The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 25: The Influence On What Followed.

It's safe to say that the Mystery Business(tm) Era has a strange relation to the later eras of the strip. It's the debut, after all, which introduced the core cast--or at least the original core cast of four. But, except for Damon, that cast barely resembles those early versions of themselves, a bunch of strange substitutes who bear the same name but little more. The simple shallow cores of the characters may remain, but everything around them is completely transformed. Sam is (again, after the unaltered Damon) the closest to her original character, but even that is often a rough similarity. Modern Sam is a vicious unpleasant bitch--to an extent that puts her original self to shame--who goes on about engineering every now and then to establish her as smart and logical, and just ignore your lying eyes. But the modern Sam is a proud redneck, a country girl who don't like them cityfolk, in essence a far cry from the urban professional of the Mystery Business(tm) Era. Her age has been quietly lowered over the years (most of the time), a process that started quite prominently at the very end of the era, but has subtly continued since. It's hard to think she and her now husband used to spend strips complaining about how they were a couple of aging forty year-olds who felt increasingly out of place in the modern world, but then as I've noted before, characters in DbD don't develop, they change. Sam now seems to be a nearly ageless vixen, even if she's now a grandmother. Who recently gave Zed yet another child herself.

Zed is an even more extreme change, an entirely new character sitting in the old's remodeled skin. The process of becoming Captain Mitty that began in the later years of the Mystery Business(tm) Era and accelerated in the Transition Era (something we'll be examining heavily in the upcoming segments) has run its course and turned him into a scowling attempt at an action hero. Zed's original schlub status and human touches are gone, replaced by a grim idol of toxic masculinity. And Zed is fortunate compared to Jan, who is now a hollow space where a character was, nodding along with her husband against the values she was created to embody. What little importance she has in the strip comes from the deus ex machinas that are her father and her son, supplying the Compound with infinite Plot Coupons through limitless wealth and infinite magitek respectively.

For that matter, while Damon's character remains the same, the one member of the cast who is still who he was to begin with, well... as I said in the first entry about him... he doesn't show up much anymore. He might still be the same guy but the strip doesn't need that guy anymore. And Muir seems to realize this on some level--every effort to bring him back ends with Damon shuffling off after a few weeks, Jan in tow. It seems that nostalgia is what keeps them around these days, in so much that they're even around.

And that nostalgia is key to understanding the bizarre relationship that the Mystery Business(tm) Era has with the strip's later days. Muir clearly has a sentimental attachment to the early days of the strip, beyond some simple wish to keep some level of continuity. But he can never indulge too much in that sentiment, because the strip that now exists just doesn't match the early one. The DbD that is now is an elaborate, rickety structure built over a ditch, and focusing on the foundations could send the entire structure toppling down below. There's clearly a part of Muir that wants to just abandon it all and move on to a new work--witness the occasional side projects. And yet, both fears of losing his audience and his own attachment to what he's made keeps him still writing the old strip--again, witness the occasional side projects being presented as fictional works created by Sam, featuring protagonists that are supposed to be self-inserts of her. He just can't move on. Aside from his business model, something in him won't let him. And so we get the occasional strange wistful comment on the past, one that ignores most of what actually happened at the time.

This can go in odd places. I've referred to the fate of poor Suzi the Intern on multiple occasions, and now is a good time to detail it. Over a decade after her aborted storyline ended abruptly without even really starting, and she unceremoniously exited the strip, Sam brought her up to her husband during a discussion of the "Me Too" movement. This was a standard misogynistic denial of its legitimacy, during which Sam chuckled that Zed was lucky that "Suzi from a few years ago" didn't make a (spurious) report on him. Now, you may think that depicting the movement as nothing more than hysterical women reporting on men that they'd been obsessed with would be the low point of this. But, no it got worse. Zed wound up giving Suzi what she'd never had in her actual appearances, a last name. Indeed, "Suzi Strom" got a sudden nationality change--she was apparently Swedish, something that had never been indicated at the time. No, Zed stated, Suzi wouldn't be saying anything. She had gone back to Sweden years ago, where he stated she had been "raped to death" by her Muslim boyfriend. He then followed this up with a cruel quip.

