Empress Theresa: Chapter Twenty-Seven Analysis

Looks like I was wrong about Theresa being back on her feet already. Hey, even the best of us are wrong sometimes. Instead, something very unexpected happens. In fact, it’s so unexpected because there was absolutely no evidence to suggest that any such thing would ever happen at any point in the book. Especially not in the second to last chapter! All of a sudden, hundreds of HALs come drifting down out of the sky like little snowflakes. That came out of nowhere. This might be a clever plot development if it was described in an engaging way. Instead, we are told a bland play-by-play of what happened, and there is an incredible excess of (you guessed it) numbers!

Theresa and Steve are informed of the development by President Stinson with a phone call. Why Steve is informed is beyond us, because all he does is rely on Theresa to do anything, because he’s a supportive beta-male who’s only trying to creep his way out of the friend-zone. I know that he’s her husband, but that’s how men like Steve behave in real life (and in real life, he would never actually be her husband).

As the incident unfolds, all the little HAL’s converge toward the Prudential Building. If you don’t know what that is, that’s because it’s now called the Guaranty Building. We also get some pretty unnecessary information about how big the building is for no reason other than to add more numbers. Shockingly, no specific numbers are listed as all of the little HALs begin to cascade down and merge with the people in the crowd below. Uh-oh! Now other people can use HAL’s powers. Theresa’s no longer a special Mary Sue now that everyone else is just like her. Naturally, Theresa’s first reaction is to cry about it. That is not a joke. She actually cries about other people having HAL powers.

The phone rings again, and it’s Blair, who informs them that Stinson was supposed to still be on the phone telling them about the incident at the Prudential Building, but the author forgot about that. Blair wants to know what the hell is happening just as badly as we do. The best that Theresa can guess is that HAL duplicated itself when it got nuked. No it didn’t, because there was absolutely nothing to indicate that this had happened, or that HAL had this ability before. But hey, HAL works in mysterious ways. I’d rather have that as the explanation than the one that’s given for why HAL divided, and why its little buddies are merging with innocent bystanders. It seems that they’ve always been up there in the sky the whole time. Even though there was no evidence to suggest it. Not when Theresa was spying on the entire planet with her remote vision. Not when she was helping NASA mine materials from the sun or put a telescope on the moon. Not even a news story about strange phenomena seen by pilots. It’s a bullshit plot point that’s quickly going nowhere.

Coverage of the HAL invasion is broadcast. People are impressed by their superhuman strength (it looks like Boutin remembered those powers after all). While the rest of these normal people wonder about how to control their powers, Theresa thinks they’re all stupid, because they wouldn’t know what to do with such power. Neither does Theresa, because all of her plans have been overly elaborate, convoluted, and wouldn’t actually work in real life.

Blair and Stinson visit Theresa and Steve at their place. They talk to each other about how bad the situation is, now that more people than Theresa have HAL’s power. Theresa determines that it is very bad, because nobody is as good and moral as she is. No joke, she blatantly states her moral elitism.

Theresa has a plan, though. She’s going to track down all of the new HAL hosts, put them into the same deep sleep that she was in when she got nuked, and try to extract those HALs from them that way. When she tries an experimental test trial with her plan, it doesn’t work, and she cries about it. After Steve talks to Blair and Stinson about the next course of action, (remember that Theresa shouldn’t know that this happened because she wasn’t there) Theresa decides that she’s ready to pull off her biggest plan yet. In a week, she and Steve disappear, and nobody knows to where. After that, the chapter ends with the entire world beginning to go into a deep sleep.

This entire chapter was a complete non-sequitur. Nothing about it logically followed what came before it. The explanation for how there were suddenly multiple HALs was more like a justification for doing it, just because the author wanted there to be. Theresa’s sudden interest in a bizarre parallel to stem cell research was dropped just as suddenly, which makes me think that the author realized that this would prolong the story, even though he didn’t want to write anymore. However, it seems like I was completely wrong about Theresa being able to walk again by the end of this chapter, as she is still in a wheelchair. But there’s still one more chapter to go, so she could be up and walking by then.

Next chapter is the very last chapter. Finally, we can get this over with.