In The Wonder Years, Kevin Arnold’s adult narration is voiced by Daniel Stern, the same actor who plays a bumbling crook in Home Alone. Let’s see if I can shove these together.
After high school Kevin Arnold was drafted for the Vietnam War. While in combat he saw high school buddy Jeff Billings (the best friend after the falling out with Paul Pfeiffer) impaled on a makeshift bamboo trap. Kevin comforted his dying friend by telling him the Jets were going to go all the way. When they got back they would both go see Joe Namath win the Super Bowl. Jeff died in his arms.
Upon returning home Kevin suffered from severe PTSD which went unrecognized and untreated. Kevin was ultimately kicked out of his parent’s house by Jack Arnold who thought Kevin was just lazy. This led to a series of unfortunate events. Unable to hold any steady work Kevin turned to crime. Not wanting to tarnish the Arnold family name he started using the alias “Marv Merchants” (another soldier in his platoon that died in battle).
As Marv he eventually wound up meeting Harry Lime. Their partnership of crime was ultimately thwarted by the actions of 9-year old Kevin McCallister. Marv and Harry received 20 year sentences in prison. Unable to seek treatment for his PTSD and depression Marv wasn’t able to assimilate with other prisoners and routinely engaged in physical altercations. One instance led to a death. Marv was sentenced to life for murder. Because of his emotional outbursts Marv was often held in solitary confinement. The isolation proved to be too much. Rocking on his cell floor he would mentally flash back and narrate out loud his fondest memories, The Wonder Years.
The Jupiter 2 was failing. Critical systems were burnt out as the astrogator locked on to the nearest inhabited planet and prepared for descent. Unable to fix the sabotaged landing systems, Major West gave Robbie his final command, to pilot the ship into the heart of a nearby sun, saving the planet below from a K-T level extinction event and finally abandoned ship.
Climbing into the first available escape pod, young Will Robinson cleared space on the zero-g couch and strapped himself in, not realising that Dr. Smith’s attempts at synthesizing espresso coffee had leaked into the wiring, cause a short in the escape pod’s guidance system. As the pod jettisoned, it was the second time that Will had become Lost in Space.
Time passed, as did the stars as the pod drifted clean through known space without ever being detected.
…
After an unusually long hypersleep, “Danger” Will Robinson’s escape pod chanced upon the Minbari systems, where he was revived and given the medical attention he needed. After he was adopted into the Religious caste, a renegade group saw this as an opportunity to fulfill an ages-old prophecy, re-writing his DNA and mind-wiping him.
With the tensions of the Earth-Minbari War causing division in the Grey Council, it was decided that all traces of his former existence and discovery be stricken from the record. Post-war, as a Child of Valen with both Minbari and Human elements to his soul, he was both the ideal candidate for a junior diplomatic post on a frontier space-station, but it would also keep him out of the way in a quiet and remote location, to prevent any further complications and to be watched over by the careful eye of a prominent Ambassador…
Dread Like Me (prequel to Dead Like Me, sequel to The Princess Bride)
His time as the Dread Pirate Roberts had carried on longer than expected when the reaper came for him. When he learned he would become a reaper for a time, he left for the new world, claiming souls of all cultures through the ensuing ages he developed a taste for waffles and maple syrup, let his swashbuckle out a few notches and put down the sword, but never lost his rapier wit.
That would also have been acceptable. No, I picked up on the Mandy Patinkin thing, but surely Inigo’s friends Westley and Buttercup died eventually, which would have been a tailor-made place to put the line I quoted.
Comely Teen Terminator Cameron has failed to protect John Connor, and her future timeline is eradicated along with him. She now sees only one way to defeat Skynet and prevent the apocalypse, by enabling the creation of a new generation of post-humans even Skynet would be powerless to resist.
She assumes a new persona, a neuroscientist Dr Bennett Halverson, who infiltrates as a new hire Rossum Inc, a large technology corporation with a reputation for ethical flexibility. She stealthily deploys technology from the future for transferring and manipulating consciousness, making their own scientists think they’ve invented it.
The goal is to make humans collectively a match for Skynet, with both it’s immortality and a capacity for insightful massively parallel thought in humans whose minds are engineered for the purpose. Unfortunately the greedy and ambitious Rossum diverts Cameron’s technology into degenerate Dollhouses of human toys, and a different apocalypse ensues where almost every human is doomed to have their persona wiped and be a slave. Apparently apocalypse is inevitable.
R’as Al-Ghul is the name given to the leader of the League of Shadows. It is rarely the name the man was born with.
In the case of the current leader, he was born Bryan Mills.
As a CIA agent, he had to do many things that he felt were morally wrong, in order to make the world a better place. Eventually, disillusioned by the slow and often incompetent work of the CIA, he was offered a place in the League of Shadows, which had been doing much the same thing for millennia on a larger scale. He retired from the CIA, and joined the League, eventually becoming its leader.
Eventually, a group of people who had no idea of either of Ra’s’s identities made the mistake of kidnapping his daughter, Kim. Make no mistake: as ruthless and sociopathic as his work with both the League and the CIA had made him, he still loved his daughter deeply. The League would have seen it as a sign of weakness if he used them to deal with such a small and personal concern, so he went after them himself, with no assistance at all.
After several of these misadventures (it turns out that there are multiple people stupid enough to mess with Ra’s Al-Ghul’s family), Ra’s aka Bryan decided that his daughter would be safer at his side as a member of the League. She took the name Talia al-Ghul, and helped him in his plans to bring down the corrupt city of Gotham.
When this endeavour failed due to the actions of a new apprentice that Ra’s had brought into the fold, Kim/Talia swore both vengeance and to take on a new mission: to avenge her father and complete his plan. Taking on another new name, she infiltrated the board of Wayne Enterprises…
After many years and adventures up and down the time-stream and through multiple universes, The Cat grew weary of travel and had had enough of his companions. So at a stop somewhere, sometime, when he found himself in an island paradise much like Cloister the Stupid had foretold, he decided to remain.
He took the name Dwayne mostly because he answered to it once and it stuck. Somehow, despite his many cat-like traits, people just assumed he was a native. Or perhaps it was another game of Better Than Life, but if it was, at least this one hadn’t yet turned bad, so he didn’t care. Still, he kept half an eye out for familar faces. There was sun, sand, and rum, and things (well people) to chase. What more was there to want?
After being thrown back in time to the nineteenth century chasing Adam Worth, the immortal Dr. Helen Magnus is forced to return to the future the long way: by living through the entire twentieth century for a second time.
Because she cannot be allowed to interfere with the work of her other self, she decides to stay away from study of Abnormals and take up first a career as a physicist, and then one at the Pentagon. She spends years trying to get the Stargate operational, thinking that there may be new species of Abnormals on other planets, or perhaps a new, safer place for an Abnormal homeland.
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and Better Than Life are just wonderful wonderful books. (There is an Omnibus version with both of them together as they should be)
