From the Vault: Anthology of Horror, Volume 9

Yes, the Halloween tradition continues as Robert and Joe dive into the rich history of TV horror and sci-fi anthology shows to focus on STBYM topics that might not otherwise make the show. In this installment, they spin some science and contemplation out of the 2001 episode of “The Outer Limits” titled “Think Like a Dinosaur” and the 1974 episode of “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” titled “The Spanish Moss Murders.” (originally published 10/31/2023)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We're heading
into the vault for an older episode of the show.
This was a Halloween episode we did called Anthology of Horror,
Volume nine, one of our long running series of Halloween
season episodes where we look at anthology TV series and
various things like that. I think in this one I
ended up talking about an episode of cole Check The Nightstalker.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
Yes, yeah, it's a pretty fun one. I believe this
is going to be This will have been our last
Anthology of Horror episode, but there's going to be a
spiritual successor to this series starting in just the next
couple of weeks, or next week or this week. We're
recording these intros ahead of time so we can get
a little lost in the time flow.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Oh by the way, this episode originally published October thirty first,
twenty twenty three. Hope you enjoy.

Speaker 3 (01:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This is
Ruthless Rob Lamb.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
And this is Corrosive Joseph McCormick and Happy Halloween.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
That's right, we're continuing our Halloween tradition this year, or
it's been our Halloween tradition for several years now. Anthology
of Horror this is where we take We each take
an episode of a TV anthology series or something related
to this tradition, such as in the case of Joe's
selection this year, kind of like a Monster of the
Week episode, which which still close enough for our work,

(01:48):
and then we spend some science or contemplation out of it.
Before we switched over and started doing horror and sci
fi anthologies, we did the same treatment with creepy pastas
in the past. So that's what we do in this series,
take a little horror, a little sci fi, and spin
it out, squeeze it out, and see what kind of
science we can get out of it. However, I think

(02:10):
this is likely the final installment of Anthology of Horror.
Here on stuff to blow your mind, and mainly because
ever since we started doing Weird House Cinema, the premise
has felt like a little bit redundant, like we get
to talk about a weird movie every week, so maybe,
at least in my case, it feels a little less
special to have this Horror Anthology episode we do every year,

(02:33):
and we've also covered a lot of great selections already,
So I don't know if listeners out there have strong
feelings about this right end, and we will consider now.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
I know you suggested that this would be Anthology of
Horror the Final Chapter, but if we're going by Friday
the thirteenth sequel naming conventions, that would have actually been
the fourth Anthology of Horror episode we did, which was
many years ago. Now this is the ninth, is that correct?
Which would that would put us in Jason Goes to
Hell territory? So this really should be Anthology of Horror

(03:05):
Part nine Robin, Joe go to Hell.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
Okay, well, hopefully we can deliver Jason Goes to Hell
quality level or above in this episode. All right, Joe,
what do you have for us? I teased it a
little bit, but what is your selection for this year?

Speaker 2 (03:23):
Okay? So, not too long ago, on some episode or other,
it came up that I had never seen any of
the classic American TV series Colchak The Night Stalker, which
was originally broadcast on ABC in nineteen seventy four. I
think it ran seventy four to seventy five only for
one season, though I think there are around twenty episodes

(03:46):
or so. And my ignorance of this show was so
deep that I didn't even realize it had a supernatural element.
I thought, I guess this was just based on the name.
I thought it was some kind of gritty crime show.
I think because I night Stalker. I thought about that
serial killer and I was like, okay, it's like a
serial killer show. But no, no, no, it's so much

(04:07):
more delightful than that. This show is essentially a precursor
to The X Files, where instead of FBI agents Malter
and Scully, we have a fast talking, rascally Chicago newspaper
reporter named Carl Kolchak played by Darren McGavin, whom I
knew primarily as the dad, the guy who gets his

(04:29):
son a BB gun in a Christmas story.

Speaker 1 (04:32):
Well, and of course that's a tremendous role by Darren
McGavin there as well, So if you only know him
for one role, like that's a good one to know
him from. You know, it was in tons of stuff.
But yeah, he's great in this, as I'll mention in
a bit, I think he's he's he's really holding the
show up on his shoulders.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Now, I think any episode of Kolchak the night Stalker
would count as an anthology entry because it had a
monster of the Week format. In each new kaper Cha
would begin by reporting on some weird crime, usually a
murder that baffles the narrow minded police detectives. Ah, you know,
the victim's teeth were all painted blue. What could this mean?

(05:11):
And eventually we discover it means that the deaths were
caused by a shape shifting wear tiger or something.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
Yeah, the plot that you encounter in these episodes, it's
gonna be very formulaic. I think I watched a bunch
of these back in the nineties on either Sci Fi
or any probably sci Fi, and I remember liking it.
And one thing I also strongly remember about it is
it being kind of a cross generational hit. I have
vague memories that like, both my dad and my granddad

(05:41):
would be like cool with this show being on, because
you know, kids in the nineties we wanted to watch monsters,
or I wanted to watch monsters anyway. But the rest
of the show has a very traditional episodic gum shoe
feel to it. You know, it feels very classic television
in that regard. It's very much a product of its age,
but with this strange supernatural twist to it. And then

(06:03):
at the center of this you have just an incredibly fun,
fast talking and charismatic performance by Darren McGavin, and you
just can't help but love him. You can't help but
follow him, and you want to see what he does next.
And it doesn't matter if you're here for the monsters
or you didn't know monsters were going to occur, You're
gonna stick around and see where this goes.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
Yes, the force of the main character's personality is really
the anchor of the show. And now I haven't seen
the whole series. I've only seen this one episode now
and then read about some others, but I'm going to
be watching more. I think it is interesting to compare
the dynamics of Kolchak to the show that it is
explicitly acknowledged to have inspired The X Files. I know,

(06:44):
I think Chris Carter has said Kulchak was an inspiration
on The X Files. So the X Files, the investigations
there are that the tone of them is largely based
on the tension between Molder the believer and Scully the skeptic,
whereas in Colchak there's just one investigator, so there are

(07:05):
not two characters to bounce ideas off each other and
act as foils for one another. It all has to
be there inside Darren McGavin, and there is a similar
tension within him, but it's different. It's not like part
of him is an idealistic true believer who just wants
aliens to be real, and another part is ruthlessly seeking

(07:27):
out hard evidence instead. I think the tension is between
Coolchak's personality versus his observations. So it seems to me
that the tension is that Kolchak is naturally a wily, sardonic,
no nonsense personality. He talks like a just the facts

(07:48):
kind of newsman, and he makes wry jokes about anything
that sounds unusual, not just monsters, but unfamiliar science concepts,
Like he makes jokes about the idea of rim sleep.
You know, there's like a guy in this episode who's
undergoing rim sleep, a scientist says, and he's like, oh,
is he remming right now? And there's like an inflection

(08:09):
on that that makes it sound funny, And then he
has the same kind of jokes about anything that's outside
of a very grounded, working class kind of scope of life.
So he makes jokes about the impossibility of pronouncing the
scientific names of plants, or about French food items, you know,
stuff like that. And yet at the same time he
puts the clues together and he does end up believing

(08:31):
that the murders are supernatural in nature, and then has
to convince other people. He has to convince his boss
at the newspaper, the police whatever, that it really was
a monster again this time, and not this other poor
guy who's being falsely accused of the crime.

Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yeah. I think that's a good summary of the energy here.
It's kind of like Molder and Scully kind of have
like an forgive me if I if I'm not doing
justice to musical genres. They have kind of a shoegaze vibe,
and I feel like, I feel like Coulhak is jazz,
you know. Anyway, A couple of quick notes just about
people involved in this series. The main character was created

(09:07):
by Jeff Rice in his novel The Cool Track Papers,
and this was adapted before it was published into the
original nineteen seventy three TV movie That Kicked It All. Off.
It concerned vampire murders, and I think that's where we
get the night stalker thing. Also of note is that
this episode is directed by Gordon Hessler, who lived nineteen
twenty five through twenty fourteen. He directed nineteen seventy Scream

(09:29):
and Scream Again, which we talked about in Weird House Cinema.
M okay, And as far as the cast goes, you know,
if this were a weird House would go deeper. But
I will point out that we have the prolific Keenan Wynn,
who lived nineteen sixteen through nineteen eighty six, playing Captain
what mad Dog Joe in this and it's a pretty
fun role.

Speaker 2 (09:48):
Yes, what do I know him from? I mean he
was in a lot of things. You probably know him
from Doctor Strangelove.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
I think he was in Tarantula. I don't know, have
my notes in front of me, but he was very prolific.
He was in a lot of stuff.

Speaker 2 (09:59):
But another big guest star in this movie, though you
don't see his face, it's covered by some fibrous material,
is Richard Keel, the guy who played Jaws in the
James Bond series.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
Ah, he's just doing a basic big man monster role
in this.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
Right, Yeah, he's ega. He's a soggy ega in So,
to summarize the episode, it's called the Spanish Moss Murders,
and it starts with Kolchak intercepting a call in his
police radio to the scene of a murder in a
fancy French restaurant. He makes some joke about the wine
cellar of this restaurant having more than being worth more

(10:35):
than the entire gross domestic product of Paraguay, which I
looked that up and that would make it worth like
billions of dollars at the time, So I think that's
a little bit of an exaggeration. But anyway, the head
chef of this restaurant has been slain right in the
middle of the restaurant kitchen. His body's lying there on
the floor between the prep tables and all that. And

(10:56):
not only has he been killed, but his body was
found in a particularly gruesome state, with its chest cavity
crushed like a beer can. On top of that, there
is some kind of weird, wet vegetable matter scattered around
the crime scene, described by one character as quote green glop,
and the police sagely conclude that the plant matter must

(11:18):
be salad. They were in a restaurant after all.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
All right, solid police work, right.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah, I think Rob you've seen more Culchak than me.
Is this a theme that like the police don't know
what they're doing and Colchak has to be the one
to figure everything out.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
Yeah, I vaguely remember this being the case. You know,
it's like you need an outside thinker because you know
the police they're doing they're doing a good job. They're
you know, they're not incompetent in this show, but they're
used to dealing with normal crimes. Yeah, cold Shack's expertise
comes into play when we're dealing with supernatural crimes.

Speaker 2 (11:52):
So Colchak is on the case. Through some crafty investigation
involving trickery and trespassing, Colchack starts to piece together a
perplexing set of facts connecting a number of different crimes.
Together people all crushed or killed by severe blunt force
trauma to the thorax, all with the same green glop

(12:13):
found around their bodies, and after a visit to a
local botanical garden, Kolchak is able to ascertain the origin
of the green glop. It is Spanish moss, which only grows.
He is told in hot and humid conditions nowhere around
Chicago outside of a greenhouse. And I have to make
a little observation. Spanish moss is not like usually wet

(12:35):
and soggy. So I think I don't know how much
experience the writers here had with actual Spanish moss, which
is consistently described in this more like they're talking about algae.

Speaker 1 (12:48):
Yeah. Yeah, that is weird, isn't it. Yeah maybe they
just hadn't been really exposed to it. But yeah, I
don't think of Spanish moss as being humid and wet
and drippy and gloppy and so forth.

Speaker 2 (12:58):
It's actually rather dry and crispy. In fact, famously, I
know I was reading about there was one huge historical
fire that was started when some Spanish moss caught fire.
It was the Great Fire of nineteen oh one in Jacksonville, Florida,
which a huge fire that was started outside a factory

(13:18):
that was putting stuffing inside of upholstery for furniture, I think,
and the stuffing they were using was Spanish moss. There
were piles of it that I guess were sitting there
to dry or sitting out ready to be stuffed into things,
some of it caught fire and it caused this giant conflagration. Anyway,
back to Colchak, investigation of one victim leads him to

(13:41):
the victim's workplace, a university sleep laboratory, where the professor
and his assistants are running an experimental treatment on a
man with severe narcolepsy by keeping him in an induced coma.
Colchak learns that the murder victim was an assistant in
the last who was known for her clumsiness, one time,

(14:02):
nearly waking up their test subject when she knocked over
some apparatus in the room. Beyond that, other murder victims
seem to have some connection to a social group of
Cajun street musicians who are all originally from Louisiana Bayou
Country and have moved up to the Chicago area. Kolchak
learns from one of their associates the story of a

(14:25):
bogeyman figure from Bayou folklore known as Paramoulfay, or the
evil Father. All the Kajuns would joke to each other,
you better watch out or Paramoufay is going to get you,
and the stories go that Para Malfay has lived in
the swamp since long before the Cajuns arrived. He's wet,
he's covered in rot and festooned with Spanish moss from

(14:47):
head to toe. Mothers warn their children that if they
get out of line, paramoul Fay will squeeze the life
right out of them, and the only way to beat
him is to stab him with a steak from a
bayou gum tree. Kolchak gets another piece of the puzzle.
A prime suspect emerges in several of the murders, a

(15:07):
man named Languis who is known to have a grudge
against several of the victims, but he has a rock
solid alibi. He is the man who has been in
an induced coma in the sleep laboratory, so he's being
monitored twenty four to seven. There's no way he could
have done the murders because he never left the lab
he's been asleep. Finally, Coolchak pieces it all together. He

(15:30):
discovers the truth. The murders are being carried out by
the sleeping man, but not physically. He is dreaming people
to death. His experimental coma is preventing him from dreaming normally.
I guess the drug regimen that the scientists are giving
him is doing something to his ability to dream, and
so his dreams are escaping his mind and becoming a

(15:53):
physical entity in the form of the swamp monster paramou.

