From the Vault: The Dark Crystal

It’s time for another movie-themed episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and this time Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick are bound for the world of Thra in Jim Henson’s 1982 masterpiece “The Dark Crystal.” What are we to make of these complex creatures, mythological themes and cosmological alignment? (originally published 4/4/2019)

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Episode Transcript

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, and this time
the Vault is glowing with an eerie purple light. That's right,
we're gonna go back to Uh let's see. This was
March four, nineteen. We did an episode on Jim Henson's
The Dark Crystal and this one, this one was a
lot of fun. I was really excited to do this.

(00:26):
One of my favorite films. Uh. This, however, was before
the Netflix series The Dark Crystal The Age of Resistance
came out, so all the additions to the world are
not reflected in this particular episode. But I will go
on record as saying that I loved The Age of Resistance.
I thought it was a fabulous of your experience. Me too,

(00:48):
I thought it was absolutely wonderful. Terrible name, but great show.
What well, I mean, you have to call it something?
He didn't. You didn't have to do a colon name.
I can't get with the colon titles. Why does everything
have to be a colon something of something that the
title of this episode is from the Vault Colon The
Dark Crystal. You know, I could, I could sometimes do

(01:09):
with fewer colon's in our titles. I am, I'll go
on record is sort of anti colon really Okay, well,
I mean, you know, every every creature has one, some
of the creatures in the Dark Crystal. I think I
have multiple colon's. But anyway, Yeah, this is a This
is a fun, a fun podcast episode. We hope you
enjoy it. Travel to another world, another time in the

(01:33):
Age of Wonder the Crystal. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome

(01:59):
to to have to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with
another movie episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. I'm
so excited about this. When Robert, what are we talking
about today? We're gonna be talking about The Dark Crystal.
Last month it was Highlander two. Uh. You know, I
think a pretty objectively terrible film. But this time we're
talking about a film that that, in my personal opinion,

(02:22):
is is a indeed a great film, if not a
perfect film. In the words of a good friend of
mine who's it is his favorite movie of all time,
he posits it is the most magical movie ever made,
and I think I agree. There is no more magical film.
There's also no film I can think of that is
a more pure fantasy than The Dark Crystal. There are
a lot of fantasy movies, but The Dark Crystal is

(02:45):
is the most fully committed to a fantasy vision. It's
a movie with no human beings in it. Yeah, it
is a it's just a wonderful alien experience. But yet
one that you know is it shadows the natural world
that we we know. It's shadows human mythologies and storytelling traditions. Uh.

(03:05):
And it really leads to just an overall eloquent work.
Um to remind anyone who hasn't seen it or does
just sort of introduce you to it, because I've spoken
to people who have not seen The Dark Crystal, uh,
and I have to tell them about it. I have
to serve as an ambassador for this film. Uh. It
came out in two directed by Jim Hinson and Frank
Oz written Kerman yea Kerman Hed written by David O'Dell

(03:30):
and Jim Henson, and the world and creature designs were
created by the artist Brian Froud and then and then
brought to life through Hinson's creature shop and just the
vast effort of just an entire industry of people. Uh.
There's a wonderful making of documentary that is generally included
on most TVs and blue rays uh that you'll find

(03:52):
of of the Dark Crystal. Highly recommend everyone watch that.
In short, though, The Dark Crystal is a story of
prophet and reunification in a divided fantasy world, in a
world that, like you said, it is almost entirely rendered
via puppets. I mean, you'll see rocks and maybe a
few you know, you know, see some grass, etcetera, that

(04:14):
sort of thing. But sometimes the grass is a puppet,
that's right. Sometimes the you know, the faun of the flora. Uh,
all of it is is realized with puppetry, at least
at some point in the film. The various creatures were
designed through a superb fusion of that imaginative design from
Brian Fraud, inventive puppeteering and puppet design from Jim Hinson's

(04:34):
creature shop, and also the various professional physical performers such
as dancers and still walkers. And you really can't over
emphasize the importance of these three things coming together, because
it's it's not enough. That's like, the creature looks real,
but does it move in a way that feels real?
And then does it move in a way that doesn't

(04:55):
feel like a human in a suit? Yeah? So it is.
It is a beautifully designed film, and it's the kind
of design that I love. You know, it's back before
everything with c g I. It's puppets, it's models, it
sets its painted backgrounds. God, I love painted backgrounds, and
I would love to go back to that more often. Yeah,

(05:15):
it's it's a film that that that really could have
only occurred in two It came into at a perfect
time because on one hand, like you said, if it'd
come out a little later, you would have had the
early c g I coming coming into play. You imagine
that like Mortal Kombat Level c g I the Dark Crystal,

(05:36):
or or likewise, if it had been earlier, you might
not have had the degree of a technical know how.
Certainly the puppetry technology might not have been quite where
it needed to be. I would also say a thing
that's remarkable about The Dark Crystal is the way that
it seems to be a product of true collaborative evolution,
because it seems like it's something that was originally kind

(05:57):
of a rough concept and mythology dreamt up by Jim Henson,
who joined forces with Brian Froud and Brian Froud's type
of creature designs. Brian Froud illustrated like giants and fairies
and things like that, and so his designs for creatures
sort of fed back into Henson's ideas about the story

(06:18):
and the mythology, and then all this came together and
got more definition when the performers came on board. It
seems like a real ensemble creative project that was formed
by a gradual accretion of mutations over many generations. Yeah,
And a big part of that was that, like there
was money for this to happen, and I you know,
it's not a given that that would have been the case.

(06:40):
That's Muppet money, and Muppet it is Muppet money, Like
I believe part of the deal was, like, you know,
when it was financed, it was like, all right, you
can make the Dark Crystal, but you gotta make some
Muppet movies as well. We need them, you know that
we need to have the definite cash cows as well
as this This sort of long gamble at trying to
cash in on the sort of you know, franchise um

(07:01):
uh dominance that you saw just a few years earlier
with Star Wars. Yes, and also I think it was
pretty clear through the Empire Strikes Back that people were
looking at The Dark Crystal and saying, Hey, you know
Yoda the puppet, he's very popular in the Empire strikes Back.
We can we can make some puppet money with this
Dark Crystal thing. Now, arguably it may not have reached

(07:24):
the degree of financial achievement that they were that everyone
was hoping for at the time, but it has certainly
become a beloved film, and certainly one with a very
strong occult following um and uh and and today generally,
if you find if you ask somebody about The Dark Crystal,
sometimes you may get some people are like, oh, I
remember seeing that as a kid. It was a little dark, etcetera.

