“The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals” (part three)

In the living room area where Dr. Hidgens has his bar stocked up, Tim is making himself a drink, and is soon joined there by Ted. Ted takes his frustration over his fight with Charlotte out on Tim, but finds the latter much shorter on patience than usual due to the everything. Paul has to come into the room and intervene before it gets physical.

Also, Bill. His name is Bill, not Tim. Wonder how I could have misheard that?

Are "Bill and Ted" supposed to be an allusion? Not really seeing the parallels, aside from the names, so probably not.

After managing to get Bill to ignore Ted's increasingly drunken provocations, Paul walks over to where Emma is sitting just outside the lab room where Dr. Hidgens is studying the blue shit. She's a little buzzed herself, and musing on the cruel irony of how coming back to her hometown turned out to be an even worse idea than she thought. She worked so hard to get out of Hatchetfield, and only returned under financial pressure, and...well, then this happened. So she is a local then, sort of.

She'd apparently been in Guatemala, in the meantime. Mostly backpacking. Interesting.

Also, in the first really serious and comedy-free bit of the play so far, she further explains that it wasn't just money issues that brought her back here. Her years spent buming around Central America were punctuated by invitations to come back home to attend important moments in the life of her overachieving - but unadventurous - older sister. First it was come to my graduation. Then to my engagement party. Then to my wedding. Emma kept putting it off, partly due to resentment and envy, and partly due to shame at letting the rest of the family see her beside her sister and where they both are in life. She promised her that no, really, she WOULD come when she had her first baby, only for her sister to die in a car accident before that could happen.

So, she came limping home to Hatchetfield and started belatedly working to pay her way through community college. And then this happened.

So. Yeah. Quite a bit heavier and more serious than anything else in the show until now. And nary a joke in the entire delivery, aside from ones that a person with Emma's personality might realistically make to cope with the pain of recounting this story. It's a little jarring, honestly. I think they could have built up to this tone shift just a bit more gradually, and it would have been easier to keep up with.

Paul lightens the mood again a little with his own, much more sedate, life story. Still, though his delivery has more gags and his autobiography is less bleak, there's some gravitas to it. I thought he might have Asperger's or something like it back in the beginning of the play, but now it seems like there's more to his stiffness than that. It's like something instilled a terror of anything outside of normalcy in him, to the point where he likes his life and his hometown because of how boring they are. Hmm.

Things lighten up further when the two of them realize that they're the same age, and the only reason they didn't already know each other is because they each went to a different one of Hatchetfield's two high schools. He also remembers going to the other high school to see their theater club put on a musical, which Emma must have been in (Emma confirms this). So, she was in the show that taught him he hated musicals.

The banter here is, while lighter and sillier than it was for the previous anecdotes, still pretty close to realistic. It sounds more like two funnier-than-average people having a genuine conversation than it does characters in a comedy.

Also, their certainty that this is the end of the world seems a little weird, given that Hatchetfield seems to have been effectively contained and the outside world is aware of the situation. I could see them being sure that they, personally, won't survive this, but the world as a whole? Seems awfully pessimistic, even for people in their situation.

Then there's a flash of lightning and crash of thunder, and Sam and Charlotte burst into the room. I guess they can infect you even after you've been killed and disemboweled.

Pretty sure at this point that the zombies don't actually have a coherent set of rules. They're just an amalgamation of traits and concepts from assorted other contagion/zombie horror media. Well, I guess that's all I really should have expected, given the sort of show this is.

The ensuing musical number, "Join Us And Die," is unfortunately pretty lame. Musically, lyrically, choreographically. One of the most forgettable songs of the piece. The gist of it is that the zombies are pissed at how much resistance this little group has been giving them, and so they've given up their attempts at "peaceful" assimilation and will now just kill them and do the postmortem transformation.

