Dear Johnny Fanboy,

After listening to the latest Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy CD (Quandary Phase), I was a little depressed to find I had discovered a Marvin nit-pick.

At the very end of the CD, Marvin is reading the words of God's final message to the universe. Marvin spells out the letters but then the money runs out in the telescope he is using. So far he's read: "We apologise for the incon..." and he guesses that the last word may be "incontinence".

If he has a brain the size of a planet, how come he can't simply deduce that the word is "inconvenience", especially since Arthur guesses it straight away, as do all the listeners (probably)?

Debbie Preston

Johnny Fanboy replies:

For one thing, Marvin isn't the robot he used to be. He is rusted away to almost nothing and in a very bad state of repair, which is why he needs to use the telescope, so who knows how impaired his mental faculties are by now.

Furthermore, Arthur doesn't guess what the letters say. He doesn't need to. The letters are perfectly legible to the human eye, and he and Fenchurch can see them clearly without the aid of the telescope.

It is also possible that although the phrase: "We apologise for the inconvenience" is commonly used on Earth, it might not be so familiar throughout the galaxy at large. Therefore even though Arthur, Fenchurch and any human listeners would have been able to guess the rest of the message, Marvin cannot. You might think it's a bit of a coincidence that God's final message to His creation is a commonly used phrase on Earth, but bear in mind that Earth is - or rather was - really a giant supercomputer built to calculate the question to the ultimate answer of life, the universe and everything.

The question now is: do you feel uplifted by these answers, or are you even more depressed now that I have demolished your argument?

Return to: