Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the Old Vault. This one is
an episode from last October. It was our first episode
on horror anthologies. Yes, uh so the basic format here
is that in we'll explain this in the actual episode,
but we each picked different episodes from horror sci fi
(00:29):
anthologies of the past, you know, stuff like Night Gallery
or Tales from the Crypt, Twilight Zone, etcetera. And then
we tease apart some of the science in them, you know,
more or less online with what we do with our
movie episodes when we do our regularly uh recurring uh
movie episodes here on the podcast. And uh and also
we will notice it's still marked his volume one. That
(00:50):
is because volume two is coming up next. I'm so excited.
All right, Well, let's dive right in. Welcome to Stuff
to Blow Your Mind. My name is Dr Anton Jess,
Professor of Monster Studies, and I am Professor Griffith Wells
(01:15):
Warden of the Howling Pit. Robert and Joe have a
delightfully ghoulish installment of the podcast for you today. One
guaranteed to curdle your blood and expand your mind in
the most cranium popping ways imaginable. It's a science based
stroll through the world of horror anthology, television and cinema,
(01:39):
The Twilight Zone, the Night Gallery, Tales from the crypt Tree,
House of Horror, and more so, stake around blood suckers
and find out which episodes they picked and what sorts
of scientific subjects they were able to suck from their ters.
(02:10):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
as you can tell from our delightful intro there, I
by a couple of colleagues of ours. We'll just assume
it was delightful. It was. They sounded delighted. They sounded
(02:32):
delighted there. But they always even the most, even in
the most inopportune of times. Well, it comes down to
the things they delight in, I suppose. But but what
they told you is correct. We're gonna be talking about
horror anthologies today and then we're gonna we're gonna ring
some science from their their desiccated corpses. That sounds like
(02:53):
great fun to me. But Robert, so, by horror anthology,
you mean like TV shows where say it's it's horror
themed and it's not the same characters every episode. We're
we're not so much talking about like Monster of the
Week episode on the episodes on the X Files are buffy, right,
and we're also not talking about them from modern version
of this you see with American horror story where each
(03:15):
season it's a different story. No, we're talking about the
likes of the Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, Tales from the Crypt, uh,
the Simpsons, Treehouse of Horror, personal favorite of mind. Yeah,
shows of shows of this nature where each episode is
a self contained story or sometimes a pair of stories
or a short story and like a sliver of a
(03:35):
little extra on there. But they're they're self contained. They're
they're essentially horror, short horror fiction that has been translated
generally for television. But then of course you also see uh,
cinematic installments of these shows as well, where you'll have
a feature league length film that consists of say three, four,
maybe five different short horror segments. Oh yeah, maybe we
(03:59):
can do maybe we can include movies like that in
the future. I think we just did TV shows this time. Yeah,
there are a few, a few kind of branch out
into film a little bit um and of course, of
course we'd be remiss we don't end up talking about
any of these episodes. But Black Mirror, I think is
one of the finer examples of horror at times more
sci fi. But really most of those episodes are pretty terrifying.
(04:21):
I think you could make an argument that Black Mirror
is a horror anthology television series. Now, Robert, I'm a
little at a disadvantage in this episode because you have
seen far more of these types of shows than I have.
I'm I'm big on Simpson's tree House of Horror, but
I've actually seen pretty I've seen no Tales from the
Dark Side, I think, no Night Gallery. I've actually not
(04:41):
seen all that much Twilight Zone. A few episodes you know,
here and there, and the only full Tales from the
Crypt episode I've actually seen that I remember is deeply
inappropriate one with Tim Curry, who is the most wonderful
actor ever in in all of acting history. But it's
just too grotesque to even talk about out well, as
we'll get into that description can go for just about
(05:04):
every Tales from the Crypto, like great actors and sometimes
great filmmakers, but kind of a deplorable story. Um. Yeah,
if if I've seen a lot of her anthology TV
SHO shows, it's because I watched a lot of Sci
Fi Channel and syndicated cable back in the nineties. I
guess you could say it was my my teacher mother
(05:25):
secret Lover U to reference the Triosa far Um, But yeah,
I watched like stuff like Night Gallery, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits,
both new and old. I think on the original Sci
Fi Channel watch Tales from the Dark Side in like
Syndication on Sunday afternoons. It always felt like a particularly
unholy place for it to be. Well, you know what
(05:48):
I do expect to find if we get into If
I go back and start watching shows like this, as
I bet I will recognize things from when I was
a kid and we would go on a trip and
like stay in a hotel or something like that, and
of course they always had all the channels we didn't
get at home, so they had the Sci Fi Channel
and I just tuned into whatever in the hotel, And
(06:09):
so occasionally I'll see some crazy movie now and realize
I saw a piece of it as a child on
vacation with my family in a hotel. Well, I didn't
have ready access to Tales from the Crypt. I would
what would happen? Is occasionally that on HBO was on HBO.
It was really one of the original original HBO programs.
But to watch it, since we were not HBO subscribers,
(06:32):
I had to either hit it and just mainline it
during HBO preview weekends, or more often watched them half scrambled,
because I think it would be like it would be
kind of like pizza colored scrambled versions of it, or
sometimes you know, it would just become black and white.
So there are some episodes for Tales in the Crypt
when I go back and watch them now and I'm like, oh,
(06:54):
I had no idea. For instance, I had no idea
that that was Tim Curry playing female character, because clearly
the first time I watched it, it was too scrambled
for me to tell well in that episode. That's kind
of a mercy, I think. But wow, it's amazing the
things people will will put up with in the search
(07:15):
for for a story that they're into, you know, like
like the idea I always think it's funny that, you know,
people watch like theater bootlegged videos that like somebody will
record a movie with the camcorder inside a theater and
people will watch that. That's kind of look terrible, but
I don't. I mean people you're they're hungry for it.
They want that movie. And I guess you were like
(07:35):
that too, watching through through all the static and weird
color variations. Yeah, that was how you got to watch it. Um. Yeah,
So to today's episode for any long time listeners to
stuff to prow your mind. This is essentially the same
concept as the three Creepy Pasta episodes that I did
with Christian where we would pick a creepy Pasta stories
(07:56):
and sort of squeeze the science out of them. And
I have to say, we we squeezed all the science
out of Creepy Pasta. I don't think there's there's much left.
So this feels like the next logical place to, uh,
to start squeezing horror anthologies. Well, I say, let's get
right into our first selection of the day. Alright, Uh,
(08:16):
my selection here for our first one is a Question
of Fear, and this is this is one of my
favorite episodes of Rod Serling's Night Gallery, his horror anthology
series that ran from nineteen through ninety three. Uh, and
then of course just eternally on the Sci Fi Channel
during the during the nineties. Is this a picture of
(08:37):
Leslie Nielsen with an eye patch and a mustache? I'm
looking at Yes. This episode starred um Leslie Nielsen as
Colonel Dennis Malloy and it also starred actor Fritz Weaver
as Dr Mazzi. Weaver is terrific in this as well.
I mean, Nielsen is great and this this is the
pre naked gun Nielsen. This is the serious actor Nielsen. Oh,
(09:00):
he was that way for a long time. What movie
did I just watch recently where he plays a straight character?
I can't remember right now, But of course he was
in Forbidden Planet, was he? Yeah, you don't remember. He
was like the main he was the commander astronaut and
Forbidden Planets. I mean Forbidden Planets great, it's not great
for the astronaut characters who as usual or just like
(09:22):
some stiff white dudes. Well, you could say that Leslie
Neilson was also one of those those stiff white dudes
for sure. Um, he's kind of like put him in
the same category as Peter Graves, you know. Uh and
and like Peter Graves, and was later used to terrific
effect in comedy as such as in the Airplane movies
and the Naked Gun movies. Uh. And in this he's
(09:44):
he's pretty great because he plays just a very um,
just a very hard cold character. And this colonly plays
he's a fearless mercenary. Uh that has you know, just
been in multiple wars, and even after World War Two
was over, you know, he couldn't get enough. So he
just continually works as a mercenary and kind of a
Lee Marvin type. Yeah, very much, very much a Lee
(10:06):
Marvin type character here also reminds me a lot of
the kind of character that, say, um, Lee van Cliff
would have played. Oh yeah, okay, So in this episode,
it starts off with a gentleman's club, and here is
Colonel Malloy, uh, you know, talking it up with the
other gentleman there. And one of the gentleman there, Dr Mazzi,
(10:26):
played by Fritz Weaver, starts talking about an episode at
a haunted house, some sort of an encounter with a
haunted house where it was just too terrifying for anyone
to survive, and of course the fearless colonel. Here he
starts talking about just how fearless he is and how
fear is a disease. He says, I'm careful, but I
am incapable of fear. Okay, So this leads to a bet,
(10:49):
as of apparently tends to happen in stuffy gentleman's clubs.
Mazy says that he bets he cannot survive one night
in this haunted mansion with being scared to death. And uh,
and he puts ten dollars on the line. Yeah, it's
a load of cash, and so of course our mercenaries
(11:10):
up for it to prove how fearless he is and
to and to to get a nice pay day. He says,
of course I'll do it. So uh. And this is
one of the fabulous things about this episode. It's basically
a two person show. It's just just Weaver and Nielsen.
So and you don't even see Weaver again physically. He
only appears on a television set. So what happens is
(11:31):
that Malloy braves the ghost effects in the house, you know,
all these smoke and mirror effects that seem intended to
scare him out of his pay day. He definitely fires
a few rounds and do some obvious special effects. Uh,
and just the audience is clear that they're special effects,
or it's obvious within the story that they're special effects.
Think a little of both, especially the modern viewers. Uh.
(11:54):
The effects aren't like outright terrible, but anything they're lacking,
I think actually enhances this aspect of the episode. So
it's like supposed to be visible to Malloyd that it's fake, right,
or certainly after he's through, you know, emptying his gun
into it, he's like, oh, you're just sitting real. Um.
I dealt with the problem the way I deal with
all my problems. I attempted to murder it. Uh, and
(12:15):
then I saw that it wasn't anything to be afraid of.
So uh. He eventually, though, he settles into bed, he
has a little coffee for some reason, and then he says,
all right, I'm just gonna go to bed, and when
I wake up, I'm gonna be ten thousand dollars richer
dreaming of mounting ghost heads on this wall. Right. But
then the second he settles in, iron bar snap into
place over him, and a pendulum starts descending from the ceiling,
(12:37):
and he still refuses to give into the fear. He's like, yells,
all right, Mamsy, you can do this, you can kill me,
but you're not gonna win because look at me, still
not afraid, not afraid to die and uh. And so
he ends up going to sleep and when he wakes up,
he makes himself breakfast and Mazy communicates with him via
a live TV transmission and he reveals the following first
(12:59):
of Malloy apparently encountered Mazzi's pianist father in Italy during
the Second World War, where he tortured him for information,
pouring gasoline over his hands and setting them on fire. WHOA. So,
as you can imagine Mazzi's for to find Malloy and
to break him. You burn my daddy's hands, I'll get
you for this, right Yeah, So now we know it's
(13:20):
a revenge piece. So Mazzi reveals at this point that
he is a biochemist, one of the greatest biochemists in
the field and is highly respected uh in the realm
of biochemical warfare. And he says that he and his
colleague recently discovered a way to convert a complex enzyme
in the human body into that of an earthworm, and
(13:41):
by injecting this, he says, quote, the bones of the
body disintegrate without affecting the nervous system or the vital organs,
until the victim is as near as can be an
earthworm able to move on its belly, but without vertebrae,
unable to stand, able to feed, able to pass waste matter,
unable to use its arms and legs except to assist
(14:03):
with a slithering motion in the manner of an earthworm.
