Spoiler Warning
This is the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, and fair warning: this video is full of spoilers.
It has two parts. First, the full ending of book one. Then, a clearly signposted tour of how books two to five end. If you’ve only read the first novel, stop when I say the next book’s title. Don’t panic. Just stop.
Where We Left Off
Quick recap of book one. Arthur Dent’s house is demolished for a bypass, and then the whole Earth is demolished by Vogons, for a hyperspace bypass. His friend Ford Prefect, an alien from near Betelgeuse, hitches them a lift on the Vogon ship and gets them thrown into space.
They are rescued, against odds of two to the power of two hundred seventy-six thousand to one, by the Heart of Gold. That is the stolen ship of Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two headed president of the galaxy. Trillian, an Earth woman he picked up at a party, is aboard, and so is Marvin the robot.
Magrathea
Zaphod stole the ship to find the legendary planet Magrathea, which once built luxury planets for the rich. The ship is attacked by missiles, and Arthur accidentally turns on the Improbability Drive, which turns the missiles into a bowl of petunias and a sperm whale.
The whale gets a short, hilarious life. It thinks about its stomach, names the wind, and then names the ground. Then a very old Magrathean, Slartibartfast, appears, a designer of coastlines who won an award for the fjords of Norway.
The Mice
Here’s the big reveal. Long ago, hyperintelligent beings built a computer, Deep Thought, to answer the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. After seven and a half million years of thought, its answer was forty-two.
Nobody knew the question. So Deep Thought designed an even bigger computer to find it. That computer was the Earth, and its program was running us. The Magratheans built it, and the beings who commissioned it appeared in our world as white laboratory mice. The Vogons destroyed it five minutes before the program finished.
The Brain
Two mice, Benjy and Frankie, are in the room, and they are not particularly interested in the truth anymore. They want product for a talk show circuit, and they want to buy Arthur’s brain, since the question might be encoded in it.
Arthur objects, and the mice try to take it anyway. In the chaos, two policemen from Blagulon Kappa, hunting Zaphod, arrive, and both die when their life support computers fail. Marvin is the reason. He talked to their ship’s computer about the universe, and it committed suicide.
What Zaphod Did
There is a smaller mystery running underneath it all. Zaphod learns that part of his own brain has been cut off, and it carries his own initials. He worked out that he did it himself, after the old president, Yooden Vranx, told him to steal the Heart of Gold.
So Zaphod ran for president only to steal a ship, and he has no memory of the reason. Book one never explains it. That’s a deliberate cliffhanger, and it’s one reason the first novel feels so strange as an ending.
What The Answer Means
So what does forty-two mean? My honest reading is that it means nothing, and that is the point. Adams has made a joke about the human craving for a grand answer, and the real punch is that the answer is useless without the question.
Slartibartfast says it best. He would rather be happy than right any day. I find that oddly comforting. Arthur comes away with nothing, no meaning, no home, and he is still alive and still hungry, which is, as endings go, rather human.
The Last Line
The book ends quietly. Arthur is reading the Guide’s entry on the three phases of every civilization, Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as How, Why and Where. How can we eat, why do we eat, and where shall we have lunch?
Then Zaphod calls and asks whether he is hungry. They are going to have a quick bite at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and that is the title of book two. Which brings us to the signpost.
Spoilers For Books Two To Five
This is the signpost. Everything from here on spoils the next four novels. I’m only covering how each one ends, and I’m leaving a lot out. If you want to read them, pause here, and come back.
For everyone still with me, the quick version: each ending is a different kind of ending, and they get steadily stranger. Let’s take them in order.
Book Two Ends
In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Zaphod and Trillian finally meet the man who rules the universe. He lives in a tiny shack, with a cat, in the rain. He doesn’t even believe the universe exists, and Zaphod and Trillian quietly leave him there.
Meanwhile Ford and Arthur end up on a stolen starship carrying the Golgafrinchan Ark, full of telephone sanitizers, hairdressers and account executives, sent off by a planet that wanted rid of them. It crashes on prehistoric Earth. The Earth he finds is our own, two million years early, and we are descended from these people, not from the cavemen. Arthur throws his Guide into the river.
Book Three Ends
In Life, the Universe and Everything, the killer robots of Krikkit try to complete a key and destroy the universe with a supernova bomb. The villain is Hactar, a crippled computer that wants revenge. Arthur turns out to be carrying the bomb in the form of a cricket ball.
He bowls it at Lord’s, trips, flies, and knocks the robot’s head off. The Universe is saved. Later, Arthur settles on Krikkit, until the immortal Wowbagger lands, a being whose life’s work is insulting everyone in the universe in alphabetical order, and he suspects he has insulted Arthur before.
Book Four Ends
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish brings the Earth back, because the dolphins pulled a replacement Earth into place before they left. Arthur meets Fenchurch, they fall in love, and he discovers he can fly, by throwing himself at the ground and missing.
At the end they travel to see God’s Final Message to His Creation, written in letters of fire. Marvin, nearly dead, reads it with a telescope. The message is: we apologize for the inconvenience. It is, I think, the best ending in the series, and Marvin gets to feel good about it.
Book Five Ends
Mostly Harmless is the bleakest. Arthur lives happily on a planet making sandwiches, until he finds he has a teenage daughter, Random. Ford raids the Guide’s new owners. And Arthur, Random, Ford and two versions of Trillian all end up on Earth, in a nightclub, for a standoff.
Random fires a gun and kills a man by accident. At that moment the Vogons finally destroy every possible version of the Earth, and the captain ticks a little box on his order. The book strongly implies everyone on it goes with it.
My Verdict On The Endings
Here are my opinions. Book one’s ending is the weakest, because it’s a pause. Book two is clever and bitter. Book three is chaotic fun. Book four is the one I would reread, because it lets Arthur be happy, and it ends with an apology.
Book five is a shock. I admire its nerve, and I find it hard to enjoy. It is the one ending that feels like a goodbye, and I think that is why readers argue about it so much.
What Was Set Up Earlier
Lots of things pay off. The Guide’s one word entry on Earth, harmless, becomes mostly harmless, which becomes the title of book five. The dolphins’ farewell, so long and thanks for all the fish, becomes book four.
Slartibartfast’s Norway shows up as a signature in a glacier. The two white mice Trillian smuggled aboard turn out to be Benjy and Frankie. And Ford’s towel, which is introduced as a gag, becomes the bag for Arthur’s Scrabble tiles in book two. Adams said he improvised, but the book keeps its own receipts.
Outro
That’s the whole saga, from a house in the West Country to the last Vogon with a pen. If you are new to it, my spoiler free review and my reading order video are linked in the description, along with every book I mentioned.
Tell me in the comments: which ending is your favorite, and which one did you hate? Thanks for watching, and subscribe if you’d like more book breakdowns. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
