So, before I head down to the
Funsville dockyards for the traditional Gathering of Disinterested Bystanders
Who Watch Nothing Specific Happen to Stacks of Unladed Cargo, I’d better keep
the pot boiling on the story I’ve been telling you…
We left Sparky both trapped and
lost in an alternate universe of television programs. After being ousted from
his post as head string-puller in a puppet dictatorship of Planet Earth, Sparky
disappeared more quickly and completely than Morgan Stanley’s credibility after
the Facebook IPO.
That little joke for the Wall
Street junkies in the audience aside, this development promised to make
retrieving Sparky from the alternate universe even more difficult than before.
As M’Dear, Moose, Science Boy and I were pondering our options, a shadow
appeared in our midst.
The voice coming from the owner
of the shadow was familiar to one of us:
It’s…PROFESSOR PROTEUS—! Science
Boy yelped, with the same intonation you might expect to hear from someone
who’s just received a hot-foot while sitting on a tack.
“Why must you always overact
your reactions to my entrances?” Professor Proteus snapped at him. “It
completely shatters the dramatic tension of the moment.”
“Oh, who died and made you
Stanislavsky?” Science Boy shot back.
Before this discussion of
acting technique could go any further, Moose turned to face Professor Proteus.
“Listen—” she started, and then stopped abruptly, before explaining why she’d
stopped. “There’s nothing there.”
“I’m still here,” replied
Professor Proteus. “It’s not my fault you can’t see me.”
Science Boy took it upon
himself to clarify matters. “Professor Proteus has changed his appearance so
many times that he has no recognizable physical form…unless you’ve seen him before, in which case he
looks the way he did when you last saw him.”
Moose avoided asking for a
further clarification on how that was possible, and moved on to a
simpler question. “How can he cast a shadow, then?”
“Force of habit,” Professor
Proteus replied. That was good enough for all of us.
Science Boy steered the
conversation down a new track. “State your business, you foul and odious
villain.”
“Your dialogue is just as
overblown as your acting—honestly,” was what Professor Proteus said
instead. “A simple “What brings you here?” would have done nicely.”
“So…er, what does bring
you here?” I asked, in an attempt to get things back on to a topic they’d never
gotten on to in the first place.
“I heard of your (ha hum…)
little problem and I thought I might offer my help.”
“We don’t need your
help,” sniffed Science Boy.
An out-of cadence chorus of
voices from the rest of us countered with various phrasings of the opinion that
we’d take anybody’s help at this stage.
“Good,” said Professor Proteus,
considering the matter settled. “It just so happens that I have a new piece of
apparatus that I wish to test on a subject who can be deemed, shall we say…expendable.”
Murmurs from the rest of us
circled around the general point that Sparky was by no means expendable, but
that we no longer had anything to lose.
“As I understand it,” Professor
Proteus went on, “your main difficulty is that your carrot-topped little
friend is trapped in a narrative which is not entirely of his own making, and
that you have no means to get him out of it.”
No murmurs or anything from us
this time—just nodding.
“And this is where my new
invention comes in,” Professor Proteus continued. He stepped towards a
strategically-placed tarpaulin, and pulled it aside.
“Behold—THE CONTRIVED PLOT DEVICE—!”
“Now who’s overacting?”
grumbled Science Boy in a time-consuming aside.
“But does it work?” asked
Moose, ever the practical one.
“Does it work?” chuckled
Professor Proteus, in a sinister fashion. “It’s just supplied this story
with an entire chapter of padding to spin things out and add suspense before
the climax.”
We couldn’t argue with that.
How does the Contrived Plot
Device work? What does it do? Why is it customary to ask your audience three
questions when leaving them hanging at the end of an instalment of a serial? At
least one of these questions will be answered once, if not for all, when next
we meet…assuming you can’t guess the answers before then, which I bet you can’t.
Uncle Fun
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