Speaker 1 (15:58):
Fay sleep dream manifestation kind of a toolpa.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
Exactly, and in the form of the bay U boogeyman
covered in Spanish moss that this sleep subject grew up
hearing about. So I guess presumably the monster in this
story could have been anything. It could have been whatever
it was that this man had in his mind. But
because this is the folklore he knows, it assumes this form.

(16:23):
It's kind of like Wes Craven's New Nightmare. You know,
there's an entity that could take any form. The form
it takes is the form you imagine, So it becomes
Freddy Krueger.

Speaker 1 (16:34):
Yeah, or of course reminds one of Gozer as well,
choose the form of the destructor. Yes.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
So Kolchak explains his theory to the police commander in
the sleep lab, to Mad Dog Captain mad Dog Keenan
Winn here, and the professor is ordered to wake up
the test subject in order to stop the mayhem. But
it doesn't work. Langua will not wake up, and instead
he dies Coolchak thinks that, well, that's tragic, but now

(17:02):
at least the trouble is over, until he discovers water
and Spanish moss in his desk drawers. He thinks that
there's like that the ceiling. The plumbing in the ceiling
is leaking, and that's why there's water everywhere. But nope,
Paramoufay has been stalking around his desk in the newspaper office,
and this seems to mean that Paramoufay has escaped his host.

(17:24):
Even though the dreamer is dead, the dream lives on independently,
and now the dream knows the reporter is on to him.
In the end, Coolchak has to confront the monster by
tracking it to the sewers and staking it with a
Bayou gum tree branch that he stole from the botanical garden.
The sewer confrontation, I feel like, is a little anti

(17:44):
climactic for me because you never get a great, great
look at the monster. He's kind of a big, shaggy
vegetable sasquatch played by Richard Keel.

Speaker 1 (17:54):
Yeah, I mean the lighting's pretty good, so it's not unforgiving,
but yeah, it's a bit dark, and I mean it's
obviously not the most robust monster costume ever committed to film.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
But I love the concept of the monster, even if
it's not the most impressive looking thing I've ever seen.
The idea of this shaggy creature dreamed into existence and
covered head to toe in Spanish moss, just a shambling
mess of plant matter.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
Yeah, I think it's a It's an admirable plot. It
all fit, all the pieces fit together, and then at
the same time it feels wild and weird enough that
it could have been a symbol via like an improv
theater audience shout out plot elements, like all right, what
do we have? Okay here, I hear rim sleep, I

(18:43):
hear Cajun boogeyman, I hear French cuisine. Okay, let's put
all this together now.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
I was really hoping to discover that Paramolfa would be
a real piece of Bayou lore that I could dig into,
but alas I came up shore on this, all the
sources I could find that looked solid at all seem
to trace back to the Culchak episode. There are some
websites that claim paramol Fay is an independent folk tale,

(19:12):
but they don't cite any sources and they're just kind
of websites, so I don't know. I couldn't find anything
that looks solid that says this is an actual story
that goes anywhere back further than the TV show. So
I can't say for certain, but I will say my
best judgment is it looks to me like this creature
was invented for the show, though I think it may

(19:33):
be based on existing folk beliefs. There are many monsters
of the swamp. One example that it could be based
on would be like the rugaroo, sort of a Francophone
American werewolf legend.

Speaker 1 (19:45):
Yeah, I think the rugaru connection is pretty solid here. Which,
by the way, if you ever go to the zoo,
the Audubon Zoo down in New Orleans, they have one
on display. That's a lot of fun. But yeah, I
feel like vay connection to that creature, like maybe that
was even the original concept, and they're like, we have

(20:06):
another episode that has a werewolf in it. Let's go
a different direction here. I didn't do an exhaustive search.
It seems like you went a lot deeper, but I
did crack open Carol Rose's books and see if she
had any mention. The only the closest thing she mentions
is a different supernatural father, and that's Pierre Futard or
Father Spanker, which is a French kind of uger character

(20:29):
that's also a monstrous Christmas kind of crampiest creature that's
a counterpart to Father Christmas. So she doesn't listen any
kind of you know, swamp Spanish moss creature. So I
think you're right. I think it's an invention for the show,
but a fun invention and one that feels like it
could be real enough. So there you go.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
Yes, Now, what about the monstrous qualities of Spanish moss itself?
I wanted to get a bit into this. Here. A
funny thing about Spanish moss. Most scientific sources will acknowledge
this right at the top, is that it is neither
Spanish nor is it moss, which is pretty funny, but
I'll deal with those one at a time. So regarding moss,

(21:13):
the species name of Spanish moss is Telanzia eucinioides, and
it's taxonomized within the flowering plant family Bromeliacee, also known
as the bromeliads, along with the pineapple plants. So Spanish
moss is a cousin to the pineapple, and I feel
like you can almost see it, Like if you get
up real close to Spanish moss and you look at

(21:35):
the weird curling stalks and leaves that kind of remind
me of pineapple leaves in a strange way. They're obviously
much smaller, but you can almost see the family resemblance.

Speaker 1 (21:46):
Yeah, I'm looking at some close up pictures right now,
and yeah, I can lean into that.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
True mosses, of course, are more distantly related. They belong
to a division of non vascular, non flowering plants called bryophytes.
Spanish moss is not a moss at all. It's also
not Spanish. It is native to north, South, and Central America.
So in the United States it's only found in the South,
along the Gulf Coast and up the East coast to

(22:14):
around Virginia. Chicago is no place for a Spanish moss
man to thrive.

Speaker 1 (22:18):
Yeah, when I think Spanish moss, I always instantly think Savannah, Georgia,
because we have some some beautiful examples of it there,
especially in the out there in amid the tombstones.

Speaker 2 (22:30):
Yeah, in North America, it's going to be especially in
like coastal areas around the American South. But if it's
not Spanish in origin, why is it called Spanish moss.
You know, a lot of things just have like a
country name applied to them and they're not from that
country at all, and this is one of those cases.
The origin story that I've seen most attested here is

(22:52):
that the naming convention comes from early French explorers in
the Americas who thought that the plant looked like the
big beards of Spanish conquistadors, so they called the plant
Spanish beard.

