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February 29, 2012

#1023: Late-Night PBS explain

Late-Night PBS

[Megan with disheveled hair is rubbing sleep out of her eyes and talking to Cueball.]

Megan: Have you ever watched PBS late at night?

Megan: I fell asleep after Downton and woke up at like 3 AM.

[The next panel is split in two. The upper portion, which is not in a frame, continues Megan’s dialogue, while the lower part, in a frame, shows a drunk game-show host (indicated with two small bobbles and a third exploding next to his head). He has stubble and only little hair on his head. He is holding a bottle in one hand and the other hand is up over a TV monitor showing a black field filled with crosses, presumably graves, going out to the far off horizon. In front of him are three kids, who are contestants in the game. They stand behind three lecterns to the left. The first kid is a boy with thin black hair, who has turned away from the monitor. The middle kid is a girl with blonde hair in a ponytail who looks at the host, and the last kid looks like Cueball and he looks down at his lectern.]

Megan (off-panel): Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego was back on, except the host hadn’t aged well and he’d clearly been drinking.

Megan (off-panel): Every question took them to some horrible place like Mogadishu or the Cambodian killing fields.

[In a room with tiles on the floor, a bookshelf full of books has been moved away from the wall revealing that is was a door to be opened with a hidden room behind it. Megan continues to speak, her text is above the shelf but inside the frame this time.]

Megan (off-panel): The kids were freaked out, but they kept playing. Eventually they were told they’d found Carmen Sandiego hiding behind a bookshelf in a Dutch apartment.

[Megan has stopped rubbing her eyes but still talks to Cueball.]

Megan: The Chief appeared and asked “Are you proud of what you’ve become?”

Megan: Then Rockapella walked out and just glared at the kids until they started crying.

Cueball: I, uh, don’t remember the old show being that dark.

Megan: Maybe we were too young to pick up on it.