The Bad and the Ugly

In today’s strip, at least the focus seems to be moving off Eva and it appears from tomorrow’s strip, the whole point of this story arc is for John Patterson to appear cool because of his car purchase. Saturday’s strip has to be a police ticket for speeding joke, possibly related to the officer making some comment about how cool John’s car is, or maybe the reappearance of Brad Luggsworth, who has not been around in years. If it’s Brad, then maybe he and Dr. Patterson can have a nice chat about how his wife left him just in time to vie for Elizabeth’s hand in marriage, while Duncan and Gerald think similar thoughts, except without the wife part.

The only thing that could be done with Eva was to have some sort of explanation as to why she would be narrating what the boys were doing. the_berserker as Duncan noticed the narration, qnjones as Becky and Gerald added to it, and I had Jeremy Jones explain it as a manifestation of Eva’s text on the Who’s Who part of the For Better or For Worse website, which had to mention Duncan being interested in Eva. All of this was topped by qnjones ' masterful “Eva talks to Gerald” post where she laid out the many views of Eva point by point with explanations that are far better than, “The Lynnions don’t know what to do with her.” She looks black. She looks white. She looks sexy. She looks frumpy. She loves to exude psychopath chic. She can’t speak without using analogies.

Constable Paul Wright, Michael Patterson and Howard K. all had their takes on Dr. John Patterson taking the boys to show off the car, which all amounted to, “This doesn’t seem right.” I would like to say in tomorrow’s strip it gets better (and it does for Eva), but for Dr. Patterson it gets much worse. The strip presents a Dr. Patterson, who has intentionally and irresponsibly been speeding for no other purpose than to impress the boys. It’s hard to believe the same guy who was afraid of “dangerous information“ with April, is now breaking the law with Gerald and Duncan. It’s either a sexual double-standard or the people who wrote this story don’t seem to remember that Dr. Patterson is the same idiot who drives trash out to the dump and complains about the things people threw away. For him to blatantly break the law seems far, far out of his character.