(07:46):
And it does have some darker serious themes. Yeah. Um,
But I don't think I've ever met anybody who who
disliked to the Dark Crystal, Nor do I want to
meet something to dislike The Dark Crystal, because that's its
probably gonna be pretty big red flag for me that
maybe we don't have a lot in common. Yeah, if
you don't like it, don't even bother right and end
to tell us no, no, you can you can tell

(08:07):
us I'd be interested here your reasons, okay, But why
are we talking about the Dark Crystal today? For starters,
we do like to chat about films on the show
here and there, and they often give us a means
to discuss various scientific, philosophical, or psychological concepts that in
some cases we might not otherwise cover. And with the
Dark Crystal, I think I think there's there's a lot
to be said about how it reflects aspects of our

(08:31):
world and what we can see of planet Earth and
human culture in the world of Thraw Thraw. So that's
the planet they're on in the Dark Crystal or I
don't know if they say play yeah, I guess it's
the planet. It's their world. Yeah. It gets kind of
tricky when you start trying to apply that like the
scientific lens to a world that is uh to a

(08:51):
to a pretty large degree realize through mythology, you know,
like it's we will get into some astronomical concepts, but
for the most part of the world of the Dark
Crystal is a world of of myth and magic. Yeah.
And also I will say, though I love The Dark
Crystal and I'm a partisan of science, I will say

(09:11):
it is not I don't know if it is a
strongly pro science and narrative because you notice in the
film basically science and technology seems to only exist among
the bad guys and the Well, no, that's not quite true.
There's Augura. Yeah, I'm overstepping. And then the say, the
Skexies have a scientist, but the good mystics are more

(09:32):
mystical in nature. Yes, but then we have to consider
where they came from and well we'll get back to
that in a bit. Okay, but but those are those
are aliens, those are that come to the world of Thraw.
We should talk for a little bit about the the
native inhabitants of this world. So, for first and foremost,
The Dark Crystal is the story of gelf Links. Yeah,

(09:54):
it's it's a sort of hero's journey type narrative, basic
classic adventure narrative, with a with a young Gelfling at
the core of it. Yeah, two of them, actually, we
have We start off with the male gelfling Jin and
then we meet a female Gelfling later on named Kira,
and they are the last two, or seemingly the last
two members of their species. And we we come to

(10:18):
learn that that they were their people were hunted to
extinction by the Ske Ske season in ages past. And
I guess we'll have to explain explain the sas. But
basically their species is all but extinct. If we're to
apply you know, scientific understanding, I think we can safely
say that they're extinct in the wild, like the gene

(10:38):
pool would be too shallow for them to repopulate the world,
though in a mythological sense, like the sort of Adam
and Eve logic applies, and they could conceivably bring everything back.
But but then also more to the point, their culture
is uh is extinct, like the only thing we see
of original Gelfling culture we see in ruins, because Jin

(11:00):
and Kira have each been raised by a different people.
Gin has been raised by the mystics, the Uru, and
then Kira is raised by the podlings. These sort of
utat people. Yeah, they live in huts and uh and
the dance about and have a good time. They do
quite literally appear to have potatoes for heads. Yes, they

(11:21):
and we're modeled on potatoes. Yeah, so they live sort
of underground. It makes sense. They're they're potato potato humans,
basically little potato people. Now. Biologically, one thing that is
interesting about the gelf wings, uh, is that the males
are wingless and the females have wings. Otherwise they're sort
of basic. They're they're the most human characters in the film.

(11:41):
They're kind of elf like, thus the word gelfling uh
sort of you know, elf like humanoids. But the wings
are interesting because ultimately this would be an example of
sexual dimorphism, and we see this kind of sexual dimorphism
a lot, say in the insect world. You'll find examples
of winged females and wingless males. Uh. You know, bees, wasps, ants,

(12:05):
soft flies, different types of beetles, all boasting morphological gender differences.
And the reasoning generally comes down to pure sexual economics.
You know, for all intents and purposes, females are these
species itself in most cases, in all cases, and males
exist as a biological variant necessary for sexual reproduction. Yeah.

(12:26):
They basically in a lot of these insects species, the
males are just kind of there to mate and then
do much else. I mean, for an extreme example, just
consider there's a particular type of fairy fly um called
uh dico Pomorpha egmc cargis, And not only are they
wingless compared to the winged females, but they're also blind
and non feeding, so they don't even remember working digestive system. Yeah,

(12:49):
now we don't see that in the gulf links. But
but at any rate, it's an interesting case where you
can you can look at this fantasy example and see
how it matches up with the real world biology. But
in in the insect examples, the males exist only to breed,
and that breeding takes place close to where they hatched,
often with nestmates, so there's no need for them to
disperse um. However, if we were to, you know, apply

(13:12):
this to the guelf wings, we might assume that male
gelf links exist primarily to breed close to home, when
the females would have migrated to find new mates, produced
new young, find new communities of guelf links, that sort
of thing. I don't know if we get much sense
of that in the movie, because it seems like they're
both long lived. At least that the jin Jin, the
boy guelf link ventures out. Yeah, that's right. We do

(13:35):
see that it's a reversal that Jin is the one
who ventures and and Kira is the one that is
still remaining close to home. So so you know, maybe
that doesn't match up all that. Well, Oh, I didn't
mean to say it doesn't match it all. I mean,
I just that I would say that the gelf links
perhaps are not insects showing insects. Well, another possibility would
be that perhaps Kira still has wings but there, and

(13:57):
we see her sort of glide with them, that not
really eye with them. Perhaps they have more of a
pure like mating display purpose, you know, like they're a
show of fitness, reproductive fitness. Well, in that case, I
would think you'd be more likely to see them on
the males. That's true. This would be an inversion of
the sexual dimorphism we typically see where the male is
the one with the with the fancy peacock feathers as

(14:19):
opposed to the pe hen. Another bit of a sexual
dimorphism with the Gelfings is that the gin is a
little bit taller, So I mean that could be maybe
Gen's a little older than Kira, but also it could
just be like the sexual dimorphism of more of a
sort of a warrior cast within the species, so we
can consider that as well. But basically the big difference

(14:39):
is the wings uh and and uh. And that kind
of spoils a key moment in the film for people
who haven't seen it. Uh oh yeah, because it comes
as a surprise to to Gin as well. I mean,
I would say the experience of the Dark Crystal is
not really about learning what's going to happen. You can
probably kind of predict to the plot. It's more about

(14:59):
the experience of the world, the texture of it. But
we are going to continue to talk about the plot
of the film today. So if you can't stand to
have this, uh, this rather straightforward hero's journey kind of
story spoiled, I guess you should stop here and then
come back after you've seen it, alright. Well, another native
species that plays a pretty important role in the film

(15:21):
are the land striders. And this is this is my
this is my son's favorite creature from the movie, and
he's always drawing these things that These are long legged
striding herbivores that are sometimes used by gelf links as mounts,
and they are ferocious fighters when they have to be.
They're kind of sweet looking, but they can really put
up a fight. They've got like pussycat whiskers of funny

(15:43):
looking eyes. They're great. Like most of the creatures in
the Dark Crystal designed by Fraud here, it is kind
of difficult to put a real firm line on the
on the hybridity that's going that's taking place. You know,
it's not just a case where oh, it's a tiger
with a rabbit's head. Know, it's more like there's a
sense of a rabbit to it, but also the sense
of an insect or a moth, and also a giraffe.

