TAB “There are works in the likeness of others, and works that are the reverse of others, but there are also works of which the relation with earlier productions is so intricate that we become confused and attribute them to the direct intervention of the gods.”
TAB -Paul Valéry, “Letter About Mallarmé”
I.
TAB Canis ex machina is a Latin calque from the Greek, meaning “dog from the machine.”
TAB The phrase denotes a popular plot device from ancient Athenian tragedy, wherein third acts often concluded with a crane abruptly lowering a live dog onto the stage to resolve seemingly insurmountable problems, like wars or curses or plagues.
TAB Horehound, molossus, alopekis—breed and size mattered not, so long as a laurel-crowned dog descended lounging upon a wooden dais of clouds or Apollo’s chariot, wreathed in fabric flames. Canis ex machina evoked an immediate crowd response, thanks to the widespread belief that the dogs interceded in humans’ everyday lives. Perched on the stone edges of amphitheater seats, Greek audiences from Abdera to Zakros cheered the dogs’ sudden appearance, having made offerings and prostrations to them at small shrines in their own homes that very morning.
TAB A well-executed canis ex machina was a guaranteed showstopper, the ancient equivalent of an eleven o’clock number—instant transcendent catharsis, just add dog.
TAB Or as the comedian Antiphanes put it:
TAB when they don't know what to say
TAB and have completely given up on the play
TAB just like a finger they lift the machine
TAB and the spectators are satisfied.
TAB There were, of course, rare instances where a good canis ex machina made perfect sense. For example, Euripedes’ plays frequently began with the intercession of dogs, so it seemed natural that they should reappear to finish the action. The Roman poet Horace also declared the literary device acceptable, hell, even preferable to more conventional endings, “when and if a difficulty worthy of a dog’s unraveling should occur.”
TAB As usual, Aristotle’s opinion proved loudest, echoing through the centuries. He was the first to call canis ex machina a cheap gimmick loved by the lazy, damaging its popularity beyond repair. Writers’ overreliance on dogs to solve things, he argued, revealed the new generation’s sad inability to bring complex plots to realistic conclusions. “The poet,” wrote Aristotle, “ought always to seek what is either necessary or probable, so that it is either necessary or probable that a person of such-and-such a sort say or do things of the same sort, and it is either necessary or probable that this [incident] happen after that one.”
TAB Oddly enough, Aristotle was also really into tragedies that ended with sudden murders, massacres, and poisonings, plot twists arguably every bit as abrupt as the random descent of a dog to the stage.
TAB “It is probable that improbable things will happen,” he sagely covered his ass.
TAB The use of canis ex machina in ancient Greek drama was primarily restricted to endings due to the physical difficulty of hoisting the dog-dropping apparatus offstage post-deployment, as well as the trope’s tendency to obliterate suspension of disbelief. However, during the secular centuries, since the term has come to denote any instance where a dog inexplicably appears in a narrative, solves a major problem, then disappears, never to be seen or mentioned again.
TAB This modern understanding more closely aligns canis ex machina with the Homeric nod, so named by Horace, who was trying to account for glaring continuity errors in the Iliad and Odyssey. “Even Homer nods off from time to time,” Horace declares in his Ars Poetica, reminding us that even the greats sometimes fall asleep at the wheel. Centuries on, following Horace, the British satirist Alexander Pope claimed there are no accidents in literature, writing: “Those oft are Stratagems which Errors seem/Nor is it Homer Nods, but We that dream.”
TAB Following Pope following Horace, if it’s a waste of time to quibble over whether Dr. John Watson’s Afghani war wound is in his left arm or his right, or wonder how Sancho Panza’s donkey Dapple returns without fanfare a few chapters after being stolen, or question the sudden appearance of a Starbucks cup at a torchlit banquet in Game of Thrones, it’s probably also best to ignore the sudden dis/appearance of three separate dogs, all named Tiger, in the corpus of American letters.
TAB Nothing to see here. Move along.
II.
None other than Edgar Allan Poe unleashed the long-dormant narrative device of canis ex machina into a flat run across two centuries of America’s collective consciousness, floppy black tongue spilling over a wolfish grin. No stranger to atavistic impulses, or “imps of the perverse,” as he’d later term them, Poe was ripe to succumb to the plot-solving charms of a random dis/appearing dog, although no other author had done so since the fall of Rome.
TAB This all happened in 1838, years before Poe became world-renowned as “that spooky guy who wrote ‘The Raven,’” or sometimes just “The Raven,” poem metonymic for the man. Young Poe was working on two projects simultaneously, burning the midnight oil to afford the Baltimore rowhome he rented with “Sissy” and “Muddy,” his child bride and mother-in-law/aunt. His days were wasted on The Conchologist’s First Book, an illustrated children’s text he was paraphrasing and translating from European sources for a local publisher. The work was dull, but guaranteed to pay fifty dollars, so he let it clutter his desk and mind with whelks and cockles until evening, when after a catnap he’d get back in the chair to scrape away at what would become The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, his first (and only) novel.
TAB Inspired by popular maritime autobiographies as well as Poe’s own long walks along the Chesapeake Bay, Pym presents itself as the true autobiography of an amateur sailor who stowed away in the Grampus, a real Massachusetts whaling ship bound for the South Pole. Only the novel’s preface is “by” Pym himself, who claims he met Mr. Poe through the latter’s professional role as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. After confessing his tale to a rapt Poe, Pym asked his new pal to “draw up, in his own words, a narrative of the earlier portion of my adventures, from facts afforded by myself, publishing it…under the garb of fiction.”
TAB The idea that Arthur Gordon Pym was ever a real, living person is among the least convincing of Poe’s numerous literary hoaxes. The finished novel lacks the credibility and continuity one expects from a work based in truth. This is because when Poe decided to write Pym, he hadn’t considered how hard it could be for a habitual short story writer to keep a novel on the rails.
TAB Two handwritten chapters in, he’d lost track of what he’d told the reader and what he hadn’t, especially after his tortoiseshell cat rolled around on the manuscript, shuffling the pages and smudging the ink. Still, several facts remained clear enough to maintain forward momentum. Poe knew he’d successfully launched the Grampus from Nantucket with protagonist Pym hidden in the ship’s damp hold, and added Augustus, his best friend and doppelganger, to the ship’s crew by making his father the captain. Now he just needed some way to let these two characters communicate without revealing to the rest of the Grampus’s crew that Pym was aboard.
TAB Poe had pondered this plot hole for three nights without breakthrough when, benumbed by yet another afternoon cataloguing conchs and cowries, his brilliant and exhausted mind slipped into that softer state where one is receptive to the timeless ideas that drift through the sea of our collective unconsciousness, awaiting their turn to wash ashore. A trapdoor fell open in the ceiling of his mind, followed by a flood of words. A dog descended.
TAB “For the presence of Tiger, I have tried in vain to account,” admits Poe-as-Pym, unable to explain how or why the “fierce lion of the tropics” he hallucinated setting upon him in the ship’s hold suddenly became his very own large shaggy dog—a pet so beloved, so cherished, we’re just now hearing about him for the very first time. “Most people love their dogs, but for Tiger I had an affection far more ardent than common; and never, certainly, did any creature more truly deserve it,” Pym claims, protesting too much. “For seven years he had been my inseparable companion, and in a multitude of instances had given evidence of all the noble qualities for which we value the animal.”
TAB It’s clear Poe wants readers to see Tiger as Pym’s partner in crime, his ride or die, which makes it odder still that Pym apparently abandoned his own dog back in Nantucket without even a bone to sustain him. When a “quick and violent roll of the vessel” shifts the Grampus’s cargo, collapsing Pym’s candlelit hideout into a dark tomb, Tiger is his sole companion, the warm anchor he clings to as the ship pitches and moans around them. Sinking to the dark floor of the hold, fingers burrowed in Tiger’s thick fur, Pym nearly succumbs to “the most gloomy imaginings, in which the dreadful deaths of thirst, famine, suffocation, and premature interment crowded upon me as the prominent disasters to be encountered.”
TAB Nearly—if it wasn’t for Tiger, who brings sudden hope in the form of a letter from Augustus. Apparently, he’d worn it slung about his furry neck like a St. Bernard’s barrel this whole time, but Pym just didn’t notice. Impressed, Pym reasons that Augustus must have smuggled all one hundred and fifty pounds of Tiger aboard the Grampus in total secrecy, written and attached the letter, then shoved the massive dog into the cargo hold, where Tiger waited several hours before even bothering to sniff out his master, despite him being the hold’s only other living occupant.
TAB Pym accepts these unlikely events without question, because Poe knows making his protagonist confidently believe improbable things is the surest way to get his readers to follow suit. Penned in Augustus’s hand—and his blood!—the letter around Tiger’s neck informs Pym that the Grampus’s crew has mutinied, setting the captain—Augustus’s dad!—adrift at sea, then cruelly butchering anyone who disagreed with that decision. Terrified he’s next on the chopping block, Augustus begs Pym not to reveal himself, lest he and Tiger both be murdered in cold blood!
