Anthology of Horror, Volume 3

The time has come. Once more, Stuff to Blow Your Mind reaches into the depths of TV horror anthology history, pulls out a handful of episodes and spins science and wonder out of the monstrosities therein. For this year’s installment, Robert and Joe discuss episodes The Outer Limits and The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to Stuff
to Blow Your Mind. And my name is Robert Gooley Lamb.
I forgot we were doing the voices. Let's see, I
am what's my name? Also, I'm Corrosive Joseph McCormick exactly.

(00:23):
And we're here with our excellent audio producer Death Nicholas Johnson.
It is Halloween. It is Halloween itself, I believe. Yeah,
And so we are presenting Anthology of Horror Volume three.
So this will be a sequel to our two previous
Anthology of Horror episodes, where we look at old episodes
of horror anthology TV shows and figure out how they

(00:45):
might often be deeper than they seem. Yeah, I mean,
and also sometimes they're not very deep, but we we
have a knack for finding some hidden depth in horror
and science fiction. Now, in the last episode, which should
have been just a couple of days ago, we talk
about an episode of the Twilight Zone concerning how you
can know whether or not you are in a dream

(01:06):
or whether you are someone else's dream. And we talked
about an episode of the old horror anthology Monsters that
featured a story about ghoules called down Below and related
to that to cities dealing with rat problems. Uh So,
today I think we were going to start by looking
at an episode of The Outer Limits, right, yes, the

(01:26):
sixth Finger. This is the fifth episode of the first
season of ABC sci fi anthology series legendary sci fi
anthology series The Outer Limits, which originally ran from nine
through nine. It was created by Leslie Stevens, and unlike
a lot of these shows, he didn't have a true
horror or sci fi host. It didn't have like a

(01:47):
puppet or an actor that spoke to you and introduced everything.
But it did have the control voice, which in and
of itself is pretty classic. Explain the control voice. So
we will control the vertical, we will control the horizontal.
You know, it's like this, this disembodied voice that is
taking over your television set and presenting you with some
sort of cosmic transmission from the Outer Limits. I see,

(02:10):
Is this the one that's there's no need to adjust
your television exactly? Okay? I think I for some reason
confused that I thought that was like an alternate opening
to the Twilight Zone. Uh no, no, no, that Twilight
zone is always like Rod Serling being like you were
entering another dimension, yeah, etcetera. Um, Yeah, The Outer Limits
was definitely more in the in the science fiction domain.

(02:32):
It was in many ways kind of like the sci
fi side of the coin to the Twilight Zones horror.
But it also got a little spooky, a little scary
at times. Uh, and certainly falls under the domain of
our our mission statement here. Now wait a second, sorry,
I just realized that the Outer Limits introduction you're doing here,
that this might be the first sort of hint or

(02:54):
attempt at doing a kind of found footage thing. Right,
it's saying like you are receiving a TRANSMISSI shin. It's
like implying that you're part of the narrative because your
TV set is is something's being beamed from another place
to Yeah, to a limited extent. I mean, once the
episode starts, it's pretty clear you're still safely in television land,
but you're also in in a place that still feels

(03:14):
a little less safe. But this ain't I Love Lucy exactly.
So The Outer Limits went two seasons and produced forty
nine episodes. Again, it's just always amazing just how robust
these some of these older seasons television were not all
of the episodes are classics, but some stand out amid
the all time greatest achievements in science fiction television even

(03:35):
today in this sort of golden age of television and
television options. Some of the most famous episodes include, uh,
for instance, Demon with a Glass Hand, which was scripted
by Harlan Ellison. But The Sixth Finger is also rather iconic.
Like a lot of the episodes, it features some alien
makeup effects that that are pretty astounding. A lot of
the alien designs on the Outer Limits uh kind of

(03:58):
you know, leaned into old school ideas of what an
extraterrestrial might look like. You know, there are a lot
of oversized heads and long ears and whatnot, like the
brain mutant from the Silent Earth. Yeah. Yeah, so some
of them are a little bit dated, but but they
were still pulled off exceptionally well, shot in black and
white and and and you know, sometimes with an almost

(04:20):
avant garde kind of style. That being said, there are
some effects that they pulled off on that show that
stand up I think really well today. Um, The Galaxy Being,
I think is an exception where we had like this
kind of sharp contrast of black and white where it
seems to be just radiating on the screen. But The
six Finger was directed by James Goldstone, who also directed

(04:42):
the pilot for a little show called Star Trek Okay,
So that's before Kirk is the Captain, right right, Yeah,
And it was written by Ellis St. Joseph, who did
a lot of TV work in his career, and it
also started British American actor David McCallum, who starred opposite
Robert Vaughan in The Man from Uncle. So McCollum stars
in this episode as the character Griffiths, a Welsh miner

(05:05):
who agrees to let a rogue scientist named Professor Mathers
experiment on him, which is of course always a solid
life choice. Mathers played a role, we're told, in the
development of atomic weaponry, and he wants to aid humanity instead,
and so he has invented of means of speeding up
evolutionary development and he wants to try it out on
a human being. Now I can say, in the early

(05:27):
nineteen sixties this would actually be not that far fetched
of a scenario. I mean, I think there were a
number of scientists who were known at the time to
have worked on the creation of atomic weaponry who were
deeply publicly regretful of their work even Oh yeah, absolutely, Uh,
I mean to typified for the most part by the

(05:47):
heavily quoted a bit from from Oppenheimer now and become death,
where he himself is of course to quoting Vedic scriptures. Yeah,
because certainly the atomic bomb is this uh, you know,
continues to loom over us as this uh, the symbol
of of of of great human achievements that are put
to work in in the name of like our worst

(06:10):
impulses as as a species, as a civilization. Totally and
uh and yes, so the idea of someone involved with
that wanting to do something that that you know, that
it saves us, that changes us, that does you know,
that puts us in a different direction. I think that
that makes perfect sense. And I think a lot of
people would would agree that. You know, this, this period
of of of nuclear power, you know, is something we

(06:32):
hope it's it's kind of a bottleneck, right, It's like
it's a period of extreme danger to the species that
we hope to move past, we hope to evolve through.
And and certainly, you know, we tend to think of
that evolution as more or less biological and more cultural,
more political. But in a science fiction story, you know,

