When the time comes for Tinker to get with the program, to fish or cut bait, to shit or get off the pot, to come on in for the big win, he first looks around for inspiration. An eyeline match cut reveals what he’s looking at: a troop of stuffed monkeys, posed in the familiar “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil” manner.

Only…only that’s not all, is it? There’s a fourth monkey, isn’t there? And what part of his body is this furry fellow covering? What evil is he intended to instruct us not to do?

The monkey’s covering his dick, that’s what I’m trying to point out here. He’s covering his monkey penis. See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, and last but most definitely not least, Fuck No Evil.

Again, this is the very end of the film. This is energy with which Rowdy Herrington, director, wishes to leave us. Tinker looks at a monkey holding his dick and says “A polar bear fell on me” and two old codgers chuckle to themselves with a dead body on the floor nearby.

When I say things like “I could watch Road House a hundred times and still find new details I’d never noticed before,” this monkey is the kind of thing I’m talking about. This monkey, holding its monkey genitals.

Pete Strodenmire and Red Webster can hardly contain their levity. And who could blame them? Tinker just said “A polar bear fell on me”! That’s objectively hilarious. Oh, sure, they just shot to death their nemesis of many years and are standing just feet away from his bullet-ridden corpse, one of five dead bodies currently festooning the property. And if they hadn’t opened fire, that man would likely have killed their friend Dalton, and quite possibly Dalton’s girlfriend and the dead man’s ex-wife Dr. Elizabeth Clay as well. And had that happened, it’s hard to imagine the blood-dimmed tide that would have swallowed Jasper, Missouri, as Brad Wesley used the fortune amassed from his commercial ventures to hire a new army of goons and seek vengeance on all those who aligned themselves against him. Pete and Red stood on a knife’s edge of carnage and did what needed to be done to prevent from tilting over into oblivion. This happened about ninety seconds ago. But now? Tinker said “A polar bear fell on me.” Ya gotta laugh!

There’s one chink in the armor of Frank Tilghman’s “everyone murder Brad Wesley together and then lie about it” plan. And yes, I’m assuming it was his plant. He delivers the killshot. He drops the one-liner. When Emmet and Strodenmire and Red Webster all ask each other if they saw what happened, per the sheriff’s request, they fail to ask Tilghman too; they know, without being told, that the Double Deuce owner’s role in the downfall of Brad Wesley must go unspoken.

Who do they ask instead? Who gets the final “You see anything?” The fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, the pain in the ass: Tinker.

Tinker is Brad Wesley’s sole surviving core goon. He is the only man in the Wesley organization present at his house on that day not to be brutally murdered by Dalton and his accomplices. No one knows better than he how the balance of power has shifted. No one knows better than he whose town this now is. Despite the fact that he came closer than any other goon to killing Dalton, way back in that fight in Tilghman’s office when he knifed the cooler’s side, Tinker is reconsidering his loyalties, and reconsidering them fast.

But he’s still been asked by Red Webster if he’d seen anything. Like Red and Emmet and Pete, he needs to say something to answer the question. The police want to know. What can he say that will allay the suspicions not just of the cops regarding his complicity, but of Dalton and the town worthies regarding his newfound allegiance to their cause? What are the magic words?

“A polar bear fell on me.”

That’s it. That’s his reply.

“A polar bear fell on me.”

That’s the final word on the death of Brad Wesley and the triumph of Dalton and his friends.

“A polar bear fell on me.”

That’s Tinker coming to terms with Dalton sparing him the fate of all his fellow goons by toppling a taxidermied animal on top of him.

“A polar bear fell on me.”

That’s…that’s…that’s the final line of dialogue in the film. That’s the note on which the filmmakers wish to leave us. That’s the last word, the summary statement. That’s “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” That’s Road House beating on, corpses against the current, borne ceaselessly into the JC Penney.

“A polar bear fell on me.”

Fin.

