KNIVES

Yeah. Little bit of pain never hurt anybody. If you know what I mean. 

Also, I think knives are a good idea. 

Big, fuck-off shiny ones. 

Ones that look like they could skin a crocodile. 

Knives are good, because they don't make any noise, and the less noise they make, the more likely we are to use them. 

Shit 'em right up. 

Makes it look like we're serious. 

Guns for show, Knives for A Pro.

[being taken away by the TVA to be forcibly "reset"] 

Loki : 

You ridiculous bureaucrats

 will not dictate how My Story ends!

Ravonna Renslayer: 

It's not Your Story, Mr. Laufeyson. 

It never was.

Loki : 

You have no idea what I'm capable of!

Mobius M. Mobius : 

[stands up in the back] 

I... think I might. 

Have an idea of what he's capable of.

Ravonna Renslayer: 

Approach the bench.

Mobius M. Mobius : 

[does so; whispers] 

Hi.

Ravonna Renslayer: 

[whispering] 

If you're thinking what I think you are, 

it's a bad idea.

Mobius M. Mobius : 

Okay, I'm just chasing a hunch.

Ravonna Renslayer: 

Anything goes sideways, and it's on you.

Mobius M. Mobius: 

Okay.

[amiable]  

I feel like I'm always looking up to you. 

I like it. It's appropriate.

[speaking in Mobius' office] 

Loki : 

You don't know anything about me.

Mobius: 

Maybe I'd like to learn. 

I specialize in the pursuit of dangerous Variants.

Loki: 

Like myself?

Mobius: 

Mmm. No. 

Particularly dangerous Variants. 

You're just a little pussycat. 

I got a series of questions for you. 

You answer them honestly, 

and then maybe I can give you 

Something You Want. 

You wanna get out of here, right? 

Yeah, so we'll start there.

Should you return, what are you gonna do?

Loki : 

[firmly] 

Finish what I started.

Mobius: 

Which is?

Loki: 

Claim My Throne.

Mobius: 

You wanna be King?

Loki: 

I don't want to be, 

I was born to be.

Mobius: 

I know, but King of what exactly?

Loki: 

[scoffs] 

You wouldn't understand.

Mobius: 

Try me.

Loki: 

Midgard.

Mobius: 

AKA Earth. 

Alright, now you're 

The King of Midgard. 

Now What? 

Happily ever after?

Loki : 

Asgard, 

The Nine Realms.... 

Space?

Mobius: 

Space? Space is big. 

That'd be a nice little 

feather in your cap :

"Loki, The King of Space".

Loki: 

Mock me if you dare.

Mobius: 

No, I'm not.

[chuckles] 

 Honestly, I'm actually a fan. Yeah. 

And I guess I'm wondering 

Why does someone with so much range 

just wanna rule…?

Loki: 

…..I would've made it 

Easy for Them.

Mobius: 

People like Easy.

Mobius: 

You weren't Born to Be King, Loki. 

You were born to cause 

Pain and Suffering and Death. 

That's how it is, that's how it was, that's how it will be.

[shows the Avengers one final time] 

All so that others can achieve 

The Best Versions of Themselves.

[Mobius begins showing Loki the aftermath of the Battle of New York; Loki turns away in embarassment] 

Loki: 

[on recording] 

If it's all the same to you -- 

I'll have that drink now.

[Mobius offers Loki a soda] 

Loki: 

No. And I remember. I was there. 

Anything else?

Mobius: 

It's funny, for someone born to rule, 

you sure do lose a lot. 

You might even say it's in Your Nature.

Loki: 

You know, things didn't turn out so well 

for the last person who said that to me.

Mobius: 

Oh, yeah. Phil Coulson.

[the events of Loki stabbing Coulson in the back with Thor watching in despair are shown, followed by the Avengers coming together as a team] 

Mobius: 

Didn't the Avengers come together 

to literally avenge him by defeating you?

Loki: 

Little solace to A Dead Man.

[ He got better -- Couple of times, actually.... ]

Mobius: 

Do you enjoy hurting people? 

