Yes, the tablet really is as epic as all that. It deserves to be introduced to awesome music with lots of pomp and circumstance and fanfare. Because it can do really, really amazing things. It brings things to back to life every night, everything from mummies and dinosaurs to tiny plastic figurines of cowboys and Romans, waxworks to works of taxidermy, even mammoth stone statues of jackal-headed bodyguards. Beyond bringing things back to life, it also gives the three old retainers of NATM 1 enhanced vitality, even though it doesn't reverse the aging process. Once the tablet is active, Cecil, Gus, and Reginald have enough energy to kick ass. They open such a can on Larry and try to go against the exhibits, but the exhibits have fifty years of harsh treatment to serve as motivation, and there are more of them. (This is a dynamic I want to go into at some point.) In BOTS, the tablet is also revealed to have the power to open the gate to the Underworld, allowing for the release of a half-bird, half-man army of the damned (that they split shortly thereafter is their business).
In both movies, the pieces of the tablet are shown to at least rotate and depress slightly in their places (these two contradict each other on principle, unless you press the pieces in the right places to push them down without turning them, but this tablet is magic). It is also a reasonable expectation to have there be writing on both sides of the tablet, some of it laying out key instructions even. Since the pieces can rotate a whole three hundred sixty degrees, there are symbols on both sides, and there are nine rotating pieces, this opens the way for (according to the Combinations and Permutations Calculator) 4.42*10^43 possibilities, using numbers to represent hieroglyphs, with eighteen being used, one on each side of each rotating piece, allowing, like any sane language, for repetition. Knowing that there are eighteen symbols to choose from and nine can "face front" at any given time, this narrows it down to 3124550 combinations (which is still a lot). What I'm trying to get at with all this is something stated in the writers' commentary for the original Night at the Museum: originally the tablet was a puzzle that could be rearranged, such as to magically compel someone to obey the holder of the tablet, or to obey Ahkmenrah, or that all exhibits come to life to serve Ahkmenrah, or whatever else. They ditched the concept deciding it was too complicated, but it's very easy to make a franchise out of such a concept. I also mean to say that perhaps part of the concept has been retained and/or will be resurrected later on (maybe Lancelot knows something about that, or that Shepseheret knows more than initially suggested by the lack of news about her casting with relation to NATM 3). It is very possible that the tablet can be made to spell out a different spell each time, and it just so happened that when Nicky turned the piece at the end of NATM 1 to spell out what Ahkmenrah needed to know, or was able to prompt a brain still struggling to adjust to the hustle and bustle of a museum in chaos after however long being shut up in a sarcophagus.
The symbols also correspond to numbers one through nine (take this to Giorgio A. Tsoukalos and you will more than likely receive the following response: ANCIENT ALIENS!), which may or may not be a coincidence, and in fact the combination is a secret pass phrase, which also happens to coincidentally coincide with the first several digits of pi. This was never gone into very well, so sadly I am forced to speculate. It could be aliens. It could be the gods telling them how to do this (and who in their right minds disobeys the gods?). It could be the will of fate that it worked out this way. Nobody knows.
But speaking of gods, the fact that the tablet's powers all seem to revolve around life and death, especially around the underworld and the realm of night, led me to conclude that the tablet is powered by Ra. Ra was the ancient Egyptian god of the sun, who steered his boat across the sky during each day and through the Underworld every night. He was king of the gods until his daughter-in-law/daughter Isis tricked him into giving her his secret name through use of poison, which she used to not only heal him, but send him to some undisclosed location, never to be seen again. Now, there are two options with this theory:
- Ra blessed the tablet before he was banished, and it was passed down through a specific family up to Ahkmenrah's generation, when he was buried with it upon death, because he was chosen in some way (bit of trivia that I've never been able to find again is that Ahkmenrah means "in the likeness of Ra") to guard the tablet in eternity. Perhaps because he was the most fit for the task.
- Ra resides within the tablet, waiting for release and carefully observing who around the tablet acts in what way and lending his power to its purposes. He brings light and life to the realm of dead, but only after sundown, hence why the exhibits only come to life after the sun sets and that the tablet can open the door to the Underworld and allow its denizens access to the upper world. There are other implications of this theory, such as that he may or may not compel certain people to act in certain ways in order to ultimately gain his freedom, or the question of whether or not there's a better reason he was sealed away than just one woman's ambition. In this case, the tablet was still passed down from generation to generation until Ahkmenrah was buried with it, but Ra would have been able to make a more informed choice about who would serve as the best guardian.
Either way, based on the tablet's abilities and general information about Ra, he is the best fit as its "patron deity" and the source of its power.
So yes, to paraphrase Cecil, the tablet is "very cool." To quote Larry Daley, "It's freaking awesome!"
In other news, just as I promised: according to the IMDb website for NATM 3, we should be expecting a character named Augustus (another name for Octavius, if in fact our Octavius is the Octavius in question). This could be an older Octavius, or it could be another trick out of the Once Upon a Time creators' playbook. You keep a character's real name under wraps (i.e. Peter Pan's casting call described him as Rufio before we knew in fact they were looking for Peter Pan himself) and use an alias to either satisfy the eager fans with regard to a name or to stoke the speculation fires. In this case, if this is a borrowed play from the creators of not only OUAT but Lost as well, then the latter is certainly more likely. There can be two Teddy's, for instance, but they do not share space or screen time, which begs the question, as brought up by the writers in the commentary for BOTS, about the Teddy statue out front. Does it not come to life because there can be only one? Or is it because it's technically "outside"?
And the point about only one Teddy brings to mind ancient Egyptian ideas of the afterlife which influence how the tablet operates, it being an Egyptian artifact after all. The Egyptians believed in a soul divided into five parts but which inhabited only one image of the deceased at a time, preferably the dead body but could also inhabit a statue which took the likeness of the dead guy, up to and including waxworks, plastic figurines, and taxidermy. Egyptians believed in exactness and attention to detail for that very reason. In case the body or the statues were destroyed in an effort to erase someone from existence or due to various natural causes (up to and including grave robbers being sloppy), there was a backup "body" for the part of the soul (the ba, I believe) which needed something to inhabit to recharge it's batteries after a long day of being dead. Each person has only one ba, which preferably wants to rest in a body. The reason the wax Teddy comes to life instead is because wax is closer to flesh than bronze.
The tablet, infused with life-giving power, allows souls to return to their bodies or reasonable facsimiles of their bodies. One of its related powers is to open the gate to the Underworld and allow its denizens to dwell among the living. The upper world must be something special.
Next time on "For the Love of Night at the Museum": the dynamic between guards and exhibits, and why being a night guard under the tablet is unlike anything else.
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