Jimmy is dead. Morgan is dead. O’Connor is dead. Ketcham is dead. Pat McGurn is dead. Four corpses litter Brad Wesley’s mansion. And what is his response when he sees the men who risked their lives from him lying bloodied and mangled all around his house? How does he react when he sees O’Connor’s lifeless husk? He smiles. It’s the grin of a man thinking “If it’s not one thing, it’s another!” or “When it rains, it pours!” or “Ya gotta love it!” It takes a true sociopath to respond to mass murder not with horror or rage or resignation or even cold indifference, but with what Rifftrax’s Mike Nelson referred to as “wry amusement.” Ha! What a day, Brad Wesley thinks as he walks past one slain servant after another. Or as his enemy Red Webster once put it, That’s life. Who can explain it.

Of course, he never could stand a Bleeder, so there’s that too.

Technically speaking, Dalton is not the man who murders Ketcham, in the sense that he does not die instantly from being stabbed and carved in the guts. No, he’s still alive when Pat McGurn accidentally blows a hole in his back when Dalton pivots and uses Ketcham to block Pat’s incoming shot. Dalton then withdraws the knife from his dead foe’s belly and lobs it perfectly at Pat, where it lodges in his solar plexus, causing him to misfire his gun one last time before plummeting to the floor one story below and presumably breaking his neck, killing him. So ends the saga of the Sister-Son, the shiftless ex-lover of Frank Tilghman, the Man with the Weak Constitution, Patrick McGurn. And with him dies the instigating incident for the entire Dalton/Wesley War, the firing of Pat McGurn from his job of stealing from the register at the Double Deuce. He won’t be robbing registers ever again. Never again, the dulcet tones of Pat McGurn calling someone “chicken-dick.” Alas, alas, alas.

Brad Wesley may not seem like much of a details guy, considering how much of his business he delegates to his dubiously competent goon squad. But look at the butt of the knife that our good friend Gary Ketcham used to kill the already wounded and winded Wade Garrett. That’s a quarter, tails up—perhaps the very same quarter Brad Wesley flipped to decide whether to murder Wade or Dr. Elizabeth Clay. (Not that he communicated which person corresponded with heads or tails during the coin toss. See what I mean about how he doesn’t come across as much of a details guy?) Point is, this knife is always going to come up tails if used properly.

And use it properly Dalton does. When he gets the drop on Ketcham, he has just enough time to kick his shotgun and send his shot wild, then drop him to the floor. Ketcham reacts quickly, unsheathing his knife (which he’d recovered from Dalton’s car) and immediately adopting a knife-fighting stance. Showing steely resolve, Dalton dodges a few slashes, then kicks the knife out of Ketcham’s hands and straight up into the air. He grabs Ketcham, catches the knife after it makes its suspiciously leisurely descent, and jams it into his foe’s guts.

“Tails again,” he quips, and god help us, these are the last words Gary Ketcham will ever here. Imagine committing your life to a cause, in this case Brad Wesley’s control of a town full of old farts, and having that commitment lead you to a poetically just death, if by “poetically” you mean “on the level of a bathroom-wall limerick.” One needn’t like Katcham as a person in order to pity him.

After discovering the dead bodies of Morgan and O’Connor, Ketcham makes an even bigger show of stealth than he had before. He’s all silently approaching corners and then turning with his shotgun at the ready, only to find an empty space where he’d thought to find Dalton. Then something—goon-sense?—tells him exactly where Dalton is: He’s right behind him.

The fight that ensues is swift and brutal and ends with two men dead, neither of whom is Dalton. You get the sense that at this point Dalton wants his enemies to see him coming. I mean, look at him back there, just standing and waiting, giving Ketcham a fighting chance. There’s no other explanation for Dalton allowing himself to be intercepted: He wants to look in this man’s eyes as the lights go out. Boo!