Making them feel small? 

Making them feel afraid?

Loki: 

Your Games don't frighten me.

Mobius: 

Making them feel little?

Loki: 

I know what I am.

Mobius: 

A Murderer?

Loki: 

A Liberator.

Mobius: 

Of eyeballs, maybe.

[sees the sequence where a smiling Loki carves out a man's eyeball] 

Mobius: 

Look at that smile. You are enjoying that. 

Did you enjoy hurting them?

Loki: 

I don't have to play This Game. 

I'm A God.

Mobius: 

Of what, again? 

Mischief, right?

Mobius: 

You're gonna start taking things more seriously.

[Mobius begins showing Loki footage of the future he hasn't experienced yet, beginning from "Thor: The Dark World"] 

Mobius: 

If you hadn't picked up the Tesseract, 

you would've been taken to a cell on Asgard.

[shows Loki meets with his adopted mother, Frigga] 

Frigga: 

Loki.

Loki: 

Hello, Mother. 

Have I made you proud?

Frigga: 

Please, don't make this worse.

Loki: 

What is this? 

This is nonsense, more tricks. 

This never even happened.

Mobius: 

Not to you, not yet.

 

Look, the TVA doesn't just know your whole past, 

we know your whole life, how it's all meant to be. 

Think of it as comforting.

Loki: 

This is absurd.

[Loki sees his final meeting with Frigga] 

Frigga: 

And am I not Your Mother?

Loki: 

You're not.

Frigga: 

Hmmm. Always so perceptive about everyone 

but yourself.

Mobius: 

And then the Dark Elves attack the palace, 

and you think you send them to Thor...

[sees Loki talking to Kurse] 

Loki: 

You might wanna take the stairs to the left.

Mobius: 

But instead, you send them...

[shows Frigga's death]

Frigga: 

I'll never tell!

[Frigga is killed] 

Loki: 

[outraged] 

Where do you have her? 

Where is she?

Mobius: 

You lead them right to her.

Loki: 

I don't believe you. 

You're lying. 

It's not True.

Mobius: 

It is True. 

That's the proper flow of time

 and it happens again 

and again and again 

because it's supposed to, 

because it has to. 

The TVA makes sure of it.

Loki: 

Where is she?

Mobius: 

Now why don't you tell me, 

Do You Enjoy Hurting People?

Loki: 

I don't believe you.

Mobius: 

Do you enjoy killing?

Loki: 

I'll kill you.

Mobius: 

Like you did your mother?

[Having seen where his future will lead to, Loki has given up escaping and returned to Mobius' office] 

Loki: 

I don't enjoy hurting people. 

I... [sighs] 

I don't enjoy it. 

I do it because I've had to.

Mobius: 

Okay, explain that to me.

Loki: 

Because it's part of The Illusion:

It's the cruel, elaborate trick 

conjured by The Weak 

to inspire Fear.

Mobius: 

A desperate play for Control :

You do know yourself.

Loki: 

A Villain.

[sighs] 

Mobius: 

That's not How I See It.

You Call Him a Survivor — He’s Not.

The ensemble cast portrays the nine characters who live on Serenity. 

Whedon pitched the show as :

“nine people looking into 

the blackness of space 

and seeing 

nine different things.”

Mal's been telling his story. 

Harken's not buying it.

HARKEN

Reavers?

MAL

That is what I said.

HARKEN

You can't imagine how many times men in my position hear that excuse. 

"Reavers did it."

MAL

It's The Truth.

HARKEN

You saw them, did you?

MAL

Wouldn't be sitting here talking to you if I had.

HARKEN 

No, of course not.

MAL

But I'll tell you who did. 

That poor bastard you took off my ship. 

He looked right into the face of it. 

Was made to stare.

HARKEN

"It"?

MAL

The Darkness. 

Kind of Darkness you can't 

even imagine. 

Blacker than the space it 

moves through.

HARKEN

Very poetic.

MAL

They made him watch. 

He probably tried to turn away, 

and they wouldn't let him. 

