Setting and Endgame.

Now that I've assembled a cast for the fantasy continuation, it only seems fair to hint as to what they'd be doing with their time. Since I'm a sucker for when the strip was actually good, the new order would not be the claustrophobic horror of the Early Years or the irritating soap opera of the Declining Years. What we would have is the ups and downs of a quiet, tidy suburban family of admittedly flawed but likable people making their way in the present day world. We would then have Liz as the axis about which the family rotates, Anthony as a less nutty Ted Forth, Elly trying to make up for a life of panicking over nothing to compensate for feeling powerless, Francoise and Jimmy as friendly children dealing with everyday problems and the lot of them doing things most families do for the reasons that most families do them.

The occasional deviation from the path of tidy domestic tranquility is, in this situation, dealing with Mike and his family. While Liz always wants to respond to his or Deanna's or Meredith's latest outrage by doing battle, everyone else quotes a lyric Steven Page sang once: "They built a wall/to protect them from us all/We should have left them there" as a means of reminding her that he simply isn't worth powder and shot.

This would all lead up to a planned end game which I call the Lesser Dysfunction. In this scenario, Mike gets called out for stealing other people's lives to make his terrible books by the relatives of one of the people who didn't want his story told. As his career finally implodes and his ego auto-destructs, the editor who canned him for upsetting Divala is seen leading the lynch mob.