Morgan was an important man, in the same sense that Brad Wesley’s grandfather was an important man: “He was an asshole.” Or as Carrie Ann put it, “Morgan was born an asshole and just grew bigger.” Here was a guy who was so temperamentally unsuited to the trade of bouncing that his presence actually made the old, hellhole version of the Double Deuce worse than it would have been had he not been there. Morgan had a great voice, a knack for off-kilter line readings (how can we forget “You’re a dead man“?), a penchant for tossing people through tables, and a thing for little moon boots. He’s gone now, murdered by Dalton, not even afforded the dignity of an onscreen death.

I can’t say he’ll be missed by many, because most of the people who might have missed him either are dead already or will be dead within minutes. One of those unfortunates is O’Connor, aka the Bleeder, the rumble-voiced dink who got his ass kicked by Dalton, then got his ass kicked by Brad Wesley for getting his ass kicked by Dalton, then got his ass kicked by Dalton and Wade Garrett in tandem. Then he, too, got killed by Dalton, offscreen, which—speaking as a general rule here—is not the place most movies want to kill their memorable goons. Road House is the exception that proves that particular rule.

And who is our guide through all this, our combination Charon and Virgil? It is Ketcham, the least memorable major goon, sneaking around Brad Wesley’s mansion looking for Dalton and finding only his handiwork. “Shit,” he says when he finds O’Connor slumped lifeless against the wall. That he was, Ketcham, that he was.

Ketcham—you remember Ketcham, don’t you?—is the one who puts it all together. It is he who investigates the thoroughly shot up and burned out wreck of Dalton’s car and discovers Dalton isn’t in it. (Surprise!) It is he who finds the knife pulled out of Wade Garrett’s chest and driven through the gas pedal to force the empty car to ram Brad Wesley’s compound. It is he who issues the four goons in his charge their marching orders: “Find that prick!” It is he who puts the knife back in his empty hip sheathe, revealing to the audience that it was he who put the knife in Wade Garrett’s chest. These climactic beats of the Road House story are pounded out by one man and one man alone.

Of course, and as this series has detailed, no one knows who the fuck Ketcham is when they first watch this film. Or when they seventh watch this film. Christ, before I wrote 140,000 words about Road House in daily increments I’m not sure even I realized the pivotal role this asshole played in several major events—driving his monster truck, lurking in the background of the Bleeder speech, spying on Dalton and Elizabeth from his monster truck, kicking Dalton with the boot-knife, running over Strodenmire Ford with his monster truck, killing Wade Garrett, and now, at the last, serving as the focal-point character for Brad Wesley’s goons unsuccessful attempt to find and eliminate Dalton. He genuinely is an important goon in this movie.

You just have no reason to believe that unless you’ve picked apart all the minutiae, is the thing. Importance is one thing, but do you remember him the way you remember the other four guys in this scene—Morgan, Pat McGurn, Tinker, and O’Connor, aka Terry Funk, John Doe, the funny overweight one, and the Bleeder? Of course you don’t, and why would you? They’ve looked and acted memorably. Ketcham might as well be a mannequin performing his tasks. You don’t even get to see him drive the knife into Wade, which might cement him as Jimmy Junior, so to speak. He’s just a stuffed shirt with a boring look and no preexisting connections to the Double Deuce by which to remember him.

Yet he will be the central goon in the carnage to come. Find that prick? My friends, we’ve already found him.

Pat McGurn is weak. His uncle, his only mother’s brother, Brad Wesley, says so himself: “Pat’s got a weak constitution, you boys know that. That’s why he’s working as a bartender. He’s my only sister’s son, and if he doesn’t have me who’s he got? And if I’m not there, you’re there.” An entire ecosystem of goonsmanship, formed to protect Pat McGurn from the vicissitudes of the mad mad mad mad world outside Brad Wesley’s mansion. Pat may show some sand every once in a while, like when he pulled a knife the size of a newborn baby on Dalton and tried to murder him in front of several witnesses while calling him “chicken-dick,” but in general he’s just the loser who got fired for skimming the till. It’s enough to make you wonder what his former lover Frank Tilghman saw in the guy.

