this wetness.
The cracks in time are thermoconductive. Energy that comes in contact with them is distributed away across the timeline.
Every loop, every retcon, every mind-warping gambit between Bina and the botfly, has caused the cracks to spread and deepen. Retroactively siphoning more heat away from the "present" and into the past. To the point where it's now created a cold spot strong enough to effect the local weather conditions, causing an unseasonal rainstorm directly overhead.
It was a clear summer night when we started. However, it has now been raining the entire time.
So. Yeah. That's the level of environmental WTF we're operating on.
And yet, within that surreal, highly theoretical backdrop, the problems that Bina has to deal with for most of chapter 5 are very mundane, very visceral, and very humble. First step, after they tumble down into the half-flooded factory shell, is for Bina to make sure she isn't seriously injured, and then to find Kendra. The enemy here is...darkness. Just ordinary, mundane darkness. With only the hungry green light of the botfly shining out of the wound in her hand available to push it back with.
There's an incredibly tense, incredibly page-turning sequence that goes on for quite a while, consisting JUST of Bina trying to find Kendra in the darkness. She doesn't even really know Kendra yet, but she's lonely and scared enough - and her loneliness and fear are transferred effectively enough to the reader - that by the time she's reunited with her it's downright cathartic. I actually breathed a sigh of relief, out loud, in real life.
Well, technically it wasn't just the darkness. It was the darkness, the cold, the fear of open wounds being exposed to so much filthy water with no medical aid in sight, and the possibility of Gregor or the dog being around any corner. Even when Bina hears Kendra's voice again, there's still the problem of underground acoustics making the source of any sound impossible to track down. And Bina still recovering from the aphasia. And the fact that if Kendra looks at the green light, she'll start getting all high and hypnotized and Bina will start to think she can see luminous tentacles reaching out of her wound at Kendra. Resulting in a Marco Polo game in the cold, rubble-filled mud where the echoes are endlessly deceptive, it's pitch black except when Bina unwraps her wound, and Bina can't explain to Kendra why she needs to close and cover her eyes whenever Bina does unwrap her wound.
It's an incredibly strong juxtaposition of power and powerlessness. Struggling through cold mud and broken rebar, even though you have the power of (limited) time travel.
One thing that keeps Bina going through this prolonged sequence of misery and horror is a snippet of conversation with her previous/alternate/older self that remains in her mind:
And, that knowledge is what enables her to pull through until the two finally can cling together for warmth while Bina's ability to speak slowly returns.
Not that the ability to speak is really adequate for all of the information Bina tries to relay to Kendra. Because, uh, well. I consider myself to be quite a good communicator - I do it for a living and all - but I still struggled to make my first "All Night Laundry" review comprehensible.
I feel you there, Bina. I really do.
The big setpiece that chapter five leads up to concerns the television set I mentioned before. It's the same one that was set up in the laundromat, before the laundromat fell into the earth. The one that kept turning itself off and on by itself when Bina was entering the laundromat for the first time, and that she was seeing weird fragmentary images through. It turns out that the reason it kept turning itself off and on is because Bina and Kendra would later find it down here, and Bina would accidentally infect it with the botfly emanations from her hand, causing it to become interlocked with an earlier version of itself. It turns itself off and on down here in the ruins because of Bina messing with it back in chapter one. It kept turning itself off and on back in chapter one because of Bina and Kendra messing with it down here in chapter five.
The botfly seems to have a particular affinity for electrical devices. Makes sense, considering that the ground zero for its infection was an attempted electrical entropy-reverser machine. Whenever Bina puts her hands near an electrical device, it behaves strangely. For instance, back in the office trailer, an open laptop's monitor started displaying ripples of green light when Bina put that hand near it. Various lights and machines have turned themselves off and on when she approached them. Etc.
And this might be important to something that happened back in chapter four, too. See, when the dog-monster cornered Bina and Kendra and forced them to retreat down the hole instead of up the stairs, Bina also saw flashing green lights upstairs behind the monster. The narration described it as "like someone waving a lime green flashlight around." In retrospect, it's pretty clear that Bina will shortly be going back in time and be upstairs in the laundromat with a flashlight in hand at that moment, looking at the Piotyr-monster as it goes downstairs to menace the versions of herself and Kendra down in the basement, right before the collapse.
A theory somewhat validated by the fact that Kendra accidentally's herself back in time while she and Bina are messing with the TV.
Thus forcing Bina to figure out how to "recharge" the TV's intertemporal properties using the botfly's emanations so that she can follow her. Which, sure enough, deposits her a few hours back in time, in the laundromat, where she and Kendra now have to find each other and avoid Gregor again while hopefully not melting their own brains with epileptic time-seizures.
Also, when she travels back through the pattern of reality-cracks that have been spidering out from around that TV, the light of Bina's hand shows that she's breaking them open even further by doing this. And...she grabs a piece of spacetime as she vanishes through the gap.
It feels like a piece of glass, but it absorbs heat and shows glimpses of the underground ruins when she looks in it, no matter where she takes it from this point on.
Presumably, she'll be able to use this broken time-shard to quantum-entangle other things together to create more two-way time bridges. And also probably spread the spacetime corruption even further, fucking up the weather and structural integrity of the nearby objects even more and probably giving the botfly the power to shoot lasers or something, but what can you do.
I did technically include some information in chapter 6 in this review. Because it was that hard for me to stop reading when I reached the end of 5, and ended up going a little bit further.
All Night Laundry might have started out as a quest, but its webcomic incarnation - with its cookie-based retcon system to let readers follow the branching timelines as they wish - elevates it greatly. To the point where I'd say that this is the medium that the story is best suited for, even though it's not the one it started out in.
In fact, this might be my favorite webcomic period now. I never had this much trouble putting Kill Six Billion Demons down.
Read it. Seriously. Just read it.
The following chapters of "All Night Laundry" don't get any less mind-blasting than the first two. If anything, the more one learns about what's going on in the story, the harder it is to make sense of it all. For multiple reasons.
First - and with massive kudos to the author - this story succeeds where many others fail in portraying a "monster beyond human comprehension" as actually beyond human comprehension. The time-warping, observer-effect-feeding maggot entity that Bina eventually comes to call "the botfly" has rules that it works by, but the reason and method behind them remains totally opaque. At the same time, the botfly isn't infallible or invincible. It HAS limitations. You can learn over time what it can and can't do. It's just mindbogglingly hard to understand how and why it can or can't do those things.
