Oh sure, there are other roles to remember (Severus Snape, Dr. Lazarus, Hans Gruber, Elliot Marston, The Metatron, Absolem the Caterpillar), but I’ll always remember him as Marvin.
Marvin is mis-diagnosed, people are actually out to get him. What he is is deeply, deeply depressed. “Marvin is afflicted with severe depression and boredom, in part because he has a “brain the size of a planet” which he is seldom, if ever, given the chance to use. Indeed, the true horror of Marvin’s existence is that no task he could be given would occupy even the tiniest fraction of his vast intellect.”
You can blame the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation for making androids with GPP, Genuine People Personalities. I’m a personality prototype. You can tell, can’t you…?
I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed.
I didn’t ask to be made: no one consulted me or considered my feelings in the matter. I don’t think it even occurred to them that I might have feelings. After I was made, I was left in a dark room for six months… and me with this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side. I called for succour in my loneliness, but did anyone come? Did they help? My first and only true friend was a small rat. One day it crawled into a cavity in my right ankle and died. I have a horrible feeling it’s still there.
Funny how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to take you to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction, ’cause I don’t.
Was I amongst friends when the Haggunenon admiral evolved into a life pod and everybody aboard his flagship escaped leaving me aboard as it steered itself into the nearest star?
Was I amongst friends when I was left to walk in circles on a swamp planet? (What happened? Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it. It committed suicide.)
Left to park cars outside a restaurant for millenia? (576,000,003,579 years in fact, he counted them)
The first ten million years were the worst. And the second ten million… they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn’t enjoy at all. After that, I went into a bit of a decline.
Left for the Krikkit robots to use for batting practice? (where he is eventually tied into their War Computer and “simultaneously manages to plan the entire planet’s military strategy, solve “all of the major mathematical, physical, chemical, biological, sociological, philosophical, etymological, meteorological and psychological problems of the Universe except his own, three times over, and compose a number of lullabies.”)
Friend? I don’t think I ever came across one of those, sorry, can’t help you there.
You think you’ve got problems. What are you supposed to do if you are a manically depressed robot? No, don’t even bother answering. I’m 50,000 times more intelligent than you and even I don’t know the answer.
There’s a whole new life stretching out in front of you.
Oh, not another one. Life. Loathe it or ignore it. You can’t like it.
Goodbye, Arthur.
Miserable git! I’ll miss him.
1 comments
I remember him as Emma Thompson philandering, but not quite cheating husband, Harry, in “Love Actually”