Robot and Frank (aka You Must Have Fell On Your Head As A Baby, You Really Know How To Hurt Yourself)

The first question worth exploring about Jake Schreier's Robot & Frank (2012) is whether it offers an optimistic vision of "the near future", in which robotic assistants have become a familiar part of our everyday landscape, at least for the senior citizens among us. The answer is yes, but also no. The futuristic world of Robot & Frank is hardly a dystopia - there's not even a sense of it bubbling below the surface. It examines the ways in which technology might continue to grow and re-shape our lives, and our dependency on said technology as it becomes workaday, yet the technology itself is entirely benign, the story is small in scope and the pace accordingly gentle. The most dramatic event happening in the wider community are the plans of trendy yuppies to renovate the local library to be less about the books and more about the "library experience". There's also some inkling of a broader debate going on about the ethics of building robots to take on jobs traditionally fulfilled by paid humans, but it's not front and centre to the narrative. As a future, it seems entirely inhabitable, just replete with sadness. But it's the same sadness that already permeates the here and now, and has dogged us for all of human history - the realisation that we are not built to last. The titular Frank Weld (Frank Langella) is an early stage dementia sufferer, the robot (played by Rachael Ma and voiced by Peter Sarsgaard) an artificially intelligent carer entrusted to keep him out of trouble as his memory erodes. Such a robot might represent the height of human technical innovation, but its very presence also provides an uneasy mirror to our own fragility, and to the inevitability of our own decline. Robot & Frank is a film that has stuck with me over the years, partly for its quirky story about a natural born outlaw who turns the symbol of his degradation to his own cunning advantage, but also for its honest and poignant portrayal of the onset of old age, and the fear of losing touch with your sense of who you are. The film's key concern is with the relationship between memory and identity, and how you hang onto the latter when the former is wont to betray you.

Even before his fading memory drove a wedge between himself and the rest of the world, Frank has always been something of a societal outcast. In his youth he was a professional cat burglar - in his words a "second storey man" - who specialised in lifting priceless jewellery. For his crimes, he ultimately served sixteen years in prison, although most of those were technically for tax evasion. As Frank tells it, the tax evasion rap was garbage, but his expertise as a thief was clearly a source of tremendous pride to him; in his twilight years, he's been left with few comforts besides the knowledge that he was once pretty good at stealing from the rich. His family life has largely disintegrated - his wife has been out of the picture for three decades (or so we're lead to believe), his daughter Madison (Liv Tyler) is a charity worker who spends most of her time overseas, while his son Hunter (James Marsden) makes weekly commutes but would sooner put his father into a full-time care facility (euphemistically described as a "Memory Center"), a matter of heated contention between the two. Frank is nostalgic for the glory days of his erstwhile criminal career, his only outlet for which is in his routine visits to a local cosmetics store, where he's made an enemy of the owner (Ana Gasteyer) with his tendency to slip bars of soap shaped like animals into his pocket. He gets a more sympathetic reception from Jennifer (Susan Sarandon), the librarian whose workplace is currently being remodelled beyond all recognition, and with whom Frank feels an intuitive connection. Both of them belong to worlds that seem fated to be left behind by the relentless march of time - Frank with his increasing temporal confusion, Jennifer with her preference for the printed word over augmented reality.

Hunter eventually settles on a compromise - he brings Frank a robotic caregiver (in more technical terms, a VCG-60L), as an alternative to forcing him into the Memory Center, although from Frank's perspective this is a no less damning judgement on his cognitive prowess. What could be a more sure-fire indication that his best days are behind him than requiring a hunk of metal to keep him in check? At first, the robot is about as much fun as Frank anticipates, insisting that he swap his favourite cereal for healthier breakfast options ("That cereal is for children, Frank." "You're for children!") and take up non-threatening hobbies in which Frank has little interest, such as growing tomato plants. He's also mortified at the thought of Jennifer sighting him out in public with the thing. His perspective changes, however, when he discovers a quirk in the robot's AI that greatly appeals to him, in that it has only a surface-level understanding of human law and order; it can parrot dictionary definitions of crime, but it can't elaborate on what any of that means. It passes no judgement on Frank for his criminal past (outside of acknowledging that it is a touchy subject for Hunter); better still, it has no objections to serving his thieving impulses in the present. Its single impetus is to help Frank, whether that entails prompting him to eat more healthily, or assisting him with his habitual shoplifting. Suddenly, the robot becomes less a signifier of Frank's incontrovertible decline than it does his ticket to rejuvenation. From there on in, it's just a matter of training the robot to pick locks and crack safes so that it can assist him in a far more ambitious project, one specifically targeting Jake (Jeremy Strong), the obnoxious upstart dictating the future of Jennifer's library. Jake is the film's most one-dimensional character, albeit to a purpose - it gets around the fact that Frank robs him by making him as odious as humanly possible (as in-joke, he's also named after the film's director). Much as Frank seems to identify a kindred spirit in Jennifer, Jake seems to instinctively recognise Frank, a man from the bygone age of printed information, as a threat, and makes a point of belittling him from the moment they make eye contact.

Frank has vivid recollections of the jobs he used to pull as a burglar, and of the flashy high-end shit everyone wore back in the day, but there's an obvious disconnect where human relationships are concerned; he vaguely recalls the "knockout redhead" he was involved with at the time of a particularly ambitious job in a high-rise in Florida, but doesn't remember her name. He doesn't seem to fare much better with his family relations, something foreshadowed in one of the earliest scenes, when Madison attempts to make contact from Turkmenistan via video call, and a loss of connection occurs - technology may be as unreliable in the near future as it is right now, but no more so than the human brain.

It becomes apparent that Frank's commitment to inducing the robot into the world of breaking and entering is about more than simply recapturing the adrenalin rushes of yore and demonstrating that he's still a light-fingered force to be reckoned with - rather, passing on his specialist knowledge, esoteric as it may be, is a way of compensating for lost time, by using the robot as a substitute for the connections he was unable to forge with his children. Frank confides with the robot that one of his life's greatest regrets is in never teaching Hunter the tricks of his burglary trade - tellingly, Frank intermittently talks to the robot as if it were Hunter, which is a reflection of his addled mental state, but also the degree to which he projects onto the robot his yearning for a closer bond with his son. Frank is troubled by the gaps in his memory with regards to his children, but these have less to do with his dementia than with the fact that they were only second-hand memories to begin with; Frank was in prison for most of their childhoods, so he experienced their growth and development vicariously, though whatever information his family cared to share with him. Frank expresses awareness of an incident where one of them burned a hole in the carpet, but is not sure if it was Madison or Hunter. Passing on his own knowledge is also a means of procuring a legacy for himself, and it's from this perspective that Frank's conflation of the robot with his son speaks to the broader degree to which the robots represent an attempt on the part of their human creators to transcend their own mortality - they are beings molded in our own likeness, and they might well inherit the Earth once we've shuffled off it (although Frank's robot is nonplussed when this particular idea is put to it). The ability to pass down the skills and knowledge he has accumulated, to something that can retain them even after his own diminishing brain has given out, provides a vital lifeline to Frank (and you might think that cat burglary is morally questionable, but as Schreier and screenwriter Christopher D. Ford point out on the DVD commentary, the kind of meticulous planning and execution required to pull these kinds of heists off makes it an art form unto itself). The robot becomes a vessel for the part of Frank he fears he is in danger of losing, and a means of getting around the fact that his son, who might have fulfilled the role of successor under a more traditional set of circumstances, has rejected Frank and his way of life. The use of the robot as a proxy for human interaction is a process that works both ways, with Hunter flat-out admitting at the film's climax that he brought the robot into the equation because he didn't want to have to put up with Frank full-time himself. The robot's function is to act as a buffer between the two; the technology of Robot & Frank might be fundamentally benign, but there is something faintly troubling about the characters' application of it, in how it offsets the need to repair their broken connections. Their reliance on technology is implied to be symptomatic of their basic human failure to communicate.

