She doesn’t remember any of that though. Nobody except him remembers anything that happened before he died. In the final timeline, they only met very briefly, here. From her perspective, she was talking to the strange girl who visited her, then he came into the room, hugged her, then they both ran off chased by security. As far as we saw, they never spoke.
Trying to keep score… we’ve had a Cowardly Lion, Nick the Chopper, a Patchwork Girl, Tip, Tick-Tock, a Dog… You could pencil in Imogene as a Dorothy type, sort of. Oz is presumably in the driver’s seat… Have we had a Scarecrow? a Bilina? What have I missed?
“Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”
Maybe Nera as Dorothy. And Virginia as the Good Witch. Not sure if Moustachio really works as the Tin Man, although he does require regular attention (winding as opposed to oiling) to keep going.
And the more I think about it, I think Virginia must be the Tinsmith, since she did, after all, give Nick his metal body, and her business is that of creating unnatural beings.
Whelp, all the folks who were hoping it wouldn’t be Nick who randomly saves him in a display of absurd and yet sadly predictable Deus Ex Machina get to be disappointed…
To which I can only reply with the Gene Wolfe observation that those who complain about a Deus Ex Machina forget that it is better that the day be saved by such means then that it not be saved at all. ^_^
Yup. If I’m ever in the position of falling to my death and I get saved by a Deus Ex Machina plot mechanism, I damn well won’t complain about it being ‘sadly predictable.’ Wait, OH SNAP….. Right! I once failed to die tragically while falling down an *extremely* steep cliff-slash-hillside because the dead branches I clutched at during my fall actually snagged in some rocks about 40 feet up, right out of a really improbable No-Shit-There-I-Was plot mechanism. Oh Horrors! Would our heroine escape to live another day? How would she get back to Terra Firma with a broken foot, lots of bruises and bloody gashes? Stay tuned in for our next thrilling episode of <Dumb Americans And How They Roll! (As it was, a friend who was climbing the thing with me got me down somehow and went looking for help. An elderly German man got me to my car and drove me and my friend to a hospital; I had gone into shock so I was pretty out of it at that point. See? These things happen.)
Tropes and plot devices exist as such because of those who read about or view them having the luxury to group and name them as such, rather than having to actually endure them personally.
But just because a story employs a Deus ex Machina does not make it poorly written.
I think many people complain about using such a device because it often involves the supernatural, or at the very least, the highly improbable. They would prefer that the plot be resolved naturally.
But as far as the Narboniverse is concerned, it’s perfectly normal to have an awful lot of the supernatural, the improbable, and the just plain hard to explain. So what some people might think of as a Deus ex Machina is really just another day at Skin Horse.
More to the point, since we know Jonah and Nick have each others’ numbers, and given Jonah’s powers, I’d argue having Nick rescue him is the LEAST Deus Ex Machina possibility. Any other solution would involve introducing a new to us character or relationship just in the nick of time.
As the sort of general argument that if he falls unexpectedly from a high point he should just die, that’s thinking like this is some kind of simulation. It’s not, it’s a story. Having a character randomly fall to his death just because would be the worst kind of narrative. From the point of view of sensible storytelling, if he randomly fell from the flying car it was BECAUSE he was going to be rescued.
I agree with your preferences D., but I’m not sure I agree about this plot point being Deus Ex Machina. A main characteristic of D.E.M is that it be coming from out of nowhere, while this seems to have been set up: We saw Jonah texting a distress call about being in a flying car in New Hampshire a couple days ago (and as a friend Nick might well be expected to be on Jonahs contact list), and the current story has established the Skin Horse Team’s presence in the general area.
I actually think most of us were expecting Nick to swoop in to save the day – so hardly out of the blue. Now, if you want to accuse it of being predictable writing I’m not sure I can put up much of a defense. (OTOH if predictable writing is a deal breaker for you, I pity your interactions with basically the whole mass media landscape.)
Mind you, this pegs Jonah as that variety of conspiracy theorist that goes in for tin foil hat type countermeasures to prevent the Government/Crypto-Fascists/whoever from spying on him all the while keeping the location feature on his smart phone active cuz, Hey – what if I lose my phone!
