41 In the Iliad, the Amazons were referred to as Antianeira ("Those who fight like men").

80 To the Amazons, "the patriarch's world" is pretty much everywhere that isn't Themyscira. If this were public knowledge, I suspect the good people of, say, the Bugrom homeworld would find it bemusing. --G.

91 What makes me laugh is that he's not even as far off as he thinks now, since, given the way Diana came to be, she basically is a statue of a Greek goddess. --G.

129 Diana uses the phrase "mortal man" here because Kal-El of Krypton, who most Amazons think is actually an incarnation of Apollo, stopped by once in the mid-20th century as well. --G.

130 some people might have had the idea, but no, Diana is not Steve and Hippolyta's daughter. She was made out of clay like a proper Amazon child.

175 Fallschirmjäger = German paratroopers. In WWII they were essentially Luftwaffe Special Forces, elite and highly-trained shock troops carrying advanced equipment. The Fallschirmjägergewehr 42, a weapon developed for their use, was a sort of Paleolithic precursor to the modern assault rifle. (It eventually led to the development of the Sturmgewehr 44, often thought of as the first proper assault rifle, which in turn went on to inspire Mikhail Kalashnikov's AK-47, patriarch of the most ubiquitous assault rifle lineage in the world today. Which is really far more information than was called for here, but what the hell.) --G.

191 The troops pretty much earned this beating by letting the Fire of Hestia go out this way.

201 This is the shield Captain America had in his first appearances. The more familiar round shield was given to him in 1943.

It's worth noting here that, at least in UF, Cap's original shield is also more or less indestructible. It's not made of the same exotic alloy as his later "discus" shield - for instance, its behavior when subjected to kinetic energy is less interestingly unintuitive - but it still represents quite a triumph of metallurgy. --G.

229 Please note that the Daodan is not used in this fight. A dozen Earthforce gropos isn't a fight, it's light exercise.

294 as noted in the credits, this was written by Phil Moyer.

294 For those who worry about such things, the shout-outs are as follows:

Tortuga -- 17th century center of Caribbean piracy, and all the tales derived thereof
Moth -- Pip and Flinx by Alan Dean Foster
Sanctuary -- Thieves World (ed. Robert Asprin)
Rigel VII, Farius Prime -- Star Trek (NOT a reference to the homeworld of Kang and Kodos from The Simpsons)
Tai-Tastigon --God Stalk by P.C. Hodgell
Bludhaven on Kane's World -- DC's Batman comics
Madripoor on Gulo -- Marvel's X-Men comics.
Mos Eisley, Mos Espa, Nar Shadda -- Star Wars
Roanapur -- Black Lagoon

Note that I've not actually read all of these; I queried my friends to obtain suitable areas of ill-repute from fiction, many of which are better-read than I.

(My only regret is that I didn't include New Hong Kong (from Buck Godot) in that list, but it would have interrupted the flow of the text, so I didn't.) -- PJM

335 the signaling is considerably more complex than this might suggest, so that some poor schlub in Roanapur who comes in and sings a 'business' song doesn't actually get caught up in some kind of black op he's totally unsuited for.

Although that would make an excellent comedy hook... --G.

There's similar signaling situations for poker nights, too.

420 Yes, that Leonidas. As an aside, the "iron coinage" thing is true. Spartans in those days were forbidden by law from engaging in business, but they obviously did need to carry out day-to-day trade, so their coinage deliberately had little intrinsic value so that it wouldn't be regarded as commercial wealth. Had Diana selected a unit of Spartan currency from an earlier period, it would've been a three-foot iron roasting spit (that's what obolus literally means), but I figured her declarations of its value wouldn't have been believed if she did that. --G.

464 One wonders if Thai TV still features illegal Spectreman spin-offs in the 2400s...

556 In my mind, I always hear this line in the style of Sean Bean's delivery as Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring. "They have a cave troll." --G.

599 He's only human. And the designs for Revy are very nice.

630 Rosalita Cisneros is not, in fact, a bioroid. She's an enhanced human, with bioengineering instead of cybernetics. Geoff's seen her work, and since he didn't ask, he assumed she was a bioroid from what she did. (In the source material, Black Lagoon, she's referred to as 'the Terminator in a maid outfit'.)

Geoff's assumption is understandable. There is, after all, a small but stable market for combat androids/bioroids/robots in Meido costumes to serve as houskeeping/security servants on the more affluent Japanese-influenced worlds.

For some reason, the style is popular on Ragol, too; on often finds RAcaseals so configured, which is odd, since Ragolian robots aren't commercial products - implying they've had themselves set up that way. --G.