One of the film's most enigmatic qualities is in the aura of ambiguity it maintains at all times around its pivotal robot. You can project whatever you want onto it, as each of the Welds do. To Frank, the robot is a companion, accomplice and his new lease on life, to Hunter it is an appliance designed to alleviate his own guilt, while to Madison is an unpleasant symbol of societal degradation (Madison is opposed to robot labor, in theory, but it's a stance she eventually backs down from, when she realises how much harder it is to keep Frank's house in order without it). The nature of the bot's intelligence, and of its relationship with Frank, is left open to interpretation; the character who is most at pains to argue that the robot is not a real being and should not be regarded as such is actually the robot itself. Early on, it seems to imply otherwise, when it confides in Frank its concern that if it fails to take good care of him, it will be returned to the warehouse and have its memories wiped, a disclosure that appears to open up a degree of common ground with Frank and his own wariness of being regulated to the Memory Center. Later on, the robot directly contradicts this, insisting that this was all just a cunning bit of emotional blackmail designed to get Frank to comply, and that it places no value on its memories. This doubles as a warning to the audience not to get overly attached to the robot as a character, but since we only ever see the robot through Frank's eyes, it asks too much of us. Fact is, the robot is too endearing, and too benevolent for us not to warm to it, and to not feel the sting when Frank is faced with the possibility of having to destroy the connection they've forged. He discovers that there is, in fact, a downside to using a robot as your partner in crime - should the robot be seized by the authorities, its memory data can be checked and will contain evidence of his illicit activities. This creates a dilemma when the law gets wind of Frank's re-entry into the burglary arena and the robot suggests that Frank might want to consider erasing its data as a precaution. Frank is strongly opposed to doing this; by now, it's evident that he's developed an attachment to the robot as a companion (enough so to object when Madison takes to treating it like a personal slave), but it would also mean throwing away the part of himself that he has invested in the robot. Yet the robot seems unmoved by Frank's attempts to ascribe it deeper qualities, regarding its artifice with an awareness that seems almost paradoxical ("You think, therefore you are...in a similar way, I know that I'm not alive"). Frank finds such discussion objectionable - understandably, he would prefer not to think of his closest companion as being an illusion, but on a deeper level, the robot's words act as a memento mori, playing into Frank's fear that his own reality will eventually be negated. Its ease with its professed non-existence is jarring to Frank's imperative to keep fighting to reassert his own being. This takes on additional resonance when we consider that the memories it claims not to value are those specifically of its time with Frank and all that he has taught it - in this way, the robot becomes less a reflection of Frank's desire for self-preservation than it does a mouthpiece for the general impassivity that stretches beyond him.

What, if anything, is going on inside that robot's noggin? Hard to say; the robot is a child-like figure, although it is tempting to try to read a kind of wisdom into its affectlessness - there are times where its inability to grasp the moral ramifications of stealing plays less like innocence than it does a general indifference toward the messiness of the human condition. There are flashes of personality too. Its malleability, and the manner in which it allows Frank to educate it and influence its behaviour culminates in a show of apparent sassiness on the robot's part, when it absorbs casual advice Frank dispenses about resisting the harassment of over-inquisitive teenagers, and later uses this, wittily, to fend off Jake. Still, the robot insists to the end that it is not real, the only concession it makes being in acknowledging that it hurts Frank to hear it. Heavy spoilers now follow: we know the robot is capable of manipulating Frank in order to prompt certain behaviours from him, so we do have the option of interpreting the robot's final insistence that he destroy its memory data as an altruistic gesture on its part. Even so (and despite what the film's Wikipedia synopsis would imply) this isn't actually the reason why Frank eventually chooses to relinquish his bond with his mechanical friend. There is additional dialogue, in which the robot repeats information that Frank had casually divulged to it, ("Lifting that high-end stuff, no one gets hurt except those insurance company crooks"), and which clearly disturbs Frank. Again, we wonder if the robot knows what it is doing, in turning Frank's own words back on him. What is apparent is that Frank's termination of the robot amounts to a relinquishment of himself. He might be disturbed at the extent to which he has corrupted the robot; on another level, the robot may be an uneasy indication of how Hunter might have turned out, had he followed more closely in his father's footsteps. Having externalised himself, his life's work and the values that guided him into the robot, Frank chooses to let it all go; hitting the off-switch is both a rejection of the person who he was (albeit a highly mournful one) and a resignation to the fact that he cannot go on forever. In the end, he embraces the non-functional robot just as he embraces his own impending oblivion.

Crucially, this all follows after the picture's big twist, revealing to both Frank and to the viewer the extent to which the former's memories have already degraded. After escaping the police with the robot, Frank seeks refuge with Jennifer; backstage in her territory, he makes the shocking discovery that she has pictures of Hunter and Madison on her wall, and photographs of herself and Frank at an earlier point in life, and realises that she is the ex-wife who left him 30 years ago (for all we know, she might even be the "knockout redhead" he'd reminisced about earlier). The dialogue used to explain this twist is entirely minimal (says Jennifer, "When I moved back, you just didn't remember"), and it is the narrative's most divisive development, with some viewers finding it overwhelmingly poignant, and others questioning its plausibility. Could Frank really just up and forget this woman with whom he'd forged such a vital bond multiple decades back? On a thematic level, it is the ultimate signifier of Frank's disconnect from his family, a disconnect that clearly pre-dates the onset of his dementia, whether it came from his enforced separation or his greater interest in his criminal career. But it also speaks of the paradoxical degree to which memory forms both the basis of identity and the means to navigate forward, and a burden that keeps its bearers entrapped in the past. I am not proposing that Frank's suppression of his prior history with Jennifer was intentional, but his acceptance of her as a whole new person does seem symptomatic of a desire to start anew by rejecting the traumas of the past. Whatever happened previously between Frank and Jennifer and the precise details behind their marriage's disintegration are not expanded on - we see their relationship only as it survives in the present, as a mutual nostalgia for another time, one that is permitted to exist adrift out of time. But while Frank's desire is to begin again anew and to undo the mistakes of the past, Jennifer is all-too aware that the world has moved on; she sees in Frank not an opportunity to start over, but an avenue that is closing off. We can see how the renovations going on at the library mirror Jennifer's plight in terms of her relationship with Frank - Jake aligns Frank with the printed media he is intent on expunging from the venue, and just as Jennifer watches the tome she has maintained be removed and tossed out, she must contend with the fact that Frank is slowly eroding, along with the aspects of her own identity she had previously invested into their connection. Much as Jennifer is determined to stay on and watch over the library in its current state, so too is her only recourse to try to adapt and connect with Frank as he exists in the present. Frank's initial theft, before he moves onto casing Jake's abode, is of an antique copy of Don Quixote, which was going to be sent away to be preserved, but which Frank felt that Jennifer should be allowed to keep - viewed from the perspective that the book represents Frank's endangered identity, it echoes his resistance to entering the Memory Center, and his desire to remain in his temporal no man's land with Jennifer, even as he goes about it in a flagrantly self-destructive way.