Second, while Bina was introduced as an everywoman young adult protagonist, it becomes clear over time that she's much stranger than she initially appeared. It's not clear if she was always like this, or if being implanted by a parasitic outgrowth of the Botfly changed her...in part because the changes that this things make to the world are often retroactive. We get more interludes of Bina's childhood and teens as time goes on, and she's gotten up to some mightily strange things over the years even before Piotyr the dog starts appearing in her memories from before it was ever born and we see Bina's six year old self wearing decorated armbands to hide her alien parasite scars.
Is reality actually changing behind her, though, or is it just her memories? Is it some of both? Like I said, everything increasingly pushes up against the borders of human understanding.
And then, there's what Bina does during the events of her actual one-on-one time war itself. And ohhhhh boy.
Like, take this sequence from the end of chapter 3. After fleeing from Gregor (the botfly's murderous human lackey/worshipper who runs the laundromat), Bina finds herself hiding in an office trailer in the construction site out back. Inside, she finds the dead body of a construction worker who must have gotten in Gregor's way earlier that evening. And, when she tries to investigate, the body and blood start warping in and out of reality.
Interacting further - in particular, bringing her infected hand in contact with the crime scene elements - causes Bina to be transported back in time to the point at which Gregor - due to other transtemporal events that Bina's gambit with the botfly caused - was sent on the course that led to him murdering the man. Bina decides to try and save the construction worker by cutting a warning into the picture hanging on the wall, which leads to her discovering...this:
Until the moment that she involved herself with the events taking place around the laundromat, Bina was a person. From that moment onward - and, retroactively, backward as well - she has been thirteen people and counting. Some of them died very early on. Others have had partial successes, and left caches of supplies and information like this one for herselves.
On one hand, knowing that this was originally a quest, this is a really cheap way for the QM to throw the players a bone or drop them much-needed exposition when the circumstances wouldn't otherwise allow.
On the other hand, knowing that this was originally a quest, this is a completely fucking brilliant way for the QM to throw the players a bone or drop them much-needed exposition when the circumstances wouldn't otherwise allow.
And it doesn't stop at just quantum schizo-conversations written on walls. A minute later, when Bina's changing of the timeline in a way that effects her own past and future causes violent seizures from her brain glitching out while something (either the botfly, or a more natural cosmic force) drags her back to some version of the "present," she gets some...erm...help?
Notably, Bina-12 still has the magic scarf that she pulled out of a childhood memory and used to escape the Corpse of a Day. Presumably, she picked it up from the intertemporal void where she(?) left it. Or else there are several instances of the magic grandma scarf rather than just one.
...
After this whole incident, the comic shows Bina entering the office trailer and not finding any blood or body in it. And then having an epileptic seizure that she fortunately still medicates herself against using the medicine taped to the wall by all the mad scrawling.
I'm not even sure how many different Binas we've been following in the damned comic. At what points other instances of her might have branched off, and if we've occasionally alternated between several of them after those branching timeline points.
In fact, the Bina who appears in person to give "our own" Bina some information in person to her childhood self attending her grandmother's funeral in India not long after this in the comic might be the instance of her we WERE following up until the previous retcon.
Or else that part is just an epilepsy vision as her mind tries to process information from multiple sets of memories, and for some reason imagines it happening as a meeting during her childhood. Who can even tell.
The author/QM must have had one hell of a spreadsheet to keep track of this. Possibly one that exists in more spatial dimensions than the typical software can support.
...
All that is just a couple of scenes from late chapter 3 and early chapter 4, by the way. There's plenty of more sanity-blasting setpieces, this is just the most extreme and illustrative one.
With my description so far, I might be making it seem like "All Night Laundry" is just some nerd's mental masturbation about time travel. I will now take this opportunity to assure my readers that nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, this story's commitment to the human element is not only an important part of its themes, but also the anchor that keeps the reader hooked and invested through even the most baffling mind screws.
Ironically for a story about time travel, this is very much a "coming of age" narrative. Unusually for those, though, it's a grandparent rather than a parent who Bina needs to live up to. To the point where her retconned memories about her grandmother and her retconned memories about talking to herself may actually just be the same thing in different guises. Notably, the memory/dream that she got the scarf in back in chapter 2 comes when Bina is a hapless victim, and it has her grandmother as the wise mentor figure. The next big childhood flashback/dream/whatever comes when Bina has just made the proactive decision to save the construction worker and knowingly change the timeline despite her own fear of the consequences...and this time, the vision has an older version of herself stepping into the wise mentor role after her grandmother's death.
If anything, Bina's parents are portrayed as a coddling, pacifying, neutralizing influence that she needs to push back against in order to get in touch with her grandmother's power, bravery, and self-reliance.
...
I don't think it's a coincidence that Bina is the daughter of small-business-owning immigrants, who sent her to get a four-year degree in a subject Bina rarely even sees fit to mention to the reader. The embodiment of the appearance-obsessed, desperate-to-assimilate model minority stereotype. Bina's grandmother who stayed in India, meanwhile, was a fiery investigative journalist well into her old age, and who fought against her daughter's desire to raise Bina in the liberal mind prison. With the subtext of the botfly embodying millennial lethargy and despair (literally forcing its victims to sit in place amidst a frozen landscape and stare at a screen forever), Bina only stumbling into it because of her parents setting her on this course in life is...well, yeah.
Now that I'm thinking about it from this angle, I wonder what the story is getting at by making the botfly's most prominent minion - Laundromat Gregor - also an immigrant to the west who has a strained relationship with his small business owning family. Or what the symbolism is of Bina kinda-sorta psionically adopting an uncorrupted version of the mutant zombie dog that Gregor works with. Yeah, the story is definitely going somewhere with this, but I don't yet know where.
...
Another area where the story makes sure to stay human and heartful and not just get lost in the high concept scifi weeds is with the introduction of new character Kendra. A traffic cop who Bina meets when she wakes up after her quantum paradox-induced seizure in Gregor's captivity, awaiting their turns to be fed to the botfly.
This sequence presents new kinds of challenges for both Bina and (presumably) the quest participants at the time. Getting Bina's fellow captive to help her would ordinarily be simple enough, given that "locked up together in a serial killer's basement" is the type of situation that encourages erstwhile strangers to cooperate. Unfortunately, Bina is still having aphasia issues in the wake of her recent seizure. And, bringing us back around to the high concept stuff a bit, she's been informed by her future/alternate selves that due to a combination of structural damage and high energy timeline fuckery, the laundromat is going to collapse on top of them within a few minutes of Gregor leaving them alone.
So, getting Kendra to both understand AND BELIEVE this, and thus modifying the timing and nature of their escape accordingly, is both harder and more urgent than it would otherwise be. Good thing Bina also packed herself a lockpick in one of the envelopes she taped up to the wall behind that framed picture, because without that fortuitous "coincidence" it would have been a very hard sell.
