Well… This is, so to speak, the “Spock” sort of thing to do. I won’t say rational or reasonable, because no, it’s not, but it’s the sort of thing the character in a story whose job is it to sound rational would suggest. And both Artie and Helen are vulnerable to that.

Besides, this setup really is unsustainable. SPOILER: As Helen knows, as soon as Dave breaks through, he’ll pretty much instantly realize what Helen’s been doing all this time. That means that Helen’s options are either to kick him out, or tell him about what she’s been doing.

And as much as classic storytelling would have you believe otherwise, better communication isn’t always the answer. If she tells him about the Tinasky experiment, Helen is not good enough at social, and Dave is not emotionally stable/mature enough, for that to end well. That will very predictably end with almost exactly the same outcome as we see later, with the only difference that the mad scientist whose base gets usurped is Helen instead of Madblood.

Oh, and he actually has to make a computer to upload himself into instead of just exploiting poor Lovelace, but does anyone really think that would slow him down much?

Helen genuinely has no good out here. There was a right choice, but it was more than a year ago. By now, she’s painted herself into a corner.

It sucks, but life is really more like the old Infocom games where you can both render your game unwinnable within five moves of starting, and also have no way of knowing this until the end.

Yeah? Are you sure he didn’t meet his maker?

I can kind of understand why Artie thought that this might be a good idea, given his lack of experience with this human emotion called “love”, but I have never figured out why Helen agreed to go along with it.

One thing I think would have been nice to do more often is to emphasise the size difference between gerbil Artie and a given human character, by making them fill or not completely fit in the panel. In today’s case, it offers a unique way of portraying emotional distance between Artie and Mell without either of them being that spatially distant.

(It also offers a unique way of portraying Mell’s face as an 8-ball that will never be repeated in history.)

I liked that when Dave was in his darkest hours in the past, only a demon believed/helped him. Another plot point is that Artie revealed himself to Mell in the spike pit by his not-knowledge of Caliban as her boyfriend. Would need a different hook to get out of that scene. The Malbreche?? Meh, editable probably. Although “Thanks for guaranteeing that they WON’T!!” is a killer punchline.