(06:52):
it makes sense to go with the more literal interpretation
of that, Like, human beings need to evolve beyond this
point of extreme danger. So I'm going to put a
human being inside of a crazy sci fi contraption and
see what kind of you know, peaceful being comes out
the other side. Right as you increase our ability to
destroy ourselves in one another, it seems like every year

(07:13):
that goes by, we're just sort of like barely eking.
You know, we're just making it if we don't use
that power unless you change us somehow, that it would
be inconceivable to us to use it right now. To
be clear, evolution, as we've discussed plenty of times on
the show, is a process of mutation and natural selection
that takes place across the vast periods of time due

(07:34):
to various environmental stressors. Would you agree with that You're
more Darwin's bulldog on this show than I am. I mean,
our modern picture of evolution I think has become a
little bit more nuanced, and that we we learn more
and more things that uh that affected like epigenetic factors
possibly and things like that. But yeah, basically, I mean

(07:54):
the standard model is that there is variation and then
there is selection by the environment. And yeah, the big thing,
of course, the way this happens in nature is it
happens over many generations. The way evolution is often conceived
of in stories like this is it basically just means
like changing somebody, like changing an individual's body in their lifetime,

(08:16):
which would be different from biological evolution that would be
more like that I don't know, bioengineering of the body. Yeah.
And and also I mean the other thing too, is
this this model in this science fiction story it has
this it kind of implies that there's an exact map
of our evolution inside of our bodies, inside of our genes.
You know. Is if like we're a Pokemon and you

(08:36):
can look at a chart saying like how it advances
to its final form if I have my Pokemon reference
is correct, I don't know my Pokemon all that well.
But but still yet it implies that there's like a
certain path that an organism should take and it's all
written in the genes, as opposed to being this process,
uh you know, being you know, driven by this process
of natural selection that depends so heavily upon environment. So

(08:59):
on one hand, it's a tad silly to think that
some manner of mad science process could simply speed up
human evolution. But again they're trying to make a statement here,
so we'll roll with it. Okay. So as Griffith evolves
and there there, this is a this is a real
talky by the way, as far as um you know,
anthology shows Go and Outer Limits tended to be I
think a little more cerebral than the many of the

(09:20):
other anthology and you know shows that would come in
its wake. There's a lot of discussing what this means
and discussing, uh, you know, how we might apply it
to our understanding of the world. And so Griffith's you know,
he goes through these problems like a I guess, a
treatment of evolution. Then he comes back out and he's changed,
and he talks about it, and he goes back in,
he gets another treatment, he comes back he's even different.

(09:42):
But basically these are the changes biological and mental that
take place. Okay, First of all, he gets an extremely
over developed cortex like a giant alien melon head, which
again is very impressive makeup effects, but at the same
time it's kind of a dated look for our idea
of like a far future being Okay, So just to clarify,

(10:04):
basically is the idea that this is naturally how humans
would evolve if we were allowed to just you know,
keep living for thousands of years. But the scientist has
figured out a way to get us there down the
already mapped path ahead of time, right. I think that's
what the model is here. We just have to sort of,
you know, take their word for it on the sci

(10:24):
fi process that's getting it to us. Sure, so huge
yet great now, as the title implies, one of the
other major changes is that there is a sixth finger
on each hand, so a total of twelve digits on
the hands. Now better to press nuclear launch buttons with
yeah uh. In addition, long L fears, which you know

(10:46):
isn't I don't really have a good discussion lined up
for that, but there are L fears mental powers such
as telekinesis, vastly enhanced intelligence and ultimately enhanced empathy and understanding,
And in the original script, he also eventually develops a
means of photosynthitus and lives on pure light and kind

(11:08):
of transcends into a being of light. In the show, however,
he attempts to push himself even further in evolution, but
his wife betrays him out of love and turns him
back into his original self, you know, turns back the
dial on the evolution machine to try and get the
you know, the man that she loves back in the room,
but the process ends up killing him. It's just too

(11:30):
much for him. So it all makes for a great
mad science tale and one that I think works well thematically.
Plus McCallum has that kind of like old school Leslie
Howard Delivery you know which show, which I really love
because if you're watching a show like The Outer Limits
of the Twilight Zone, you do have to you find
a reason to love some of the more you know,
by today's standards antiquated uh aspects of say acting or

(11:53):
pacing or even the effects. And Joe, I have a
picture of of the being here for you and it
certainly anybody wants to see this. Just look up The
Outer Limits the Sixth Finger. You can also find it
on like Hulu or Netflix, streaming pretty much everywhere, but
you can also find lots of images of this. It's
very iconic cost him. Okay, so first of all, I

(12:14):
see the giant melon head and that look that looks
great because you get so much brain in there. I
am immediately imagining some problems having to do with birth,
like the size of the human birth canal, which you
would have to assume it would also evolve to be
much bigger to allow a birth of that kind of creature.
Though I believe it's it's widely thought that we're already

(12:37):
pretty much it's sort of the limits of what our
bodies will allow in terms of cranial size, right. I mean,
the the other thing that comes to mind is our
discussions in our episode on brain soup and liquefied brains. Uh,
the actual size of the brain would not be as
important as the number of neurons within it. So I
think by our modern understanding, it was kind of it
was very much in vogue at the time to to see,

(12:59):
like you know, outside craniums as being a sign of
super intelligence and your fictional creatures. But I think nowadays
we realize that that would not be necessary. But I mean,
like I already mentioned, this island Earth. It shows up
in a lot of sci fi from the mid century
that you've got aliens with huge old heads. I guess
because they're very smart. But also I like how he's
got extremely defined facial bone structure, Like this guy has

(13:23):
cheekbones to die for. He does, yes. And then of
course there are the lf ears, which again we don't
really have anything to say about them. I'm not sure
what point of ears would really accomplish evolutionarily. Oh man,
this seems like something that has to have been explored
in a kind of speculative paper, like somebody who's an
expert on the morphology of the ears and how they

(13:43):
help you here, how would you hear differently if you
had l f ears. I don't know. We should come
I bet we should come back to that, because there
is a good answer for it. Uh. You know, there's
a whole world of of elve and ear structure that
we could discuss in the future. But what I want
to talk about is that extra finger. So we're gonna
take a quick break, but when we come back, we
will get into the the five digit rule invertebrate evolution

