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I waited nearly two weeks to listen to "A Diner in the Desert." Well, I put it off. Still hit me like a ton of bricks. Not the fact that Ex was presumed dead, but the reunion. Reminded me of my own best friend and how I probably won't see her for the rest of my life once she moves countries, permanently
I don’t know if it will happen, but a short side series about the other “assets” from where Terric was held in confinement could be neat. If Midnight Burger is essentially Doctor Who crossed with Star Trek, I’m confident Joe Fisher and company could do their own spin on X-Men of a non-super-heroic variety.
I’m actually still not over the fact that the bravest person Leif says he knows is Gloria. The man is besotted. That’s his work wife. She may very well be His Person, actually. She’s the only one as insane as him, she matches his freak.
He gave her a laser saw, y’all. He listened to her batshit insane plan to escape Krok, and was willing to bear the burden of grief and guilt to shoot her and everyone else with the time gun even if it killed them all. He builds for her. He lets her hold his leash. She yelled fifty acres and a mule at Abe Lincoln and he killed John Wilkes Booth. They both destroyed the Teds (and she is gonna be so mad he used the doomsday device to do it but wouldn’t let her, and then she’ll probably feel weirdly grateful because he’s always been willing to bend his integrity to the point of breaking but he’ll always keep her honest). They’re both cooks with cookbooks that have nothing to do with cooking (Gloria’s is mental, and it’s all her batshit plans, many of which involve kidnapping for some reason lmao). They both lost their parents, Leif a little bit more symbolically, but it’s still what eventually sets them on their period of wandering.
Like. Yeah, yeah, Caspar and Ava are nauseating and it’s not a competition, but Leif and Gloria’s relationship is sooooo. They’re sooooo!!! Much. They’re not quite a bonded pair the way Caspar and Ava are — those two shouldn’t be separated because they’ll do some real fucked up shit to get back to each other. But Leif and Gloria carry pieces of each other with them in such a weird way. I need them to hug when they’re back in the same room or I’m building a purple nullifier
Sad rapport that I have now realized that since Leif's lastname (thorvaldson) is so obviously Scandinavian it makes sense if his (admittedly unusualfor an American) first name was also Scandinavian. I (a Scandinavian) didn't even connect the dots cause they pronounce it [leaf] or [laif], it didn’t even occur to me that his name is fucking [Lejf]!
In the same vein that I don't like the Leif is fundamentally a bad person take, I really hate the Ava is a static character take because it's so obvious that she does change throughout the series and the easiest way to prove that is to listen to how her interactions with literally anyone have changed between the first season to now. She's still the sarcastic scientist we met in episode 1, but she's started caring for things!
I was going over all the ways people are given second (and third and fourth) chances in Midnight Burger, if not in their current universe then the next, and had a thought.
The whole reason I was struck by the whole “until you get it right” of it all in the first place was because of the conversation Leif and Trinkett were having when alternate!Malu makes an appearance underneath Raxius. And in much the same way that Caspar never gets to make it right with his David, this time, they’re able to save Malu where they couldn’t before. Trinkett mused on the importance of the specific people in the fabric of your life being why so many repeat offenders show up in an infinite universe, but then I realized who shows up most frequently in the multiverse.
It’s the people that need those second chances. It’s the people on the other side of the split in the timeline. The people who went left instead of right. Leif has a whole little diatribe about it with Dark Leif. He just kept doing this instead of that one too many times. And suddenly this lingering question I’ve had wrt why there are some people we NEVER see the alternate universal versions of had an answer: because they got it right.
Think about it. Who do we see most often in the multiverse? Leif. There are so many alternate versions of him, and so goddamn many of them exist to provide another version of himself the second chance he so desperately needs in every alternate reality. Then there’s Caspar, with just as many variants if we’re counting all the millions Ex was able to interrogate before being set free. But most important of those alternate!Caspars was the one who took Clementine’s deal and left his diner. Because that Caspar didn’t know what ours knew — that in order to be the father David deserved, he actually had to stay and save the universe. Even the one alternate!Ava we’re shown, the one who helps make Caspar the “motor boat” to get back to his family… she never shares her notes or her ideas on how to get to that point of null entropy. I don’t think a single alternate version of a person presented on this show has it better than the first version we’re presented with. They’re all in a worse or equal situation and in need of help.
And then there’s Gloria. The one person we’ve never seemed to catch a second glimpse of. And I just could not figure out why until Leif’s little speech with himself. Couldn’t have figured it out without him at all, because of the way they work together. Gloria got it “right” on the first try.
It makes sense that we never see a second version of Gloria. The story starts with her and follows the path she set everyone on, the “prime construct” included. It makes sense that none of the other diners/theatres/bowling alleys have anything like Effie and Zebulon, this is the diner that got it right. But Gloria is really an anomaly in this because you still get to see alternate diners, we still get the knowledge that this Effie and Zebulon are entirely separate entities from the physical Effie and Zebulon that existed in Earth’s past. But Gloria? Not even in the Your Mother episode is there a hint of her existence in these alternate universes.
