Chapter 43-1 The Darkness Ahead

[Litmaster]

REGARDING SAUL'S FATE

I think Saul is not long for this world. From a storytelling stand point he is a Foreshadowing God. Said Lady was alive.... she is alive. Said his mom was alive... she is alive. Said Lizzy will fall for him.... Lizzy Falls for him. Said Lizzy was still alive... Lizzy is still alive. Outside of Burt saying "Scratch is alive" no one else has done this. Him saying "I need to set up stuff just in case..." is nothing short of KC going "Yeah. This bastards about to die". Add in that he is Immune and such? Yeah. I see him going down protecting group and Lizzy naming the child Saul Jr.

Interesting thought, but I just don't see martyrdom in Saul's character. He never really has been a 'sacrifice myself for the greater good' kind of guy. Datu? Definitely. But Saul has always been motivated more from a fierce loyalty to his inner circle, which currently only includes Lizzy, the baby, Tanya, and Victor. Just look at how quick Saul was to ignore the needs of the group and get single-minded focus on saving Lizzy; he wasn't even really thinking whether that was the best for the whole or not; he probably didn't even really consider that aspect.

REGARDING SCENE VS. EXPOSITION

Yeah, that scene had the most gaping holes in terms of eyewitness accounts, and even Michael said that leading into it. They had to piece it together after everything happened. It was such an important event, it had to be documented. Why did we hear what the soldiers were saying? Like word for word? That's the mechanics of how we tell the story. The details of this instance, at the end, follows the rules already established. How, exactly, won't be clear for now.

Even so, that would only give them what had transitions between the chopper/base and the recon team. They had all the banter before the chopper landed. Kc did say this was the only event that broke the rule so far in the story....

Wow, @Gooer, you're really beating this drum today. Would Michael & Co. have LITERALLY known every specific thing that was said by the chopper team, despite being miles away and far removed? Of course not. But the story has been told that way since the beginning--hell, ALL first person narratives are told this way, when you think if it. The journal-narration leads us into each scene as exposition, but each scene follows it's own dynamics, as if you could start by telling a friend about a concert you went to last month, and then suddenly your friend is magically transported back in time, as an invisible overseer to that very event.

For example, Michael starts the story with his journal-narrative of "I remember that day like it was burned into my brain: may 8, 2009" and then we get the scene with the girl inviting him to a party and the teacher saying there'd be no make-ups on the exam, etc. So would Michael have REALLY remembered, verbatim, the exact transcripted dialogue of those scenes, and of every other scene he took part in with this story? Of course not! Can you remember the exact transcript of a conversation you had with someone last year? Again, no. The purpose of exposition in fiction is to summarize the non-essential events that either aren't important ("e.g., "And that was all I remembered about that") or occur over a span of time (e.g., "The next four months at the Colony flowed into each other, as each of us were busy with our respective jobs"). Really unimportant information to the story is often left out altogether, or perhaps briefly alluded to (like what Lady has been up to this whole time at the Colony).


REGARDING SCRATCH

SCRATCH CANNOT DIE!
If she dies, all of our collective love will resurrect her, like Tinkerbell....but if Tinkerbell was human sized....with a scratch....and guns.

Well, I'd really love if Big Boy Robbins would get up off the mat, but I think his femur is being gnawed on right about now...

Splitting the party:
Scratch's return:
To me it's like she still is up and true to her sole agenda: To kill Pegs.
This bitch is so mad and crazy. Really f*cked up.
But, hey, that's why we love her, right?

And this is where I gotta criticize The Great One just a bit, regarding Scratch's motivation for still hanging around: okay, so Pegs shot her brother, but would that REALLY have been enough for her to stake her whole life, focus, resources, and manpower, for such an extended period of time, with this one revenge in mind? Hell, Latch's stupid-ass was the one ATTACKING the tower in the first place, so she could just as well placed the blame for his death with him, or maybe Durai for planning the attack. It's been such a long time since Scratch has even seen Pegs, I just don't know how realistic it is that she would still, STILL be hell-bent on coming after her, to the detriment of all else.

Not only that, but why the hell are the rest of the Mallers still in cahoots with her?! THEY didn't have their brother killed by this girl, so I would imagine their motivation for keeping on with Scratch's vendetta to be a whole lot more tenuous, especially after witnessing the fate of many of their comrades who got torched under the direction of Heir Scratch. We know about honor and thieves, so I imagine that most, or all, of them would have cut bait and snuck off one night while Scratch was sleeping...


REGARDING MONSTER FODDER

With this being said, I can't help but wondering if any hanky-panky took place in the Arena. Just what kind of Playing (As Samantha called it) and Fun (as Martin called it) took place in the enter of the rink? When Burt saw the army of zombies approaching the hospital, in The Devil's Workshop, he mentioned seeing several living, unturned humans. Any babies made prior to the Purgatory chapter will be due shortly, if not already born.

@Witch Doctor, I think it was back in the Martin chapter that he mentioned the captured people at the Arena were divided up into 2 groups--one tortured in the arena, and the other dragged off 'somewhere else' (i.e. Cain hospital to become Ink's new test subjects). In fact, given what we know about Ink's experimenting, the various incident's we've seen of live humans being dragged off, but not killed, in the story is making a lot more sense: Ink needed non-turned test subjects to work on, so he sent out the command that his followers go out and capture some (like Datu).

Speaking of that: do you think the fact that it was Randy who tried to drag off Tanya confirms that Randy is indeed under the leadership of Ink?? There has been no evidence in the story of Randy doing his own experiments, so this is pretty good evidence that he is a Zed First Mate or something...