The film's epilogue reveals that Frank has moved into the Memory Center, where he is visited by Hunter, Madison and Jennifer. The ending seems to uphold the importance of human connection over technological innovation - this is the only point in the narrative in which the Welds all appear together, and with nary a robotic being in sight. In line with his prior rejection of himself, via the robot, Frank expresses relief that his children did not turn out like him: "That's one thing that I don't have to worry about - my son did better than his old man." To a point, the premise of Robot & Frank seems reminiscent of Ron Howard's Cocoon (1985), blending science fiction with a senior citizen's quest for immortality, although it reaches the opposite conclusion to Howard's stargazing fantasy, with its protagonist being brought back down to Earth and accepting his decline as something he must make peace with. You might recall how, in Cocoon, the rejection of mortality was explicitly equated with the rejection of nature; said one character, "The way nature's been treating us, I don't mind cheating her a little." By contrast, Schreier's film incorporates a subtle message about the necessity of tending to the Earth; immortality, it suggests, is to be attained not by turning your back on the Earthly existence, but within the soil and in the very rhythms of nature. The image of the robot watering the tomato plants recalls Dewey at the end of Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull, 1972); one of the more optimistic aspects of Robot & Frank is that it does not see nature and technology as diametrically opposed - in fact, nature maintains a more dominant presence in the picture's setting more than the technological world, with most of the story taking place against the woodlands of upstate New York (Frank reports that he saw a bobcat the other day). The robot's insistence on starting a garden, which seemed like the kind of menial, inoffensive task that should make Frank want to gag, is all about regeneration, planting the seeds on which the next generation can thrive, and this is something that Frank eventually makes good on. Of course, in this case there is a bit of a cheeky subversion, with the actual renewal coming not from the literal seeds per se, but from what Frank has concealed with them. The force Frank ends up cheating is not Mother Nature, but Father Time, as personified by the character of Jake. Frank might have to consign himself to the same fate as Jennifer's printed media, but before he does he manages to turn back the clock a little and steal millions of dollars' worth of jewellery from Jake, which the law is never able to uncover, giving him the means through which to finally provide for his children and leave them something on which to build their future. As their visit ends, Frank slips Hunter a note, indicating that the jewels are buried beneath the robot's tomato plants, and that he wants Hunter and Madison to have them. In other words, the film gets to have its cake and eat it; Frank's fierce individuality, as expressed through his thieving tendencies, might be the factor that had previously kept the family apart, but it is what ultimately facilitates the family's deliverance. With a little assistance from the gentler tendencies of the robot, that is.

The robot is not forgotten at the end. The last images are of Frank roaming the corridors of the Memory Center and sighting another resident with a robotic assistant in tow, a VCG-60L, the very same model as his own. For a second, Frank is gripped by the hope that it is his own - the robot seems to take an interest in him, but it continues on its way. He then sees another VCG-60L walk by, and resigns himself to the reality that his friend is gone for good, lost in a sea of identical models; it is, likewise, a resignation to the fact that he is fated to have his own identity erased through the disintegration of his memory and, after that, the universal leveller of death. It is an indifferent world to man and mecha alike. Robot & Frank doesn't have a lot that feels overwhelmingly positive so say about the process of getting old. But does communicate, with tremendous empathy, the universality of the problem, and both the isolation and the kinship that emanate from our imperfect machinery.

Finally, I couldn't cover Robot & Frank without saying a few words about the soundtrack by Francis and The Lights (aka Francis Farewell Starlite). The score has a mournful, dreamy quality that feels reminiscent of a divagating train of thought attempting to get back to wherever it was originally going. Even better are the closing credits, which show footage of the real artificially intelligent creations that inspired the VCG-60L, and are accompanied by the track "Fell On Your Head", a quirkily-written throwback to the 1980s pop rock of Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel and their ilk. It's a retro sound that seems strangely at home alongside the unassuming future depicted in Robot & Frank. As far as I'm aware, "Fell On Your Head" never got a commercial release, not even on the Robot & Frank soundtrack that came out in 2013. At the time, Starlite stated in a tweet that it would be on his upcoming album, but...it was not. He's had two albums since R&F and there's not been not a peep out of "Fell On Your Head", so I think it's safe to say that it may have fallen by the wayside. Ah well, shame. Just one more factor making the movie so distinguished, if it's still the track's only official outlet.

It Sucks To Be Me #2: It's Tough At The Top (Survival)

At first glance, it might not seem as though there was a massive amount of variety in the Survival series. Five of the six books have you playing as a species of mammal, and all of them had you navigating what was effectively the same basic environment, ie: the woodlands and rivers of rural Britain. It's not hard to see the format transferring to more adventurous locations, such as the African savannahs or the Arctic plains, but they never strayed far afield, with most editions of Survival feeling like they were unfolding right on the others' doorsteps. In practice, I don't think it matters, since each animal brings a unique eye-perspective and its own individual set of talents and vulnerabilities, and while you'll find a few familiar notes here and there, in no book does the gameplay ever feel exactly the same. In the second edition of Survival, "Fox", you play as a predator, meaning that you get to be a dispenser of death as well as a possible recipient. Several pages involve you stalking various prey species and having to make judgements about which are the most viable targets. Compared to "Deer", it's a whole other angle, having to track down food that's liable to run away from you (although foxes are omnivores, not carnivores, and you'll also get the option to forage for apples and berries - one thing you'll learn from this book is what varied and resourceful feeders they are). Don't assume that being top of the food chain means that you automatically have the upper hand - no prey animal is a total sitting duck (except for the ones that are literally just that), and there is at least one quarry you might encounter who'll succeed in turning the tables on you in a shockingly fiendish manner.

"Fox" is, in many regards, already leaps and bounds ahead of "Deer", which had fewer visual puzzles and relied more extensively on dry textual information to guide you through your choices. The vagueness of some of the losing outcomes in "Deer", in not consistently accounting for where you went wrong, has here been rectified, so that the deaths always feel logical, reasonably telegraphed and a direct result of your flawed decision-making, as opposed to author Roger Tabor deciding to hit you with a random fatality every so often. Having said that, the one area in which "Deer" really excelled - its omnipresent sense of menace, as you were stalked by hunters who kept largely out of sight - isn't replicated quite so successfully here. In "Fox", it's less a case of trouble looking to seek you out than it is you getting into trouble only if you actively look for it. Most of the danger is situated on the farmland, and you'll likely have a pretty sweet time of it if you just stay in the fields and play tag with your sister - in fact, there is one possible route that allows you to finish the game in just three steps without encountering any danger at all. I'm not going to sell "Fox" short and say that it's necessarily the easiest of the Survival range, as there are enough diabolical surprises hidden throughout, but it is the book in which I didn't feel quite so perpetually endangered at all points of my adventure. The wind direction mechanism is retained from "Deer", but without that omnipresent sense of menace it feels largely redundant here, and "Fox" would be the last edition to make use of it. What "Fox" does implement a whole lot more thoughtfully than "Deer" is the points system - in "Deer" it was only possible lose points by dying, whereas "Fox" incorporates a number of non-fatal mistakes (eg: if your prey gets away from you), which adds greater depth to the gameplay. Elsewhere, some of the innovations in "Fox" still feel a bit wet behind the ears - we see here the appearance of what will henceforth be referred to as "hidden enemies", ie: creatures that pose a direct threat to your animal, but whose presence in the illustration might not be immediately obvious (like that snake who so bamboozled me when playing "Frog" as a child). "Fox" has two such enemies, but they're of a fairly low challenge (compared to the upcoming "Otter", which, trust me, has an absolutely devious one). The hidden pitfalls that are well-incorporated into "Fox" are those indicated by subtle environmental detail - it pays to give close consideration to where you are, what's around you, and what might be lurking just around the corner.

I mentioned in my coverage of "Deer" that a general flaw found in all six volumes of Survival is how easy it is to accidentally pick up on which choices are bad ones due to the layout of the books; the death endings, with their ominous grey coding, are located in the pages containing multiple outcomes, and they're difficult not to notice, even if you're headed for a nice safe green one. In the case of "Fox", it looks as though Tabor might have attempted to mitigate this problem by putting three of the five death endings within the same spread, but I'm not sure how much better this works in practice - access even one outcome from those two pages, you're hit by a near-total grey wall that's even more overwhelming and conspicuous than the alternative. I did have to remind myself that the books were aimed at children, who might not necessarily be keeping tabs on the specific numbers quite as diligently as older readers. As for the deaths themselves, one of the more distressing aspects of "Fox" is that, whenever you do make a fatal error, the text rarely indicates that your demise was instantaneous, but instead a protracted process caused by injuries that slowly and surely got the best of you. You might have time to skip around the fields with your sister, but it's tough at the top after all.

A small quirk - throughout the sections entitled "Expert Tips", Tabor keeps addressing a second person, and I didn't clock right away that he's referring to you in character as a fox. I was somewhat weirded out when Tabor advised me to hunt for worms by "catch[ing] one end carefully in your teeth and pull[ing] very gently until it comes free. If you pull too quickly it will snap." I really hope that no children who shared my confusion tried that at home.