Just running away isn't possible, unfortunately, on account of maybe-Piotyr guarding the stairs. This thing seems much bigger than before. Apparently, every time Bina causes a time paradox, that dog monster gets bigger and more powerful. Which might imply that the botfly may actually be benefitting from what she's doing, come to think of it.
Chapter four ends with Bina and Kendra freeing themselves from their restraints, and then fleeing down the ominous hole in the basement floor to get away from Maybe-Piotyr just seconds before the building collapses.
Presumably, this hole (which Gregor left a ladder near) leads down to wherever he can access the botfly's extratemporal lair from. So, going down there is going to be dangerous, even without the ceiling following them, but they don't have a lot of choice.
Something that reassures Bina as she wakes up under the rubble (fortunately, the underground space they fell into is covered in a shallow layer of mud or water, so the fall doesn't kill them) is that she's now saved two people. The construction worker, and also Kendra. In her (mental?) conversation with her previous quantum fork, Bina was told that she doesn't always manage to save Kendra. Her last self did not. In the context of Bina growing to fill her grandmother's shoes, finding the power deferred for a generation, this is a really inspiring moment.
As for what Bina and her new friend finds underground beneath the laundromat and adjacent construction site, well.
...
Bina encountered a question before, possibly poised by herself, possibly by someone else. "What kind of maggot grows in the corpse of a day?" The underground discoveries to come seem to point to a related question. One that Bina might just be too afraid to think about asking.
"What kind of insect lays its eggs in a freshly-killed day?"
...
In the second chapter, Bina escaped from the corpse of a day. In the fifth, she explores its coffin.
There were indications all throughout the story that the construction site behind the laundromat wasn't just doing normal construction. Snatches of glimpsed documents and overheard conversations during the trailer-office scene. Strange details of the site layout and oddities mentioned by the botfly's imprisoned victims glimpsed even prior to that. Now, in chapter 5, it comes together.
The landowner wanted to put in a normal building of some kind here, but the construction crew punched through into a massive hollow space underground. A space that probably shouldn't have been able to bear the weight of the city blocks overhead, but seems to have been doing so anyway. The city government quickly took over the site and suspended further development until they could figure out just what this archae/geological site was, and then (implicitly) the national government took it over from them.
Beneath the breach in the floor of the construction site sits the rusting corpse of the sugar plant. The factory where the early twentieth century scientist performed her quantum electrical generation experiment, on a day that has since been dead and verminous with alien life.
How and why did the ruined factory end up covered up by a half-dozen meters of soil? Unknown. A century certainly isn't enough time for geological processes to do this, and it isn't just built-over the way that cities often build themselves over. Something weird happened with the factory. Either intentionally by the botfly (or, perhaps, the cosmic horror that seeded it there), or as a weird natural consequence of its presence interacting with terrestrial elements.
Something from down here made it up through the breach into the construction site. And somehow got the botfly's hooks into Gregor. Possibly using the dog as a vector, now that I think about it. Since then, Gregor has dug down from the laundromat's basement to create his own entrance to the buried sugar plant, and he's been using that passage to bring victims to a spot where the botfly can pull them into its lair from. This undermining, along with esoteric fallout of Bina's timeloop shenanigans, is probably what ultimately causes the laundromat to collapse into the ground when it did.
When it comes to exotic effects of time-warping on the material environment though, we haven't even gotten to the weirdest part yet.
It's improbably cold down here in the buried ruin. And, after a certain event involving a quantum-entangled television set, Bina realizes that when she exposes her botfly-wound, its eerie green light can reveal "cracks" in the middle of reality. These cracks in spacetime are the sources of the unnatural cold.
And...about it being so wet and muddy down here. The mud and water might have saved their lives from the fall, but Kendra points out that it's the middle of summer. And that it was a clear night. And yet, despite that, it is now raining cats and dogs, with the breach in the construction site overhead being the source of the water creating all this wetness.
The cracks in time are thermoconductive. Energy that comes in contact with them is distributed away across the timeline.
Every loop, every retcon, every mind-warping gambit between Bina and the botfly, has caused the cracks to spread and deepen. Retroactively siphoning more heat away from the "present" and into the past. To the point where it's now created a cold spot strong enough to effect the local weather conditions, causing an unseasonal rainstorm directly overhead.
It was a clear summer night when we started. However, it has now been raining the entire time.
So. Yeah. That's the level of environmental WTF we're operating on.
And yet, within that surreal, highly theoretical backdrop, the problems that Bina has to deal with for most of chapter 5 are very mundane, very visceral, and very humble. First step, after they tumble down into the half-flooded factory shell, is for Bina to make sure she isn't seriously injured, and then to find Kendra. The enemy here is...darkness. Just ordinary, mundane darkness. With only the hungry green light of the botfly shining out of the wound in her hand available to push it back with.
There's an incredibly tense, incredibly page-turning sequence that goes on for quite a while, consisting JUST of Bina trying to find Kendra in the darkness. She doesn't even really know Kendra yet, but she's lonely and scared enough - and her loneliness and fear are transferred effectively enough to the reader - that by the time she's reunited with her it's downright cathartic. I actually breathed a sigh of relief, out loud, in real life.
Well, technically it wasn't just the darkness. It was the darkness, the cold, the fear of open wounds being exposed to so much filthy water with no medical aid in sight, and the possibility of Gregor or the dog being around any corner. Even when Bina hears Kendra's voice again, there's still the problem of underground acoustics making the source of any sound impossible to track down. And Bina still recovering from the aphasia. And the fact that if Kendra looks at the green light, she'll start getting all high and hypnotized and Bina will start to think she can see luminous tentacles reaching out of her wound at Kendra. Resulting in a Marco Polo game in the cold, rubble-filled mud where the echoes are endlessly deceptive, it's pitch black except when Bina unwraps her wound, and Bina can't explain to Kendra why she needs to close and cover her eyes whenever Bina does unwrap her wound.
It's an incredibly strong juxtaposition of power and powerlessness. Struggling through cold mud and broken rebar, even though you have the power of (limited) time travel.
One thing that keeps Bina going through this prolonged sequence of misery and horror is a snippet of conversation with her previous/alternate/older self that remains in her mind:
And, that knowledge is what enables her to pull through until the two finally can cling together for warmth while Bina's ability to speak slowly returns.
Not that the ability to speak is really adequate for all of the information Bina tries to relay to Kendra. Because, uh, well. I consider myself to be quite a good communicator - I do it for a living and all - but I still struggled to make my first "All Night Laundry" review comprehensible.
I feel you there, Bina. I really do.