...or, hmm. Actually, maybe postmortem IS the way it has to work? Their description of the coffee as "poisoned" would make much more sense then. Put the alien fungal mass into the brew along with a deadly-to-humans poison. Human drinks it, poison kills them, blue shit immediately reanimates the corpse with barely a second lost.

That does make one wonder how the first few got infected. Was anyone in that building when the meteor crushed it?

I know, I'm putting vastly more thought into this than you're supposed to, lol.

I'm not sure why Paul, Emma, Bill, and Ted don't just try to overwhelm the outnumbered zombies. They don't seem to be super strong or anything (at least, as far as the others have seen; tearing someone's organs out barehanded does take some doing, heh). I guess their varying levels of drunkenness is a sufficient explanation.

It also seems like the zombies DEFINITELY keep at least some genuine parts of their old personalities, because when they finally stop dancing and start attacking they literally push Paul aside in order to deliver a concentrated beating to Ted.

Which is pretty relatable. So, yeah.

Unfortunately for the rest of the group, the infected Sam and Charlotte don't quite manage to inflict any mortal wounds on Ted before Dr. Hidgens comes back out of the lab room with a cigarette in his mouth and a shotgun in his hands. The latter of which he uses to quickly resolve the situation.

Well, they're not tougher than normal humans, at least. Though I suppose having their brains exposed by someone hitting them once with a trash can lid was already pretty strong evidence that it's much the opposite, heh.

Also, the first words exchanged after everyone gets over the shell shock:

“EMMA: “You killed Charlotte!”

DR. HIDGENS: “No. I killed a...Charlat-an!” *looks around expectantly waiting for everyone to laugh at his stupid pun when a party member just died, and is visibly disgusted with them when they don’t*”

He's the best character, full stop.

Anyway, in his time in the lab the doctor was (somehow) able to determine that the blue shit is a retroviral agent that slowly turns humans into members of an alien species from the inside out. He also (somehow) learned that the infected have individual wills, but that they also are telepathically networked to each other through what appears to be another, outside consciousness.

He also wants to make sure no one else got infected while he was in the lab, so he holds the others at gunpoint and makes them sing the opening to "Moana" until he's satisfied that they're bad enough to still be themselves.

I guess the aliens couldn't pretend to be bad singers even if they had to to save their lives, heh. Or at least, Dr. Hidgens has convinced himself that that's the case, rationally or otherwise.

A moment later, Bill gets a call from his daughter Alice. He's very glad that she left town to go back to her mother earlier today...but then she informs him that she didn't, actually. She decided to stay another day in Hatchetfield just to be with her girlfriend, Debra. And now is hiding in the school music room while Debra and a bunch of other high school aged zombies try to batter down the door.

...wait, why was Alice supposed to be traveling on a schoolday? And, where does she even go to school anyway? Eh, whatever.

Bill immediately grabs some bread and water to sober up so he can try and mount a rescue. Ted tells him that she'll be dead before he can get to her, he'll die too if he tries, and that he's too stupid, weak, and pathetic to try to help anyone or anything. What the fuck is this guy's problem, seriously.

Paul is then inspired to propose a safe, secret route to get to exactly the right side of the school building for them to climb into a typically-open window, without crossing through any densely inhabited parts of the town. Having gone to school there himself a decade ago, he knows the way.

Bill isn't at all confident he can recall the directions. Being new-ish in town, apparently (though Ted eagerly attributes this to stupidity, only to be angrily ignored by the others). So, Paul offers to go with him.

This is actually really good character work, at least for one character. Paul's utter lack of interest in anything and anyone not already known to himself (motivated by fear or trauma or whatever exactly his deal is) is juxtaposed against his companions. Bill is actively engaged with the outside world, and though it makes his life more stressful and dangerous, it also makes it far more fulfilling, and you can tell that just by watching and listening to him. Emma tried to disconnect herself from everything and disengage from the life she knew she'd have to return to eventually (albeit in a much more scenic and interesting way than Paul does it), and regrets what she missed in the meantime. Ted, meanwhile, is an exaggeration of all of Paul's worst traits, and a warning of what he might turn into eventually if he doesn't start doing and caring about things. Seeing them all side by side has helped Paul advance as a person.