For those of you wishing to play this game unspoiled, the point of no return approaches. What sinister secrets lie within the fox tome, and how did I rate them? Click below to find out.

New Kid on The Block (aka Hertz, Don'ut?)

 "New Kid on The Block" (aka 9F06) is a real oddball episode of The Simpsons, but it's oddball in deceptively low-key ways. Debuting on November 12th 1992, around the middle of the show's fourth season, it tells an uncharacteristically modest story for its era, one that's small in scope but, when you pick it apart, actually quite high in ambition. There's a lot going on, yet it's a relatively quiet episode, relaxed in its pace. It is, in many respects, about the inevitability of change, something that seems to permeate the episode all over (the title is a nod to the 1980s boy band New Kids on The Block, although it might also be a little meta, in that this was the first script from Conan O'Brien, who came in just as some of the older writing staff were moving on). And yet few of the changes it implements were of particular consequence in the long run. It offers (on Bart's end of the story, anyway) an honest and relatable exploration of a pre-adolescent rite of passage - the faint awakening of sexual curiosity, and the withering realisation that being a child means that nobody takes you particularly seriously. Like the season's other great outlier, Selma's Choice, it's a story that wouldn't have felt at all out of place in one the show's earlier seasons, but feels all the more convincing for having come along slightly later down the line in Bart's development, when we'd seen him play the irrepressible hellion for long enough to know what a bombshell it is to see these strange new feelings in him. This is, after all, the same Bart who, just last season, had struggled to comprehend those very feelings emerging in his best friend Milhouse, and who'd insisted, of the opposite sex, "They all look alike to me". And now here he is, falling head over heels in love - check that, falling in love with his babysitter, an authority figure it would ordinarily be within his nature to mercilessly obliterate. The whole premise is off the charts in its adorableness, and one of the absolute best things "New Kid on The Block" has to recommend it is Nancy Cartwright's suitably endearing performance as the artless puppy lover - I particularly love the way she chokes out "I please to aim" when Bart goes to meet Laura inside the treehouse. Like a lot of the Bart classics, it gets its mileage from showcasing his hidden vulnerabilities, Bart being at once self-conscious about how out of his depth he is around Laura, but steadfast in his eagerness to impress her. We know from the outset that Bart is setting himself up to have his callow heart broken, so there is tremendous pathos in his efforts.

On paper, "New Kid on The Block" feels like a monumental episode, for various reasons. It opens with a coming and a going. We see the back of the Winfields, the Simpsons' other neighbours for the first three seasons (actually, I don't think they were established to be the Simpsons' immediate neighbours in preceding episodes - rather, they appeared to live a little further along on the same street, but since this is their last hurrah I'll let it slide). This in itself wasn't such a massive shake-up, since the series never found a whole lot of use for those characters, other than to dish out the occasional murmur of judgement - they were a lot less tolerant of the Simpsons' eccentricities than the Flanders, and rarely said anything that wasn't openly hostile to them. It's a niche that feels better suited to the earlier seasons, when the premise lent slightly more toward the Simpsons being this singularly ignominious unit whom respectable people looked down upon, and less toward Springfield being this intrinsically rotten burg that no respectable person would inhabit, period (a notion advanced in "New Kid on The Block", with the revelation that TIME magazine has formally declared Springfield to be "America's Worst City"). The Winfields had their moments (such as their cameo in "Simpson and Delilah"), but I can't claim to have felt their absence terribly. 

The Simpsons getting a whole new set of neighbours, on the other hand, feels like the kind of development that should have opened up a wealth of additional avenues. In the Winfields' place we gain the Powers - Ruth (Pamela Reed), a divorced mother, and Laura (Sara Gilbert) her teenaged daughter - both of whom strike up an immediate rapport with the family that feels natural, fresh and genuine. Of course, the producers might have shot the characters in the feet straight out the gate by enlisting guest stars to play them, as opposed to members of the series' regular voice cast - Reed and Gilbert are both great in the roles, but presumably this limited how much we were ever likely to see of them. As it turned out, Ruth had only one other major appearance on the horizon, in "Marge on The Lam" of Season 5 (in which Laura was referenced, but never appeared), after which both Powers just kind of fizzled. Laura was good as forgotten, while Ruth continued to make regular appearances as a background character, but nothing more substantial than that. She eventually garnered a third speaking role, in "The Strong Arms of The Ma" of Season 14, where it was established that she was no longer the Simpsons' neighbour (paving the way for Sideshow Bob to acquire her house, but that's a story for another occasion). On the DVD commentary, they make some ironic wisecrack about how "Ruth Powers went onto become everybody's favourite character", but if you ask me she was a wonderful addition to the neighbourhood and the series' failure to go particularly far with her is certainly not any reflection of her limited potential as a character. For one thing, she gave Marge something that had been sorely lacking in her life up until now, and that's a female friend with whom she could open up about her problems and actually have something resembling a social life away from her family. This would be utilised in greater depth in "Marge on The Lam", although you see the roots of that affinity forming here, during a scene where Marge goes to present Ruth with a welcome basket and they briefly touch upon on their respective husband troubles (and since Marge has such an appalling time of it elsewhere in the episode, it's nice to see her at least getting one sweet thing from the arrangement). Other possible angles suggest themselves - Ruth explicitly asks Homer to hook her up with one of his friends, in a scene that seems to be purposely laying the ground for future story material, but it ends up going nowhere (of course, I figure Ruth would change her mind the instant she caught a whiff of Homer's social circle).

The real reason why Ruth was doomed to obscurity might simply have been that the writers were never overly invested in developing her character. The DVD commentary is awfully revealing in that regard, as it gives the distinct impression that nobody on the production staff was all that enthusiastic about making this episode, other than James L. Brooks, who had pushed to have a single mother to move in near the Simpsons. It didn't surprise me to learn that this should be his idea - he was the producer who, in the show's early years, had championed for it having a strong undercurrent of heart and drama to equilibrate the comedy, and the opportunity to explore contemporary social issues like divorce and single parenthood would have fed right into that. As a bonus, it allowed the series to make concessions to the fact that the modern family didn't always conform to the 2.5 kids model reinforced by the Simpsons themselves. His intentions were good, but in the era where Al Jean and Mike Reiss ruled the roost, these kinds of slower, more down-to-earth character dramas were fast becoming an endangered species; writing this Brooks-mandated story was deemed an unenviable task among the top brass and dumped into the lap of newcomer O'Brien, who had a noble stab at it. The result was a sweet (if mildly uneven) case for why the Powers' introduction was a worthwhile endeavor. Alas, in the long run, The Simpsons was determined to remain Ruth-less.

Laura, though? If not for the fact that she slipped into oblivion faster than her mother, a part of me would seriously wonder if she represented an attempt to further broaden the show's appeal by adding a character more openly geared toward courting the hip Gen-X crowd. To that end, she in no way reeks of the same cynical corporate programming as Poochie, but I can see how she might potentially have been conceived to fill an obvious gap in the Springfieldian line-up - The Simpsons didn't have many characters within the teen to young adult bracket and certainly no positive depictions (it's been established that the show was, at one point, under pressure to add a teenage relative to the family, which provided inspiration for the one-off character of Roy, so presumably this was a concern of somebody backstage). The teenage years have traditionally been treated quite unsympathetically within The Simpsons, but then again, what hasn't? Younger teens, like Jimbo and his crew, are there to be an endless source of antagonism to the weaker children they relentlessly pummel, while older teens, such as the Squeaky-Voiced Teen (though he was not fully established as a character at this stage in the series) are there to look awkward and pathetic in dealing with the demands of the adult sphere. Laura is cut from a very different cloth, in that she occupies a beautiful middle ground between childhood and that other direction that's slowly but incontrovertibly calling. I'm not clear on Laura's exact age, but I'm guessing she'd be about 14, maybe 14 going on 15 - young enough to still be a kid at heart and up for some mischief with her smaller charges, but old enough to have that all-important air of adolescent mystique that both makes her so alluring to Bart and sets her firmly out of his league. She has the kind of worldly wisdom Bart admires, in being a few rungs ahead of him on the pranking ladder. (I'll admit that I still find the part with Laura's palm reading trick difficult to watch - not so much because it's gross (although that too), but because as a kid I once fell victim to that exact same prank...thankfully, the perpetrator in question was nowhere near as good at expectorating as Laura and their saliva mostly missed my hand. Mostly.) She's also warm and nurturing in how she connects with the younger Simpsons - there are some lovely moments during her initial babysitting session with her introducing them to the delights of waltzes and labna. (I'll also admit that I don't get quite what the joke is meant to be with that Two Guys From Kabul restaurant - was there some negative buzz around Afghan cuisine in 1992 that's been lost to time? - but the dynamic between the two guys themselves is hilarious.)