But not here, not now, not with Dalton’s car barreling down on him. Here we see a whole new side of Pat McGurn, a gangly grinning gun-toting side. Look at that shit-eating smile! He pumps that shotgun with a boogie-woogie rhythm in his hips, like he’s mentally saying “yee-haw!” or playing “Rock This Town” by the Stray Cats. Maybe this is just the default setting for actor John Doe, who after all was the frontman for the Los Angeles punk act X. This is Pat McGurn taking the stage and rocking Dalton’s car’s face off. Sadly—sadly for Pat, at least—his performance is about to be cut short.

After three star turns in under five minutes, Dalton’s car finally has its first fight scene. First and last, sad to say. It barrels towards Brad Wesley’s mansion at breakneck speed, plowing right through a fence and over a hedge to its appointment with destiny. Arrayed against it are Wesley’s five core goons who are a) alive and b) not Karpis—Ketchum, O’Connor the Bleeder, Morgan, Tinker, and Pat McGurn. There’s no jaw-jacking involved here. It’s on sight. They open fire with an array of shotguns and handguns—all of which raise the question of why they bothered with the fistfighting and knife-fighting in the first place. They certainly don’t hesitate to shoot Dalton’s Benz, and (they assume) Dalton himself, full of lead. Was it Jimmy’s death that lifted the shibboleth against straight-up murder by gunfire? Did Dalton bring this fusillade upon himself? Or at the very least on his car?

Jimmy Reno has exactly four minutes to live when he sets off the initial explosion in Emmett’s home. Four minutes to the second. What an emotional journey that must be for him. The tension and thrill of being a sneak in the night. The firebug awe of the detonation. The bonus, unlooked for, of the secondary explosion, even bigger than the first. Stopping his getaway motorbike to laugh uproariously at Dalton, Doc, and Emmett, reveling in their powerlessness compared to his fiery prowess. The sudden shock of being knocked off his bike by a flying man. The determination to kill this man. The back and forth of their battle. The pain of incurring blows and the satisfaction of inflicting them. The sadistic delight of reminiscing about his time as a prison rapist. The moment when it all changes and he realizes he’s in trouble, deep trouble. The desperate decision to pull a gun and settle things for good and all. The rushed in-the-moment thinking that occurs when you feel you’re at immediate risk of death. The pain in his throat. Oblivion. From lighting up the night with his malice to floating face-down dead in a river, in the time it takes the Beatles to do the “na na na nanana na” part of “Hey Jude.” Take a sad song and make it wetter.

Some men have a face that says “I can and will kick your ass, and I will be weird doing it.” In the ’80s and ’90s these men often found work as memorable goons in Hollywood action films, playing the heavy’s henchman, a mutant in leather bondage gear, someone who gets dispatched with a one-liner, you know the deal. In the case of Road House, one wore a sporty blue t-shirt and didn’t do much of anything.

The man you’re looking at here is Benny Urquidez, martial artist, stuntman, and fight trainer. He worked closely with Patrick Swayze and Marshall Teague to help choreograph the legitimately phenomenal fight scene between Dalton and Jimmy that will take place later in the film. Even though he’s just kind of in the background here, milling around with all the other goons as Brad Wesley prepares to order the destruction of a Ford dealership, he stands out. You know how I’ve gone on about how to be a good goon, you need to get introduced with a memorable shot or while performing a memorable action? Benny’s nameless goon whips off his sunglasses like a @dril character, revealing a distinctive beady-eyed visage beneath. He’s hard to miss, so hard in fact that the first few times I saw the movie my mind just filled in the blanks and conjured him into fight scenes in which he was not present at all.

Because that’s the thing: He’s not present in any fight scenes. He’s not present in any scenes period, except for this one. In a way he’s the heir to Karpis: He makes an impression and then <poof> he’s gone. Only unlike that dashingly handsome mystery man and possible Cousin in Memphis, his legacy lives on in the titanic struggle between an itinerant bouncer-philosopher and the chief enforcer of a guy who has his own reserved parking space at the mall. It is through Dalton and Jimmy that the Lost Goon may be observed, ripping throats from another plane.