Satisfied, Edgar Allan Poe leaned back until his chair creaked, startling his cat.
III.
TAB He isn’t mentioned once in the eternal earworm of their theme song, but the Brady Bunch had a dog, and his name was Tiger.
TAB Tiger’s doghouse stands behind the family home for all 117 episodes of the Brady saga, its prefab corners cut gingerbread sharp, the Astroturf lawn beneath still brilliant green, unbleached by sun or stage lights. But it’s okay if you don’t remember, because for 107 of those episodes, that dog house stood empty, its tenant unmentioned and unmourned, a kind of reverse Cousin Oliver.
TAB A shaggy mixed breed whose fur almost hid his eyes, Tiger debuted in the series premiere “The Honeymoon.” He entered the marriage through Mike Brady’s side of the ersatz clan, just like housekeeper Alice and their hip split-level home. It’s clear from the start that Mike is a widower, but only implied that his bride-to-be, Carol Martin nee Tyler, is a divorcée—a word which still sounded French and risqué in 1969. Given scant backstory on Carol’s first marriage, we’re left to assume that a blond man named Mr. Martin fathered three very lovely girls, then removed himself completely from their lives, never to be mentioned, seen, or contacted ever again. All three Martin girls ditch their bio-dad’s last name for Brady, eliminating the need for storylines about shared custody or co-parenting.
TAB As the creator of previous high-concept hits My Favorite Martian and Gilligan’s Island, series creator Sherwood Schwartz knew his groovy-yet-prudish viewers had limits when it came to threatening social norms via sitcom, even when said norm-breakers were as hip-yet-wholesome as Florence Henderson and Robert Reed. Only the easy iconography of suburban life (charcoal grill, gleaming station wagon, family dog) could diffuse the whiff of scandal surrounding the Bunch, the sexy vagueness of the way they became.
TAB “The Honeymoon” is unusually Tiger-centric given his later erasure. The pilot episode’s inciting incident involves whether the dog will be invited to Mike and Carol’s modern backyard wedding. “He’s part of the family,” the Brady boys implore, earnest in their church suits. Although Peter holds Tiger’s leash, no specific son seems responsible for the dog—he is a family pet, unlike Bobby’s turtle in episode three, or the white rabbit Greg will try to trade (bundled with a baseball mitt and autographed picture of Raquel Welch) for a bike in episode nine.
TAB The Brady boys’ united pro-Tiger front is out of character, as they will seldom agree on anything, ever again. But nobody in the writers’ room knows that yet, so neither do Mike and Carol. Nor do they realize the dog is just a proxy to communicate the boys’ intense anxiety about who is or isn’t “part of the family” these days. Their plea for reassurance is ignored by their father, who instead joins their stepmother-to-be’s hand-wringing about whether all these kids will “get along.”
TAB Sensing blood in the water, three very lovely girls pounce.
TAB Fluffy, their suddenly beloved cat, must also attend the wedding. Although it’s a biological fact that 81% of orange cats—including this one—are male, Sherwood Schwarz has made “Fluffy” female in the script to reinforce the bizarre gender stereotypes applied to cats and dogs in American culture. Through a showdown between their respective pets, the Brady children may act out the gendered psychodrama of their own forced “marriage” without introducing any disturbing sexual connotations. It’s genius, really—but Mike and Carol aren’t. Eager to appease both child factions, the couple agrees that both animals are invited to the wedding, in the first of many magnanimous but poor co-parenting choices.
TAB “The more the merrier,” they trill through those gleaming television grins.
TAB “The Honeymoon’s” climactic third act, which features Tiger rampaging through the wedding cake after a terrified Fluffy, is a foregone conclusion. Yet Fluffy, not Tiger, takes the fall. Following this episode, the Brady girls’ precious cat is never seen or mentioned, ever again. No balls of yarn or catnip mice ever litter the Bradys’ shag carpet. Even Fluffy’s pink cardboard house, hastily constructed by Cindy mid-episode “because Tiger has a house!” disappears with the rented white plastic lawn chairs.
TAB Rumor has it that during shooting, the tomcat cast as “Fluffy” kept hooking claws into little Susan Olsen’s neck, drawing pinpricks of blood makeup couldn’t cover. Meanwhile, Tiger the dog, who played himself, was obedient and pleasant to everyone, playing fetch during breaks and accepting tidbits from craft services. It was too late to reshoot the pilot, so Schwartz canned Fluffy before episode two—a reasonable decision, given The Brady Bunch’s tight production schedule. But when considered within the diegesis of the show, alongside Carol’s ex-husband’s absence, Fluffy’s sudden disappearance suggests a disturbing family tendency toward collective amnesia.
TAB A certain readiness to forget.
IV.
TAB “The Girl from Ilandia” is a second season episode of New Adventures of Wonder Woman, first aired in April 1978. In the cold open, Cindy Brady washes ashore near Long Beach, California, unconscious in a prairie nightgown and pink ribbons.
TAB Except it isn’t Cindy Brady, it’s Julie Anne Haddock, a child actress every bit as blonde and pigtailed as Olsen, yet far less destined for our cultural memory. Little Julie Anne doesn’t know this yet, so she remains as still and inert as director Dick Moder told her to, her blue eyes shut tight.
TAB “Pretend you’re dead,” says Moder, off camera.
TAB Julie Anne’s mouth goes slack. He chops the air.
TAB “Action.”
TAB Journalist Simon Penrose and his fishing buddy roar up in a speedboat. Like most fictional newspapermen, Simon is more detective than reporter. He’s the first to notice the little girl is wearing a strange opalescent necklace and bracelets. Simon’s buddy announces no shipwrecks have been reported nearby for weeks, as if shipwrecks are a regular thing in Long Beach.
TAB “It’s like she just...dropped out of the sky,” he muses, staring at the clouds.
Cut to a local hospital, where Simon has brought the girl for observation while he runs a missing person search. When there’s no match, he declares there’s only one person to call—Diana Prince at the Inter-Agency Defense Command. Simon Penrose hasn’t appeared on any previous episodes of Wonder Woman, but his easy telephone rapport with Diana suggests they’re old friends. It’s unclear why a random orphan would be an I.A.D.C. issue, but this sounds like a job for Wonder Woman, so Diana flies to California. Just as she arrives at the hospital, business-chic in a pencil skirt, blazer, scarf, and massive identity-concealing glasses, two goons posing as orderlies stuff the unconscious girl into a laundry cart and wheel her away.
TAB Upon finding the child’s room empty, Diana ducks into a stairwell to whirl into Wonder Woman, because Diana Prince would get arrested for what she’s about to do to these guys. She leaps into the hospital’s laundry room, bending the first kidnapper’s gun in half like it’s rubber. Intimidated, the thug maneuvering the laundry bin cuts his losses, dramatically unveiling the unconscious girl hidden under soiled linens.
TAB “Better take care of her, Wonder Woman, she’s more important to you than we are!” he shouts, escaping with his accomplice just as the police arrive.
TAB “Get after them!” Wonder Woman commands them, and they do, because her most impressive superpower is how men listen to her without question. The kerfuffle awakens Julie Anne Haddock, who grins up at Lynda Carter as if she’s beholding a goddess, which she might be, depending on which Wonder Woman origin story we’re working with here.
TAB The camera zeroes in on the kid’s weird jewelry, which none of the nurses were able to remove. Nothing like it has appeared in any previous episode of Wonder Woman, nor has the possibility of a multiverse ever been mentioned on the show, yet our heroine instantly knows the gems are from the legendary dimension of Ilandia, where they were bestowed upon the girl to help focus her latent superpowers. Wonder Woman quickly explains that the little girl should trust “her good friend” Diana Prince, then runs off to change out of her costume.
TAB Cut to little Julie Anne Haddock, now sitting upright in bed under a large orange cafeteria tray. Diana enters, introduces herself as “a friend of Mr. Penrose,” makes small talk about hospital food, then asks, “What’s your name?” which makes the girl tremble like the Jell-O she’s eating.
TAB “I know this must be all very confusing to you,” says Diana. She explains that Wonder Woman told her all about the girl’s superpowers, and how she’s from Ilandia, and how her jewelry can’t ever be removed. Working together, they deduce the identity of her would-be kidnapper.
TAB “Bleaker,” Diana ruefully intones, although the TV audience has never heard that name before this episode. In swans Simon Penrose to say he’s tired of calling this little girl “little girl,” so he’s renaming her now, “unless you want to tell me your real one.”