(16:07):
And it's all swirled around in a way that feels
familiar but also just distinctly alien. But we do see
some some some key real world animals reflected in it,
most notably probably the giraffe. So the giraffe that are
real world land striders. They can actually reach top speeds

(16:28):
of thirty seven miles per hour, but they can't really
maintain it for long. But their kicks are are no joke,
just as the kicks of the land Strider are seen
to be pretty devastating against their their enemies. Um An
adult giraffe can kill a human or a lion if threatened,
and they've also been pretty effectives slinging their necks, certainly

(16:49):
in fights against other giraffes. Well, yeah, long limb gives
you a lot of leverage. You can you can really
whack with that thing. There's also again a hint of
the rabbit and the land strider anatomy, and I've also
read that out consider jumping spiders and designing them, so
that kind of makes sense. They've got a kind of
so they've got very long legs below, but then they've
got this hunched upper body that looks almost kind of

(17:09):
like the the bunched up tiny body of a salta
said spider. Yeah, now I was thinking about like animals
like this. When you consider really long legged animal body forms,
you can think of quite a few reasons for animals
to have long legs compared to the rest of their body.
Might be a defensive thing, you know, maybe they want
like big legs for you know, a lot of leverage
and kicking. Maybe they want to be able to move

(17:30):
faster across short distances, longer stride longer legs. Of course,
the long legs also come with downsides to fast movement.
But another thing would be to reach farther or taller.
Is fairly simple one. But one really interesting example I
came across of animals with long legged body ratios is
for a totally different reason. Uh. I want to look

(17:52):
at the black winged stilt or human optus human optus.
This is a type of bird that's a very land
strider to my eye. Uh. It's got these long, narrow
legs with these kind of knobby joints. Uh. And it
walks around in the water. Human Optus has found all
over the world, and they walk around in the water
pecking around for food. According to the British zoologist Mark Carwardine,

(18:16):
the black wing stilt has the longest leg to body
ratio of any bird on Earth, with an average body
length of thirty five to forty cimeters and an average
leg length of seventeen to twenty four centimeters. Uh. The
legs are usually about sixty or more of total body length.
I'm looking at a picture of one right now, and
these are some long legs. Yeah, it's it's a bit

(18:39):
ridiculous looking. But the question would be why, I like,
do they need to reach up into trees? And the
answer here is interesting. Instead, they're reaching down. The human
optus bird is a waiting forager like wades around in
water or mud, pecking down below to catch its prey.
And the long legs allowed the bird to walk around
in water pecking at prey, keeping their body up above

(19:02):
the water and dry. And I guess if you want
to do that, longer legs allow you do way deeper. Interesting.
And you know, in the Dark Crystal, the landstrider does
seem to be more of a like a purely terrestrial animal.
And and it kind of there are some swamps in
there are a lot of swamps, So you know, I
don't know if anybody's ever really drawn a fine line
on why they have long legs. I always kind of

(19:24):
imagine that it was more like a draft they needed
to reach like high pining fruit or flowers or something
to chew on. But you can easily imagine one trooping
through the swamp as well. All right, let's take a
quick break and when we come back, we'll talk about
the Wise Woman of thraw Agra. Than alright, we're back. Uh,
So everybody's gotta have a favorite character in the Dark Crystal.

(19:46):
It's kind of hard for your favorite character not to
be agraa. Auger is pretty great. Like she's she's commanding,
she's powerful, she's wise, she grunts a lot. She like
every there are great scenes where she like sits down
and releases this powerful grown of discomfort as she does. So. Yeah,
I have seen the interviews, old interviews where Frank Oz
describes her as being you know, she's she's so ugly,

(20:08):
she's beautiful, that she's there's this there's this grotesque, gorgeous
quality to her. She she can detach her eye and
hold it in her hand to see around with it. Yeah,
she has uh I belie. She has like sort of
goat curl curl goat horns um coming out of her head.
And she has what looks like a parietal eye where

(20:30):
a third eye would be um, you know, kind of
like you see in the say lizards and various species.
So she too, is this kind of thing that seems
like a hybrid of all these different forms, though she's
largely humanoid. Uh We we only learned so much about
her in the actual film. But there's a wonderful book
that came out um Bye Brian Froud titled The World

(20:52):
of the Dark Crystal. It's magical. This is one of
the best illustrated books ever, and it's so it's um
It is presented as if it is a like an
academic translation and gloss on an ancient text that's been discovered,
and that ancient text is the Book of Augura. So

(21:13):
it takes as like a fact as if you know,
the stuff that happened in the Dark Crystal is like
a mythology from a long ago existing culture, and Augura
is the author of this mythology. And then it's been
translated by a by a fictional scholar and I think
named lue Ellen, right with the various academic asides of uh,

(21:34):
dismantling what's happening there, But but we learned it's it's
really a wonderful book, not only because it's filled with
Froud's production art and designs, but it is it's just
so weird too, because it could have just been that, right,
it could have just been Hey, my name is Brian Froud,
and I worked on this movie called The Dark Crystal.
Here here's some of the pictures. No, it's this, this

(21:54):
this utterly weird and magical and one of a kind book.
But but in it Yeah, we hear a lot more
about Auga where she came from. We get more of
a sense of the backstory on the world of Thraw.
But we learned that she's something like an earth elemental,
that she's like a being that rises up out of
the stones and the roots of the world so that

(22:17):
the world can have voice in that the world can
witness what's happening. And uh. And then she loses one
of her eyes when the Great Conjunction occurs, but we'll
get more into that later on. Yeah. Now, one of
the cool things about Augres is that she's sort of
an astronomer astrologer type, right. She she has in her laboratory.

(22:37):
She has like a big observatory on the top of
a mountain, and within it there is an oor y
and I love a good oorory. So an oory is
basically a mechanical model of the movement of celestial objects,
usually of the planets in the Solar System, and these
have been constructed based on various astronomical models throughout history.