The big setpiece that chapter five leads up to concerns the television set I mentioned before. It's the same one that was set up in the laundromat, before the laundromat fell into the earth. The one that kept turning itself off and on by itself when Bina was entering the laundromat for the first time, and that she was seeing weird fragmentary images through. It turns out that the reason it kept turning itself off and on is because Bina and Kendra would later find it down here, and Bina would accidentally infect it with the botfly emanations from her hand, causing it to become interlocked with an earlier version of itself. It turns itself off and on down here in the ruins because of Bina messing with it back in chapter one. It kept turning itself off and on back in chapter one because of Bina and Kendra messing with it down here in chapter five.
The botfly seems to have a particular affinity for electrical devices. Makes sense, considering that the ground zero for its infection was an attempted electrical entropy-reverser machine. Whenever Bina puts her hands near an electrical device, it behaves strangely. For instance, back in the office trailer, an open laptop's monitor started displaying ripples of green light when Bina put that hand near it. Various lights and machines have turned themselves off and on when she approached them. Etc.
And this might be important to something that happened back in chapter four, too. See, when the dog-monster cornered Bina and Kendra and forced them to retreat down the hole instead of up the stairs, Bina also saw flashing green lights upstairs behind the monster. The narration described it as "like someone waving a lime green flashlight around." In retrospect, it's pretty clear that Bina will shortly be going back in time and be upstairs in the laundromat with a flashlight in hand at that moment, looking at the Piotyr-monster as it goes downstairs to menace the versions of herself and Kendra down in the basement, right before the collapse.
A theory somewhat validated by the fact that Kendra accidentally's herself back in time while she and Bina are messing with the TV.
Thus forcing Bina to figure out how to "recharge" the TV's intertemporal properties using the botfly's emanations so that she can follow her. Which, sure enough, deposits her a few hours back in time, in the laundromat, where she and Kendra now have to find each other and avoid Gregor again while hopefully not melting their own brains with epileptic time-seizures.
Also, when she travels back through the pattern of reality-cracks that have been spidering out from around that TV, the light of Bina's hand shows that she's breaking them open even further by doing this. And...she grabs a piece of spacetime as she vanishes through the gap.
It feels like a piece of glass, but it absorbs heat and shows glimpses of the underground ruins when she looks in it, no matter where she takes it from this point on.
Presumably, she'll be able to use this broken time-shard to quantum-entangle other things together to create more two-way time bridges. And also probably spread the spacetime corruption even further, fucking up the weather and structural integrity of the nearby objects even more and probably giving the botfly the power to shoot lasers or something, but what can you do.
I did technically include some information in chapter 6 in this review. Because it was that hard for me to stop reading when I reached the end of 5, and ended up going a little bit further.
All Night Laundry might have started out as a quest, but its webcomic incarnation - with its cookie-based retcon system to let readers follow the branching timelines as they wish - elevates it greatly. To the point where I'd say that this is the medium that the story is best suited for, even though it's not the one it started out in.
In fact, this might be my favorite webcomic period now. I never had this much trouble putting Kill Six Billion Demons down.
Read it. Seriously. Just read it.
I never read it as 'beyond comprehension in principle', just really hard to orient to. Part of that is the normal gorgon problem, where if you try to inspect it directly it kills you, but a lot of it is that Bina is sleep-deprived, injured, evading a hellhound and a slasher villain, has barely any chance to talk when she meets anyone somewhat oriented, and, as a result, doesn't have the time and safety to experiment systematically or to really take notes.
So I guess it's interesting, that the timebreaking boss monster is hard to comprehend because of time pressure.
Which dreams have you read? Getting lost looking for her grandma's apartment isn't that weird, just scary. Whereas the first teenage dream, if I recall correctly, would warrant more commentary than that.
You mean B12 medicates B13 against? Because that was an interesting scene that this description glosses over.
...Huh. I didn't catch the retroactivity. Possibly because rainlike indoor condensation around the cracks was raised as another explanation?
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It is true that the more anodyne works got adapted to mainstream, which in turn generated positive feedback loops of studios emulating the most successful works and genres, fans generating fanfiction for the evergreen invested in IPs, etc etc. However I don't think sci-fi fantasy ever stopped or even slowed down generating weird works. It seems like they've just moved to the web.
It is kind of conspicuous that a lot of the more gonzo works reviewed in this thread started on the internet. Webcomics like All Night Laundry or Kill Six Billion Demons, web serials like City of Angles or Katalepsis, web series like Amazing Digital Circus, web podcasts like Magnus Archives, web music videos like Starship Velociraptor. Being on the internet means not having to worry about editors or censors, marketability or mass appeal.
- Location
- Patriarchova
Funny. I make some of these same comments in the not-yet-public SCP review.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
You still find weird shit in published novels as well. Ancillary Justice, for example. It's just that even the weird novels usually try to make their characters feel more human, their dialogue feel more natural, and their endings more climactic than a lot of the Golden Age scifi stuff that we were discussing.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
After Tolkien, a lot of the weirder stuff also migrated over to the Magical Realism genre (One Hundred Years of Solitude et al). Though a lot of Fantasy fans, at least that I know, won't touch Magical Realism out of genre rivalry
- Location
- The Middle of the Howling Wilderness
There's also stuff like Blindsight being published in science fiction, which has weirdness quotient similar to something like The Dragon Masters
There's a video from Tales Foundry that's about the weird fiction of the bygone era (the pulp magazine where HPL was a writer).
Recommend for those really on this topic.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfDbWbX_5lw
Recommend for those really on this topic.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfDbWbX_5lw
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
TaleFoundry is one of those Youtubers I'm mixed on. While they have put out some good stuff and spotlighted more obscure works, some of their videos can be pretty basic if not weak (e.g. their video on Seuss and Peake increasingly felt like a massive stretch). Their thumbnails can be really try-hard too, though they're far from the only YouTuber guilty of that.
I'll say Children's Fantasy (Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, et al) also deserves a mention when you're talking about Pre-Tolkien stuff, with Magical Realism in terms of atmosphere feeling like the adult equivalent of those sorts of stories. Of course, it's the farthest thing from the likes of The Dragon Masters and the Pulps
I'll say Children's Fantasy (Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, et al) also deserves a mention when you're talking about Pre-Tolkien stuff, with Magical Realism in terms of atmosphere feeling like the adult equivalent of those sorts of stories. Of course, it's the farthest thing from the likes of The Dragon Masters and the Pulps
Presumably you mean something other than 'diligent'. Overblown?
The Oz books, at least, are political satire. Not sure that's true of Borges and his fans? Not sure it isn't, though.
(I've also heard Scott Pilgrim described as magical realism, and if we're using that definition most of John Allison's work certainly qualifies. I dunno; magical realism is a confusingly-bounded genre.)
No, they're not.