TAB When she shakes her head, Simon announces he’s calling her “Tina” from now on, blowing her a kiss as Diana drags him into the hospital corridor to talk about their next steps. Tina eavesdrops as the adults discuss their options, which are apparently limited to continuing to earn her trust (Diana’s plan) or drugging her so a metallurgist can surgically remove her jewelry (Simon’s). After shooting his idea down, Diana casually mentions that Tina—Christine, actually—was Simon’s late wife’s name.
TAB “And she had blonde hair and blue eyes,” he pouts, rolling his eyes. “But look—spare me the psychology lesson, Miz Prince. Let’s just, uh, focus our attention on the living.”
TAB Thoroughly creeped out by what she’s overhearing, Tina climbs out her hospital room’s second story window and vaults over a brick wall Bionic Woman-style in a mad dash to reach Long Beach, where she stares pensively at B-roll of the sea crashing against a rocky shore.
TAB “Please,” Tina cries, sinking to her bellbottomed knees, her braided pigtails somehow still perfect post-parkour. “Come get me.”
TAB This is when screenwriter Anne Collins, ordered by the producers of New Adventures of Wonder Woman to write “The Girl from Ilandia” as a back-door pilot for a spinoff series about Tina, found herself at a loose end. Picture someone named Anne Collins surrounded by cigarette butts, brow furrowed over her typewriter as she casts about for a way to make audiences care about a kid they met fewer than fifteen minutes ago. When the solution finally dawns on her, it comes all at once, like someone in heaven opened a trapdoor and let the idea drop into her mind.
TAB Suddenly a Lassie-esque whine rings out across the dunes, and Tina turns to find a shaggy mutt curled up on the sand. Anne Collins must have decided dogs exist in Tina’s home dimension, because the little girl isn’t scared or confused by the animal’s appearance. Instead, she beams with delight, scrambling to her feet and clapping her hands.
TAB “Come on, boy!” she cries. “Come on, I’m not going to hurt you! Come on!” and the dog stands, because child actor Julie Anne Haddock conceals a sweaty Gaines Burger in her palm. Her canine co-star feigns resistance, unable to resist wagging his tail at a friendly kid. When the dog finally reaches her, the girl flings both arms around his fluffy neck.
TAB “Aw, yeah! That’s a good boy. Hey, yeah—wanna play? Here’s a stick, can you go get it?”
TAB He can.
TAB “Can you get it? Yeah. Yeaaah,” drones Julie Anne Haddock, sounding stoned as she rubs the dog’s face between her hands. “You’re lost too, aren’t you? Just like me.”
TAB Kindred spirits, the hungry pair go Dumpster diving, picking at wilted romaine and other photogenic garbage until a delinquent tries to make them an accessory to robbery. Tina and the dog scare the guy off with barking and glowing interdimensional jewelry, but the police arrest her for the crime regardless. After a brief off-screen stay in juvie, Tina is released into Simon’s custody.
TAB “Well, my attorneys are finally working for the retainers that I keep them on,” he quips, and Diana Prince laughs as if it’s not weird as hell for a middle-aged bachelor to abuse the law in order to get custody of an unrelated preteen girl. The stray dog barks twice, making his presence known. He’s lingered outside the detention center since Tina’s arrest, waiting patiently for her return.
TAB “Would you like to take the dog home with you?” Simon asks Tina, although the word “home” is a bit presumptuous, given the kid’s circumstances.
TAB “Oh, please, yes, can I?”
TAB Simon and Diana exchange a knowing look, like approving parents.
TAB “Well, of course you can,” says Simon. “Do you have a name for him?”
TAB “Tiger,” breathes Tina, as though she knew it all along.
V.
TAB Once unleashed into the grassy yard of a narrative, even the most well-crafted canis ex machina will set to roaming the perimeter, snuffling out plot holes like loose planks in a fence line. It’s in the trope’s very nature to test boundaries, to slip any collar an author tries to buckle on.
Had Edgar Allan Poe known this, he might never have summoned Tiger into the dank hold of the Grampus. He might have found some other way for Augustus to communicate with Pym that didn’t obligate him to keep track of a dog’s whereabouts for the rest of his novel. There’s evidence Poe regretted Tiger almost immediately, because just a few pages after Tiger delivers Augustus’s Very Important Letter to Pym, Poe makes the lack of freshwater and “confined atmosphere of the hold” drive the poor dog “mad,” transforming Pym’s beloved pet into a foaming, growling demon whose “eyes fastened upon me with an expression of the most deadly animosity.”
Poe is invoking rabies here; a disease his 19th century readers knew as “hydrophobia” because the infected are strangely averse to water. In Poe’s day, rabies was a death sentence, so Pym fears needing to “destroy” Tiger, lest the disease spread to the rats aboard the Grampus. As soon as Augustus arrives to explain he’s plotting a counter-mutiny that casts the dog in a major combat role, Poe restores the dog to perfect health and vitality “with no indications of hydrophobia,” making the reader wonder why he was ever made ill in the first place.
During the very next thunderstorm the Grampus sails into, Pym dons the blood-soaked uniform of one of the mutineers’ dead victims. Rising out of the hold with a giant black dog at his heels and lightning flashing behind them, Pym resembles a vengeful spirit enough to send the superstitious and guilty mutineers into a blind panic. Then, amid the confusion, Augustus’s band of counter-mutineers springs into action. Pym manages to thwack a man unconscious with an iron pump handle. Meanwhile, Tiger rips out an attacker’s throat, “the blood issuing in a stream from a deep wound.” Triumphant, he growls drooling over the mutineers’ limp bodies, the Grampus reclaimed at last, his honored place among its restored crew well and truly earned.
This is the last time Tiger is seen or mentioned in the entire novel.
TAB One would think, given the loyal dog’s crucial assistance in helping to stop the mutiny, Poe could have written Tiger a more dignified exit, or indeed, any exit at all. Possibilities abound. The logistical difficulty of being a shaggy dog at sea under the blazing equatorial sun could prove convenient. Maybe Tiger goes rabid for real, forcing Pym to pull an Old Yeller. Or maybe he slips off the deck into the churning sea, Pym oblivious as his “inseparable companion” paddles futilely against the foundering ship’s wake. Sure, any of these ideas paint Pym as a jerk who doesn’t take care of his dog, but that was already true. All things considered, there was no logical narrative reason not to keep Tiger around through throwaway sentences until the plot needed him again.
TAB Except that’s not how any of this works. Edgar Allan Poe was hunched over his writing desk with his wine and his cat when, just as abruptly as the idea had first occurred to him, Tiger happily evaporated back into the aether, his busy blur of a tail neatly erasing his departure.
VI.
TAB Official accounts tell us that after a mere ten episodes, Tiger was written off The Brady Bunch due to a tragedy behind the scenes.
TAB “It’s a sad story,” producer Sherwood Schwartz reminisced decades later. “Tiger the dog left one day with his trainer and got away for a moment—was killed. By a car. Now, the trainer, who was making a good living with Tiger, didn’t want to tell us that Tiger was killed. So, he got another dog that looked exactly like Tiger, and brought him to the set.”
Unfortunately, half of season one’s “Katchoo,! an episode where the A-plot has Jan Brady develop an allergy to Tiger’s flea powder, was already in the can. The dog was needed on set, but New Tiger didn’t heed any commands, not even “sit.” He didn’t respond to his name. This confused the kids, who’d played with their former co-star often. During a scene where Tiger was supposed to “lie down” and “stay” on the Brady boys’ bedroom rug—a lazy dog’s two favorite tricks!—New Tiger wandered off-camera, wasting the child actors’ limited screen time. “I mean, he didn’t know, he’s just a dog,” Schwartz conceded.
TAB “This always gets a big reaction when I say this at colleges, when I talk about The Brady Bunch,” recalled Schwartz, pleased with himself. “We solved the problem by nailing Tiger down to the floor. And I hear ‘God, how could you do such a thing?’ But then I explain. We nailed the collar down so his head was down on the floor. He was looking around sheepishly because he had no place to go!”
New Tiger’s acting never improved, which made the writers’ room start avoiding the family dog as a plot device. After “Katchoo!” Tiger only made the call sheet for episodes where his presence was essential to the plot. In his last two appearances, Tiger’s role is reduced to clashing with ever newer, smaller additions to the Brady clan, who keep viewing animals as mere props to collect and discard. During the Bobby-centric episode eleven, “What Goes Up…” Carol and Mike inexplicably gift their youngest son a parakeet to entertain him while he recovers from a broken leg. Tiger plays the villain, barking at the petrified bird until it escapes through Bobby’s open window. Two episodes later, in “The Impractical Joker,” Tiger barks at Greg’s pet mouse Myron. After the rodent goes missing, making Alice call an exterminator, Tiger saves the day by finding Myron’s nest in his very own dog house. The episode ends with Tiger embraced by the whole beaming Brady brood, his thick tail thumping the Astroturf as he embodies the happy wagging heart of America’s favorite blended family.