One could even argue that predictability (of behaviour, at least) is a key element of character driven narrative. (Examples as diverse as Patrick O’Brian, Terry Pratchett, Louis McMaster Bujold…)
On the contrary. Nick’s rescuing him is definitely a Deus ex Machina, since Nick is the machine. You may not think it’s one in the literary sense, but it certainly is in the literal sense. And a Deus ex Machina doesn’t necessarily have to come out of nowhere (although Nick does literally come from out of the blue). It just needs to be highly improbable. I mean, what are the actual odds of Nick being in a position to reach Jonah in the few seconds he had?
Had it been milked for more drama, I’d be inclined to agree, but it felt more like a comic interlude than a proper cliffhanger. Besides, unpredictable != satisfying, as evidenced,IMO, by the last arc.
… I timed myself reading the dialogue since he went out the trunk; that’s at least thirteen seconds of dialogue, even speaking quickly. So he’s going from a minimum of around 130 m/s to zero as he impacts against a hard surface. Should he be alive? Am I overthinking this? Do giant robot hands really save lives?
I had the same thought (I’d already posted something similar when I saw you’d gotten there first – no geeks here, guv, honest…). 120mph to 0 in an inch or so. It doesn’t even matter whether the surface he hits is the softest, most energy-absorbent in the world – his internal organs are going to be pulp. Plus Nick is clearly on a curving trajectory that’s bringing him up at the end, when he needs to be going down, FAST. so that’s not going to help. Cartoon physics.
“Mad Science – taking the ‘terminal’ out of ‘terminal velocity!”
Maybe the car’s antigravity field slowed his descent, thus allowing him to have an extended conversation with Nera and making sure he didn’t reach terminal velocity before he hit Nick? … Sure. Let’s go with that.
If we’re worried about the physics, let’s say that the motion lines represent Nick being in a steep dive and tilting (but not pulling out of the dive) to let Yu go through the door.
Oddly, to me is just seemed that Nick just pulled out of a dive he used to match Jonah’s velocity and simply rolled to catch him.
Thus no velocity differential and no diced Jonah. Now all Nick has to do is throttle up and fly instead of plummet.
What could be simpler?
The answer is a resounding ‘yes’. Everyone knows that comics and cartoons don’t have to answer to the laws of nature — and in this case, specifically physics.
I actually think you haven’t overthought it enough: Nick’s rotors are facing forward, not up. So in addition to Jonah’s ~200kph downward velocity, we also have at least an Osprey’s stall speed (204kph according to Wikipedia), added as right angle vectors. About 280kph in all. Luckily Jonah is a quantum creature and exists at multiple velocities and positions until Nick observes him and collapses the waveform. Very luckily, Nick was in a good mood and collapsed the waveform in a way Jonah could survive (the “whup” distribution).
So, let’s see. Jonah was falling for about 15 seconds (based on previous dialogue). And it takes, by coincidence, about that to reach 99% of terminal velocity. And Nick was cutting in to catch him on a trajectory that was – to be generous – no more than horizontal. So Jonah just hit a solid deck at a closing speed of 120mph or more.
Nah, that just proves they’re doing their job. If they hadn’t been suppressing jetpacks, Jonah would have undoubtedly had a commercially-produced personal jetpack, and this wouldn’t have been a problem in the first place.
Yes, please, add that to the flame war. If you can provide proof of the flying car (and with Nick’s sensor array being what it is, he can provide pictures in several different spectrums) that will get the Dept. of Jetpack Suppression on the case against the owner of said car. And anything that adds more confusion and disarray to Anasigma can only help everyone else.
I have to ask, for all those making story logic and physics-related complaints, why on earth are you reading a comic that involves mad science and “mojo”? This is not a physics textbook, it’s an awesome comic set in an alternate universe where they have mad science and “mojo”, and the improbable becomes probable! I’m pretty sure that Shaenon and Jeff are creating this comic primarily to entertain, so why not just enjoy it? I find it pretty darn entertaining myself, and I think Shaenon and Jeff have done a good job of establishing that we should not expect the Skin Horse universe to work in any kind of mundane and ordinary way like ours does.
If it had ever been suggested that Nick had a Mad Science powered device to arrest falling people harmlessly, nobody would be complaining. Just because a story has magic or sci-fi tech, that doesn’t mean all logic and reason go out the window. Things in fiction are generally assumed to be similar to real life unless we have a reason to believe otherwise. This could just about scrape in under ‘cartoon physics’, although that’s a poor explanation as falling from a high place onto a hard surface will usually kill you in anything more realistic than Looney Toons.
