Forum:Omar—cause of death

Forums: Index > Fan Theories > Omar—cause of death

Well, at first I thought the "Omar von Zinzer was a revenant" theory was sort of reaching, but a recent review of the early pages has converted me. "Which part?" I hear absolutely no one cry.

Well, when Punch and Judy hear it was stolen, they go and look in the thieves' market. Not the hospitals. If the locket killed Omar, it did it fast- probably less than twenty-four hours. That's dangerous enough that you'd think Barry would have mentioned the possibility. But when they go looking for it, they're just looking for a little piece of jewelery. Not a mysterious ailment.

Did everyone notice this before me? And what do you guys think? - Acacia 09:13, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

How utterly bizarre. I was on the verge of starting this topic when I noticed it was kinda covered in the article. I proposed this Revenant theory in the Yahoo! group a while ago, and wasn't exactly shouted down, but nobody grabbed me by the shoulders and cried 'By Ghod, Corgi, you're RIGHT!'

But it seems so obvious - and typically Foglio-sneaky. Agatha loses her... mitigator; she gets angry; she tells someone to 'die like the miserable rat you are!'... and he dies. Slowly. Miserably. Promptly. The locket is a classic red herring.

One of these days, Agatha will be reminded that she quite accidentally murdered Oman von Zinzer, and there will be Grief.

Corgi 09:24, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Or possibly just a vague and VERY faint sense of guilt; it's not like she didn't loathe him entirely, and even Moloch admits there was plenty to loathe.

'Grief' also in the sense of 'I'll give you some...'. It's the whole boatload of shadings of meaning. :D

Corgi 23:48, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Think it could have something to do with the reason the Vienna is important in the Future? -Acacia 09:51, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

D'oh! You [Acacia] nailed it! That's totally why they're looking for the Vienna. On the locket, I originally thought that The Other was simply trying to kill Agatha by arcing her locket, but it killed Omar instead. However, the hole in this theory is that Omar was not a Heterodyne, and presumably wouldn't even notice whatever the locket did, either before or after the event. There's also the possiblity that The Other was trying to destroy the locket itself, for whatever reason. o.O --mnenyver 19:55, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Nonono, c'mon. Agatha. Blood on her hands. There's a big difference between whacking a Jäger with a wrench when you know it won't hurt them much, or defending yourself against an over-aggressive prisoner... and killing somebody because they slapped you. She hasn't been blooded yet - she didn't even try to kill Vrin, remember, just disable her from attacking. It's just got to be a story point in the future, it's got to.

Corgi 03:46, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Just wanted to second this analysis. Definitely agree. --mnenyver 04:44, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Okay, probably so. Still, "guilt" is probably a better word than "grief"; that generally means you miss someone, which... not so much. -Acacia 04:53, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

So, if Omar was a revenant, then a person with time travel could find the moment when he was infected and thus locate the hive engine that generates the special, covert wasps. They might even be able to locate the Other. Could that be what Agatha and Moloch were doing paging backwards through time to find a date earlier enough to save Omar? --DryBrook 16:55, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

No, I don't think so. The time windows ✣ suggest that Agatha is looking for Moloch's Vienna 707 friends (Bruno and the kid) ✣ , not Omar. --DryBrook 16:55, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm in favor of this theory too. I know it's not too popular on the list, but I think it makes more sense than Agatha's locket being lethal. I suppose the jury is technically still out (how strong does a spark-suppressing device have to be, anyway?), but it's more interesting if Omar was a revenant. We know that being a spark is dangerous, and that it was damaging for Agatha to wear the thing, but that's not really dramatic tension, is it? Agatha's voice being able to kill people, though? Definitely packs more punch. -Evaneyreddeman 20:16, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

In response to Corgi's last comment, it seems somewhat optimistic to assume that when Agatha was flipping out at the circus, all the Wulfenbach troops guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time were just knocked cold by all those explosions and knives and bombs and missiles and other seldom non-lethal weapons... after all, once pied, one of Agatha's first worries was that she's accidentally killed Gil, which kind of implies a lot of poor dead soldiers lying around. - Someone who should probably register

Yeah, I'm not following this argument either. Remember furthermore that Agatha carries the Do Good, Smite Evil gene. The inability of possessors of that gene to grasp that Smiting Evil may entail killing human beings isn't unique to fiction, nor to "evil" characters.

IMO the original theory is almost certainly right, and the late, quietly-Revenant Herr von Zinzer was simply an early demonstration, not recognized or knowable at the time, of just how potent The Other's voice can be versus Revenants. If Agatha had known about the way she killed him with just a word back before she knew she was a Spark, she'd have been mortified, most likely. By now ... well, the rules have changed, and so has Agatha's worldview. (BTW, please do sign up/sign in so we know whom we're debating with. People here are exceptionally civil by the standards of wiki-discussions, and I'm pretty sure that none of us will eat you.)