TAB As the screen fades to black in a postmodern equivalent of the ancient Greeks’ mechanical apparatus lifting him heavenward, so Tiger departs forever from the Brady backyard, never to be seen or spoken of by any of them ever again.
“That’s TV,” said Jan’s actress Eve Plumb decades later. “Stuff comes and it goes.”
VII.
Almost a century and a half after he disembarked the Grampus, but a mere seven years post-Brady, Tiger is rolling around on the sunny green lawn of a California mansion, barking happily as Wonder Woman prepares to train Tina in the use of her superpowers.
TAB In a five-minute montage contrived to introduce audiences to Tina’s abilities and feature slow-motion shots of Lynda Carter’s bouncing chest and buttocks, they run, do mid-air somersaults, fold steel bars, bounce tennis balls into stratospheric orbit, and finally practice Tina’s ability to generate a forcefield with her mind. The camera cuts to Tiger, who barks and bows in excitement after each feat of strength, especially those involving tennis balls.
Experimenting with her superpowers gives Tina a false sense of security.
“The man who kidnapped me can’t hurt me,” she defiantly declares, crossing her wrists to imitate Wonder Woman’s signature bullet-deflecting pose. “If he tries to take me again like those men in the hospital, I’ll let him! Then I’ll make him take me home.”
“Promise me you will do no such thing, Tina,” says Wonder Woman, wagging her finger like a schoolmarm. “You’re not strong enough yet.”
Instead of promising, Tina disassociates hard, staring blankly at the tennis court before revealing that her real name is Amadonna. She’s sad now because she thinks “the people back home in Ilandia”—she doesn’t specify who—have forgotten all about her. Moved, Wonder Woman reassures Tina/Amadonna that her loved ones would never forget her, although she has absolutely no way of knowing that’s true, or anything about Ilandia at all.
“Tina!” Simon calls from the nearby mansion, which is apparently his.
“Guess I’d better go now. Thanks, Wonder Woman,” says Tina, scurrying across the tennis court and up an outdoor staircase. Tiger barks at her heels because the foley artists on New Adventures of Wonder Woman think dogs bark constantly, for no reason. Watching them go, fretting over Tina’s recklessness, Wonder Woman hatches a plan.
“Tiger!” she calls.
TAB Girl and dog are only halfway upstairs, totally within earshot, but Tina keeps going while Tiger obediently trots back down to the tennis court. Kneeling so she’s at his level, Wonder Woman engages her animal telepathy by scratching Tiger’s uncollared neck and staring intently into the middle distance, then into his shaggy face. She wags her finger again.
TAB Tiger. You take care of her, and if she’s in trouble, come and find me. Understand?
TAB Tiger barks excitedly as he races upstairs to find Tina. Although it’s hard to imagine what a dog can do to protect a superpowered preteen girl, no one has to wonder long. Almost immediately, Tina is accosted by the goons from the hospital, who emerge from a sinister green van parked in Simon’s driveway.
TAB “Just a minute, little girl. Now, don’t you try anything. None of that funny stuff, now,” one warns her. Tiger barks at them as he bursts onto the driveway, ready for a fight. But when Tina realizes Wonder Woman hasn’t followed him, she tells Tiger to sit down and be quiet.
TAB “Now you’re being a smart little girl,” says Bleaker’s henchman, yanking Tina toward the van. “Come on, sweetheart, let’s go.”
TAB Because Tina told him to sit, Tiger sits, watching helplessly as the green van speeds away with her. Then, simultaneously remembering Wonder Woman’s earlier orders and the instrumental role he must play in resolving this episode’s plot, Tiger tears off in a dead run. He stalks the van all the way to Bleaker’s beach cave hideout, then turns around and tracks Wonder Woman’s scent to Diana Prince’s motel, because secret identities don’t fool dogs. Tiger pauses in a groovy breezeway lined with bright orange doors. He confidently selects Diana’s suite, scratching and whining until she opens up.
TAB “Tiger!” Diana smiles at the dog as if he’s just stopping by to say hello.
Frustrated, Tiger barks until she remembers the conversation they had just two scenes ago.
TAB “They’ve taken Tina,” says Diana aloud, translating canine to English for the audience’s sake instead of doing the whole dog telepathy thing again. “Can you lead me to her?”
TAB Tiger barks assent.
TAB “Okay, now hold on, I’ll change. I’ll change first. Hang on.”
TAB Meanwhile in Bleaker’s underground lair, Tina/Amadonna demands to be sent back home to Ilandia. But instead of doing that, Bleaker explains how he’s going to erase Tina’s memories, including her knowledge of Ilandia’s existence, then use her powers for his own evil ends. Just as Bleaker’s done announcing his plan, Wonder Woman bursts into the hideout, kicking off a slow-motion brawl where we get to see Tina use her training to hurl grown men into breakaway furniture. Realizing he’s lost, Bleaker punches a secret button under one of his computer consoles before escaping through a hatch in the wall. Thick white vapor pours from the machinery.
TAB “It’s poison!” shouts Wonder Woman, ushering Tina out of the cave and onto the rocky shore. Bleaker’s goons stumble out after them, coughing so hard they’ve forgotten which side they’re supposed to be on.
TAB “Tiger!” Tina cries. He jumps on her and barks, overjoyed she’s safe.
TAB Then—BOOM! A giant orange explosion fills the screen as Bleaker’s secret hideout self-destructs. When the dust clears, we watch him escape via B-roll of a gray World War II submarine plunging under equally gray waves.
TAB “He tricked us!” wails one of Bleaker’s henchmen, rethinking all his life choices. Tina sobs as the sub disappears along with her only chance to return to Ilandia.
TAB “I can’t stop him,” says Wonder Woman, because the episode’s almost over.
TAB “But I want to go home! Please, make him take me home!” cries Tina.
TAB Wonder Woman promises she’ll go home someday, although that’s not a promise she can keep. She explains how now that Tina is no longer living in her home dimension, she must let herself love people here on Earth, even if loving them might someday make her choose our world over her old life back in Ilandia.
TAB “You have to take the chance,” says Wonder Woman. “And right now, you have no choice.”
TAB “In Ilandia, I had a dolphin,” says Tina, apropos of nothing. “We played tag on the ocean all the time.”
TAB Tiger uses his teeth to tug the drawstring of Tina’s sweatshirt, whining and licking her hand so she’ll pet him instead of pining over that dumb old dolphin—but the camera pans up and away, focusing on Wonder Woman’s golden Lasso of Truth as she gives Bleaker’s goons selective amnesia. When Simon arrives with the police, Tina asks if she can go live with him, as his ward.
“She’s one human interest story I’m gonna have to live with for the rest of my life, if I’m lucky,” quips Simon, reminding us how journalists love newspaper metaphors as he hugs Tina tight.
It’s the last time either character ever appears on The New Adventures of Wonder Woman, and Bleaker is still on the loose, but everyone stands on the beach and throws their heads back laughing like people are supposed to during happy endings, except we don’t hear Tiger barking, because he’s already long gone.
VIII.
Like all literary devices, canis ex machina has its limitations. The dogs must never introduce an unexpected twist that creates a new conflict within a narrative, nor should their sudden appearance detract from or significantly alter the work’s meaning, moral, or message. Any plot knots unraveled by the dogs must be clearly insoluble without their immediate intervention, lest audiences cry foul, buoyed by the false notion that there exists some truer, more ideal version of the story that the author has somehow failed to dredge out of their own mind.
TAB Even when this condition is met, critics of canis ex machina claim its inclusion in a given narrative only betrays the author’s subconscious desire to destroy their work before it’s even done being created. Following the Latin root of the word “text,” “textus,” which means “to weave, plait, or braid together,” they argue only an insecure wordsmith lacking conviction would slice a gaping hole in the warp and weft of their painstakingly half-finished story just to shove the dogs through. Like the much-hated “and it was all a dream” conceit, the suspensory ligaments of disbelief are stretched beyond recovery. For after the dogs have descended, it becomes virtually impossible to take anything that happened beforehand seriously.
However, those who have flung open the proverbial kennel door—like Poe, Schwartz, and Collins—often report feeling as though the dogs appeared not because, but in spite of, their mightiest efforts to wrestle complex plots to rational ends. They saw how the material space of a page is unfixed, a backyard without fences, a map no one’s yet drawn. They knew how to transform it into a sundrenched suburb or the dank hold of a whaling ship or a rocky coastline somewhere in California, or all three, or none at all. Above all, they understood we keep words like “impossible” handy because such things occur all the time. On the tightrope between paragraphs, it’s best to accept that none of us are really in control of everything that could happen here.
In the corner of the last page, a dog appears.
He is glad to see you.
