TV → Flash Gordon – Akim the Terrible: Part II
Flash Gordon
Akim the Terrible Part II
The show fades to Commissioner Alec using a pen that his son made for him in art class at his desk in front of a wall of flood lamps with letters of the alphabet on them. Immediately the Commissioner is greeted by the happy robot on his desk and informed that Flash Gordon and Dane are coming in. I was hopeful that this Commissioner was finally going to be the one normal character in the show. Just to clarify what I’m talking about check out the inset to the right for a breakdown of where we stand in the story.
As you can see, commissioner Alec was my best hope for someone that was normal. But that all fell away as soon as they did a close up of his face.
To say that Alec’s eyebrows were horrifying would be a tragic understatement. Commissioner Alec has eyebrow parasites attached to his face that are slowly eating away at all the hair on his head. A better description would be to say that they it like a pair of long skinny caterpillars crawled up onto his face, latched onto his forehead and died. After the close up of Commissioner Alec’s face everything went black.
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The Story So Far Part I
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When I awoke I was greeted by Flash’s gay lover, Chris (or possibly Kurt, I can’t tell) who is on his way to the planet Karen as a welcome wagon. What exactly he is sent there to do is never quite make clear. But luckily the writers didn’t let that get in the way of progressing the story and after a very telling discussion between Flash and Chris, he’s on his way to the planet of Akim the Weird.
After Chris lands in the spaceport on Karen, he walks through to customs and is pounded senseless by two guys in unitards and a train conductor. The conductor calls the throne room to inform Akim that the GBI spy has been caught. This is a pivotal scene as you can see in the background that the spaceport door is actually made of bamboo chutes. This means that Akim’s scientists have discovered one of nature’s best kept secrets: Bamboo is space-proof.
Again we are taken to the throne room of perpetual laundry with the GBI spy Chriskurt. Most of the dialogue in this scene is by the king, meaning that I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on. This made me lose focus and I started trying to see pictures in the clothing in the background. In this Tide-inspired Rorschach Test I found a camel and a monkey.
Being that I can only truly understand one side of the conversation, I was at a bit of a loss as to what was going on. Apparently Akim wants Chris to kill Flash, but he won’t do it. So they tie him in the spring mounted bathtub which gives him an orgasm inducing massage which turns him into a killer.
After he’s had his fun in the Raffle’s hot tub, Chris is taken back to Akim and is questioned about his loyalty to Flash. Chris responds by promising to kill Flash with a knife. The most important thing to note about this scene is that in the laundry you can clearly see both a buffalo and a human hand.
Back at GBI headquarters the Commissioner plays himself like a bagpipe as they wait for word from Chris, the happiest spaceman in the galaxy. This scene is the final nail in the coffin over Chris’s sexuality. This guy is queerer than Richard Simmons while sucking on a popsicle. Finally, after waiting for what seems like 3 or 4 lines of dialogue, Chris beeps them and explains how much he wants to see Flash. The wild thing is that Flash doesn’t act like its strange at all that Chris REALLY wants to see him after being away for so long.
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Public Service Announcement |
The next important scene takes place in small room where Flash is planning out some cruise to visit a crab. Drawn on the board is also an intergalactic Family Circus with Jeffy’s path drawn all across it. Here Chris or Kurt or whatever the hell his name is tries to stab Flash, but ultimately fails as Flash slaps him in the stomach and takes him down immediately. To his own credit, Chris completely deserved that one. In a future of interplanetary travel, stun guns, and spring-loaded mind obliterating bathtubs, if you’re still trying to kill people with pointy things then you deserve to have the ever loving crap kicked out of you. You damn dirty ape.
The show then fades to Dr. Zarkov’s laboratory where he is examining Kurt/Chris’s brain with his glowing Magic Eight Ball from the future! Zarkov determines that Kurt has the brainwaves of a homicidal maniac. The Dr. says “It looks like he’s had a frontal lobotomy.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t a frontal lobotomy make you docile? I thought that was the whole point behind it giving them to violent mental patients.
At first I was skeptical that you could determine someone’s mental health from a lightshow or that lobotomies made people fly across the galaxy and try to murder people with knives. My fears were quickly relieved when I realized that Dr. Zarkov has a beard. If there’s one thing that TV has taught me, it’s that you don’t argue with doctors that have beards. You’ll probably wake up one day as a head in a jar.
Dr. Zarkov Determines that in order to keep them from falling to the same fate, he’ll need to put a celinite tape on their frontal lobes. And to do that, they’ll need to shave their heads and put wigs on them. I know what you’re thinking. They just pretended to cut their hair and pretended like they were going they put on a celinite tape and then pretended to put a wig on afterwards that looked EXACTLY like their original hair. But that is WRONG. They really did all that stuff, because the crew of the Flash Gordon TV show were committed to excellence.