mission earth had the worst ending

Nearly 4000 pieces of paper that wish they could have been used in a suppository instead

I remember when everyone was talking about the Game Of Thrones ending being bad, and just to get it out of the way, I think everyone’s opinions are valid, as are their complaints (so long as the complaints remain in the context of “a negative opinion”; a petition full of petulant signatures could only be worth anything if it was printed on toilet paper and used vigorously).

I certainly had my own complaints, such as Circe getting squashed (literally and figuratively) like Brock Lesnar had someplace to be in ten minutes, and the White Walkers getting built up longer than the animated clockwork opening credits just to get Death Star’d by the wrong Skywalker. But hey, at least we’ll always have Ramsay Bolton getting strained through a dozen canine digestive tracts. It’s fine.

It certainly isn’t as bad as the ending to many things. The one I keep coming back to is the way “Mission Earth” ended.

What is “Mission Earth”?

If you haven’t heard of Mission Earth, I can’t blame you. It was a ten-part book series written by L. Ron Hubbard, it was the last thing he ever finished before his death, and even compared to his earlier work as the navy-pope of Dianetics, it was a whole new level of delusion.

See, you can tell he was going for satire. The writing style and creative choices smack of intentional hyperbole for the sake of making a point. The thing is, satire is supposed to be a reflection of the real world, or at least the real world as viewed subjectively by someone with strong opinions. In Mission Earth, L. Ron clearly has some strong opinions about the world he lives in, and to understand those opinions, you’re gonna need to go to whatever planet has an atmosphere of 10% oxygen and 90% G.G. Allin’s divine farts.

The series is a train wreck. One-note characters, performing nonsense actions across time and space to achieve dubious goals, in a directionless universe based on the kind of no-pulled-punches social commentary you’d expect from a psychology-hating homophobe whose bloodstream is 20% medicine cabinet, and all of it is as subtle and tasteful as IBS at a nudist sauna.

I’d classify Mission Earth as being “so bad it’s good” if it wasn’t for all the senseless sexual assault and gratuitous torture.

The main character, Jettero Heller, is a blond-haired blue-eyed conventionally handsome space government peace officer alien. Yep, he’s from an entirely different planet and still manages to be the entirety of N’Sync in one body. He’s also really good at every sport, he woos a powerful man-hating female warrior named Countess Krak 1/4 of the way through the first book (a woman who was clearly named after whatever was 10% of L. Ron’s atmosphere while writing this nonsense), and spends 8 or so books making friends with every problem once the problems concede he could kill them with his naked pinky finger. It’s every bit as eye-rolling obnoxious as you’d expect, containing a mere quantum of tolerability because the painfully unlovable protagonist hated Jettero as much as I did.

Oh, right. Jettero’s the main character, but he’s not the protagonist. That honor goes to Soltan Gris, and if you say that name out loud three times, the slimy awfulness left in your mouth is basically what this character is covered in. He’s a greasy little psychopath that works for the same alien government, but the one that is staffed entirely by criminals and lunatics who are then trusted to coordinate all surveillance and intelligence. Again, it’s obvious Hubbard’s trying to make a point about the CIA, it’s just hard to say WHICH CIA he’s commenting on with this character. They’re all equally distant from whatever is going on with this garbage.

As for the story, “all over the place” doesn’t do it justice. Don’t worry if my descriptions above left you lost, it really doesn’t get any clearer as the books progress.

It starts off as aliens plotting to save Earth from pollution, then for a while it’s about Soltan farting around a villa in Turkey, then Jettero befriends the Mafia, then Soltan gets his ding-dong enlarged so he can impress a Russian mail-order bride, then there’s a bit about using a camera that can see a day into the future to cheat the stock market, then Soltan gets kidnapped by lesbians who he then cures with his aforementioned monster-sausage, then there’s something about a multi-billionaire using WW2-era German science to trick humanity into culling itself, and at one point a teenager smuggles herself onto a spaceship so she can start an alien sex cult. About twice per book someone either gains or completely loses an astronomical sum of money for contrived reasons, and the only reason Hubbard’s depiction of homosexuals having sex doesn’t immediately come across as offensively wrong, is because (a) his hetero sex scenes manage to be just as laughably inaccurate, and (b) the gross sexual assault kind of overshadows all of it.

Seriously, it’d be like pointing out OSHA violations in the last 15 minutes of Robocop.