(14:07):
and we'll discuss the possibility of a sixth finger coming
into play. Than all right, we're back. So we've been
talking about the classic Outer Limits episode The sixth Finger,
about a man who speeds up his own evolution within
his own lifetime, and he gets a gigantic melon head,
he gets really defined facial bones, beautiful cheekbones, he gets

(14:29):
elf ears, but he also grows a sixth finger. And so, Robert,
you looked into what it would mean to grow a
six finger? Is that kind of thing possible? Why or
why would not we? Why wouldn't we see that in
human evolution or primate evolution? Yeah, it's really it's really
fascinating because, first of all, the five digit rule does
run pretty deep invertebrate evolution. According to Michael Coates, Associate

(14:52):
professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at
the University of Chicago and co editor of Evolution and
Development fighting for Scientific American, the condition of having no
more than five fingers and toes probably goes back before
the evolutionary divergence of amphibians and amniots, birds, mammals, reptiles.
We were talking three hundred and forty million years ago,

(15:15):
go back three hundred sixty million years ago, and there's
evidence of tetrapods with six, seven, eight, digits. Uh, the
the decrease to five or fewer came about alongside the
development of sophisticated wrist and ankle joints. So basically, the
creatures with more digits had simpler skeletons and simpler limb mobility,

(15:37):
and they were generally, you know, something along the line
of flippers, because we're talking about creatures of the water here.
But as these limbs evolved to allow certain organisms to
stand or to push off with those limbs essentially, or
you know, as they moved towards being land creatures, we
see the reduction of digits, and indeed we tend to

(15:58):
see you know, the further reduct of digits because the
rule of evolutionary thumb here is that it's easier to
lose something than it is to gain something. Absolutely. I
mean you can see that with many tetrapod mammals today.
For example, look at a dog's paw. I mean, they
have a sort of vestigial other thumb type thing up
there on the on the leg, but basically they got

(16:19):
four toes that go go down on the ground. It's
the what the do claw? Yeah yeah, up there, or
I mean even look at the feet of ungulates. Yeah,
I mean, horses are a great place to look because
we see how far it's reduced now. But you know,
various prehistoric courses had three or four toes. And when
animals actually do gain digits, well, uh Coats points out

(16:42):
that the lack of true six toed or six fingered
creatures in today's fauna quote highlights some sort of constraint.
For instance, one of the rare cases we see of
you know, a creature gaining digits is the marine reptile
uh Ethosaurus. This is the these sixty years ago. We
talked about about them on the show before. They essentially

(17:02):
are dolphin like creatures, they have that same sort of shape,
but they they are reptiles um and as a result
of returning to the sea, they eventually developed paddles that
sometimes had you know, quite a number of digits in there. Okay,
so the atheosaurs, like the marine mammals of today, in
their evolutionary history, went to land and then went back
to water, right. Yeah, So, which again lines up nicely

(17:25):
with this idea of of as long as you're a
sea creature, you can have multiple digits within that paddle,
but when you start using that paddle increasingly again over
you know, generation after generation after generation. If it's used
to push off, if it's new used even to hold
up your weight, it becomes increasingly um more beneficial to

(17:45):
have fewer digits in that at the end of that limb. However,
we do see creatures like the mole and the panda,
both of which benefit from remodeled wrist bones that essentially
serve as a sixth finger, but which are not true fingers.
And if you haven't seen a picture of this, I
encourage everyone to look up pictures of panda's paw or

(18:08):
the the claws of a mole, and you will, you know,
if you start doing some counting, you'll be like, okay,
one to three, four, five, and oh, kind of six
again not a true thumb. But for the panda, for instance,
it serves as a thumb. It has like the roll
of a thumb in helping them handle food. The panda,
of course, is the herbivore of the bare world, and

(18:31):
and the end it has to eat constantly, and therefore
it has eventually used the point where it needs a
little extra thumblike appendage to get the job done. Meanwhile,
for moles, uh, this extra little thumblike appendage. It helps
them tunnel through the earth, so being almost more like
a flipper, Yeah, help it swim through the earth. Yeah.

(18:52):
These are, in Coats's words quote, rather baroque solutions to
the apparently straightforward task of growing an extra finger. So,
you know, if we're going to think back to our
outer limits example here, it would be far more likely
that one would grow some sort of a you know,
you know, a paddle of a pseudo finger, as opposed
to growing a full finger, no matter how many keyboards

(19:14):
you're having to use, no matter you know, how many
you know, you know, mad science gadgets you're having to
manipulate with your far future digits. But I want to
talk about another even more amazing example from real world biology,
and for this we have to turn to the world
of the Lemur. As recently reported in Smithsonian, the I
I Lemur known for its weird looks and its elongated

(19:38):
middle finger, which it uses to fish grubs out of trees.
You may have seen this in various documentaries before. It
looks like a tree goblin and it's I think it
has unfortunately suffered from like superstitious killings in the past,
but it has this. It's nocturnal and has this fabulous
super elongated in some people's eyes and man think it's

(20:00):
creepy middle finger which it uses. You have to fish
out a grub and uh and then it's it's you know,
it's this highly specialized digit. And once it gets the
grub out. I was reading that it will also like
pluck the top of the grub off and like suck
the inside of the grub out, like it is just
a highly evolved grub eater. But in addition to this,
it also boasts an extra tiny thumb or pseudo thumb,

(20:23):
complete with a fingerprint. This according to Adam Hearthstone Rose,
Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University,
It's a pseudo thumb made of bone and cartilage, but
it can be moved in three directions, much like a
human thumb. Now you might wonder, why, why why is
this creature so greedy for crazy digits? It already has

(20:45):
this super elongated specialized digit. What does it need an
extra digit for? You know what? I realized the II
hand reminds me of I just looked it up to
see it again. It reminds me of the of klaus
Kinsky's hands in Werner Song's nose fur aw too, he's
got the long nails and the creepy fingers. Yeah, it does.

(21:06):
It does seem like a true creature of the night,
doesn't it. But yeah, basically it seems to have developed
this this additional pseudo thumb because the other fingers are
elongated and specialized. Like essentially it's lost that middle finger
to specialized usage, and so it has had to develop
a pseudo thumb to make up for that special specialization.