I can't help but notice this sounds like a better
and more interesting version of a movie I don't like
to talk about. Yes, I have long thought about this.
We've had a couple of movies that have come out
over the past ten years in which a deranged scientist
wants to turn somebody into a creature of some sort,
(14:26):
generally a lesser invertebrate. And and and I find that all
of those men like the concept is initially revolting and appealing,
but then you realize it's not really dealt with in
any depth. It's only rolled out to to revolt the audience.
Whereas in this episode, I feel like it is. It
is leveled in a in a very intelligent way. Uh so,
(14:47):
so yeah, to continue going. Malloy initially doubts this. He's like,
you're you're full of it, but Masi tells him, oh well,
why don't you look in the cellar and see what
became of my colleague and says that he was a
large man, but now he's reduced to something like a slug.
And indeed, earlier in the episode, when when Leslie Neilson's
character is looking around the mansion, one of the things
(15:07):
he encounters is this unexplained trail of slime through the cellar,
and there's this it's it's it's it's a legitimately creepy
moment and certainly seems a little different from the uh
the ghost effects that are thrown at him. So then
he tells Molloy. Massy tells Mooy that the transformation is
going to take time, but that he's going to go
down in medical history and there's no stopping it. He said,
(15:30):
you can after you leave here, you can tell the police.
You can go to a specialist, but first of all,
the specialists probably won't believe you, and even if they do,
they're not going to be able to help you because
this cannot be reversed. Wait, so at this point he's
done something to Malloy. He's like injected him or something.
That's what he claims, yes, and Molloyd calls his bluff,
but but he's already beginning to give in the fear.
(15:50):
Massy tells him, Uh, look, you should just wanted to
check your inside forearm. I believe it is you'll find
an injection point. We drugged your coffee, and I snuck
in and injected you while you were asleep. And and
if you still don't believe me, then go into the seller.
Go into the seller and see what my colleague became.
(16:10):
And at this point, he's like really working Molloy up.
And Molloy begins to move towards the seller and he
sees the trail of slime this time, uh you know,
working through the hallways and descending into the cellar. And
then he turns around and he tells Mazzi that he
still isn't that there's no way mass is gonna win,
that that that that he Malloy is going to win,
and then he shoots himself with his own gun. And
(16:33):
at this point, um Mazzi uh admits, he says, actually,
I win because there's nothing in the seller that's pretty good. Yeah,
I mean this is just my retelling of it, so
certainly the episode itself is a is a finer version
of the tail than my synopsis here. I love the Uh.
It's a common thing, apparently in horror to just talk
(16:55):
to people through TVs. I'm thinking about those solid movies.
Isn't there a segment in Creep Show where somebody talks
to somebody through a TV? Yes? I believe it is
actually Leslie Nielsen. I think so. In the bed where
Ted Danson and I can't remember the other actor's name,
where they're buried up to their necks in the surf
in the sand. Yeah, and Leslie Nielsen's like, ha ha,
(17:17):
I'll talk to you through a TV. Yeah, that's a
that's a nice connection between this episode and Creep Show
horror anthology film, which, incidentally enough, Fritz Weaver is also
in In the crate segment, he plays the professor. Uh.
That works with how Hobrook's character. Oh okay, and he's
fabulous in that as well, like he's he really should
(17:38):
go down as more of a horror anthology legend. Well,
I I got to see this episode this is pretty
creepy just hearing you describe it. Yeah, it creeped me
out then it still creeps me out now even though
there's no actual transformation, it's described so well. It's a
it's set up so well that you don't even care
like it it. It doesn't deflate the horror of it
(17:58):
when when you have this final twist at the end.
But this, uh yeah, particularly this concept of transformation into
an earthworm, I feel like there is a lot of
dread here and it and uh and I'd like to
know discuss a little bit why uh we feel that
sense of dread when we imagine being turned into what
is essentially a noble organism, uh, the earthwork. Now. I
(18:21):
can think of quite a few culturally common body transformation
or deterioration phobias. People have phobias about loss of teeth.
That's a common when people have from nightmares about losing
their teeth. Uh, There's like the penis retraction phobia. You know,
people have genital deterioration fears. But I've never heard of
(18:42):
bone disappearance phobia before. That's a new one. Uh, It's
it's a great one. Though. There's actually an episode of
The Ray Bradberry Theater from the eighties, which has a
similar plot line in which I believe Eugene Levy plays
an individual who goes to a doctor for some sort
of skeletal issue and he like removes his skeleton and
reduced him to a like essentially an invertebrate. Oh so
(19:03):
he like becomes a human jellyfish basically. So perhaps it's
not explored enough the bone removal or disintegration um sub
genre body horror. Well, Robert, I assume you're going to
tell me something about the science of earthworms, right, Yeah,
this gave me a good excuse to look into the
science of earthworms. And I have to apologize to earthworms
(19:24):
and humans who have been transformed into them, because you know,
we could do a whole episode just on the importance
of earthworms and the evolution of earthworms. That's probably true
of any of the subjects we discuss in this episode,
that we could probably expand them into a whole episode
of their own. Yeah, if we were. If I was
a little more of a grown up about it and
was and didn't want to just use these things as
(19:45):
an excuse to talk about night Gallery. Um, the so yeah,
the uh, we're talking about the analyds here from the
analytic phylum, which includes all the segmented worms such as earthworms,
Lee choose, and a whole host of polychy marine worms
such as the bristle worm, which I recently got to
(20:06):
see on a vacation in Costa Rica tide pools. Yeah. Um,
what do they look like? Are they bristly? They are
bristly And if you touch them, especially with a five
year old touches them, uh, they will they will sting you.
But the child was fine. It was a friend of
my son's. Yeah, he was fine. He got that. But
he did get to have a very up close and
(20:28):
personal experience with with the bristleworm. Um. So, the this
particular phylum contains more than nine thousand species and six
thousand species of earthworm. They live everywhere except Antarctica. And
there are even bioluminescent earthworms. Oh I don't think I
knew that. Uh yeah, I found a couple of great
sources on them, in particular Dr Frank Anderson and Dr
(20:50):
Samuel James. They did a blog post at Biomedical Central
titled the Evolution of Earthworms. So earthworms are fabulous. There
their eco system engineers working draining, aerating the soil. I
feel like nowadays most people realize that, hey, if you've
got worms living in your garden, earthworms, they're they're doing
the Lord's work. That's good. But what did we not
(21:12):
always realize that worms were good for the soil? Well,
it seems like we didn't. I mean, you can look
back to the writings of say Aristotle, who referred to
them as the intestines of the earth, which is in
many ways true. It seems like a good thing, right,
You don't want to not have intestines, right. But but
apparently before Charles Darwin came along with his interest in earthworms,
(21:35):
there was this idea, at least in the Western world,
at least in in Europe, in Britain specifically, that earthworms
were kind of a pest in your garden, that they
weren't really doing anything. Get there. By the way, Dr
Anderson and James, one of the things they discussed in
their their article is that roughly one third of the
earthworms species in North America were introduced from Europe or Asia,
(21:58):
and some were introduced into northern forests which had been
free of earthworms since the end of the Last Ice Age.
Roughly eleven thousand years ago. Oh wow, I've never thought
about that the way um like the soil fauna has
to recover after areas have been covered by glaciers. I
guess yeah. I believe we've touched on this in the
past on the show. Maybe it was a very old
(22:19):
episode about the idea of of earthworms being brought in
by by colonial forces from the from the Old World
into the New World. Anyway, but earthworms, there are a
lot of them out there. The largest is the giant
African earthworm. Uh. It's typically typically reaches fifty four inches
(22:40):
or one point thirty six ms in length, but its
record length is twenty two ft or six point seven ms. What. Yeah, Now,
even this species before anyone pictures like a full Leslie
Nielsen transformed earthworm, uh, this species was still the giant
here was still less than an inch in diameter. Uh.
So nothing that could scare a man to death. A seller.
(23:00):
That makes me wonder what are the upper limits of
Like how how filament like an organism can be? Like
at some point you would think that the strains of
moving something that long and that thin would want to
rip it apart or something. I guess that's one because
you see them remaining so thin, you don't see them
reaching sandworm or gravoid size. So Anderson and James that
(23:24):
they believe that the ancestor of all living earthworms probably
lived over two D nine million years ago, making earthworms
about as old as mammals and dinosaurs. They based this
estimate on DNA sequencing as well as the fossil record,
which they said, you know, ultimately doesn't tell us a
lot regarding earthworms, but it does give us leech cocoon
(23:45):
fossils from the late Triassic two one million years ago, so,
which presents a minimum age for leeches and earthworms. But
the idea of a human becoming an earthworm, the loss
of our vertebrate status, I think it terrifies us because
it also, you know, it reduces us to the activities
mentioned by Dr MASI right, moving, eating, producing waste, and
(24:08):
these are all things we do naturally. But but we
tend to focus on all the other aspects of our
human existence. I mean, sometimes to the point where we
want to reject our inner worm. You'd say, I think
generally bones are pretty important to our lives. Yeah, I
agree with that. We we need our bones. But but
(24:28):
but also just the idea that the worm doesn't do
anything else. I mean does a lot. Again, but to
the sort of the human perspective, digging around in a
garden and not knowing what the earthworms are doing, all
it seems to do is just food goes in one end,
poop comes out the other. It crawls around. It is
like just the you've stripped everything more interesting away from
(24:50):
the certainly the human experience and the mammalian experience as well. Well. Yeah,
I mean a common feature of body horror. You know,
long before we had David Crone and Berg, we had
older strains of body horror, the kind of horror that's
based not saying a monster chasing you, but in the
transformation of yourself into something you don't like or recognize.
I mean that the most common version of that is say,
(25:14):
reduction to what people would consider a lower strata of
animal existence, you know, being made into a beast that's
less than human. Oh yeah, I mean I can't help
but think, of course, of of Kafka's the metamorphosis. Yeah uh,
though of course that that beast like he was turned into.
I think the term directly translated into translates into something
(25:36):
like vermin. But it's often interpreted as like a you know,
a cockroach or something like that. But yeah, he The
weird thing there is he retains all of his mental faculties.
You know, he has full sentience. He's just said his
body transformed. I absolutely love that story. That is. I
think that is the only horror story that I've actually
read in a foreign language. I read it in a
(25:57):
German class. Really yeah, yeah, what was it like in German?