Jess Bowers
Canis Ex Machina
TAB “There are works in the likeness of others, and works that are the reverse of others, but there are also works of which the relation with earlier productions is so intricate that we become confused and attribute them to the direct intervention of the gods.”
TAB -Paul Valéry, “Letter About Mallarmé”
I.
TAB Canis ex machina is a Latin calque from the Greek, meaning “dog from the machine.”
TAB The phrase denotes a popular plot device from ancient Athenian tragedy, wherein third acts often concluded with a crane abruptly lowering a live dog onto the stage to resolve seemingly insurmountable problems, like wars or curses or plagues.
TAB Horehound, molossus, alopekis—breed and size mattered not, so long as a laurel-crowned dog descended lounging upon a wooden dais of clouds or Apollo’s chariot, wreathed in fabric flames. Canis ex machina evoked an immediate crowd response, thanks to the widespread belief that the dogs interceded in humans’ everyday lives. Perched on the stone edges of amphitheater seats, Greek audiences from Abdera to Zakros cheered the dogs’ sudden appearance, having made offerings and prostrations to them at small shrines in their own homes that very morning.
TAB A well-executed canis ex machina was a guaranteed showstopper, the ancient equivalent of an eleven o’clock number—instant transcendent catharsis, just add dog.
TAB Or as the comedian Antiphanes put it:
TAB when they don't know what to say
TAB and have completely given up on the play
TAB just like a finger they lift the machine
TAB and the spectators are satisfied.
TAB There were, of course, rare instances where a good canis ex machina made perfect sense. For example, Euripedes’ plays frequently began with the intercession of dogs, so it seemed natural that they should reappear to finish the action. The Roman poet Horace also declared the literary device acceptable, hell, even preferable to more conventional endings, “when and if a difficulty worthy of a dog’s unraveling should occur.”
TAB As usual, Aristotle’s opinion proved loudest, echoing through the centuries. He was the first to call canis ex machina a cheap gimmick loved by the lazy, damaging its popularity beyond repair. Writers’ overreliance on dogs to solve things, he argued, revealed the new generation’s sad inability to bring complex plots to realistic conclusions. “The poet,” wrote Aristotle, “ought always to seek what is either necessary or probable, so that it is either necessary or probable that a person of such-and-such a sort say or do things of the same sort, and it is either necessary or probable that this [incident] happen after that one.”
TAB Oddly enough, Aristotle was also really into tragedies that ended with sudden murders, massacres, and poisonings, plot twists arguably every bit as abrupt as the random descent of a dog to the stage.
TAB “It is probable that improbable things will happen,” he sagely covered his ass.
TAB The use of canis ex machina in ancient Greek drama was primarily restricted to endings due to the physical difficulty of hoisting the dog-dropping apparatus offstage post-deployment, as well as the trope’s tendency to obliterate suspension of disbelief. However, during the secular centuries, since the term has come to denote any instance where a dog inexplicably appears in a narrative, solves a major problem, then disappears, never to be seen or mentioned again.
TAB This modern understanding more closely aligns canis ex machina with the Homeric nod, so named by Horace, who was trying to account for glaring continuity errors in the Iliad and Odyssey. “Even Homer nods off from time to time,” Horace declares in his Ars Poetica, reminding us that even the greats sometimes fall asleep at the wheel. Centuries on, following Horace, the British satirist Alexander Pope claimed there are no accidents in literature, writing: “Those oft are Stratagems which Errors seem/Nor is it Homer Nods, but We that dream.”
TAB Following Pope following Horace, if it’s a waste of time to quibble over whether Dr. John Watson’s Afghani war wound is in his left arm or his right, or wonder how Sancho Panza’s donkey Dapple returns without fanfare a few chapters after being stolen, or question the sudden appearance of a Starbucks cup at a torchlit banquet in Game of Thrones, it’s probably also best to ignore the sudden dis/appearance of three separate dogs, all named Tiger, in the corpus of American letters.
TAB Nothing to see here. Move along.
II.
None other than Edgar Allan Poe unleashed the long-dormant narrative device of canis ex machina into a flat run across two centuries of America’s collective consciousness, floppy black tongue spilling over a wolfish grin. No stranger to atavistic impulses, or “imps of the perverse,” as he’d later term them, Poe was ripe to succumb to the plot-solving charms of a random dis/appearing dog, although no other author had done so since the fall of Rome.
TAB This all happened in 1838, years before Poe became world-renowned as “that spooky guy who wrote ‘The Raven,’” or sometimes just “The Raven,” poem metonymic for the man. Young Poe was working on two projects simultaneously, burning the midnight oil to afford the Baltimore rowhome he rented with “Sissy” and “Muddy,” his child bride and mother-in-law/aunt. His days were wasted on The Conchologist’s First Book, an illustrated children’s text he was paraphrasing and translating from European sources for a local publisher. The work was dull, but guaranteed to pay fifty dollars, so he let it clutter his desk and mind with whelks and cockles until evening, when after a catnap he’d get back in the chair to scrape away at what would become The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, his first (and only) novel.
TAB Inspired by popular maritime autobiographies as well as Poe’s own long walks along the Chesapeake Bay, Pym presents itself as the true autobiography of an amateur sailor who stowed away in the Grampus, a real Massachusetts whaling ship bound for the South Pole. Only the novel’s preface is “by” Pym himself, who claims he met Mr. Poe through the latter’s professional role as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. After confessing his tale to a rapt Poe, Pym asked his new pal to “draw up, in his own words, a narrative of the earlier portion of my adventures, from facts afforded by myself, publishing it…under the garb of fiction.”
TAB The idea that Arthur Gordon Pym was ever a real, living person is among the least convincing of Poe’s numerous literary hoaxes. The finished novel lacks the credibility and continuity one expects from a work based in truth. This is because when Poe decided to write Pym, he hadn’t considered how hard it could be for a habitual short story writer to keep a novel on the rails.
TAB Two handwritten chapters in, he’d lost track of what he’d told the reader and what he hadn’t, especially after his tortoiseshell cat rolled around on the manuscript, shuffling the pages and smudging the ink. Still, several facts remained clear enough to maintain forward momentum. Poe knew he’d successfully launched the Grampus from Nantucket with protagonist Pym hidden in the ship’s damp hold, and added Augustus, his best friend and doppelganger, to the ship’s crew by making his father the captain. Now he just needed some way to let these two characters communicate without revealing to the rest of the Grampus’s crew that Pym was aboard.
TAB Poe had pondered this plot hole for three nights without breakthrough when, benumbed by yet another afternoon cataloguing conchs and cowries, his brilliant and exhausted mind slipped into that softer state where one is receptive to the timeless ideas that drift through the sea of our collective unconsciousness, awaiting their turn to wash ashore. A trapdoor fell open in the ceiling of his mind, followed by a flood of words. A dog descended.
TAB “For the presence of Tiger, I have tried in vain to account,” admits Poe-as-Pym, unable to explain how or why the “fierce lion of the tropics” he hallucinated setting upon him in the ship’s hold suddenly became his very own large shaggy dog—a pet so beloved, so cherished, we’re just now hearing about him for the very first time. “Most people love their dogs, but for Tiger I had an affection far more ardent than common; and never, certainly, did any creature more truly deserve it,” Pym claims, protesting too much. “For seven years he had been my inseparable companion, and in a multitude of instances had given evidence of all the noble qualities for which we value the animal.”
TAB It’s clear Poe wants readers to see Tiger as Pym’s partner in crime, his ride or die, which makes it odder still that Pym apparently abandoned his own dog back in Nantucket without even a bone to sustain him. When a “quick and violent roll of the vessel” shifts the Grampus’s cargo, collapsing Pym’s candlelit hideout into a dark tomb, Tiger is his sole companion, the warm anchor he clings to as the ship pitches and moans around them. Sinking to the dark floor of the hold, fingers burrowed in Tiger’s thick fur, Pym nearly succumbs to “the most gloomy imaginings, in which the dreadful deaths of thirst, famine, suffocation, and premature interment crowded upon me as the prominent disasters to be encountered.”
TAB Nearly—if it wasn’t for Tiger, who brings sudden hope in the form of a letter from Augustus. Apparently, he’d worn it slung about his furry neck like a St. Bernard’s barrel this whole time, but Pym just didn’t notice. Impressed, Pym reasons that Augustus must have smuggled all one hundred and fifty pounds of Tiger aboard the Grampus in total secrecy, written and attached the letter, then shoved the massive dog into the cargo hold, where Tiger waited several hours before even bothering to sniff out his master, despite him being the hold’s only other living occupant.
