3 for 1, ladies and gentlemen, that is what you get at E&M when you pay top dollar. And a bonus, a shiny 4th episode in a miniseries like no other. To explain to those descending from Mars: “Pitch this” is an award-losing internet space where we publish scripts from budding European script-writers, which will be picked for production like next to never. That is if you don’t act and spread the news about this very moment. The current offering is the author’s first attempt at TV, after realising film should have never extended past Chaplin. Check out what we have collected so far here, here, here, here. Be blessed and Hallelujah!
Pitch 5: Gullible’s Travels. A voyage to Fatherland
By Lilly Putina
Gullible’s Travels follows the story of Gamaliel Gullible, a lumpy intellectual and a vegan, nicknamed Gmail as most people can’t figure out that Jewish name of his. A series of unforeseen circumstances force Gmail to take up a livelihood as a seafarer, a turn he would have least expected during his university years, mostly spent in heated discussions of neo-Gramscian critical theory.
Episode 1: Departure. A pitiable voyage through life and sea.
At 35, the main issue driving Gmail to outright lunacy is hunger. His plan to float on the cloud nine of academic bacchanalia has backfired spectacularly. He has no ideas or charisma to dabble as a lecturer and backroom lover of confused sophomores. Having eaten youghurt for years, Gmail finds it increasingly difficult to withstand the dark allure of corporations.
Luckily, somewhere between alien insemination and slurping jellied baby snakes out of a war veteran’s belly button, Gmail has a chance encounter that turns his faith around.
Yet, his foray into sea-merchantry is anything but clear-cut. Spurned by liberal think-tanks, Gmail soon lowers his standards dramatically, passing through increasingly odd gig jobs. Luckily, somewhere between alien insemination and slurping jellied baby snakes out of a war veteran’s belly button, Gmail has a chance encounter that turns his faith around.
He meets a distant uncle at an underground living darts event. Surprised to recognize his relative as the night’s target, the uncle takes down the bound gavroche and raves profusely about his own stuff. He also mentions a free spot on a boat going to the East Indies. What’s to lose, the uncle asks. Free food, the smell of the sea, good company. After a brief hesitation, revolving around Gmail’s inability to swim and general distaste for hard labour, he takes the plunge and gets hired as the only candidate for the position of ship waste cleaner.
On departure day the sucker shows up in slim pleats, canvas docksides, light blue shirt, and a cream-colored sweater tied around his neck. His deplorable looks almost sink the boat on the spot as the crew nearly suffocates. Their bodies convulsing violently in bouts of the most savage, excruciating laughter the world has ever witnessed.
Picking on Cream boy, Gmail’s marine pseudonym, soon becomes a favourite pastime of the hardened sailors, even more than needlework and tapestries. Until Gmail earns their respect by catching and killing a huge ship rat with his bare teeth. He has mastered this technique back at his former student abode located above a Chinese restaurant. Consequently, Gmail is promoted to a rat-catcher and thrown deep into the hold.
One sunny day the ship, the mighty and seasoned Perpetua Illustra, sinks for no apparent reason. Gmail does not even have time to reach the upper decks and get on a lifeboat. He has the sensation of drowning but sees a blue light and through some sort of space-time glitch finds himself on dry land where he finally vomits and passes out.
Episode 2: Fatherland. First entry and trouble.
When he regains consciousness and the surroundings sink in, Gmail is flabbergasted. He is lying on a lifeless beach, generously showered with oil and plastic waste. After rambling around for a while in the muck like a forlorn cormorant, the castaway is picked up by a pair of Pithecanthropus-like creatures in their early Erectus phase. Not sure what to do with him, they give him a good beating, tie him up and throw him in their oxcart. Interestingly, the vehicle runs on squares instead of wheels.
In two days’ time, Gmail is transported to the goons’ city, called, as he would later learn, Breidbaurd. Upon arrival he is incarcerated and thrown in a cell with a bunch of beings whom even the most benevolent philanthropist would find difficult to qualify as sapiens. They are humanoid, but do not exhibit most of the faculties Gmail would associate with his kind, such as to communicate through words or refrain from bashing each other’s heads in.
