By: Paul Cornell (story), Ryan Kelly (art), Giulia Brusco (colors)
The Story: Professor Kid discovers he’s been the object of a kinky couple’s dirty game.
The Review: With only one more issue until the end, Saucer Country now seems in a hurry to get it all over with. If you thought last issue went by quickly, this one takes it up a couple notches more, throwing one big confrontation after another in succession. This isn’t such a bad thing; the pace on this series has been fairly slow up to this point, so acceleration during what is essentially a series finale seems appropriate.
So it’s not the speed itself that feels off; rather, it’s the jarring feeling of everyone suddenly kicking their interactions into high gear when cautious wariness has been the name of the game for the past year. Saucer Country has always been about the mind games these various groups engage in with each other, but to win requires playing for the long game—meaning you need to do as the chess masters do and take your time to consider the next move.
What happens when you start making rash decisions in a mind game—as in chess—is cracks start to appear in your strategy. Kidd’s threat to hang himself forces the Pioneer couple to take immediate action and reveal more information than they obviously planned, but more than that, they reveal they can be rattled in a very non-supernatural sort of way. Gone are the smooth speeches; in their place are the long pauses of people scrambling to come up with the right words on the fly, which sounds pretty human to me: “We’re your…magical helpers. We have to protect you!” “[The evidence is]…not here!”
Ultimately, the truth comes out about these so-called figments of Kidd’s imagination, but if anything, the truth is even more bizarre and loaded than the fiction. After all—spoiler alert—if the Pioneer couple is just a projection of a man and woman doing full-frontal, then you have to ask: what kind of technology allows them to do that? Who set them up to do it? Why is Kidd so important to their plan that they’re compelled to save his life? And how did they get hold of that alien artifact you’ve seen in the Bluebirds’ possession?
Speak of the devil, the myth of the Bluebirds is starting to break down too, as Chloe and Michael quickly deconstruct the motivations and background of Astelle’s association. It’s hard to tell how much the duo knows is genuine and how much is a bluff, but even if it is a bluff, that only makes their tactic even more impressive. As Chloe says, “I know how to send journalists on snipe hunts—and she’s not a journalist.”* But to pull off a good snipe hunt (read: fast one) requires in some ways even more cleverness and thought than the real thing.
Fun as these scenes are, they still feel awkward in how quickly and easily Team Arcadia are able to overcome these deceptions when you’ve been led to believe that it was going to take a lot of care and struggle for our heroes to get the upper hand. Cornell may have at least one trump card left for the final play, though; Jackie, who campaigns for the incumbent president, reveals how much he knows of Arcadia’s close encounters and when rebuffed by Harry, he mutters, “Damn it, Harry—you can’t say we didn’t warn you.” Naturally, you wonder if that remark’s a threat or an actual warning.
I don’t know if Kelly’s got anything planned after this, but I hope so. While I think Saucer Country’s paranoid conspiracy material made the perfect fit for Kelly’s soap-opera style, Kelly has such a flexible, detail-oriented style that it can probably fit in quite a lot of other settings. He brought a lot of humanity to the characters during his run on this series, which was half the reason why you could get attached to them in the first place. I’ll miss Brusco’s coloring, too, so confident and secure, giving every individual object its own hues to show off Kelly’s meticulous detail, instead of letting them all blend together.
Conclusion: I understand necessity drives the pace of this title now, but that doesn’t make the rushed feeling any easier to take.
Grade: B
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: * I particularly love the snipe hunt reference since me and my friends loved trying to pull that trick on every new kid we ran into during our elementary years. Good times. Does anyone fall for that anymore, I wonder? Better question: does anyone even know what that is anymore?
– Can I also just say that it tickles me pink to see Cornell using the phrase “cray-cray” in a comic?
– I loved Harry’s belief in his candidate. I haven’t put that much faith into any human being since Mother Theresa, Charles Schultz, and Mr. Rogers died.
Grade
Conclusion