Peter Pan - Part VII

Part VII 

"Son of a bitch!" says Hook, hardly able to believe that his pre-adolescent arch-enemy is not currently a layer of charred, steaming goop clinging to the inside of a tree. 

"This time you've gone too far!" says Peter, as if this were any worse than any of the other murder attempts of which Hook is guilty, and pulls out his knife.   He cuts a hole in the sail and flies through it, even though he could have easily gone around.  

"Son of a bitch!" says the pirate whose job is to repair sails.  He goes below decks to look for a thimble as Peter slices effortlessly through ten loops of thick rope to free the lost boys and the Darling brothers.  

"Son of a bitch!" says the pirate whose job it is to repair ropes.   

"You wouldn't dare fight old Hook man to man!" challenges Hook, somehow oblivious to the fact that such a challenge sounds pretty dumb coming from a guy who has already been beaten countless times in similar situations. 

"I'll fight you with one hand behind my back!" says Peter, because handicapping himself unnecessarily while in a fight for the lives of other children is apparently a risk worth taking for the sake of his ego.   

They square off and start smacking blades together with much ringing of steel.  Dodge, parry, spin, thrust and all that.  The rest of the pirates battle the gaggle of ragamuffin children.  The pirates are grown, tough, and armed with guns and knives and swords.  The children are small, untrained, and armed with slingshots and sticks.  John fights with an umbrella.  Michael puts a cannon ball inside his teddy bear and drags it around.  In a dazzling display of ineptitude, the pirates are beaten back one by one and wind up in the drink.  

Michael clobbers one pirate in the head with his cannon-ball-bear.  The pirate spends two days in agony and dies, but this story is over by then so nobody knows about it.  Michael goes his entire life not even realizing that he killed a guy with a teddy bear when he was a toddler.

Now it’s just Hook vs Pan in an epic battle that takes them out onto the yardarm where they show off how nimble and coordinated they are.  After much posing and swordplay, Pan disarms Hook and holds him at sword point.  Hook grovels.  Pan decides to be the better man and lowers the sword.  Hook tries to take a cheap shot at Peter, but loses his balance and plummets into the sea, where the crocodile is waiting.  He’s been lingering around the whole time; I just haven’t mentioned him in a while.  

When we last see Hook, he is swimming for his life with a flesh eating monster snapping at his heels.  He is either a fantastically good swimmer (despite the fact that one of his hands is a hook) or the crocodile is not, because they appear to be fairly evenly matched.  Hook’s crew rows out to save him in a little lifeboat, and that’s the last we see of them, too.  

There is much cheering and yelling and dancing about on the deck.  The cheering only intensifies when who should show up but Tinkerbell, cheese-grater in hand, alive and well after all.  Somehow her tiny, fragile body and delicate wings are immune to balls of fire and the concussive blasts caused by close-proximity explosions.  She also must regenerate skin like Wolverine, because she somehow grates enough of it off to coat the entire ship in a layer of the stuff, and it lifts out of the water.  Nobody is mad at her.  

“Where are we going?” asks Wendy, who has every right to be apprehensive after nearly being killed every ten minutes since she arrived.  

Peter tells them they’re going to London and they’re all mighty relieved, especially Michael who has been in the same diaper for days.  The ship floats away into the night, finally arriving in London where they step back through their nursery window.  They say their goodbyes, and the ship sails away with the appropriate amount of handkerchief waving and wringing of hands. 

Mr. and Mrs. Darling get home and stroll in.  Assuming parallel time lines, and given that the directions to Neverland include “straight on till morning” each way, they’ve been gone for three days and are still wearing the same clothes.  The whole time they were gone Nana was chained up in the yard and as far as they know, their three children were alone in the house, which is pretty damn irresponsible.  Still, somehow everything seems to be in order.  Wendy tells them that she’s ready to grow up and Mr. Darling puts his arm around her as they gaze out the window.  Then the pirate ship sails in front of the moon, bigger’n shit.  

 “You know, I have the strangest feeling that I’ve seen that ship before, when I was very young” he muses out loud, possibly to cover up the sound of him farting tremendously.  One gets the impression that everything that just happened was a rite of passage of childhood or something, and that it happens all the time.  

