Mr. Stick and the Big Goodbye!

With the Robot King defeated and Stickmania avenged, what fate awaits our intrepid stick heroes in the dramatic conclusion of The Adventures of Mr. Stick!!!.

I almost killed Mr. Stick off twice. My original plan for Episode 8 didn’t include Mr. Stick’s “Ow” line, and would have just cut to the ending screen with him lying on the platform.  Likewise, in this episode, Stick Lady would originally have just stood up without admonishing him for his dramatically timed death scene.

The original versions of each episode would have probably carried more emotional weight, but I backed off because I realized two important things:

1. I don’t actually want Mr. Stick dead.
2. I don’t want to be the jerk who pretends to kill off his characters at the end of every episode to manufacture tension. (Even if that would be true to the series’ pulp-adventure roots.)

Also, “emotional weight” probably isn’t something anyone was going to associate with The Adventures of Mr. Stick!!! in any case, so I figured it was probably better to go for the joke.

This, of course, meant that the title doesn’t make a ton of sense. (It is, of course, a reference to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode notable for introducing both the Dixon Hill detective novels and the malfunctioning-holodeck trope.)

On the other hand, leaving Mr. Stick alive didn’t leave the episode with much ground to cover, which made the post-ending sequence a lot more important than I’d planned when I came up with it.  I mean, if I came up with a strong ending, it wouldn’t really matter if people thought the story was over.