They do have occasional bits of satire in them, because like many of the best creators of children media, LFB understood you have to have something for the grown-ups, but the idea that they were written as attacks on the Gold Standard, etc. is a myth.
General Jinjur's Revolutionary Army? The Sawhorse, which runs very quickly and doesn't have knees? Not all of his satire is good, or for that matter especially political, but neither is it subtle.
One: Y'mean his excuse for having chorus girls in the stage adaptation he was hoping for?
Two: see below.
Beg pardon?
Like I said, he's got satire in it, but it's not a work of satire, it's just one ingredient in the stew?
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"Try-hard" can mean overblown too, due to trying too hard.
Same book - The Marvelous Land of Oz - has an animated sawhorse which despite a lack of knees or the sense to stop when it loses a rider, can run extremely quickly. It seems quite evidently a joke about automobiles.
Are you arguing this because you think 'a work of satire' centrally means one of those political cartoons that makes no sense whatsoever out of context? Because I don't know what meaningful distinction you're trying to draw here.
I am aware, I have read all of Baum's Oz books multiple times.
...
I wouldn't say so myself, but i guess if you squint.
No?
A work of satire is a work where political satire is the point. For instance, The War of the Worlds is a about colonialism/imperialism. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is about race relations in then-contemporary America. Whereas, a work that is about something else but occasionally has references to or jokes about, politics and etc. is not. For example, the Sherlock Holmes stories.
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I feel like 'the main thing being articulated is social satire, but it's cohesive enough to work on other levels' shouldn't be a disqualifier for calling a thing satire? Again, Schlock Mercenary's author said he eventually realized it was social satire he was writing, but it's totally possible to miss that angle in favor of the military sci-fi space opera.
I agree, completely, but I am unsure why you mention this since it has nothing to do with what we are discussing, which is me responding to your (it seems to me) claim that, because some of the Oz books have some jokes or references that are satirical in nature, the entire series should be considered a work of political satire, by arguing that "satire isn't the main thing being articulated, it just happens to throw in satirical stuff in occasionally while it's doing it's own thing" should be a disqualifier for call a thing satire, since by that logic, almost everything is satire.
Also, the whole argument started because I mistakenly assumed you were referring to the popular theory The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written as a work of satire on the Bimetallic Question, which has been a bugbear of mine I picked up from a college professor who exhaustively debunked it, though that was decades ago and I don't recall most of his arguments; I used to refer people to an article on the subject, but I think it's no longer extant.
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Chip'n Dale, Rescue Rangers ("The Case of Cola Cult" and "Risky Beesness")
- Location
- Patriarchova
This review was commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire
Chip and Dale (named after the furniture manufacture, not the male striptease group; the latter postdates these characters by multiple decades) are a pair of cartoon chipmunks who have been helping fill out Walt Disney's steel donut shelf since the 1940's. They've been cast in various roles, usually as supporting characters for Mickey Mouse and Pluto and such. In the late eighties, they got their own show recasting them as a crimefighting superteam, because every American cartoon character in the late eighties had to be part of a crimefighting superteam. Thus, "Chip'n Dale, Rescue Rangers" was a thing, and a few years later "Gargoyles" was designed from the ground up to be a better version of that thing.
Those fucking turtles really remodeled the place, didn't they?
"Rescue Rangers" does present an interesting picture of Disney's televised animation in a transitional state. Both visually and tonally, this show harkens back to the chipmunk duo's origins. Like, this swarm of angry bees here. Do these not look distinctly Early Disney? Even moreso than the 1980's versions of Chip and Dale themselves' character designs?
Tonally, we're still kind of getting out of WB and Fred Wolf Films' shadows, while also still keeping a foot in the door of Chip and Dale's original, mouse-adjacent provenance. Hell, we even literalize the latter by having nearly all of the supporting original characters in "Rescue Rangers" be mice (although apparently, this is also partly recycled character design from an aborted "The Rescuers" series). Of the three other members of the rescue ranger superteam besides Chip and Dale themselves, two are mice.
I might be making this show sound worse than it is. From what I've seen it manages to be a pretty decent show of its kind, even if it has an awkward transitional sort of feel to it. Regardless of anything else about the series, its theme song is also a bop.
Anyway, the two episodes I'm looking at today are called "Risky Bees-ness" and "The Case of the Cola Cult." I suspect that both of them were chosen because of the way they handle some fairly adult subject matter that kids' shows of the time usually shied away from, even in their Very Special Episodes. How well they handle that subject matter, and how intentional their handling of it even was, varies considerably.
The stronger of the two, "The Case of the Cola Cult," is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The Rescue Rangers happen to cross paths with a cult of mice who worship the corrosive power of soft drinks to melt away the trappings of this sinful world and leave its members free and pure in their super-insular commune. There are aesthetic details parodying the Unification Church, the Society for Krishna Consciousness, and the Church of Scientology, with the centrepiece of a trademarked sugary drink obviously being an oblique nod at the People's Temple.
Where I'll give this episode full marks is in its portrayal of cult recruitment tactics. When the Rescue Rangers bump into the cola worshippers, it's initially a friendly encounter. The cultists seem like harmless weirdos, though their leaders have distinctly shady vibes. They invite the rangers to join, and present a happy, welcoming face, and their charismatic high priest is savvy enough to know how to apply emotional pressure without seeming pushy or coercive. When the rangers decide it's time to head on home, the priest sees them off with a smile and a perfectly innocuous invitation to come back any time they want to learn more or even just say hello.
Things start to turn sour when a cultist who's been having doubts reaches out to the Rescue Rangers for help, only to be disappeared by the sect's militant wing (they have a whole martial art based on using bottle caps and straws as deadly weapons). And, this is also where the psychology of cult recruitment gets a relatively accurate portrayal. During an attempt to further investigate the cult after that one mouse's disappearance, the team inventor (with the uncreative nickname of "Gadget") gets her machines sabotaged by the cult's main legbreaker. She'd already been rolling a bunch of fumbles with her engineering recently, and after the dire failure that ensues from this she loses her confidence altogether and falls into a self-loathing spiral. She quits the rangers and - while the others just sit it out and assume she'll get over it and come back to them soon enough - she runs into a cola cult parade and gets talked into joining them.
They haven't actually found any evidence implicating the cult in wrongdoing yet, so her guard isn't up all the way.
Now, granted, the gaslighting and destruction of her self-confidence isn't deliberate on the cult's part. The sabotage was purely a tactical move to prevent the investigation. However, the fact that they readily jumped on the new weakness that performing it created still hews close enough to what actual cult leaders (and other forms of abuser, for that matter) do. Convincing marks of their own weakness and worthlessness, and then offering them a solution to their problems when they've been beaten down. At her initiation, they are also seen throwing her technician tools in their corrosive cola vat, removing her ability to support herself or stand on her own feet outside of the cult.
