Munch
When I wrote this, I had forgotten that Lottie and the rest of the mystery friends had actually been under alien mind control – in fact, the only one who wasn’t was Shauna. I wrote it as a goof on Lottie’s love of the X-Files. But if you’re reading this, I didn’t manage to write a better final line.
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We all know John Munch, right? The unifying TV figure who really ties the Tommy Westphall system together. You’ll enjoy reading about this preposterous interlinking of TV shows if you’ve never encountered it before.
I suspect that Law & Order: Criminal Intent is an unlikely candidate for pinball immortalisation, but for the connoisseur, it remains the franchise branch of choice, the only one with Goldblum (in a wig?)
BOB OM! 🙂 I love the idea of a Law & Order pinball game for any of the series.
Also, when does the next season/series of UK Bakery Tent drop? We’ll all want to watch Shauna’s appearance.
It’s fine, John. The irony just makes it more powerful.
(I was talking about the final panel, though I supose it’s accurate for the pinball game, too.)
Every time that sting plays, a composer gets a royalty
(Suppose.)
Mind control? Lem was just a right good laugh once you got to know him.
Until I got to the commentary, I was just assuming that Lottie had reconstructed events in her brain so Shauna was controlled and she wasn’t. Which I guess doesn’t bode well for the events of “The Big Hiatus” having actually happened.
I like this way of looking at it.
Is there anywhere to read The Big Hiatus? I looked at Gumroad and GoComics, although given my lack of detective abilities there’s a possibility I fumbled it.
I was able to dig it out of The Wayback Machine.
Thank you fine sir!
John Campbell, I don’t know who you are, but you have my eternal gratitude and so does the Wayback Machine. I had completely forgotten this episode. A tragic tale, and the hell with alien mind control, this is obviously what really happened.
The story Lottie told in tThe Big Hiatus was supposed to take place before The Case of the Missing Piece, I think. It was Lottie’s explanation for the rift in her and Shauna’s friendship that occurred in that story. That rift was repaired at the end of The Case of the Severed Alliance.
Yeah, the framing story fits into the few days gap between “Missing Piece” and “Severed Alliance” (and immediately after this “Hard Yards” strip), but it’s Lottie answering Shelly’s inquiry as to “What happened between the case of the MOPED INSANITY [“Modern Men”] and the case that didn’t seem to feature a mystery [“Missing Piece”]?”
I don’t think the rift ever has been fully repaired, for all that Claire declared them best friends again. If it had, they wouldn’t be having this conversation.
I disagree. Friends can drift apart. It happens. It doesn’t necessarily mean the rift was still there.
An ice sheet doesn’t drift without a rift to break it from the shelf…
All I can go by here is my own experience, but in the case of the vast majority of friendships I’ve had, our lives simply went in other directions eventually, with no rift of any sort. In the case of the one friend I’ve remained in close contact with over the decades, we actually have had a couple of rifts here and there, but in the long run they didn’t lead to any drifting apart at all. So, for me, “friends drifting apart” and “serious rifts in a friendship” are two entirely separate things that don’t relate to each other at all. Your experiences may be different.
Oh my gourd, find a way to get The Big Hiatus back online. Looking at this reunion I feel that moment when the Green Man asks for “your friendship” and realized what he was asking. Damn, that was a fine and painful moment and I’ve never forgotten it.
So, that’s what happens after their old school was closed… sad but very natural. This explains pretty well why the old team stopped to be interested in mysteries leaving Lottie (except Claire, who was and still is with her). I hope Shauna is still friend with the rest of the former mystery kids group. Also, I have no idea what UK Bakery Tent is supposed to be, but sounds very competitive. Perfect for Shauna!
I’m assuming UK Bakery Tent is the Tackleverse equivalent of The Great British Baking Show — which, BTW, is one of my favorite shows of all time.
Or The Great British Bake Off, to give it its proper name. It was renamed in the US for trademark reasons.
Is that what happened? Of all the possible Britishisms, I couldn’t figure out why anybody thought we wouldn’t understand “Bake Off”.
Yep, Pillsbury trademarked the term way back in the day. The show even goes as far as using digital visual effects to get rid of the original name in the US version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OEwbocwYF8
Does everyone re-record their dialogue to avoid saying ‘bake off’, or is it more of a top Cat/ Boss Cat thing?
If it’s a trademark issue, using the phrase in spoken dialog should be fine (if potentially confusing in this case). In fact, it’s kind of hard to see what kind of trademark Pillsbury could have on the term that would prevent its use for a TV show.
a search on the USPTO database suggests they have trademarks on “BAKE-OFF” for “cooking and baking contests” and for “cook books” (which are surely an important spin-off income source for TV cookery shows). Maybe they could have used the title for the show but clearly they decided it wouldn’t have been worth the trouble.