Speaker 1 (23:06):
Well, I think that's another reason that one might lean
into creating a monster based on it, right, because it's
already compared to a part of a person's look in
general features.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
That's true. I want to get back to that in
a minute now. An interesting thing that makes Spanish moss
different as a plant is that it is an epiphyte,
which means an organism that grows on other plants. Epi
means on top of fight means plant, So it's an epiphyte.
If you've ever seen it in the wild before, you've
probably seen it hanging off of the limbs of trees,

(23:39):
especially trees like live oak and cyprus. Now you might
assume just by looking at it dangling off of tree
limbs the way it does, that Spanish moss is a
parasite killing the tree that hosts it. And you also
might remember the botanical body horror that we talked about
in our episodes on missletoe from several years back. In

(24:00):
that case, one that is totally going Cronenberg on its
host plant, that seems not to be the case with
Spanish moss. A lot of sources flatly state that it
is just not parasitic at all. It does no harm
to the tree. According to this opinion, it would probably
be best considered a commensal organism. So in this case,
the idea would be Spanish moss benefits the tree is unaffected. However,

(24:24):
it seems to me like the exact symbiotic equation is
perhaps debatable, and some sources say Spanish moss might have
a mild negative effect on the host tree, possibly just
by blocking sun from reaching some of its lower leaves
or something like that. But it's not like drilling into
the host tree and sucking it, sucking nutrients out of

(24:46):
its sucking water out of its vascular system and stuff
like that the way that mistletoe does so. According to
most sources. At least, Spanish moss is probably not a parasite.
It certainly not an obligate parasite, though it seems to
prefer trees. I think you can see it sometimes growing
on other substrates, even inanimate ones. And it does not

(25:07):
leach sustenance directly from its host tree. So if it
doesn't act like a vampire to the host tree, and
it doesn't have roots going into the ground, how does
it get its water and mineral nutrients which plants need. Well,
it gets these things from the air. Spanish moss is
an air plant, so it absorbs moisture from the air

(25:28):
using little scales on its leaves called trichomes. So when
rainfalls or when fog swirls, when mists rises off the ground,
the Spanish moss will be there waiting to get its cut.
And as this tangled, shaggy collection of hair like leaves,
these fibers, all winding together, it does have a very

(25:49):
uncanny appearance. It can form these ghostly drooping masses like
the wispy hair of a witch, or like old bits
of cobweb tangled up in the branches. But if you
look close, the structure is interesting. Rob, I've got some
pictures for you to examine here. People at home, you
might want to look up close ups of Spanish moss,
especially to see the tri combes. If you see magnified images,

(26:13):
like through a microscope, you can see all these little
these little scales lifting up like flaps off of the
surface of the leaves.

Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah. Yeah, it's very intricate.

Speaker 2 (26:26):
And these scales are what the plant uses to trap
moisture from the air. However, that means that in order
to survive, the Spanish moss does need what will at
least at some point be a warm, sunny, humid environment. So,
as Colchak discovered, you're not going to find it growing
around Chicago, except maybe in a steamy sewer, though I
guess there it wouldn't have access to the sun. But

(26:49):
during cold and dry times it can apparently go dormant,
so it can kind of like keep the water that
it has stored just kind of close up and then
wade out dry times. But it will eventually need favorable
conditions to come back. And the tricombes are also used
to trap mineral and chemical nutrients that the plant needs.
Those can be dissolved in the water that it absorbs

(27:12):
or it can. I've read also that it can sort
of like just catch debris from the air. It can
catch dust, bird droppings, whatever, and try to make use
of that for its nutrients. Now, because Spanish moss has
to survive by trapping whatever water vapor is in the
air for some monstrous flavor, we can call this breathing fog.

(27:33):
Because it has to breathe fog. You might imagine that
water is precious to it. What little it can get
must be preserved. But plants also need to breathe in
a way in order to perform photosynthesis. In order to
power their metabolism, they have to exchange gases with the atmosphere,
taking in carbon dioxide and water and then using sunlight

(27:55):
to power that chemical reaction that generates the carbohydrates for
the plant, and then of course oxygen as a waste product,
which is useful to us. But breathing exchanging gases with
the atmosphere can be dangerous when you are living on
a razor's edge of hydration when you have to get
all of your water out of the air itself, and
specifically the danger comes when a plant opens the little

(28:18):
holes in its leaves called stomata to absorb CO two
from the atmosphere. When it opens up like that, it
can lose moisture through those little openings, especially under a
hot sun, so Spanish moss uses a specially evolved type
of photosynthesis to avoid this. It's called crass eulacian acid

(28:41):
metabolism photosynthesis usually CAM photosynthesis for short, and this is
an adaptation found in plants that survive in especially arid conditions.
Under this regime photosynthesis, it actually has two phases. There's
a day cycle and a night cycle. So during the day,
when the environment is hot and dry, the plant keeps

(29:03):
its stomata closed so it doesn't lose water through the
holes under the burning sun. But nighttime is the right time.
When the sun goes down, the stomata open up and
they absorb CO two and you specially adapted structure chemical
structures in their cells to fix the CO two and
store it until daytime. Then when the sun comes back up,

(29:26):
the stomata close once again and the plant cells release
the stored CO two harvested during the night for photosynthesis
to take place under the sunlight. So you could argue
that Spanish moss feeds by night and then closes the
coffin lid to digest during the cursed daylight.

Speaker 1 (29:45):
Ooh, very nice. That's seasonally appropriate right there.

Speaker 2 (29:49):
So actually, I think Spanish moss is the perfect thing
to cover the body of a monster that roams in
the nighttime.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
Though.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
You know, something that just occurred to me about the
episode is how come the monster in Kolchak always attacks
in the night. The guy is sleeping all day in
all night, so shouldn't he sometimes be dreaming it during
the daytime.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
Unless he's aware of how cam photosynthesis works. You know,
it's a shame they didn't go into all this in
the episode, because Darren McGavin could have been like, cam photosynthesis?
Is it camming right now?

Speaker 4 (30:24):
That is what he'd say. Okay, Rob, are you ready
for yours?

Speaker 1 (30:37):
Yeah? For mine. You know, if you've listened to the show,
and if you've listened to Weird House Cinema, you probably
know that I have a soft spot for the nineteen
nineties Outer Limits revival. They produced a ton of episodes,
more episodes of this than the original Outer Limits series.
I think they were all filmed in Canada, often used

(30:58):
very Canadian crew and very Canadian casts, and of course
often dealt with you know, it was a science fiction series,
so it's more likely to involve elements that we can
discuss here on the show, as opposed to shows like
Night Gallery or Tales from the Crypt.

Speaker 2 (31:15):
What little of the nineties Outer Limits I've seen is
mostly stuff that you've referred me to, but by large
I'm impressed, Like, well, it's a mix of things. The
episodes don't always look the most amazing, but of the
stuff I've seen, typically the writing and the acting is
quite solid.