The fact that Rosalita "Roberta" Cisneros is pretty much human just makes her all the scarier. -- PJM

636 I like this bit a great deal. It has a thematic callback to something back in Excessive Force where Paige is told she hasn't failed, she just needs to think of resources. Geoff's resources are a bit... less legal that most people's, but that's what's needed right now.

665 The program that Kilovolt and Geoff both were in was run, until his death, by Miguel "Dazzling" Cervantes. His day-to-day representative was known as 'the Sharif'; the ID coding of the message gave Geoff the password which fit the situation.

705 If you find the phrase, "I'll buy THAT for a dollar!" funny, you'll know what show It's Not My Problem! is.

716 Similar to Belle Reve prison in DC Comics.

830 The original technique was discovered, chemically, by the rather insane psychiatrist and biochemist Dr. Jonathan Crane of Kane's World in the early 2300s. The Psi Corps version is purely telepathic, but does basically the same thing. The psionic method doesn't reveal to the telepath what exactly happens unless they scan the person they've hit, which has its own set of problems.

862 If Geoff didn't have the Daodan to repair him, it would have ruined a perfectly good kidney as well.

965 What's that you say? The Minuteman 9 isn't a Leopard-class dropship? Now what good is a covert-ops vessel whose transponder squawks what it really is? --G.

970 As Gryph said to me, "The Pan-Worlds Enforcement International starship Minuteman 9: when the IPO wants you to know who did it, but never be able to prove it."

I also said, "How did the Minuteman 9 survive the fall of the Golden Age WDF? Who cares! It's the goddamn Minuteman 9!" I was too pleased at finding a place for this old friend to reappear to give a damn how it got from A to B. --G.

1030 Note the spelling here; the ancient city of the Amazons was Themiscyra (named for Themis, the primordial Greek goddess of justice), while the island to which they exiled themselves after its fall was Themyscira. --G.

1100 We debated whether to go through with this bit - it meant ending the main body of the piece on a bit of a downer, but at the same time, it quite concisely demonstrates the utter, wanton ruthlessness and cruelty of people at high levels of Earthgov, that they would cheerfully nuke a bit of their own planet in retaliation for the thwarting of one of their illegal schemes. Even the weapon they chose, an old-fashioned H-bomb, is part of their message. There are cleaner ways, with less cultural and psychological baggage attached, to make a very large explosion in the 25th century. Using a nuclear weapon makes a bang and a statement. --G.

1142 In the classical 'language of flowers', scarlet lilies mean high-souled aspirations, and buttercups mean riches. Balalaika recognizes this and accepts it as that they're not going to come after her.

1171 The Church of Violence is a real organization in the Black Lagoon series. In that series, it's believed by many to be a CIA front for weapons sales to fund black projects. No one's sure what they do in this series, but they always have good weapons for sale, that's for sure...

1179 Now it can be told: Earl, Q-Boss Roanapur, is mentally modeled in my head after Larry the Cable Guy, who I cannot stand. Killing him in the Official Sith Style (i.e. down a pit) was remarkably fun.

1197 Let's note here that being shoved down a ninety-foot-deep shaft onto concrete was probably MORE merciful than he could have expected at this point.

1210 I'm sure we'll see these guys again.

1248 A defensive formation, I note.

1271 What happened to Neville Greeley? You'll find out soon enough. --G.

1280 Chokhmah is the Hebrew word for "wisdom". It's also one of the positions on the Kabbalah Sephirot, which is a favored diagram of sinister government organizations everywhere. As such, it is probably more than just the President of the Earth Alliance's AI secretary. --G.

1302 Sing, goddess, of the wrath of the daughters of Athena, that destructive rage that sent countless ills on the men of Earth...

1344 to answer a question from the forums: the other three members of the Livewires exist, but their work didn't require them to appear on screen.

1405 This is coming off basically the end of all the madness which will be shown in S5, so it's no wonder Utena's looking kind of tired.

1433 And now the full connection comes to light.

1445 This is, basically, the (retconned in Captain America 200) origin of the Skull, excepting his early years, which formed him into the hateful creature he became.

1499 I liked this bit for what it implied more than what it announced - the idea that, after his brief return to Barsaan in The Handle of Faith, Geoff is not only taking time off to have something of a social life, but having at least one dinner date with a woman he met under deeply inauspicious circumstances at the very beginning of his reinvention. (For what it's worth, I don't think he and Sara are actually dating, per se, but I've been wrong about these things before. :) --G.

1505 As our Redoubtable Editor mentioned, George Catlett Marshall, Jr. was the Chief of Staff of the Army, and Captain America's direct commander, during World War II. He later created the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe.

--
Geoff Depew - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lord of Sith Tech Support.
"And Remember! Google is your Friend!!"