Maybe they pulled "Cold Deck" on the 2000AD readers...? There something we maybe missed in last few progs about Dredd?
Aye, the misdirection's targeted as much on the readers as it is on Bachman
et al. I was thinking along similar lines to
Doc X regarding a
Zenith-style switcheroo, but I had the big twist of
Phase Four in mind, where the Lloigor are tricked into thinking they've won. I don't think Tek Dept are up to fabricating scale model universes, but
Burdis's gripes about the plausibility of
another bent judge being able to use the sleep machines to brainwash their own army got me thinking. It seems to me that someone like Smiley (if he actually exists) would be all over something like that, so if he let it happen there must be a reason.
I'm questioning the existence of Smiley and the reality of this story because of that word
saudade, which I think explains the number of references to the Dredd strip's history in all three stories. At first I imagined it was the writers taking the pish out of themselves and their shameless milking of reader nostalgia for characters like the Kleggs and Murd, and ephemera like the nightmare gun, but now I think it might explain why such a major Dredd story is constructed from the fragments of previous adventures. Smiley's sitting room feels a lot like
The White/Black Lodges.