Speaker 1 (31:33):
Yeah, Typically, if you're just going in blind on a
nineties Outer Limits episode, you can expect it to be
well acted, overly serious, with a mix of solid practical effects.
Usually there's some nice sets, like this is a show
that really had to think and rethink how to create
a spaceship or alien hallway multiple times per season, and

(31:54):
they generally did a pretty good job. The digital effects, though,
ye are generally not that great to look at.

Speaker 2 (32:01):
I'm going to say regarding the sets, it has a quality.
I don't know exactly what this is I'm noticing, but
it looks like other TV shows made in Canada in
the nineties, Like the sets remind me of the sets
from Are You Afraid of the Dark. The Nickelodeon horror
TV show with you Know shot in Canada in the nineties.

(32:23):
A lot of things shot in Canada in the nineties
look like this to me, film nerds out there, tell
me what is it? I'm noticing? What is that nineties
Canada look?

Speaker 1 (32:32):
Yeah, and if memory serves I may be wrong in this.
I think they filmed all these in and also around Toronto.
So you know, anytime you need like an urban environment,
you need some skyscrapers or what have you, there's a
certain mix of buildings that are going to be considered
for those shots. But an your right, Yeah, I love
the nineties Outer Limits. The lesser episodes are often going

(32:56):
to have a weaker message or more ham fisted men,
and the opening and closing narration can also be a
bit hammy, as it tries to like compose a really
grandiose idea for this episode that is sometimes present and
sometimes feels kind of tacked on.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
I agree. I thought with this episode in particular, it
might have been better without any of the narration, because
I feel like the narration just tried to put an
overly simplistic spin on what was actually a morally complex episode.

Speaker 1 (33:25):
Yeah, like, I feel like the ending to this one,
they nailed the landing, there's no need to say, and
the plane landed successfully and like, no, we just watched it.
It just didn't. So the episode that I selected is
from the seventh season of The Outer Limits. I believe
this is actually from two thousand and one. It is
titled Think Like a Dinosaur.

Speaker 2 (33:45):
You might really expect the episodes going in a different
direction than it does based on that title.

Speaker 1 (33:50):
Yeah you think you think, I don't know, walk like
an Egyptian or I don't know, do the dinosaur. We'll
get into what the title means. But it's based on
the nineteen ninety six Hugo winning novel lette of the
same name by James Patrick Kelly. It was directed by
Jorge Montesi and it stars Enrico Colintoni. This is an actor,

(34:16):
by the way, who played Veronica Mar's dad on Veronica
Mars and he also played the character of Mathisar in
Galaxy Quest. It also stars Linnea Sharples.

Speaker 2 (34:26):
I would say Enrico Colantoni is especially good in this.
I've liked him in everything I've seen him, and you know,
he's great and Veronica Mars and all that, but he
really is the heart of this episode and his performance
holds it down.

Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah yeah, Maybe not on the same level as holding
it together as as Darren mcavan, but still solid, solid
performance that grounds the episode. Oh I should also point
out if you want to watch this episode, lucky you,
because if you get Prime, this show is back on Prime.
It was on Prime like early in the pandemic, and

(35:02):
I watched a number of episodes like virtually with some friends.
We would do it every Monday night, and then it
vanished and we had to like watch it via like
scrambled versions on Daily Motion I think, and like sometimes
where they had it was completely the footage was backwards
or mirrored, so that all the text was weird I think,
so that like it couldn't be detected by bots or something,

(35:24):
I don't know, and the quality was suspect. But now
it's back on Prime. The quality is as good as
it's going to get for the nineties outer limits, maybe
even too good considering some of the effects.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
Okay, tell us the plot.

Speaker 1 (35:38):
All right, So what we have here is a good
old fashioned teleportation horror yarn, one of my favorite sub
subgenres of horror so in the story, this is what
the scenario in the future a technologically advanced reptilian alien
species called the Hanen, but dubbed dinos by humans. They

(35:58):
facilitate a form of teleportation that has allowed human beings
to travel to new worlds and explore the wider waters
of the galaxy. Now, the process here is very clinical,
presented as something it can do undergoing anesthesia, and many
humans seem to feel a great deal of anxiety about
the process, anxiety that the emotionless, pacifist dinos do not share.

(36:23):
So the dinos carry out most of the process, but
a human supervisor has to hit the final switch. Because
the system works by scanning a comatose individual at point A,
sending the information of that individual to point B, where
the machine over there recreates an exact duplicate of them,

(36:45):
and at this point there are two of the individual
with identical bodies and identical brains, identical memories. It then
falls to the human supervisor at point A to hit
the switch that incinerates the common toast individual, the original individual,
the one who is doing the quote unquote traveling. This

(37:07):
termination of the original individual at point A is called
balancing the equation.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
Now, I should note that they explain the experience of
the what they call the jumper in this story as
as being continuous. So they say that you close your
eyes here at the jumping station, and then you open
them on this wonderful planet that you're being transported to,
so that they suggest that it's just going to be

(37:33):
like being here and then being there.

Speaker 1 (37:35):
Right. But as we'll see, like deep down, everybody knows
what this means. And you know, I should point out
and we'll get into this more in a bit, but
I mentioned anesthesia. Anesthesia seems to be like a common
reference point or starting point for fantastic interpretations of this,
and it's also involved in sort of the wider philosophical
contemplation here. You know, what does it mean when my

(37:59):
consciousness chane? What does it mean when my consciousness seems
to cease for an amount of time? You know, it's
that weird experience of suddenly, oh, whatever happened happened, and
I'm suddenly awake again after the fact, I'm conscious again
after the fact. And so you see this reflected in
other treatments of teleportation, in say Stephen King's The Jaunt,

(38:22):
or also you see it referenced in like cryo sleep
scenarios and other science fiction.

Speaker 4 (38:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:31):
So anyway, that's the setup, the sort of technological world
building setup for the episode. The plot concerns essentially three characters.
You have Enrico Colintoni's Michael Burr. He's the human supervisor
at the lunar jump station. He's the one who hits
that incineration switch. Then you have LINEA. Sharple's Kamala Shastri

(38:53):
it is pronounced Kamala in this episode, who has arrived
at the lunar station to jump to distant world which
she's going to study an alien civilization. And then you
have David James Lewis playing this character Will Carson, who
it takes a little bit to figure out what he's
there for, but he's a replacement tech who is actually
a psychological observer sent by the company to make sure

(39:16):
that Burr can handle the job.

Speaker 2 (39:19):
Because a lot is writing on Burr doing his job correctly.