It’s just her.
Because she’s still getting it right.
All those times Gloria made a decision NO ONE else in the diner would have made: giving the shark-human hybrid a cup on coffee back on Planet Straightforward before they knew he was trapped in Cryptessia. Fighting the Teds and sowing the seeds of their defeat (only for Leif to have to make that same decision later, using the very weapon he told Gloria she could never use). Holding that ceremony for BOOFAR and forcing everyone to play along, only for that to be a part of the most important ship in early coalition history. Gloria’s compassion has kept her “on the right course” so to speak. The timeline hasn’t needed to splinter for her yet.
Which is odd, isn’t it? In a multiverse that splinters, as Ava put it, the moment someone is punched (dying in one of those infinite iterations), Gloria has yet to pop up in another timeline.
Which led me to another thought while writing this. One slightly less wholesome and sweet. I’ve mused in the past on the relationship between Krok and Chuck. Krok comes before the universe, Chuck comes “after” in that he’s the inheritor of power Krok loses and is a singular entity that represents the whole of a given universe. There’s only one four dimensional being because that’s all there can be. Consequently, Krok knows what came before and Chuck is the one who knows everything that happens after that because he exists in all moments where time exists. (Stay with me).
What I also mused on amidst all this is the fact that there’s this secret third thing that Krok is afraid of. Something that can’t be killed. And I likened it to a parent. If Krok and Chuck are “brothers” — Krok the elder and Chuck the inheritor, the two of them fighting in the sandbox we call a universe — who’s the catalyst? Who or what is the reason for any of this at all.
And then all the dominoes fell and did that cool thing where they react in reverse and fall into neat lines.
It’s Gloria. She either is or at least represents the secret third thing Krok is afraid of: change. She’s the catalyst. She’s the only other “singular” entity. She completes the “holy” trinity as it were. Krok is the father (self explanatory), Chuck is the Holy Spirit, and Gloria is the son — if we’re gonna use trinitarian Christianity and baptists are trinitarian as far as I know, since we’re going with the Mucklewain basis of faith here.
Chuck and Krok could swap places on the trinity, the important part is that Gloria is the son because she’s the only one who’s moving through the mortal world in a normal way, righting wrongs through her boundless compassion (also, twelve apostles doing the good work: Caspar, Ava, Leif, Teta, Libuza, Kazi, David, Fiona, Voon, Phil, Effie and Zebulon — one of whom betrays her principles, Leif).
It would also explain the division of power I was curious about, here:
Also begs the question of who the fuck their parent is. Because Krok couldn’t made a rock instead of a star, and even Chuck is limited in its abilities. Something made the universe spring into being, and if Krok slowly lost his reality warping power then I’m willing to bet that whatever created the first sparks of matter — pulling from [redacted] knows where — also lost a significant portion of its power. But I think that means it retained something else…
Krok got the body and the ability to directly interact with the universe. Chuck got the power to manipulate the universe (within reason and with constraints because: energy). So what’s the secret third thing that someone/thing else got? And what does it mean if it’s with the being that ostensibly created the universe? And why would proximity matter? Why fling it across time and space?
It has to be something you can target, because the weapon is still a gun. It’s not some diffuse grenade that captures everything in a radius. It’s focused and directed. So whatever this thing is, it has something like a body, too. But, it’s limited enough in either thought or ability to manipulate things that throwing it through space and time is a viable way to slow it down.
I doubt Gloria is actually the specific thing Krok is afraid of, at least she isn’t in a way he realizes, but… she’s the reason this universe is unfolding before us as listeners. She’s where the story starts. She’s who it follows. She’s targetable by those guns, and Leif very much did have to use them to fling everyone across the multiverse, slowing them down.
I think Gloria is the fucking secret third thing! And that power she got was her compassion and capacity for change — her almost infectious ability to catalyze that change. Chuck said they (people, in this case humans, and him) needed each other because he could fix the big problems they couldn’t but he could never know them in a focused way since he exists in all moments.
It’s fucking Gloria.
And more than that, Gloria represents the why that seems to keep coming up. Why any of this? Why do we keep seeing the same people? Why them? Because the powers that be are gonna keep showing up… until you get it right.
So my dad sent me his list for a live action fantasy of Midnight Burger and…
I can’t even begin with how awful I find this.
HI GUYS IVE UPDATED MY SHOP!!!!
midnight burger and tma fans will be happy to learn that ive now got a lot of tma and modnight burger prints up!!! including my latest gerry art
and mcyt fans will be glad to know that literally nothing has changed and theres still a lot of mcyt things !! yay !!
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