Elsewhere in the episode, it is shown that the cult preferentially targets wealthy mice for recruitment. Again, very true to life.
The ending...kinda sticks the landing, in some ways, but in many others it doesn't. When the other rangers eventually come looking for Gadget, they end up discovering the vault where the cult's leadership has been secretly stashing all of their recruits' worldly possessions instead of dissolving them in cola like they claim. And, they end up stumbling into a power struggle between the cult's two leader figures, with the purely cynical chief enforcer making a move against the actually-drinking-his-own-cola high priest. Gadget gets her mojo back, and she ends up landing the killing blow on the bad guy with an improvised invention; a crit success to balance out her previous fumbles. So that's cool.
The portrayal of the power struggle/coup plot itself would also be fairly true to life, except the show is really weirdly forgiving of the high priest after the more violent upstart has been dealt with.
Like, I think the episode is trying to make it seem like the high priest wasn't actually intending to use any of the stolen riches, just hide them? Or...he was originally planning to enrich himself, but then started believing his own lies and ended up not doing so while his lackey did? Maybe? Anyway, after a final battle that sees the thug dude drowning in his own cola vat, the priest and other cultists just get a heartwarming speech about how they don't need a phony religion in order to give themselves a sense of community. They can still have their little commune and their marching orchestras and such without needing to do any of the creepy shit or extorting money. And um. They listen. Everyone lives happily ever after, I guess.
Like I said, some parts of the landing stick, but most of them don't.
The other episode, "Risky Bees-ness," is just fucking weird from beginning to end.
The plot is much more typical SatAm kids' stuff than the cult episode, at least on its face. A bee colony's entire worker population gets hypnotized by a mysterious infrasonic pulse, and the abandoned queen needs the rangers to help her get them back. There's a subplot running through it about the rangers' housefly member, Zipper, having an unrequited crush on the queen and trying to use the team's heroics while on the case to impress her. Also fairly typical kiddy show material.
The weird thing is that this episode has this constant undercurrent of class conflict that it keeps diverting itself away from at the last second. And when I say "undercurrent," it's really more "rushing river with a thin, transparent membrane over the top."
Much of the runtime is spent showing the queen being a spoiled, elitist, self-important caricature of aristocracy. She clearly thinks of the hypnotized workers as her property rather than her family or community, and in her own words describes the crime as "theft" rather than "kidnapping." This persists even when we eventually liberate the workers and hear them describe for themselves how horrible it was being under the villain's mind control. Zipper's one-sided crush on her is mostly one-sided on account of him being a commoner, not because she's disinterested in him on his own (lack of) merits.
Meanwhile, the villain is shown to be an underappreciated human scientist whose brilliant inventions in the field of acoustic pest-control devices are enriching the company without really benefitting her. Her villainous career starts with her repurposing her worker-bee-repeller into a worker-bee-controller, and (in an amusingly whimsical bit of plotting, to be fair) uses her hijacked bee swarm to brute force her way into the musical world as a bee-themed folk-rock star.
Like, Taylor has the bees steal a bunch of top-tier instruments and then play them for her at the concert she terrorized her way onto the stage of.
The fact that Taylor is very unattractive-looking definitely feels like part of the package in framing her as an underprivileged, underappreciated person driven to madness by her treatment by her social and financial betters. The fact that she isn't a very good musician (but IS a very good inventor), on the other hand, definitely makes it clear that out of all the grudges she might have against society, "holding back my dreams of a music career" is not one of the legitimate ones.
Anyway, the payoff for all this social tension is...nothing. The rescue rangers break Taylor's machine, the swarm turns on her and drives her out of the studio before returning to their queen and hive, and...the queen thinks to send Zipper a valentine card made of the living bodies of her workers in order to thank him for risking his life for her. Validating his crush on her a little bit, maybe.
There was so much focus on what an overbearing bitch the queen is that I was *sure* the final twist would be the workers deciding that she's no better than Taylor and leaving her of their own volition this time. But nope.
Ditto, we never get back to the corporation that Taylor was working for. Not for better or for worse. It's just never seen or mentioned again after her intro scene.
It's not like I expected a 1980's Disney cartoon to be super leftwing. I didn't. I'm more just surprised that the episode came as close as it did to getting openly political if it *wasn't* going to follow through with it. The villain didn't need a sympathetic, downtrodden starting situation for the plot to work. The queen didn't need to be so unpleasant for the plot to work (hell, she didn't even need to be so unpleasant for the subplot about Zipper's crush to work). It's weird for what it did AND for what it didn't do.
...
As a sort of silly aside here: I'm a little disappointed in how anthropomorphic media always takes the low-hanging fruit when it comes to social insects.
Like, sure, we call the reproductive females of the colony "queens." When you're making a cartoon for children, it's intuitive enough to roll with the terminology and portray them as literal royalty. But, wouldn't it be cool if - just once - we had a show or a movie like this that actually portrays the hive as a family with the queen as its mother?
Or hell, keep the not-all-that-biologically-accurate framing of the hive as a society rather than a family unit, but have the queen be as exploited (or as not exploited) as everyone else. Queens don't actually lead their colonies, they just lay eggs. You could even work in some #feminism about flying free until you settle down, and then never leaving the house and being stuck with reproductive labor for the rest of your life.
Or something else. I just feel like there's a lot of storytelling potential being squandered here, you know?
...
The high point of this episode was probably the heavy metal band that Taylor chased out of the backstage with bees so she could steal their stage. They look like this:
But they have these super-posh British accents and dainty upper crust mannerisms that cracked me up for pretty much as long as they were onscreen.
The low point of the episode was the exterior shot of the bee nest:
These are identified as honeybees in as many words, and we see them making honey and storing it in wax combs in the interior shots. However, this globular, free-hanging structure is very clearly a paper wasp nest. This broke my suspension of disbelief and ruined the entire story.
Something that stuck out for me about both episodes is how little Chip and Dale themselves had to do with anything. They rarely are the ones advancing the plot, or carrying the subplots. Almost seems like they're just here for brand recognition, while the "supporting" rescue rangers are the actual lead characters. There's a reason that none of the screenshots I saw fit to include in this review actually have Chip and Dale in them, despite the show ostensibly being about them. But then, that might just be an issue with these two episodes rather than the show as a whole.
Anyway, that's pretty much all I have to say I think. Interesting look at where Disney's for-television animation was at the time, both visually and writing-wise.