Speaker 1 (39:23):
Yeah, because the Dinos are like, this is great, this
is this technology is wonderful. It's going to change everything
you do. It's going to ensure the long term survival
of the human race. But you've got to prove to
us that you're able to handle this. The dinos refer
to humans as weepies because they see them as is
way too emotional. They make a big deal out of

(39:44):
this whole destroy yourself at point A to travel to
point B, and they do not want to continue with
it if humans cannot handle it. So in this scenario again,
Kamala Shastri traveling to a distant point in the gall
or whatever. It seems like everything is going to going
as plan. She's a little nervous, but she's up for it.

(40:06):
But then during the procedure, the transmission is interrupted. Reconstitution
at point B cannot be confirmed, so the jumper at
point A cannot be incinerated. So Kamala wakes up screaming
still at point A, and essentially we're unsure if her
double has awoken at point B. And she is traumatized

(40:28):
by the pain and terror she felt in the jump chamber,
and Burr is there. He tries to reassure and you know,
said some kind words, is very compassionate, but she's like,
I don't think I can go through it again, and
he assures her, you don't have to, you know, don't
don't worry. You don't have to worry about it then
if you don't want to give it a second try.
This is entirely voluntary. But at this point even Burr's

(40:52):
commitment to teleportation technology is put to a severe test
when the Dynos confirm that Kamala has arrived at Point Be.
They tell him and Carson insists as well, that now
he has to balance the equation by killing the original Kamala.
So he struggles with the ethics of this, but goes

(41:12):
forward with it by convincing her to simply go through
with the teleportation. It's like, you've got to get back
in there. You've got to continue your mission, with the
idea being that she won't be scanned and transmitted this time.
She doesn't know this, She'll just be incinerated, and that
will balance the equation. That will only be one Kamala,
and she's on this distant planet exploring this new civilization.

(41:34):
And at this point he almost pulls it off, but
she gets cold feet again and the truth comes out,
and so now Burr is under even more pressure to
balance the equation, and there is no way around the
fact that he's contemplating just cold blooded murder. And being
asked to kill her, and she knows that that is
the scenario as well. And what's at stake here is

(41:57):
like the continuation, like you said, of the entire teleportation,
the advancement and continuing survival of the human species. So
a lot of pressure is put on him at this moment.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
There's a background scenario that they discuss, which is that
humans have destroyed the environment of Earth, that Earth is
close to uninhabitable at this point. Humans have polluted the
environment so much and that in order to have a
chance at survival, they're going to have to be able
to teleport en mass to these unspoiled worlds. But the Hanen,
like you said, they're unwilling to let humans do this

(42:30):
unless they prove that they can handle the technology that
they can quote balance the equation.

Speaker 1 (42:36):
Now, at this point, my summary is not going to
really do it. It's going to sound a lot more
rushed because this is a part of the episode that
I think really depends heavily on the performances. But this
is what happens. We see Berg grab a cool looking
sci fi gun from a safe, something that you might
see in time coop or something, and we think he's

(42:56):
going to go killer at this point, but when he
runs runs into her in the complex, he tells her
that he's arranging to have her smuggled safely back to
Earth on a routine shuttle, so that seems to be
in motion, and then he's confronted by Carson and he
knocks Carson out, So yeah, it seems like, all right,
he's gone rogue. He's doing the moral right thing here

(43:19):
for the individual. Maybe not for the greater good, but
for the individual. And then he leads her to an
air lock. But then he has this change of heart.
We see flashes back to this background information about him
having lost his family, lost his wife, and he has
a change of heart and instead he blasts her out
the air lock. Clearly this was not an easy choice

(43:41):
for him to make. He's just emotionally destroyed by this.
Two years later we see him once more. He's still
apparently the supervisor there at the lunar Teleportation station, and
the teleporter is being used and it's receiving somebody. Who
is it. Well, it's Kamala on her return to the

(44:02):
lunar station from her studies on that distant planet, and
she greets him warmly, telling him Hey, you were my
jump supervisor. Don't you remember remember me? You were so
nice to me, you were so comforting, And he says
flat late, no, that was somebody else.

Speaker 2 (44:19):
And then the narrator comes in with some I think
over overly simplified, kind of hammy summary of everything we
just saw.

Speaker 1 (44:26):
Yeah. Yeah. When I was watching these episodes with with
some with some friends, we would always make fun of
the ending narration, especially if the episode was a bit
bad or confusing, because you knew he'd come in and
try and wrap it up with a tight little boat.

Speaker 2 (44:41):
Now, I think there are a lot of really interesting
things about this episode, and it raises a lot of
the great questions about about teleportation as a technology, if
you were to imagine something like it actually existed. Some
of the same questions applied to the idea of like
mind uploading or you know, transfer consciousness to a machine
substrate or something like that. I think one of the

(45:03):
really interesting things in this episode is that the essential
thing that Burr has to do has not changed. In
both cases. He is supposed to destroy the body of
the jumper at the origin point while they while they
go on living at the destination point. The only thing

(45:24):
that has changed is that in this scenario, the jumper
at the departure point has had time to wake up
and become conscious of the fact that they're still here.
But otherwise it's the same. So there's something where like,
it doesn't feel like murder if they knew what was
going to happen going in and they're destroyed instantaneously at

(45:47):
the departure point as long you know, they understand, they
get to live on at the destination. But something about
the fact that she has had several seconds of being
awake now and she's like, well, now that I'm here,
I don't want to die at this place. That changes
the equation. And I think that's interesting because it plays

(46:07):
with our intuitions about what would or would not be
murder in a strange scenario like this.

Speaker 1 (46:14):
Absolutely, yeah, it's just this level of it certainly reminds
one of various sort of moral thought experiments where it's like, Okay,
you're going to flip the switch and you're going to
save the human race, but somebody that you don't really
see or know in another room's going to die. And
then if they're okay with that, well, okay, here's a
different version of the scenario, etc.

Speaker 2 (46:35):
Though I guess it also raises these some questions about
like where is consciousness located and is it possible for
consciousness to be continuously transferred if that concept even makes sense,
because again the jumpers talk about the idea that well,
they don't mind that their body is going to be
destroyed at the departure point because they're just going to
close their eyes and wake up on this other planet.

(46:56):
They seem to have confidence that their consciousness will continue
in some way. But what does that mean?