Bart's first instinct, on falling for Laura, is to make himself more dapper, by donning a lounge jacket and blowing on a bubble pipe in an effort to emulate Hugh Hefner (which, handily, doubles practice for when he'd get to meet Hefner for real at the end of the season). He then consults various adults for advice, but quickly discovers that they have nothing valuable to offer - if there's one lesson this series has taught us repeatedly, it's that most adults don't have a clue what they're doing, either. Apu approaches Bart, having picked up on the fact that Bart likes Laura, but doesn't impart anything other than the mere observation. Bart then goes to see Abe, who tells him about the time he failed to impress the oldest woman alive by wearing a 15-pound beard of bees - a fascinating anecdote, sure, but it does sod-all for Bart's predicament. Finally, Bart gets desperate enough to talk to Homer, who got his preliminary sexual education from watching animals on heat (to be fair, I think most of us did), and accumulated little to no wisdom beyond that - he does, however, figure out how to segue a frank discussion with Bart about the facts of life into an excuse to down several cans of Duff. There seems to be a vague running gag all throughout the episode with Homer getting his lines perpetually crossed when it comes to sexual metaphors and similes and the veneration of food and beverages. But then, as one other character making his debut appearance so delicately puts it, he is more stomach than man.

The episode's most impactful move, in the long term, was the introduction of old salt Captain McCallister, one of the show's more outlandish supporting characters, who plays an instrumental role in the B-story and whom the writers swiftly adopted as their bit-player of the month - which is to say, the character they'd insist on shoehorning into the most random of places for a sizeable stretch of the episodes thereafter (in just the right doses, he is hilarious, but you can have too much of a good thing - I thought they were overdoing it a bit by the time of his entirely disconnected appearance in "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show"). He was a character who joined the cast through pure serendipity - the original pitch had Homer getting into a feud with comedian Don Rickles, only Rickles wasn't game (as per the DVD commentary, he didn't appreciate how mean the script made him out to be outside of his comedy routine), which necessitated a total revamp to instead have Homer grappling to salvage his wounded pride - and unsatiated hunger - when a restaurant owner has him ejected from the premises before he's eaten his fill. The Homer story definitely feels like it's there to counterbalance the more grounded elements of the Bart A-story, in that, tonally speaking, it seems to be taking place in another galaxy entirely. It's less off the wall than his sugar-peddling adventures in "Lisa's Rival", but with hindsight does play like the evolutionary ancestor to that very model of storytelling, with Homer's cartoonish appetite and bullish indignation feeling like they were lifted more from a Looney Tunes short than the trials of the everyman. I give the subplot points for how logically it intermeshes with the main story, in providing not just one, but two instances of the family requiring Laura to babysit, and McCallister is on fine form for his first appearance ("Would ye sooner eat a bilge rat than another burger?"), as is Lionel Hutz in his small role (I kind of want to hear more about his case against The Never-Ending Story). What does bother me, and in some respects makes that sugar subplot preferable, is the subtly unpleasant way that Marge is made to endure this entire debacle. I tell you, "New Kid on The Block" is a phenomenally punishing episode for Marge; I get that she's dragged along to act as Homer's foil (ie: the voice of reason who's perpetually ignored and shouted across), but the episode seems strangely at ease with just how colossally insensitive he is toward her for the duration. First, he takes her to a restaurant where she can't eat anything on the menu due to her seafood allergies and expects her to sit there for hours while he stuffs his face. He then insists on pursuing a lawsuit against McCallister when Marge pleads with him to let it go, with the result that Marge is made to testify in court in his interest, which she finds painful and humiliating. When we hear how, after being ejected from The Frying Dutchman, Homer had them driving around until 3:00am looking for another all-you-can-eat fish restaurant and, failing that, had them go fishing, my thoughts are entirely with Marge and how she hadn't eaten anything that whole evening except for some Tic Tacs she had in her purse. Surely she must have been dizzy with hunger by the time they got around to the fishing? (I'm just saying, Jacques would never have treated her that way...even if he is now, regrettably, a slice of cantaloupe short of a brunch.*) Even the resolution, which sees Homer and McCallister reaching an out of court settlement where McCallister allows Homer to eat endless food in exchange for using him as a sideshow attraction, entails the continued humiliation of Marge for some reason. There's actually no reason why Homer even needed to bring Marge along in the first place - if he was so eager to dine at the Frying Dutchman, then couldn't he have gone by himself? I know the answer there is that if Marge had stayed at home it would have ruled out the need for a babysitter and then we've got no A-story, but I'm still compelled to pout on her behalf.

Where the two stories intersect thematically is in showing just how unapologetically petty father and son both are in pursuing their respective ends. The only character I consider more short-changed than Marge by the episode's out is its eventual antagonist, Jimbo Jones. For a while, the A-story looks to be spinning its wheels, when it consists of Bart wandering from adult to adult in his fruitless quest for wisdom, but it figures out where it's going by the third act, when Laura announces to Bart that she and Jimbo are officially an item. He's scratching her itch for life on the edge in a way that the cute, Hef-emulating Bart most definitely is not, having impressed Laura with his willingness to poke corpses with sticks (what is the subtext behind that particular tidbit of information, anyway? Are we to assume that Mayor Quimby or one of his aides killed that man?). To Bart, this is a betrayal on multiple levels - it's bad enough that Laura would fall for another boy, and all the more unbearable that it should happen to be a natural adversary like Jimbo. But it also signifies Laura's increasing desire to move away from the sphere of childhood revelry of which she and Bart are still mutual occupants, and into more adult pursuits like dating and kissing. Hence, Bart is in danger of losing the connection they already have. The warning signs are there, in how Laura's attachment to Jimbo transforms her approach to babysitting - she goes from being an attentive babysitter who bonds sincerely with her charges to an indifferent one who packs the kids off to bed so that she can make out with her boyfriend on the couch (and did Laura even ask for Homer and Marge's permission before inviting Jimbo over? I'm guessing not.). Still, to be totally fair to Jimbo, his status as episode antagonist is rooted squarely in the fact that he has something Bart also desires - there's a flashback reminding us why Bart and Jimbo aren't exactly the best of friends under ordinary circumstances, but in the present Jimbo doesn't really do anything that's so egregious, outside of calling Bart a dork. It's not as though there's evidence of him mistreating Laura or anything. Bart's reasons for wanting to wreck Jimbo's relationship with Laura are entirely self-serving and blatantly malicious - but then, as Laura is at pains to remind us, he is just a kid. And, if I'm honest, I much prefer this approach to either Bart or the episode harbouring any delusions that he's somehow "protecting" Laura by interfering with her love life.

