Have you ever read something and enjoyed it, but then had someone point out what are in retrospect glaring, obvious flaws?
May I reintroduce you to Geoff Klock’s blog. He does a pretty good bit of critical thinking-type stuff at his blog and it’s a definitely worthy addition to your RSS reader. Here, he’s taken on Planetary 26.
Planetary: A Rant about story failures. Click the button to see a quote, or click the link to see the full post. He makes a few very, very good points.
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In Planetary 26 we finally see Dowling, for the first time other than in a flashback, after a six year buildup. We have been teased with his weird power, some kind of mind worms (”Everyone who has ever met Dowling probably is Dowling.”). We don’t get to see his power at all. He scans Elijah for anything dangerous, finds nothing, and hands over all his secrets. (?!) Why he does not scan the Drummer is beyond me. Then Elijah announces the Drummer handed him a special device that means that no information will work in this area save one kind. That was an awfully powerful magic chip Dowling forgot to scan for. Then Elijah takes a door out and the ground rumbles and the shiftship from issue 4 appears and Dowling and Kim Suskind just fall to their deaths. After six years they die off screen. We get to see their bodies later. In the first few pages of the same issue Elijah just announces that Greene and Leather are dead. All four of the Planetary’s main villains die off screen.
You know what? I can’t exactly argue with him.
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I’m off to read the article itself in a bit, but I sure as hell can argue with the quote.
A) Scanning the Drummer would be utterly pointless, because the Drummer controls information flow. Dowling’s scan would’ve come back showing that the Drummer is carrying three Game Boys and the nuclear football.
B) Leather was alive the last time we saw him, but the size of the implant that got yanked out of his head would indicate that he didn’t survive the surgery (or the horrible torture) that he was undergoing the last time we saw him. Besides, Leather got his comeuppance maybe three times over the course of the series.
C) Elijah doesn’t know Greene is dead, but Greene is incapable of unassisted spaceflight and went for a nice long ride on the corpse of Not Galactus Really. Saying he’s dead is a fairly decent assumption.
D) Elijah contriving to get Greene out of the picture was the focus of an entire issue. There was build-up there.