I have to imagine his books were terrible if he only half-assed writing them between saving the world all the time (and maybe snuck in some secret clues for Mark along the way?)
It was more or less confirmed that Cecil was responsible for basically all the book sales in order to keep Nolan and his family financially situated, so it seems like they weren’t exactly flying off the shelves on their own.
I did love the subtle but brilliant parallel between Nolan staring at the black hole and Debbie staring at the highway from that bridge, both of them in a real bad place and teetering on the edge…
That stood out to me as well and I have to assume it was intentional, Mark looked bruised and battered to fuck while the Viltrumite barely had a scratch on her even after he got a decent number of hits in.
I’m not convinced she was actually “beaten” or just taking it easy to sus him out a bit, cause she also recovered immediately as soon as he showed even a hint of weakness. Considering it was seemingly the Viltrumite plan all along to threaten Mark into replacing Nolan as their man on the inside on Earth, it would make sense if they were trying to test rather than kill him with this fight…
Even if they weren’t racist, “The Man with the Invincible Gun” is just an absolutely terrible title for a book lol, so that probably din’t help.