by Steve Cook
Number two in the series Rise of the Brain Dead presents a departure form the convoluted and somewhat implausible drama of Series One and veers sharply in the direction of equally implausible yet immensely entertaining slapstick comedy.
Game of Loons also switches from the bleak landscape of Ukraine to the bleak political landscape of a land known as the United States of Awesomnolence that exists just North of Mexico and just South of Reality.
The series starts with the King of Awesomnolence, a black Irishman known as O'Bama, Lord of the Drones, forced to abdicate due to having overstayed his welcome and being a closet Muslim who cunningly hid his religion from the world quite convincingly by spending the eight years of his misbegotten reign dedicatedly blowing up Muslims.
The plot of the sitcom centres around the crazy antics of two pretenders to both the Throne and Sanity.
The first of these is the Wicked Witch of New York played by Killery Hinton (Benghazi, You Got Hacked Mail, The Nearly Woman) who dabbles in the Occult under the auspices of her mentor, a ringer for Satan known as Soros The Bloody Horrible.because he is, well, bloody horrible.
The Wicked Witch is afflicted by a curse that makes her incapable of (a) telling the truth (or even recognising it ) and (b|) not killing people. However, neither affliction disqualifies her from ascending to the Throne - and are even considered an advantage - thanks to the support of a race of zombies known as "Democrats".
As thought moves slowly, if at all, through antidepressants, the Democrats are convinced that if they could just hand the power of life and death over the human race to such a one as She, everything will miraculously be All Right, although nobody can explain how and we must assume the existence of a magic spell that suspends common sense.
The Wicked Witch, often preoccupied, in the long tradition of Presidential candidates and other maniacs, by trying not to look mad, rides the length and breadth of the land in the company of her familiar,"Bill".a Misogynist gargoyle who once laid waste to Yugoslavia and Monica Lewinsky.
The other contender is a character known as Trumpet the Wallbuilder, played by Donald Trump (Hairdo, Almost Human, Dim and Dimmer). Trumpet is also afflicted by a curse: one that renders him incapable of (a) running a country and (b) not being vacuous but these too are not considered impediments to taking the Throne and lording it over Awesomnolence in the manner of his predecessors (except Lincoln).
Trumpet also tours the length and breadth of the Land, blaming the misfortunes of The People upon a less-than-one-percent minority known as "The Muslims", who replaced Communism as the Ogre everyone has to to be worried about after the latter mysteriously vanished just as it was about to murder everybody in their beds. Blaming The Muslims enables him to deflect attention from his cronies, the infamous Money Lenders to whom The People owe more money than all the money that ever existed. This proves to be quite popular as The People need somebody to blame, having decided not to blame the people who are actually to blame for the Land's rather swift descent from Greatness and to blame instead The Muslims. The latter are too busy being blown up, having their countries stolen and otherwise shafted to speak out in their own defence and thus present an easy target that requires no thought, which, let's face it, can be quite tiring.
The two antagonists also spend a great deal of time accusing one another loudly of crimes they themselves have committed in the time-honoured tradition of criminals and psychopaths the length and breadth of the political landscape or indeed any other landscape. Both characters keep skeletons in their closets but strangely The Witch's skeletons (so numerous as to require several closets) are never mentioned by the land's Town Criers, who all belong to the Guild of Fibbers, whilst Trumpet's tend to be paraded for all to see.
But the political ritual known as the Slagging Off saves both pretenders the hassle of thinking up any real policies or workable ideas by which they will reverse the dwindling fortunes of the kingdom.
Yet the Wicked Witch does promise to give Israel lots of weapons and money crowbarred from the wallets of The People by tax collectors, while at the same time to continue to goad the King of the Evil Empire to the East (Vladimir Putin: Being There, The Man Who Was Guilty of Everything He Didn't Do, A Fistful of Roubles,) in the hope of starting a profitable war that will kill everybody yet make lots of money for The Oligarchs who will spend it on fallout shelters. Both these policies are considered a Good Thing by a mysterious cult called The Zionists, who are suspected of being The Power Behind the Throne, or at least one of them as there are several (including aliens but excluding The People).
Trump's character meanwhile promises to build The Wall to keep everybody out and thus make the country "Great" again, which establishes him firmly as a Great Statesman in which everybody should invest their complete trust, although he never gets around to defining what "Great" means exactly, probably because he is too busy slagging off Clinton and/or having his hair done.The Wall will cost a gazillion dollars but he puts everybody's mind at rest by promising to make the people of another country pay for it, which demonstrates his grasp both of Diplomacy and Capitalist Economics.
The plot is a bit predictable in so far as millions of viewers were predicting from the first episode that the vacuous Trumpet would turn out to be a plant (not the flowering, leafy variety) who had been instructed all along by mysterious handlers known as The Syndicate of Loons to fall on his sword at the last minute, thus handing the throne to the articulate but nevertheless demented Wicked Witch of New York.
The actors are almost convincing and while the plot and setting are becoming both tired and tiresome and border at times on implausible slapstick, we would like to thank Elite Productions for nevertheless treating us all to hours of Hillarity as the characters fall about and trip over their egos in a variety of amusing ways.
It is at least preferable to its prequels, The President's Brain is Missing and Stranger in a Strange Land.