Can someone translate 6th Form College vs 6th Form High, and what that equates to in US High School levels (Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior) so I can get a feel for what age we are talking about? I’m guessing this occurred right after BadMachinery wrapped up?
I believe it’s roughly equivalent to the U.S high school juniors and seniors. Griswalds had a sixth form for most of Bad Machinery, but it was closed at the end of “The Great Unboxing” (which John kindly linked the other day) due to fallout from the terrible chain of events that Mildred set in motion.
Yes, sixth form would typically be for ages 16-18, preparing for university entrance, generally by studying for “A levels”. A “sixth form college” would be independent of the local schools, probably drawing students from several of them, allowing a wider range of courses than a single school sixth form could provide.
The Griswald’s 6th form ended up a victim of the ongoing defunding of British state education. Once the Wen-Tack tunnel provided a quick route between the two towns, students had two other 6th form alternatives in easy reach and the school could no longer justify the funding for two additional year groups and A-level course materials/classroom space. Since the alternatives were at St Ginnifer’s girls school and the independent 6th form, this hit the friendships of the Griswald’s girls especially hard.
As a note, in most state schools these have since been reclassified as Years 12 and 13 instead of lower and upper sixth.
“Sixth form” is the two final years of school before university admission; it follows a set of exams (GCSEs, O levels in olden times) taken at age 16ish which mark the end of compulsory schooling. In some schools it’s just a more or less seamless transition (maybe with a change in or removal of uniform), but also some university-bound kids transfer to either different schools or into colleges that just teach the same courses but in a more studenty, less schooly, environment. Those colleges can be specialist “sixth form colleges” that just do courses for university qualification exams (“A levels”) or parts of bigger institutions that also teach vocational skills and so on (so like US community colleges I think).
US community colleges are roughly a low-cost alternative to the first two years of university, but also teach vocational skills. They often have a larger population of older students (retirement / career change age) than universities.
Students typically finish high school (9th–12th grade) before entering community college, but concurrent enrollment is possible, and sometimes encouraged with reduced tuition. In my experience, concurrent enrollment typically will happen at around ages 16–18, but I’ve known of two cases of 11-year-olds concurrently enrolling at a community college – the first in the nineties and the second in the aughts.
The perfect Bobbinsverse balance of humor and poignancy going on here.
Shauna’s got a badge and a gun? Cool!
That Munchman looks a bit like Anthony Fauci.
I hadn’t heard of John Munch so I looked him up and realised that John Munch looks like Fauci. It was the ears.
So in other words – it was all the fault of Mildred Haversham, the ‘great unboxing’ and the sudden radical redrawing of sixth-form catchment areas.
Waitaminute …
Is “LAW & ORDER – CRIMINAL IN TENT” a foreshadowing of what happened during the show Shauna was on?!?
DUN DUN!
WHOA
Do it do it do it do it
I concur with your analysis, Criminal Intent was the superior pony in the L&O stable, sadly gone too soon.
How come SVU was the popular one? I never understood that. SVU was kind of gross, and CI’s characters were much more interesting.
SVU’s a soap opera, I think, if you look at it narratively outside the sex crimes cases. It cuts across more easily. With the exception of the slightly weird and off-kilter first season, I don’t like SVU.
If you want weird and off-kilter but good, SVU can’t hold a candle to the first season of the original Law & Order, which is REALLY off-kilter and REALLY good.
With regard to SVU, I agree that it can be very much a soap opera, but I think some of the later season finales compel. The Greg Yates/Carl Rudnick arc is good stuff, some of the best I’ve seen on crime television.
I have season 1 of original L&O on DVD. I will never part with it. Powerhouse acting chops across the board.
SVU is the popular one because Americans are Puritanically obsessed with sex and sex crimes.
It’s always been my personal headcanon that Jeff Goldblum’s character on “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” was actually the same character he played on the short-lived show “Raines” under an alias. He played a mentally ill homicide detective who experienced hallucinations of the murder victims until he solved their murders. There was an episode of L&O in which he commented that murder victims “usually aren’t very talkative” and another in which someone asked him why he was so determined to solve a particular case and he just stared at them. I imagined him thinking “because the victim is really annoying and they won’t go away until I solve their murder”.
My heart is breaking and so happy at the same time, Allison you evil bastard, you got the Christmas special balance down just right.
There’s a typo in the very first speech balloon (“you got on on” s/b “you got on”).
Try “how you got on, on UK Bakery Tent”.
Let the record reflect that there are a few pinball machines based on less than iconic IPs.
Johnny Mnemonic and Roller Games both got pinball machines based on the prediction they were going to be big hits.
Also: Rescue 911, the obscure 70s disaster movie Meteor, the 90s The Shadow movie with Alec Baldwin, Congo, Maverick, and the 90s Lost in Space movie.
In the American system of justice, the pinballs are directed by two separate but equal groups: the plungers that launch the balls, and the flippers that direct them. These are their stories.
PING-PING!