It's not a super deep, complicated, or subtle arc. But still, it's more than I was expecting from this kind of show.

Dr. Hidgens gives them one of his guns and bids them the best of luck. Emma wants to go with them too, but the doctor insists that he needs another pair of hands to aid with labwork and defense, and he's understandably not trusting Ted with either.

Emma and Paul have their first explicitly romantic moment before he and Bill depart on the rescue mission. With Paul promising her that no matter what happens, he does NOT plan on being in a fucking musical.

Let's see how this goes for them! And for Alice, I guess. She hasn't had enough screentime for me to care about her except as Bill's daughter, but that could change.

Next scene jumps ahead to Bill and Paul reaching the school. They seem to have avoided trouble so far, but the school was in session today (I still don't understand why Alice would be there if she doesn't go to school there, friend or no friend, but whatever...) so it's likely to have a lot of people in it, and there's no telling how many have been infected. As they sneak up beside the school, Bill tells Paul that he's afraid he might have caused Alice to come here today instead of leaving in the morning. Apparently, he'd implied that he didn't like her girlfriend, and encouraged her to date someone more upstanding.

Notably, the more upstanding alternative he proposed to her was another girl from their church. I'm not sure if the implication there is that he's actually bothered by his daughter being gay and had to pull a quick save there, or if he genuinely just doesn't like Deb. There are some details of his account that could be read either way. Either way, he thinks pressing her on that subject might have made her want to spend more time with Deb, either tom comfort herself or out of spite for her dad. Which means that Bill might be the reason she's trapped in Hatchetfield. And that her last in-person memory of him might end up being negative, or at least very mixed.

Paul assures him that that's unlikely to be the case, and the two sneak inside the school building. They find Alice. Or, rather, Alice finds them.

The first words out of her mouth are "This is all your fault. Or at least, that was my last thought before they broke down the door."

She's soon joined by more zombie teenagers, and - before Bill and Paul's horrified eyes - delivers the next song. And, holy shit, this one is everything that the previous villain song wasn't.

"Not Your Seed" isn't just catchy and well choreographed. It's also the most lyrically effective song in the show, and I doubt the remaining third or so of the production is going to change that. It also, while having some gags and silliness in it, builds on the more serious and emotional scene with Paul and Emma and actually is effective horror. The song consists of zombie Alice saying everything she can to hurt her father, and she (or, perhaps, the overmind coordinating her and the others from the impact crater) knows exactly how to do it. Gloating spitefully over all the things his daughter hated him for, how she died realizing he caused her to be in this situation and then abandoned her in it, and how much better off she is now as part of the hive. It's brutal.

Aside from being a great use of parental anxiety that delivers on everything Bill has worried about in the play up until now, it also characterizes the alien hive mind a bit more. In the previous song, it told us, through the mouths of Sam and Charlotte, that it was angry at the characters for repeatedly frustrating it. Now it's SHOWING us that. It's not just trying to infect them anymore, it's trying to hurt them. And it's good at it.

As the song terminates, zombie Alice falls into a slack, dead-looking pose just to torment Bill further. Paul has to physically wrestle the gun out of Bill's hands to prevent him from shooting himself then and there. He keeps struggling after that point, forcing Paul to then drop the gun. While their backs are turned, zombie Alice picks it up. Just as Paul finally opens up to someone and tells Bill that he's his best friend and that he doesn't want him to die, she shoots Bill in the head.

The high school zombies then address Paul in unison, without singing, and...meh. I think this was creepier when the coffee shop staff did it, because the all-speaking-at-once thing was being done in normal sounding human voices. This time, Alice and the other zombie teens are doing a cliched high pitch alien voice while doing it, which...eh, not as creepy.