Speaker 1 (47:03):
Yeah, and you know, in this we can't help but
think of the think in the anesthesia example, you know,
and really like sort of like just everyday ideas of like, well,
am I the same person want to wake up in
the morning, that sort of thing, you know, Yeah, yeah,
comparisons between sleep and death. That, as we've discussed in
the show, go you know, back into the earliest times

(47:25):
during which humans were able to contemplate these things. And
and that brings us, I think to the dinosaurs, the dinos,
the hanins, because that's another element of the plot here
that we don't you kind of have to come back
and think about it more yourself, because they don't get
into it as much, at least in the episode, is like,
what is the thought process of these of these dinos

(47:47):
who are again presented as being like dinosaur creatures, but
they're not. They're not depicted as being like completely quote
unquote cold blooded, Like they're not cruel. They're just caught calculating,
and it seems like they have made the decision and
don't seem to put a lot of effort into it
really that hey, you know, when one teleports, one is

(48:10):
going to destroy a version of themselves and recreate a
new one to carry out a particular task or goal,
et cetera. And they don't think it's a big deal.
And so I was thinking a little bit like, well,
what would that mean, Where does that come from? How
much of that would be cultural? Because you can imagine
a scenario even with humans, where if they're regularly undergoing
this kind of teleportation, you would maybe have a lot

(48:32):
of cultural ideas surrounding it, maybe even religious ideas surrounding
it about the nature of the self and the soul
and how that has continued through this technological leap. But
also maybe there's something about the Hanans that, you know,
maybe they're more use social where the sacrifice doesn't mean
as much because the individual doesn't mean as much, and

(48:53):
that's just part of their just genetic program.

Speaker 2 (48:56):
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. They are portrayed as mostly
benevolent but just not swayed by emotional considerations. And so
I think their point of view is that they're not
harming the jumper by killing them here because they're already
alive somewhere else. So it doesn't matter what the jumper
at the destination at the departure point actually wants, Like

(49:19):
if they wake up and say, no, don't kill me,
it's like that is just not of importance. You know,
they're fine, they're somewhere else now, and so this is
just sort of like a mistake to be cleaned up.
Whereas the human point of view is, oh, now there's
a person in front of me who wants to live,
and that that is extremely important. Like the fact that
this person is conscious and they want to live gives

(49:40):
them just as much right to live as the person
at the destination point. And the dinosaurs don't see it
that way. They're like, well, no, this is the way
it works, and you know, she as long as she's fine.
They're what the one that's here doesn't matter anymore.

Speaker 1 (49:54):
Yeah, they don't. Again, they don't understand it. They kind
of mock at the human emotion in this respect, calling
us wheepies. You can imagine memes they might create, like,
oh no, a weepee accidentally made two sandwiches and now
it's sad, that sort of thing. But I should also
mention they made the strange choice in this episode to

(50:15):
have the Hanens speak in an almost unintelligible monster voice. Yes, yeah,
like though the monster the dino will be talking, you
just can't understand it. You have to run it back
to figure out what it's squawking about. Yeah, to jump
the chain back.

Speaker 2 (50:31):
It's kind of crypt Keeper.

Speaker 1 (50:33):
Yeah, like crypt Keeper, sketchy, but but harder to understand.

Speaker 2 (50:38):
Well, Also, they established that they're getting the humans are
hearing the Hanaen through a real time translation device, so
it's like translating their sort of squawks and language into
English for the jump operators. But hold on a second,
why does it make them sound like the crypt Keeper.
If it's doing that anyway, shouldn't the machine and just

(51:00):
give them the kind of the serie voice.

Speaker 1 (51:02):
Yeah, they're like, it's it's set to cryptkeeper. We don't
know how to change it back to Angela Lansbury. This
is just what we have to use now. Of course,
the central treatment of the whole episode has to do

(51:22):
with this, this idea of teleportation, the recreation of the self,
and and and the I guess it's not even really
a question about like the continuation of the soul like
it at Herd. Here it seems to be clear that
someone is dying and then a new person is being created.
And I really wasn't aware of this until I started

(51:44):
researching this episode. But it turns out this entire central
premise lines up with the work of Derek Parfitt, a
British philosopher who specialized in personal identity, among other subjects.

Speaker 2 (51:58):
Parfit's come up on the show before. We may have
talked about him, Was it in our episode on astronomical suffering?

Speaker 1 (52:05):
Maybe? I think so. Yeah. He he wrote about a
number of topics, so it's it's not like he's not
like a one idea guy, and he's very influential. So
he lived nineteen forty two through twenty seventeen, and in
his nineteen eighty seven book Reasons and Persons he explores
exactly this scenario, and I'm unsure if Kelly, the author

(52:28):
of Think Like a Ninosaur, based his fiction on this,
or if, as with swamp Thing and swamp Man, we
have an uncertain case with a possibility of independent development
in different fields.

Speaker 2 (52:40):
Swamp Man being another philosophical thought experiment about the idea
that like, if your body was destroyed by lightning and
then recreated out of different molecules by a lightning strike
and a swamp like, what relation would that other you
have to the original you?

Speaker 1 (52:56):
Right? Right? So again Parfitt's book Reasons and Persons, in
chapter ten, what we Believe Ourselves to Be, he presents
a thought experiment in which he is commuting to work
on Mars via a machine called a tele transporter, in
which the subject loses consciousness and wakes up a moment later,

(53:17):
or seems to wake up a moment later at their destination.
In reality, however, it's explained really an hour takes. An
hour passes in between losing consciousness and reawakening. The original
body is scanned, recorded in every detail, and destroyed. Traveling
at light speed, the information takes three minutes to reach Mars,

(53:40):
and then using that information that had been sent the
replicator machine on Mars creates a new brain and a
new body out of new matter. So then Parfitt goes
on to layout a scenario that involves interruption and accidental
duplication without destruction of the original. The added wrinkle is
that while the machine fail able to destroy the original

(54:01):
body and brain, it also inflicted a heart condition that
will be fatal in like forty days. Also in the
thought experiment, the scanning is supposed to destroy the individual
as part of the process. It's not like there's this
switch that you hit for incineration. It's like all part
of the process.

Speaker 2 (54:18):
So it's not a separate decision that an operator has
to make.

Speaker 1 (54:21):
Right, right, And it makes more sense, I guess in
the fictional treatment, he writes quote simple teletransportation, as just
described is a common feature in science fiction, and it
is believed by some readers of this fiction merely to
be the fastest way of traveling. They believe that my
replica would be me. Other science fiction readers and some

(54:44):
of the characters in this fiction take a different view.
They believe that when I press the green button, I die.
My replica is someone else who has been made to
be exactly like me. So he uses the thought experiment
to discuss what he calls two kinds of sameness, qualitative
identity and numerical identity. So the scanner and replicator produce

(55:04):
a double that is qualitatively identical but not numerically identical.
In other words, the two are otherwise the same, but
they are not literally the same person in a physical sense. Again,
like new matter was used to make, no, there's no
physical connection between these two beings.

Speaker 2 (55:23):
It's kind of like how you can have two copies
of the same book that are at the same time
the same book, but they're also two different objects.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
Right. Likewise, though, he points out that numerically identical individuals
can also become qualitatively different. Quote, though our chief concern
is our numerical identity, psychological changes matter. Indeed, on one view,
certain kinds of qualitative change destroy numerical identity. If certain

(55:51):
things happen to me, the truth might not be that
I become a very different person. The truth might be
that I cease to exist, that the resulting person is
someone else.