It's a conflict that resolves itself quite iffily, albeit in a way that's somewhat salvaged by the clever use it makes of the series' established lore - Bart rings up Moe's tavern and convinces the gullible bartender that Jimbo is the mysterious prank caller he's spent the last few years threatening to horrifically mutilate. Moe impulsively runs off to Evergreen Terrace to butcher Jimbo with a rusty knife (question - does Moe not recognise this as his friend Homer's abode? I'm certain he'd been there before in at least one other episode), only to have a change of heart when Jimbo breaks down in tears and begs for his life. And then Laura goes and dumps him, for not being manly enough to show no vulnerability when cornered by a raging sociopath who was threatening to stick a whopping great knife into him. Seriously now, that's a situation that would have most grown adults pissing themselves in terror; I think a teenager like Jimbo can certainly be excused for his reaction. At the end of the day, he's just a kid too. If anything, it makes Laura look a trifle callous, for casting Jimbo aside at a time when he's visibly still reeling from the trauma of what's just happened. But then I suppose that she's also just a kid. Kids really are a rotten bunch. (They flag up on the commentary how objectively unfair the resolution is, so it's nice to to hear that they are at least self-aware about it, even if it doesn't come across in the episode itself.)

All of this threatens to end the story on absolute bummer, but the magic ingredient that keeps it afloat is the input from the raging sociopath himself. It's here that we should address the other truly significant thing that happens in "New Kid on The Block", being that it provides what can effectively be considered closure to one of the series' earliest and most iconic running gags: those prank calls that Bart used to make to Moe every few episodes. By the writers' admission, these were getting increasingly hard to write, so it probably was time to put them formally to bed. They had already been thin on the ground for a while - I actually couldn't remember, offhand, when was the last prior occasion that Bart had got on the line to Moe, so I did something very out of character and consulted the Simpsons Wiki for the answer. Apparently it was "Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk", all the way back in the middle of Season 3. And, honestly, THAT episode looked as though it might have been toying with the idea of bringing the gag to a culminating punchline of sorts, in having Moe and Bart finally meet in person, and Moe still being none the wiser. So it might be more accurate to say that they revived an already-retired gag for the sake of plot convenience here. Still, it's a worthwhile revisit, yielding not only Amanda Huggenkiss, one of the funniest of all the pun names, but also the opportunity for Moe to act upon (or at least gear himself up to act upon) the blood-lusting urges he's been threatening all these years. As a bonus, it allows the episode to homage the old slasher convention of having a homicidal maniac drop in on an abode where an unseasoned babysitter is all they have to contend with, or anywhere else where lusty teens, far removed from adult oversight, are on the verge of letting their hormones hang loose. Given that, at the time, Jimbo seemed to be testing just how far he could take things in his make-out session with Laura, it turns Moe into the unwitting moral guardian, by ensuring that those kids keep their pants on.

The climax's most inspired joke (and a fitting punchline to the prank calls as a whole), is in how instantaneously Moe loses interest when confronted with the sobbing Jimbo ("I wasn't really going to kill you, I was just going to cut you...aww, forget it"), as if it's suddenly dawned on him how reprehensible he's being in aspiring to carve up a youngster. Holding the punk accountable is something Moe has fantasised about for the longest, yet Jimbo proves so plaintive an opponent that he sees no satisfaction to be had in the ravaging, using the "Ouch, I'd better go check on Barney" observation as an excuse to remove himself from the awkwardness of the situation. As a survival tactic on Jimbo's part, you can't say that all that crying and pleading wasn't effective.

Sucker that I am, I find the closing gag with Ivana Tinkle to be almost poignant, knowing that it is the last bow for a particular vestige of the early era, one that the show is here conceding it needs to jettison for its own longevity. You'd find the occasional throwback to Moe and Bart's routine in the later seasons (in "Homer The Smithers" and "Bart on The Road" of Season 7, for example), but they ceased to be a regular occurrence after the search for Ms Tinkle. As is befitting for an episode that's all about change, and embracing life's various comings and goings. Yet the final message of "New Kid on The Block" leans more in favour of the value of taking time to savour a good thing before it's gone - change is indeed inevitable, and it's for precisely that reason that you shouldn't be in such a rush to let it all go. The matter of Bart's crush is resolved on a note of compromise - obviously, Bart can't get the girl, but Laura admits that if Bart was of an appropriate age, she would happily date him, thus enabling Bart to remain in his pre-adolescent stasis and still have Laura acknowledge him as an equal. Bart's ultimate victory, however, is in convincing Laura, before she comes of age, to momentarily rejoin him in that middle ground, indulging her inner child by giving us one last encore for the prank calls. Order is restored in the universe, as is reinforced by the image of Homer and McCallister enjoying a keg together, with children of all ages coming together for a final snicker at the expense of Moe. Eventually, the episode teaches, you'll have to move on - but don't be in a hurry to do so, particularly when it's a matter of ditching the recreation of childhood for the formalities of adulthood. The adult world sucks, anyway. All it has to offer is booze and litigation.

Finally, "New Kid on The Block" gave us this immortal line: "As usual, a knife-wielding maniac has shown us the way." Strange, Bart, we never see you applying that philosophy whenever Sideshow Bob's in town. I suppose at this point in the series we'd yet to actually see him wield a knife.

* Sit tight. My thoughts on "Pin Gal" are coming.

It Sucks To Be Me #1: Back In The Rut (Survival)

My love/hate affair with the Survival series began all the way back in 1995, when I was browsing the shelves of my school library, and came across a hardback book with the provocative title "Could You Be A Frog?". That was not a challenge that the younger me was going to see and just let pass. The book was essentially a Choose Your Own Adventure story, in which you played at being a frog trying to navigate your way through the wide and distinctly un-frog friendly world, catching butterflies and avoiding getting picked off by the hidden nasties lurking in the grasses. Most of the book was comprised of an assortment of double page illustrations, each with a selection of choices, any of which could obliterate the paper-thin barrier between life and death. Such is the life of a wild critter. I was doing quite well at being a frog, until I got to a page where I had the option of jumping off onto a bank or into a cool, refreshing stretch of water, and chose the water. I turned to the page number specified to be met with a Grey Screen of Death, and the rebuke that, "You did not see the water snake!" I guess I didn't. I turned back frantically and tried to identify the rapacious serpent that had allegedly just swallowed me whole, but for the life of me I couldn't. All I saw was a murky collection of vaguely-defined pond weeds and shadows, any one of which felt as though it could have transformed into that elusive snake if you gazed at it long and hard enough (which I did). At one point I thought I saw the snake's jade green eyes leering up at me from just where the light appeared to glisten on the water's surface, and it chilled me to the bone, but by that point my mind was blatantly playing tricks on me. Eventually I had to return the book to the library, leaving that phantom snake forever etched upon my psyche and conceding to the fact that my snake-blindness meant I'd flagrantly sucked at being a frog.

Somehow or other I got to ruminating on that snake again in the latter half of 2022, and how much it troubled me that I had never found it, and it dawned on me, why didn't I buy my own copy of that book and have another crack at looking these older, adult eyes? I'd bet it'd be embarrassingly easy to locate now, so I could put the mystery to bed and have a good giggle at the expense of my childhood self into the bargain. Easier conceptualised than done - the book was obviously long out of print, and what sellers were asking for their second-hand copies was generally way out of my price range. It was here that I discovered that the book was in fact part of a series, and that I could also have the opportunity to live (and die) as a deer, fox, otter, squirrel and mouse, if I was willing to fork out the required cash. Most of these titles weren't exactly going cheaply either, but I figured that with enough time and persistence I'd be able to snag copies without breaking the bank. Time and persistence were indeed my friends. By January 2023 I had five of the six books in my possession, including the Frog edition (yes, that snake was embarrassingly easy to spot now, but at the same time I can see where the callow me went wrong in trying to find it). I became obsessed with the series, and I knew it was something I absolutely wanted to sing the praises of here. The one book that continued to elude me was the dratted Deer edition, and this stalled my plans for a Survival retrospective for a couple of reasons - a) "Deer" was one of the earlier installments, and I would have preferred to go through them in a rough kind of order and b) I feared that bringing even the most minimal of attention to the series would increase the competition and make it that much harder for me to ever acquire a copy. So I kept my mouth shut and hung fire, checking online listings on a daily basis for months on end, waiting for the prices to drop to an acceptable level. Once again, time and persistence proved to be sure-fire allies. In the dying days of March 2023, "Deer" finally dropped down onto my doorstep, and now the coverage can finally begin. And I wish anybody else aiming to collect the full series the utmost of luck.