Oh, did I mention the subplot about psychologists using bad fashion and rock & roll to turn people gay? The PR consultant whose psychologist commands him to have sex with his mother? The weird over-arching gimmick in which naughty words are censored with a BLEEP by the alien editing machine forced to read this mountain of words - with “ejaculate” being among the words censored - but the racial slurs are left uncensored?

Is that commentary too, L. Ron? Help me out here, I really can’t tell.

Seriously, I just cannot fathom how L. Ron has children, when he can spend 10 books writing so contemptuously about sex, and never even once depicting any of it being done correctly.

OK but what does this have to do with The ending of Game Of Thrones?

So, why am I telling you about this bad story in which bad characters do bad things for bad reasons? I mean, certainly, if anything is going to have a bad ending, it would be a bad story. But no. The ending to Mission Earth is LEGENDARILY bad. It manages to take what little value it had as a story and launch it nose-first towards a ten-story-tall butt statue made of a million unwiped butts.

The overarching plot of the whole series is supposed to be that these aliens (the Voltar) have Earth on an “invasion timetable” - basically we’re scheduled to be included in their super-awesome alliance of planets at some point like 200 years in the future. However, their intelligence reports that Earth will destroy itself before they can invade it, either due to nuclear war or environmental ruin. So they dispatch Jettero to go find a way to fix Earth so it doesn’t destroy itself, but because L. Ron wanted to get 10 books out of this, they also sent Soltan as a plot device as Jettero’s “handler”. Of course they don’t know that Soltan’s already been to Earth, as part of their weird alien CIA’s hidden agenda to get the Voltar government addicted to heroin, and so Soltan has to balance hiding the intergalactic heroin trade with sabotaging Jettero’s mission, and I’m already kinda done trying to explain it.

In all fairness, there’s enough story crumbs to maybe get a book or two out of this. And yes, I suppose a guy that can convince a significant chunk of Hollywood that they have thetan poisoning detectable only by badly-assembled junior science kits, could also spin this yarn into 4000 pages of magnum opus. Which is why it comes as kind of a surprise when everything swiftly resolves itself in the middle of Book 8, and then switches perspectives to some new character we’ve never even heard of.

How does a 10-book series end at book 8?!

What follows - for TWO AND A HALF BOOKS, I’ll remind you - is little more than a glorified epilogue. The new character, “Monte Pennwell” (the only thing about these ten books that even rhymes with “penned well”) is writing from a perspective 100 years after the story, in which he’s creating a sort of documentary travelogue about the aftermath. Apparently the events of the first 8½ books were so bad that the Voltar are disavowing the very existence of Earth (yeah, this crummy story is even trying to suppress itself) and so Monte has made it his mission to prove Earth exists.

For two and a half books, we follow this smug dingbat around, as he throws together what is essentially the world’s longest Cooley High credits recap. And because ironically L. Ron wanted Monte to be a bad writer, L. Ron badly writes him as a bad writer by sprinkling in some of Monte’s “poetry”, all of which inexplicably obeys basic English poetry rules for metering and rhyme schemes. Apparently the guy who literally holds the world record for most sci-fi books ever written still hasn’t figured out that alien poetry shouldn’t rhyme in earth-speak.

Two and a half books. And none of it is compelling in any way whatsoever. The good guys all won and lived happily ever after. The bad guys are all still being punished in some way.

That’d be like if Sansa took the Iron Throne with no objections in the middle of Season 7, and the last 9 episodes was just Bobsworth Randomguy from West Floob, wandering Future Westeros on a moped, asking all the locals if they remember whatever happened to that one guy that kinda looked like Ed Sheeran. Nothing is the least bit interesting about any of it.

Except for the last page and a half. I am being serious - this last thing takes a page and a half to happen. That’s the part where Monte suddenly and inexplicably becomes a gay sexual predator… because his Earth research exposed him to too much psychology.

The last thing Hubbard ever wrote before he died, folks.

So yeah, it’s a bad ending, quite possibly the worst ending (Hubbard’s subsequent death notwithstanding). And that’s before you take into account that to even GET to that ending, you had to read ten terrible books.

…Why does this exist?

Now, you may be asking why I spent all this time telling you about this terrible ending to a bad story you probably don’t care about at all, and what any of it has to do with Game Of Thrones. Well, honestly I have no idea. And now as I reach the end of this little rant, I’m not really sure how to end it.

If I were writing this in the style of Mission Earth, this would be the part where I’d swallow an entire live koala and declare my undying love for capitalism.

The end.

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