Batiuk's latest chronological failure.

I'd like to take this opportunity to head back to Westview, Ohio for a while to talk about a problem that I've noticed: the way that Batiuk has unintentionally turned Anthony "I HAVE NO HOOOOOOOME!!!!!" Caine into freaking Galahad by making Les Moore pole-vault over the moral event horizon. For those of you who have not read the horrible waste of an arc, I'll establish the setting a bit. It seems that for some reason or another, the Crazy Harry of 1979 decided to show a random selection of his classmates the time pool he had in his locker. Also, for some reason, Bull stupidly decided to steer the thing to Westview High's gym in the year 2015. This meant that Crazy, Bull, Funky, Holly, Cindy, Les and Lisa wound up looking around at a strange new era in which most of them looked like what a teenager thinks a person in their early fifties looks like (which is to say, exceedingly old). While Batiuk had a lot of fun mocking Cindy for reasons I'm about to get into and while he's currently having a lot of fun watching the gang of the late seventies try to cope with a Samsung Galaxy, the real problem is that Lisa Crawford looked around and found something that unsettled her: she wasn't there. We and the cast know that part of her is scattered illegally in the middle of Central Park. Where we and they part company is the need to try to make things easier to digest. The adult cast attempted to cloud the issue by making reasonably plausible excuses because of a need to spare her feelings because of a misguided sense of charity. The stupid idea they have is clearly "the poor dear is fated to die so let's make her think that her future self is happy in order to calm her down." This is nuts because there was an easy way to prevent her from dying that she'd have known about if she read the Great Big Book Of How Her Death Affected Someone Who Matters Because He Has A Penis.

This leads us to where it is that Les went from "passive, clueless, hand-wringing nitwit who didn't know what was going on around him" to "Complete Monster." You see, he read the book that his adult self wrote and hopes that he doesn't remember what he saw so that he won't have to act at all. What's more, he wants to keep Lisa from speculating overly much about the future because he believes that she, a mere girl, cannot handle a future that terrifies a man like him. The problem is that they do remember what they've seen. What this means is that teenage Les knows exactly how the future will unfold and refuses to do anything about it. He knows that Lisa will be raped by Frankie. He knows that she'll get pregnant. He knows that her asshole dad will disown her. He knows about the post office blast. He knows about the missed test result that will eventually kill her. He knows all this and does nothing to really help her because he can't abide a world in which a woman has agency. The idea is that if she knew things that could help her, she might leave him or something and he wouldn't get the girl he's supposed to have because he's a man and that's 'how things work'.

This leads us to what the problem Batiuk seems to have with women. After all, what is a woman to him? A woman is a mother who thinks that comic books are gaudy, juvenile trash that her son has to be made to outgrow so he can make a name for himself in the real world. A woman is a mother who thinks that being a cartoonist is a witless waste of talent and that a teacher is a figure of respect. A woman is a pretty girl who selfishly and cruelly fails to acknowledge that the best woman alive is lower than the lowest sort of man. A woman is thus someone who refuses to admit that he is entitled to her services because he's got a schlong and that's the deal. Since he prefers Lisa dead and dependent than alive and autonomous, Les Moore is thus a full-on villain protagonist.

The secret identity of Le Chat Bleu

The interesting thing about the arc is that as of this writing, Les has collapsed on the gym room floor because something has overwhelmed him. While it might be that the whole time travel arc is simply the end result of his hallucinating after having a mild stroke, I'd like to raise an interesting possibility. What might be happening is that Les has watched his past self read the Great Big Book Of How Lisa's Death Affected Me, A Passive And Helpless Observer Who Could Have Done Nothing To Prevent It by Les Moore and realized that what he thought was a hallucination or lucid dream wherein he went to a distant and impossible future and read a book he supposedly wrote about any number of horrible things that could happen to her actually did happen.

Oh, sure, every last one of the tragedies that he actually did experience did line up pretty much exactly with what he "dreamt" he read but, as he's managed to convince himself up until now, that was merely a horrific coincidence. So far, he's managed to convince himself that he didn't really have foreknowledge of the future and thus is not morally responsible for not suggesting courses of action that could have saved Lisa's life. This is no longer the case and the result staggered him. He could have done it and should have done it but didn't do it because he couldn't handle it and didn't realize that he could have changed everyone's lives for the better until it was far too late.

What's worse, Le Chat Bleu will never let our boy hear the end of it. For years, Les has been tormented by an imaginary fiend who exists to berate him for being a fraud and fool who doesn't deserve the success being handed to him on a tray. Said bogey seems to be animated by the fact that he knows something Les has wanted to blind himself to since he was in high school: the fact that for a very selfish and stupid reason that probably relates to a need he has to deprive a woman of an agency that could be used against him, Les failed to warn someone of any number of things that could hurt her so he could pose as her protector. This means that Le Chat Bleu is sort of like the character of Nadine on the PBS thing Arthur in that both are the conscience of an annoying pain in the neck glory hound.