It was. It was a cool experience. I've since forgotten
any you know, smidge of German that it was. That
was that Reading that story in German was the absolute
peak of my, my, my, my German language reading ability. Well,
it sounds like a good peak to climb before committing
to the valley forever. So I mentioned Charles Darwin earlier.
(26:19):
Charles Darwin, of course, the famous naturalist who gave us
the theory, the theory of natural selection. He was quite
interested in earthworms, and in fact they were the subject
of his last book, Ones, The Formation of Vegetable Mold
through the Action of Worms. And despite this, you know
what makes him dry subject matter? Perhaps, uh, it was
(26:42):
still the most successful book published during his lifetime and
uh and uh yeah, And according to Anderson and James,
it was pretty key in changing Western views on earthworms. Uh,
they were no longer soil pests. People realized they had importance.
And the tying in with our directly with our Night
Gallery episode it's it's success inspired an eighteen eighty two Punch,
(27:05):
which is a publication punch magazine. I guess you would
call it. Um. They had a cartoon that depicted worms
evolving into monkeys and monkeys evolving into men in you know,
kind of a spiral around a cartoon version of Charles Darwin. Well,
I feel like I should know the answer to this question,
but I honestly don't. Are is a worm like organism
(27:29):
at some point believed to be part of our phylogenetic history?
Or is or have worms always been separate from whatever
became vertebrates and eventually became us? Well there They've been
a lot of studies over the years looking at nematodes
in particular. Um, Like, if you just do some searches
for uh, human genetics and worms, you'll find these, uh,
(27:53):
these articles. And I was tempted to go into those
deeper here, but then realized that's it's really deserving of
a whole episode. But but either way, I mean whether
or not some type of worm is a direct ancestor.
Obviously we share common ancestry, so the question is how
much do we have in common? Well, I was looking
at a paper that goes into this, a bit titled
(28:13):
Earthworm Genomes, Genes and Proteins The Rediscovery of Darwin's Worms,
and this was by strussan Baum, Andre Kylie and Morgan
was publishing two thousand nine and in the Proceedings of
the Royal Society b SO. I I'd like to read
just a section where they referenced Darwin here, and in
particularly they're referencing that illustration I talked about with the
(28:36):
worms transforming into monkeys. Quote. The illustration is a humorous construct,
but an examination of the earthworm structure and function reveals
cells and tissues and cell types with vertebrate counterparts. Earthworms
are ce limit protostomes, possessing an anatomically and functionally differentiated
(28:59):
alum terry canal with brush bordered absorptive epithelia, a closed
blood circulation with hemoglobin in free suspension, an organized nervous
system with cepholic ganglia, and neuro secretary activities, a multi
functional tissue for which carbohydrate metabolism and storage properties are
(29:21):
reminiscent of mammalian heptocytes, a series of paired tubules in
each segment with renal urine forming functions, and a systemic
immune system comprising leukocite like cells. So I realized there's
a lot of though very technical information there that I
had to stumble through. Uh. But you know, what it's
(29:41):
basically getting down to is that, yes, we're very different
from earthworms. I'm not saying that earth worms and humans
are basically the same thing, but when you start looking
at genetics and just sort of life itself, we're not
that different. Ye know. They've got a lot of similar
anatomical counterparts, some of the same stuff you'd see in mammals,
(30:02):
and in a way, you can see them as a
reduced version of what we are right Um, and in fact,
when you look at our genes. Uh, one thing that
the author's pointed out here is the earthworms share something
like two d and twenty genes um of their of
their then catalog that eight thousand, one hundred twenty nine
gene objects with humans, and that's more than with fruit
(30:23):
flies sixty eight genes or nematode worms forty nine genes.
Despite the importance of fruit fly and nematode genes in
human research, there's so you know, so there are a
whole lot of vertebrate homologies in there. They wrote in
summary that more earthworm genes are conserved between earthworms and humans.
Provides anecdotal support of the original Punch Cartoons strapline quote,
(30:48):
man is but a worm. That's wonderful. And I like
how they have fundamentally conclusively proved that you can inject
somebody with an enzyme and turn them into an earth
No no, no no, no no, that's still pure science fiction.
But but I think maybe it does lean into the
idea that it is science fiction and not just pure sorcery.
(31:08):
Like there there there is a connection, there are There
is a wormy, slimy trail descending through the haunted House
of human evolution if we dare follow it. Well, I
have greatly enjoyed following the slimy trail. Robert, Yeah, I
think that's part of the fun of going after these
is like sort of picking an episode from an anthology
series and then just seeing what kind of science you
(31:31):
can probably squeeze out of it. Um. On that note,
let's take a quick break, and when we come back,
I believe you have a selection for us. Thank alright,
we're back, okay, Robert. Treehouse of Horror. Do you have
a favorite Treehouse of Horror of all time? Oh? Well,
I have a I definitely have a favorite episode, yes,
that I watched last night, because it has some of
(31:53):
the best segments. It has. It has the Shinning, which
I I referenced already in the episode. It also has
Nightmare Cafeteria, the one where you know, all the teachers
in the lunch room returning to cannibalism and eating the children.
But it also has has one more just really stellar segment. Yes,
and this is, of course the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment,
(32:16):
Time and Punishment, one of the great Simpsons Treeouse of
Horror shorts of all time, maybe maybe the best one ever.
So I'll give you the quick rundown. Homer Simpson breaks
the toaster by getting his hand jammed in it twice. Uh,
one of the best gags ever on the show. It
still makes me laugh every time the second time he
(32:36):
gets his hand jammed in there. So I think Lisa's like, Dad,
your hands still in there, and He's like, there's just
so much fabulous screaming and sprawling about. Anyway, So toasters broken,
he has to do some repairs. So in doing so,
Homer accidentally turns the toaster into a time machine that
takes him back to the Cretaceous period, and upon arriving,
(32:58):
he recalls the advice his father gave him on his
wedding night, which is, if you ever happened to travel
back into the past, don't change anything, because the ripple
effects through time could be disastrous. Unfortunately, of course, Homer
ends up killing bugs and you know, generally messing stuff
up in the past. And so Homer comes back to
(33:18):
the present the first time to find a kind of
nineteen eighty four scenario where ned Flanders rules the earth,
a kind of nineteen eight didle for if you will,
and uh, it's just too good. So eventually Homer he
goes back through time again to try to fix things,
and every time he changes something in the past, the
future changes in horrible ways. Finally, in the end, he
(33:42):
settles for a present in which things are basically normal,
but everybody has forked lizard tongues yeah, he says, like, yeah,
good enough. Uh. And of course this seems to be
based on Ray Bradbury's short story A Sound of Thunder,
which was originally published in Collier's magazine in nineteen fifty two.
And by the way, Robert, I think I'm to understand
you have not seen the two thousand five movie version
(34:04):
of A Sound of Thunder with Ben Kingsley and that
dude with an attitude from Saving Private Ryan. No, I
haven't you sent me a trailer for it? And somehow
I totally missed this movie ever even existed. It has
some of the most deliciously awful c g I monsters
of all time. It's, you know, that kind of early
(34:24):
two thousands c g I that at the time people
just thought was amazing, and now you can't look at
it without laughing. Yeah, it's it's a it's a shame,
you know. It's like, it's not like some of the
stop motion animation you find in older some older horror
films like this is the Puppets. Yeah, yeah, puppets like this.
Maybe maybe you know, our taste will change, Maybe we'll
(34:46):
look back on them in ten years and we'll love them.
Right now, it's very difficult. Well, I mean, I do
love them, but not for the reason they were expecting
people to love them. It's it's hilarious like reading movie
reviews from the late nineties in early two thousand's where
critics will say like, well, this movie wasn't very good,
but at least it has dazzling special effects. Some people
(35:08):
were just they're out of their minds in the late
nineties and early two thousands for these c g I
movies that looks so bad you cannot keep your eyes
focused on them. You have to look away. I remember
seeing the Spawn movie when it came out and thinking, oh,
well that that had some pretty cool looking action in it. Yeah,
and I recently like glanced back like Glant. Granted I
(35:29):
didn't watching him full. I just watched a few scenes
on YouTube and I was just really astounded at how
bad the c g I was. It's it's amazing. But anyway,
this movie, it takes this story. At one point, there's
this monster, this kind of like a baboon velociraptor hybrid.
It's just amazing. But anyway, so, what what is the
plot of A Sound of thunder Ray Bradberry's original story, Well,
(35:51):
it involves hunters traveling back through time to go on
the safari through time and kill a turano source Rex.
And so this time travel afari in the story is
believed to be safe because scouts have gone ahead and
selected an animal that was about to die anyway, so
killing it shouldn't change too much about the past. But
then in the story, won one of these safari guys.
(36:13):
I think this rich guy pay in to go on
this trip. He sort of goes off script. He falls
off this levitating path that they've constructed. Uh, and he
changes too much about the past, especially in the end
by discovering that he crushed a butterfly under his boot.
And so then when they return to the future, everything's weird.
English words are spelled different, and a fascist politician has
(36:34):
come to power. It's a fabulous story. I should also
point out that I think it's the third season of
the Ray Bradberry Theater had an adaptation of this that
I think was actually scripted by Ray brad Berry and
I remember as being pretty good. Yeah, so do not
feel like you only have that that awful c g
I film to fall back on. But but isn't it
(36:55):
interesting that probably more people have been exposed to this
concept through The Simpsons, then through the Ray Bradberry Theater,
or certainly that the writings of Ray Bradberry. Oh. I
think that's how it often is. I mean, lots of
classic sci fi stories ended up as Simpsons episodes, and
that's what people primarily know them from. Just like I
(37:15):
bet more people of roughly our generation know the Tale
of the Monkeys Paw as the Twisted Claw episode of
Are You Afraid of the Dark? I mean it makes sense.
We're essentially talking about folk tales and myths, and these
things evolved, These things change with the teller historically, and
so it makes sense that they should change with the
teller even today. Yeah. But so this is sort of
(37:38):
a timeless story in a way, because it's illustrating a
concept that if you've ever really thought about time travel
and what it would mean if time travel into the
past could exist, if you think about it hard enough,
you're likely to stumble across some version of what's come
to be known in chaos theory and meteorology and mathematics
as the butterfly effect. Now, there are plenty of popular
(38:01):
misconceptions about the butterfly effect. You heard about it in
Jurassic Park and stuff. One of the common misconceptions is
that the term actually comes from Ray Bradberry's story A
Sound of Thunder, because what do we find out at
the end that this guy stepped on a butterfly and
he sees it on his boot and realizes, oh no,
that caused these cascading effects through time and changed everything. Uh,
(38:23):
this is not the case that the term does not
come from that story. In reality, credit can be given
to the m I. T. Meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz, who
was discussing the accuracy of weather prediction models. And Lorenz
found while working on meteorological computer programs that extremely tiny
changes in initial inputs would lead to huge differences in
(38:47):
predicted weather patterns over time, such that unavoidable errors in
our inputs will probably always make weather fundamentally unpredictable beyond
a certain distance into the future. And you actually know
this from your own experience. Right, you look at today's
weather forecast, it's probably pretty accurate. Tomorrow's is probably pretty accurate.
