Wizards (1977)

Wizards (1977)

I don’t know how much new there even is to be said about the ending of Nick Cutter’s The Troop.

Yet the conclusion I’ve come to feels enough like a personal revelation to me.

Spoilers for a very nasty and great book, duh

It’s pure bitter with no sweet. It leaves more questions while answering very little. It’s left just open enough for people to even have this ongoing back and forth theorizing on what exactly happens to Max, or the worms. I didn’t find it unsatisfying though. There’s something of an inevitability to it. If anything, a last survivor feels almost optimistic at first, given how hard the novel had foreshadowed a grim death for the entire batch it started with. Feeling disappointed by the state we are left with by the end of that read would have been like being let down by the ending of “To Build a Fire”.

In fact, the so commonly held theory I hear that Max didn’t in fact make it off of the island uninfected feels most thematically consistent with all the build up we were given. The fearsome survivability of the pathogen, the scent in the air, and the dread of the book’s final sentences… and equally, and more to my leaning, was the idea that Max was left infected in a more allegorical sense- haunted by the trauma of the events for the rest of his life and the fear he will always inflict on those around him.

I think to myself though for the first time lately I’ve figured out the true despair of the ending as it was left this ambiguous: that the significance of whatever answer we come to about the end is… not much, really. Does it really matter if the boy was dead allegorically or literally following his return to the island? What we are all really even debating on was how much was left of any of the main cast after the dust had settled, and no matter how hard we pour over the possibilities, it’s just another flavor of “almost nothing”

The nature of the parasites were to core out and devour every form of life it touched, and leave nothing but a spreading emptiness in its wake. Its ending isn’t necessarily mysterious, it’s just that where we want to find the answers and the resolution, there is only emptiness. The Max we met from the first pages was as dead as his friends by the final few either way. The island is dead, either way. The community is scarred and pathologic and hurting their own, either way.

And all for, I guess, the greed of a few wicked men, the corruption of those in power, the ignorant compassion of a doctor, the naivety of unbridled kids… It’s a whole disgusting tragedy that honestly teaches you no new lessons of humans. That we are blundering and imperfect animals that doom our own and ourselves? That we’re resilient and can comfort each other and find hope even through the bleakest disasters?

Maybe that’s the real spirit at the heart of the ordeal. Though the disease in the book is a purely fictional, impossible creation, real disasters are so often equally as tragic, equally artificial, and the blame for them split to so many fractions it’s hard not to entertain them as a symptomatic expression for that which all humanity is infected with.

And maybe that sickness which feeds upon us and inhabits us is inevitable in a way, but I hardly think the book was aiming for a read this cynical. For all of the toothless threats Cutter gave about the worms’ rapid evolution, their appetite never did seem to make the final jump off of that island. Though there are teases here and there about a potentially dormant infection in Max, or the air of Falstaff, neither comes to fruition. Further on, Max even voluntarily returns to the blighted origin, separating himself and his ripples from the community that shunned him.

And just maybe, in thinking about Max again, I have found some solemn grain of sugar in this outcome after all.

To my interest there’s a unique context around the way death is treated in The Troop. Dying is written as a drawn out and spectacularly agonizing, cruel, and horrific event; however, death for almost all of the characters and animals in whole book is portrayed as contrastingly merciful. With Kent’s death, Tim’s death, Newton’s death, the chimp’s death, I’m only left with a breath of relief if anything. These were terminal beings you watched suffer for chapter after chapter knowing there was a dwindlingly impossible chance of being saved. Multiple times you almost want to yell “oh my god, just put me out of that poor thing’s misery already!”

Ephraim’s own was actually terrifying and more avoidable, but at the actions of a dying Shelley, who, even if you have nothing but hatred for, still passed with a finality that just screams “thank god that’s over” for anyone in witness to his final game. You know that once he was gone, he had taken his last victims. What I’m saying is that maybe there is a similar peace somewhere in the fate of Max.

The deranged doctor told that the worms would be the final living things alive even after the wake of the apocalypse, but where there are no cockroaches, there will be no guts for those worms to nest. Parasites by definition live by the hosts they pursue, and Falstaff is now the resting place of those the worms called theirs. In Max’s return, in his death, spiritual, physical, whatever it may be, there is resolution in knowing that the memories and trauma of that emptiness will rest with him on that scorched rock. There is finality in knowing that the mainland dodged the bullet of wider outbreak and that, while the scars will linger, the infection has been survived by the more adaptable, more resilient organism that nursed it.

I don't remember why I drew this

he need some milk (follow up to this one)

Yes, and many of us already know that that kind of absurd irony was heavily inspirational to the creator’s vision. The other thing though, is, I would say Dib still doesn’t even “outsmart” Zim very often. When you account for the dumb luck of the show’s comedy and Zim’s tendency to fumble his work all on his own I can’t recall that many actual big wins Dib has claimed over him. Most of Dib’s victories are literally passing “objective:survive” or obstructing while punching so far above his own weight class. He can and does outwit Zim and gain bits of progress in breaking through his defenses and secrets, but mostly in the gathering of little crumbs and the picking at the cracks the latter leaves everywhere in his own defective sloppiness.

Dib is incredibly fortunate that Zim underestimates him so much, but he’s all the luckier for how much Zim actually overestimates his threat to the mission, or else he wouldn’t be worthy of being treated like an equal combatant, he wouldn’t deserve this sheer degree of overthink and convoluted planning when it comes to getting rid of him; it wouldn’t be a show he’s meant to see and understand first. Zim could obliterate him in an instant like he has so, so, many others but Dib’s tryhard ‘strongest enemy you’ve ever faced before’ performance is working so well that Zim’s pride in large part now shields him from the more practical and less dramatic ends he could meet fighting against the guy.

I’m not saying this to gas Dib up and then immediately flick him back down, I’m saying this to remind us that these two are in yet more ways directly a parallel to each other.

These were tags left on this original post (thank you kindly @anonymoosen). They were directly about Dib, but I would nod my head just as hard back if they were about Zim, who, for all of his scrambled and incomprehensible thought processes, is arguably the most intelligent being in the universe. I’m complimenting Dib for the fact that he can also help us forget that even more chilling information and for being able to half-way keep up with the machinations of a literal alien genius in the first place. He’s not just an enemy of the Armada, but the only human alive who made himself an expert on the Irken race.

He is the first human being to discover and study Zim’s technology and much about his biology against all attempts to keep him at bay, but even more so, besides Fitzoo-Menga, an alien with bored billionaire level resources, he’s the only non-Irken to ever successfully reverse engineer or manipulate with a PAK, Zim’s PAK, and survive, at least in one timeline. And Fitzoo didn’t even do so with the cleanness that Zib seemed capable of.

There’s something actually scary about how Dib is a very appropriately immature and dorky and unwise 12 year old kid and still possesses utterly freakish intelligence canonically putting him as likely for the second or third smartest human alive on Earth.

Or rather there is a lot of scariness in how easy it is to forget that latter part because of the former.

Wacky? I was wacky once. They locked me in a room. A dirty room. A dirty room with doughboys. And doughboys make me wacky.