This is the first time Jonah Yu has met “the gang,” right?
Come to think of it, yeah. He only met Nick last time. The team was out in Florida.
He met Dr Lee, too.
But she’s not exactly “the gang,” is she?
Of course she is
Trying to remember if he met Virginia in the timeline where they got out alive.
If you’re referring to the one where Jonah died like 27 times, yes. Virginia knocked out one of the security staff for them in her office… repeatedly.
She doesn’t remember any of that though. Nobody except him remembers anything that happened before he died. In the final timeline, they only met very briefly, here. From her perspective, she was talking to the strange girl who visited her, then he came into the room, hugged her, then they both ran off chased by security. As far as we saw, they never spoke.
First for them. Likely not for him.
OH HELL YES
I would love to know what swear was replaced by ‘small fried oysters’.
I’m hazarding a guess one related to what “rocky mountain oysters” refer to.
Yeah, I suspect Nick actually accomplished a near-swear with this one.
Regardless, it is among my favorite of Nick’s cen-swears
I really like “Cellophane!” Gonna have to start using that one in my own swear filter.
I could probably hazard a guess.
Happy happiness!
Trying to keep score… we’ve had a Cowardly Lion, Nick the Chopper, a Patchwork Girl, Tip, Tick-Tock, a Dog… You could pencil in Imogene as a Dorothy type, sort of. Oz is presumably in the driver’s seat… Have we had a Scarecrow? a Bilina? What have I missed?
“Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”
Maybe Nera as Dorothy. And Virginia as the Good Witch. Not sure if Moustachio really works as the Tin Man, although he does require regular attention (winding as opposed to oiling) to keep going.
No, he’s Tick-Tock, who also required regular winding.
That did occur to me.
And the more I think about it, I think Virginia must be the Tinsmith, since she did, after all, give Nick his metal body, and her business is that of creating unnatural beings.
Nick is the Tin Man. TM’s actual name was Nick Chopper, and just to drive it home, our Nick’s surname is Zerhakker.
While she may not be H.M., Gavotte is presumably T.E.
I mean, the character doesn’t line up at all, but that’s the first thing I thought of when this subject was brought up.
H.T. is definitely the Hungry Tiger, right down to the initials. But does he eat cornflakes? Past events suggest not.
Don’t forget Tip Wilkin as Ozma.
Whelp, all the folks who were hoping it wouldn’t be Nick who randomly saves him in a display of absurd and yet sadly predictable Deus Ex Machina get to be disappointed…
To which I can only reply with the Gene Wolfe observation that those who complain about a Deus Ex Machina forget that it is better that the day be saved by such means then that it not be saved at all. ^_^
This.^
Yup. If I’m ever in the position of falling to my death and I get saved by a Deus Ex Machina plot mechanism, I damn well won’t complain about it being ‘sadly predictable.’ Wait, OH SNAP….. Right! I once failed to die tragically while falling down an *extremely* steep cliff-slash-hillside because the dead branches I clutched at during my fall actually snagged in some rocks about 40 feet up, right out of a really improbable No-Shit-There-I-Was plot mechanism. Oh Horrors! Would our heroine escape to live another day? How would she get back to Terra Firma with a broken foot, lots of bruises and bloody gashes? Stay tuned in for our next thrilling episode of <Dumb Americans And How They Roll! (As it was, a friend who was climbing the thing with me got me down somehow and went looking for help. An elderly German man got me to my car and drove me and my friend to a hospital; I had gone into shock so I was pretty out of it at that point. See? These things happen.)
Tropes and plot devices exist as such because of those who read about or view them having the luxury to group and name them as such, rather than having to actually endure them personally.
I’d rather read a well written story where the day is not saved than a poorly written one where it is.
But just because a story employs a Deus ex Machina does not make it poorly written.
I think many people complain about using such a device because it often involves the supernatural, or at the very least, the highly improbable. They would prefer that the plot be resolved naturally.
But as far as the Narboniverse is concerned, it’s perfectly normal to have an awful lot of the supernatural, the improbable, and the just plain hard to explain. So what some people might think of as a Deus ex Machina is really just another day at Skin Horse.