(39:07):
You try to go seven days into the future, it's
it's kind of a crapshoot. Then, in predicting, say whether
a month into the future is almost useless. And this
is because even though we have very good weather prediction
models at this point, their accuracy just deteriorates over time
because of the amplification of tiny initial differences that you
(39:30):
can't ever totally eliminate. So you know, uh, you you
make a tiny, tiny, you know, many many decimal places
behind the zero change to some initial input in a
weather prediction model, and then you run that, run that
alongside something with the original input, and one day into
the future they will be pretty similar, but five days
(39:53):
into the future they will be dramatically different. So whatever
you've got slightly wrong today, however tiny that error is,
will mean you just can't predict the future in a month.
And illustrate this concept, Lawns used the image of a bird,
I think a seagull or a butterfly flapping its wings
leading to changes in the weather that would create a
(40:14):
tornado that you wouldn't have had otherwise. Now, one thing
I also want to make clear is that this is
talking about the predicted movements of like specific weather patterns
and events. Right when they're trying to say where rain
will be at a certain time and how the front
the you know, the the air fronts will move and everything.
We can, on the other hand, make some solid predictions
(40:35):
about whether just based on climate and statistics. For example,
you can predict it is much more likely to be
raining in Seattle tomorrow than it is to be raining
in Death Valley tomorrow, and you you are likely to
be correct based on those predictions made on on the
basis of knowledge about climate and statistics. But still, if
you're trying to predict far in the future with specific
(40:56):
movements of weather patterns, you're you're gonna have a really
hard time doing it. Another misconception about the butterfly effect.
I think a lot of times people interpreted exactly the
wrong way. It's like the opposite of what it means.
They think that it means you can identify small changes
that lead to big effects in complex systems. This is
(41:16):
the opposite of the point about the butterfly effect. The
butterfly effect is specifically about the lack of deterministic predictability
in complex systems with sensitivity to initial conditions, and the
technical term for this would be deterministic non linear systems.
Nonlinear systems are systems where the outputs are not directly
(41:37):
proportional to the inputs. You know, you can slightly vary
an input and get big changes in the difference of
the output. So the point is not that you can
see a tornado and actually trace it back to a
butterfly flapping its wings. Rather, the point is that weather
systems emerged from complex interactions over time with extreme sensitivity
to initial conditions, meaning that if you move far enough
(41:59):
back in time, you could not have predicted that a
tornado would emerge. It's not about predicting the future of
a complex system based on tiny initial changes. It's about
how complex systems are more and more unpredictable the farther
into the future you try to predict. This, of course,
is one of the fundamental concepts of chaos theory, and
maybe maybe we should come back and devote a full
(42:19):
episode to this one day with special GUESTI and Malcolm.
I've never really thought to look critically at whether the
way Ian Malcolm tries to apply chaos theory and Jurassic
Park is a legitimate application of that theory. Maybe maybe
the maybe it is, I don't know. That would would
actually be fun to just to do a breakdown of
the original Jurassic Park film, Uh, and it would give
(42:40):
us more opportunity to rail against what Jurassic Park, especially
the recent films, are doing the understanding of dinosaurs. I'm
really into kids now whose favorite dinosaurs are fictional dinosaurs
from this most recent movie, and I feel like it's
a shame. Real dinosaurs are good enough. Come on, Yeah,
It's like everybody they're like, oh, it's this blue velociraptor
(43:00):
or something. I don't know, I haven't seen it yet.
Maybe it's wonderful. I suppose I should just be played
that they're interested in dinosaurs at all. But they're just
so many wonderful actual species, and our current scientific understanding
of them I feel like should be reflected to some
extent in our fiction. Totally. Uh So, it's pretty widely
accepted that something like the butterfly effect applies to whether
I think there are actually are some who dissent and say, no,
(43:23):
it's just, you know, problems with our models or something.
But the question is would it apply to the biological
history of Earth? Would stepping on a fish seventy million
years ago change the present substantially? And how would it
change the present? Unfortunately, this is not a question that
I think has a firm scientific answer. I think this
is just something people we don't know what the answer
(43:45):
to this question is. Uh. One thing I think, though
I could be wrong, is that I think stories like
this often get the scale of the changes wrong, like
that It's interesting that these stories tend to assume kind
of nonsensical esthetic changes around the margins of reality, but
where the broad strokes are the same, uh. You know,
(44:07):
example would be Ned Flanders still exists the Simpsons, The
Simpsons still exist there apparently the same people. Uh. Ned
Flanders is still the Simpsons Simpsons next door neighbor, but
is also the dictator of Earth, you know. And I
know that's a parody. I'm not trying to like rag
on the Simpsons for that, but it's a It's a
good parody because it highlights the kind of absurdity that
(44:28):
you see in stories like this, like in a Sound
of Thunder, the idea that you'd still basically have the
same uh people existing in the same like candidates running
for offer It's office, but a different one of the
candidates one yeah, and the bactor the Simpsons, Like why
would everything be the same except for the tongue? Right? So,
I you know, I could be wrong, But I would
(44:49):
tend to say, just intuitively and based on you know,
using the weather analogy, that butterfly effect type changes from
deep into the past would result in let's say, larger
amplitude changes tens of millions of years down the road, bigger,
bigger amplitude changes than which candidate wins an election. Would
(45:10):
people even exist if they did with the same individual
people even exist? I don't know. It seems kind of doubtful.
There's that great scene in that episode where Homer sits
on a creature emerging from the water. Yes um, which
I love that because I feel like it it kind
of calls back to um paleo art in our science
(45:30):
textbooks where you're told about the evolution of life and
you see this picture of some sort of creature waddling
out of the water, talking about like life coming from
the sea and then becoming terrestrial. But it it can
it's kind of accidentally put this idea in your mind
that there was one fish. There's one creature like that,
just like this is the one and if you sat
(45:52):
on it, it would change everything. Yeah, that that kind
of misconception, like one fish got brave and it climbed
out of the water, and if it hadn't done that,
there never would have been uh any kind of like
water to land dwelling vertebrate transition. Yeah, I mean maybe
that's part of like an American exceptionalism, right, kind of
(46:13):
kind of you know, accidentally drained into our science. God,
that fish, really it was a freethinker. It really changed everything.
It's the great Man theory of history exactly. Of course
we got no time for that, but hey, this story
also deals to the practical effects of time travel, something
that unfortunately again is in in the speculative realm. But
(46:35):
at least we can offer some informed criticism even if
we can't have a like, you know, a proven scientific
theory about time travel. So one of the things we
often point out on the show is that, of course
time travel into the future is easy. In fact, you're
doing it right now in more ways than in more
than one, more than one way, more way than one,
more ways than one anyway. You are traveling into the future,
(46:58):
of course, at a rate of one set can per second.
But beyond that, you are in fact time traveling into
the future in the way that many stories imagine, meaning
you're going into the future faster than other things are.
Because of time dilation effects, you're closer to the center
of gravity of Earth, so you are actually going into
the future faster than objects farther away from the center
(47:21):
of gravity of Earth that are moving at the same
velocity as you. Also, because you're moving faster, that's dilating
time in a way, speeding up your travel into the future.
If you get in a spaceship and travel even even
faster than you will even more greatly speed up your
relative travel into the future. You will get old slower
than things that are not traveling with you in that
(47:43):
fast moving spaceship. So yeah, time travel into the future
is totally real, proven feature of relativity, and it's just
it's actually almost kind of easy. Um. On the other hand,
we often talk about how time travel into the past
is perhaps impossible, and if not impossible, at least very
very hard. Uh, the ways in which it has done.
(48:03):
I was I was reading a post about this, UH
on Sean Carroll's blog, The physicist Sean Carroll, Caltech physicist.
He writes a lot of great, you know, popular science
writing these days, and he's got a great blog. One
of his posts from two thousand nine is called rules
for time travelers, where he just says, Okay, if we
were to try to make scientifically accurate time travel movies,
(48:24):
what would happen in them? He argues that traveling into
the past is difficult, it might not be impossible. If
you can do it, it would be based on what's
you know, basically like bridges through space time known as
closed time like curves. And if it is possible to
travel into the past. One of the things about this
is that it is not possible to change the past.
(48:47):
So you might be able to travel back in time,
but you couldn't create a paradox by say, going back
and killing your grandfather or whatever, so that you never existed.
In fact, anything you went back into the past and
did you would find was in fact already part of
the past in the future that you came from. That's
the paradox of the whole situation, right, I mean, And that, yeah,
(49:08):
that makes it kind of weird because that seems to
sort of create a paradox as well, like it's the
closed time loop like you see in the original Terminator movie. Uh,
there's a boy who exists or a person who exists
only because somebody from the future was sent back in
time by him to become his father. So like, how
how did that closed loop get initiated? So anyway, backward
(49:32):
time travel still generally smells rotten to me. But but
Carol saying, if it's possible, if it's possible at all,
you can't change the past. You you know, whatever's done
is done. That just is the past, even if you
can go back. Also, another point he makes is that
you can't travel back in time to before the time
machine was invented. He says, you know, maybe you can
(49:55):
travel back to a point you know, you've got a
time machine later and you can travel act to when
the time machine was made, But you can't travel back
to the Middle Ages or something like that, because you
get paradoxes again, which takes some of the fun out
of our timetab travel fiction. But it also would explain
why we haven't been visited by time travelers. Oh yeah,
I mean that's always a great question. Now you might
(50:18):
be thinking, okay, but wait about wait a minute, what
about like forking branches of time? You know, can't you
like fork off into different branches of time? You know?
Even Sean Carroll, he he adheres to the many worlds
theory of quantum mechanics, right, so he thinks that the
universe is constantly branching off into different realities based on
the wave function of quantum mechanical objects and events. Um.
(50:40):
But but even if you accept that, there's no reason
to think that traveling back into time would somehow give
you access to different quantum realities. It just seems like
you know you're here, You're here, this is the one
you have access to. You can't interact with other quantum realities.
By definition, you can't interact with them. That's what makes
them differ realities. So unfortunately, I don't think you you know,
(51:03):
if you don't like the your lot in life today
and you want to change things, I don't think you
can do it by going back and stomping on a
fish or even a butterfly. Still, great episode of tree
House of Horror, so good, and and I do recommend
that Ray brad Berry a theater episode as well. I
believe you can find the full thing on one of
the video streaming sites if you love bad movies. I
(51:26):
also recommend the two thousand five movie. It's It's one
for the c g ages. All right, Well, let's move
on to another one, shall we all right? So, Joe,
you've flown with me before, Yes, so you probably have
observed that then I'm kind of a slightly nervous flyer.
I like to try to be a calm, reassuring presence,
trying not to raise my voice around you when we're
(51:47):
getting onto an airplane. Yeah, and I have to say,
you know, I don't have anywhere near the difficulty that
I know some people struggle with when it comes to flying.
