Leo and Taki make a fun pair. They remind me of me and my supervisor in Small Mammals, actually. Leo is like me, wanting to get as much done as possible, and finding things like cleaning my house and social niceties boring and pointless. And Taki’s version of “hurrying” being “walking slightly faster” is like my supervisor, who has no motivation beyond getting the bare minimum done, and constantly complaining he doesn’t have enough time to get everything done, even though he’ll sit outside the building smoking and watching TikTok videos for 10 straight minutes, multiple times a day! Anyway, I bet the version of Leo in the Department of Efficiency timeline has a real good time . . .
So, Naomi didn’t quite make it out alive in the end. She was a sympathetic figure, but I guess her reliance on control and forcing the world into the shape she wanted got in the way of learning how to resolve a story in a satisfying way, which ultimately returned her to the PPC’s radar and blocked her from being able to fight off Leo and Taki. Alas! Looks like she’s back in some unformed word salad now, so perhaps she’ll find a way to reform as a better character someday?
Applied Sciences certainly seems to attract the most physically outlandish agents, doesn’t it? I must ask, is Gazebo a dire gazebo? Also, it looks like Gazebo was about to say she helped Leo with a “quest for revenge.” Did Leo know Naomi in some way? Or does that just mean Leo was getting revenge for Naomi surviving her encounter with Kaito and Tanner?
Congratulations on getting through your first mission!
New word you taught me: “noogenesis”
One nitpick:
I ask (the Simpsons cast, not the voices . . .)
I think Simpsons here should be italicized, if I’m reading this correctly as “the cast of the show” rather than the specific family with surname “Simpson.”
—doctorlit wonders if he’s so out of touch; no, it’s the children who are wrong