More to the point, since we know Jonah and Nick have each others’ numbers, and given Jonah’s powers, I’d argue having Nick rescue him is the LEAST Deus Ex Machina possibility. Any other solution would involve introducing a new to us character or relationship just in the nick of time.
As the sort of general argument that if he falls unexpectedly from a high point he should just die, that’s thinking like this is some kind of simulation. It’s not, it’s a story. Having a character randomly fall to his death just because would be the worst kind of narrative. From the point of view of sensible storytelling, if he randomly fell from the flying car it was BECAUSE he was going to be rescued.
I hadn’t thought about that, colomon. So Jonah was right to send out the shotgun text, since that’s why Nick is there.
I agree with your preferences D., but I’m not sure I agree about this plot point being Deus Ex Machina. A main characteristic of D.E.M is that it be coming from out of nowhere, while this seems to have been set up: We saw Jonah texting a distress call about being in a flying car in New Hampshire a couple days ago (and as a friend Nick might well be expected to be on Jonahs contact list), and the current story has established the Skin Horse Team’s presence in the general area.
I actually think most of us were expecting Nick to swoop in to save the day – so hardly out of the blue. Now, if you want to accuse it of being predictable writing I’m not sure I can put up much of a defense. (OTOH if predictable writing is a deal breaker for you, I pity your interactions with basically the whole mass media landscape.)
Mind you, this pegs Jonah as that variety of conspiracy theorist that goes in for tin foil hat type countermeasures to prevent the Government/Crypto-Fascists/whoever from spying on him all the while keeping the location feature on his smart phone active cuz, Hey – what if I lose my phone!
One could even argue that predictability (of behaviour, at least) is a key element of character driven narrative. (Examples as diverse as Patrick O’Brian, Terry Pratchett, Louis McMaster Bujold…)
On the contrary. Nick’s rescuing him is definitely a Deus ex Machina, since Nick is the machine. You may not think it’s one in the literary sense, but it certainly is in the literal sense. And a Deus ex Machina doesn’t necessarily have to come out of nowhere (although Nick does literally come from out of the blue). It just needs to be highly improbable. I mean, what are the actual odds of Nick being in a position to reach Jonah in the few seconds he had?
Had it been milked for more drama, I’d be inclined to agree, but it felt more like a comic interlude than a proper cliffhanger. Besides, unpredictable != satisfying, as evidenced,IMO, by the last arc.
We knew something would rescue him, or there would have been an alternate future where he learned from that death and didn’t fall.
“Great idea I had… Find a passing spaceship — get rescued by it.”
“Oh, please. The odds against it were astronomical.”
“Don’t knock it. It worked.”
Don’t be silly. That’s as unlikely as his landing on the back of some passing, giant bird…
Has Nick had an Improbability Drive installed?
Since most of his tech is classified, who can say?
I would assert that, after what happened to him, Jonah Yu basically *is* an improbability drive.
Does this count as Jonah throwing himself at the ground and missing?
Nah, it was an accident and I don’t think he’s gained the ability to talk to birds
Altarboy called it.
I really wanted it to happen. Really, how often do you get a deus ex actual machine?
… I timed myself reading the dialogue since he went out the trunk; that’s at least thirteen seconds of dialogue, even speaking quickly. So he’s going from a minimum of around 130 m/s to zero as he impacts against a hard surface. Should he be alive? Am I overthinking this? Do giant robot hands really save lives?
But if Nick was moving downward while catching Yu, then Yu’s velocity relative to Nick could have been a good deal lower…
I had the same thought (I’d already posted something similar when I saw you’d gotten there first – no geeks here, guv, honest…). 120mph to 0 in an inch or so. It doesn’t even matter whether the surface he hits is the softest, most energy-absorbent in the world – his internal organs are going to be pulp. Plus Nick is clearly on a curving trajectory that’s bringing him up at the end, when he needs to be going down, FAST. so that’s not going to help. Cartoon physics.
“Mad Science – taking the ‘terminal’ out of ‘terminal velocity!”
Maybe the car’s antigravity field slowed his descent, thus allowing him to have an extended conversation with Nera and making sure he didn’t reach terminal velocity before he hit Nick? … Sure. Let’s go with that.