But yeah, I've I found myself grow more anxious when
it comes to flights in recent years, and I've I've
been able to successfully uh manage this to to a
certain degree, uh with a little uh Zanex, a little
(52:09):
Steve Roach and being electronic music, maybe a little biosphere uh.
And then that seems to do the do the job.
It makes me a more pleasant flyer, it makes me
more pleasant to be around when I'm flying. But so,
given this reality, I couldn't help but discuss the classic
Twilight Zone episode from October of nineteen sixte uh Nightmare
(52:32):
at twenty thousand feet based I should point out on
the Richard mathieson short story Alone by Night, Isn't it great?
How many of these shorts come from great short stories
by sci fi writers. Yeah. I mean we're gonna get
to some that are not based on terrible stories, true,
but but yeah, so far we've been talking about some
(52:53):
big names here. Uh Richard Matheson, Uh what is was
a legend? Um. This episode, of course, is famous because
it also started with him Shatner. Uh so just a
quick thing. Oh yeah, he's he's pretty good at this.
But and he was in at least a couple of
Twilight Zones, maybe more. I remember there being at least
(53:14):
another one he was in. Yeah, what was he He
was in one that had like a what was it
a jukebox napkin napkin dispenser? Yeah? Why why did I
think juke box it like to spit out fortunes or
somethingthing to that effect. Yeah, it's like a fortune cookie
napkin dispenser. I'm blanking on the details. He's not nearly
the same as this episode. So in this one, William
(53:34):
Shatner plays a nervous flyer who witnesses a creature on
the wing of the plane during flight. Um, and he
has in the episode he has he's just bouncing back
from a nervous breakdown a board of flight, So everyone's
doubting him when he starts reporting seeing a creature on
the wing of the plane. Uh this, so what what
is essentially a grimlin? Though it's kind of a YETI suit.
(53:56):
It's like a combination of a YETI suit and it
also kind of looks like that dog down the hall
and the scene in the Shining. Yeah, it's not a
great monster suit, but the episode is so solid it
somehow works. And I guess it makes sense that it
would be furry if it's at such a height. You know,
it's cold up there. Um I should point out I
said it's a grimlin. Well it's a pre Magua Grimlin
(54:18):
of a pre gremlins, and grimlins to gremlin, not the
Joe Dante kind, right, Yeah, this is, you know, essentially
the folkloric creature that messes with technology, an idea that
spread especially during World War Two. So if something went
wrong with your airplane engine, you'd say they're gremlins in there, right.
So in this episode, the crew attempts to state and
I think they even give them a pill shatter or
(54:40):
not the gremlin, right, they don't. Nobody sees the gremlin.
They're just like here take this pill crazy person. Um.
By the way, good luck trying to get any kind
of sedatives out of out of the crew of your flight. Semifly,
that's the policy. You can't ask for them. You have
to say you see monsters, and then you'll get them. Yeah.
(55:00):
So he's raving about the creature and finally like the
plane lands, he's rolled away in a straight jacket. But
as he's rolled away, he sees the claw marks on
the outside of the plane, the proof on the engine
that the monster was tearing apart the plane. He was
right all along. He's not the insane person. In fact,
he's the only same person of course. This uh. This,
(55:21):
this episode was also recreated in the three film Twilight Zone,
the movie in which John Liftgau played the lead played
the nervous flyer. Uh. And he's absolutely wonderful in that uh.
And oh and by the way, George Miller of Mad
Max directed that that segment in the film. I like
the gremlin in the in the movie version. Yeah, there's
(55:42):
the movie version. Grim one is a lot more frightening.
And then also there's a Treehouse of Horror that did
this as well. When they do it with the school
bus right tere at five and a half feet. Uh yeah,
it's it's pretty wonderful as well, and then does a
great job of delivering exactly the same story essentially, except
with it's on the outside of the school us right.
Uh yeah. And then when they put barton the ambulance
(56:03):
at the end, it follows him under the ambulance. Yes, yes,
that's a nice twist, like they added sometimes the Treehouse
of Horrors, Like they add a little extra element to
the existing story and it really works. So the science
of this, well, uh, you know, we could probably have
a really rich discussion about flying anxieties in general. We've
touched on it before in our Escape Pod episode. You know,
(56:26):
we we we trust ourselves over to the machine and
the people, companies and regulations that ensure everything is working.
There's a loss of agency and flying and I feel
like it's you're just you're constantly reminded or are reminding
yourself about the potential undesirable possibilities. I mean, it's it's
like standing atop of mountain when you look out and
(56:47):
you see the height that you have achieved, not through
any skill of your own, but just through the technology
and people surrounding it. It's like being deposited on the
top of the mountain. Yes, it's a little bit less empowering. Yeah,
airplanes are are sort of great to look at it
when you're thinking about fear, because they combine so many
different kinds of phobia triggers for people. Um. Of course,
(57:10):
there's just fear of like heights and stuff, you know,
looking out the window and looking down that that can
upset people. There is fear of an accident of the
plane crashing, but there's also just a fear that has
always been more salient for me whenever I've had airplane
fear is mainly what it is is, um, what do
you call it? Here? It's a sort of a type
of a variety of claustrophobia, I guess where um, not
(57:33):
being able to leave a place when you want to.
You know the idea that like, okay, for so many hours,
I'm stuck here and I could not get off if
I wanted to. Yeah, the most I can do is
go through a lot of rigamar role to walk down
the hallway and you can use a very difficult bathroom,
uh and potentially have to wait in line. Yeah, I
(57:54):
guess that's the type of fear. There's also just like, uh,
I know, airplanes are are a particular type of agoraphobia
trigger for some people, where you know, like the fear
of losing control or having a panic attack or something
like that in a public place, and that itself can
trigger anxieties. And then on top of that, you've got
the travel anxieties leading into it, you know, because inevitably
(58:14):
you had to get to that airport, you had to
get through security, purity, and you know, maybe customs if
you're on the other line, like there, They're all these
other stresses added on top of it makes for you know,
a very stressful day of travel. Really, in my experience,
there would be a lot of problems solved if airports
would actually just play you knows music for airports, yeah,
instead of CNN yeah on the TV, instead of instead
(58:39):
of Eno, I don't get it, Yeah, play me something calming,
just like ENOS music, and just scenes the scenes from
Legend of Unicorns drinking water. That's all I need. No goblins.
So I guess the thing we should talk about is
the idea that this is a nightmare at twenty thou feet?
What what is the feet about? Right? Uh? To put
(58:59):
this in perspect to the top of Mount Everest is
twenty nine thousand and twenty eight feet above sea level.
But that's also quite a bit below the Carmen line
at three thirty thousand feet, which is generally considered the
rough boundary between the atmosphere in space. And I say
rough because it's not like the atmosphere just stops. There's
more of a tapering off. Now for modern flyers such
(59:22):
as ourselves, we're generally working with a cruising altitude. And
cruising altitude, you know, that's that's when you've achieved, you know,
the altitude that you're gonna have for the main portion
of your flight. You're not ascending or descending. You're just
achieving an optimal altitude, optimal speed, et cetera. But it's
generally going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty
(59:43):
three thousand feet to forty two thousand feet. So according
to the USA Today article of what is the altitude
of a plane in flight, the upper limit is generally
the domain of private jets because that's gonna be more about, Yeah,
we want to get where we're going. Uh, you know,
price isn't much of an option, But with commercial flights,
everything is kind of a careful algorithm, like, how can
(01:00:04):
we do this in the most cost effective way possible
and the safest way possible. But for the rest of us, Yeah,
we're gonna be, you know, somewhere closer to that thirty
three thousand uh foot altitude. It's gonna be this sweet
spot where the ear is thin enough to reduce drag,
but there's still enough oxygen for the engines. Plus it
allows them to fly overmost weather, which is located further
(01:00:25):
down in the troposphere. So we're talking about minimal turbulence,
which is exactly how I like to consume the word turbulence. Now,
I would guess at normal cruising altitude because cabins have
to be pressurized, Like you couldn't just like breathe the
air at that height, right, Yeah, since we're flying above
ten thousand feet, airliners are are pressurized, hence those little
(01:00:47):
drop down mass for oxygen in the event of cabin depressurization. Now,
of course, the Twilight Zone episode, the original one, takes
place in the early nineteen sixties, so it made me
think what sort of altitudes were we talking about here? Well,
I was reading a longing for the Golden Age of
air travel. Be Careful what you wish for by history
professor Janet bed Narnick on the conversation, and she points
(01:01:11):
out some key factors in flying during this time period,
and as the title implies, why you'd be better, far
better off flying now as opposed to that Golden age,
no matter how cool it looks on you know, stuff
like mad Men. Yeah, but can you smoke a pipe
on a plane today? Well? Yeah, these are the things
people get nostalgic about. I guess if they're smokers. So
(01:01:31):
she points out that prior to the introduction of jets
in night, the transatlantic commercial flight might last something like
fifteen hours and they had a maximum cruising altitude altitude
of ten to twelve thousand feet, meaning that they couldn't
fly over bad weather. So you thought modern delays were bad,
No way. Basically like, if the weather was bad, you
(01:01:53):
just too bad to fly through it, and then it
wasn't gonna happen. The then you had the propelled were
driven Boeing Strato cruiser come along, for example, that could
see fifty first class passengers or one coach passengers and
it could cruise at thirty two feet above most of
the weather. But during its heyday, only fifty six were
(01:02:15):
active in the entire world. So that's the other thing
we have to realize. Now, It's like the commercial flight
world is just so much vaster than it was uh
in the in previous times. Later we got the d
C six and the d C seven, both pressure pressurized planes,
but they had to fly at lower altitudes. Guess what
we're talking twenty thou feet. So that's where we I
(01:02:38):
think come back around to uh, to the to the
Twilight Zone episode. Uh. Here for the for these flights,
turbulence was common. The engines were difficult to maintain, and
this resulted in frequent delays. Uh. So this just matches
up perfectly with the ZIGRIDGM idea the Twilight Zone concerned
about the you know what the engines are doing, engine malfunctions, turbulence, uh,
(01:02:59):
all happening at around twenty thou feet. Now, I must
notice in in Nightmare twenty feet that the windows on
the airplane look very large compared to the windows on
a plane today. You know, I didn't I didn't look
into this as much. I wonder if that's just so
you can see the monster through it, or they used
an actual fuselage. Yeah, I didn't research that particular aspect
(01:03:20):
of it, huh so. But Nerik also makes some other
important notes about safety at the time, because ultimately this
is a film about airline safety and fear of of
of bad things happening during a flight. She points out
in the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties, US airlines
experienced at least a half dozen crashes per year, most
(01:03:41):
leading to fate to the fatalities of everyone on board.