The Survival books follow the same basic format, allowing you to play as a given animal going about a day in its life - which could end up being the last day of its life, if you don't make all the right decisions. Either you'll keep going until your player animal has returned to its place of safety, ending the story, or you'll meet a Grey Screen of Death, indicating that you just made a fatal error, prompting you to head back to Page 1 and start from scratch. These are accompanied by a harrowing image of your animal's lifeless body (your animal always leaves a clean corpse, even in situations where the cause of death probably should have entailed blood and entrails). In all of the books there are three sections that, in place of the usual double page illustration, are broken down into four separate squares, each containing a different outcome - it's in these sections that you'll find all of the death endings, but a number of them are also green, indicating that you just made a good decision or at least one that didn't kill you. It's here that we should address the slight design flaw in how the books are put together - whenever you turn to these pages, it is somewhat inevitable that you're going to notice which squares are grey and which are green and, even if you're trying desperately hard not to, register which numbers are safe and which are to be avoided. It's annoying, but I suppose it was easier and more economical than doing a double page illustration for every individual choice (not to mention, those death endings are already so grim and depressing that I'm not sure I'd want to see them magnified into two whole pages). If the pressures of staying alive weren't enough, there is an additional gameplay mechanic allowing you to gain or lose points as you progress through the story (so non-fatal mistakes can prove costly in other ways); it's a mechanic that I was generally indifferent to, but it might add greater replay value, in seeing how you can increase your score on subsequent playthroughs. The books' objective was fundamentally educational, the idea being to get young readers thinking about the needs of the species in question and the kinds of challenges they face on a daily basis. In most of the books there is also an underlying narrative about how human intervention has, whether intentionally or not, made the process of survival that much harder. The series was aimed at children, and it goes without saying that they're not the most difficult gamebooks in the world, but you might be surprised at just how intense and involving the gameplay can get. What most impressed me about the series is the atmosphere of omnipresent dread that accompanies you up until the end, not knowing quite what was coming next, just that danger could be lurking anywhere and it could all be over with a single slip-up. I came away wishing that they'd made a whole lot more than just six of these things. Since all but one of the volumes selected mammals as their subject, I would have suggested that for a hypothetical seventh edition they might liked to have focussed on a species of bird. Really, there are so many ways in which they could have expanded this series - I think the concept would have made for a very good range of point and click adventure games during the CD Rom era. But it's all just a lot of missed opportunities now.

The first four editions of Survival were written by Roger Tabor, with John Norris Wood taking over for the Frog and Mouse editions. The books were published by Heinemann in the UK and by Ideals in the US - and, despite the series being British in origin, I actually had an easier time sourcing US copies. The UK setting is important, since the absence of large predators means that the three bigger animals - the deer, the fox and the otter - have only two things that can feasibly kill them, those being humans and dogs...although, believe me, there's no shortage of ways in which that former threat can manifest itself. With the squirrel, frog and mouse, you have the additional pressure of knowing that pretty much everything is out to get you. The differing perspectives according to the animal's size and where it ranks in the food chain do a lot to add variety to the proceedings; what does become apparent is that all of these creatures are, in their own way, as vulnerable as each other.

Having played through all six editions, I've compiled a list of tips for anybody else looking to dip into the series:

• A good chunk of Survival effectively boils down to a continual game of "What's wrong with this picture?", so study the illustrations carefully.
• In addition, be sure to read the accompanying text in full. Often it's tempting to jump straight to the illustrations when thinking about what page you're going to turn to next, but the text frequently contains vital clues and narrative information. In particular, look for details in the illustrations that aren't mentioned in the text, as these are likely to be of significance in terms of how your decision is going to play out.
• In a situation where you find yourself in a stand-off with an enemy, it's a good rule of thumb to avoid the option that flagrantly underestimates your enemy.
• On a similar note, don't underestimate yourself. You'll be surprised at what your animal is capable of doing when under pressure.
• Sometimes the game rewards you for making a bold decision, so don't always err on the side of caution. The distinction between a bold risk and a stupid risk isn't always obvious, but worth considering.
• Don't. Step. Out. When. You're. Close. To. The. Edge. There is one scenario that shows up in four of the six books that invariably leads to disaster. You'll figure it out soon enough.
• If you're working from a Heinemann softcover edition, then DON'T be tempted to peek at the index at the back before you play, as it lists where all of the death endings are. That was considerate of them, wasn't it?
  

 

The "Deer" edition, published in 1989, was an early foray for the series, and the concept definitely doesn't feel quite so polished here as it would in subsequent volumes. The images (a mixture of photographs by Fiona Pragoff and drawings by Tim Hayward) are great straight off the bat, but have less of an opportunity to incorporate the kinds of sinister visual clues that make the Survival series so involving - the "What's wrong with this picture?" approach actually doesn't apply too often here, with the book relying extensively on the text to do the heavy-lifting. Furthermore, the death endings don't always make it too explicit what you did that was wrong - there is at least one death where it's not altogether clear to me what was supposed to have tipped me off that this was a bad decision - intermittently having it seem as though they inserted the death arbitrarily as opposed to it feeling like a truly logical outcome of your actions. This adds up to the gameplay feeling all-round less involving, and more a case of passively turning the pages to see how the narrative works out. On the other hand, that atmosphere of omnipresent dread is something they absolutely nail - throughout the book, your deer is repeatedly stalked by hunters, and the unsettling sensation of being followed by something you can't actually see (the hunters are glimpsed in only two of the illustrations) is something that really permeates the gameplay.

"Deer", along with "Fox", has an additional symbol on each page to indicate the direction in which the wind is blowing - if you move downwind, then you obviously risk making yourself more vulnerable - although this was abandoned in later editions. To be honest, it has very little relevance in determining the outcome in most scenarios (in both "Deer" and "Fox"), but it definitely adds another dimension of peril to the proceedings. The points system, meanwhile, isn't too creatively implemented here, as there's no way you can have your score lowered other than to die - later books would play around with this a bit more by implementing non-fatal mistakes that would result in a reduction of points. 

"Deer" is the only edition in which the sex of your player animal is specified (it's hinted in "Squirrel" that your character may be a male, but not made explicit), and the only book in which reproduction is clearly on your character's agenda as much as feasting - you play a male deer travelling with a harem of does, and the imperative to keep your does from being lured over by the charm of rival stags is an additional factor in determining how well your day is going to play out.

As I go into more specificity about the content of "Deer", I feel it merits doing something that I have never before done on these pages, which is to insert a page cut in order to protect you Survival virgins out there from having the solutions spoiled. Cuts are not something I ever got into the habit of implementing as a blogger, but here it just seems like good courtesy. If you're going to read further, then I encourage you to play the books beforehand, if possible, and I emphasise that the hidden text is intended for those who have already done so (not that I'm banking on there being legions of you out there, given how tricky the books are to get hold of). If you don't care, then you can of course click anyway, but you do so at your own peril.

Now, let's go over all the grisly ways you can kick the bucket as a deer, accompanied by my personal analysis...

Fifty Percent Grey (aka Heaven Is A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens)

Content warning: suicide, graphic head injury

Anybody looking for their fix in offbeat ghoulishness who only has a scant handful of minutes to spare would do well to seek out the 2001 computer animation Fifty Percent Grey. An early project from Irish film-maker Ruairí Robinson (who did not persist with animation as a medium thereafter, although dystopian narratives remained a favourite subject of his), it starts out by evoking the kinds of plot devices well-ingrained into the popular psyche from classic Twilight Zone installments, in which a protagonist finds themselves thrust into an unknown situation and tasked with making sense of where they are and where they might be headed from here. It takes an archetypal nightmare scenario - the threat of being mired for all eternity in a featureless space with no prospect of growth or change - and milks a whole lot of twisted fun from it. The result is a note-perfect bundle of dark humor and existential dread mixed with just the slightest dash of visceral horror, all packed in to slightly less than three minutes. The early-millennium CG animation might look a tad primitive by modern standards, but has a grotesque expressiveness that perfectly compliments the morbid underpinnings of the narrative. Fifty Percent Grey was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 2002 but lost to Pixar's submission, For The Birds. No surprises there - the gentle cartoon slapstick involving the big-eyed feather-brains was always more likely to placate mainstream sensibilities than Robinson's ingeniously sick vision of the hypothetical next world (besides, this was the same year that DreamWorks beat Pixar rather unceremoniously to the first award for Best Animated Feature, so it is nice that they at least got to triumph in the other animation category). Fifty Percent Grey, though, definitely strikes a stronger chord with the desolation in my own psyche. Actually, it was a fairly good year in terms of quickies - also in the running was Cordell Barker's Strange Invaders, one of my all-time favourite animated shorts, so you are urged not to sleep on the competition.