Apparently Peter Pan is some sort of childhood-to-adulthood transitional tool, who kidnaps children and endangers their lives repeatedly in order to prepare them for adulthood.  That explains why he didn’t originally invite John or Michael, they were too young.  Now Michael is a toddler who’s seen too much.  

But Peter doesn’t seem to remember that all of it has already happened.  He’s clueless.  They all are.  He and everybody in Neverland are caught in some kind of hellish infinite loop; they repeat their cycle of adventures forever, always with different children.   

That’s why nobody ever grows up.  The lost boys really are lost.  Lost in time.  Forgotten.  Hook is tormented by the crocodile.  Tiger Lily is kidnapped and tortured.  The pirates are humiliated (and slain) by children.  Tinkerbell attempts multiple homicides and betrayals.  It all happens over and over and over again.  Forever.  

And they live happily ever after.  

The End    

Previous (Part VI): http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/06/peter-pan-part-vi.html

Peter Pan - Part VI

Part VI

While Tinkerbell is busy plotting another betrayal of Peter and pre-meditating some Wendy-related killings, the lost boys have let themselves be convinced by Wendy that they need a mother.  They live in a hole under a tree, and they're all wearing the skins of dead animals and don't seem old enough to have ever been apprenticed to a tanner, so the skins probably haven't been cured at all.  They're just wearing dead animal skin.  That's nasty, and Wendy is probably right, but Peter doesn't buy it and tells her she and the rest of them can go suck an egg.

Wendy, her brothers, and the lost boys decide to leave immediately, and exit the tree through a little hole, intent on returning to London.  None of them takes into account the fact that they need a healthy dusting of Tinkerbell's dandruff in order to fly, and she (as far as they know) won't be back for a week because she's been banished for attempted murder.  In actuality, of course, she's alone on a pirate ship locked in a lantern.  The pirates are all waiting outside the tree with a stack of burlap sacks and a good bit of rope.

As the children exit the tree one at a time the pirates gag, bag, and hogtie them.  They're hauled off to the ship.  Hook waits for Peter to come out, but Peter is down in the hole feeling sorry for himself so Hook lowers a box into the hole that's neatly wrapped to look like a gift from Wendy.  It has a big fancy pink bow on it and everything, although nobody knows which of the pirates had that handy.  The box is not a gift so much as it is an improvised explosive device set to detonate very soon.  

There must be some sort of tear in the fabric of the space time continuum, because somehow Wendy and the boys are already on the ship with Captain Hook just as Peter gets the box.  Perhaps the ship was parked right there and was just a few swarthy steps away.  He reads the little note that says "To Peter, From Wendy" and has no problem with the fact that she hasn't had nearly enough time to fashion a gift for him.  He's so used to being fawned-over by all the Neverlandian women that it doesn't even register as strange that he should recieve a gift from a woman who was moments ago giving him the almighty stink-eye and walking out the door on him.  

Many things happen at once.  For some reason, Hook offers Wendy and the boys positions on his crew.  He must have been short-handed (ba-dum, tssshhh).  Wendy refuses to become a pirate and tells Hook he's welcome to apply his piratey pursed lips to her wee British ass.  Hook declines this offer like a gentleman and instead orders her to walk the plank at sword-point.  Her hands are tied behind her back, which guarantees her a nasty bit of drowning.  She takes these orders like a champ and heads toward her death with her chin up, telling the boys to be brave as they watch her die.

Peter slowly begins to open the box.  Tinkerbell rocks her glass prison until it tips and breaks, and buggers off at top speed to warn Peter about the bomb that she couldn't have known about because Hooks plan was originally to capture Peter, not blow him up.  Wendy takes a step towards her death.  Peter is almost finished opening the box.  Tinkerbell fireballs in so fast that particles in the atmosphere exfoliate her entire body, leaving skin-flakes trailing behind her like a meteorite.  Wendy takes another step.  Tink zips into the tree, grabs the box and flies out of there just as it explodes in a cataclysm that makes nuclear weapons tests look like Cub Scout marshmallow-roasting campfires in comparison.