After spending some time in the bin with his new friends, Gmail is dragged to a dirty infirmary. There he is subjected to some bizarre tests by a committee of royal scientists. In one of them he has to sing a strange version of “Just as I am” where the Lamb of God is gunned down and braised in wine and rosemary.
After much thought and consideration, the committee is ready to announce their conclusion. A formal event is organized, and a word is sent to the Father, the supreme leader. At the ceremony’s apex, the committee pronounces Gmail a liberal. The audience gasps. The Father exclaims that this is impossible, the existence of such a condition has never been empirically proven. To persuade him they are facing a fully-fledged liberal the scientists slay a unicorn and force-feed it to Gmail, who barfs it right out.
Convinced that he is indeed seeing a liberal the Father decides to free the foreigner and keep him in the court for his own amusement. He strips protection from one of his Lords and confiscates his property in favour of the new protégé. Gmail is allotted a personal valet, Trolt, given permission to roam the golden palaces and even meet with voters outside.
Episode 3: The ways of Fatherland. Boychicks, patriotans and other lifeforms.
Gmail soon gets to know the ways of Fatherland, the mighty territory he has been lucky to wind up at. Borderless and vast, Fatherland is the exclusive property of its supreme leader, who owns the entire immovable property and the majority of life forms above ground, excluding cacti, who have been granted partial autonomy in their daily decision-making. The rest of the territory’s inhabitants, a progeny of humanoid forms, known as boychicks, as well as animals, trees, flowers, and all other flora and fauna depend on the will and wisdom of the Father down to even the simplest tasks, such as eating cake.
Below ground lays the adjacent kingdom of Patriota, which nobody from above knows much about. In the past, Patriota used to spew up throngs of deplorable creatures, resembling boychicks in appearance, but completely devoid of intelligence. As those were running amok on main roads waving with their right hand like policemen, the Father decided to seal the entire ground surface with concrete, a sort of vertical wall, to stop the influx of pesky Patriotans. The ones already in were put in zoos, jails and fertilizer clinics, one of which Gmail had the displeasure to be locked in during his first days in Fatherland.
Fatherland’s chief lifeform in terms of acuity is the lesser papoose. They are usually dispatched as accountants and agency executives. Then there is the obtuse sucklings, the drowsers, the clumsirines, and somewhere at the lowest junctures of the intelligence chain, the boychicks, the humanoid majority part of the lot.
Fatherland’s chief lifeform in terms of acuity is the lesser papoose. They are usually dispatched as accountants and agency executives. Then there is the obtuse sucklings, the drowsers, the clumsirines, and somewhere at the lowest junctures of the intelligence chain, the boychicks, the humanoid majority part of the lot. The key social function of boychicks is to vote. Fatherland’s Scouts, the territory’s guards, are also recruited from the ranks of the boychicks. As the territory does not need guarding or votes, the boychicks are for the most part useless. However, they are also the ones that would be dispatched to do the job if an occasion arises, as they are the territory’s lower class.
The territory has two classes, based on physical appearance. Those whose looks the Father has personally endorsed are pronounced high class and given a spot in the golden palaces. They are entitled to benefit from the territory’s riches. On the contrary, the ugly ones are given a good whopping and kicked to the territory’s periphery to work the land, erect buildings or whatever it is that scumbags do. However, most of them just go around hunting for lottery tickets, considered worthier than gold. Two of those scavengers picked up Gmail when he first made his entry into Fatherland.
Episode 4: The workings of Fatherland. The grand finale.
Boychicks, it appears, are rather emotional, but also not very subtle. Over decades of isolation and inbreeding on the outside, this charming combination has precipitated a sharp inclination towards physical violence. Politically, the history of Fatherland has hinged on coming up with a viable outlet to appease the nation’s undercurrent of pristine soreness. The current Father, 23th in a descending order of impeccable buffoons, has succeeded in channelling this social energy into multiple elaborate rituals.