TAB Pym accepts these unlikely events without question, because Poe knows making his protagonist confidently believe improbable things is the surest way to get his readers to follow suit. Penned in Augustus’s hand—and his blood!—the letter around Tiger’s neck informs Pym that the Grampus’s crew has mutinied, setting the captain—Augustus’s dad!—adrift at sea, then cruelly butchering anyone who disagreed with that decision. Terrified he’s next on the chopping block, Augustus begs Pym not to reveal himself, lest he and Tiger both be murdered in cold blood!
Satisfied, Edgar Allan Poe leaned back until his chair creaked, startling his cat.
III.
TAB He isn’t mentioned once in the eternal earworm of their theme song, but the Brady Bunch had a dog, and his name was Tiger.
TAB Tiger’s doghouse stands behind the family home for all 117 episodes of the Brady saga, its prefab corners cut gingerbread sharp, the Astroturf lawn beneath still brilliant green, unbleached by sun or stage lights. But it’s okay if you don’t remember, because for 107 of those episodes, that dog house stood empty, its tenant unmentioned and unmourned, a kind of reverse Cousin Oliver.
TAB A shaggy mixed breed whose fur almost hid his eyes, Tiger debuted in the series premiere “The Honeymoon.” He entered the marriage through Mike Brady’s side of the ersatz clan, just like housekeeper Alice and their hip split-level home. It’s clear from the start that Mike is a widower, but only implied that his bride-to-be, Carol Martin nee Tyler, is a divorcée—a word which still sounded French and risqué in 1969. Given scant backstory on Carol’s first marriage, we’re left to assume that a blond man named Mr. Martin fathered three very lovely girls, then removed himself completely from their lives, never to be mentioned, seen, or contacted ever again. All three Martin girls ditch their bio-dad’s last name for Brady, eliminating the need for storylines about shared custody or co-parenting.
TAB As the creator of previous high-concept hits My Favorite Martian and Gilligan’s Island, series creator Sherwood Schwartz knew his groovy-yet-prudish viewers had limits when it came to threatening social norms via sitcom, even when said norm-breakers were as hip-yet-wholesome as Florence Henderson and Robert Reed. Only the easy iconography of suburban life (charcoal grill, gleaming station wagon, family dog) could diffuse the whiff of scandal surrounding the Bunch, the sexy vagueness of the way they became.
TAB “The Honeymoon” is unusually Tiger-centric given his later erasure. The pilot episode’s inciting incident involves whether the dog will be invited to Mike and Carol’s modern backyard wedding. “He’s part of the family,” the Brady boys implore, earnest in their church suits. Although Peter holds Tiger’s leash, no specific son seems responsible for the dog—he is a family pet, unlike Bobby’s turtle in episode three, or the white rabbit Greg will try to trade (bundled with a baseball mitt and autographed picture of Raquel Welch) for a bike in episode nine.
TAB The Brady boys’ united pro-Tiger front is out of character, as they will seldom agree on anything, ever again. But nobody in the writers’ room knows that yet, so neither do Mike and Carol. Nor do they realize the dog is just a proxy to communicate the boys’ intense anxiety about who is or isn’t “part of the family” these days. Their plea for reassurance is ignored by their father, who instead joins their stepmother-to-be’s hand-wringing about whether all these kids will “get along.”
TAB Sensing blood in the water, three very lovely girls pounce.
TAB Fluffy, their suddenly beloved cat, must also attend the wedding. Although it’s a biological fact that 81% of orange cats—including this one—are male, Sherwood Schwarz has made “Fluffy” female in the script to reinforce the bizarre gender stereotypes applied to cats and dogs in American culture. Through a showdown between their respective pets, the Brady children may act out the gendered psychodrama of their own forced “marriage” without introducing any disturbing sexual connotations. It’s genius, really—but Mike and Carol aren’t. Eager to appease both child factions, the couple agrees that both animals are invited to the wedding, in the first of many magnanimous but poor co-parenting choices.
TAB “The more the merrier,” they trill through those gleaming television grins.
TAB “The Honeymoon’s” climactic third act, which features Tiger rampaging through the wedding cake after a terrified Fluffy, is a foregone conclusion. Yet Fluffy, not Tiger, takes the fall. Following this episode, the Brady girls’ precious cat is never seen or mentioned, ever again. No balls of yarn or catnip mice ever litter the Bradys’ shag carpet. Even Fluffy’s pink cardboard house, hastily constructed by Cindy mid-episode “because Tiger has a house!” disappears with the rented white plastic lawn chairs.
TAB Rumor has it that during shooting, the tomcat cast as “Fluffy” kept hooking claws into little Susan Olsen’s neck, drawing pinpricks of blood makeup couldn’t cover. Meanwhile, Tiger the dog, who played himself, was obedient and pleasant to everyone, playing fetch during breaks and accepting tidbits from craft services. It was too late to reshoot the pilot, so Schwartz canned Fluffy before episode two—a reasonable decision, given The Brady Bunch’s tight production schedule. But when considered within the diegesis of the show, alongside Carol’s ex-husband’s absence, Fluffy’s sudden disappearance suggests a disturbing family tendency toward collective amnesia.
TAB A certain readiness to forget.
IV.
TAB “The Girl from Ilandia” is a second season episode of New Adventures of Wonder Woman, first aired in April 1978. In the cold open, Cindy Brady washes ashore near Long Beach, California, unconscious in a prairie nightgown and pink ribbons.
TAB Except it isn’t Cindy Brady, it’s Julie Anne Haddock, a child actress every bit as blonde and pigtailed as Olsen, yet far less destined for our cultural memory. Little Julie Anne doesn’t know this yet, so she remains as still and inert as director Dick Moder told her to, her blue eyes shut tight.
TAB “Pretend you’re dead,” says Moder, off camera.
TAB Julie Anne’s mouth goes slack. He chops the air.
TAB “Action.”
TAB Journalist Simon Penrose and his fishing buddy roar up in a speedboat. Like most fictional newspapermen, Simon is more detective than reporter. He’s the first to notice the little girl is wearing a strange opalescent necklace and bracelets. Simon’s buddy announces no shipwrecks have been reported nearby for weeks, as if shipwrecks are a regular thing in Long Beach.
TAB “It’s like she just...dropped out of the sky,” he muses, staring at the clouds.
Cut to a local hospital, where Simon has brought the girl for observation while he runs a missing person search. When there’s no match, he declares there’s only one person to call—Diana Prince at the Inter-Agency Defense Command. Simon Penrose hasn’t appeared on any previous episodes of Wonder Woman, but his easy telephone rapport with Diana suggests they’re old friends. It’s unclear why a random orphan would be an I.A.D.C. issue, but this sounds like a job for Wonder Woman, so Diana flies to California. Just as she arrives at the hospital, business-chic in a pencil skirt, blazer, scarf, and massive identity-concealing glasses, two goons posing as orderlies stuff the unconscious girl into a laundry cart and wheel her away.
TAB Upon finding the child’s room empty, Diana ducks into a stairwell to whirl into Wonder Woman, because Diana Prince would get arrested for what she’s about to do to these guys. She leaps into the hospital’s laundry room, bending the first kidnapper’s gun in half like it’s rubber. Intimidated, the thug maneuvering the laundry bin cuts his losses, dramatically unveiling the unconscious girl hidden under soiled linens.
TAB “Better take care of her, Wonder Woman, she’s more important to you than we are!” he shouts, escaping with his accomplice just as the police arrive.
TAB “Get after them!” Wonder Woman commands them, and they do, because her most impressive superpower is how men listen to her without question. The kerfuffle awakens Julie Anne Haddock, who grins up at Lynda Carter as if she’s beholding a goddess, which she might be, depending on which Wonder Woman origin story we’re working with here.
TAB The camera zeroes in on the kid’s weird jewelry, which none of the nurses were able to remove. Nothing like it has appeared in any previous episode of Wonder Woman, nor has the possibility of a multiverse ever been mentioned on the show, yet our heroine instantly knows the gems are from the legendary dimension of Ilandia, where they were bestowed upon the girl to help focus her latent superpowers. Wonder Woman quickly explains that the little girl should trust “her good friend” Diana Prince, then runs off to change out of her costume.
TAB Cut to little Julie Anne Haddock, now sitting upright in bed under a large orange cafeteria tray. Diana enters, introduces herself as “a friend of Mr. Penrose,” makes small talk about hospital food, then asks, “What’s your name?” which makes the girl tremble like the Jell-O she’s eating.
TAB “I know this must be all very confusing to you,” says Diana. She explains that Wonder Woman told her all about the girl’s superpowers, and how she’s from Ilandia, and how her jewelry can’t ever be removed. Working together, they deduce the identity of her would-be kidnapper.
TAB “Bleaker,” Diana ruefully intones, although the TV audience has never heard that name before this episode. In swans Simon Penrose to say he’s tired of calling this little girl “little girl,” so he’s renaming her now, “unless you want to tell me your real one.”