You call him A Survivor? 

He's not. 

A Man comes up against 

that kind of will, 

the only way to deal with it, 

I suspect — is to become it.

He's following the only course 

left to him. 

First, he'll try to make himself look like one. 

Cut on himself, desecrate his flesh and then, 

He'll start acting like one.

You Sound Like The Man

 

LONG RUFUS :

How you coping, kid? 

BETHANY :

It's weird. Just when I think I have a handle on things something wholly unbelievable presents itself. 

Sometimes I wish I'd just stayed home. 

LONG RUFUS :

You sound like The Man. 

BETHANY :

What's He like? 

LONG RUFUS :

He likes to listen to people talk. 

Christ loved to sit around the fire, listen to me and the other guys. 

Whenever we were going on about unimportant shit he always had a smile on his face. 

His only real beef with mankind... ...is the shit that gets carried out in His Name. 

Wars, bigotry, televangelism. 

The big one, though, is the factioning of all the religions. He said mankind got it all wrong by taking a good idea and building a belief structure on it. 

BETHANY :

You're saying having beliefs is a bad thing? 

LONG RUFUS :

I just think it's better to have ideas. 

You can change an idea. 

Changing a belief is trickier. 

People die for it. People kill for it. 

The whole of existence is in jeopardy right now because of the Catholic beliefs regarding this plenary-indulgence bullshit. 

Bartleby and Loki, whether they know it or not, are exploiting that belief, and if they're successful, you, me, all of this ends in a heartbeat. 

All over a belief.

FIREMAN

‘Coz You Know, Sometimes Words Have Two Meanings.....

In the Mundane World, A Fireman is someone who extinguishes blazes, preserves  flammable things and Saves People.

In Fahrenheit-451, A Fireman is someone who burns books, destroys forbidden knowledge and extinguishes The Past.

Pirates are The Men of Fire, The Pyrates

and in The World of Twin Peaks, The Fireman is God.

Loki walks in the sky with shoes that fly, and he can transform his shape so he looks like other people, or change into animal form, but his real weapon is his mind. He is more cunning, subtler, trickier than any god or giant. Not even Odin is as cunning as Loki. 

Loki is Odin’s blood brother. The other gods DO NOT KNOW when Loki came to Asgard, or how. 

He is Thor’s friend and Thor’s betrayer. 

He is tolerated by the gods, perhaps because his stratagems and plans save them as often as they get them into trouble. 

Loki makes The World more interesting but Less Safe. He is the father of monsters, the author of woes, the sly god.

Q.

There were things that Thor did when 

Something Went Wrong;

The First Thing he did 

was ask himself 

if What Had Happened 

was Loki's fault -- 

 

Maybe Q. did The Right Thing for The Wrong Reasons.

 OR

Maybe Q. did The Wrong Thing  for The Right Reasons

OR

Maybe Q. did The Right Thing for The Right Reasons....

Q: 

They will follow this ship until you exhaust your fuel. 

They will wear down your defences. 

Then, you will be Theirs. 

Admit it, Picard. You're out of your league. 

You should have stayed where you belonged.

You can't outrun them. 

You can't destroy them. 

If you damage them, the essence of what they are remains. 

They regenerate and keep coming. 

Eventually you will weaken, your reserves will be gone. 

They are RELENTLESS.

Where's your stubbornness now, Picard, your arrogance? 

Do you still profess to be prepared for what awaits you?

I'll be leaving now. You thought you could handle it, so handle it.

PICARD : 

Q. End this.

Q : 

Moi? What makes you think I am either inclined or capable to terminate this encounter?

PICARD : 

If we all die, here, now.... you will not be able to gloat..!! 

You wanted to frighten us. 

We're frightened. 

You wanted to show us that we were inadequate. 

For the moment, I grant that. 

You wanted me to say that I need you. 

I NEED You!

(With a snap of Q's fingers, the Enterprise goes whirling through space again)

Q: 

That was a difficult admission. 

Another Man would have been humiliated to say those words. 

Another Man would have rather DIED than ask for Help.

