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
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