The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Defeat

When you come to see defeat as your natural position, it might be comforting to be defeated. Unlike his Khan ancestors, Prosser isn't a great conqueror; he's just a bureaucrat who probably gets pushed around by the bureaucratic laws as much as he pushes other people. It's almost enough to make you sad for him. Almost.

If this were Independence Day or some other alien invasion movie, there might be something to do to fight off the aliens. (Luckily, in Independence Day, the aliens' computers are Mac-compatible.) But in Hitchhiker's, there's nothing to do—Earth was defeated before it even knew it. All of which is emphasized by the ridiculousness of the only suggestion made: "lie down or put a paper bag" on your head. What disasters could a paper bag over the head possibly help with other than a disastrously bad hair day?

The attempt to convince the Vogons not to destroy the Earth goes about as well as Arthur's attempt to convince Prosser not to destroy his house: it goes badly. This is a defeat for common sense and decency. But let's look at it the other way: it's a victory for bureaucratic politics and general jerkiness. Yay?

Not everyone takes defeat lying down, or with a paper bag over the head. Here, for instance, Ford heroically kicks the hatchway that's in the way of his plan. Of course, that doesn't actually change anything, though it does probably hurt Ford's foot. We've already seen Arthur and Ford fail to convince Jeltz and a Vogon guard; now they're facing certain death with no hope of escape. That's funny, right?

Okay, so defeat can be funny, but an endless string of defeats can also be depressing, and it can lead to the death of your characters. One way Adams keeps defeat funny in Hitchhiker's Guide is to make people's reactions to defeat and danger a little ridiculous. That's Zaphod's cue to come on: here, he's faced with nuclear missiles launched from Magrathea. If he panicked, we might get a little nervous, as Arthur does. But when Zaphod says that it's "terrific" that someone is trying to kill him, we probably laugh at the mismatch.

It's no wonder that our heroes are so often defeated. (We're using the terms "heroes" and "defeated" pretty loosely here.) They're not brave space rangers with lots of skills or cool gadgets. They're a bunch of bumbling fools most of the time, as we can see here: Zaphod has stolen a ship that he can't really drive, and he's captain (sort of) of a crew that can't really do their job.

This is just a tiny joke, but we see what happens when our foolish heroes (or heroic fools) try to solve a problem. The original Eddie personality is totally annoying, so Zaphod switches it… to another really annoying personality. Adams drives home this defeat by giving us Zaphod's plan and then immediately showing us that it has failed. No waiting, here: we get to see pretty immediately that this is another defeat.

If we actually saw Phouchg and Loonquawl get lynched, that might be kind of a buzzkill. Luckily, that doesn't happen, but what does happen is that we learn how deep this defeat goes. Deep Thought has succeeded in finding the answer to life, but Loonquawl and Phouchg are still defeated since they never knew the real question. Even when you think you've succeeded in Hitchhiker's Guide, there's usually a defeat waiting just around the corner—and you didn't even know there was a corner there.

Boy, Adams really loves his anti-climactic let-downs, especially to express defeat. The first half of this sentence is full of exciting words that ramp up the action: the ships are "mighty," they "tore" through space, they "dived screaming." The second half, though, starts to introduce a little defeat when it mentions terrible miscalculation" and "accidentally swallowed." Then Adams hits us with the full force of this defeat: the whole battle fleet was swallowed by a "small dog." That's one heck of a defeat.

After all that defeat, we thought it would be nice to end on a victory, like when Benjy mouse and Frankie mouse come up with a fake question to pass off to unsuspecting rubes back in their home dimension. The whole section is worth looking at just to see what questions they reject. But we mostly pulled this because their victory—coming up with a fake question—is kind of a defeat for the whole project, not to mention for science and philosophy. Now there will be tons of talk shows and books about this question, and only these two mice know the question is bogus. So after all those defeats that make us laugh, here's a victory that makes us cry.