Compare that to seventeen, the safest year on record in
commercial air history, zero accidental deaths in commercial passenger jets,
and that's with many more flights, tremendously more flights. Uh
Dutch aviation consulting firm uh to seventy estimated that the
(01:04:02):
fatal accident rate for large commercial passenger of flights is
point zero six per million flights, or one fatal accident
for every sixteen million flights. I would suggest by that
calculation that it appears gremlins are either extinct or endangered. Yeah,
that would seem to be the case. Like this is
ultimately a story that speaks more to an earlier age
(01:04:24):
of of commercial air travel, despite the fact that every
time I fly, legitimately, every time I fly, if I
look out the window and I see the wing, I
think of this Twilight Zone episode. Yeah, not that I
like freak out about the possibility of an actual gremlin,
but I still I can't help but think think about it.
It's just always been there. But I'd like to turn
to the biological element of nightmare twenty feet. What sort
(01:04:48):
of organism can actually become a factor at that altitude? Well,
I mean, I know there there are bacteria that live
in clouds, but are there are there large animal that
fly up that high? That's a great question because we're
talking about some extreme heights here, right, Um. And again, well,
you know, we require pressurized cabins and or masks to
(01:05:12):
to survive up there. Everything has to be uh, you know, temperature,
The temperature has to be carefully maintained. But evolution delivers
certain bird species to these lofty heights as well, and yes,
some of them can pose grave danger to flights. These
are of course referred to as bird strikes, um, which
which are when they occur, can be pretty pretty terrible.
(01:05:34):
I've read that most bird strikes are encountered at below
ten thousand feet. I've also read that most are actually
occurring below three thousand feet, so I mean, I think
that should give you an idea, like most of the
birds are are are operating at at lower altitudes. When
you fly above the weather, you're probably flying above the birds.
So as with most things in air travel, the majority
(01:05:56):
of the dangers are going to be closer to take
off and landing, not at crewing altitude. Right and and again,
they can be pretty dangerous, especially in the event of
a double bird strike, where like both engines are hit
by the birds. Still, major accidents are few, but we
have to consider some of the birds that do get
up to some crazy heights. So I just want to
run through a few of them here before we get
(01:06:18):
to the like the King of Altitude. Uh, there are
migrating white storks which can reach sixteen thousand feet or
forty eight hundred meters. They're migrating bar tailed godwits that
can that can actually reach twenty thousand feet or six
thousand meters. There's the bar headed goose which can get
(01:06:38):
up to twenty nine thousand feet or eight thousand, eight
hundred meters. And these guys fly over the tallest mountain
ranges on Earth. Why do they go up so high?
Do you know? Well, with the earlier species we're talking about,
like this ends up being a part of their migration. Um.
But the king of all this, the king of altitude,
is definitely Ruple's vulture, also known as Ruple's Griffin. Whoa,
(01:07:01):
we're talking a maximum altitude of eleven thousand, three hundred
meters or thirty seven thousand, one hundred feet. So these
are these are vultures. They're extremely keen of I you
know there they have evolved to fly above it all
and uh and taking everything beneath. But they can get
up to just crazy altitudes. Uh, they're just unchallenged in
(01:07:23):
their ability to do so. Now. Fortunately they're found only
in the Sole region of Central Africa. This is a
belt stretching across the continent just below the Sahara. But indeed,
a bird strike entailing Ruple's vulture actually occurred over the
Ivory Coast at an altitude of thirty seven thousand, one
(01:07:43):
hundred feet or eleven thousand, three hundred meters on November three.
According to serious vulture hits to aircraft over the world,
a two thousand report by the International Bird Strike Committee.
Outside temperatures were frigid, there was almost no oxygen, and
yet here comes this, uh, this vulture and it hits
the plane. So that I think is one of the
(01:08:05):
you know, these are some of the few examples of
organisms that are actually going to be going about their
normal business, like large organisms, organisms large enough to pose
a potential and slim, uh, you know, threat to commercial flights.
By the way, I also ran across a story from
in which a Ruple's vulture escaped from a bird show
(01:08:27):
in North lack Shear, Scotland, and her name was Gandalf
and uh and after she escaped, airports in the area
were put on notice, and there was no evidence that
she was, you know, ever recovered or anything. Fly are
you fools? But but it's it's like, it's kind of
an alarming story because it's like, oh, this bird has escaped,
and it could there's a very slim chance it could
(01:08:49):
pose a danger to commercial flights in the area. But
we should remind you that even with the Ruple's vulture
flying around somewhere out there, flying is generally pretty safe
these days. Yeah, it's far safer than driving when you
break down the statistics again, commercial flying, not necessarily getting
in the airplane that your dentist buddy owns. Right, we're
(01:09:11):
talking about commercial flights again, seventeen safest year on record. Um,
you really don't have to worry about green ones on
the wing of the plane, only about the langue years
land the plan. Speaking of late nineties c g I right, yes,
for real, man, that's a good one. I love that
short story though. That was that was definitely a Stephen
(01:09:32):
King wellmank It was more of a novella, but it
it definitely harkened back to some of those Twilight Zone
type scenarios. I've never read the story, but I remember
seeing that on TV sometime around back when it came out,
and oh man, that was one where maybe even maybe
even the critics of the time, we're not wowed by
(01:09:54):
the c G I. Yeah, they were essentially like the critters,
the crits from the Critters movies. There were just these
big c g I mouth is like eating the sky.
It's a shame because the original story it is a
lot of fun. I do recommend it. I mean, don't
read it on a plane, for God's sake. Um, you know,
do read it when you're on the ground. Okay, we
need to take a quick break, but we will be
right back with more horror, anthology, science. Thank thank Alright,
(01:10:19):
we're back. So what do you have for us, Joe, Well,
you just did a Twilight Zone episode. I feel like
I gotta do a Twilight Zone episode they had. There's
so many thoughtful episodes of the Twilight Zone. And perhaps
because you know, it wasn't just pure hard it also
had a lot of science fiction in it and just
sort of weird fiction in general. So here is a
sci fi horror episode of the Twilight Zone. This is
one of the classics. You probably, I bet the majority
(01:10:41):
about you out there listening already know the story here,
but for those of you who don't, I've got to
tell it. It is to serve man. Uh. This is
one that was written by Rod Serling, based on a
story by a writer named Damon Knight. It was originally
aired on March two, nineteen sixty two, and it's just
got a whist to put him Night Shamalan to shame.
(01:11:02):
It is the best. So here's Rod Serling's teaser for
the episode, respectfully submitted for your perusal. A cannement height
a little over nine feet, weight in the neighborhood of
three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin unknown motives. Therein hangs
the tale for in just a moment, we're going to
(01:11:22):
ask you to shake hands figuratively with a Christopher Columbus
from another galaxy and another time this is the Twilight Zone. Well,
that's already a terrifying possibility here. So it's got a
guy named Lloyd Bachner in it as he's a Canadian
actor as this government cryptographer who who is tasked with
(01:11:45):
decoding and alien books. So I actually I should say
first aliens show up. They're called the Cannimates. They're played
by Richard Kiel who ended up playing Kyle or Kiel.
Do you know how you pronounce it? Always heard Kio,
but it could be drastically wrong on that. He's the
guy who played jaw Us in the James Bond movies.
He was he was, he got yeah. Uh, And so
he plays all of these aliens. They all look the same,
(01:12:08):
uh and uh. Richard Keel in in like some weird
head makeup, shows up on Earth and he speaks to
the United Nations telepathically and he's like, hey, we're here
to help you. We're gonna solve world hunger. We're going
to make we're gonna make war disappear. We're gonna solve
all your problems and make life on earth great. Don't
you want that? Don't you want this free new energy
(01:12:30):
source that you can, you know, power a whole country
for a few dollars a day? Don't you want all
this great stuff? And people are. They're hesitant at first,
but they're like, well, okay, And so Jaws brings a
book with him that has like a title in these
alien glyphs on the cover. He's like reading things from
this book as he's promising stuff to humanity, and they
(01:12:53):
get a copy. The humans grab a copy of the
book and they bring it to this government cryptographer and
they're like, can you decode this? Tell us what it means?
And so he works on it. He's got a colleague
named Patty who works on it. Uh. It proves too
difficult to decode, except that Patty decodes the title and
figures out that the title is to serve man. Well,
(01:13:14):
that sounds noble and wonderful and and really works out
well for us exactly, So they can't decode the rest
of the book, but to serve Man, and that sort
of puts people at ease. They're like, Okay, well, the
book there is about how to serve humankind. That that
sounds like a good thing. So people start getting on
spaceships to go with Jaws to his home planet where
(01:13:35):
they will be given. I think that at one point
they're talking about how they've even got baseball on the
Cannibate's planet. Uh, to go to the Basically it's like
a forever vacation where everything is just going to be awesome,
so that people are getting on the spaceships to go there.
And then the big twist that comes at the end
is right as the main guy is about to get
on the spaceship to go to the cannon It's planet
(01:13:57):
and uh and and live out his days at the
baseball resort or whatever, Patty comes yelling at him, don't
get on the ship. It's a cookbook. It's so good
to serve man for dinner. I believe the sentence of
period this as well to a limited extent, right, how
to serve mill House for dinner? Oh oh, I'm vaguely
(01:14:22):
I don't remember when that which one? I don't I
can't remember which episode it was, okay, but they definitely
touched on it at one point. Now, I don't want
to be too literal about interpreting the science of the story,
because if you really wanted to be nitpicky, you could
point out a million really funny details. And its like,
there's one point where to try to make sure that
(01:14:43):
the aliens intentions are actually good. They hook Jaws up
to a to a polygraph test. It's just like they
give him a human polygraph to to see if he's
lying about wanting to help them. And another thing that's
funny is they bring in this cryptographer to decode this
alien book, but to decode it to what like cryptography
(01:15:04):
usually consists of trying to decode encoded messages to ann
language where you're like, you know where it will code
out to some kind of script that you already understand.
How would you decode an alien language when you have
nothing to start with? Yeah, and I like the idea
that they could they could figure out nothing from the inside,
like no content but just the title. Yeah, it's great.
(01:15:28):
But anyway, Okay, the main thing I wanted to talk about,
ignoring all that other stuff is the idea of aliens
invading in order to eat us, or perhaps more realistically
another option, just to eat earth life in general, maybe
not focused on us, but just here to eat things. Okay,
so not just to say, harvest the resources of our
planet or to do something to our star, which we've discussed,
(01:15:51):
and but you're talking about like just just just tear
into the bio mass of Earth. It's a very common
theme in sci fi horror. At a glance, it sort
of makes sense because you think about, like, okay, so
what do human invaders do when they invade a country. Well,
a lot of times what they'll do is they'll just
like raige your village and take all your food. They
(01:16:14):
want food, they need all your steal all your grain
and stuff. And then they'll move on, or they'll land
on an island. And if there's a particular flightless bird
or or some sort of a turtle or tortoise that
is uh, you know, notoriously unable to defend itself and
and perhaps even trusting to a fault of humans, they
(01:16:34):
might just eat them all or just every time they
come back, harvest as many as they can and eat
them on the ship, or just kill them and not
eat them human as did the did that too? Yeah, yeah,
that that's a little maybe maybe we don't want to
think about that comparison. Uh but okay, so would they
want to eat us or eat our food? I came
across an interesting opinion about this. This was in a
(01:16:57):
chapter from a book called Aliens, The World's Leading Scientists
on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life, published in twenty seventeen
by Piccador. And this book was edited by the Iraqi
British physicist Jim al Khalili. And there's a chapter in
this book that was written by the British astrobiologist Louis
Dartnell where he's talking about what would aliens actually want
(01:17:20):
with Earth? Why would they be interested in coming here?