(21:29):
And to be clear, you'll you'll sometimes find a six
finger occurring on a human as a as a birth
to fact, and in fact, since we're celebrating Halloween, it's
worth noting that Hannibal Lecter in the books um has
an extra digit on his left hand like that that occurs,
but it is not, you know, it's not a naturally

(21:49):
you know, evolved feature. So you're probably wondering where does
this leave our six fingered man in the outer limits.
So Griffith kind of essentially dodges the question when at
one point a scientists actually asked him about the six finger, like,
what's what's up with that extra finger? And he just
kind of starts talking about something else. But but it's implied,
especially given the prior scene in which he plays a piano,

(22:10):
that it enables the better manipulation of interface tools like
the keys of a piano or the keys of a computer, etcetera. Now,
if again, this is suggesting this would be selected for
an evolution, that would imply that at some point people
are like dying or not reproducing as much because they
can't type as fast. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's where we

(22:32):
get into some some problems with this this model if
you look at it too closely. Um. I also had
to realize as I was typing up notes for this,
I was hyper conscious of how little I actually use
my pinky fingers while typing. Now, ultimately I'm probably using
some sort of weird hybrid of of actual typing with
a little hunt and peck thrown in there. But yeah,

(22:53):
I don't know that I use my pinkies all that much,
if at all, unless I'm doing some sort of weird
hot key. I definitely is mine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's that's semicolon, you know, for sentences. No, yeah, I wait,
I've gotta think of it. Okay, yeah, okay, yeah, I
do it, okay, all right to each Sorry, I'm not bragging.

(23:14):
I mean no, no, I mean I thought just because
my pinky fingers are way better than yours, well you
know they're not. They're not holding me back. I'm just
saying that, Like, you know, when I catch myself typing,
I'm like, oh, I don't think the pinkies are really
carrying their weight here. So um, it's kind of silly
to imagine a scenario in which being able to type

(23:34):
extra hard and be able to hit like crazier hot
keys on a keyboard would would have this kind of
impact on human evolution. At the same time, maybe it's
for the next level of PC gaming. Yeah, that's but
But on the other hand, it is true that habitual
tool use has led to the evolved state of the
modern human hand, including thumb length. So tool use has

(23:57):
shaped our bodies, it has shaped our hand in the past,
so it's not ridiculous to say that the future human
evolution would continue to reshape the human hand. Sure, but
there you would be contending with the fact that I
think there's you know, in the environments that we mostly
live in today, not being able to use a tool
as well doesn't usually mean that you're going to, you know,

(24:18):
on average, have fewer children than the people next door.
That that seems like a thing that would be more
the case in like a hunter gatherers survival scenario. Exactly. Yeah,
And ultimately we have to remember that you were no
longer subject to purely natural selection at this stage of
the human experience. You know, it's it's more of an
unnatural selection. We also have to consider the potential of

(24:39):
directed evolution that we will, in the future continue to
figure out ways to manipulate our own genes, which brings
up the possibility that perhaps our far future selves have
simply added on an extra finger. Rightly, it's not a
situation where we evolved when but we realized, hey, having
two pinkies on each hand would be nice, let's wit

(25:00):
and then we just we just do it. We just
check it off on the menu of g manipulation, which
which reminds me of Less Grossman's The Magicians and the
sci fi uh TV series that's based on it. There's
a there's a dark wizard in the show called the Beast,
and he has an extra finger on each hand because

(25:20):
in the in The Magicians, casting spells involves a lot
of like fine manipulation of your digits, like sort of
like the the use of mood ras and whatnot. Uh So,
if you had an extra digit on each hand, you'd
be able to cast improve variations of spells. You'd be
able to cast spells that a normal individual with five
digits would be incapable of. Well, that makes me wonder

(25:41):
who invented those spells then, I mean, I guess they're
of his own creation. Well, yes, and of course there
are a lot of inhuman being entities in this world
as well. He could be going to them for such spells. However, uh,
you know, discussing this idea of like, you know, growing
extra fingers to manipulate technology, It's said, as Peter Ward

(26:01):
pointed out in his Scientific American article The Future of Man,
how will evolution change humans? We also have to consider,
you know, not only like computer interfaces like keyboards, but
more drastic interfaces, some of the sort of futuristic mind
computer interfaces that we've discussed in the show before. Um.
He points to a quote from George Dyson in his

(26:23):
nine book Darwin among the Machines. Quote, everything that human
beings are doing to make it easier to operate computer
networks is at the same time, but for different reasons,
making it easier from computer networks to operate human being
Darwinian evolution, in one of those paradoxes with which life abounds,
may be a victim of his own success, unable to

(26:44):
keep up with non Darwinian processes that it has spawned.
I think there's a lot to that. I mean, I
would say, I mean, this is in the nineteen nineties,
before you could anticipate a lot of the stuff that's
going on now with say social media, in the many
ways that our our technology is influencing us. But just
one thing I would say here is that this person
probably lived through the transition from command line computers to

(27:07):
graphical user interfaces, and so obviously having a graphical user
interface makes it way easier for people who don't know
much about how the computer works or understanding directories and
commands and all that stuff to use it because it's intuitive.
It's easy. You just look at the thing, you recognize
that you click on it. All that, but also those
graphical user interfaces I think led to all of the

(27:28):
ways that computers are now just completely attention monopolizing devices.
Absolutely so Ward basically concludes that we'll have to go
one of three different ways as humans continuitive to evolve. Uh.
There's these There's the stasis direction, where we mainly just
stay the same but with minor tweaks, and also a

(27:48):
kind of merging of races. There's also a speciation in
which we break off into different species. Uh, you know,
and hopefully none of them are are more locks. Because
ultimately a speciation is the maw that H. G. Wells
explores in the Time Machine, and then he also talks
about the board grout, which is symbiosis with machines. I

(28:11):
find it kind of hard to believe that there could
be human speciation unless you're talking about space colonization, like
fully separating human populations from one another so that they
cannot physically come together at all for you know, hundreds
of hundreds of years. Even if you sent some of
them below ground to man all the machines and keep

(28:32):
the surface world running. Well, I guess it would depend
on whether you could go back and forth between I mean,
I think as long as humans stay in physical contact
with each other, I find it hard to believe that
there will be actual human speciation. But then, yeah, space
colonization does seem like that creates a kind of like
a certain hard divide. It is it is the equivalent
of having a species wind up on an island and