Yes, that was how Muir had her die, in a cruel manner that regurgitated racist talking points about Europe, Muslims and interracial dating, and misogynistic talking points about women reporting rape, as well as liberal women daring to not do what reactionary white guys demand they do. Made into an object lesson that insisted not only were left and center-left women bad, but they deserve to have bad things happen to them. That's what the Mystery Business(tm) Era has been for the past decade or so. Something to occasionally mine for counterfeit continuity, fraudulent sentiment and cheap shock. 

And so this era stands, both the starting point, and yet a near complete contradiction of what would follow, save, of course, for its politics. But of course, there's a lot more strip ahead, and in the next era, we're going to see that rickety structure get built. Prepare for wackiness. 

But not fun wackiness. Oh no.

That Is, In Fact, Not What The Quran Says.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Voice on the Wire.

As we watch Muir repeat the Right-wing urban legend that pork functions as some sort of Muslim kryptonite, let's recall that I'm pretty sure it was Sam who drove the feral hogs in there originally.

But then, as we keep seeing, time and space are bendable in DbD and causality can be warped at will.

Astonishingly, Muir Is Sure Everything Was Great When Muir Was A Kid.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Red Ace.

And Muir once again demonstrates that Sam is now on Marvel's comic time, where her age can vary wildly from strip to strip. Of course, we've seen Muir wax sentimental about the 1970s before, the era where he was a kid--but an old enough kid to have some freedom. And by the time he stopped being a kid during it, Jimmy Carter was in charge, so Muir could tell himself all the bad things were his fault. Because, obviously, this is a stunningly simplistic, naive, even incorrect summation of the 1970s.

Another thing poking out is that Muir misses large swathes of what the society of the New Deal built that his people have been working to destroy. But he can't accept that, so he has to tell himself that it was great despite all that "socialism" and also, if we bring back the racism, things will be good again. Hence his continued allegiance to the people trying to do that, despite the fact that they keep failing.

To quote, Dylan, only a pawn in their game.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 20: Home Again, Muir Retcons Sam Young, And There Are Much Shenanigans.

The Iraq storyline wrapped up in a sluggish fashion over the course of September and October, with Muir repeating the same points he'd made throughout as he brought things to a close.  Things were made more sluggish as Muir wound up taking a sizable break at the start of October, which we will explore in greater depth later. But in November, Zed was back home, reunited with his wife, who had been joined by her mother and had been retconned to be 39.

Sam's mother was... well, much like Jan's father, a stereotypical foreigner speaking slightly broken English leavened with words from her native tongue. (Hence my giving her yet another Superfriends nickname, Samurai Mom.) She would stick around on the margins of the strip for most of the same reasons he did, but that's for another story. Sam's age retcon...

Well, Muir had likely realized that having a 45 year old woman cheerfully going through her first pregnancy as if it were no big deal might not quite work, and so shaved six years off Sam's age. The explanation of why Sam had lied about her age to Zed for so long was strange, convoluted and nonsensical, which is probably why Muir never bothered explaining her future age-downs, just doing them. (We will talk of this again.) Notably, this still left Sam and Skye with about a decade and a half between them, but then, as that whole nonsensical explanation offered in the retcon makes clear, Muir's fictional universe does not bear any examination.

And then, having reunited his cast, Muir had Sam go into labor at the airport, the cast rushed to the hospital, and Sam and Zed finally spawned the twins. It was all very much in what I've come to call the 'Sitcom from Hell' vein, where Muir manages to meld a great deal of hackneyed, obvious humor and situations only done slightly off, and with the deep unpleasantness that is the cast's calling card. As things finally wrapped up and the cast settled in...

They all got the news that Mystery Business(tm) had folded. 

Yep, we're hitting the end of the era, folks.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 19: Don't Mess With Naomi. Or Bother Having A Coherent Storyline.