And he's making the case that a lot of the
stuff that people usually imagine aliens would want to come
here for doesn't make any sense. That they want water,
or they want raw minerals or something like that. He
just you, oh, that's one too with all those things.
He points out, how you know that's either and that's
(01:17:43):
not actually a concern for anything they would want, or
they could get this more abundantly elsewhere. And so here's
Dartnell's case about whether aliens would want to eat us. So,
the cells in our bodies are made of large collections
of specific organic molecules. You've got proteins, which are chains
of amino acids. You've got the nucleic acids like DNA
(01:18:03):
and RNA, which are chains of bases and sugars. And
then of course you've got the best part, the membranes
and the phospholipids UH, and so in order to keep
our bodies alive and working properly, we need to have
steady incoming streams of those molecular building blocks, so we
eat other life forms like plants and animals in order
(01:18:23):
to get them. You can't survive obviously, just by like
eating sand or tree bark or salt and ammonia. You
need to get specific organic molecules like sugars, amino acids,
and fatty acids in order to survive. It's also true
that your digestive system is specifically evolved to break down
certain kinds of stuff like earth plant matter and earth
(01:18:46):
animal flesh, and it is it has specially tailored enzymes
for breaking down those molecules likely to be found in
the stuff Your ancestors were eating. Yeah, it's also worth reminding,
you know, we eat a lot of creatures and a
life on this planet. It's easy to forget that there's
a whole lot of stuff we cannot eat. There a
lot of a lot of species that are just not
(01:19:08):
on the menu for us. Most of the mass of
planet Earth you can't eat. I mean that. Yeah, there's
a lot of stuff you just can't get nutrition from.
Even if it contains raw atoms that you might want,
you know that would be useful. Your body doesn't have
a way to break them down properly, doesn't have the
right chemical enzymes and stuff to separate out the parts
(01:19:30):
that you would need or put together the parts that
you would need. Your digestive system is shaped by what
was available to the creatures that you evolved from. Now, fortunately,
most other life forms on Earth have these useful molecules
in some nutritionally available way. Other animals on Earth are
nourishing to us because we came from a common ancestor
(01:19:51):
and we share common biochemistry. So in order to get
nutrition from eating us and the alien would need to
share our biochemistry, And in order to do that, we
would either need to share a common ancestor, and unless
they're coming from somewhere else within our solar system, which
seems unlikely at this point, It's not likely we would
share a common ancestor or we need to have the
(01:20:14):
same biochemistry by coincidence. So what are the odds of
sharing biochemistry by coincidence? Dartnehill rights, well, that's certainly possible
for all we know. Perhaps our DNA based life is
the only way you can make self reproducing life forms
out of the chemistry available in the universe. Dartnell points
out that quote, a whole variety of amino acids, sugars,
(01:20:37):
and fatty molecules are actually found in certain meteorites, having
been produced by astro chemistry and outer space, and so
maybe extraterrestrial life would be based on the same basic
building blocks as us. So the point there is that
we haven't found life beyond Earth, but we found a
lot of the chemical building blocks of life beyond Earth. Uh,
(01:20:59):
And maybe our way is a common way, or even
the only way for the universe to put evolution in
motion and create the possibility of intelligent life. But then
Dartnell points out a big complication quote simple organic molecules
like amino acids and sugars can exist in two different forms,
mirror images of each other, in the same way your
(01:21:21):
two hands are similar shapes but can't be placed exactly
on top of the other. These two versions are known
as a nantiomers. And it turns out that all life
on Earth uses only left handed amino acids and right
handed sugars, whereas non living chemistry produces even mixtures of
(01:21:41):
both kinds. So, yeah, picture that what he's saying about
holding your hands on top of each other. They're they're
the same shape, but you can't put one on top
of the other one. You have to invert one of
them in order for them to match up. And with
three dimensional things, that means that they're they're not chemically
the same. Actually you can't you use one for the other.
(01:22:01):
And in science, this this handedness of sugars and amino
acids is known as chirality. Uh, the fact that all
life on Earth uses only left handed amino acids and
right handed sugars, that's known as homo chirality. And it's
a fascinating mystery to people who study the chemistry of life.
Why why not the other way around, or why not
(01:22:22):
both Both chiralities are and presumably always have been available
out there in the universe. So why did life on
Earth end up using only these kinds? Why only left
handed amino acids and only right handed sugars? And in fact,
Dartnell points out that chirality is a good way to
know that traces of life we find, say on Mars,
(01:22:44):
are actually authentic. So imagine you've got a rover on
Mars and it picks up amino acids somewhere on the
surface of Mars, and they employ the opposite biochemical orientation,
so you've got right handed amino acids. Then we could
know that they were genuine the alien and not simply
contamination from Earth life that we took along with us
(01:23:04):
on the rover by accident. And so Dartnell writes, quote,
so here's a fascinating thought. Alien invaders could be based
on exactly the same organic molecules amino acids, sugars, etcetera.
But they still wouldn't gain any nutrition from eating us,
as the origins of life on their own planets settled
on the opposite in anti amours, we'd be mirror images
(01:23:27):
of each other on a molecular level, and of course,
if this applied to us, meaning we couldn't be nutritious
to them, it would also apply to our food sources.
It would apply to all life on Earth, so they'd
be like, ah, that Earth food, I can't handle any
of it. In fact, it might even be toxic to them.
I was looking at a paper from in pl Os
one by jiang in son Um about how how bacteria
(01:23:52):
are able to sort of break down right handed amino acids,
and one of the things that they talk about it
is how right handed amino acids are toxic for life
on Earth, and it's actually important that back to bacteria
do some breaking down of these right handed amino acids,
or else they would accumulate to toxic levels in the environments.
(01:24:13):
Oh man, I think it has to be some hard
sci fi that explores this possibility. What did aliens come
here to eat us but then we poison them? Well,
I mean just the idea that their reflections on a
molecular level and therefore incompatible with us or our food. Yeah, well,
I like that idea that like they could they could
in theory even look exactly like us. They could have
(01:24:34):
bodies that are very so they were just toxic to
each other, like contact and sharing organic molecules from each
other would be poison us. Like if it was the
movie Alien Nation and you had to have like left
handed food restaurants and right handed food restaurants, and there
was you know, it was you know, there's certainly discrimination there,
but also the fact that the each species can only
(01:24:56):
eat a certain type of matter and organic matter. Uh yeah, well,
I mean but the thing there is that if you
assume their ecosystem is their planet is also from a
single common ancestor maybe it would be that all of
their planet uses the opposite chirality of us, meaning that
it's not just like we need different food, but every
bit of life in their whole world would be toxic
(01:25:18):
to us and all the life in our world would
be toxic to them. So like, in order to interact,
we almost need to like you know, be be sort
of sealed off in a way. Oh wow, well see
that's a wonderful sci fi concept there. So anyway, I
thought that was an interesting possibility. Even if they wanted
to serve man, it might the dinner might not go
so well. I like that we were taking some of
(01:25:40):
the anxiety out of our twilight zone. Episodes here. Don't
have to be as afraid of creatures on the wing
of the plane, don't have to be as afraid of
alien civilizations coming to our planet to cook us and
eat us. Well. I mean, the downside of that, thinking
about the incompatibility of different biochemistries is that you could
have a liens that meant well and that didn't want
(01:26:03):
to eat us, but you know, just wanted to make
contact and actually be helpful, wanted to serve man in
the original naive sense of the understanding, but just brought
with them a bunch of molecules that are deadly to us,
which brings us kind of back to the Christopher Columbus idea,
doesn't it. Well. I wouldn't say that Christopher Columbus meant well.
I know that's not what you were saying. No, no, no,
but just the idea that on a biological level ends
(01:26:25):
up bringing death and also on a cultural level as well. Yes,
like that even if Columbus had actually meant well, he
wouldn't have been able to help bringing death along with him.
All Right, I feel like we're going pretty long here,
but I think we have time for just one more story, okay,
and this one comes to us from Tales from the Crypt.
(01:26:47):
It aired in the fifth season, episode five. This was October.
I love how most of these episodes actually aired during
October at some point, and it was titled people who
Live in brad Hersars. Alright, So this one, this is
a delight because this is one of four episodes directed
(01:27:07):
by Russell McKay, the visionary director who gave us Highlander one,
Highlander one, and Highlander two, Highlander two really yes, and
most of the great music videos of the nineteen eighties.
Total Eclipse of the Heart. That was him, Wild Boys,
that was him. How do you say his name? Makakey.
It's it's I believe it's more kay. It's m u
(01:27:29):
l k h y. I've never been able to pronounce that.
But yeah, the the visionary behind uh Highlander, various other films.
And I do mean that authentically, like there is a
visual style to his work. There is an intensity that
you just you know what when you see it. A
thing that I think I rediscovered this year upon going
(01:27:52):
back to the first Highlander movie. And it's your insistence
is that actually the first Hilander movie is almost as
bad as the second one. It's pretty bonkers. Yeah, but
what we'll say that for for an upcoming episode. Oh yeah,
we've still got Science of Highlander two coming out. Yes,
before the year's up, that episode will finally come to fruition.
(01:28:12):
We're not joking. Yes, it's real. So this episode of
Tales from the Crypt, Uh, it's like a lot of episodes,
It's a wealth of just wonderful acting talent, spectacular gore effects,
a notable director, and the script that well depends on
how you look at it, right, I mean, it's easy
to take these scripts out of context and dream about
what a stronger, uh you know, rewrite could have done
(01:28:35):
for it. But on the other hand, the material is
the material, and the whole premise of the show is
that these are retold classic horror comic shorts, you know,
from the the you know, the golden age of horror comics,
and they tend to throw some sort of a heel
character through the ringer with the murderous or supernatural circumstances
taking place. Yeah, it's generally there, there's some kind of
(01:28:58):
nasty dude, he gets his come up and through some
kind of supernatural karma, Yeah, nasty meets nasty, and then
there is a joke about it. There's not a lot
of nuance. It's uh, these were horror stories essentially for
for for for kids, and uh, but with completely inappropriate contome.
Oh yeah it was. That's the other thing. All of
(01:29:19):
these stories are so inappropriate you go, even going back
now and watching these these episodes, like some of them
are just like so cringe worthy. Uh. And I'm not
sure that it's a flaw. It's like it's kind of
what you get. It's that stales from the crypt. It's
it's gross, it's inappropriate. Yeah, and yet there's something wonderful
about it. So this particular episode definitely brings it with
(01:29:41):
the cast because this one started Bill Paxton and Brad Dorrif.
