The Monstrefact: The Thanapod from "Bad Traveling"

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses the monstrous crab from the “Love Death + Robots” episode “Bad Traveling.”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the
Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow
Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas and monsters in time.
Given that video versions of our episodes are now being
published to Netflix, I thought it fitting to cover a
Netflix monster and they have quite a few to choose from.

(00:32):
In fact, we've previously discussed on Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
everything from Black Mirror's Bandersnatch to the creature from Panos Cosmotos.
Is the viewing today, though, I want to take you
back to a twenty twenty two episode of the third
season of the animated series Love, Death and Robots titled
Bad Traveling Now. This episode was directed by David Fincher,

(00:54):
with Frank Balson, Jerome Den Jean, and Jennifer U. Nelson.
An adapted the Neil Asher short story by none other
than Andrew Kevin Walker. The setting is a fantasy twist
on the age of sails, with a crew of sailors
who brave alien oceans on the hunt for javel sharks,
which are harvested for their oil. The ship in our

(01:16):
story encounters a terrible storm and is bordered by a
monstrous crab called a panopod, which takes up residents below deck.
Lots are then drawn among the crew to see who
has to go down to deal with the monster, and
our protagonist Torren winds up with the duty. Now this
is where the plot gets clever. The phanopod, we learn,
can use the bodies of the dead to talk, it

(01:37):
can puppet them. It's a nice twist that also seems
to channel some of that attack of the crab monster's energy.
The phanopod lays out what it wants to reach the
populated island of Fate Torn strikes a deal with the monster.
He will give it what he wants in exchange for
his own life and a key from the captain's body.
The captain's body was previously eaten by the phanopod, so

(02:02):
we then follow Tora and as he employs this key
to unlock the captain's pistol and uses this pistol to
claim control of the ship, and he puts the matter
of Fadan Island to a vote. Should we bring the
creature to the densely populated island or drop it off
on a nearby deserted island and just tell the giant
crab that this is where you wanted to go. There's

(02:23):
a great deal of turmoil over this. Some crew members
may be more than a few simply want to give
the monster what it wants, like whatever it takes. Meanwhile,
it becomes clear that the monster is a parent, and
now the depths of the ship are crawling with its young.
It's a fun action horror ride, and the central monster,
the phantopod, is just a real grotesque treat. Lots of

(02:45):
excellent crab vibes to it as well wonderful monster design.
So Bad Traveling concerns a monstrous invasive ship born organism,
but it serves as a fantastic exaggeration of the very
real history and present reaction of ship born invasive species. Now,
there are multiple avenues by which invasive species plant or

(03:06):
animal have been and are still being spread through human activities. These,
as outlined in twenty eighteen's Animals and Human Society by
Skeins and Tikshadi, include species introduced just for aesthetics or
for as a game, species for biological control which often
doesn't go well, or for fur, as well as populations
of feral domestic animals, pets thoughtlessly released into the wild,

(03:30):
and of course animal stowaways much like our phantom pod,
and these occur not only via boat, they can also
occur via airplane. One example of this is the brown
tree snake. This particular snake is native to eastern and
northern coastal Australia, eastern Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and many

(03:50):
islands in northwestern Melanesia. The brown tree snake is only
mildly venomous to humans, but its venom packs quite a
punch when comes to birds, and according to biologists Brian
Frye of the University of Queensland, you know that can
pose quite a problem. The brown snake has been particularly
rough on the bird population of Guam, which it apparently

(04:12):
reached aboard Australian troop transports during the Second World War,
and fry also points out that the US was still
flying military planes from Guam to Hawaii at the time
of the riding, and brown snakes have been intercepted at
Hawaiian airports in the past, so the potential is there
for plane based introduction of the species to the Hawaiian
islands as well. And as for why this particular snake

(04:34):
is so adept at hitching rides on planes well. One
reason seems to be their lasso locomotion, which allows them
to climb large, smooth cylinders. But when talking about animal stowaways,
especially ships play a huge role, with rats and mice
standing as one of the best examples of creatures that
have spread to every continent except Antarctica, where I believe

(04:57):
the only invasive species is a variety of muscle and
these likely traveled by ship as well. But stowaways include
far more than rodents and monster crabs. According to Grasping
at the Routes of Biological Invasions by Hume at All,
Journal of apply Tocology, two thousand and eight, stowways include
organisms that foul the wholes of ships, are transported as

(05:18):
seeds or resting stages, in soil attached to vehicles, and
in ballast water, as well as in shipping containers, cargo
and air freight. So for instance, as the authors point out,
brown seaweed sargasm A muticum is a great example of
a stowaway species thought to have spread from its native
Japan to northern France, the English South Coast, and to

(05:41):
the Netherlands via contamination of commercial oysters and then via
drifting plants. The authors share that vessels provide numerous interior
and exterior possibilities for species to spread, but one of
the most pervasive is just the hull of the ship itself,
so species don't need to climb inside the hull to
use it the means of traveling from one far flowing

(06:02):
island to another. They need only a fix to the
outside of this vessel, this artificial island that will then
drift from one place to another. There are other examples
that we can point to. Oar boreal monkeys have also
spread to various places as invasive species, and there are
accounts of monkeys taking up residents in a ship's rigging.

(06:23):
It seems like most of these introductions, though, were via
monkeys that were kept as pets, but still there have
been accounts from this century of monkeys stowing away on vessels,
such as I believe a twenty fourteen report of monkeys
who boarded in Malaysia and arrived in the Netherlands. I
think in this case the monkeys were caught and caged
in transit and then handed over in the Netherlands upon arrival.

(06:46):
One of the challenges of stowing away is, of course
being able to survive a lengthy sea voyage without detection
and being able to just survive with some sort of
dependable food source. Mice and rats remain the best example
of note, because of course they're highly skilled at living
in humanity's shadow, eating what we eat or cast aside,

(07:08):
and so forth. There are other interesting examples of animal stowaways.
Invasive earthworms are a great example, spreading via transported soils
and plants. Birds can also stow away. The house sparrow
is thought to have spread aboard Roman ships, and this
is how they reached Great Britain. So while we don't
see anything as singular and gigantic as the panopod in

(07:29):
our own invasive ship born species, it still works nicely
as a fantastic symbol of it all. None of our
real world stowaways are actually aiming to reach specific destinations
that they have heard about or inquired of with their
puppeted corpses, but they are still ultimately following their genetic

(07:50):
mission and taking full advantage of new environments they might
never have reached otherwise. Tune in for additional episodes of
the monster fact, the artifact or animaliust Opindium each week.
As always, you can email us at contact at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
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