 Naomi first appears as a past military comrade of Zed's, an Israeli military contractor who simply pops up to reaffirm Zed's badass credentials. and join in the general abuse of Jan during this storyline. But then, after a week, Muir decides to use her for some cheap sentimental drama and ALSO decides that she's been hired by Jan's dad to keep an eye on her daughter. (So either the military are just letting an unaffiliated mercenary stroll around because, hey, she's cool, she's from an ally, or they're letting a contractor take a side job from a private citizen, neither of which are great.) While this is yet another display of Muir's growing fascination of using Don Portago as an Instant Plot Coupon Dispenser, the more interesting thing is Naomi herself. Somehow, even though she truthfully doesn't seem too distinguishable from the various other soldiers Muir bespecks this storyline with, she tickles Muir's fancy and just keeps showing up throughout. 

Because, that's the other thing about this story--it's long. While the original plan appears to have had this go on for a month--Muir has Zed toss that time out early on--things just dragged on so that Jan and Zed wound up spending most of 2007 in Iraq. And Muir was no more skilled at crafting storylines then as he is now--the entire sojourn is repetitive, formless, and dull. Jan gets taught the same jingoistic, racist messages over and over, all while the real Iraq burned, and Muir struggles to ignore it alongside the rest of reality.

And through it all, Naomi just... hangs around. It's clear that she'd tickled Muir's fancy somehow, likely by his own twisted counterfeit philosemitism which saw Israelis as admirable because they were so good at dealing with those evil Muslims. She likewise gave a window in what was going to be Zed's ever-expanding badass past, which Muir must have found convenient. Still, a casual reader from this era would probably be shocked to learn this incidental character was going to become a major supporting character and at times a member of the main cast. Indeed, Naomi was a good indicator of the future of DbD, a future that was more bizarre, more insane and more unpleasant than its present.

And that present was quite unpleasant indeed.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 17: Captain Mitty Gets A Wife.

Zed and Sam's relationship had been in sort of a holding pattern since around 2005, when he started treating them as an actual couple, and frankly had been approaching it earlier, as the period of de facto coupleship prior to that wasn't too different. Just now, it was clear that they were dating and sleeping with each other, where previously, you sort of thought they were, but weren't sure. Muir seems to have toyed with shaking the dynamic up when he introduced a young intern named Suzi with a thing for Zed, but this rudimentary storyline died after two strips, and Suzi only ranked a horrible offscreen death years later that was mentioned in passing to allow Muir to indulge even more of his now overwhelming misogyny, racism and Islamophobia. Skye's arrival just added her being, well, awful while keeping the overall relationship the same. So, Muir finally did something that shook things up--he had Sam wind up pregnant just as Zed got called back into service.

Now, Sam previously had shown little interest in or proclivity for motherhood--indeed, she'd even been fairly dismissive of it--but that was the Early Period, where Muir just wanted her and Zed to be a couple of snarky urban professionals. Now that they were ever more Muir's vision of an ideal American couple, well, she and Zed just took it as given that they'd have kids now, which meant marriage. Interestingly, neither of them seemed particularly worried about the fact that Sam was a woman in her forties going through her first pregnancy.

Put a pin in this, there's bullshit coming.

The pair hurried off to Vegas, tied the knot--they had an Elvis wedding--and just like that, there'd been a profound change in the status quo. And Muir having quietly just retconned Sam's entire attitude towards parenthood was, well, going to retcon a lot more in the future. Oh, were changes coming. Indeed, without realizing he'd done it, Muir had just quietly set a charge under what had been the core premise of the strip so far, but that was lurking in the background. 

Soon, Zed would be heading overseas with Jan somehow getting to play journalist because... look, her dad is ultrarich magic, all right? For Sam though, this meant lots of "jokes" playing up her being Zed's loyal, pregnant wife waiting for him to get back as he risked his life.

This isn't particularly subtle propaganda. But then it hardly has been at this point.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 16: Captain Mitty Gets The Call.

