Umm, what part are we looking at in the 2nd and 3rd panels? If exposed bone, then how can the patient be so wide-awake?
Also, if the parity of turns is correct, the current site is playing O, and has only losing moves. Can’t they concede, and not ship the guy off to let County, playing X, claim their victory?
Comics I Don't Understand 
The final dialog balloon could be completed to read “Son of a … gun, he’s right!” — The doctor here has just discovered (in the third panel) that Dr. Rosenberg is right, and that the patient will not need any more operations. In the second panel he has not yet seen the current state of the tic-tac-toe game. Therefore, he can and should concede, he just hasn’t done it yet: there’s no fourth panel.
P.S. Credit the lack of anesthesia to PBF’s well-known habit of grim, gruesome, and generally NSFW setups.
Spinal anesthetic? My mom had her hip replaced with a spinal while fully awake. It’s safer, especially for elderly people (as she was). Recovery is said to be faster, too.
Wait, lemme get this straight. This doctor is not Dr Rosenberg, since the current doctor appears in panel 3 where the patient mentions Dr R in 3rd person. OK, so is Dr R at County? Where they are playing X? And the reported remark by Dr R to the patient was encoding “I win!” as a message to be carried by the unknowing patient?
The doctor here has just discovered (in the third panel) that Dr. Rosenberg is right, and that the patient will not need any more operations
But do you mean, discovered it as a legit medical decision? Or (as I took it) because the t-t-t game is lost for “our side” so there need not be any reply — where reply would mean operating and sending the patient back to County.
@ deety – Your analysis @3 is perfect, that describes the situation exactly. The implied setup is that these two medical malpractitioners have been repeatedly reopening the victim’s leg, just to use his femur as a ttt-board. Whether or not they are “honest” enough to give up when the outcome is clear is left up to the reader’s imagination; it is equally likely that they will find excuses to keep transferring him back and forth until all nine moves have been recorded, just to siphon off the operating fees and/or insurance money. As I said @1, PBF can be pretty gruesome at times.
This is how I see the game must have played out. Obviously these aren’t genius tic-tak-toe players, but I’m going to assume a modicum of intelligence.
X just went, so either they put the X in the center square or one of the corners. If they put it in one of the corners they could have won on the previous turn, so the most logical conclusion is they put the 3rd X in the center square. The center square was open until the 5th turn.
On the first turn, X took one of the corners. Let’s say it is the top right.
If O had chosen the top middle, then X chosen top left, O could have taken the middle and gotten to a draw. Taking the middle left was idiotic if X had the top two corners. So this leads to the conclusion O’s first move was middle left.
The game went as follows:
1st move: X top right corner
O middle left
X top left corner
O middle top (to block)
X center square
If X’s first move had been top left corner, either of the O positions is the same as O taking the top middle with X in the top right corner. Since O didn’t take the center on their 2nd turn, we can conclude X’s first move must have been top right.
It does make some sense if the sequence was:
Top left, left middle, top right, top middle
What doesn’t make any sense is:
Top right, top middle, top left, left middle
Or
Top left, top middle, top right, left middle
So there are two sequences I think could have happened.
In both sequences O’s first turn was left middle. Which corner X chose first isn’t obvious.
In the first panel, Conner is at some un-named “other” hospital, where Dr Rosenberg has made his decisive move. That is probably Dr R walking away in the first panel.
In the second and third panel, Conner has already been transferred to the county hospital — notice that the scrubs are a different color. It is the county hospital surgeon who sees that his victory has been blocked.
Nothing worse than a draw for either player in noughts & crosses makes sense.
Yeah, if neither player makes a mistaken move, there will be a draw. And the game is small enough that the strategies are pretty easy to know.
Still, if the second player makes a mistake on their first move, the first player can force a win from that position. A good choice for the first player may be taking a corner, as the only correct response for the second player is the center.
Interesting reading, jajizi. But I don’t see why it’s necessary — is there a problem with the simpler picture that the three panels are in the same place and close in time sequence?
I think jajizi is right.
So do I.
The medico talking to the patient in the first panel would have to be presuming he needs to be transferred back if these were all in the same hospital. It makes more sense for the medico to be at “not county” hospital and they know the patient needs to go to county because the game isn’t over.
The medico holding the bloody instrument in panel 1 indicates the patient completed the surgery instead of just getting ready to start it.
Re-examining the panels, I agree completely with jajizi’s transfer hypothesis @8. Although that shifts the identities and names of the characters shown, it does not change the fundamental setup of the strip, which is still hideously gruesome.
P.S. @ Mitch (10) – In Martin Gardner’s “Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles & Diversions”, he extolls the entertainment and strategic advantages of opening with “X” in one of the four “side” squares. Unlike the corner opening, which can be countered only with a center response (and vice-versa), the side opening offers four “safe” and four “losing” replies for “O”, but it is not immediately obvious which squares are which type, especially because the side opening is not very popular.
P.S. The safe responses to a side opening are the center square, the opposite side, and the two adjacent corners. If “O” responds in either of the other sides, or in one of the non-adjacent corners, that will produce a win for “X”.
Had I known there was confusion regarding at which hospital Dr. Rosenberg was resident, I would have commented earlier. To me, the change of venue between panels one and two is as obvious as could be — everything is completely different from the bed to the bed linens to the scrubs.
Strange game, the only winning move is not to play.
From my teen years up thru his death I was a big fan of Martin Gardner, both thru the collections and in fresh issues of the Scientific American magazine; also The Annotated Alice and other writings.
(If you’re going to mistype his last name, you should also substitute for the first name and make him “Marvin Gardener” who would be the caretaker for a certain Monopoly property.)
Sometime after I had settled into my present location of Chicago, I happened to reread one of his columns about Dr Matrix (have I got that name right?), his fictional “numerologist”. They mention street addresses that look interestingly patterned or suggestive. For instance, a prominent publishing house listed their address in their books — 666 Fifth Avenue in NYC, maybe signaling demonic affiliation? Another was 1234 East 56th Street in Chicago, which they mentioned had been the headquarters of an odd political/philosophical movement called General Semantics (led for a time by a certain Hayakawa, whom I don’t recall as the same or different person who became president or chancellor of Berkeley). This was something Gardner may have observed from his time at the University of Chicago. I live in that neighborhood, and sometimes would walk down that block, so I eagerly checked out that the address 1234 E 56 was still posted on a building, which now seemed to be residential and not institutional. (And sometime later I visited there one day for an IRL meeting of the local followers of rec.arts.music.dylan. It was part of a group of row homes being rented out as student apartments, with the oddity that a three-storey town home would be rented to a group of 6 or 7 kids, rather than subdividing it into flats.)
@ Mitch (18) – Rather than nitpick on me about the typo, you could have simply fixed it, as I have just done.
But didn’t you enjoy the invocation of the Monopoly property Marvin Gardens? I didn’t want to lose the hook for that..
Playing Monopoly with my family (who shared or at least were aware of my interest in Martin Gardner), when somebody had a transaction involving Marvin Gardens, we would rarely miss the opportunity to invoke a Marvin Gardener and speculate on whether he would provide any Mathematical Games.
Mitch4: For interesting addresses for companies, does it count if the company named the street itself? American Express is located on a street named American Expressway, and everybody knows that Apple Computer is located at 1 Infinite Loop.
Those are def fine by me! Dr Matrix, as a “numerologist”, probably needed to have a number involved.
and Seagate is/was located on Disc Drive!