Channel J: Carmen Sandiego Never Quit ACME

With the recent fourth season of Netflix’s Carmen Sandiego being the last one, Carmen has been on my mind a lot lately, as you can probably figure out.  The franchise has spanned computer games and a minor cinematic universe made up of several different and presumably unrelated television shows.

The recent Netflix series was definitely in its own continuity, given Carmen was a rogue agent working against VILE while trying to stay one step ahead of ACME as well.  The older shows played the conflict straight: Carmen Sandiego was the head of VILE in need of capture.  Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? showed her performing all the thefts herself, but the game shows (and some of the computer games) had her underlings performing most of the thefts despite that she was the title character of the franchise.  Players needed to decipher clues to figure out where the crook was hiding in order to return the object of their theft.

In order to keep Earth going, Carmen always had to escape, or else there wouldn’t be a series.  The game shows, however, could have her caught at the end but free by the time the next episode aired.  When I was younger, that never bothered me because I didn’t really think critically about the television shows I watched.  Now that I’m older, I can’t help but wonder just how big the revolving door was on the jail they always took Carmen and her VILE agents.

But if that’s all that was going on, I wouldn’t be writing a post about it, would I?  Because something occurred to me when I was putting together the summary of the franchise for last week’s Quarantine Control.  Carmen’s underlings in VILE ratted her out at the end of each episode of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and she never got sick and tired of that.  I would’ve fired them if they proved to be that disloyal to me.  But then I realized that in the end, it never mattered because Carmen never stayed in jail more than a few hours.  The series aired daily and if Carmen was caught, she’d be free the next day to orchestrate another theft.  Her underlings were also a constant presence in the series.  Despite the near impossibility of the thefts involved (one episode had Kneemoi somehow steal George Washington’s face off every American $1 bill in circulation) and how serious some of the crimes were (Patty Larceny stole the Hope Diamond in season three, a surprisingly straightforward crime for a VILE agent), there was only ever a very small pool of crooks to pursue, suggesting that they were also released from jail relatively quickly.

At this point, it’s probably pretty clear what was happening, but I’m not done.  I’ve got even more evidence to present and when I’m done, you’ll be able to see beyond a shadow of a doubt that Carmen Sandiego was never the villain of the classic television franchise.  She was definitely not the villain of the Netflix show, but I can definitely prove that she was never the villain in the first place.

I noted last week that Carmen seemed to look out for ACME agents Zack and Ivy in Earth, to the point where she would occasionally try to rescue them or otherwise keep them out of danger.  But that could mean she was just trying to be the world’s greatest thief and not a murderer, right?  Maybe.  Throughout the series, there’ve been scenes like in “Rules of the Game”, where Carmen reached out for Ivy when she was about to fall.

Carmen: Give me your hand.
Ivy: Never!
Carmen: Don’t be so childish, Ivy. I’m trying to help you.

Throughout the series, Carmen had never willingly or knowingly tried to murder any of the ACME agents and she even left them Christmas presents in “Just Like Old Times.”  In the same episode, she stole the Chief from ACME’s computers, but the data transfer was imperfect and the Chief was at risk of permanent deletion because of the theft.  Carmen ordered her tech expert to do everything he could to keep the Chief from falling apart, because the two were old friends and used to play chess together every Christmas.

We first got the idea that the two were old friends when the Chief showed up on Carmen’s computer at the end of the second season episode “Skull and Double Crossbones” and the series gradually revealed that Carmen was an ACME agent before going rogue.  Later on, another ACME agent went rogue in “Boyhood’s End, Part 2” but let’s just say that he had few scruples and no integrity.

Lee Jordan: Say hello to your new nemesis, detectives.  Me!

Lee cut the rope Zack and Ivy were trying to use to climb up after him in the scene and despite that they were flying over water, they were high enough up that Carmen Sandiego was immediately angry with Lee’s attempt to kill them.

Carmen: Don’t you ever try anything like that again.
Lee: They were practically in here!  I didn’t have any choice!
Carmen: There are always choices, when you use your brains and not your brawn.

At the end of “Maelstrom’s Revenge”, when the question of whether Carmen would ever give up her thieving ways came up, Carmen responded with a quote from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Was this Carmen herself suggesting that she’d never actually quit ACME to form VILE?  Maybe.  Although Earth and World couldn’t be considered to be in the same continuity, they both featured Carmen acting like a villain, and yet she was constantly leaving clues for Zack and Ivy in Earth.  In World, she must have known her phone was tapped, since once per episode the gumshoes got a clue from Carmen herself when she phoned her agent and told them where to go next.  She didn’t give her agent the instruction in a straightforward manner, as you’d expect she’d do if she didn’t think she was being listened in on.  She gave the instruction as a clue to figure out, in roughly the same format as all the other clues given on the show, and although her agent acted like they’d be homeless if their brains were converted to construction material, presumably they were still somehow able to figure out where to go since the gumshoes usually managed to follow them there.

If Carmen was working for ACME, that would explain why she was always able to get out of jail before the next episode, and it would also explain why she never fired her agents.  In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that the agents were always instructed to get caught and tell the winning gumshoe where to go to find Carmen, since Carmen was always telling her agents where she was going to hide out waiting to be caught.

Patty Larceny: “I used to be a sweet, innocent schoolgirl.  Now I’m a sweet guilty schoolgirl and it’s call Carmen’s fault!  Go look for her in Africa.”

This quote can be found in the third season’s penultimate episode, “The Williamsburglary”.  After three seasons of being constantly caught by ACME, if Patty really was resentful towards Carmen for tarnishing her reputation, she would’ve quit.

To be fair, the show recycled these clips all the time, presumably to save both time and money.  For example, in season three, she was always whining about her reputation in each of her phone calls, with the only variation being the continent Carmen was hiding and in season five, she was bothered by how the prison did its laundry.  Other crooks had their own way of trying to act like they had reasons to snitch on Carmen to hide the fact that they were instructed to by Carmen herself.  The show did nothing to outright suggest this was going on, but if these crooks were somehow escaping custody each and every time and weren’t being incarcerated in a maximum security facility by at least the end of season two, then it was very likely they were working with ACME to train new recruits.

Why else would they constantly be stealing items that even the best thief in the world shouldn’t have been able to take?

The best evidence that Carmen was working with ACME came during Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?  The series featured Carmen sending a VILE agent through time to steal something, but there was always a time limit to get it back before history would be changed.  Carmen even had her agents attack ACME’s time machine, but never in a manner that would actually put the gumshoes at risk.  Again, this is like what her relationship with Zack and Ivy was like, constantly looking out for them and making sure that they were only in mild peril at most.

When her agent was caught, the final round consisted of six history questions, but the nature of the questions was typically weighted in the gumshoe’s favour, with a multiple choice between two possible answers, so that if the gumshoe didn’t know the answer, they still had a one in two chance of getting it right.  On average, that would mean a gumshoe should’ve answered three of them right and would’ve had to physically open the time gate three times, a task which ate up several seconds, but which they could usually afford to do a few times and still win.

Not only was this final round deliberately designed so that it was easier to win, the questions were being delivered by Carmen Sandiego herself.  As far as I can tell, the only way you can explain that is if Carmen was always working with ACME to train these gumshoes.

Spread out over all three classic shows, the clues that Carmen Sandiego left for me has led me to believe that she never quit ACME.  In fact, VILE may have been an organization secretly funded by ACME in order to train up gumshoes in the game shows, and specifically to train Zack and Ivy in Earth.  Why else would Chief Lynne Thigpen herself have said “Today’s caper is bankrolled by…” at the beginning of each episode of World, starting in season three?