 The transformational storyline of the Late Period wouldn't have happened without a Dubya program that I'm going to have to discuss, the embedded journalist program. Throughout the Iraq War, journalists were 'embedded' in various combat units for lengths of time. While supposedly this was about superior access to allow for more in-depth reporting, critics argued it destroyed any pretense of objectivity, encouraging the journalists to identify with the units they were embedded with. Obviously, results varied--the classic Generation Kill, after all, was produced by just such an embedded reporter. And then...

Muir's selection as an 'embedded reporter' came very late in the day for the program, and was undeniably politically motivated. His qualifications were negligible--he was, after all, a syndicated cartoonist whose strip was appearing in a mere four papers. But he did have some connections to the GOP's pet bloggers--we'll discuss this when we wrap up this era--and that's likely most of what got him in. And of course, Muir was motivated. To his mind, the people, manipulated by the lying press, had betrayed the righteous government that had done so much good, and brought the treacherous Democrats back into power. People needed to see the truth, to be brought back into the right way of thinking. And so Muir was off to Iraq.

For five days.

As should be obvious, this wasn't enough time for any sort of in depth "reporting", but it was enough time for a man who was quite interested in producing propaganda to get the material for it, especially if he was simply going to reinforce his priors. (Which, as we will see, is precisely what he did.) And so, Muir came back to produce his story. There were many ways he could have written it.

But it was Muir, so we naturally got his self-insert being recalled to active duty, because he was so badass. It was the sort of choice that a more reasonable person might have realized was a mistake, tone-deaf, insensitive, hell, down right pathetic, but, well, this is Muir. He didn't realize how this might look to someone less... sympathetic. Hell, he was going to give Captain Mitty even more of the life he wished he had.

Zed was going to get married before shipping off, with a family on the way. As I said, the transformational storyline of the Late Period, and oh boy, do we have a lot to talk about in the next installment...

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 15: A New, MORE Inferior Sort Of Leftist.

 By 2006, both the political situation and Muir's strip had changed.  As noted before, Muir had painted the opposition to the Iraq War as a bunch of shiftless, cowardly hippies during the War's buildup--after the quick fall of Saddam's government, he went to ignoring them outright, clearly feeling that the matter was over and he had won. However, the opposition to the War didn't stop and instead broadened, especially as toppling Saddam did not in fact lead to a speedy peace, but instead to a violent insurgency and lengthy occupation. Now, as noted last time, Muir's response to what was actually happening in Iraq was a mixture of studiously ignoring it, and actively gaslighting about it, all while whining about how the press/Democrats/people were misleading the public and being unpatriotic and stuff. But that still left him a more visible, militant Left to deal with than the sort of genteel establishment liberalism represented by Jan. Muir could see the need for another Left character.

And of course, there were other issues with Jan--while she was still allowed moments of her previous feckless idiocy to show what Muir imagined was the liberal viewpoint, her relationship with Damon moved her firmly into one of the good ones, a person Muir imagined was only kept from seeing the transcendent truth by sentimentality, habit, and of course, the evil Leftist conspiracy to lead good young women like her astray. While she hadn't moved completely to her Fox Liberal role yet of showing the audience just how wretched the Democrats were by having this liberal staring agog at their perfidy, she was already making moves in that direction. And of course, both these moves had another source that we'll talk about in the future when we talk about a... certain aspects of the strip, and how it stood at this time. (Let's put a pin in that one, all right?)

Now, the fact was Muir didn't mind this, because he'd clearly had a lot of fun with his vision of the anti-war Left during the buildup, people he enjoyed punching even more than the Democrats. That undifferentiated blob of stupid hippies started showing up again, and then in 2006, a couple were shown praising themselves for booing Hillary Clinton, allowing Muir to bash both her and them simultaneously. A couple strips later, and "Sky" explains that she's going to go visit her in Florida, one of the few clear references to the setting at this point.