PICARD:

I understand what you've done here, Q --

But I think The Lesson could have been learned without the loss of eighteen members of my crew.

Q: 

If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross -- but it's NOT for The Timid.

[Ten forward]

(Guinan and Picard are playing Chess)

GUINAN: 

Q set a series of events into motion, bringing contact with The Borg much sooner than it should have come. 

Now, perhaps when you're ready, it might be possible to establish A Relationship with them. 

But for now, for right now, you're just raw material to Them. 

Since They are aware of your existence --

PICARD: 

They WILL Be Coming.

GUINAN: 

You can bet on it.

PICARD: 

Maybe Q did The Right Thing for The Wrong Reason.

GUINAN: 

How so?

PICARD: 

Well, perhaps what we most needed was a kick in our complacency, to prepare us ready for what lies ahead. 

Racing Downhill

“Science progresses because scientists, instead of running away from such troublesome phenomena or hushing them up, are constantly seeking them out. 

In the same way, there will be progress in Christian knowledge only as long as we accept the challenge of the difficult or repellent doctrines. 

A ‘liberal’ Christianity which considers itself free to alter the Faith whenever the Faith looks perplexing or repellent must be completely stagnant.

Progress is made only into a resisting material.”

— C.S. Lewis,

Christian Apologetics

An attribute of the penny-farthing is that the rider sits high and nearly over the front axle. 

When the wheel strikes rocks and ruts, or under hard braking, the rider can be pitched forward off the bicycle head-first. 

Headers were relatively common and a significant, sometimes fatal, hazard. 

Riders coasting down hills often took their feet off the pedals and put them over the tops of the handlebars, so they would be pitched off feet-first instead of head-first.

Although easy to ride slowly because of their high center of mass and the inverted pendulum effect, penny-farthings are prone to accidents. 

To stop, the rider presses back on the pedals while applying a spoon-shaped brake pressing the tire. 

The center of mass being high and not far behind the front wheel means any sudden stop or collision with a pothole or other obstruction can send the rider over the handlebars.

On long downhills, some riders hooked their feet over the handlebars. 

This made for quick descents but left 

no chance of stopping. 

A new type of handlebar was introduced, called Whatton bars, that looped behind the legs so that riders could still keep their feet on the pedals and also be able to leap forward feet-first off the machine.

David Foster Wallace on Commercial Literature and Reading

McGoohan: 
I think we're progressing too fast.
I think that we should pull back and consolidate the things that we've discovered.

Fifth Boy: 
Mr. McGoohan, when you began "The Prisoner," you began it in a decade in which a lot of people were used to secret agents. 

You very neatly saw the next decade coming. 

I thing you saw Watergate; The Enemy Within as opposed to The Enemy Without. 

I don't know if you can answer this, but if you were going to do the series again and you had to look aged to the 80's and you were thinking in terms of what you see as being the real enemy, not the storybook enemy but the enemy that's really going to hassle us. 

If you were going to look into the 80's now, what would you look to?

McGoohan: 
I think progress is The Biggest Enemy on Earth, 
apart from oneself, 
and that goes with oneself, 
a two-handed pair with oneself and progress. 

I think we're gonna take good care of this planet shortly. 

They're making bigger and better bombs, faster planes, and all this stuff one day, I hate to say it, there's never been a weapon created yet on the face of the Earth that hadn't been used and that thing is gonna be used unless...

I don't know how we're gonna stop it, not -- it's too late, I think.

Fifth Boy: 
Do you think maybe there's going to be a strong popular reaction against "Progress" in the future?

McGoohan: 
No -- because we're run by the Pentagon, we're run by Madison Avenue, we're run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don't revolt we'll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche.

Sixth Boy: 
We tend to view the threat, the Village there, as sort of a thing as something external like Madison Avenue, the media. 
How responsible are we for accepting this? 
Where do we become involved in being "unfree"?

McGoohan: 
Buying the product, to excess. 
As long as we go out and buy stuff, we're at their mercy. 
We're at the mercy of the advertiser and of course there are certain things that we need, but a lot of the stuff that is bought is not needed.