With Tinkerbell most likely reduced to a sparkly cloud of ashes and a tiny jealous poltergeist, Peter is pretty bummed but realizes he needs to go help the children even though he doesn't know they're in trouble since Tink never had a chance to tell him.  He flies off at top speed.  Wendy takes one last step and disappears off the end of the plank.  She makes a whistling sound as she goes down, presumably for dramatic effect.  The pirates lean towards the edge with horrible smiles on their faces and their hands cupped behind their ears in anticipation of the splash... but there isn't one.

Mr. Smee assumes there's witchcraft afoot because Wendy never hit the water, and there is some gnashing of what few teeth remain among the crew as they cast fearfully about for ghosts and the like.  Instead, they see the silhouette of Peter Pan against the mainsail and quickly figure out that he's caught Wendy, that she's not dead and neither is he, and that they've failed yet again to accomplish one simple friggin task without screwing it up.  

Previous (Part V):  http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/06/peter-pan-part-v.html
Next (Part VII): http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/06/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html

Peter Pan - Part V

Part V

The Indian girl is Tiger Lily, and she’s the daughter of the local chief, which apparently qualifies her as a princess.  She is a feisty sort, and in response to her interrogation tells Hook he can go piss up a rope even though she’s about to die.  This helps to demonstrate just how beloved Peter is among the womenfolk on the island of Neverland.  Hook leaves her to drown, because he’s a mean guy.  Right as she’s about to choke to death on a mouthful of seawater, Peter Pan shows up, quickly beats Hook in a sword/knife fight (again… the guy just never gets better) and saves her.  He’s now saved two women from certain death in a matter of an hour or so, and gets lots of props from the locals even though both of them were only ever in danger because of him.  

In the meanwhiles, during all the mermaid fawning and pirately torture/attempted murder of indigenous Neverlandians, the lost boys and the Darling brothers gear up to go and hunt Indians.  This is something the lost boys do fairly regularly in good fun, and the Indians play along, so it’s not as horrible as it sounds.  Little do they know that the Indians are pissed off because somebody stole their princess and they can’t seem to figure out who it was despite the fact that there’s a shipload of pirates parked a stone’s throw away.  They've deduced that it was probably this ragtag group of filthy yard-apes that did it.  So rather than a fun game of “hunt the Indians”, the boys all get captured and tied up in the middle of the Indian village.  There are teepees all around, despite the fact that teepees were more of a Great Plains thing and this tribe lives in the middle of a forest on an island.  

There is a lot of war paint, whooping, hollering, and any number of stereotypical (if not blatantly racist) things going on as the Indians prepare to execute the lost boys and the Darling brothers in a bloodbath of death and violence and the usual mosaic of innocent children being slaughtered by Indians.  Just as it’s getting particularly ugly, Peter Pan shows up with Wendy and Tiger Lily in tow, and everything is forgiven in favor of everybody dancing around the bonfire in loincloths singing impossibly racist songs.  Except for Wendy.  Wendy gets to enjoy a glaring example of racism and sexual discrimination simultaneously as a large Indian woman tells her “Squaw no dance.  Squaw gettum firewood”.

At long last, everybody retires to hangman’s tree, which is the secret location of Peter Pan’s hideout.  Wendy becomes very motherly and convinces everyone except Peter that they’d rather tidy up and go to bed early than party around a bonfire.  She does this by reminding them via song that they are all motherless vagrants and that nobody loves them.  This seems unnecessarily passive aggressive until one considers that her entire trip to Neverland has thus far been fraught with peril, disappointment, and emotionally traumatizing near-death experiences.  

On a parallel timeline to all of this, Mr. Smee somehow manages to capture Tinkerbell, who apparently doesn’t understand the concept of being banished from Neverland and was sulking around the island feeling sorry for herself.  Smee takes her to Captain Hook, who finds it ridiculously easy to manipulate her into acts of treachery.  Just by playing on Tinkerbell’s jealousy of Wendy, Hook convinces the duplicitous little shit to give up the location of Peter Pan’s hideout.  She makes Hook pinky swear that he won’t hurt Peter Pan and believes him when he says he won’t, which leads us to believe that she is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the crunchiest peanut in the turd.  