And boom. Like that, Sam suddenly had a younger sibling. (That Sam had never mentioned such a sibling previously or the fact that, initially, Sam and her sister had in the vicinity of twenty years between them were just part of the shoddy construction.) Skye--she gained the 'e' on her third appearance--was that mass of dirty hippie peaceniks concentrated into one character. Written to be as obnoxious as possible, she was lazy, perennially unemployed, viciously self-righteous, in essence, every form of sheer awfulness that Muir imagined when he imagined a leftist. She willfully sponges off her sister, a complete parasite. Indeed, Skye isn't going to have any sort of discernible job for years, just floating around and being "left". She's rude, childish, and egotistical. Of course, so is the rest of Muir's cast, but Muir doesn't realize that, he thinks they're quirky and lovable. Another thing that will be come clear very quickly is that Skye's bluntness means she frequently puts her arguments rather forcibly, making the supposedly right-thinking cast look even worse. But again, Muir doesn't notice that. He simply assumes he's built a loser, and that the audience will respond as expected.

And so, his new straw leftist in hand, Muir waits for the Democrats' inevitable defeat in 2006 so he can chuckle about them thinking all this criticism of the glorious war was a good idea.

The Democrats win control of Congress. Muir is irritated, but still convinced that it's all just a temporary disturbance. And that will produce... well, a lot. Oh, such a lot.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 13: Lo, A Captain Mitty Approacheth.

 So now that we've looked at how Jan's character, measly as it had been, was sent into a destructive tailspin by the combination of an ill-considered retcon to her ethnicity, accompanied by the sudden transformation of her background to being ultra-wealthy, and a somehow even more ill-considered relationship with Damon, it's time to move on. Because as significant as all that was, it was small beer next what would wind up the most significant retcon in DbD history, the one which changed Zed and Sam from mere members of an ensemble into the strip's de facto protagonists.

Early in 2005, Zed and Sam went on a date. They were randomly mugged by a knife-wielding thug, as happens in fiction, and most especially conservative fiction, and Zed drew a gun on the mugger, followed, of course, by Sam also drawing a gun. What followed was the stereotypical 'good guy with a gun' story, with Sam and Zed reveling in their mighty power. This moment has been called by others the birth of the new Zed, the figure I like to call 'Captain Mitty'. However, I argue that would actually come later. This was more the moment when the embryonic form of that character, who'd lurked around the edges of Zed in his schlub days, became sharply defined. Captain Mitty would be truly born nearly a year later.

That event would occur in a later mini-storyline, Zed, Sam, Damon and Jan go out to practice their shooting, and Sam notes that the various military guys are saluting Zed. Zed burbles out an explanation, Sam notes that Zed has scars on his back, Zed burbles out more explanation, and in aside panel, two of the military guys reveal that Zed is a former special ops sniper.

And just like that... we had Captain Mitty, Zed not as a dopey aging office worker, but as a patriotic deadly badass. And because she was ultimately defined by her relationship with Zed, Sam would change too, to become the worthy helpmate of this vir maximus. Indeed, we see some of it in that first story I mentioned, where Sam, in that mugging, drew her gun as quickly as Zed did. The woman who'd been defined as Zed's counterpart as a snarky, aging urban professional was going to become, well, his counterpart in a very different way.

Now, this is the start of Zed and Sam's becoming figures of more or less total wish fulfillment, not the end, so we will be talking about this more in the future, especially once we hit the Transition Era. But what we need to shift to in the next installment is how the changing politics of the world changed the tone of DbD in very subtle ways.

At first.

Destroying It Completely, Yet Again.

 It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Hop Harrigan.

You know, the amount of times they've utterly thwarted this preposterous thing after previously utterly thwarting it takes on a certain comic grandeur that only gets better when the completely ridiculous nature of it--a prospective Muslim-only building project, on the Texas border--is considered. This is Muir so desperate for a hate object, he throws one together in a hurry, then keeps putting the resulting jumble back up so he can knock it down again.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 11: Daddy Warbucks In Rich Corinithian Leather.

 I'd originally planned to talk about Jan and Damon's relationship, but then I saw that the very first storyline to actually ratchet it up involved the emergence of Don Portago's increased role in the strip, so you know what? We're doing this.

