Gorillaz

In an interview, Murdoc claimed that Noodle HAD in fact died when the windmill island was shot down. Murdoc said he tried to recover her body from the wreckage, but the most he could get was a DNA sample. He also attempted to travel through the bowels of hell in order to bring her back, but failed. He later used her DNA to create a cyborg version of Noodle (who is super violent and basically lives to do Murdoc's bidding). In the Stylo video, Cyborg Noodle pulls out a shotgun and nearly blows away a cop in pursuit of their car. Their is some evidence that Noodle may be alive, however. Part of the album artwork for Plastic Beach included a picture of a battered and bruised Noodle with jet-black eyes. Since a robot can't bruise, it makes sense that this picture would be of the real noodle rather than the cyborg version. (Of course, that brings up the question of how she got those eyes and what exactly they mean, but time will tell.)

2D was gassed and kidnapped in his flat and taken to Plastic Beach in a suitcase (as shown in 2D's Plastic Beach Ident video clip). He believes Murdoc was the one who kidnapped him, however it appears that a new character, a demon wearing a gas mask, was his kidnapper. (The demon appears in several places in artwork, as well as 2D's Ident and Stylo videos. It is likely that this character was created as an alter-ego for Mos Def, as he raps on several Plastic Beach tracks.)

Murdoc made and lost a great deal of money through some illegal means (I believe he was working as an arms dealer selling to the Russians), and decided to burn down Kong Studios for the insurance money. He also mentioned that part of the reason for the move was to flee from the Russians, who were out to kill him after their business deal went south. The burned wreckage of the studio is visible on a certain part of the Gorillaz website. Before burning down the studio, he shipped a great deal of the band's belongings to Plastic Beach, their new home. The beach itself is not made of earth at all; it is the collection of all of the plastic and rubbish floating in the ocean (similar to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch near Hawaii, it symbolizes the the wastefulness and excess of society). The top part of the rubbish heap was stuccoed and painted pink to look like a natural plateau. Murdoc built their new home/studio atop it. (And it's about as dilapidated and leaky as Kong Studios was.) According to the pelican at the entrance of the building on the band's website, Plastic Beach is the farthest point from any other land mass in the world.

Little was known about the fate of Russell initially, as Murdoc mentioned he had essentially dropped off the face of the earth. Finally, Russel's Plastic Beach Ident clip hit the website, showing him stomping down a fishing dock (clearly pissed), and jumping off the end into the ocean. When the album dropped and the artwork for the record debuted, it depicted Russel as a giant; he is now as tall as all of Plastic Beach (which is about 3 or 4 stories high). In the "Making of Plastic Beach" documentary, included in the deluxe edition of the album, Jamie Hewlett shows Mos Def the artwork for the album and explains the back story for each character. He says that in swimming the ENTIRE way to Plastic Beach, Russell ingested so much pollution, trash and toxic waste that it transformed him into a giant, making a reference to Gulliver's Travels. Russell's situation reinforces the idea of human excess destroying nature already present on the album.

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