Speaker 2 (56:03):
And in fact, the strange thing is that our bodies
and minds are constantly undergoing physical change, and yet we
have the conscious experience of it seeming to be that
life is continuous. It just feels like you were the
same person you have been your whole life, but physically
you're always changing.

Speaker 1 (56:23):
Yeah. Yeah, physically at a cellular level, things are changing
where we're not exactly the same matter that we were
years back, and then major events, as he's pointing out,
have a huge impact on us. The episode closes with
this idea as well, which I thought was right, thought
was really nice. The Kamala, who is beamed back to

(56:44):
the lunar base is one numerically different. This is the
third version of her in the story that we don't
see the second, the one that's on that other planet.
This is all due of course to the scanner destroyer
replicator technology, but she also seems to be qualitatively different
as her as her experienced studying an alien civilization has

(57:06):
greatly impacted her. There's even a new tattoo on her
and a different hairstyle to sort of drive this home visually.

Speaker 2 (57:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:14):
Meanwhile, Burr is numerically identical to the man she knew
before that she met before, but it seems that he
is qualitatively different as well, forever changed by the horrendous
series of events that he went through, namely the murder
he committed to keep the teleportation machines running. And and
of course she is completely oblivious to this because the

(57:37):
version of Kamala that she is did not witness any
of this and was not the one murdered. And so
that final line just hits nicely. He's like, no, that
was someone else, Like that was a that was a
different me before I was changed by what happened.

Speaker 2 (57:55):
I think this raises another interesting philosophical question, kind of
a moral philosophical question, which is, imagine that the error
scenario had never happened. You know, you never had the
scene where he has to hunt down a jumper with
a gun and blow them out of the airlock. It
like murder them in a very explicit way, and he

(58:15):
was still just pressing the button to incinerate the body.
Is there anything morally wrong going on there? If we
assume that everything that the characters assume is true, so
assume that it is basically painless, that the conscious experience
of the person undergoing it is that they close their
eyes here and they wake up at the destination point.

(58:35):
There's not actually like a person to suffer or to
be denied life or whatever, that there's just a continuous
conscious experience and all of that. Is there anything morally
wrong with what you're doing by pressing the button to
incinerate the person at the departure point? I don't know.
I think that's a really interesting question to ask, because

(58:57):
you could say, even if nobody is suffering and the
person who's jumping gets to continue to live, so in
whatever normal way we would think about it, they're not
being murdered, you'd still have to wonder if there is
some kind of subtle moral violence going on just by
the repeated pressing of a button to destroy a human

(59:18):
body like that, Like, is that conditioning the person who
has to do the button pushing in a way that
degrades them morally in some way?

Speaker 1 (59:29):
Yeah? Yeah, It's a rich field for thought here. And
to be clear, Parfitt goes into a great more detail
in the book and of course uses this thought experiment
as a leaping off point to discuss identity and self
at great length. Though it all, it's all very very
readable and absorbable, so I do recommend picking that up.

(59:52):
And I did not not have time to seek out
and read the original novel. Lette think like a dinosaur.
But I understand, of course it's quite good as well,
and I'd be interested to hear from anyone out there
who has read it and can compare it to the
outer limits adaptation. And of course, yeah, in terms of
human consciousness and identity. You know, we could easily go

(01:00:15):
on and on here, but I thought I might close out.
I was reminded of a brief mention from an article
that we reference in our shadow episodes. Do we actually
see shadows? On Jay Store Daily? By Roy Sorensen. He
writes the optics of the Chinese moists focused on shadows
rather than light. They defend the literal truth of Chiang

(01:00:36):
Xu's aphromism, the shadow of a flying bird never moves,
for shadows last only an instant. The Chinese dialectician Kung
Sun Lung three twenty five through two fifty PCE appears
to have extended the objection to the bird. At each moment,
the bird is where it is and so is not traveling.

(01:00:56):
Since the bird is always at rest, the bird no
more move than its shadow.

Speaker 2 (01:01:01):
I guess to try to map that onto our questions
about teleportation and human consciousness, you know, would consciousness survive
the body being destroyed in one place and recreated exactly
in another. Uh, you could maybe take the view that
consciousness is not continuous anyway, that that is merely an
illusion and there are only instants of consciousness that are

(01:01:24):
that are mistakenly thinking that something is traceable from one
moment to the next, and in fact there is not.

Speaker 1 (01:01:32):
Yeah. Absolutely, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:01:34):
If I buy that, but that's an interesting way of
seeing it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:37):
Well that I guess that's one of the great things
about this about it, about this particular quandary, but also
questions about consciousness in general, is that there's I mean,
I guess there's some wrong answers out there, but you
can generalize and say there are no wrong answers like this.
These are all just thought experiments and ideas that that
tease at the reality and make us sort of turn

(01:01:58):
our perceptions on their head and reconsider what they are
and what we are. Well.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
Yeah, I think a lot of the thought experiments about
consciousness they don't necessarily provide evidence to help us discover
the true nature and origin of consciousness. They don't always
help us discover what consciousness really objectively is, but they
do help us better understand our intuitions about consciousness, which
are often quite vague, and these thought experiments can make

(01:02:26):
them clearer. Yeah, anyway, good Outer Limits episode.

Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
Yeah, I recommend checking out. It's one of my favorites.
It's one of my wife's favorites. I think she she'd
seen it before our I did years ago, and she
always brings it up as an episode worth watching. So
I would agree. Not all of the Outer Limits episodes
are necessarily worth watching. Again, there are some weak ones,
but this one's a strong one, all right. And on

(01:02:51):
that note, we're going to go ahead and close up
Anthology of Horror volume nine. Thanks for listening, joining us
on this quest, and we'd love to hear from everyone
out there. If you have thoughts about the episodes in particular,
or the show's in particular that we discussed here, ride in,
and if you have thoughts about the subject matter that
we discussed about consciousness and the self, about Spanish moss

(01:03:15):
and different interpretations of it right in, we would love
to hear from you. Just a reminder that stuff to
blow your mind. As a science podcast with core episodes
on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we have a listener Mail episode
on Mondays. We have a short form Monster Factor Artifact
episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays, we set aside most

(01:03:36):
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Weird House Cinema. And Hey, if you use any of
the social media platforms, do check us out and follow
us There, There, up and running again on Instagram. We
are stbym.

Speaker 2 (01:03:50):
Podcast Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer
O Skull of Skulls Pauseway. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episod
or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
or just to say hello, you can email us at
contact Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:04:14):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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