Well, Darth Welly finally steps in to provide some direction for this discussion. Of course, Cricket Bro has to promote an over-engineered, irrelevant app which Mark easily dispatches. If that is Cricket Bro’s best, he should quit while he is behind. Maybe let those younger entrepreneurs take the stage with their better thought-out projects. Will Rivera even take this step?

The term “dad energy” is roughly defined (online) as a man strongly exhibiting “fatherly” traits normally related to home and family, while gladly letting other people know about it. A bit of bragging, in short. That might fit the bill here, as Cricket Bro is clearly not happy to be showed up by Mark’s response.

In at least one source I read, wearing plaid shirts was listed as a stereotypical meme of Dad Energy. There’s more to this concept, but feel free to do your own research. I don’t have time as I’ve got to do some car work that only a manly father can do.

Alas, Rivera downplayed a reasonable discussion and replaced it with a kind of low-rent, “reality show” battle between speakers and a reactive audience like that seen on TV shows such as Jerry Springer or Maury.

Sure, this is a comic strip, albeit a nature-based adventure strip. Still, is there no room for nuance? Where is the adventure? And I wonder: is Rivera doing this deliberately as a metaphor for our perceived lack of political and social engagement by the general public? Or possibly a critique of the hardline positions of the Left and Right? Or maybe Rivera just likes Jerry Springer and thinks it makes a good format for this panel discussion.

Still, within the confines of the story, itself, do you think that Cricket Bro would go to all this trouble just to try and humiliate Mark in public? Is his ego that fragile that he feels the need to flex his fake muscles and try to make Mark look like a weak technophobe, a neo-luddite?