Now, Don Portago was introduced primarily to announce that oh, yes Jan was Hispanic, but he did a lot more than that. He also established that she was from a wealthy upbringing. Why Muir decided this was something he had to do isn't necessarily clear--part of it was doubtless to further underline that she was his own stereotype of a liberal, a child of privilege whose views were just the result of being coddled. But it's hard not to suspect that another part was on some level Muir feeling that making Jan Hispanic necessitated giving her more advantages to make her fit that stereotype. Jan as a merely middle-class Hispanic woman doesn't hit the way a Hispanic woman who has never and will never have to worry about money does.

In essence--Muir knew on some level that what he liked to think was bullshit, and if he didn't give Jan more money than she needed, people would naturally start seeing her as facing problems in life. And so her father was made into an insanely wealthy and connected man.

This would have a profound effect on the strip, and in fact, it wouldn't take long for it to emerge. A storyline in 2005 would see Damon quitting in a huff when he found that Mystery Business(tm)'s primary stock holder was Pepsi, whose CEO had said some unkind things about Dubya. Jan, instead of seeing this as a profoundly childish and unprofessional behavior, was filled with admiration, because Muir was convinced he was writing something like Sam and Diane. And so Jan went to her father... who simply bought the company.

Now, this little plot detail was never brought up again, not least of all because Muir just didn't understand what he'd done here. But to mix my Greek metaphors, Pandora's Box was opened, and Muir had discovered the use of a Deus ex machina to have lowered from the heavens at will. El Dorado's Dad improbable wealth would be popping up quite a bit in the future whenever Muir figured he needed it... and that was only the first of these Plot Coupons (as I like to call them) to appear. Soon, they'd proliferate, leading to the bizarre world the cast lives in now.

But then, a lot of very stupid, silly things were put into motion at this stage of the strip.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 10: Muir Diversifies The Cast Through Retcons.

The tiny central cast of DbD of the Early Mystery Business(TM) Period were three white people and one Black guy. Then, very early in the Late Period, this suddenly became one white man, one Black guy, one Hispanic woman, and one Eurasian woman who also would sometimes be treated as fully Asian when that advanced whatever racist point Muir wanted to make in a strip.

And all without changing a single member of the cast.

Muir's decision to simply make it so that Jan and Sam were Hispanic and Eurasian respectively was... well, sloppy as hell, a pair of hamfisted retcons that just... happened. Now, Sam's, which happened quite a bit later, was shockingly quick and thoughtless, occurring in a strip that was insisting Democrats were the real racists, and also featured Damon in blackface. It was likely done partially for the joke, partially so that Muir could say his strip had an Asian in it, and partially so that Sam could fulfill two, count 'em two, sexual fetishes for her creator at once. (Zed even stresses that Sam is Irish-Japanese, which given what we've seen... yeah.)

But Jan's... well, Jan's would be complicated. It is fascinating to stare at Jan as she is presented now--dark-skinned, with long, straight black hair, and compare her to her original form--a very white woman with curly brown hair who almost always wore glasses. While Jan's ultimately dramatic change in appearance would happen, it would take some time. She would look the same throughout the entire Mystery Business(TM) Era. Indeed, only a month or two after the strip where she was revealed to be Hispanic, Jan would be back to acting as a Clueless White Girl in response to another Hispanic, her change ethnicity apparently requiring a little while to... take in universe.

Of course, this revelation had also involved the introduction of a reoccurring supporting cast member who continues to stick around DbD to this day--Jan's father, Don Portago, whom I like to call El Dorado Dad for his tendency to talk like El Dorado in Superfriends, speaking perfect or near-perfect English sprinkled with gratuitous Spanish so we all know he's foreign. El Dorado Dad would, believe it or not, have a significant effect on the strip despite not appearing that often, but that's something to talk about later. For now, what we really need to focus on is how this completely undermined Jan as a character.