(22:58):
They became very popular in the early modern period to
represent the heliocentric model of the Solar System. A standard
oor y would operate by orbiting physical objects around based
on a clockwork mechanism timed to simulate a ratio of
the actual orbital periods. And of course, because the mechanisms
that generate the movements were approximate, the known oorries are

(23:21):
basically all to some degree inaccurate. You might have heard though,
of like classic examples of these things that are very
ahead of their time, like the ancient Greek astronomical computer
from the second century b CE known as the Antikithera
mechanism h This was discovered in a shipwreck around the
turn of the twentieth century, but it was a couple

(23:41):
of thousand years old, and it's essentially an analog computer
that computed the future positions of celestial objects by way
of differently sized gears that would spend at different rates
and show you where the objects would be at different
points in the future. And this kind of thing showed
up again in the early modern period, where you'd have

(24:01):
these oories that were generally clockwork. You'd you know, have
like a somebody would work out all the details of
how to put it together, and you'd have a clockwork
solar system spinning around. Now we have highly accurate digital
or oories based on software so I guess that's actually
a little bit less fun even if it's more accurate.
But one interesting thing when constructing an accurate or ory

(24:23):
is that Augrea faces a problem. We don't. We have
a solar system that is, by comparison, very easy to
predict the future positions of Augra's solar system has three
sons and will return to this later. That's right. It's
key to the plot because when these three sons aligne
it creates the great conjunction, which has tremendous, uh mystical

(24:48):
properties in this film. You know, I've never wondered this before,
but is Pitch Black sort of a takeoff on the
Dark Crystal? Is there a great conjunction? So long as
as I've seen it, it's on this hot planet where
the suns are always shining, but there's there's like a
predicted a prophet side conjunction when like all the suns

(25:09):
will suddenly be hidden. This almost never happens because there
are multiple suns and then the planet will go dark
and then all the monsters can come out because they
can't they can't tolerate the sunlight. That's right, that's right.
I thought you were up on your Riddick movies. I'm
more of a Chronicles of Riddic guy. I've seen that
one like a couple of times. I've only seen the
original one. I only watched Pitch Black because you've told

(25:30):
me to. Did you move on to Chronicles a Riddic
to I haven't yet. Oh, that's the only reason to
watch Chronicle, the only reason to watch a Pitch Black.
So you can watch Chronicles of Reddit. Pitch Black was
kind of trash, but I sort of liked it. No,
it's it has cool monsters in it, and uh, it
has some some I don't want to trash it because
it does have again, really cool monsters, and I think

(25:51):
it it did some stuff really well. But then Chronicles
of Riddic came along and it's just even more over
the top. It's like more of like a flash Gordon. Okay,
well i'll see it. I'll see it this time. Okay,
all right, But back to the dark crystals. So one
of the things that we're just talking about the mystical
nature of the of the great conjunction in this world.

(26:12):
So this is how we end up getting the Earth X. Okay,
now the Earth X are being that we don't encounter
in the film to the very end, but then there's
a lot more information about what they were and where
they came from. In the World of the Dark Crystal
the book, they look kind of a bit like a
creepy pagan ghosts with like like wicker crowns, or they

(26:34):
look kind of like when you see the images of
the Nine Kings in the Lord of the Rings movies,
like as ghosts in the Shadow Realm that you can
only see when you put the ring on there there
like that. Yeah, like all the things and all the
other things in the film, there's this wonderful synthesis right
of all these these things coming together so that it
feels familiar and yet alien at the same time. So

(26:56):
it does feel like an extra restaurant, are like an
angel or or some sort of pagan spirit being, but
it is also unique. And so we learned that these
are the Earth Skex, or more specifically the fallen Earth Skex,
who came to the planet to Thraw to exploit the
properties of the Great Crystal there and um In the
World of the Dark Crystal was written that they arrived

(27:18):
during a past great conjunction, and the Great Conjunctions occur
every one thousand trine, which we assume is something like
a year, so about thousand trines a thousand years roughly.
But when the Great Conjunction occurred, it allowed for them
to open a door through the crystal, some sort of
a star gate, kind of like in two thousand one
Space Odyssey. I assume their home world had a crystal

(27:40):
as well, but it was unsuitable for the work that
they wished to pursue, and so, against the advice of
their fellow earth Skets, they traveled to the world of
Thraw and they set up their operations there where the
crystal serves as kind of a meta crystal. And so
you had eighteen earth Skets and they constructed this great
castle around the crystal and Thraw and it began manipulating

(28:00):
its power. So there are users of high technology and uh,
and they're you know, seemingly um at least benign, if
not benevolent species. They seem to get along well with
the existing species. They form a relationship with the gelf Lins,
They form a relationship with Agah. In fact, they teach
agraa a bit about technology and the and their use

(28:23):
of crystals. But despite being these splendid, angelic beings, full
of brilliance and possibility. They also recognized that that inside
themselves there was this duality, there was this disharmony in
their souls of darkness and light. And so what they
decided to do, what they set out to do with
the crystal, was to purify themselves, to expunge their darker natures.

(28:46):
And as they tried this, during a great conjunction uh,
they managed to sever themselves. They divided themselves into two beings,
and then subsequently the crystal was cracked. So that's where
you are in the movie. Were actually the movie is
like a thousand trying or a thousand years after this,
right when you have these two beings are now completely separate, right,

(29:07):
and you have the the Uru also known as the
Mystics in the movie. Who are these very very sweet,
gentle you know, gentle dinosaur, gentle friendly Brontosaurus UH type creatures.
I don't want to knock him. I mean, the mystics
are great, but oh yeah, they're wonderful. They're there's certainly
a dinosaur sense to them. There's kind of a Galapagos
turtle sense to them, a slow calmness. They also have

(29:29):
a sense I think of there's like an equine quality
to their heads, so you get this this herbivore vibe
to them as well. But they are, yeah, they're very
zen like. They're they're they're they're they're drawn to prophecies
and spirals and uh and they're connected with the natural world.
And these are the ones that raise the hero of
the film, the young Gelfling gen right now, but then

(29:52):
you've also got the villains of the movie, the bad
halves of of what the r skeex and these are
the skex Eas or the Skexis. So these are vile, ruthless, greedy,
also six limbed creatures. We often uh, it's easy to
not pick up on this, but we see later that
they do have an extra pair of arms that have atrophied.