Minor niggle: that’s not a curving trajectory, that’s Nick tilting so that Jonah goes through the door instead of hitting the roof.
I know, it probably doesn’t help.
If we’re worried about the physics, let’s say that the motion lines represent Nick being in a steep dive and tilting (but not pulling out of the dive) to let Yu go through the door.
Oddly, to me is just seemed that Nick just pulled out of a dive he used to match Jonah’s velocity and simply rolled to catch him.
Thus no velocity differential and no diced Jonah. Now all Nick has to do is throttle up and fly instead of plummet.
What could be simpler?
“Am I overthinking this?”
The answer is a resounding ‘yes’. Everyone knows that comics and cartoons don’t have to answer to the laws of nature — and in this case, specifically physics.
This.^
I actually think you haven’t overthought it enough: Nick’s rotors are facing forward, not up. So in addition to Jonah’s ~200kph downward velocity, we also have at least an Osprey’s stall speed (204kph according to Wikipedia), added as right angle vectors. About 280kph in all. Luckily Jonah is a quantum creature and exists at multiple velocities and positions until Nick observes him and collapses the waveform. Very luckily, Nick was in a good mood and collapsed the waveform in a way Jonah could survive (the “whup” distribution).
Speaking is a free action.
HA
I CALLED IT.
So, let’s see. Jonah was falling for about 15 seconds (based on previous dialogue). And it takes, by coincidence, about that to reach 99% of terminal velocity. And Nick was cutting in to catch him on a trajectory that was – to be generous – no more than horizontal. So Jonah just hit a solid deck at a closing speed of 120mph or more.
Kid’s got guts. (Over there…. and there…. and…)
Come meet the gang, Yu. You’ll fit right in.
Oh come on, Nick. Someone falling out of a flying car? You can’t turn that into an epic dis against the DoJPS?
Nah, that just proves they’re doing their job. If they hadn’t been suppressing jetpacks, Jonah would have undoubtedly had a commercially-produced personal jetpack, and this wouldn’t have been a problem in the first place.
Yes, please, add that to the flame war. If you can provide proof of the flying car (and with Nick’s sensor array being what it is, he can provide pictures in several different spectrums) that will get the Dept. of Jetpack Suppression on the case against the owner of said car. And anything that adds more confusion and disarray to Anasigma can only help everyone else.
I kinda want unity to guess what Nick’s swears are “supposed” to be again
Passengers to Jonas: “Who are You.” Jonas: “Yes, I’m Yu.” Jonas to helicopter: “Follow that car!”
“You are you?”
“Yes.”
“No, who ARE you?”
“I am Yu.”
“You are me?”
NO, I’m telling you, I am YU!”
etc, etc.
Ah, classic comedy . . .
Thumbs up!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JEFF!
Thanks so much, Kay!
All this debate about a Deus Ex Machina, but no one’s commented on the best part:
Nick’s back on the job at Skin Horse! Yay!
Does that make Nick a God?
If he is, he’s a small god
But we already knew Nick was coming back.
http://skin-horse.com/comic/now-concluded/
Oh, and forgot this one:
http://skin-horse.com/comic/hr-files/
You are correct; it is *barking* awesome to have Nick back!
I have to ask, for all those making story logic and physics-related complaints, why on earth are you reading a comic that involves mad science and “mojo”? This is not a physics textbook, it’s an awesome comic set in an alternate universe where they have mad science and “mojo”, and the improbable becomes probable! I’m pretty sure that Shaenon and Jeff are creating this comic primarily to entertain, so why not just enjoy it? I find it pretty darn entertaining myself, and I think Shaenon and Jeff have done a good job of establishing that we should not expect the Skin Horse universe to work in any kind of mundane and ordinary way like ours does.
Dag. Where’s the ‘like’ button?
If it had ever been suggested that Nick had a Mad Science powered device to arrest falling people harmlessly, nobody would be complaining. Just because a story has magic or sci-fi tech, that doesn’t mean all logic and reason go out the window. Things in fiction are generally assumed to be similar to real life unless we have a reason to believe otherwise. This could just about scrape in under ‘cartoon physics’, although that’s a poor explanation as falling from a high place onto a hard surface will usually kill you in anything more realistic than Looney Toons.
Nobody tell the DoJS about that flying car.