(28:53):
uh and and coeval. So Ward doesn't specifically chime in
on the six finger thing, It doesn't refto that, but
he does dismiss the idea of giant brained, futurized humans
like we see in the sixth Finger. He says, quote,
the big brain vision has no real scientific basis. The
fossil record of skull sizes over the past several thousand

(29:14):
generations shows that our days of rapid increase in brain
size are long over. Yeah. In fact, we we already peaked, right,
We're we're Our average brain sizes in the modern world
are smaller than they used to be. Yeah. But ultimately,
this episode of Outer Limits is not just about biological evolution.
Is about the evolution of of what it means to
be human. You know, can is there a potential for
us to change in a more meaningful way? Can we become,

(29:37):
for instance, more empathetic? Can we become more present as
a species kinder? Uh? This is the idea that the
episode is playing with and hoping for and and ultimately,
like that's where it gets to. At the end with this,
he the character, while he's still more human, is you know,
possessed by this this quest for vengeance against the people

(29:58):
who operate the MO and in which he works. And
by the end of it, he has evolved beyond these
feelings of vengeance. Like there's a period in the in
the episode where he wants to use his crazy uh
you know, future brain powers to go you know, wreak
havoc on them, but by the end of it he realizes, no,
that is not the way. Well, I would say, I

(30:18):
think it certainly is possible for us to become more empathetic,
um uh you know, less vengeful and violent and all
that kind of stuff. But I don't think you necessarily
need biological changes for that to happen. I mean, I
think we've seen massive changes in the levels of like
violence and vengefulness you see in the average person across
different societies through time, and the main changes are through

(30:40):
like culture, like like social norms, how children are educated,
what's acceptable socially within your friend groups, and the culture. Right,
so changes in the software as opposed to the hardware. Yeah,
but then of course we have to we have to
consider like the rate which software can change, at the
rate of which it may evolve. Uh, you know how

(31:00):
no matter how pleasant uh human civilization's current software, maybe
how much has to happen to it to make it
well to to use a naughty word on this show,
devolve into some lesser state. Well, yeah, I mean, I
guess that's the danger. I mean, yeah, cultural changes can

(31:21):
can be undone, maybe as quickly as they can be done,
or even quicker. By the way, I was reading about
the original script and the production of this episode of
The Outer Limits, and according to the Outer Limits companion
by David J. Scoe, Uh, Dorothy Brown, the ABC sensor
at the time, had objected to the Darwinism and promotion

(31:41):
of evolution inherent in the sixth finger so one. In fact,
one of the early deletions from the script was a
speech on the topic of evolution. Well that's funny, I
mean again, like to really explore the what's happening to
the character in the episode is not actually Darwinian evolution.
But but that's funny. Yeah, I mean, I guess it

(32:01):
does rely on the idea that there's like a roadmap
for our species generally, which also is not part of
Darwinian evolution. So it's not like they're not really hitting
the viewer over the head with you know, a hardcore
speech on evolution. But I think just the mere fact
that they were citing evolution and speaking speaking of evolution um,
and the works of Darwin as being you know, something

(32:23):
that we can actually you know, hang our scientific hat
on um. They were afraid it was going to offend people.
Well yeah, I mean I I grew up surrounded by
that kind of opposition and and sensitivity to ideas about evolution.
But I I don't know, despite that, I'm kind of
surprised that it made ABC censorship priorities, especially in a

(32:45):
show like this, which you know, ultimately is you know,
kind of high minded and stuffy. Well, I guess also
trading and science fiction, which would have had a you
know a certain amount of appeal to younger audiences as well.
But still say, this is a pretty solid episode of
The Outer Limits. I think it stands up really well today.
Uh you have to go into it knowing you're not
going to get an action packed, um you know episode here.

(33:07):
This is this is a very talky episode, but it's
it's really solid, well shot, well acted, um worth checking out.
I think a lot of the best anthology sci fi
and horror episodes are not actually action packed. Uh. They
often tend to be rather subdued, just dealing with a
strange idea as discussed by a handful of characters. Yeah,

(33:28):
and you know, sometimes you do see this kind of
unevenness to perceived budget of a show, Like you know
that some of those anthology episodes maybe they had a
had a few more bucks to spend on the cast,
on the locations, and some are essentially kind of bottle
episodes where there's just like one set or it's it's
almost kind of a stage piece, but there's you know
when it when it's really well done, you know, that

(33:49):
will certainly get you there to serve man, is an
action packed either is? Yeah, it's just And that's the
one that we talked about last year. Right, Speaking of Joe,
what is your selection your final selection for this year's
Anthology of Horror Episodes? Well, I wanted to talk about
my favorite all time Simpson's Treehouse of Horror episode, Citizen Kang.

(34:14):
This is from Simpson's tree House of Horror seven. It
originally aired October n and I think this is this
is not only one of my favorite uh Simpson's bits, ever,
I think it is some of the best political satire
in American media history. Yeah. This this is just a
great tree House episode period. I rewatched it the other

(34:37):
night with the family, and I must have seen it
a dozen times in the in the past, because, in
addition to Citizen Kang, it also contains the genesis tub.
This is where Lise's tooth grows the civil of civilization
after it gets a little static shock from Bart, which
is very similar to a tale by George R. Martin
that was adapted by the ninety nineties revival of The

(34:58):
Outer Limits more or less along the same time. And
then this episode also has The Thing and I, which
is a great more of sort of a straight up
horror piece, which contains a twist ending that I have
to say is nearly identical to the twist ending of
a certain top twenty nineteen horror film. Okay, well, let's
not say any more than that. I think you know

(35:19):
the one, right, I know exactly what you're talking about,
but I don't want to spoil it for anybody else.
All Right, we need to take a quick commercial break,
but we will be right back. Okay. So this Simpson's
Tree House of Horror again. It aired at the end
of October nineteen and at the time it actually aired,
the United States was right in the final days of

(35:41):
a presidential election that was pitting incumbent Democratic President Bill
Clinton against Republican Senator Bob Dole from Kansas. And in
this Tree House of Horror segment, alien invaders Kang and Kodos,
who are from a certain ringed planet who they prefer
not to mention um. They plot to take of the
world by body snatching both Clinton and Dole and taking

(36:04):
their places in the election as lookalikes, and the idea
is stated pretty directly by Kang. In the Guys of
Bob Dole, a reporter asks the Kang Dole Senator Dole,
why should people vote for you instead of President Clinton?
And Kang Dole responds, it makes no difference which one
of us you vote for. Either way, your planet is doomed.

