It is just not cricket...

That's because this next sports themed confrontation (following Montone and O'Neil hammering a Squash ball around a court) features Golf...

Why Golf? Well this seems to have a more obvious potential answer - it is the favoured sport of highly paid executives, hardly anyone can't have of heard of or experienced a boss at some point being "down the golf course"

If Outland could be said to have any particular allegorical message, it is very much about big corporations (with the given company name Con - am being an inverted shortened version of Amalgamation of Conglomerates) and corruption in those big companies all the way from the top...

A similar message first appeared in Ridley Scott's Alien with the company in question being more interested in getting a Alien than the crew surviving, Outland borrows more than a few cues from Alien, being equally "down and dirty"

But just how dirty will Outland get...? you know what to do, Tune in next week...

Stranglehold

So here we have it - Jaunty Jim - sorry I mean Yario has O'Neil firmly by the neck in the walk in freezer

- So obviously there must be something important in the fridge as well as it being a good place for a ambush being firmly out of sight...

Looking at the whole picture...(or even the movie)

Yario appears to strangle O'Neil and just as he is congratulating himself, O'Neil leaps to life completely surprising Yario and O'Neil finishes off Yario (for good)

And its then revealed that O'Neil was wearing a plastic collar around his neck preventing him from getting killed, (a similar ruse to that famously used by Clint Eastwood to avoid gunfire) so not only was O'Neil expecting to be ambushed he even knew which weapon would be used... so Montones death is at least important from that point of view

O'Neil then goes on to find the motherload of the highly illegal and dangerous drug that's causing all the deaths... tucked away inside one of the animal carcasses...

So if we step back a bit to the gathering in Outlands night club of everyone who O'Neil was watching via CCTV - we had Spota who after being thrown into a zero gee and atmosphere free cell got his airline cut by a knife, we then had Montone who was strangled by a garrotte in his apartment (at least in the movie) and Yario above...

That leaves just one person left - who O'Neil will be paying a visit to next - yes it's time for another odd sports themed confrontation, this time with Shepherd himself...

A pain in the neck

Which is what O'Neil is clearly experiencing here after shining too much light on the forbidden subject...

Courtesy of Yario and his garrotte...

So it's clearly Yario who killed Montone (at least in the movie at any rate)

on a side note, it is probably just me but I was wondering how much of a Steranko self portrait Yario was, I mean the hair and face do look similar, obviously the glasses are missing...

But what do you think, a sneaky in joke from Steranako or just a great drawing...

Don't drop that torch

I mean it's dark enough as it is in this butchers walk in freezer..

It must be a butchers freezer, aside from the large animal carcasses everywhere theres big meat hooks for them to hang from..

But there is another kind of butchering going on here, perhaps the next page will shine some light on this?

Temperature is monitored at all times...

So says the large letters hidden behind both a oversized piece of meat (most of a cow or a pig possibly) and the proportionally tiny shadow figures...

Telling us in no uncertain terms that it is chill in here...

Like many scenes in the movie it does not bare much scrutiny very well, are we excepted to just casually accept that whole entire animal carcasses are shipped over the astronomical distance between Earth and io (between 528 and 931 million kilometres from what i could see) and then are put in a large walk in freezer?

Seems a very costly exercise and doubly unnecessary from the point of view of how much waste the people eating this would generate, I mean there are many reasons why astronauts have powdered ice cream and a mostly liquid diet...

That aside even actually having a freezer (with temperature being monitored) seems rather ridiculous, given the surrounding environment it would be more of a case of not actually having much (or any) heating than actually chilling anything as space is rather cold so why waste energy freezing something when you could for most intents and purposes just bung it outside?

I suppose this is the part where one thinks its best not to poke at the holes, lest an abyss beckons..

Anyways something not quite so cool is happening in the freezer, find out what starting next week

Montone is dead...

So goes the dialogue starting the next instalment, as seen below

but the death itself happens completely "off screen" in the comic and is not depicted at all.. instead all we get is a brief explanation "killed because O'Neil came too close to discovering the truth"

Which, well - doesn't bare scrutiny that much, after all O'Neil has already uncovered that the workers are going crazy and dying as a result of strong and very illegal drugs which are being smuggled in under supervision of Outlands manager himself Shepherd, - I mean how much more truth has O'Neil to uncover here?!

Rather than dwell on that, lets step back a bit and look at the movie in which post finding Spotas air hose cut by a knife, O'Neil finds Montone in his apartment strangled by a garrotte which is still tied around his neck

Either way really Montones death does not make much sense as anything less than an act of rash panic of the part of the person ordering the murders...

I mean murdering Montone as an "example" to O'Neil does not make much sense, as if anything the powers that be rather O'Neil be like Montone as in he knows the situation but is quite happy to take a bit of money and look the other way and not interfere...

Isn't then the message by killing Montone as a warning then to be NOT like Montone?!

All we are left with realistically is panic on the part of the person ordering the murders and the need to introduce some twist / excitement into the movies story by the writer

For one of the main characters its a pretty bad way to go - either way in comic of movie it should have been a bit different - I don't know if I would agree that not showing it all makes more sense as Montone being killed by a garrotte is a plot point

of this double page spread we are looking at right now... 

Does this mean there is another  murderer or there is suddenly a shortage of knifes - find out some more over the next few days

Cell 36

So here we are with the finished page

and the double spread that goes with it...

So, in the movie O'Neil tries to get Spota to talk by telling him how "accidents can happen" in a zero gee cell, that you can loose all sense of direction and so on with Monotone with him...

O'Neil implicitly instructs Monotone to make sure no-one else gets in where Spota is being held...

and then goes off to see Shepherd again...

Comes back to the cell (on his own) to find Spota has been murdered with his air pipe cut and blood dripping out his air hose

Now it could have been Monotone...?

In the comic adaptation the frankly unnecessary second visit to Shepherd is cut out - but Monotone is clearly seen here with O'Neil discovering Spota murdered...

Apart from apparently far too easy and free access to knifes in Outland (this is already the 3rd one in the story so far) the other thing that the movie make reasonably clear is that the cells are secure access which means only the police (of which O'Neil is the overall person in charge) have access..

Now in the comic it could not have really be Monotone who did the murder as he is there with O'Neil...

This means someone else is the frame, but who...

It will be a while before we find out

Tomorrow another murder attempt is made, but by who and to whom...