TAB When she shakes her head, Simon announces he’s calling her “Tina” from now on, blowing her a kiss as Diana drags him into the hospital corridor to talk about their next steps. Tina eavesdrops as the adults discuss their options, which are apparently limited to continuing to earn her trust (Diana’s plan) or drugging her so a metallurgist can surgically remove her jewelry (Simon’s). After shooting his idea down, Diana casually mentions that Tina—Christine, actually—was Simon’s late wife’s name.
TAB “And she had blonde hair and blue eyes,” he pouts, rolling his eyes. “But look—spare me the psychology lesson, Miz Prince. Let’s just, uh, focus our attention on the living.”
TAB Thoroughly creeped out by what she’s overhearing, Tina climbs out her hospital room’s second story window and vaults over a brick wall Bionic Woman-style in a mad dash to reach Long Beach, where she stares pensively at B-roll of the sea crashing against a rocky shore.
TAB “Please,” Tina cries, sinking to her bellbottomed knees, her braided pigtails somehow still perfect post-parkour. “Come get me.”
TAB This is when screenwriter Anne Collins, ordered by the producers of New Adventures of Wonder Woman to write “The Girl from Ilandia” as a back-door pilot for a spinoff series about Tina, found herself at a loose end. Picture someone named Anne Collins surrounded by cigarette butts, brow furrowed over her typewriter as she casts about for a way to make audiences care about a kid they met fewer than fifteen minutes ago. When the solution finally dawns on her, it comes all at once, like someone in heaven opened a trapdoor and let the idea drop into her mind.
TAB Suddenly a Lassie-esque whine rings out across the dunes, and Tina turns to find a shaggy mutt curled up on the sand. Anne Collins must have decided dogs exist in Tina’s home dimension, because the little girl isn’t scared or confused by the animal’s appearance. Instead, she beams with delight, scrambling to her feet and clapping her hands.
TAB “Come on, boy!” she cries. “Come on, I’m not going to hurt you! Come on!” and the dog stands, because child actor Julie Anne Haddock conceals a sweaty Gaines Burger in her palm. Her canine co-star feigns resistance, unable to resist wagging his tail at a friendly kid. When the dog finally reaches her, the girl flings both arms around his fluffy neck.
TAB “Aw, yeah! That’s a good boy. Hey, yeah—wanna play? Here’s a stick, can you go get it?”
TAB He can.
TAB “Can you get it? Yeah. Yeaaah,” drones Julie Anne Haddock, sounding stoned as she rubs the dog’s face between her hands. “You’re lost too, aren’t you? Just like me.”
TAB Kindred spirits, the hungry pair go Dumpster diving, picking at wilted romaine and other photogenic garbage until a delinquent tries to make them an accessory to robbery. Tina and the dog scare the guy off with barking and glowing interdimensional jewelry, but the police arrest her for the crime regardless. After a brief off-screen stay in juvie, Tina is released into Simon’s custody.
TAB “Well, my attorneys are finally working for the retainers that I keep them on,” he quips, and Diana Prince laughs as if it’s not weird as hell for a middle-aged bachelor to abuse the law in order to get custody of an unrelated preteen girl. The stray dog barks twice, making his presence known. He’s lingered outside the detention center since Tina’s arrest, waiting patiently for her return.
TAB “Would you like to take the dog home with you?” Simon asks Tina, although the word “home” is a bit presumptuous, given the kid’s circumstances.
TAB “Oh, please, yes, can I?”
TAB Simon and Diana exchange a knowing look, like approving parents.
TAB “Well, of course you can,” says Simon. “Do you have a name for him?”
TAB “Tiger,” breathes Tina, as though she knew it all along.
V.
TAB Once unleashed into the grassy yard of a narrative, even the most well-crafted canis ex machina will set to roaming the perimeter, snuffling out plot holes like loose planks in a fence line. It’s in the trope’s very nature to test boundaries, to slip any collar an author tries to buckle on.
Had Edgar Allan Poe known this, he might never have summoned Tiger into the dank hold of the Grampus. He might have found some other way for Augustus to communicate with Pym that didn’t obligate him to keep track of a dog’s whereabouts for the rest of his novel. There’s evidence Poe regretted Tiger almost immediately, because just a few pages after Tiger delivers Augustus’s Very Important Letter to Pym, Poe makes the lack of freshwater and “confined atmosphere of the hold” drive the poor dog “mad,” transforming Pym’s beloved pet into a foaming, growling demon whose “eyes fastened upon me with an expression of the most deadly animosity.”
Poe is invoking rabies here; a disease his 19th century readers knew as “hydrophobia” because the infected are strangely averse to water. In Poe’s day, rabies was a death sentence, so Pym fears needing to “destroy” Tiger, lest the disease spread to the rats aboard the Grampus. As soon as Augustus arrives to explain he’s plotting a counter-mutiny that casts the dog in a major combat role, Poe restores the dog to perfect health and vitality “with no indications of hydrophobia,” making the reader wonder why he was ever made ill in the first place.
During the very next thunderstorm the Grampus sails into, Pym dons the blood-soaked uniform of one of the mutineers’ dead victims. Rising out of the hold with a giant black dog at his heels and lightning flashing behind them, Pym resembles a vengeful spirit enough to send the superstitious and guilty mutineers into a blind panic. Then, amid the confusion, Augustus’s band of counter-mutineers springs into action. Pym manages to thwack a man unconscious with an iron pump handle. Meanwhile, Tiger rips out an attacker’s throat, “the blood issuing in a stream from a deep wound.” Triumphant, he growls drooling over the mutineers’ limp bodies, the Grampus reclaimed at last, his honored place among its restored crew well and truly earned.
This is the last time Tiger is seen or mentioned in the entire novel.
TAB One would think, given the loyal dog’s crucial assistance in helping to stop the mutiny, Poe could have written Tiger a more dignified exit, or indeed, any exit at all. Possibilities abound. The logistical difficulty of being a shaggy dog at sea under the blazing equatorial sun could prove convenient. Maybe Tiger goes rabid for real, forcing Pym to pull an Old Yeller. Or maybe he slips off the deck into the churning sea, Pym oblivious as his “inseparable companion” paddles futilely against the foundering ship’s wake. Sure, any of these ideas paint Pym as a jerk who doesn’t take care of his dog, but that was already true. All things considered, there was no logical narrative reason not to keep Tiger around through throwaway sentences until the plot needed him again.
TAB Except that’s not how any of this works. Edgar Allan Poe was hunched over his writing desk with his wine and his cat when, just as abruptly as the idea had first occurred to him, Tiger happily evaporated back into the aether, his busy blur of a tail neatly erasing his departure.
VI.
TAB Official accounts tell us that after a mere ten episodes, Tiger was written off The Brady Bunch due to a tragedy behind the scenes.
TAB “It’s a sad story,” producer Sherwood Schwartz reminisced decades later. “Tiger the dog left one day with his trainer and got away for a moment—was killed. By a car. Now, the trainer, who was making a good living with Tiger, didn’t want to tell us that Tiger was killed. So, he got another dog that looked exactly like Tiger, and brought him to the set.”
Unfortunately, half of season one’s “Katchoo,! an episode where the A-plot has Jan Brady develop an allergy to Tiger’s flea powder, was already in the can. The dog was needed on set, but New Tiger didn’t heed any commands, not even “sit.” He didn’t respond to his name. This confused the kids, who’d played with their former co-star often. During a scene where Tiger was supposed to “lie down” and “stay” on the Brady boys’ bedroom rug—a lazy dog’s two favorite tricks!—New Tiger wandered off-camera, wasting the child actors’ limited screen time. “I mean, he didn’t know, he’s just a dog,” Schwartz conceded.
TAB “This always gets a big reaction when I say this at colleges, when I talk about The Brady Bunch,” recalled Schwartz, pleased with himself. “We solved the problem by nailing Tiger down to the floor. And I hear ‘God, how could you do such a thing?’ But then I explain. We nailed the collar down so his head was down on the floor. He was looking around sheepishly because he had no place to go!”
New Tiger’s acting never improved, which made the writers’ room start avoiding the family dog as a plot device. After “Katchoo!” Tiger only made the call sheet for episodes where his presence was essential to the plot. In his last two appearances, Tiger’s role is reduced to clashing with ever newer, smaller additions to the Brady clan, who keep viewing animals as mere props to collect and discard. During the Bobby-centric episode eleven, “What Goes Up…” Carol and Mike inexplicably gift their youngest son a parakeet to entertain him while he recovers from a broken leg. Tiger plays the villain, barking at the petrified bird until it escapes through Bobby’s open window. Two episodes later, in “The Impractical Joker,” Tiger barks at Greg’s pet mouse Myron. After the rodent goes missing, making Alice call an exterminator, Tiger saves the day by finding Myron’s nest in his very own dog house. The episode ends with Tiger embraced by the whole beaming Brady brood, his thick tail thumping the Astroturf as he embodies the happy wagging heart of America’s favorite blended family.