(36:26):
Doomed replacing both. That's a good idea, right, Yeah, then
there's no risk, right either way, they're gonna win. Yeah.
So in this uh, in this little plot, Homer becomes
aware of the alien takeover plot because he happened to
be on the alien ship when Clinton and Dole were replicated.
So he decides he's got to reveal Kang and Kodos
for what they are, So he runs on stage at

(36:49):
an event I think at the Capitol Building where both
candidates are speaking, and he rips off their disguises, revealing
them both as hideous space reptiles. But Kangan Kodos seem
unfair as to declaring, It's true we are aliens, but
what are you going to do about it? It's a
two party system. You have to vote for one of us.
And then somebody in the crowd suggests voting for a

(37:11):
third party candidate, and Kodo says, go ahead, throw your
vote away. So the Americans, of course, end up electing Kang,
who immediately enslaves all humans and he puts them to
work constructing a giant laser to aim at some third,
unspecify unspecified planet. And then Marge laments the state of

(37:31):
affairs that they're they're suffering under right now, and Homer
smugly declares, don't blame me. I voted for Kodos. I
think this this might be the best nine minutes of
political science, satire, and American pop culture history. Uh, and
I don't want to be misunderstood there based on some
of the themes in the episode, because, of course, a

(37:53):
major theme here is the pointlessness and futility of some
parts of the democratic process. I don't want to be
mistake and for saying I think it makes no difference
who you vote for for president, or that all politicians
are the same. You know, I think that's the kind
of thing that it's like easy to say and feel
superior about saying when you don't want to put in
the work to learn what's going on and what's at stake. Right.

(38:15):
It was the kind of statement I would have found
very attractive when I was like a first year college student,
kind of intellectually lazy but wanting to stake ammorl claim. Yeah,
are wanting to to differentiate yourself from you know, the
politics that you might have been born into. It's easier
instead of saying, actually, I disagree with you completely and
I go to this side, you can just say, oh,
I think I don't sorry, I don't go for any

(38:37):
of it, right, Yeah, you know I can remember being
like that. I wanted to have a strong opinion without
having to do the work to earn an opinion. So
I don't think that way anymore. But at the same time,
while I don't generally feel the field that's always true
about elections, I think there is some real cutting wisdom
in that satire, because even though it's not the case
that all politicians are the same in elections don't matter,

(38:59):
people often overestimate how much their democratic choice will make
a difference to particular issues they really care about. Uh.
I mean, there's so many big problems that you thought
electing the right person might solve, and then that person
was elected and the problem stayed the same or got worse.
But even more than that, I think this episode is

(39:19):
brilliant at highlighting the absurd and nonsensical conclusions often reached
by group choice algorithms that we follow in our politics.
And that's sort of what I wanted to look at
here in relation to this episode. In that vein, I
want to explore the question of whether or not the
election of Kang is an example of the Abilene paradox. Robert,

(39:42):
had you ever come across this concept before? I don't
believe I had. Yeah, I I think this is very
useful to have in your tool kit of of concepts
to apply to the world, because it's absolutely something that
explains many unfortunate group behaviors in politics, in business, even
in like family vacations and and hang outs with your friends.

(40:04):
Uh So, this paradox was explained in a nineteen seventy
four paper by the George Washington University scholar Jerry B. Harvey,
which was published in the journal Organizational Dynamics. And I'm
going to give a kind of updated scenario here for
you to consider. So imagine the following scenario. You are
hanging out with your friends p J, Nancy, and Jamie Lee.

(40:25):
It's October, You're all just finished babysitting. You're at Nancy's
house carving a pumpkin, and you're watching an old Howard
Hawks movie on TV, The Thing from Another World. You're
hanging out, You're having an okay time. But then suddenly
Nancy says, hey, does anybody want to go out and
see a movie? And PJ says, yeah, that could be cool.
Let's see what's playing. So you look up show times

(40:46):
at the local theater and the only show left tonight
is a midnight showing of The Purge seventeen as the
World purges. Uh. So, PJ says, yeah, we could see
that if you guys want, and Nancy says, yeah, okay,
I could be down to go to the urge and
Jamie Lee says, sure, if you two want to see it,
I'm in. So since all of your friends agreed, you
resign yourself. You say, okay, let's see it. Tickets are

(41:09):
fourteen dollars a piece. Uh. The movie stars Fred Durst
and Tim Allen. It's three and a half hours long.
At multiple moments, you consider leaving the theater, but you
don't want to go out alone and leave your friends behind.
So you sit through this whole terrible movie, and when
the credits finally roll, you leave the theater with a
throbbing headache, and you immediately ask why did we do

(41:29):
that to ourselves? And Jamie Lee says, I don't know.
It sounded pretty bad to me, but I thought the
rest of you wanted to see it, and Nancy says, well,
I didn't want to see it. I just thought the
rest of you did, and p J says, well, don't
look at me. I just said I was okay with
it if you guys wanted to go. Weren't you the
one who suggested it? And Nancy, the one who did
suggest going to a movie, finally says, well, I just

(41:51):
thought you guys might be bored hanging out at the house.
So it turns out that none of the four of
you actually wanted to see this movie, and yet somehow
you collectively decided it would be the best thing to
do with your time together. Everybody agreed on a course
of action that nobody individually wanted. Robert, Can I assume

(42:11):
this experience is somewhat familiar to you? Yeah? Maybe from
I think probably the best example I can think of
is like when as a family when I was a kid,
sometimes we would agree on what to watch, and you know,
sometimes it's something that one of us had a definite
steak in, but other times it it kind of felt
like this, where we ended up agreeing to watch a

(42:33):
movie just because it was it was a major film
that came out, and we're like, okay, I guess we're
watching Oh uh God. I can't even think of a
good example of just something, you know, whatever the big
mainstream family film was that had hit theaters and was
now on VHS. Christmas with the Cranks well, maybe not
that bad, but but stuff stuff like that. Yeah, yeah,

