Geese

Geese are part of the campus pond’s lively animal population, but their significance in the story extends beyond background wildlife. Gathered beside ducks at the water’s edge, they disrupt a television report and draw the attention of William Henry Devereaux, Jr.; Finny the Goose then becomes the unwilling, active center of Devereaux’s public protest. The episode’s humor depends on distinguishing a goose from a duck, while its stakes arise from the possibility that a deliberately comic threat will be taken seriously.

The Flock at the Pond

At the pond, ducks and geese crowd along the bank and squawk while a television crew prepares a report about the planned Technical Careers Complex. A couple of crew members feed the birds popcorn. The news reporter repeats her introduction as the sound technician struggles with the noise and checks the recording level. The flock is thus present before Devereaux’s protest begins: the birds occupy the same space as the planned building dedication and the university’s public messaging, but do not accommodate the broadcast’s need for a clean, controlled scene.

The narration marks the difference between the two kinds of birds through the people watching them. When the reporter asks whether someone wants to lose a duck, Tony Coniglia corrects her: the larger birds are geese, while the smaller black ones are ducks. He also corrects her description of the body of water, making a comic performance out of precise distinctions. These corrections are more than incidental wordplay. The later threat is framed as a duck-killing ultimatum, but the animal Devereaux actually holds up is a goose; the discrepancy becomes the scene’s most memorable contradiction.

Finny the Goose and the Camera

Finny the Goose is introduced through behavior that resists being treated as mere spectacle. After the popcorn runs out, he turns toward the discarded bag and then the hand that had fed him, hissing and honking. When nearby movement sends several mallards into awkward flight, Finny stays where he is and grows louder. The flock is not simply a quiet backdrop for the news crew: its noise frustrates the broadcast, while Finny’s refusal to scatter makes him conspicuous within it.

The encounter becomes more personal when Devereaux turns around and finds Finny behind him. Finny nips his little finger, then follows his hand toward a jacket pocket, apparently seeking food. Instead, the goose catches the fake nose and glasses Devereaux has there and pulls them out. Devereaux wrests the disguise back, and Finny responds with renewed trumpeting, hissing, and wing-flapping. The camera crew, which had come to cover the building dedication, recognizes that this unexpected confrontation has become a more compelling scene than the scheduled report.

The sequence gives Finny a limited but unmistakable agency in the action. He reacts to the lost popcorn, the movement around the flock, Devereaux’s hand, and the recovered disguise; those reactions repeatedly redirect human attention. The narrative does not present him as understanding the budget dispute or the camera’s purpose. Instead, his ordinary responses collide with a human performance already becoming a public event. His presence turns the scene away from a prepared message and toward an unstable encounter that the participants cannot fully control.

A Goose in a Budget Protest

Devereaux’s protest emerges as the birds, broadcast crew, and university politics converge. He has been considering signs that the university may be changing course, including the loss of a promised department chair and Jacob Rose’s job interview elsewhere. In that unsettled state, he is suddenly angry and exhilarated. With Finny still trumpeting, Devereaux takes hold of the goose, raises him toward the camera, puts on the fake nose and glasses, and identifies himself as an anonymous department chair.

His grievance is specific: the English department lacks next year’s budget to hire enough adjunct instructors for freshman composition. Devereaux contrasts that shortfall with the millions committed to a new building and says that the needed composition sections would cost only three thousand dollars each. He presents the disparity as evidence of distorted educational priorities, then declares that beginning Monday he will kill a duck each day until he receives a budget. The threatened victim is therefore a duck, but the living bird before the camera is Finny, a goose. The contrast supplies the scene’s absurdity without erasing the real institutional complaint behind it.

Devereaux shakes the frightened bird to emphasize his ultimatum, while the crowd applauds. Dickie Pope and state representative Jack Proctor arrive from a limousine as the camera continues to record. The gathering is no longer centered on the scheduled dedication: the professor in disguise, the live goose, and the budget demand have displaced the official event. Finny’s presence is essential to that reversal, though the protest’s stated purpose concerns funding rather than the bird itself.

Protest, Protection, and Significance

The following day, geese and ducks again share the scene, this time amid a large animal-rights protest. Protesters gather where Devereaux faced the cameras, carrying signs and chanting; their voices join the clucking, quacking, honking, and trumpeting. They link arms into a semicircle around the birds, presenting themselves as a barrier against the danger suggested by Devereaux’s televised threat. Their chant names Devereaux and the slaughter, recasting his comic ultimatum as a public animal-protection crisis.

Finny does not remain inside the protective formation. Perhaps made claustrophobic by the crowd’s closeness, he breaks through the line and trumpets loudly. That movement complicates the protesters’ image of the birds as a group to be protected: the human beings organize themselves around the flock, but Finny acts independently of their arrangement. The crowd has grown to about a hundred and fifty people, and the television crew has returned, so the goose’s movement occurs before both a public demonstration and its recording apparatus.

Across the two scenes, geese occupy several overlapping roles: noisy inhabitants of the pond, disruptions to a television report, the subject of a mistaken duck label, and participants in a protest organized around the threat to animals. Finny is not merely a prop held up to make Devereaux’s speech memorable. His persistence, search for food, resistance, and break through the protesters’ formation each alter what people can see and do. The episode’s comedy depends on human confusion and performance, but the geese remain materially present in the conflict—and Finny’s unscripted actions repeatedly unsettle the human stories imposed on them.