The film sees a man - his name is not cited in the film itself, but the synopsis on the Irish Film Institute website indicates that we are to call him Sgt Cray - wake up in what appears to be the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a grey, barren landscape that seems to stretch out into infinity. We can deduce from the dripping blood and the visible wound in his chest, which rapidly closes up, that he is an ex-human and likely died in combat. He still has his gun, and the battle armor that blatantly did not protect him. Cray gets up, and notices a television set situated immediately before him, causing him to drop his helmet in surprise. He activates a video recording, which greets him with the upbeat announcement that, "Congratulations, you are dead!" and welcomes him to Heaven, where it promises he can enjoy eternity in peace and tranquillity. Cray looks around and, noting that the monotonous world around him bears no resemblance to the paradisaical images flaunted in the video, sets off in the hopes of encountering something more. Cray keeps on walking, until eventually a speck appears on the horizon; he rushes excitedly toward it, only to find himself face to face with the very television he'd contended with earlier, distinguished by the helmet he'd abandoned right beside it. He has, in fact, been walking in a circular loop the entire time - there is nothing to this "Heaven" except endless grey inertia. Horrified by the implications, Cray puts his gun to his head and shoots himself, hoping to end his entrapment but merely restarting the process - he wakes up in an identical grey landscape, in the vicinity of yet another television. Cray activates the video message, which greets him in the same upbeat tones, the crucial difference being that this time it welcomes him to Purgatory, advising him that he's here because mistakes were made. Cray inserts his gun into his mouth and fires it once again. By now, a clear pattern is emerging, so you can probably guess where this is headed next, although you might not be prepared for the smattering of body horror that accompanies Cray's next awakening, as he rubs his head to find a sample of his pulverised brains leaking out. His wound immediately heals, and Cray finds himself faced with the same inertia and yet another television. "Congratulations, you are dead!" proclaims the video recording. "Welcome to Hell! You are here because..." This time, Cray doesn't wait for the message to finish - he turns his gun on the television and blows it to smithereens. He then puts the gun to his head, whereupon he discovers that he only had a finite number of bullets, leaving him stranded in this grey monotonous "Hell". Not that it makes any difference, given what his other two options were.

I've seen some viewers forward the interpretation that Cray was in Hell all along and the looping inertia part and parcel of his damnation, but that reading gets a hard disagree from me. I think it's much funnier if the implication is that all three places are indeed exactly the same. Besides, what I find objectionable about the all-Hell interpretation is that it hinges on the need to presume that what Cray is experiencing now is somehow karmically proportionate to sins committed in life, and I see that as contrary to the absurdist nature of the short. The kind of person Cray was in life is really of no odds when the joke is that we are all inherently fucked. Having said that, the fact that he is a soldier does seem to be of greater significance than merely accounting, in narrative terms, for why he would have that gun on him, suggesting as it does two potentially contradictory readings of the situation he has come from. We might equate military combat with heroism, but it does entail the rampant destruction of life. The clue there may be in the title - life is never completely black and white, and it's possible that the afterlife has followed suit, with any potential rewards and retributions merging together and cancelling one another out, leaving us to tread an interminable grey platform signifying the intrinsically murky terrain of human existence. (The title is also a cunning reference to the 50% grey layer technique, which is used to add light and texture to pixel imagery.)

How I'm inclined to interpret Fifty Percent Grey is as less as a commentary on human notions of morality than on the television's role as an authoritative voice. It is a horror short in which the chattering cyclops emerges as our villain, albeit in a somewhat different manner to the child-abducting television set in Poltergeist. The afterlife (in all three of its purported dimensions) is infused with a troubling corporate coldness; it appears that God/the Devil/Charon/whoever cannot be bothered to greet any of its denizens in person and instead leaves a pre-recorded video message to do the heavy-lifting. The television is the closest thing Cray has to a companion (mimicking how the television might function as a substitute for social interaction in real life), and his sole means of making sense of the world around him - the joke being that the world around him never changes, but the narrative the television is feeding him does. Horror and humor alike arise from the discrepancy between what is promised (or threatened) on the TV screen and what you actually get, with Heaven, Purgatory and Hell all constituting the same experience as it is continuously repackaged and resold. One of the sharpest gags, with regards to Cray's so-called Heavenly encounter, is that the closing statement actually sounds more ominous than inspiriting, the alleged perk being in the opportunity to, "Sit back and unwind as you contemplate the mysteries of the universe," followed by the baleful reminder that, "You have all the time in the world!" What is immediately chilling about this afterlife is the total indifference of whatever higher powers are pulling the strings - and, to my mind, the horrifying stasis with which Cray is faced is a reflection squarely of this and not anything that he might have done in life. Even the Heavenly images that accompany the original message have a distinctly lackadaisical quality, a banality that's reminiscent of the kinds of still images that once populated old Windows screensavers. It offers a paradoxical glimpse into a vision of a promised land that is blatantly not there and yet one that effectively mirrors the unbearable vacuousness of the space Cray already occupies.

As the short progresses, the television becomes less of a proxy for these indifferent higher forces than an oppressor in and of itself. There is a visual clue hinting toward this early on, when Cray walks away from the television set, and we see an eerie shot of with TV in the foreground, appearing to dwarf the wandering man. It gives the impression of dominance on the part of the television, that it "knows" something that he does not. The TV's non-benignity is reinforced through its persistent presence yet shifting appearance, as if different layers are being stripped away to reveal the corporate malevolence lurking underneath - Robinson incorporates a witty sight gag in which the televisual technology is downgraded the lower Cray descends in his metaphysical journey. I'm not sure, but I think he may even have a laserdisc player in "Heaven", while in "Hell" he gets a clunky-looking model of VHS machine. I am, unsurprisingly, won over by the latter's retro charm - I would say that, of the three options on offer, it would be better to be in Hell, if you at least get to gape at truly vintage home video technology. That's just me, though.

Fifty Percent Grey was released in the same year as Richard Linklater's feature animation Waking Life, and in some respects represents a more brutally comical variation on the same basic formula, where the (potentially deceased) protagonist repeatedly fails to find their way out of an increasingly oppressive otherworldly state of being. In both films, the protagonist intermittently turns to a television set for guidance, the television representing a window through which to view and process the grander scheme. In Waking Life, the punchline to one of these sequences is supplied by an advertising jingle that breezily proclaims, "Now I'm free to see the world!"; this alludes, jokingly, to the liberation that both the television and Wiley's possible disconnect from the corporeal world should theoretically provide, all while he remains incongruously in his sedentary position as a passive observer (at the time, Wiley is engaged in channel surfing, an act that implies the intersection of creativity and passivity). In Fifty Percent Grey, I've no doubt that the central gag lies in the tension between the television's dual function as a mode of escapism and and a means of numbing spectators into accepting the status quo they are looking to transcend. Cray engages in warfare with the television as it attempts to exert control over his perception, striking back with a vengeance at his every effort to duck out of the narrative it projects onto the void and instructs him to consume, its rhetoric becoming more aggressively damning (quite literally) with each round. Cray might have the right idea at the end, in resolving to shoot the television and silence his opponent before it can complete its final condemnation, but it registers as rather a hollow victory. After all, it's not like he has anything else to stare at out there, except into that infinite grey abyss.