(30:13):
But anyway, they are they're completely awful. They squander and
pervert the science of the Earth's CAx for their own
personal gain their technologists, but they're also exploiters, so uh,
you know, they end up working with the Gelflings for
a while, but then eventually they're uh, they're they're they're
capturing the Gelflings, they're enslaving the gelf Wings they enslaved

(30:33):
the pod people. Uh so they're just nasty to the core.
They all they hate everything, they hate each other, they
hate themselves and uh, I guess in appearance they mostly
resemble humanoid birds, especially raptors, and also crocodilians. One of
the things we read preparing for this was in a
book You Let Me Robert called uh well, not the

(30:54):
book was called, but the essay and it was by
Katriona Makara called a Natural Ural History of the Dark
Crystal the conceptual design of Brian Froud. And in this
essay it's mentioned that the Skexies, in addition to being
inspired by reptilian features and predatory bird features and classic
attributes of the dragon, they may also be based in

(31:14):
part on angler fish. Interesting, but clearly the predatory bird
like the vulture aspect and the crocodile aspect are there.
And Hinson was reportedly inspired in dreaming up the world
of the Dark Crystal. When he was first thinking about
the idea of the Skexies, he was inspired by an
illustration he saw in the nineteen seventies thing it was

(31:35):
in nineteen seventy five of crocodiles like being posh in
a fancy Victorian washroom. And this illustration was by a
an artist named Leonard Lubin, and it was accompanying a
some printings of Lewis Carroll poem. But in this illustration
I found a copy of it. And it's like one
crocodile is in a fancy bathtub with its tail sticking

(31:57):
out with a rubber ducky, and another one is like
being toweled off in a graceful way. Yeah, it's uh,
you know again, it probably doesn't. It's not, you know,
super helpful exercise to apply too much of the natural
world to the skexies, especially since they're not even presented
as a naturally evolved species. They're born out of a

(32:19):
mystical division. And yet if you try to if when
you try to imagine, like, what would a culture be
like if it was if it consisted of more solitary
creatures there are more, you know, and they're they're more
competitive and less cooperative. What might that be like? Uh,
you know, it's interesting to wonder to what extent the

(32:41):
skexies are a realization of that. Yeah, I mean, you
can see some kind of social ish looking behaviors in
in some birds and reptiles. But if I was thinking
about a more selfish kind of creature, a less social
kind of creature, yeah, I wouldn't think like mammalian features.
But again with it with the mystics and the Skexies,

(33:02):
they both represent a one side of the same being,
and ultimately they're supposed to represent, uh, you know, two
sides of human nature, the idea of being that the
skex represent balance, uh, the uru are you know, it's
the the noble human, the human that is a you know,
at one with his natural environment and peaceful, whereas the

(33:22):
Skexies are awful and exploitative and petty. The disgustingness of
the Skexies absolutely comes through in the design of the puppets,
and it actually even came through for the people working
with them, because Makara points out in in her essay
that the costumes and the puppets of the Skexies became
more and more genuinely disgusting as work for the film

(33:44):
went on, like as production went went over time. She
quotes one person who worked on the production who said
that the uh, the Skexies puppets came more and more
to consist of quote, rotten rubber permeated with cold k
y jelly and putrefying noodles. Yeah, it's it's something that's
easy to to to, uh to to overlook in when

(34:08):
you consider the costumes like this and puppets like this,
is that they were never they weren't built to last.
And that's why when you go somewhere like Atlanta's own
Center for Puppetry Arts and you see the the examples
of Skexias and uh and Uru and various other creatures
from the film that that are presented there and on display,

(34:30):
like everything had to be restored before it was suitable
for a public display. Again. And by the way, uh,
if you haven't been to the Center for Puppetry Arts
in Atlanta, I highly recommend it to anyone visiting our city.
Here you can find out more about it at puppet
dot org. And through September one, two thousand and nineteen, Uh,

(34:51):
Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal World of Myth and Magic
is going on. It is a fabulous presentation of the
various prop some designs that you see in the film. Yeah,
they have like some full puppets from the movie. They've
got an Augura when I was there, at least they
had Augura. They had one of the Skexies, they had
one of the Mystics. They have a bunch of other
stuff land Strider puppets, and it was wonderful. Yeah, and

(35:15):
even if you don't make it by September one, they
have a lot of dark crystal stuff in the permanent
Hintson exhibit as well. Oh. In fact, one of the
things they have I believe in the permanent exhibit is Robert,
do you hear a scuttling That scuttling sound, it's the
garth Yes, So the Gartham are podcasters killed by Gartham.

(35:38):
I hadn't thought about that. We're kind of we're kind
of pod people, aren't we um in some sense? So, yes,
the Gartham are those fabulous scuttling, giant crab like monstrosities
and uh and they're essentially an engineered weapons species of
the Skexias. The Skexies are you know, decrepit, cowardly, nasty creatures.

(35:58):
They don't fight their own battle. They're not going to
fight their own battles there. They need to make something
to go out there and wage their wars against the
gelflings and the pod people and too and and so forth,
and so they make these things. Um, yeah, they're they're
massive guardians and soldiers and there they look like a
mixture of beetle and crab anatomies, though closer inspection reveals

(36:20):
than to be kind of like bipeds with supporting tentacle
like appendages. Uh. And part of that is kind of
like the illusion of the puppetry. But the thing about
the puppetry in the Dark Crystal is like, even when
you see how something works with the facade, is still
so perfect. Um. One arm at the garthen terminates in
a vicious crab pincher, and the other has like a

(36:41):
fingered claw for snatching up prisoners. Yeah. So in his
introduction to the world of the Dark Crystal, I thought
this was so funny and so interesting. Brian Froud was
talking about the process of coming up with the concepts
and the designs for the movie, and Froud mentions that
he often drew inspiration before the movie from walking in
nature when he designed creatures. You know, he would do

(37:03):
illustrations and he'd go out and walk in nature and
look at trees and rocks and animals. But he was
working on the Dark Crystal in New York City and
didn't have much access to unspoiled countryside to go look
at trees and rocks and animals. So he said, you know,
maybe you could sort of go to Central Park, but
it wasn't quite the same, so instead, he said he
would end up taking inspiration from wherever he could find it,

(37:25):
including by the natural forms he found in his food.
So he said he he and others went out to
a dinner where they ate lobster, and then Froud was
inspired to take all the lobster shells home with them
and this became partial inspiration for the shells and the
exoskeleton of the Gartham and also for the carapace of

(37:45):
the Skexies. Oh yeah, they have these elaborate costumes that
make them look grander than they actually are. Yeah, but
you can kind of see it there, like in the
in the carapace of the Skexias, you can kind of
see like a a plated, overlapping, plated lobster tail kind
of thing, except it's really craggy and nasty, and you
can definitely see the lobster shells as they came through

(38:06):
in the Gartham. Yeah. Um, so, you know, a couple
of things to sort of take apart with the Gartham here.
I believe it's mentioned in the World of the Dark
Crystal that they're they're sort of a symbol out of
the memory of ancient sea creatures, which is something we'll
get back to in a minute. Uh. And then um mccara,

(38:26):
who again wrote a natural history of the Dark Crystal
conceptual design of Brian Froud. Uh. She speculates the Gartham
may actually exist as the thought projection of the Skexies
because like, yeah, because when they're when when the Skexies
power is broken, the Gartham kind of vanish, or at
least they their internal um biology vanishes and the shell