Gary grins from ear to ear. Jimmy does a double fist-pump. O’Connor raises an arm aloft in triumph. Tinker yee-haws his hat off his head. Pat McGurn and Morgan? They literally embrace. (Jimmy and Tinker merely clasp hands.) The Goon in Blue (about whom more later) is just happy to be there. And Brad Wesley acts like a game show host. Truly, the destruction of Strodenmire Ford by the coward Gary Ketcham is the high-water mark of villainous delight for the Brad Wesley organization. For once in their miserable lives they managed to get one over on their enemies in a way that did not require any of them to get their asses kicked. They didn’t even need to throw a punch, much less take one. They just had to get behind the wheel of a monster truck—one of them did, anyway—and drive on through to the other side. The rest take a joy in this of the sort you see in bars when the home team wins the Super Bowl. They are thrilled, inordinately thrilled, “the director overdid it” thrilled, to have watched a monster truck run over a car dealership. Did I point out that Morgan and Pat, the two orneriest cusses in the whole gang, hug each other, like one just announced his wife is expecting? This is the rough beast they gave birth to instead, haulin’ ass towards Bethlehem to put a little something down on a new car.

You’ve heard me complain about Ketcham, Brad Wesley’s most anonymous goon. How he’s handsome in a generic, Ken-doll way. How he’s a shirt-tucked-into-jeans kind of guy. How he doesn’t get a memorable introduction, just kind of sidling along in the background during the Bleeder scene. How no one ever bothers saying his credited name “Ketcham” out loud. How he pales in comparsion to Morgan, O’Connor, Jimmy, Pat McGurn, even Tinker, but how he’s the final guardian of Brad Wesley and the killer of Wade Garrett. How despite wielding the boot-knife and driving the monster truck you could walk right past him without even realizing who he was. How he’s aggressively, almost confrontationally non-descript.

Imagine how I feel now that I realize his name is “Gary.”

“Well, what are you waitin’ for, Gary? Drive through there!” That’s what Brad Wesley yells just before this tool in his giant red baseball cap runs over Strodenmire Ford with his monster truck. He says it with his back turned and with no eyeline-match cut, which is why I’ve watched this movie several dozen times and never noticed it before, but yeah, that’s Ketcham’s first name, Gary. Gary Ketcham. Gary, that most vanilla of names. If beige were a name rather than a color, it would be Gary. Gary is the “pic of myself wearing Oakleys in the driver’s seat of my car as a twitter avatar” of names. Gary. Wade Garrett gets killed by a guy named Gary. You remember Gary, don’t you? Wait, who are we talking about again?

It’s not often that you encounter two shots of two diametrically opposed characters doing basically the same thing but in such different ways that you can understand everything there is to know about them both at a glance. It’s not often that you encounter a movie like Road House either, though. And here we have two future combatants in a life or death struggle, one arm pulled back, the other extended. The first is poised but serene, making a fist but with no intention to use it, shirtless, glistening, one with nature, wet with nature. The second is enraged, pointing at an enemy, singling him out, hungry for a kill, blocking out the blue light of the happy societal microcosm in which he is an interloper. Dalton and Jimmy, two sides of the same coin, the Batman and Joker of the JC Penney.

There’s a thin line between threat and come-on, and Road House spends its final reels dancing all over it. When Dalton steps in to stop Jimmy’s trouncing of Wade Garrett (and we love Wade, we love Wade Garrett, but this is a piss poor showing on the sensei’s part), he naturally makes a mortal enemy of his opposite number. Jimmy’s relationship with Dalton heretofore has been one of long, meaningful stares, without so much as a word exchanged. But the relationship has escalated, and a statement is called for. It’s almost an overture for the opera to follow, featuring all the major melodies: smug superiority, possessiveness, infantilization, a reference to Dalton’s ass. Jimmy and his biological father Brad Wesley (that’s my statement, no further questions) will return to these refrains over and over as the duel for Jasper heads toward its bloody conclusion. After much toil and tribulation, we will finally learn whose ass is whose.

