DEZONKING A MULTIVERSAL ZONK - HOLLY MARTINS

I guess the ‘Endeavour’ finale of “Deguello” had quite an effect on me because I’m talking about it again today, and it looks like I’ll make it through Friday covering the topic….

DCI FRED THURSDAY:
"Memoirs Of A -#"  What was it, Morse? 
DS ENDEAVOUR MORSE:
Voluptuary.
THURSDAY:
Voluptuary. Racy go for a numbers man, I'd have thought. 
DOCTOR JASPER NICHOLSON:
I'm writing a paper on Edwardian erotica. It's very popular. 
THURSDAY:
Well-thumbed, I'm sure. I'm more of a Holly Martins man myself.

Hoo boy!  This poses a puzzle for Toobworld Dynamic!

“The Third Man” is multiversal. 

• There’s the original book by Graham Greene.
• Then there’s the 1949 adaptation by Carol Reed which starred Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Trevor Howard, and Valli.
• And finally there’s the bowdlerized, sanitized TV series from 1959 starring Michael Rennie in the Orson Welles role of Harry Lime and Jonathan Harris.

Because Harry Lime of the TV show was so revamped from the novel and the movie, Toobworld had to act as though those venues didn’t exist.  But with Thursday’s mention of Holly Martins as a writer, that has to be re-assessed.

In two of his meta-fictional universes, Harry Lime was a duplicitous con man and black marketeer whose dilution of penicillin caused agony and death in sick children in post-war Vienna.  But in Toobworld?  Lime was a suave international ladies’ man who was an art dealer and who would on occasion solve mysteries that might have an impact on his life.  For the TV Universe, he came off more as a predecessor for Simon Templar.

In more than 75 episodes, Holly Martins, an author who wrote Western genre novels a la Zane Grey, was never seen.  However, in all his world travels (that we saw), Harry never looked up his old friend.  And yet we know Holly Martins existed in Toobworld because back in 1969, Thursday mentioned that he read his books.  (Among his titles are “The Lone Rider From Sante Fe” and “The Oklahoma Kid”.)

I have no problem in wanting to absorb the movie version of “The Third Man” into the TV Universe – it’s one of my top ten movies of all time and I’m always learning something new from it.  (As a matter of fact, in preparing this post, I learned something else – that Wilfred Hyde White’s character of Crabbin was with his mistress and was always trying to keep her out of the way.  Went right over me noggin.)

But that leaves us now with the little problem of what to do with the TV version of “The Third Man”?  “Little”… yeesh!

One option would be to just ship it off to another TV dimension.  We’ve got plenty of them, according to the opening narration of ‘Sliders’ and they’re always needing new occupants.

Or we can claim that it’s an actual TV show from within the TV Universe, visible to us in its entirety.  We’ve seen that happen in the past – the best example is that span of episodes from ‘The Lone Ranger’ which starred John Hart as the Masked Man instead of Clayton Moore.  When it was Moore in the role, we were seeing the actual Lone Ranger.  When it was Hart, we were watching the TV show based on the Lone Ranger’s adventures.

And I think we might invoke the Toobworld-specific group known as UNReal for being the reason behind this TV show which rehabilitates the image of Harry Lime.  Why did they do this?  To preserve the tenuous nature of the global political alliances, especially in Vienna would be a good enough reason I should think!  And there could be reputations to protect, chief among them Western writer Holly Martins.

Harry Lime didn’t deserve to have his reputation burnished after death, but UNReal might have thought it was better to let the world believe he was a fictional construct rather than an actual person.  The only problem was that Graham Greene wrote the novel based on the facts.  Still, television has always proven to be more powerful than the written word so the general public accepted the Michael Rennie series as the Truth.  And so the movie – which also existed in Toobworld thanks to mentions in ‘Remington Steele’, ‘NCIS’, ‘Law & Order’, ‘NCIS: New Orleans’, and ‘Chuck’ among others – would just be dismissed as the adaptation of the novel and not real life.

"Makes my head hurt...."

It’s a more complicated splainin than I prefer, but ironically I think the world is a better place for having the embodiment of scum and villainy having walked through it.

But I’m open to how you would interpret/reconcile this Zonk quandary.

Zonk Quandary….  Sounds like another bad name for a “Star Wars” character…..

BCnU!