Because that is what happened here, something I noted when I first reviewed that strip years ago. Jan wasn't a good character when she was a Clueless Liberal White Girl, but she at least made some sort of sense for the story Muir wanted to tell. Damon is the Black Conservative, Jan is the Clueless Liberal White Girl who keeps telling him he's being Black wrong, in essence, underlining her hypocrisy. Jan says she's fighting against privilege and the status quo but in truth she's mostly just reinforcing it. And that all changes the moment you make her a minority.

Or rather it should. Because of course, Muir hasn't really made Jan Hispanic. Much like Damon, who is completely isolated from the culture of Black America, Jan has no real ties to Hispanic culture. She will start, by degrees, to indulge in a watered down version of the character tics her father uses to show that he's foreign, occasionally speaking in Spanish, but that's it. She has no membership in left or liberal Hispanic groups--Damon will insult those groups to her face, and she will usually say nothing. She makes no comment on the hardships of being Hispanic. The cultural world she lives in is the same white Americana that the rest of the cast does. It is, once again, Muir imagining ethnicity in characters as nothing more than ticking a box.

Now, this would be both a fatal undermining and inept treatment of the character on its own. But of course... Muir would make it worse.

Muir Insists Up Is Now Down, And Always Has Been.

 It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Son of Zorro.

Interesting bit. Even though I commented on how Muir was quietly reiterating that he is true-true for now last time, I have to note that Jo/Trump's list of "accomplishments" aren't quite the same this time. I suspect most of this is the developing situation--Muir is as eager to declare victory as Trump, but much less able to--and some is Muir's developing oddities.

Right, Forget What We Said Earlier, This Is The Actual Brilliant Plan.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Federal Operator 99.

The Gnostic reality shifts and Muir insists this shows how clever he is, as he sneers at alliances, sneers at Congress, and imagines that this boondoggle is somehow going to be a cost-saving measure.

This is simultaneously creepy and sad.

"Ah, That Thrilling Moment When I Said, 'Hi, Zed, From Design'. Maybe. Is That Still Canon?"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because King of the Royal Mounted.

I do appreciate the occasional reminder that despite purporting to be the same characters who started out in 2002, we're actually dealing with some alternate universe version of them with similar but not identical backgrounds, where events happened differently than we saw, and may have had a different emphasis on things.

I don't think Muir realizes that, mind you, but that only adds to the unintentional comedy.

Astonishing How Every Savior Of The Cause Turns Out To Be A Dirty Traitor, Eh?

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Lone Ranger Rides Again.

And Muir once again indulges in this bathetic whining, insisting that the only reason electing an incompetent, clownishly corrupt narcissist hasn't worked out is some evil conspiracy, and insisting that his people don't really control things, and also, all his opponents are pedophiles.

All of which is a bit much in the present circumstances.

An Awkward Attempt At A Segue.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Hawk of the Wilderness.

It's hard not to think that at least part of this weird, quasi-pivot is that Muir's feeling a little hot under the collar from Peanut Gallery pushback for going full Nazi.

Has She Mentioned That She Knows How To Add Three Inches? And That Pink Salt Fights Dementia?

 It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Heroes and Villains.

You know as this more argle-bargle nonsense about business, I'm going to focus on the one fascinating thing here, which is Muir's constant back and forth on AI. When he's imagining business and moguls using it to show the serfs and the dusky hordes their place, he's all for it. When he realizes it's swiping his shitty art to make even shittier art, he's against it.

And he can do this sort of pivot because Muir never thinks about things in any sort of depth.

Who Could Have Seen It Coming?

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because flambe.

I've said it before, and I will say it again--Muir's appearance of fanatical loyalty to any individual is always a pretense. It is a lie he tells himself and others because he wishes to be seen as a man with such loyalty, following an individual worthy of such loyalty. It's never about the idol, it's about Muir, and whenever it seems to Muir that sticking with it is no longer worth it, we get bits like this great anime betrayal.

Drum Roll Please.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Zigzags of Treachery.

Has Muir done one of his patented about-faces on Ukraine, because Trump hasn't solved the war magically and Zelenskyy hasn't been revealed as as sinister criminal confederate of the pedoelite?

There's something both hilarious and depressing in that.