#à la 'THIS is what you do to people: You endanger them make them irresponsibl. You turn them into a danger to themselves. YOU are dangerous'

[isalabells]

Quick rant now that I’ve finished reading Toteninsel:

never before have I realized the irony (bordering on cynicism?) of #100 being published not even a month after 9/11 happened. Terrorists are actually called out quite a few times in part 3, along with the whole ‘going to war’ discourse, and while I believe Marx is deliberately exaggerating when he says he doesn’t care much for day-to-day politics, I do believe him when he says that he tries to not even hint at any contemporary political shenanigans in DDF (which, ofc, further establishes DDF as the anti-thesis to TKKG, seeing how TKKG is highly political with almost every single story, while DDF is as apolitical as it gets). So this wasn’t done on purpose or written as a meta-take, foreshadowing the years to come, but it can very well be read as such, and it’s quite eerie, looking at it now, bc it catapulted the series out of the 90s innocence into the age of terrorism, if just briefly and mainly for this episode. But wow, that kinda struck me.

The whole story is like the biggest Bob/Jelena fanfiction Marx has ever written, hands down. There are countless, unashamedly mushy, heartwarming scenes, and there’s a lot of heavy flirting going on, and I am lovin’ it.

It comes as a surprise to no one that I am still madly in love with Dr. Maria Svenson (or rather: the idea and concept of her, bc while the novel thankfully fleshes her character out a bit more, there’s still so much wasted potential), and I am still mad we never got a Sphinx reunion.

Hot Take: The Hadden Siblings are really great and entertaining, highkey dramatic and unhinged villains and they deserved to be main focus in an episode dedicated to them. Or even better, a trilogy. Like I still don‘t get why Kari felt the need to create a new Gary Stu with Mr. Grey when we’d literally JUST gotten rid of the old one (yes, I am talking about Hugenay, I do like him and esp Marx’ iteration of him, but he is a Gary Stu and there’s a good reason he closed the door on him for good), when like the Hadden siblings were RIGHT FUCKIN’ THERE. You could’ve gone in the craziest directions with them, just whyyyy waste them

What really got to me tho: the amount of issues both Peter and Bob got when it comes to the everlasting question of ‘how loyal do I have to be to our lil’ detective team/how much sense of self-preservation am I allowed to display/how much of these dangerous things do I keep doing to not disappoint or anger Justus’. It’s amazing, when they first send Peter to snoop around on board of the Explorer, he approaches this task with Just’s imaginary voice in his head. Lateron, when he’s stuck on that ship and has to try not to blow his cover, he spends the majority of the time figuring out how to keep their mission going (!!!) and BERATING himself for not being as clever as Justus, for not being as good as he when it comes to improvising and talking to people in a way to get more info out of them, and on top of that all, his main recurring thought is ‘I’m aware that I am not clever enough to pull any of this off long enough.’ It is HEARTBREAKING and frustrating, even more so bc a) Justus is the very reason that Peter wound up in this dangerous situation, and b) even for all his flaws, this is NOT what he’d want. At all. It’s a pity Peter will never know bc Justus sucks at communicating this. Bob isn’t off any better tho, when he gets knocked down by Hadden’s private hypnotist, and he presents him with the options of ‘either you’ll let me put you in a trance, or you can go home’, Bob admits he is super-afraid of being hypnotized yet again (yep, still traumatized from Stimmen aus dem Nichts, which Marx even acknowledges, Hi, Dr. Franklin), but he doesn’t allow himself to stew on that for long, bc his main thoughts are dedicated to ‘how do I keep this mission going, which option would Just prefer me to choose, what would Justus do’ like wow WOW.