One such important routine is “Enemy of the day” where anybody can beat, maim or kill anybody who is declared an enemy of the day.
One such important routine is “Enemy of the day” where anybody can beat, maim or kill anybody who is declared an enemy of the day. The authorities close both eyes if the victim is on the list. Families gather at breakfast and wait impatiently for the daily announcement. It’s kids under 5. Yay. A parent, hitherto cuddling his 4-year youngling, punches one in the face with full force as a proud boychick.
Apart from daily bloodletting, boychicks also organize a yearly war, which serves as the nation’s main jubilee. All the details, including conflict sides, casus belli, roles, and amount of casualties are meticulously thought over during the months preceding the outbreak of the war. Regiments are filled, soldiers trained, and simplistic but effective propaganda is spread to up the ante. As the disinformation machine has very limited time each year to cultivate dissent from scratch it has become very effective in pitting boychicks against each other over non-existing divisions. Not that boychicks need much to start a war. The last two wars were for instance fought over sock length and the type of sauce that goes on pasta – red vs. white.
What surprises Gmail is the boychick’s complete disregard of their surroundings. Never has he seen such utter abandon even in his former days at anarchist squats. It has something to do with the inhabitant’s theistic worldview, according to which the land was created by the Holly Father, the current Fathers’s distant Grand-Father, a half-God, half-monkey, who built a pristine heaven for his grandsons to boot. He knew that they will bump it, as he knew his kind very well, but, being a self-made businessman itchy to show off, he wanted something flashy.
It has something to do with the inhabitant’s theistic worldview, according to which the land was created by the Holly Father, the current Fathers’s distant Grand-Father, a half-God, half-monkey, who built a pristine heaven for his grandsons to boot.
The Holly Father ordered forests from as far as Benetnash, beaches from that small sandy planet in the Dickeldong galaxy and golden palaces from Dumberthanthat, the China of the universe. His progeny started shitting on the newly-built promised land as soon as they set foot on it. They developed industry, polluted the beaches and pumped sooth in the atmosphere like they were powering a rock concert with fossil fuel.
What also strikes Gmail is the lack of female inhabitants. First he has the weird idea that boychicks reproduce through replication, which would explain why they all have the same dumb face. However, he overhears a talk between his valet, Trolt, and an unknown imbecile, where the former explains to the latter that he got two females to feed and can barely make it with those salaries.
Gmail pushes Trolt to take him where females are kept. The Barn, as they call it, is a huge facility outside town, which Gmail and the valet approach late at night to avoid unwanted attention. Inside, Gmail witnesses the most gruesome scene he has ever laid his gaze upon. Females are crammed into cages and kept completely naked, with only food and water thrown to them. Those about to have younglings are also given blankets and birth kits. Gmail notices that the cages’ construction varies in material, from golden bars to cast iron. Some of the females are well-fed and some emaciated. The cages bear names he cannot comprehend, as they are written in gibberish.
Trolt explains that all the wives of Fatherland are kept here not to distract the males from their important tasks. The extent to which they are taken care of depends on their owner’s ability to provide. Most handsome palace insiders own the golden cages and can support numerous wives, while unattractive servants like Trolt barely manage two.
Gmail spends the winter in Fatherland, waiting for a proper occasion to fly the coop. Summer comes with a bang. The ground erupts and an innumerable multitude of Patriotans storm the territory from below causing major transportation havoc. This is an augmented version of the breed, already able to pronounce shibboleth like “incel” and “femoid”. As it seems they are not invading per se, just got lost on the way to a rally. Seeing where things are going, Gmail uses the hustle and takes a precarious ride to the polluted seaside. There he finds the space-time glitch and returns to the sinking ship, where he happily drowns.
Cover photo: Pedro Ribeiro Simões, CC BY 2.0 (Flickr)