-- that old bearded guy 20:07, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

I do like this theory, particularly given that there is a 'REPORT ALL REVENANTS IMMEDIATELY' poster in the alley itself. ✣ On the other hand, she does shout at the escaping Von Zinzers ✣ 'Stop!!'. On the other other hand, the speech bubble isn't quite dripping in the way it usually does to indicate that Agatha is speaking with the 'angry' Mongfish voice --- and it is sort of dripping when she shouts at them to die. ✣ (She's clearly angry, anyway.) On the other other other hand (where's Boris when you need him?) she isn't actually speaking in the imperative mood when she shouts that: she's actually speaking in the future tense about what will happen to them once Dr Beetle's clanks catch them.</grammarian> Incidentally, anyone who thinks that Agatha Clay of Forge Street, Beetleburg was a pacifist opposed to capital punishment would do well to re-read her 'Die Like the Rats you Are' outburst.

--Cantabrian 15:48, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

There's a possibility that came to me immediately after reading the strip: what if the locket merely kills anyone who wears/carries it closely and isn't a Spark? We know from Klaus' abortive experiment that certain areas of the brain are stimulated if you're a Spark. The locket could be designed to suppress the overabundance of energy in that area of the brain, sort of a brake for Sparking thought. A normal persons brain would have that portion abnormallysuppressed, resulting in a mysterious ailment, perhaps like Omar's. That would also explain why whenever Agatha's mind spun up into the "crazy place", as Jager-described, she would immediately get a headache that dispelled her thinking, which was the locket supressing that part of her mind. Whaddya think? --Superanth 16:38, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

This is more or less the "obvious" conclusion. Not to say correct, but it's a version what was generally assumed early on. ⚙Zarchne 21:22, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

I, too, am strongly inclined to this "obvious" conclusion. The idea that, instead, she killed Omar the way Agatha/Lucrezia killed Vrin - but by accident, as with spurring Mr. Rovainen into motion - did not even occur to me. However, there is one apparent flaw in the obvious conclusion that I've just now noticed. The locket appears to work by noting when someone gets excited enough to go into the Spark state, and it induces a headache to prevent this from happening. (Von Pinn closely supervising Gil could work in an analogous way.)

However, this apparent flaw is a non-flaw; the locket does in fact work by suppression, and the headaches are simply the result of a struggle to activate a part of the brain that is being suppressed. How do we know this? What the locket is doing to the Lucrezia personality inside Agatha!

But that might be evidence of the Moloch-Revenant theory in another way. Agatha isn't getting headaches any more, but Lucrezia, who is a Spark, is shut down hard. This could mean that Agatha's Sparky talents have been shoved out of their usual location in her brain to a different part of her brain. If that's so, and given Moloch isn't a Spark, why should he die from a part of his brain that he isn't using being shut down?

Precisely because this can get really complicated, I will go with the "obvious" theory until I have additional evidence to sink my teeth into of Omar's possible revenant status. --Quadibloc 01:27, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

It's worth noting that the locket doesn't affect Lucrezia while she's holding it, only when she puts it on ✣ . When Moloch gets sick (off camera), he's probably carrying it, but unlikely to be wearing stolen jewelry that he plans to hawk; the closest ✣ he gets to wearing it is probably after he arrives at the doctor. This suggests to me that the locket-kills-Omar theory is incorrect. --DryBrook 16:55, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

I'd guess that the locket doesn't suppress, actually, because Agatha's still able to enter the madness place that all sparks possess. Rather, it just caused her to have a headache whenever she went there. Notice that after Barry gives Agatha the locket ✣ , it doesn't immediately shut her down. Instead it gives her a headache and only then does everything fade to grey. And she doesn't regain her ability to spark (and colors) for some time after losing the locket. My guess: the locket gives her a headache when she tries going to the madness place and in self defense she completely avoided it unless riled; hence she was only able to access it, at first, in her sleep when inhibitions were absent. Surgoshan 2:54, 6 February 2009 (UTC-5)

I always thought he had some latent sparky talent, and the suppression that was designed for a spark as strong as Agatha was way too much for him. Moloch, on the other hand, had no sparkyness, and therefore was unaffected. No evidence for this, just what I always assumed.

Hm. On the other hand, this is a variation I don't recall seeing before. ⚙Zarchne 21:22, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Here is my theory: The locket was designed to supress a very powerful spark, like Agatha. It did this by.... shall we say, draining the exess brainpower that is integral to a Spark; and when Agatha tried to use the brainpower that she knew she had, but was unable to access, she got a massive headache.

Omar was not any kind of Spark, let alone one as powerful as Agatha. So, when he took the locket, it started draining his brainpower. But since he didn't have a huge excess, it took from the store in his brain for the power needed to do basic functions; basically, it drained power from his life support. Here, the doctor says that "It's like he's shutting down. Like a machine without coal!" First, he got dizzy- there goes orientation abilities. Then, he collapsed, indicating he was completely dissorientated, and possibly that he lost leg functions. A little later, he lost speaking and cognitive functions. Then, he passed out, and it was only a matter of time until he died.

Now, as for why it worked on him while he was not wearing it, I don't know. Maybe Sparks have a higher defensive wall around their mind than normal people do? That would explain why Agatha had to wear it. Omar was keeping the locket on his person, and he was average (or, might I suggest, below average) intelligence; maybe he just left the gate open on his mental wall. HeterodyneGirl (talk) 18:49, September 22, 2012 (UTC) PS- I wrote this a while ago, but just recently signed up, if you were wondering about the edit