Muhammad Avdol Quotes

The entrance is the payoff; this line is the receipt. Avdol's return is the event of the two-parter. He was last seen taking Hol Horse's bullet to the forehead in Calcutta, Polnareff has mourned him, and here the real Avdol walks in on a clay copy of himself that Cameo built from Polnareff's own wish. Everything after that is a victory lap, and this is a lap. The gag runs entirely on the arithmetic of the genie's three wishes, and the scene knows exactly how much it weighs: the transcript closes the exchange with the narrator's "Ba-dum-tss!", the same sting the Oingo Boingo episodes sign off with. A line that needs a rimshot is a punchline, not a statement of character. It also sits oddly in his mouth. Avdol has been the careful one, the man who warned Polnareff not to hunt J. Geil alone, and forgiving no one is a villain's flourish. The same scene has the pair of them urinating down the Stand user's breathing tube to flush him out, which is the register the episode wanted all along.

Avdol dies the way he nearly died in Calcutta: by pushing Polnareff out of the path of something aimed at them. In episode 10 it was Hol Horse's bullet, and the shove cost Avdol a grazed forehead that the story let Polnareff, and the audience, believe was fatal. Here it is Cream, and the line shows the order his mind worked in. Diagnosis first, because he is the group's analyst to the end: his fire could not detect the thing, Iggy's nose could not detect it, so it is something new. Only then the order to run. There is no room in the sentence for himself. The consequence falls less on Avdol than on the man he pushed. Polnareff has already grieved for him once, wrongly, and the series spent a whole two-parter on a Red Sea island on the joke of bringing him back. It cannot do that twice and it does not try. Polnareff and Iggy are left alone with Vanilla Ice. The second push is the one that counts, because this time nobody gets a punchline.