(42:55):
So this would be a prime example of what Harvey
calls the Abeleean paradox, and the Abilene paradox comes from
the story Jerry Harvey tells to open his paper. It's
similar to the story I told, but it's about a
family in Texas making a long drive to Abilene in
a non air conditioned car in hot weather. It's a
completely miserable experience, as you would expect, and it turns

(43:16):
out nobody actually wanted to go to Abilene in the
first place. Every member of the family just thought the
other family members wanted to go and then failed to
communicate their actual preferences. And as Harvey puts it in
his article, the Abilene paradox is the fact that quote
organizations frequently take actions in contradiction to what they really

(43:37):
want to do and therefore defeat the very purposes they're
trying to achieve. And any characterizes the Abilene paradox, says,
not a failure to manage disagreement, but a failure to
manage agreement. Uh So, when I first read about this
at some point in the past couple of years, I
was like, oh, my God, this kind of thing. I

(43:57):
recognize so much of this in the world. How have
I gone this long without a name for it? It
seems to me to be a problem for group choice
at all kinds of levels. Again, you mentioned you know
a family trying to decide what movie to see, but
you know a group of friends trying to decide what
to do how to spend their Sunday, or a democratic
society trying to elect their leaders. Many kinds of group

(44:20):
choice problems I think arise, of course, from the inability
to manage conflict. But this is the opposite. Har Harvey
argues that even more group choice problems arise from the
inability to manage agreement. And another real world example that
Harvey gives in his paper is the Watergate scandal. He
he quotes a number of people who involved in Nixon's

(44:41):
came the Nixon campaign's dirty Tricks team, who all claimed
privately that they had doubts not only about the morality
about but about the practical wisdom of their scheme that
to each of them privately, seemed like the payoffs were
not really worth the risks, But they each assumed they
were the only one with such doubts and thus acted
along with the rest of the group in a way

(45:03):
that hurt all of them, even though they privately, most
or all thought it was a bad idea. So it's
like Nixon wants to purge, Lily wants to purge. So
I guess, I mean, I don't really want to purge,
But if everybody's in the mood to purge, I guess
I'm in right and Uh. In a lot of his paper,
Harvey just analyzes what he sees, or like the he

(45:24):
he thinks the common organizational symptoms of the Abilene paradox.
For example, he talks about the idea of action anxiety. Yeah.
He explains this by quoting Shakespeare's Hamlet. He says, action
anxiety is that which quote makes us rather bear those
ills we have than fly to others we know not,
of which, of course, is what you know. Hamlet talks

(45:45):
about the idea of going on through pain rather than
like ending it and going on to see what undiscovered
country lies beyond the grave. Um. But it's a fear
of acting on your actual preferences an environment that makes
pursuing the path that you don't want seem like the
less scary option. Than asking for the path that you

(46:05):
do want. Well, that's also touched on a little bit
in Macbeth, right, the idea about it having waited so
far through the blood that it's better to just go
on through to the other side of this this blood
lake than to turn back around, even if turning back
around is what you really want to do. Yeah, and
he and Harvey roots a lot of this actually and
appeals to human psychology, says, you know, some of our

(46:26):
greatest fears are expressed as negative fantasies about fear, about
fears of separation and ostracization. You know, it's like terrifying
to be the one to step out and say I'm
going to challenge the momentum of this group that you know, that, like,
whether it's even in simple things like going out to
a movie, Like you're going out to a movie with friends.

(46:49):
I mean, maybe you're comfortable enough with the friends to
say no, actually, I don't want to do this. But
like a lot of times, especially if you don't know
people as well, you'd rather just not be thought of
as the jerk who who said let's not do it. Yeah,
because you're engaging and you're you're kind of engaging in
this group. Think you know, I think it's something as
simple as say, like a group of friends getting together
to to play Dungeons and Dragons. You know you're not,

(47:11):
you know, you're not a dirty tricks UH counsel or whatever.
You know you're not. All you're doing is just trying
to hang out and play a game. But you know,
still don't want to shake the boat if somebody wants
to get fried pickles, you know, um, even if you
really don't care for fried pickles all that much, right,
But maybe the person who suggested it doesn't either, and
they're just saying because they thought somebody else did. Yeah,

(47:33):
and so you reach a point where every week you
order fried pickles, even though nobody's really crazy about fried pickles,
and everybody probably feels a little bad about eating them
every week. Yeah. So in the end, Harvey comes up
with a couple of recommendations for diagnosing and dealing with
UH with abilene paradox is in a business context. Unfortunately,
there's no special magic trick. Basically, he says he thinks

(47:55):
the best way to deal with it is for an
authority figure who detects they sit uation like this to
call a meeting, frankly articulate their doubts in a group
setting and then ask others to share their honest thoughts.
If you're an authority figure, you have you know, it's
safer for you to go out on a limb and
question the direction that you're going in, all right, I mean,
that's that's why they make the big bucks, right this,

(48:17):
this is the this is the moment when they can
really earn that higher pay that the higher pay grade,
right right, be the authority figure that comes in and
shuts down, uh, you know, things that nobody really wants
to do, or that there's no real advantage to doing
from a business standpoint. Yeah. Now, in the political context,
I think the Kang in Kodos situation kind of highlights

(48:38):
a satirical absurd version of this, with the idea that uh,
you know, obviously humans would all recognize like, okay, we
we are all in agreement. We're in agreement. We don't
want either Kang or Kodos. That's the position shared by
everybody voting at this point. But they're able to cause
this action anxiety about organizing any kind of third option

(49:00):
and the idea of throwing your vote away on any
kind of third party candidate. When you've got kang in Kodos,
there is going out on a limb. You fear ostracization,
you fear being separated, you fear being different, And so
eventually they just kind of decide, well, which one will
I take? Kanger Kodos, And despite everybody agreeing that neither
option is wanted, but it keeps everybody together. I mean,

(49:23):
humanity is united at the end in their enslavement to
these uh, these terrible alien overlords. No they're not. They're
still bickering. Don't blame me. That's genius of it is there.
I mean, they're essentially unified, but they still have the
mindset of division. Uh uh yeah. And so I think
the way around that, of course, would be that it
requires some kind of uh risk of leadership for somebody