Tinkerbell goes to the big map of Neverland on Hooks desk and points to one of three features that actually appear on the map:  Hangman’s tree.  Hook never thought to look there, even though Neverland is only about the size of a city block and there are only a few possible places Peter Pan could be hiding, a fact which serves to brilliantly illustrate the fact that Captain Hook is a raging dumbass.    

He's also a registered bastard, and immediately locks Tinkerbells psychotic pixie ass in a lantern where she gnashes her teeth and beats her tiny fists against the glass, somehow surprised and outraged that a dastardly pirate would betray her.   

Next (Part VI): http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/06/peter-pan-part-vi.html
Previous (Part IV): http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/06/peter-pan-part-iv.html

Peter Pan - Part IV

Part IV

Since the pirates (or at least their good captain) are so maniacally obsessed with weaving new rigging from Peter Pan’s entrails, they ignore Tinkerbell and the rest of the kids while Peter distracts them.  Not much is said about how he does this exactly, but one suspects that there was some mooning, and the appropriate amounts of nose-thumbing and finger waggling to accompany it.  

Wendy and the boys try to follow Tinkerbell, but they fall behind because she is too fast and gets way ahead of them.  Tinkerbell, as it turns out, while innocuously diminutive, beautiful and magical, is prone to fits of horrible murderous jealousy and rage.  Unbeknownst to Wendy and the boys (but beknownst to us) is the fact that Tinkerbell secretly loves Peter in a romantical way and has deduced that Peter doth doteth upon the Wendy girl a bit overmuch.  

Tinkerbell doesn’t seem to take into account the moral issues which arise from inter-species romance (although little literature is available on the ramifications of fairy/elf-boy unions), and doesn’t worry that her affections might not be reciprocated.  Instead of mentioning anything to anybody, she decides to solve her perceived love triangle problem by abruptly ending Wendy’s short, fragile life.  She nips ahead to the hideout and manipulates the lost boys into doing her dirty work for her by telling them (via little bell sounds which the lost boys understand somehow) that Peter wants them to shoot the wicked Wendy-bird out of the sky.  

The lost boys, in blind obedience to anything Peter says, even via Tink and even if it seems psychotic and unnecessary, trundle outside armed with slings and stones and bows and arrows.  They take to firing wildly into the air, and Wendy (to her credit) absorbs a few pebbles to the jaw before her happy thought wears out and she begins to plummet to her doom in abject terror.  The tragically disturbed Tinkerbell watches with glee.  

Peter, who must have known a shortcut, appears out of nowhere and catches Wendy just before gravity turns her into a griddle-cake, effectively shitting directly into Tinkerbells victory Cheerios.  He is mightily pissed off at Tink, and lets her know it by banishing her forever from Neverland (rather than imprisoning her for attempted murder, or hanging her, which wouldn’t really work since she has wings, and none of the lost boys knows how to construct a proper guillotine).   Banishment ensures that she becomes somebody else's problem, so Peter determines that it’s good enough.  

Wendy, who knows not what the hell even happened, feels compassion for the deranged fairy and begs Peter not to banish her forever.  Peter waffles and agrees that the banishment is only for a week (which is substantially shorter than forever and seems sorrowfully inconsistent with the severity of the crime), but Tinkerbell has already buggered off to parts unknown with her wee panties all in a wad, and doesn’t hear the altered version of her sentence.

Introductions are offered all around, and Peter promptly ditches Wendy’s brothers on the lost boys so he can take Wendy on a “tour of the island” which comes off as a thinly veiled excuse for a romantic interlude of sorts.  The romance is doomed to be short lived.  

"What better way to snuggle into a girls heart than to take her to see some real live mermaids?" thinks Peter, and his logic seems sound indeed until they get to Mermaid Lagoon.  The mermaids act incredibly fan-girlish around Peter and Wendy gets a little snooty about it.  Peter is oblivious, but soon discovers that rather than a peaceful bit of heart-melting magic and fantasy, a recently mooned and mocked Captain Hook is around the corner with his sniveling first mate Mr. Smee, using the rising tide to effectively water-board an innocent Indian girl in an attempt to get information about him.   

Previous (Part III): http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/06/peter-pan-part-iii.html
Next (Part V):  http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/06/peter-pan-part-v.html