Jimmy Reno wants Wade Garrett. (Yes, his last name is Reno, as mentioned by Patrick Swayze in interview clips and as listed all over actor Marshall Teague’s CV. Yes, this could mean he is an illegitimate child of Brad Wesley born in Nevada, and Reno is his bastard name. No, I will not be taking further questions at this time.) Boy, does he ever. Enough to pole vault over Jack’s prone body onto the stage, just to be better seen and heard by his quarry. Once Wade responds, Jimmy jumps right back down again. He wanted to make a show of this. He wanted to ensure that Wade Garrett could not back out of this confrontation without losing face. He wanted the entire Double Deuce to watch him prepare to end a legend.

And Wade Garrett knows it, that’s the real asskicker. He and Dalton are off their game tonight, perhaps because of the traumatic destruction of a nearby business that’s still burning as this fight takes place, in front of the man who ordered the arson. The whole Double Deuce team is off its game, perhaps, otherwise the numbers would have worked in Jack and Hank and Younger’s favor. Instead, they’ve been laid out all over the dance floor while Wade and Dalton tussle with lesser goons we’ve never seen before nor will ever see again.

(Yes, one of them is wearing a large black hat. Yes, so is a woman visible in the background. Yes, I continue to be perplexed by the presence of all those hats. Again, I will not be taking further questions at this time.)

This is the moment Jimmy chooses to call out Wade Garrett. He vaults onto the stage. He turns. He points with the force of a kung fu strike. He bellows a single word, a single syllable: “YOU!” And Wade Garrett knows the time to be tested has come.

When Jimmy finally enters the fray, after three quarters of the film have elapsed, he does so wielding a pool cue. In this he is living the dream of every child who ever grabbed a hockey stick or whiffle ball bat or cardboard wrapping-paper tube and fancied themself a swordfighter, a Jedi, a Robin Hood, a Zorro, a Knight of the Round Table. He’s playing a game with violence.

Of all Brad Wesley’s “boys,” to use his preferred term, Jimmy is his clear favorite. It has been the position of this series that this stands to reason, because Jimmy is Brad Wesley’s bastard son. Once estranged, they are now thick as thieves. The older man, I suspect, yearns less to make up for lost time than to, in his words, “gather unto me what is mine.” A Brad Wesley who discovers his by-blow is a Brad Wesley who instantly dedicates himself to Brad Wesleyifing that product of his loins—who will see himself in all his offspring’s most valued qualities.

But by the same token, Jimmy would look to be the son Brad Wesley never knew he had. That means obedience. That means mimicry—the same sly smile, the same eyes sparkling with malignant good cheer. And that means, on some level, behaving as a child would behave. Yes, Jimmy is about to cut through Dalton’s men like knife cutting through cake. But he’ll do so with a toy in his hand.

One of the several hypotheticals Pain Don’t Hurt has entertained at length is my belief that Frank Tilghman is the Emperor Palpatine figure of the story, the secret puppet master behind Brad Wesley who engineered the conflict with Dalton and brought it to a head by orchestrating the murder of Wesley and his associates when they were no longer of any use. Another theory Pain Don’t Hurt has espoused is that Frank Tilghman and Pat McGurn, Brad Wesley’s nephew and Double Deuce bartender, were once romantically involved and that he is therefore and visibly upset about having to fire him. They seem mutually exclusive propositions.

But this is true only if you believe that Tilghman is not just sinister but supernatural. No one can control for all variables, and it’s entirely possible that Frank’s Pat-shaped blind spot prevented him from thinking through the consequences of hiring a man to keep everything on the straight and narrow when your ex-lover is a transparent thief and ringer for the very stooge whose downfall you’re plotting. It’s also possible that Frank knew full well that Dalton would exile Pat from the Double Deuce, and that he deemed this an acceptable loss in service of the larger plan. Indeed, he could have considered it a form of alibi—after all, what kind of man would fire his own ex, for whom he clearly still had feelings, if he himself weren’t morally unimpeachable?

What kind of man, indeed.