Tactical Space

In which Admiral Bunter is confused.

This chapter reminds me of the one at the beginning of Mouse and Dragon when Daav applied the understanding of a delm and started picking loose threads out of the happy ending of Scout’s Progress. Indeed, this book as a whole has been engaging in that activity quite a bit. There’s an extra-textual consideration at work here: when approaching the end of a book that might be, for all one knows, the last book in the series, tucking the loose threads away neatly out of sight is a good plan; near the beginning of a book (and even more so near the beginning of a five-book sequence) is the time to pull them back out again, in the knowledge that one has space to deal with them properly.

I agree with Jeeves that “heavily armed” and “confused” are a bad combination, but I do have hope that Admiral Bunter is not quite as confused as he appears, and that “Target destroyed” means something more precise and non-lethal than blowing up the entire fleeing ship. (If only by appealing to another extra-textual consideration: having such a fatal outcome to a sympathetic character’s decisions would put the character and the authors in a bad spot to move on from.)

Even so, we’re left with a question: Why did Bechimo approve this plan? Is Jeeves overestimating Bechimo’s abilities? (After all, Bechimo has considerably less practical experience than Jeeves.) Or did Bechimo know what was likely to happen, and approve the plan for reasons of his own?