Foobonia and Points West.

To get back to what I was talking about the other day, it's sort of obvious that Mike has spent the last thirty-odd years putting the finishing touches on his mother's eulogy. From I can understand, he and most of the rest of the family look at Elly and see a lost opportunity that will never be made right because as far as they can see, she is never going to get the Bachelor of Arts degree her parents worked their arses off paying for. Jim's last thoughts were that it was sort of a disappointment that she didn't but she had a happy life anyway so it sort of worked out, her children see her as someone who could have really been someone if she had the magic piece of paper and John is still channeling Pontius Pilate when people point this injustice out to him.

This is because like most really evil people, John has managed to convince himself that he's doing only good in the world by denying her something she wanted. The whiny blathering he made about how he wanted his house to be a home clearly indicates that despite his lying eyes, there isn't a person in the world less suited to be a mother to his children than Elly was. He can simper about how children in daycare aren't loved as much because they're not exposed to their mother but it's hard to see how a daycare worker could have done a worse job than Elly. Granted, that's a fairly low bar to set because it's hard to see how a trained ape or an agent of Hydra (or a trained ape who's also an agent of Hydra) could have done a worse job than Elly but the plain fact is that his concern for his children's happiness and well-being was insanely misplaced and only served to make a bad situation far worse. The end result is messed-up adults who can't function because they had their initiative yelled out of him and a wife who's so out of it, she actually does think that his bullshit false dichotomy made sense.