(SPOILERS!) Professor Leyton's Unsolved Puzzle
This is about as spoilerific as it gets so if you're the kind of person who prefers not to receive spoilers, look elsewhere for the moment.
Last night, Caroline and I went for our usual sushi fix at Hi Sushi in Soho. As always, conversation got very silly, about a molester messiah and the plight of the big-boned, but rather than the usual swift drink (usually ten) at the Retro Bar, we went for a coffee instead.
Oh, what a mistake that was. We ordered our wanky drinks (me a black Americano with a shot of hazelnut, her a skinny Caramelatte) and carried on the nattering, unaware that the pure, sweet cleansing power of the mountain of sashimi and wasabi (wuss-abi in my case) meant we were utterly retoxed by the coffee.
Got home and finished the last few puzzles on Professor Leyton. Strikes me, though, that there's a really quite beautiful failing on their part to realise the existential puzzle at the centre of the world they travel through.
Professor Leyton, Luke and Flora realise that they've been wandering around an intricate puzzle all this time, the village populated with strange, mechanical automatons who've presented the boy and his paedofessor with the puzzles that need solving.
Yet, even as they leave the village with Leyton's newest prize, the beautiful little girl, Flora, who holds the final secret of the village in a tattoo on her breast that the Professor discovers while holding her close in his arms, they're utterly oblivious to the irony of their situation.
For all that they've realised that the villagers are all machines, they lack insight into their own status as automatons, despite the moments where Leyton tells Luke to shut off his DS because he's got a special surprise for him.
It's beautifully sad, watching the characters drive their pixellated car towards the pixellated horizon, their binary-coded brains about to end their illusion of consciousness, character and choice as the credits roll and you switch them off for the last time.
I had a little sigh for them, trapped in their programmed world, thinking themselves so clever that they'd worked out that some of their world was programmed only able to think this because their programming made it so.
It's like an understated version of The Matrix, written by Herman Hesse. I just hope Leyton can't fly in the sequel.
Last night, Caroline and I went for our usual sushi fix at Hi Sushi in Soho. As always, conversation got very silly, about a molester messiah and the plight of the big-boned, but rather than the usual swift drink (usually ten) at the Retro Bar, we went for a coffee instead.
Oh, what a mistake that was. We ordered our wanky drinks (me a black Americano with a shot of hazelnut, her a skinny Caramelatte) and carried on the nattering, unaware that the pure, sweet cleansing power of the mountain of sashimi and wasabi (wuss-abi in my case) meant we were utterly retoxed by the coffee.
Got home and finished the last few puzzles on Professor Leyton. Strikes me, though, that there's a really quite beautiful failing on their part to realise the existential puzzle at the centre of the world they travel through.
Professor Leyton, Luke and Flora realise that they've been wandering around an intricate puzzle all this time, the village populated with strange, mechanical automatons who've presented the boy and his paedofessor with the puzzles that need solving.
Yet, even as they leave the village with Leyton's newest prize, the beautiful little girl, Flora, who holds the final secret of the village in a tattoo on her breast that the Professor discovers while holding her close in his arms, they're utterly oblivious to the irony of their situation.
For all that they've realised that the villagers are all machines, they lack insight into their own status as automatons, despite the moments where Leyton tells Luke to shut off his DS because he's got a special surprise for him.
It's beautifully sad, watching the characters drive their pixellated car towards the pixellated horizon, their binary-coded brains about to end their illusion of consciousness, character and choice as the credits roll and you switch them off for the last time.
I had a little sigh for them, trapped in their programmed world, thinking themselves so clever that they'd worked out that some of their world was programmed only able to think this because their programming made it so.
It's like an understated version of The Matrix, written by Herman Hesse. I just hope Leyton can't fly in the sequel.