Sixth Boy: 
Did you regard the Village as an external thing or as something that we carry around with us all the time?

McGoohan: 
It was meant to be both. 
The external was the symbol, 
but it's within us all I think, don't you? 

This surrealist aspect; we all live in a little Village.

Troyer: 
Do we?

McGoohan: Your village may be different from other people's villages but 
we are all prisoners.

Troyer: 
Well, I know who The Idiot is in mine...!

McGoohan: 
Yes, Number One - same as me.

Seventh Boy: 
Is No. 1 the evil side of man's nature?

McGoohan: 
The Greatest Enemy that we have...

No. 1 was depicted as an evil, governing force in this Village. 
So, who is this No. 1? We just see the No. 2's, the sidekicks. 

Now this overriding, evil force is at its most powerful within ourselves and we have constantly to fight it, I think, and that is why I made No. 1 an image of No. 6. 

His other half, his alter ego.

Troyer: 
Did you know when you first outlined the series in your own mind, the concept that No. 1 was going to turn out to be you, to be No. 6?

McGoohan: 
No, I didn't. That's an interesting question.

Troyer: 
When did you find out?

McGoohan: 
When it got very close to the last episode and I hadn't written it yet.

And I had to sit down this terrible day and write the last episode and I knew it wasn't going to be something out of James Bond, and in the back of my mind there was some parallel with the character Six and the No. 1 and the rest. 

And then, I didn't even know exactly 'til I was about the third through the script, the last script.

Troyer: 
How about you colleagues, the other writers. 
Were they surprised?

McGoohan: 
Yep..

Troyer: 
Were they annoyed?

McGoohan: 
No.

Troyer: 
Did they decide it was untidy?

McGoohan: 
No, they used to come along from time to time and say, "Who's No. 1?" you see. 
And I told them , "It's a secret" until I actually sat down and wrote it - and it was, actually; they didn't know until I handed out the script.

Troyer: 
But were they disappointed by that...?

McGoohan: 
No, they liked it. They said they always knew it was going to be him.

Troyer: (laughs) 
Once you told them.

McGoohan: 
Few of them did really. 
Nobody really knew. No.

Troyer: 
Why the double mask? 
Why the monkey face?

McGoohan: 
Oh, dear. 

Yeah, well, we're all supposed to come from these things, you know. 

It's the same with the penny farthing symbol bicycle thing. 

Progress. I don't think we've progressed much. 

But the monkey thing was, according to various theories extant today, that we all come from the original ape, so I just used that as a symbol, you know. 

The bestial thing and then the other bestial face behind it which was laughing, jeering and jabbering like a monkey.

Eighth Boy: 
Mr. McGoohan, during the last episode, Fall Out, we see the Prisoner. 

He's smiling and laughing and dancing for the first time and yet later on the very last scene is exactly the some as the very first scene where he's driving off with his familiar stern face. 

My Question is, has the Prisoner between the first and the last episode actually changed any?

McGoohan: 

Ah, no, I think he's essentially the same. 

I think he got slightly exhilarated by the fact that he got out of this mythical place and felt like doing a little skip and a dance, and singing a bit, and felt very happy to be going home with his little buddy, The Butler, you know. 

And we never did a cut of him when that door opened. 

We just saw the door open and he went in. 

So, you never knew whether his exhilaration was lost when he saw that sinister door that was left like an unfinished symphony.

Ninth Boy: 

In the final episode, does the Prisoner really consider becoming the leader of The Village?

McGoohan: 

No. He does not. 

He just wants to get out and he uses a technique which he hadn't used before that, which was violence, which is sad, but he does -- 

And that's how he gets out and then, of course, in the final episode, he goes back to his little apartment place and he has his little valet guy with him and the door opens on its own when he goes in the car. 

There you know it's gonna start over again because we continue to be Prisoners.

Ninth Boy: 
And that leads to my last question, what would the Prisoner be likely to do with his newfound freedom?

McGoohan: 
He hasn't got it.