Chip and Dale (named after the furniture manufacture, not the male striptease group; the latter postdates these characters by multiple decades) are a pair of cartoon chipmunks who have been helping fill out Walt Disney's steel donut shelf since the 1940's. They've been cast in various roles, usually as supporting characters for Mickey Mouse and Pluto and such. In the late eighties, they got their own show recasting them as a crimefighting superteam, because every American cartoon character in the late eighties had to be part of a crimefighting superteam. Thus, "Chip'n Dale, Rescue Rangers" was a thing, and a few years later "Gargoyles" was designed from the ground up to be a better version of that thing.
Those fucking turtles really remodeled the place, didn't they?
"Rescue Rangers" does present an interesting picture of Disney's televised animation in a transitional state. Both visually and tonally, this show harkens back to the chipmunk duo's origins. Like, this swarm of angry bees here. Do these not look distinctly Early Disney? Even moreso than the 1980's versions of Chip and Dale themselves' character designs?
Tonally, we're still kind of getting out of WB and Fred Wolf Films' shadows, while also still keeping a foot in the door of Chip and Dale's original, mouse-adjacent provenance. Hell, we even literalize the latter by having nearly all of the supporting original characters in "Rescue Rangers" be mice (although apparently, this is also partly recycled character design from an aborted "The Rescuers" series). Of the three other members of the rescue ranger superteam besides Chip and Dale themselves, two are mice.
I might be making this show sound worse than it is. From what I've seen it manages to be a pretty decent show of its kind, even if it has an awkward transitional sort of feel to it. Regardless of anything else about the series, its theme song is also a bop.
Anyway, the two episodes I'm looking at today are called "Risky Bees-ness" and "The Case of the Cola Cult." I suspect that both of them were chosen because of the way they handle some fairly adult subject matter that kids' shows of the time usually shied away from, even in their Very Special Episodes. How well they handle that subject matter, and how intentional their handling of it even was, varies considerably.
The stronger of the two, "The Case of the Cola Cult," is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The Rescue Rangers happen to cross paths with a cult of mice who worship the corrosive power of soft drinks to melt away the trappings of this sinful world and leave its members free and pure in their super-insular commune. There are aesthetic details parodying the Unification Church, the Society for Krishna Consciousness, and the Church of Scientology, with the centrepiece of a trademarked sugary drink obviously being an oblique nod at the People's Temple.
Where I'll give this episode full marks is in its portrayal of cult recruitment tactics. When the Rescue Rangers bump into the cola worshippers, it's initially a friendly encounter. The cultists seem like harmless weirdos, though their leaders have distinctly shady vibes. They invite the rangers to join, and present a happy, welcoming face, and their charismatic high priest is savvy enough to know how to apply emotional pressure without seeming pushy or coercive. When the rangers decide it's time to head on home, the priest sees them off with a smile and a perfectly innocuous invitation to come back any time they want to learn more or even just say hello.
Things start to turn sour when a cultist who's been having doubts reaches out to the Rescue Rangers for help, only to be disappeared by the sect's militant wing (they have a whole martial art based on using bottle caps and straws as deadly weapons). And, this is also where the psychology of cult recruitment gets a relatively accurate portrayal. During an attempt to further investigate the cult after that one mouse's disappearance, the team inventor (with the uncreative nickname of "Gadget") gets her machines sabotaged by the cult's main legbreaker. She'd already been rolling a bunch of fumbles with her engineering recently, and after the dire failure that ensues from this she loses her confidence altogether and falls into a self-loathing spiral. She quits the rangers and - while the others just sit it out and assume she'll get over it and come back to them soon enough - she runs into a cola cult parade and gets talked into joining them.
They haven't actually found any evidence implicating the cult in wrongdoing yet, so her guard isn't up all the way.
Now, granted, the gaslighting and destruction of her self-confidence isn't deliberate on the cult's part. The sabotage was purely a tactical move to prevent the investigation. However, the fact that they readily jumped on the new weakness that performing it created still hews close enough to what actual cult leaders (and other forms of abuser, for that matter) do. Convincing marks of their own weakness and worthlessness, and then offering them a solution to their problems when they've been beaten down. At her initiation, they are also seen throwing her technician tools in their corrosive cola vat, removing her ability to support herself or stand on her own feet outside of the cult.
Elsewhere in the episode, it is shown that the cult preferentially targets wealthy mice for recruitment. Again, very true to life.
The ending...kinda sticks the landing, in some ways, but in many others it doesn't. When the other rangers eventually come looking for Gadget, they end up discovering the vault where the cult's leadership has been secretly stashing all of their recruits' worldly possessions instead of dissolving them in cola like they claim. And, they end up stumbling into a power struggle between the cult's two leader figures, with the purely cynical chief enforcer making a move against the actually-drinking-his-own-cola high priest. Gadget gets her mojo back, and she ends up landing the killing blow on the bad guy with an improvised invention; a crit success to balance out her previous fumbles. So that's cool.
The portrayal of the power struggle/coup plot itself would also be fairly true to life, except the show is really weirdly forgiving of the high priest after the more violent upstart has been dealt with.
Like, I think the episode is trying to make it seem like the high priest wasn't actually intending to use any of the stolen riches, just hide them? Or...he was originally planning to enrich himself, but then started believing his own lies and ended up not doing so while his lackey did? Maybe? Anyway, after a final battle that sees the thug dude drowning in his own cola vat, the priest and other cultists just get a heartwarming speech about how they don't need a phony religion in order to give themselves a sense of community. They can still have their little commune and their marching orchestras and such without needing to do any of the creepy shit or extorting money. And um. They listen. Everyone lives happily ever after, I guess.
Like I said, some parts of the landing stick, but most of them don't.
The other episode, "Risky Bees-ness," is just fucking weird from beginning to end.
The plot is much more typical SatAm kids' stuff than the cult episode, at least on its face. A bee colony's entire worker population gets hypnotized by a mysterious infrasonic pulse, and the abandoned queen needs the rangers to help her get them back. There's a subplot running through it about the rangers' housefly member, Zipper, having an unrequited crush on the queen and trying to use the team's heroics while on the case to impress her. Also fairly typical kiddy show material.
In keeping with the homages to classic Disney, the queen has quite a bit of their traditional "princess" aesthetic to her, to compliment the workers' Steamboat Willie look.
The weird thing is that this episode has this constant undercurrent of class conflict that it keeps diverting itself away from at the last second. And when I say "undercurrent," it's really more "rushing river with a thin, transparent membrane over the top."
Much of the runtime is spent showing the queen being a spoiled, elitist, self-important caricature of aristocracy. She clearly thinks of the hypnotized workers as her property rather than her family or community, and in her own words describes the crime as "theft" rather than "kidnapping." This persists even when we eventually liberate the workers and hear them describe for themselves how horrible it was being under the villain's mind control. Zipper's one-sided crush on her is mostly one-sided on account of him being a commoner, not because she's disinterested in him on his own (lack of) merits.
