Explain the ending of Dirk Gently's Detective Agency

[AveDementia]

Aside from Shada, some of the Dirk Gently plot can be seen in another Dr. Who episode- City of Death.

Brief synopsis:
When the Doctor and Romana II visit Paris, they encounter wierd ripples in time, a stolen Mona Lisa, and a detective named Dugan. It leads to an alien whos ship blew up, causing the beginning of life on earth, and splintering him throughout history, where he worked to advance technology and thought to be able to eventually travel back in time and stop himself from trying to lift off.

The ship was cool looking in that episode. It was the coolest I can remember on the series (next to the TARDIS, that is).

[scr4]

*Originally posted by rjung *
**Don’t forget that Life, the Universe, and Everything (the first Hitchhikers’ book) was also originally intended as a Dr. Who storyline. Adams’ biggest problem there was that the Doctor was a proactive hero, while Arthur, Ford, and Zaphod are anything but, so he had to use Trillian and Slartibartfast to move the plot along. **

Now that you mention it, Slartibartfast didn’t quite fit well in that role either, IMHO. He didn’t seem like the proactive hero type when we first met him on Magrathea:

“You know,” said Arthur thoughtfully, “all this explains a lot of things. All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was.”

“No,” said the old man, “that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.” “Everyone?” said Arthur. “Well, if everyone has that perhaps it means something! Perhaps somewhere outside the Universe we know …”

“Maybe. Who cares?” said Slartibartfast before Arthur got too excited. “Perhaps I’m old and tired,” he continued, “but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. Look at me: I design coastlines. I got an award for Norway. Where’s the sense in that? None that I’ve been able to make out. I’ve been doing fjords in all my life. For a fleeting moment they become fashionable and I get a major award.”

(slightly edited)

[HalfDeadHalfAlive]

I am confused about the slimy things with legs: The incident with the ship was 4 billion years ago. Back then, life already just existed but not in any multicellular form which the slimy things with legs must have been.
So I was wondering whether Adams was suggesting that the slimy things were destroyed by the explosion, therefore making room for “our” tree of life to develop…

Or, maybe back in the mid eighties it was not clear yet when multicellular organisms first originated??

Hmmm…

Now I’m curious to see if anybody will ever respond to this… If not I’ll just use this Abacus I have here… (Get it?? Person who will never read this??)

2003, I’m coming!!!

[chrisk]

The way I read it was that the slimy things with legs were not at the same point in history as the explosion. The ghost had been wandering the land for millions, maybe even a billion years before the “slimy things with legs” (first amphibians?) emerged.

I think it may not have been as clear whether there was already single-celled life in the ocean 4 billion years ago when Adams wrote the story. In any event, the implication seems clear to me that the explosion “seeded” the Earth’s oceans with living cells–possibly even a few multicellular parasites that could have adapted to life without larger hosts, and the characters fear that without that explosion, life as we know it would not have evolved on Earth.

[ColinXSD]

The book Shada is an excellent read