(38:49):
plating just falls like empty armor. But you know, I
was looking looking reading a little bit about just like
shells and claws and weaponry, and I came back to
an excellent book by Douglas j Eland titled Animal Weapons
The Evolution of the Battle. And one of the key

(39:09):
things in this is that he's, you know, he's comparing uh,
the evolution of various biological weapons to actual you know,
man made weapons and and and tools of war. And
humans create, and he points out that, you know, muscles
are expensive to maintain even when they're resting, and males
with big claws require the most muscle. And of course

(39:31):
he's just talking about natural world fiddler crabs here. But
when we look at something like the Garthen, like that's
an enormous creature, you know, it would have to if
we're depending on an actual diet and it wasn't just
sustained through like vile Skexies thoughts or some sort of
mystical crystal powers, it would have to eat a lot.
It would be expensive to maintain. Now, you do see
the Skexies feasting in the movie quite disgustingly. There's a

(39:54):
great feasting scene where they've got stuff hanging out of
their mouths. Yeah, I don't recall ever seeing the Garthen eat. Yeah,
but and the and and maybe they don't. You know,
it's hard to be hard to be sure. But one
thing you can think of, it's like, okay, if they
are expensive to maintain, uh, just you know, through crystal
power or feeding them a bunch of meat, garbage or
whatever the Skexies are doing, you could easily compare that

(40:17):
to the sort of weapons programs that humans have, so
uh and this is you know, one of the key
things that UH that he gets the author gets into
and animal weapons that England discusses. For instance, you could
compare the garthen to UH the U. S Air Force
B two stealth bomber built at a reported cost of
two point one billion per plane and requiring fifty to

(40:38):
sixty hours of ground maintenance for every one hour in
the air and uh, and that's not even taking into
account of grade efforts. So contractors Northrop Grumman current UH
at least previously held a nine point nine billion dollar
contract to complete maintenance and modernization of the twenty plane
feet fleet. That was from a few year is back.

(41:00):
But it just gives you an idea of just like
the colossal cost of not only creating some sort of
a weapon but also maintaining it. And that would be
part of having an army of Gartham as well. But
clearly it's a price that the Skexies were willing to pay,
and UH, you know, it almost works for them. They're
able to use the Gartham to uh, you know, wage
this war of extinction against the guelf links and rid

(41:23):
the world of all, but at least two of them.
Now is the reason they do that, because there is
a prophecy that the Skexies will be undone by guelfling
hand or else by none. Exactly. That's their whole reason.
And this is a great you know, mythic storytelling trope. Right,
there's this prophecy, and therefore they're going to act on
this prophecy and try and rid the world of those

(41:45):
that will undo them. But then perhaps it's a self
fulfilling prophecy, like they have, they have set things in
motion for their own downfall. Well, it's also a great
example of the destructive power of an unquestioned religious dogma. Exactly.
All right, let's take one more break, and when we
come back, we're gonna talk a little bit more about
Gartham and crystal organisms. Before we were, we return to

(42:09):
the problem of a world with three sons. Thank alright,
we're back. So the dark crystal, as we mentioned a
minute ago, has a couple of organisms that seem to
have at least partially crystalloid biology. At least they have
crystals for eyes, or use crystals to see. It's mentioned
in a couple of sources that the Gartham have crystals

(42:31):
for eyes, and you can see this in some up
close representations of them. It seems that their eyes have
sort of uh uh you know, polygon type surfaces on
them that they might be be actual, I don't know,
pieces of dark crystal or something like that in there.
Oh yeah, like we're it's explained, especially in the world
of the Dark Crystal, that the Skexies, you know, they're
not only continuing to experiment with the dark Crystal itself, uh,

(42:53):
the the the imperfect Great Crystal, but they're also creating
like their own knockoff crystals and doing the things with
crystals and those so seemingly also incorporating them into their weapons. Species.
They're doing all kinds of nasty crystal technology, and some
of this is nasty crystal biotechnology, so the Garthen of
crystals fries. And they're also these spy beasts in the

(43:15):
movie called the crystal Bats who fly around doing aerial
surveillance and looking with their crystals that appears to be
their video recorder lens or their eyes. Now, obviously this
seems far fetched. She wouldn't expect, well, maybe there are
actually organisms that have crystals for eyes. But as we
discover pretty much every time, reality is weirder than fiction.

(43:37):
There are creatures on this very world with minerals and
crystals for eyes. And I had to talk about this
for a few minutes. Yeah, this floored me that you
were able to get so much out of the crystal bats.
I figured, the crystal bats are like the least biological
creatures in the whole movie. And yet here we go.
Let's have a look at a creature called a kitan. Now,

(43:58):
keitan is a form of a marine mollusk. They're generally small.
They're flat. They're oval shaped, kind of like a flat
slug or snail, with a protruding foot on the underside
for attaching to surfaces on the sea floor and moving
along those surfaces while they scrape up food in the
form of algae or other clinging biomatter. But on its back,

(44:20):
the kiton wears a suit of armor. It has a
shell made out of tough plates which face up towards
the sea as it crawls along a rock, lapping up
delicious slime with its ragula. Now you might suspect that
a small algae scraping rock crawling sea dweller like The
kitan is maybe simply blind, right, what does it need

(44:41):
eyes for to look down at the rocks below it
as it scrapes up stuff to eat. But they do
appear to have eyes on their backs on those protective shells,
the armor part, they've got hundreds of little beady light
sensitive organs spaced about on their dorsal armor, called ocelli.
Scientists have known about these ocellly for years. They have

(45:03):
known about these organs for sensing light, but they didn't
know much about them, what they were made of, how
they worked. Essentially, what we knew for a long time
was that the kitans had these organs with underlying light
sensitive cells like a retina in some form of lens material. Now,
a few years back, a marine biologist named Dan Spicer
conducted research on a kitan known as the West Indian

(45:26):
Fuzzy Kitan, which is the cudtliest of all kitan. It
sounds kind of like an off brand muppet. I have
to say, it sounds kind of like a fizz gig.
So Spicer was studying the lenses on the ocelli of
these animals that the little light sensing organs on their
backs and in an attempt to clean these ocelli, these
lenses off for observation. In an acidic solution, the lenses

(45:50):
suddenly dissolved, and this was a tip tip off that
the lenses were not protein based like you would find
in pretty much all other organisms. Instead, these lenses were
made of a mineral called aragonite. The Keitans had mineral
crystals for eyes. Aragonite is a form of calcium carbonate.

