Bear with me. There is an old saw that states, “Knowledge is power.” There is another that states, “Power corrupts.” And about twenty years ago Nathan Bridges (as far back as I can trace the quote) put the two together and came up with;
“Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard. Be evil.”
The Mads are clearly well-educated and evil. Mike seems to fall at the low end of both spectrums, Joel maybe less so. But Jonah, well, he’s portrayed as well educated, and he and the bots did come up with that plan to hoist Kinga and Max by their own petard at the end of the Gauntlet.
The Mads did make it pretty easy for him. If you more or less luck into a good revenge scenario, are you still as evil as you would be if you’d meticulously plotted it out from scratch, and against incredible odds set up for you by foes with more than five or six brain cells to rub together?
Also, he did get eaten and somehow expelled by Max’s pet (and nearly stranded forever in deep space), after being almost forced into marriage. It’s hard to fault him for being less than thrilled with all that.
I leave it up to greater minds than my own as to whether or not S12’s conclusion is him rising to the occasion or sinking to the level of his captors. Either way, I’m interested in seeing how it plays out.
A worthy thought experiment, but let’s not overcomplicate things too much: Jonah was trapped by Kinga and Max in the first place because he was responding to a distress call on the Moon. Categorically NOT evil.
Jonah just seemed to be on a higher job tier to me than Joel (Jonah being trusted with space travel stuff while Joel was just the janitor of the place). So Jonah would have the thinking and possible higher desire to depart than Joel did, since Joel was more used to being in one spot for long durations. Possibly explains why Mike wanted to escape more too, being a temp who was used to going from place to place.
See, you could argue that he was some sort of space pirate looking for a vulnerable crew to pillage, but I think the purposeful way in which he says “Someone needs my help!” during the opening militates against that possibility. Jonah may not be perfect, but he’s definitely at least Neutral Good.
Will nobody investigate what innocent village all those giant rocks he was transporting landed on after he set them loose to act the hero? I bet his name is now a curse in that culture.
Nah. They just landed on another Moon’s frontier and sat there until some poor schmoe of a prospector tried to reach them before a rich career criminal’s flunkies did.
Given that he was close to the Moon and heading over to the dark side thereof, the odds of those rocks hitting anything but the surface of the Moon itself which (except for Kinga and her cronies) appears to be uninhabited are extremely small. The largest gravitational source to Jonah is the Moon itself and while only 1/6 the gravity of the Earth, the Moon is still way closer to those rocks. So nothing is likely to come of those rocks except that they are lost to the Gizmonic Institute.
In all likelihood, this is true. Unless he (inadvertantly? deliberately?) used the moon for a gravitational slingshot maneuver to fling his payload at Earth. Or he could have used the Moon to fling the payload into a cislunar, barycentric, or heliocentric orbit. Orbital mechanics are tricksy that way, and we just. Don’t. Know.
Were those actually rocks? Or was Jonah a poacher of endangered space creatures that merely looked like rocks? And he ditched them to answer an SOS to appease his last shred of conscience??
Pay no attention to the devil’s advocate behind the curtain…
Either way, I’m interested in seeing how it plays out.
. You’ve defeated me this time masked crusader. This time!