Meanwhile, the villain is shown to be an underappreciated human scientist whose brilliant inventions in the field of acoustic pest-control devices are enriching the company without really benefitting her. Her villainous career starts with her repurposing her worker-bee-repeller into a worker-bee-controller, and (in an amusingly whimsical bit of plotting, to be fair) uses her hijacked bee swarm to brute force her way into the musical world as a bee-themed folk-rock star.
Like, Taylor has the bees steal a bunch of top-tier instruments and then play them for her at the concert she terrorized her way onto the stage of.
The fact that Taylor is very unattractive-looking definitely feels like part of the package in framing her as an underprivileged, underappreciated person driven to madness by her treatment by her social and financial betters. The fact that she isn't a very good musician (but IS a very good inventor), on the other hand, definitely makes it clear that out of all the grudges she might have against society, "holding back my dreams of a music career" is not one of the legitimate ones.
Anyway, the payoff for all this social tension is...nothing. The rescue rangers break Taylor's machine, the swarm turns on her and drives her out of the studio before returning to their queen and hive, and...the queen thinks to send Zipper a valentine card made of the living bodies of her workers in order to thank him for risking his life for her. Validating his crush on her a little bit, maybe.
There was so much focus on what an overbearing bitch the queen is that I was *sure* the final twist would be the workers deciding that she's no better than Taylor and leaving her of their own volition this time. But nope.
Ditto, we never get back to the corporation that Taylor was working for. Not for better or for worse. It's just never seen or mentioned again after her intro scene.
It's not like I expected a 1980's Disney cartoon to be super leftwing. I didn't. I'm more just surprised that the episode came as close as it did to getting openly political if it *wasn't* going to follow through with it. The villain didn't need a sympathetic, downtrodden starting situation for the plot to work. The queen didn't need to be so unpleasant for the plot to work (hell, she didn't even need to be so unpleasant for the subplot about Zipper's crush to work). It's weird for what it did AND for what it didn't do.
...
As a sort of silly aside here: I'm a little disappointed in how anthropomorphic media always takes the low-hanging fruit when it comes to social insects.
Like, sure, we call the reproductive females of the colony "queens." When you're making a cartoon for children, it's intuitive enough to roll with the terminology and portray them as literal royalty. But, wouldn't it be cool if - just once - we had a show or a movie like this that actually portrays the hive as a family with the queen as its mother?
Or hell, keep the not-all-that-biologically-accurate framing of the hive as a society rather than a family unit, but have the queen be as exploited (or as not exploited) as everyone else. Queens don't actually lead their colonies, they just lay eggs. You could even work in some #feminism about flying free until you settle down, and then never leaving the house and being stuck with reproductive labor for the rest of your life.
Or something else. I just feel like there's a lot of storytelling potential being squandered here, you know?
...
The high point of this episode was probably the heavy metal band that Taylor chased out of the backstage with bees so she could steal their stage. They look like this:
But they have these super-posh British accents and dainty upper crust mannerisms that cracked me up for pretty much as long as they were onscreen.
The low point of the episode was the exterior shot of the bee nest:
These are identified as honeybees in as many words, and we see them making honey and storing it in wax combs in the interior shots. However, this globular, free-hanging structure is very clearly a paper wasp nest. This broke my suspension of disbelief and ruined the entire story.
Something that stuck out for me about both episodes is how little Chip and Dale themselves had to do with anything. They rarely are the ones advancing the plot, or carrying the subplots. Almost seems like they're just here for brand recognition, while the "supporting" rescue rangers are the actual lead characters. There's a reason that none of the screenshots I saw fit to include in this review actually have Chip and Dale in them, despite the show ostensibly being about them. But then, that might just be an issue with these two episodes rather than the show as a whole.
Anyway, that's pretty much all I have to say I think. Interesting look at where Disney's for-television animation was at the time, both visually and writing-wise.
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- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
...It occurs to me that a Meow rating might be the most ironic one to give a Chip'n'Dale review, but oh well.
Originally, I was just going to commission 'Case of the Cola Cult'. But as it's more the exception than the rule for this show, and at the same time may be the most famous episode, I threw in another for a more balanced picture. 'Risky Beesness' was the one episode I remembered from my childhood, so I figured there had to be something to it.
Probably the most unrealistic thing about the cult (besides, y'know, talking mice) is that they openly call themselves a cult, something actual cults are loathe to do. I'm guessing this is because the writers were trying to get across the idea of a cult to a young audience who likely hadn't heard of cults before. Still, I don't think it would've been that difficult to have the cult call themselves something else and for one of the Rangers to go "So you're a cult then?" King of the Hill-style.
And of course Gadget (which yes, is her real name), or should I say 'the Lightbringer', despite being the focus of the anti-cult episode, would infamously spawn a real-life cult in Russia. No, really, they're even called Gadgetology.
I bring this up because I just know someone else will if I don't.
Also, you think DisneyToon would know how to draw a beehive, given they were working on a Winnie the Pooh TV show at the same time
Originally, I was just going to commission 'Case of the Cola Cult'. But as it's more the exception than the rule for this show, and at the same time may be the most famous episode, I threw in another for a more balanced picture. 'Risky Beesness' was the one episode I remembered from my childhood, so I figured there had to be something to it.
Probably the most unrealistic thing about the cult (besides, y'know, talking mice) is that they openly call themselves a cult, something actual cults are loathe to do. I'm guessing this is because the writers were trying to get across the idea of a cult to a young audience who likely hadn't heard of cults before. Still, I don't think it would've been that difficult to have the cult call themselves something else and for one of the Rangers to go "So you're a cult then?" King of the Hill-style.
And of course Gadget (which yes, is her real name), or should I say 'the Lightbringer', despite being the focus of the anti-cult episode, would infamously spawn a real-life cult in Russia. No, really, they're even called Gadgetology.
I bring this up because I just know someone else will if I don't.
Also, you think DisneyToon would know how to draw a beehive, given they were working on a Winnie the Pooh TV show at the same time
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Okay Russia, seriously. What the fuck is wrong with you?
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- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
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Sarah Z once said no character could ever rival the fandom weirdness of The Once-ler. Gadget begs to differ
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Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
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- AZ
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No discussion of Chip and Dale is complete without mentioning the looks for the updated chipmunks were wholesale stolen from Indiana Jones (Chip) and Magnum PI (Dale).
I guess if you're up shit creek you could do a lot worse than Henry Jones Jr. and Thomas Magnum coming after you.
I guess if you're up shit creek you could do a lot worse than Henry Jones Jr. and Thomas Magnum coming after you.