TAB As the screen fades to black in a postmodern equivalent of the ancient Greeks’ mechanical apparatus lifting him heavenward, so Tiger departs forever from the Brady backyard, never to be seen or spoken of by any of them ever again.
“That’s TV,” said Jan’s actress Eve Plumb decades later. “Stuff comes and it goes.”
VII.
Almost a century and a half after he disembarked the Grampus, but a mere seven years post-Brady, Tiger is rolling around on the sunny green lawn of a California mansion, barking happily as Wonder Woman prepares to train Tina in the use of her superpowers.
TAB In a five-minute montage contrived to introduce audiences to Tina’s abilities and feature slow-motion shots of Lynda Carter’s bouncing chest and buttocks, they run, do mid-air somersaults, fold steel bars, bounce tennis balls into stratospheric orbit, and finally practice Tina’s ability to generate a forcefield with her mind. The camera cuts to Tiger, who barks and bows in excitement after each feat of strength, especially those involving tennis balls.
Experimenting with her superpowers gives Tina a false sense of security.
“The man who kidnapped me can’t hurt me,” she defiantly declares, crossing her wrists to imitate Wonder Woman’s signature bullet-deflecting pose. “If he tries to take me again like those men in the hospital, I’ll let him! Then I’ll make him take me home.”
“Promise me you will do no such thing, Tina,” says Wonder Woman, wagging her finger like a schoolmarm. “You’re not strong enough yet.”
Instead of promising, Tina disassociates hard, staring blankly at the tennis court before revealing that her real name is Amadonna. She’s sad now because she thinks “the people back home in Ilandia”—she doesn’t specify who—have forgotten all about her. Moved, Wonder Woman reassures Tina/Amadonna that her loved ones would never forget her, although she has absolutely no way of knowing that’s true, or anything about Ilandia at all.
“Tina!” Simon calls from the nearby mansion, which is apparently his.
“Guess I’d better go now. Thanks, Wonder Woman,” says Tina, scurrying across the tennis court and up an outdoor staircase. Tiger barks at her heels because the foley artists on New Adventures of Wonder Woman think dogs bark constantly, for no reason. Watching them go, fretting over Tina’s recklessness, Wonder Woman hatches a plan.
“Tiger!” she calls.
TAB Girl and dog are only halfway upstairs, totally within earshot, but Tina keeps going while Tiger obediently trots back down to the tennis court. Kneeling so she’s at his level, Wonder Woman engages her animal telepathy by scratching Tiger’s uncollared neck and staring intently into the middle distance, then into his shaggy face. She wags her finger again.
TAB Tiger. You take care of her, and if she’s in trouble, come and find me. Understand?
TAB Tiger barks excitedly as he races upstairs to find Tina. Although it’s hard to imagine what a dog can do to protect a superpowered preteen girl, no one has to wonder long. Almost immediately, Tina is accosted by the goons from the hospital, who emerge from a sinister green van parked in Simon’s driveway.
TAB “Just a minute, little girl. Now, don’t you try anything. None of that funny stuff, now,” one warns her. Tiger barks at them as he bursts onto the driveway, ready for a fight. But when Tina realizes Wonder Woman hasn’t followed him, she tells Tiger to sit down and be quiet.
TAB “Now you’re being a smart little girl,” says Bleaker’s henchman, yanking Tina toward the van. “Come on, sweetheart, let’s go.”
TAB Because Tina told him to sit, Tiger sits, watching helplessly as the green van speeds away with her. Then, simultaneously remembering Wonder Woman’s earlier orders and the instrumental role he must play in resolving this episode’s plot, Tiger tears off in a dead run. He stalks the van all the way to Bleaker’s beach cave hideout, then turns around and tracks Wonder Woman’s scent to Diana Prince’s motel, because secret identities don’t fool dogs. Tiger pauses in a groovy breezeway lined with bright orange doors. He confidently selects Diana’s suite, scratching and whining until she opens up.
TAB “Tiger!” Diana smiles at the dog as if he’s just stopping by to say hello.
Frustrated, Tiger barks until she remembers the conversation they had just two scenes ago.
TAB “They’ve taken Tina,” says Diana aloud, translating canine to English for the audience’s sake instead of doing the whole dog telepathy thing again. “Can you lead me to her?”
TAB Tiger barks assent.
TAB “Okay, now hold on, I’ll change. I’ll change first. Hang on.”
TAB Meanwhile in Bleaker’s underground lair, Tina/Amadonna demands to be sent back home to Ilandia. But instead of doing that, Bleaker explains how he’s going to erase Tina’s memories, including her knowledge of Ilandia’s existence, then use her powers for his own evil ends. Just as Bleaker’s done announcing his plan, Wonder Woman bursts into the hideout, kicking off a slow-motion brawl where we get to see Tina use her training to hurl grown men into breakaway furniture. Realizing he’s lost, Bleaker punches a secret button under one of his computer consoles before escaping through a hatch in the wall. Thick white vapor pours from the machinery.
TAB “It’s poison!” shouts Wonder Woman, ushering Tina out of the cave and onto the rocky shore. Bleaker’s goons stumble out after them, coughing so hard they’ve forgotten which side they’re supposed to be on.
TAB “Tiger!” Tina cries. He jumps on her and barks, overjoyed she’s safe.
TAB Then—BOOM! A giant orange explosion fills the screen as Bleaker’s secret hideout self-destructs. When the dust clears, we watch him escape via B-roll of a gray World War II submarine plunging under equally gray waves.
TAB “He tricked us!” wails one of Bleaker’s henchmen, rethinking all his life choices. Tina sobs as the sub disappears along with her only chance to return to Ilandia.
TAB “I can’t stop him,” says Wonder Woman, because the episode’s almost over.
TAB “But I want to go home! Please, make him take me home!” cries Tina.
TAB Wonder Woman promises she’ll go home someday, although that’s not a promise she can keep. She explains how now that Tina is no longer living in her home dimension, she must let herself love people here on Earth, even if loving them might someday make her choose our world over her old life back in Ilandia.
TAB “You have to take the chance,” says Wonder Woman. “And right now, you have no choice.”
TAB “In Ilandia, I had a dolphin,” says Tina, apropos of nothing. “We played tag on the ocean all the time.”
TAB Tiger uses his teeth to tug the drawstring of Tina’s sweatshirt, whining and licking her hand so she’ll pet him instead of pining over that dumb old dolphin—but the camera pans up and away, focusing on Wonder Woman’s golden Lasso of Truth as she gives Bleaker’s goons selective amnesia. When Simon arrives with the police, Tina asks if she can go live with him, as his ward.
“She’s one human interest story I’m gonna have to live with for the rest of my life, if I’m lucky,” quips Simon, reminding us how journalists love newspaper metaphors as he hugs Tina tight.
It’s the last time either character ever appears on The New Adventures of Wonder Woman, and Bleaker is still on the loose, but everyone stands on the beach and throws their heads back laughing like people are supposed to during happy endings, except we don’t hear Tiger barking, because he’s already long gone.
VIII.
Like all literary devices, canis ex machina has its limitations. The dogs must never introduce an unexpected twist that creates a new conflict within a narrative, nor should their sudden appearance detract from or significantly alter the work’s meaning, moral, or message. Any plot knots unraveled by the dogs must be clearly insoluble without their immediate intervention, lest audiences cry foul, buoyed by the false notion that there exists some truer, more ideal version of the story that the author has somehow failed to dredge out of their own mind.
TAB Even when this condition is met, critics of canis ex machina claim its inclusion in a given narrative only betrays the author’s subconscious desire to destroy their work before it’s even done being created. Following the Latin root of the word “text,” “textus,” which means “to weave, plait, or braid together,” they argue only an insecure wordsmith lacking conviction would slice a gaping hole in the warp and weft of their painstakingly half-finished story just to shove the dogs through. Like the much-hated “and it was all a dream” conceit, the suspensory ligaments of disbelief are stretched beyond recovery. For after the dogs have descended, it becomes virtually impossible to take anything that happened beforehand seriously.
However, those who have flung open the proverbial kennel door—like Poe, Schwartz, and Collins—often report feeling as though the dogs appeared not because, but in spite of, their mightiest efforts to wrestle complex plots to rational ends. They saw how the material space of a page is unfixed, a backyard without fences, a map no one’s yet drawn. They knew how to transform it into a sundrenched suburb or the dank hold of a whaling ship or a rocky coastline somewhere in California, or all three, or none at all. Above all, they understood we keep words like “impossible” handy because such things occur all the time. On the tightrope between paragraphs, it’s best to accept that none of us are really in control of everything that could happen here.
In the corner of the last page, a dog appears.
He is glad to see you.