Empress Theresa: Chapter Six Analysis · 10:29pm Apr 12th, 2023
After watching her BBC montage, Theresa wonders if anything can go right in this world (while we wonder if anything can go right in this story). Apparently she has a ‘trademarked’ funny face, because her shopping assistant, Nancy, begins to laugh at how an eighteen year old with no experience in anything is supposed to take on such big responsibility.
After she wakes up, the American Vice President, Veronica Stinson, is sworn in as the new US President. What a mighty feminist Boutin wants us to think he is for having a woman automatically become president after a man calls it quits when he learns the planet is doomed because of his botched attempt to kill Theresa. It seems like every empowered woman in this story has been given their empowerment or had it fall into their lap without earning it, or developing as a character into that state of empowered being.
Wait a minute! We finally learn how Theresa survived falling into the ocean! The BBC program segways to how a boat of British sailors in the South Atlantic compared searching for Theresa to searching for the Titanic. They saw a strange smudge on their radar signal and decided that radiation poisoning killed a lot of fish, which then attracted a lot of seabirds. When they found it, they saw that it’s actually a feeding frenzy of tens of thousands of sharks! A frenzy so wild and uncontrolled that they’re even eating each other, creating a bloodbath that soaks the ocean for miles! That should sound really cool and intense, but it’s just told to us through bland, robotic dialogue. Dialogue with lots of numbers too…Followed by narration with numbers…
Theresa’s right in the middle of that frenzy! But she can’t be eaten. The sharks are too busy eating each other. Now, if Wile E. Coyote came up with the soda bottle life jacket, Daffy Duck’s plan to get past the sharks would be to get as many guns as possible and blow them all to that big fish bowl in the sky. And that is exactly what happens. No kidding. The sailors get as many guns as they can spare to shoot tens of thousands of sharks until a clear path to Theresa is made. Theresa is rescued, and she is pronounced dead.
Oh, sweet Jesus, how can all of this information be so irrelevant to the story so long after it happened!? Oh, wait…
But it’s not over. The BBC program changes to a statement from PM Blair, who reads from his notes about how he wept when he heard Theresa had died, because she filled him with such hope, and how now that hope had been crushed. He also publicly praises the genius of Theresa making a life jacket out of EMPTY SODA BOTTLES! (Seriously? This guy’s running a country?)
The scene changes to Admiral Ruck at a senate hearing, where he explains that he might have rescued Theresa himself, but he didn’t know she escaped, and he’s very, very sorry for being mean to her. Then it’s bye-bye, Ruck. Because we never see him again in this sorry story. We do learn that maybe they knew it was HAL who was keeping her alive, even though she was dead when they found her. How many guns did Boutin go through when he repeatedly shot himself through the foot when plotting this book?
Scene shifts back to PM Blair, who calls Theresa’s death a signal for the end of days. When the world heard such tragic news, sappy, sentimental songs like The Dying Swan and Danny Boy were played repeatedly over the radio around the globe! In case it wasn’t clear before, the British Prime Minister only exists to lick Theresa’s boots. To be her personal brown noser so that everyone knows doubly sure how great she is.
So, Theresa was to be given a funeral befitting a president. Only problem was that PM Blair finally noticed something that even the doctors missed: Theresa hasn’t decomposed at all. Whoa! The man has a brain after all! But it doesn’t seem to work very well, as the plan to resuscitate Theresa is to put her in a very hot room to raise her body temperature. No doctor would do this, as this is not how hypothermia is treated. But, hey, that’s how it worked in ‘The Thing,’ isn’t it? Unfortunately, Norman Boutin is not John Carpenter, and has no capacity to make anything as clever and intelligent as Mr. Carpenter.
Oh, yeah. Blair called Steve to tell him that Theresa’s been found. That’s it.
The BBC program finally ends. Theresa comes to the conclusion that Blair wants her to use her superpowers to make the wind blow again. But first, she has to go to an interview with some television-type people. And everyone is so invested in it that literally the entire world has huddled up into their homes to watch it. Don’t these people have lives to live, despite there not being wind? No other responsibilities? Naw, they can just make their schedules revolve around Theresa. But since you people reading this have your own schedules, go do something else until the next chapter is analyzed. Have fun out there.
Fun fact; shark blood actually acts as a repellant for sharks.
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That entire scene sounds like something straight from a Pat Mills comic. It should be the coolest part of the story up to now. Go figure, it's as dull and bland as dry toast.
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This is Norman Boutin we're talking about. He has a supernatural ability to make the most exciting actions scenes unspeakably dull, partly as he doesn't understand show, don't tell.