The Johnny Bacardi Show

Before I get wound up, a quick note to Larry Young: that Jeff Johns is damn good. Get him started on a project ASAP! Now, on with the post...

Young posts more (look for the June 11 entry) about reaction to Demo on his site, specifically that troublesome issue 6 that we all had such a time with. He provides us with an anology that explains his reaction to some of the reaction: his idea that someone could delve into the backstory of the characters portrayed by Chuck Heston and company, "Before the Planet of the Apes". And besides being a clever notion, he uses this perceived non-importance of the PotA characters' backstory to demo-nstrate (heh) that (repeat after me, kiddies) "Sometimes the story is the story is the...". All well and good. I'll grant that on a list of movies I want more backstory about, "Planet of the Apes" ranks mighty low. But that doesn't really address my concerns about that issue 6, specifically, how he heck did Ken get from point a to point b after what went down in his flashback, if we can all agree (and I think there are some valid disagreements with this) upon the veracity of Ken's story. The events in the original Planet of the Apes film and its sequel were sufficient to tell me all that I wanted to or needed to know about these characters. Chuck flew into a time warp, landed on an Earth where apes were in charge and men were hunted and treated like, well, animals...Chuck proves he's different and wins an independence of sorts, then finds out that he's on Earth after all, and Mankind made itself expendable. Then James Fransiscus shows up looking for him and pisses everybody off, so they blow up the world. Everything I need to know about the characters and the position they find themselves in is explained, more or less, logically and satisfactorily to me so I can understand and appreciate the Apely goings-on. But in Demo 6, once more with feeling, Ken is directly or indirectly responsible for the mass slaughter of the residents of his neighborhood, who admittedly had it coming, but there you go. When we are introduced to him, he's got a nice girl, and we are told he's happy and successful. Now I find it a stretch, even in the best of circumstances, that everything was just hunky dory the next morning after Ken's little guignol apocalypse, his parents let him back in so he could continue to have a more-or-less normal life and attend school and get a great job and his great girl, and when the police showed up his parents just shrugged and said "Dingoes? Who the f- knows"?

God knows I don't mean to be picking at this scab, but I just wasn't given enough information or logic to fully appreciate what I read in Demo 6. As the story stands, it's an enigma to me. I will always remember the powerful buildup and release of Ken's anger and frustration and the terrible toll it took, but I simply can't buy anything else I read in the story because it just doesn't make sense to me that Ken could skate after such a cataclysmic event. Sure, we don't need to know Ken's backstory to follow and appreciate #6, but it sure would help it make more sense. Brian Wood chose not to give this to us, fair enough, but it kept me from wholeheartedly embracing an otherwise fine story.

Imagine, if you will, Planet of the Apes if we hadn't seen the scenes with the astronauts crashing, essentially the first 15 minutes or so, and our first glimpse of Chuck & Co. had been in the tall grass, being pursued by apes with nets. What the-? How did these intelligent humans get there? Who are they? Why is everyone else sub-intelligent? What the heck is going on in this friggin movie? And imagine that we are never told. We are just asked to accept that there is one intelligent human, and he's on that planet, and we better deal with it because...the story is the story is the story is the...