This comic is a reference to the 1988 action film Die Hard. The character with the life-like goatee is meant to be Hans Gruber, the film’s primary villain. The “guy” who is thwarting their efforts represents the protagonist, John McClane.
In the actual film, John does those same things described except in the end he saves the hostages. However in this retelling of the story, the hero instead repairs some cut cables in order to maintain “uptime,” a measure of the health of a computer network based on the percentage of time it’s functioning correctly. Through this decision to sacrifice human lives in order to keep a network online, the protagonist is easily identified as a systems administrator or “sysadmin.”
By boldly portraying a sysadmin as a heroic figure, the Author will surely boost the self-esteem of the many readers of his fine comic strip that happen to be in that line of work. For those that are not, this stark contrast simply serves as a humorous punch-line.
