June 1999 - Planetary 03 - Dead Gunfighters

June 1999 - Planetary 03 - Dead Gunfighters

Essentially

The Planeary team investigate sightings of a ghostly cop in Hong Kong.

Thoughts and Reactions

It's a mix of Hong Kong action film, Chinese ghost-vengeance tale and nod towards DC's character, The Spectre (there's also a touch of Marvel's Ghost Rider here as well). Once more the plot is thin: Planetary arrive, observe the ghost of a betrayed cop and witness something even more bizarre than just a ghost. Jakita Wagner manages to karate-kicks a car and Drummer discovers an informational "junction box" that opens some sort of "God-machine". That's all. We're left pondering the existential problem of making the most of life as it is. (There's a deliberate confusion of "justice" and "just us" at the end which I get the impression speaks to the role that this Planetary team need to play to uncover the secret history of the twentieth-century).

The Planetary team's passivity is doubtlessly something that Ellis is deliberately writing. They appeared overawed by the phenomena they've encountered so far. At some point I'd assume that they will start affecting things rather than being witnesses.

The Issue in Detail

The opening 8-and-a-half pages are cinematic: action-packed, widescreen panels. We're in Hong Kong. A gangster with a scarred/dead eye has just shot a woman (through the right eye) dead in the street in front of a group of his henchmen. The gangster declares that someone called Li has a shipment (of drugs) arriving and complains that Li's "women" are more respectful (than the one he's just killed).

The gangsters drive away in their cars and the ghost of a policeman standing in the middle of the road holds up his badge and points a gun at the cars. The gangsters pretend not to see him (not realising its a ghost). The ghost fires two pistols at the car - which drives through him - and shoots the two gangsters in the head before shooting at the other car killing the rest of the criminals except the dead-eyed one. At this point, the ghost's eyes become fiery and he shoots a flaming bullet at the dead-eyed gangster which makes a 90 degree turn before going through dead-eye's head. As the gangster's car crashes into a storefront, the ghost disappears. 

All this is witnessed by Snow, Jakita and Drummer.

Later, at the Hong Kong Planetary office, Michelle, a Planetary employee, says that the field team hadn't ever visited in the 6 years had worked here. Snow checks this and Jakita says that she hadn't met anyone who worked for Planetary for more than 4 years. Snow is beginning to establish a timeline for the Planetary organisation.

Michelle explains that "The Cop" is a "fairy tale for the weird" about a betrayed cop who takes vengeance until another cop is betrayed and murdered. She takes them to where the cop was killed and explains the background (involving triads and a film star) and reveals that the dead cop was called Detective Shek Chi-Wai.

Drummer finds an informational "junction box" under the ground and gets Jakita to stamp on the floor causing some sort of ghostly dimensional gateway to open. Drummer explains that the gateway appears to him to be some form of storage device:

DRUMMER: It's like a big stack of hard drives. It's a huge information repository. Now, if you're asking what kind of information... no idea, gramps.

 Snow asks aloud what it is and the ghost of the cop replies that it's God:

GHOST: It's the only word for it that fits. It's... unimaginably huge. It is an object with more than one hundred thousand different angles.

The cop-ghost reveals that the dead-eyed gangster - Tony - had been his killer along with his parter, Mok ("He killed me because he really didn't like me.") he goes on to ask the team to tell a woman he loved, Siao Yim-Fong to make the most of her life as it doesn't improve after death. He ominously tells them that he's seen what happens after death:

GHOST: After this, there's nothing. Do you see? There's no sin, no hell for our bastards to burn in. No great punishment in the next life for the killers and rapists.

The cop-ghost begins to fade and at this point more gangsters arrive in cars. The cop-ghost recognises one of them as Mok, his partner. Jakita runs at Mok's car and karate-kicks it so hard that the engine flies out of the battered vehicle.The cop-ghost shoot gangsters in the other car. The cop-ghost finishes by executing Mok.

Before he leaves, the cop-ghost tells Planetary that they came to find a mystery but tells them "There's just us". Drummer asks if the ghosts final words were "justice" which Snow corrects as "just us".

After All Is Said and Done

It's another "three-minute pop single" (Ellis) of an issue in which we're starting to appreciate these are indeed fast-paced, compressed stories which have little room to breathe but allude to a much bigger supernatural mystery lurking just out of sight. Whether or not there is one big mystery (the "snowflake"?) that connects these strange phenomena or that its lots of different strangenesses is to be seen.

Questions and Mysteries

• The Planetary organisation is now at least 6 years old. How old is it? (And, of course, who is the "Fourth Man" who established it?)
• When the ghost mentions the angles of the "God-machine", Drummer is excited and suggests that there are 196,833 angles. Is this referring to the snowflake/quantum machine. And, if so, what's the connection here?
• (Is the implication that "God" is something wired into the fabric of the universe that stores reality as information? We see bodies in fetal positions suggesting these are stored souls/memories of the dead.)
• What happens to the gateway device that Drummer gets Jakita to open? Did it disappear when the ghost faded away?