There's a funny moment though, when each zombie keeps using the wrong synonym for a word they're trying to say, ruining their understandability, and they get frustrated at each other. They have to sing a quick three-part a capella harmony to recalibrate their links with the overmind and restore coordination.

Funny, and also a clever onscreen confirmation of Dr. Hidgens' hypothesis, along with some new implications about why the zombies perform their musical numbers. It's a nice little bit.

I wonder if the music-as-telepathic-calibration thing is a nod to Stephen King's "Cell." Possibly.

The zombies tell Paul that their kind have conquered multiple civilizations across this region of space, and that individuals who keep repeatedly running away from their agents really annoy them. Because of that, they're not even going to shoot him. They're going to slowly tear him apart, limb from limb, until he begs them to just grant him apotheosis already.

He's saved by the arrival of the military. About time they were called in. Sam's actor plays a soldier, who knocks Paul out with the butt of his rifle despite him obviously being uninfected and running from the zombies. Because, in the soldier's words, "who cares, we're the army."

I feel like this guy is getting typecasted just as bit. :v

Back at the lab, Dr. Hidgens is further marveling at the blue shit's telepathic properties. He's determined (somehow) that the overmind has a physical body it's housed in, and that that body probably has a limited range to its telepathic field (again, he's determined this somehow). He and Emma conclude that the central brain is either inside the meteorite, or IS the meteorite.

While Hidgens keeps his fingertip on the end of Emma's nose for an inordinately long time, to her mild chagrin.

Emma muses aloud whether destroying the meteorite would kill the infected, or just throw them into disarray, or what. Dr. Hidgens muses aloud whether or not, given the retention of individual consciousness in some form under the overmind's direction, humanity might actually be better off assimilated.

Well, that's a 180 coming from him.

He injects Emma with what I assume is a knockout agent before she can tell anyone else about what he believes to be the aliens' weakness.

I feel like this could have been built up to a bit better. Maybe throw some details into his dialogue in previous scenes hinting at Hidgens being misanthropic in general, rather than just inexplicably paranoid about an apocalyptic musical eventually happening someday?

He drags her unconscious body into a back room, and we flash back over to Paul waking up in the army field HQ. Being interviewed by a General McNamara (lol), who is played, once again, by the same actor as every other authority figure in the show (lol).

McNamara introduces himself as the commander of special army unit PEIP, or "peep." So called because they're so secret that you won't hear a peep about them, to the point where he denies their existence to Paul immediately after telling him about them. They deal with threats of an unconventional nature. Threats which, he subsequently shouts at Paul, do not exist and that he is forbidden from asking about.

He also tells Paul that intel had suggested there were no uninfected survivors left by this point, so his orders are to kill everyone in Hatchetfield, no exceptions. Because that makes sense. However, in his years of service fighting threats that don't exist and that you can't ask about, he's come to pledge his allegiance to a higher cause than the United States of America, and follows moral principles that supersede his orders. He offers to let Paul read some books on the subject of humanistic cosmicism, but Paul declines, citing the lack of time. Which McNamara seemed to have forgotten about. I dig this character. Anyway, he tells Paul that even though his orders are to let no Hatchetfield resident escape (again, for *some* reason), he'll help Paul slip away via troop chopper and create a new identity for himself. However, he's only willing to do so if Paul has something - or better yet, someone - else to live for.

Paul tells him that there's another survivor who he likes a lot. Not good enough for McNamara. Paul revises that statement, and says that he thinks he might love her. Okay, fine, that's good enough now. He gives Paul a handgun (by pointing it at his head and then instructing him to take it), and tells him where and when he and his love interest need to be for evac.

And also destroys his smartphone and gives him a wristwatch, because time is sacred and must be given a recording device of its own instead of having to share space in a multitool. This is also part of the religion he's developed over the course of his years of dealing with nonexistent threats that you can't ask about.

They bond over their shared hatred of musicals, and then Paul is off.


End of part three. Final half hour and analysis will be coming this week.