That's of course Bill Paxton from Aliens the Terminator, um
and uh and Brad dorrif played worm Tongue in the
Lord of the Rings movie is a voice of Chucky.
Then in so many fabulous films over the years, one
Full Over the Coupo his Nest. Yeah, that was another
(01:30:01):
one of his big accomplishments. He was also in What
Wise Blood I think, Oh yeah, he was in Exorcist three. Yes, Yeah,
he's a fabulous character actor. So already you have some
wonderful talent to work with here. Uh. They play brothers,
Billy and Virgil. Billy is a mean spirited slime bag
(01:30:21):
fresh out of prison, but performance by Paxton that reminds
me a lot of his vampire character in Uh Near Dark,
you know, just just a bad person, and his brother
is essentially Lenny from Steinbeck's of Mice and Men, so
they have that kind of relationship. Billy talks Virgil into
an ice cream factory heighs, which goes all wrong. They're
(01:30:42):
gonna steal a bunch of ice cream there, steal some
money from a safe, but they end up just murdering
some people instead, and as a fallback plan, they go
after the ice cream truck driver who originally turned Billy
in for stealing from the company, a man by the
name of Mr Bird. And Mr Bird is played by
Trian character actor Michael Lerner. Oh, the producer from Barton Fink. Yeah,
(01:31:04):
he was nominated for an actor for that role. He's
tremendous and he's he's great in this too, like everybody's
great in this. But here's the twist, here's the grotesque
tales from the crypt twist. Mr Bird turns out to
be two men conjoined twins, and the episodes grizzly payoff
as that while the brothers succeed in killing one of
the twins, they shoot him. He's shot in the head
(01:31:27):
with a shotgun. When he emerges through a beated curtain,
it turns out there the other one lives and he
gets his vengeance. The final shot of the episode, after
he's killed the brothers shows the surviving Mr. Bird Twins
sitting in his ice cream truck making his rounds with
his decaying twin hunched over in the back seat. And
(01:31:48):
this is I didn't even touch on some of the
just truly bizarre elements of this episode. For instance, Billy
Bill Paxson's character totally does not need to have a
butter eating a dick, but he's like eating sticks of
butter throughout the whole film for no reason, with no payoff,
Like he already had a pretty good, you know trope
(01:32:10):
character here Bill, you know, Bill Paxton is playing a
slime ball. It's wonderful he was born for this role
and you're throw in the butter for some reason. There's
also a part where Virgil is reading a comic book
and it is Predator versus Jesse Jane, which doesn't I
have no problem with I love it, but it's just
such a random element to throw in. That's the original
(01:32:31):
Cowboys versus Aliens. It really was. Yeah, I would love
to see it. Uh let's give me Jesse James versus Predator.
Uh So the science question here, though, of course, is
could this happen? If one conjoined twin were to die?
Would the other one be able to live on in
this grotesque? Grotesque manner? So to begin with, I do
have to point out again that Tales from the Crypt
(01:32:52):
is pretty far from any sort of fair or reasonable
portrayal of conjoined twins or just humanity in general. The
show and the comics they're based on, they tended to
have a real freak show vibe concerning any sort of deformation,
birth defect, mutilation, or even just something is routine is
identical twins. You know, everything was played for weird, Everything
(01:33:15):
was played for grotesque, and the stereotypes are pretty broad
and grotesque too. So you don't go to Tales from
the Crypt to think about how to model thinking about
medical conditions. No, not not at all. And yet that's
kind of what we're doing in this this segment, So
here we go. So scientifically, conjoined twins are monozygotic twins
(01:33:35):
who were joined at some region of their bodies, and
the details depend on exactly where the conjunction is situated.
So the exact cause of conjoined twins isn't fully understood.
But major theory here is that the fertilized egg is
going to split into a monozygotic set of twins, but
it doesn't fully separate and they remain connected. So the
(01:33:58):
bird twins here are represented as terada catadidema conjoined twins.
These are lower body conjunctions and more specifically, they are
phyg pagus twins, meaning they're back to back joined at
the rump. So this accounts for roughly nine I've also
read seventeen percent of conjoined twins, but don't let that
(01:34:19):
number free you. That still means that they're extremely rare occurrences.
Um these individuals. They commonly share the gluteal region, terminal spine,
and lower gastro intestinal, neurological and reproductive tracks. So surgical
separation of conjoined twins in general it ranges from simple
to near impossible depending on the conjunction. In many cases
(01:34:41):
it's a highly risky surgery with potentially fatal outcomes for
both patients. However, successful separations of phygo pegas conjoined twins
have occurred, and uh, you know, with various cases presented
in medical literature. Uh. And the cases of separation do
tend to be presented in medical literature like these are
these are generally know, the more certainly the more complicated.
(01:35:02):
Um separations are exactly the kind of thing you're gonna
find written up in a journal. But a separation is
not what we see in this episode of Tales from
the Crypt. One twin is killed via shotgun blast of
the head, and the other continues to live, dragging him
around while he kills off the two brothers and then
continues his ice cream rounds. Could this happen? Uh? Well,
(01:35:24):
broadly speaking, noah, And I don't think that should come
to anybody's surprise, given it again, this is Tales from
the Crypt. Dr Eric Stratch a pediatric surgeon at the
University of Maryland Hospital for Children. He actually covered the
matter in the Esquire article how to Separate a conjoint
twin On his deathbed. Yeah, he was interviewed or interview
segment was used in that article. He did not write it,
(01:35:46):
but he pointed out that once one twins heart stops beating,
the blood stops pumping, and the vessels dilate, then the
living twin will essentially bleed into the dead twin, and
this will happen quickly. The physical connection between the two
is large enough, but with smaller cases, there will be
an infection in a matter of hours. And in these
(01:36:07):
cases it's technically possible that surgical separate separation could save
the living twin, but he didn't think it had ever
been attempted. Again. In many cases, separation might not even
be possible under ideal conditions, much less like an emergency
UH intervention scenario. So while we may be able to
accept the idea that they're surviving bird twin murders his
(01:36:31):
brother's killers, the idea that he goes on to drive
the ice cream truck around seems a bit of a stretch, now, Robert,
I see you've attached a panel from a comic, so
that this one was based on I guess something that
was told in the comics before it was on the show. Yeah,
this one was definitely based on a comic. Those comics
managed to come up with some really gross stuff that
became only grosser when it was translated to to HBO. Yeah,
(01:36:55):
that the comics were big about, like the just the
visual visceral horror, and the show did agree job of
of portraying that. Uh yeah. This this panel that I
found from it, which which is easy to find if
you do just a Google search for for the title
of this episode, which was also the title of the
comics People who Live in Brass Horses. Uh yeah. You
just see the the ice cream truck driver climbing out
(01:37:17):
of the back of the truck and he just has
this this rotting corpse attached to the back of him
with flies buzzing around it. Uh. It's it's horrifying, grotesque, insensitive,
everything you would expect from the tales from the crypt Robert.
And you're reading about the actual uh like the surgeries
involved here and stuff. Do you get the sense that, um,
(01:37:39):
that medical science is making a lot of progress in
in how to help conjoined twins, especially in cases where
they do need to be separated. Yeah, I mean it
seems to be the case. But at the same time,
it's like so many of these cases they are they're different.
Each one has its own individual challenges, and that's rare.
It's rare, uh, and you know when it when it
does pop up, there also going to be a lot
(01:38:00):
of arguments potentially about is this the thing to do?
Is is is this is this the morally correct um
medical intervention if there is such a risk to both patients,
because there are some heartbreaking accounts in the literature where
an attempt is made to separate to conjoin twins and
they simply both die, they do neither one actually survives
(01:38:24):
the surgery, right, Well, I mean, I guess I was
specifically thinking of cases where it is medically necessary in
order to save them or create better health outcomes to
separate them. I mean, I don't think we should just
assume that all can joined twins naturally want to be separated. Yeah,
Basically it comes down to just the complexity of the
(01:38:45):
of the connection. Like if if the connection is is
smaller and more simple, and then it can actually be
a pretty safe procedure as I understand it. But then
there are just other cases where it is going to
be kind of like the the malin everest of surgical intervention.
And and yet sometimes depending on the situation, it may
(01:39:08):
be something that has to be done. This is yet
another thing that I think I might deserve a deeper
look sometime in the future. Oh yeah, absolutely, we've only
just we've we've only we've barely brushed the surface of
twins and certainly conjoined twins. And obviously there's a lot
of a lot of fascinating information out there about you know,
the lives that led by actual conjoined twins, and not
(01:39:31):
the you know, the cartoonish examples that we see in
like Tales from the crypt which, sadly it tends to be.
This is the kind of thing that tends to be
one's first introduction to conjoined twins. In the same way
that unless you have identical twins in your classroom growing up,
if you're not encountering them in your life, your first
example to to identical twins is likely going to be
(01:39:52):
some sort of weird horror show. Example, when you're five
and you watch Dead Ringers, well with hope, but sartainly,
you can watch The Simpsons, right, The Simpsons had the
Treehouse of Horror where twins Evil Twin was separated from
him and his living in the attic. I wonder, I mean,
is the belief in evil twins actually a fairly common
(01:40:12):
thing or does everybody understand that's not real? I hope
everyone understands that. I mean, I have friends with with
twins and um, and I I've talked to them a
little bit about just you know, to the point where
they just want to avoid any like creepy twin content.
I don't don't blame them, um, but I basically I
think comes down more to the to us untwinned individuals
(01:40:35):
where we see this, we see two identical individuals, and
we think of all the potential self exploration, like what
if I were two people, what would that mean? Would
have one represented my best qualities and one my my
you know, my my, my, my darker qualities. And of
course meanwhile, these twins are are two separate people, were
just trying to live their lives, and we're staring at them,
(01:40:56):
trying to gaze down our own navel or write a
grotesque horror story. Yeah. The the looker, the person who
looks at another is the real monster, you know, because
they always want to make monsters out of people who
are just people. Yeah, all right, so there you have it, uh,
Anthology of Horror, Volume one. Because if everyone liked this.
(01:41:17):
Maybe we'll do it again next year. Maybe this will
be our new Halloween thing. Uh. And if it is,
what would you like us to cover? I guess this
means before then, I'm gonna have to go back and
watch some some horror anthology series I am. I am
under exposed at this point. I had a hard enough
time picking just the ones that I did today, though,
(01:41:38):
I guess I'd never run out of Treehouse of Horror
episodes to pick tree Yeah, Treehouse tends to be a
nice like overview of great anthology works in places. Other times,
of course, they're parioding of futially linked films. I think
Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, Black Mirror. These are great
places to look to Tales from the crypt a little
bit harder. I ran into a lot of dead ends
(01:41:59):
and bad pun before I decided to, uh to talk
about this one. Well, it is a forest of dead
ends and bad puns, as I'm to understand. All right, Well, hey,
everybody out there, you have a year to catch up
on higher anthologies as well, and to suggest episodes from
those anthologies you'd like us to consider covering in the future.
In the meantime, check out stuff to blow your Mind
(01:42:21):
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(01:42:43):
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