(49:47):
to say, hey, wait a minute, can we try to
organize some way to get around this too? You know,
the two options we've got here that we all agree
we don't want it sounds like a really wicked problem
to deal with. Well, yeah, I mean, I think the
point the writers are making there is that we're just
not good at organizing that kind of agreement effectively. Now
what do we do about the fact that we're often

(50:08):
not good at managing agreement and this leads to repeated
absurdities like the kang and like the election of kang
Um Well he actually, Harvey ends his paper with a
strangely philosophical note for an organizational dynamics paper. Uh. He
says that, you know, sometimes these situations simply cannot be resolved,
and he calls to mind the myth of Sysyphus, the

(50:30):
character from Greek mythology who was condemned to forever repeat
the task of pushing a boulder up a hill, only
for it to fall back down to the bottom again,
making a mockery of his efforts, says not only painful
but pointless. Uh. And in Albert Camus version of the myth,
he adds a detail that sometimes, in his endless loop
of absurd toil, Sisyphus would get near the top of

(50:52):
the hill, but then release the boulder of his own accord,
letting it roll back down to the bottom on purpose
and her he says, in this act he could transcend
the absurdity of his struggle. Uh. And I think this
is sort of the bull's eye of existential philosophy. Right,
life is absurd, and you transcend that absurdity by recognizing

(51:12):
your radical freedom and acting authentically, which means basically without
lying to yourself about the absurdity of life. Like this
is when you write in a third candidate. Now, I
think actually, in this case it might be more like
voting for Kang or not voting or something while while
recognizing the absurdity and unwinnable nous of the scenario. So
I don't know if that's the best thing to do

(51:33):
in the alien election. I would say, actually try to
organize the third party. But I think the uh, this
whole discussion actually does bring us back to real questions
about the field of astro politics. I mean, this is
something I think we could devote whole episodes to in
the future. There's actually a field of study and people

(51:54):
have written about like what would happen if aliens arrived
on Earth, Like what would be the political response to that?
How would different world economic and military powers behave? Uh,
you know, would we all band together, would we put
aside our differences and our self interest and say we
need to organize an act together as Earth? Or would
aliens be able to exploit our petty grievances and our

(52:18):
differences and turn us against one another. And I think, unfortunately,
I think there are some pretty good signs pointing towards
the ladder. Yeah, I mean, our only model for intelligent
life in the cosmos is is our model of intelligent
life of of a technologically advanced civilization. And when we
look at the way that uh, you know, certainly the
way civilizations have interacted with each other, and I certainly

(52:41):
look at the way that you know, Western colonization, how
that transpired, and we see time and time again of
basically the Kyan Kodos model manipulate their their leaders and
their leadership, corrupt their uh, their their rule, and work
one side against the other, ultimately overpower and bring enslavement
and death. I mean, that's that is the story of

(53:05):
of human history, sadly. And so when we look to
the stars, you know, there are plenty of people have said, well,
that's basically what we can expect based on our models,
based on our knowledge of our self, knowledge of how
we work, that is what we can expect from a
superior technological force. Like we want to imagine the independence
day scenario where we all come together and join forces,

(53:27):
but I don't know. I don't want to be overly optimistic. Yeah,
I mean, you know, unless we look to our optimism
in the sixth finger. And I think a lot of
people have, I mean a lot of certainly the various
um New Age religions that have popped up around the
idea of aliens, you know, that they look to aliens
as a possibly we're all we're all messed up in

(53:49):
this world and we're you know, we we have just
committed crime after crime, and we're shackled to the terror
of history. Maybe something will come down from above that
has evolved beyond the state and that can guide us,
that can help us find this new uh, you know,
shape of being uh. And you know, maybe that's the case.
But again, if we're looking at our own example of

(54:11):
intelligent life, I'm not sure that that's going to happen.
I wouldn't put hope in aliens being being a good
influence on us. I wouldn't put hope in us biologically
evolving beyond our our petty grievances and all that. I
think the hope lies in culture, unfortunately, and thus it
is up to people like writers and political leaders and

(54:32):
those kinds of figures to help shape human culture in
a way that that allows us to to act collectively
in our own best interest. I know that's not the
easiest thing to put hope in, but I think that
might be the only hope personally. Yeah. I mean, well,
that's that's that's the hard answer, that's the difficult answer.
But it's that's that's the one that requires us to work.

(54:53):
That's the one that requires us to do the heavy
lifting here. Yeah, we've got to fix our own problems
mostly using word Yeah, alright, I'm sure we'll come back
to this topic in the future because oh, I definitely
I think we could do some stuff on astro politics absolutely, Yeah, yeah,
I would be down for that, absolutely. But there you

(55:14):
have it. This is gonna be our third installment of
the Anthology of Horror uh Kangan kodos Willing we will
return next October with at least one at least a
volume four, if not a volume four and five, And
of course, ironically that'll be pretty much just uh you know,
right before the like the peak moment of American politics

(55:36):
heading into the next presidential election. Probably won't do politics
when then probably not all right, in the meantime, if
you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to
Blow your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find them. You
can also find the podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
But again, this was how our Anthology of Horror Volume three,

(55:56):
Volume two came out Tuesday, and we reran volume one
for the weekend. Also, if you want to check out
our other show, Invention, you can find that at invention
pod dot com and that's available everywhere you get your podcasts.
Oh and also the fiction podcast the Second oil Age
launched as well. The first three episodes of that are
live wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, congratulations man, Well,

(56:18):
thank you, thank you. Alright, uh so that's it for
this episode. Certainly we have not seen all of the
Horror Anthology episodes out there. Uh, we are not familiar
with all the shows. So from now until next October,
if you have specific episodes of various anthology shows you
would like us to consider for next time, let us know.

(56:39):
If they're just whole shows, whole buckets of content that
we're not aware of, please enlighten us. One of the
cool places you can find us for that, uh is
our our Facebook discussion group. That is the stuff Doable
your Mind discussion module. Go check that out huge. Thanks
as always to our excellent audio producer, Seth Nicholas Johnson.
No wait, death, Nicholas Johnson. That's right. If you would

(57:01):
like to get in touch with us directly with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production
of iHeart Radios. How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from

(57:24):
my heart Radio is the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.