Well, well, well … looks like Cherry still has her life and her job! But I can’t say a lot about her gardening expertise. That’s how it is with stories, it seems. Characters get twisted and turned to fit whatever the story needs, rather than making the story fit the character. After all, Cherry is supposed to be an expert gardener.

It’s like Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation: An android supposedly possessing great strength, remarkable reflexes, and a mind the size of a planet (sorry, that’s Marvin, the depressed robot). Yet, the writers sometimes created stories where Data acted slow; was sometimes out-thought by mere humans (e.g. Kivas Fajo); or was physically bested by his “evil twin”, Lore. It’s like some kind of unwritten rule of the Fiction Universe that characters with impressive powers must have flaws and cannot appear superior to mere human beings for fear of making TV viewers feel paranoid or depressed. That’s why Superman wound up with kryptonite, I think. But that was a self-inflicted injury, as fans know; because Superman was not originally the super-flying, invulnerable character he morphed into. But I digress …

All in all, it is nice to have a change of scenery here, even if it is just for six days. But are we going to get anything of a worthy story out of this unimpressive episode? There must be something else afoot, other than the complications of transplanting rose bushes. Not that stubborn rose bushes can’t be a worthy problem in certain contexts, such as a person calling into Gardner’s Question Time on BBC 4 for advice. So we’ll have to wait a bit to see what Violet really has in mind for Cherry, after the audience laughter has subsided.

Art Dept. Today’s strip shows elements of rushed work: Boring fixed-camera views; characters and objects out of proportion to each other; schematic scenery. Some cynics <ahem!> will blame it on good weather and good surf, while others might respond with “Nothing new here.”

I sometimes make joking references to Stephen Pastis because of Jules Rivera’s love of puns. But Pastis’s puns are constructed from the text of the lead-up panels. On the other hand, the humor I see here looks more like what I find in Hi and Lois or Family Circus.