(46:11):
It's the material that forms the shells of most molluscs,
so it had lenses for its eyes that were made
out of the same stuff that its armor is made
out of. The shell is made out of and spice
are along with Earness and Johnson published a paper about
kiton and aragonite lenses in Current Biology in two thousand eleven.

(46:33):
So the Keiton uses these eyes to detect when shadows
pass overhead. That would be a signal that there's like
a predator near and when this happens, the Keitans flatten
out their bodies and clamped their armored shells down over
their soft parts. The crystallized don't appear to see in
great detail, but they can apparently distinguish dark, moving shapes

(46:54):
from a mirror dimming of raw light levels. Now, when
you've got rocks for eyes, of course they can be
eroded by water over the time. But I was over time,
but I was reading about how apparently one benefit of
having rocks for eyes is that they are less vulnerable
to the you know, the the violent washing of the
tide or intertidal areas. It's like they their eyes have armor. Yeah,

(47:19):
but what do you do in your eyes e rode? Yeah,
well you so as if you have rocks for ees,
what you do is you gradually replace them with more crystals.
So the kidans would grow new crystal lenses to replace
the old ones that would get eroded over time. And
it seems that organisms with crystals for eyes are pretty
rare in today's biosphere, but there are other examples. There

(47:40):
are other examples. So crystals appear in various forms suspended
within otherwise protein based eyes of other creatures. Right, so
there are other creatures that might not quite have crystals
four eyes like rocks as the lenses of their eyes,
but might have some kind of crystal somewhere in there.
One example I was reading about in a book called

(48:01):
Animal Eyes from Oxford University Press by Michael Fland and
Dan Eric Nielsen is about spiders. Specifically, these would be
like acids or wolf spiders. Wolf spiders have some crystal
structures inside their eyes. These are specialized eyes, usually the
lateral eyes, used for locating prey and low light and too,

(48:23):
since in low light they have a wide aperture so
they let a lot of light in. But they also
have a reflecting tap at them, kind of like you
see in a cat when its eyes shine back at
you in the dark. The wolf spider has something similar. Now,
what does the tap at um actually do. Apparently it
serves to increase the sensitivity of the retina in low

(48:44):
light conditions by sitting behind the retina and reflecting light
back in the direction of the source through the retina,
again maintaining the visual features of the image while increasing
the amount of light available to the light sensitive cells.
Some makes sense, like, so there's low light, so you
put a mirror behind the area that's sensing the light,

(49:06):
and by reflecting it back through that area, you sort
of get you get a couple of tries, you get
extra ways of sensing the low amounts of light. But
in like I said's these tapitha behind the eyes consist
of quote, many layers of very thin crystals, probably guanine crystals,
which form a long ribbon beneath the receptors. So that's

(49:27):
pretty interesting on its own, But it's not even the
only organism that uses guanine crystals in order to see
with to look at another mollusk. Reflective guantine crystals are
also important in the light sensitive organs of scallops. Scalops
like the kind you eat. Research shows that scallops use
a reflective mirror made of guanine crystals instead of a

(49:49):
transparent lens to focus light onto their retinas. And I've
attached a little picture of what these crystals look like.
They've formed these layers of plates. Almost yeah, it looks
like like plate mail, kind of like dinosaur scales. Yeah yeah, yeah,
I guess more acutive scale mail if I was going
to use the more fitting um the term there. But
to get even weirder and to connect to the dark

(50:11):
crystal in a weirder way, I want to go into
the deep past, because if you go into the deep past,
you can find even more crazy examples of crystallize. The
trio bytes, the trialo bytes of the Cambrian period, which
you know, began roughly five million years ago. The trialobytes
of this period had lenses on their eyes that were
literally made of calcite crystals. The trialo bytes had rocks

(50:35):
for eyes and this, uh, of course, the calcite crystals
that form these lenses were this is another form of
calcium carbonate stone eyes. And the lenses that were amazingly
powerful by the protein based standards were familiar with today.
They were they were seeing the world through crystal prisms,
as described in a feature by the American Museum of

(50:56):
Natural History. Quote, this provided these ancient creatures with truly
unparalleled vision that we can assume thanks to recent experiments
conducted with calcite crystals was filled with streams of light
and bursts of color. Oh wow, So that the Cambrian
seas were just a uh, you know, a psychedelic fire

(51:16):
show for these these creatures on some level. Yeah, if
only we could see the world like these ancient bugs
that had crystals for eyes. Yeah, and again this is
this is fitting because it is mentioned in the World
of the Dark Crystal that the ske the skexies kind
of summon the form of the Gartham out of the
memories of long dead sea life. Yes, I love that.

(51:37):
That's exactly what I was thinking about. So the trial bites,
the inhabitants of this ancient unseen world, are are known
to us only through fossils from about five hundred million
to about two fifty million years ago. And like the
lost prehistoric world quality of the dark crystal mythology. Yeah,
in fact, I wanted to take this connection even further.
Tell you tell me if I'm getting too wild here,

(51:59):
But now you can't get too So one idea is
thing I was thinking about is that the trio bites
mineral eyes are the first complex eyes we really find
in the fossil record. They were part of the Cambrian explosion,
which is when animal bodies suddenly showed this massive diversity
and uh at least fascinating and complex and fast moving forms.

(52:23):
These eyes are a wonder of evolution, but they might
also be a signal of something important changing in the
animal world. Why did animals suddenly need powerful calcite eyes
crystal eyes. Well, one theory about this is that it's
because of the explosion of predation. We live in a
world in which predation evolved, in which animals kill and

(52:44):
eat each other, which plenty of mythological traditions see as
a key indicator of some kind of fallen or corrupted
state of the world, kind of like the shattering of
the crystal in the Dark Crystal and the sundering of
the Earth Skex, which which in the mythology gives row
is to the garthm and the crystal bats. Interesting. Yeah,
so crystal vision on both counts emerging out of an

(53:06):
age of conflict. How about it? Look up those those
trial by dies. It's amazing. All right, Well, let's let's
return to the bigger picture here. Let's let's talk about
the Three Sons system, the three star system that we
see with the world of Thraw. Okay, so Thraw, the
planet depicted in the Crystal in the Dark Crystal uh
is a three star system. It's it's it's key to

(53:28):
the whole narrative about the great conjunction occurring. And the
three Sons are described as the Great Son of the
Dying Son and the Rose Sun. And we see these
images of these suns moving through the sky. Um, it's difficult,
you know, and perhaps kind of a fool's air and
to try and work out exactly what stage each of
these sons happens to be in. I've seen it speculated

(53:51):
that the Great Sun is a giant son, and the
Dying Sun is a gas giant or a protostar, and
then the Rose Sun is a red dwarf. But really
you could you could kind of go a number of
different directions and interpreting like what stage each star is
in that might make sense in the light of something
I'll get back to in just a minute here. Now. Likewise,

(54:11):
it might ultimately be a bit silly to to really
get two worked over up over the exact celestial mechanics
of all of this. I mean, for instance, given the
mythological nature of many themes in the movie, we might
be dealing with more of a uh ptotlemaic universe here
with the three sons orbiting thraw. You know, there's no
reason that wouldn't be the case. It's a mythological world. Um. However,

(54:35):
when we look to the world of the Dark Crystal
that the book of Brian frouds, uh there is this, uh,
this fabulous a little bit of commentary that is supposedly
from the anthropologists or the academic that is commenting on everything.
And this is what they say of the three stars
of thraw quote. In a system with three sons, astronomical

(54:56):
calculations would be intolerably complex. Newtonian or Ryne Steiny and
physics can deal exactly with two bodies Earth and Sun
or Earth and Moon, but more complex cases can be
solved only by successive approximations. With three sons, even the
elementary calculations needed to begin our studies of the skies
are beyond our scope. Augura's astronomy, therefore, is devised chiefly

(55:20):
through intuition and empirical models. So this is a reference
to a very real problem in the study of celestial
mechanics that I think we've discussed on stuff to blow
your mind before, at least in passing the three body
problem right. If so, if you're dealing with say velocity,
your momentum, and gravity, you can easily predict the future

(55:41):
states of two objects orbiting each other. Once you throw
another object into the mix there, especially if it's you know,
of a similar mass, the interactions become increasingly chaotic and
sensitive to tiny to like tiny variations, and it becomes
harder and harder to predict a future state from the
current state. Now I was looking into this because I

(56:04):
was like, well, are there really triple star systems? Like
does that exist in reality? What would that look like?
And triple star systems do exist, though they can in
some cases become dynamically unstable, meaning that they might eject
one of the stars from the system through their interactions.
But a common form of a more stable triple star

(56:25):
system is that there is essentially a core binary star system,
which means two stars more closely orbiting a shared center
of gravity, and then you'd have a third star much
farther away orbiting that center of gravity. And this even
almost sort of goes with the Great Sun Dying Sun
Rose Sun thing, like I wonder if maybe your great

(56:46):
son and your dying stunt son, the bigger, closer ones
are orbiting each other, that's a binary star system, and
then you've got a little little red dwarf for Rose
Sun that's way farther out, that's orbiting the whole system. Yeah,
I think that would make sense. Now be another question
entirely whether in reality a planet like Thraw could exist,
I mean, not necessarily like Thraw, but a planet of

(57:07):
any kind could exist in a triple star system, or
would it just be automatically, you know, pretty quickly ejected
or destroyed due to the chaotic influences of gravity from
a three star sits right, Would there be enough stability
there at all, certainly for life to emerge. I just
assumed the answer was no. That I was like, that's
probably not going to happen. But I was actually surprised

(57:28):
what I found here. I was reading an article about
this on astronomy dot com by Amber Jorgensen, which was
about the work of a few scholars of Franco Bissetti
of the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at
the University of Wits in South Africa, also Cherice Harley
of Wits and uh Are they Boost at University of
Grenoble Alps in France. So Bussetti and colleagues here conducted

(57:51):
simulations which found that planets could survive in appreciable numbers
in systems like this. So Bussetti says, quote because of
the complex dynamics between these stars and planets, it was
previously thought improbable that many planets would have stable orbits
in these regions, but they found evidence to the contrary. Quote.
We ran the simulations for periods ranging from one million

(58:15):
to ten million years in order to see if the
systems are stable over very long periods. If a planet
is ejected from that system during that time, it is
not stable. The analysis showed that most configurations had large
enough stable regions for planets to exist. Many of these
areas are actually very habitable for planets, and they even

(58:35):
mapped out areas of the galaxy where double and triple
star exoplanets are likely to be found in stable orbits.
So it is actually possible. There might be really bad
places to be within the orbit of a of a
three star system, but there could be types of triple
star systems that could have stable planetary orbits within them

(58:55):
where at least presumably life could thrive. So there might
be a thraw out there. That's what you're saying. There
could be a world. Scientists have discovered thraw. It really exists,
and we're sending a mission there right now. Um, in
terms of things that really exists, it is worth noting
that there is a real great conjunction, so the the

(59:17):
the the the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn is sometimes
referred to as the Great Conjunction, and it takes place
every eighteen to twenty years, and there's a there's a
fair amount of astrological uh speculation about them, shall we say,
especially concerning political assassinations and how they seem to line
up selectively, of course with great conjunctions throughout history. The

(59:40):
last one took place in May thirty one, two thousand,
when the next one will take place in late December. Now,
as usual, we don't put a lot of stock. We
don't put any stock in astrological predictions like this. Ultimately,
whatever the astrological pattern is, if you, if you cherry
pick enough, you can find some sequence of events on

(01:00:02):
Earth that match up with it. The planets don't influence
your dating life, folks. I'm sorry, all right, So there
you have it. This has been fun, Robert. Yeah, the
Dark Crystal. There's a lot to discuss there, and I
was legitimately surprised by some of the places that it
took us. Um But but hopefully we have, you know,
maybe even enhanced everyone's enjoyment of the Dark Crystal a

(01:00:23):
little bit, or if nothing else, giving you a good
reason to go out and watch a great film one
more time and wish you had crystal eyes. That's right.
Anytime when you hear one of those rock songs or
pop songs about touching eyes. Think think like spiky crystals
for eyes clinking against each other. Um, well cool. Obviously,

(01:00:44):
I know we have a lot of listeners out there
who have thoughts about the Dark Crystal and our Dark
Crystal fans. Some of you may be very steeped in
the Dark Crystal and have read like the novelizations and
the comic books and this sort of the extended universe
of the thing, and perhaps you have additional insight you'd
like share. Perhaps some of the questions we have presented
have been answered in other bits of literature or other

(01:01:06):
Brian Fraud interviews, etcetera. We would love to hear from
you about that. Oh no, Well, as we're closing out here,
I do want to give a quick shout out as
well to The Bizarre Cast. That's b A Z A
a R. The Bizarre Cast with Richard and Robert. Uh
they're like a horror pop culture podcast. They recently had

(01:01:26):
me on the show to talk about podcasting, about stuff
to blow your mind, invention and the upcoming Transgenesis. Uh So,
just to shout out to those guys. If you want
to check out their show. It's The bizarre Cast dot
pod bean dot com, or you can find them on Twitter,
the bizarre Cast at the bizarre Cast, Huge Things, As
always to our wonderful audio producers Alex Williams and Torry Harrison.

(01:01:48):
If you would like to get in touch with us directly,
if you give us feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot for more on this and thousands of

(01:02:12):
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. I
think