Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This is
Speaker 2: Ruthless Rob Lamb.
Speaker 3: And this is corrosive Joseph McCormick and Happy Halloween.
Speaker 2: That's right. We're continuing our Halloween tradition this year, or
Speaker 2: it's been our Halloween tradition for several years now. Anthology
Speaker 2: of Horror. This is where we take We each take
Speaker 2: an episode of a TV anthology series or something related
Speaker 2: to this tradition, such as in the case of Joe's
Speaker 2: selection this year, kind of like a Monster of the
Speaker 2: Week episode, which which still close enough for our work,
Speaker 2: and then we spend some science or contemplation out of it.
Speaker 2: Before we switched over and started doing horror and sci
Speaker 2: fi anthologies, we did the same treatment with creepy pastas
Speaker 2: in the past. So that's that's what we do in
Speaker 2: this series. Take a little horror, a little sci fi,
Speaker 2: and spin it out, squeeze it out, and see what
Speaker 2: kind of science we can get out of it. However,
Speaker 2: I think this is likely the final installment of Anthology
Speaker 2: of Horror. Here on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and
Speaker 2: mainly because ever since we started doing weird House Cinema.
Speaker 2: The premise has felt like a little bit redundant, like
Speaker 2: we get to talk about a weird movie every week.
Speaker 2: So maybe, at least in my case, it feels a
Speaker 2: little less special to have this Horror Anthology episode we
Speaker 2: do every year. And we've also covered a lot of
Speaker 2: great selections already, So I don't know if listeners out
Speaker 2: there have strong feelings about this right in, and we
Speaker 2: will consider now.
Speaker 3: I know you suggested that this would be Anthology of
Speaker 3: Horror the final Chapter, but if we're going by Friday
Speaker 3: the thirteenth sequel naming conventions, that would have actually been
Speaker 3: the fourth Anthology of Horror episode we did, which was
Speaker 3: many years ago. Now this is the ninth, is that correct?
Speaker 3: Which would that would put us in Jason Goes to
Speaker 3: Hell territory? So this really should be Anthology of Horror
Speaker 3: Part nine, Robin Joe go to Hell.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, hopefully we can deliver Jason Goes to Hell
Speaker 2: quality level or above in this episode. All right, Joe,
Speaker 2: what do you have for us? I teased it a
Speaker 2: little bit, but what is your selection for this year?
Speaker 3: Okay, so, not too long ago, on some episode or other,
Speaker 3: it came up that I had never seen any of
Speaker 3: the classic American TV series Colchak The Nightstalker, which was
Speaker 3: originally broadcast on ABC in nineteen seventy four. I think
Speaker 3: it ran seventy four to seventy five, only for one season,
Speaker 3: though I think there are around twenty episodes or so.
Speaker 3: And my ignorance of this show was so deep that
Speaker 3: I didn't even realize it had a supernatural element. I thought,
Speaker 3: I guess this was just based on the name. I
Speaker 3: thought it was some kind of gritty crime show. I
Speaker 3: think because I heard night Stalker, I thought about that
Speaker 3: serial killer and I was like, Okay, it's like a
Speaker 3: serial killer show. But no, no, no, it's so much
Speaker 3: more delightful than that. This show is essentially a precursor
Speaker 3: to The X Files, where instead of FBI agents Malter
Speaker 3: and Scully, we have a fast talking, rascally Chicago newspaper
Speaker 3: reporter named Carl Coolchak played by Darren McGavin, whom I
Speaker 3: knew primarily as the dad, the guy who gets his
Speaker 3: son a BB gun in a Christmas story.
Speaker 2: Well, and of course that's a tremendous role by Darren
Speaker 2: McGavin there as well, So if you only know him
Speaker 2: for one role, Like, that's a good one to know
Speaker 2: him from. You know, it was in tons of stuff.
Speaker 2: But yeah, he's great in this. As I'll mention in
Speaker 2: a bit, I think he's he's really holding the show
Speaker 2: up on his shoulders.
Speaker 3: Now. I think any episode of Colchak The night Stalker
Speaker 3: would count as an anthology entry because it had a
Speaker 3: monster of the Week format. In each new kper Kolchak
Speaker 3: would begin by reporting on some weird crime, usually a
Speaker 3: murder that baffles the narrow minded police detectives. Ah, you know,
Speaker 3: the victim's teeth were all painted blue? What could this mean?
Speaker 3: And eventually we discover it means that the deaths were
Speaker 3: caused by a shape shifting wear tiger or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the plot that you encounter in these episodes, it's
Speaker 2: going to be very formulaic. I think I watched a
Speaker 2: bunch of these back in the nineties on either sci
Speaker 2: Fi or any probably sci Fi, and I remember liking it.
Speaker 2: One thing I also strongly remember about it is it
Speaker 2: being kind of a cross generational hit. I have vague
Speaker 2: memories that like, both my dad and my granddad would
Speaker 2: be like cool with this show being on, because you know,
Speaker 2: kids in the nineties, we wanted to watch Monsters, or
Speaker 2: I wanted to watch Monsters anyway. But the rest of
Speaker 2: the show has a very traditional episodic gum shoe feel
Speaker 2: to it. You know, it feels very classic television in
Speaker 2: that regard. It's very much a product of its age,
Speaker 2: but with this strain supernatural twist to it. And then
Speaker 2: at the center of this you have just an incredibly fun,
Speaker 2: fast talking and charismatic performance by Darren McGavin, and you
Speaker 2: just can't help but love him. You can't help but
Speaker 2: follow him, and you want to see what he does next.
Speaker 2: And it doesn't matter if you're here for the monsters
Speaker 2: or you didn't know monsters were going to occur, You're
Speaker 2: gonna stick around and see where this goes.
Speaker 3: Yes, the force of the main character's personality is really
Speaker 3: the anchor of the show. And now I haven't seen
Speaker 3: the whole series. I've only seen this one episode now
Speaker 3: and then read about some others, but I'm going to
Speaker 3: be watching more. I think it is interesting to compare
Speaker 3: the dynamics of Kolchak to the show that it is
Speaker 3: explicitly acknowledged to have inspired The X Files. I know,
Speaker 3: I think Chris Carter has said Coulchak was an inspiration
Speaker 3: on the X Files. So the X Files, the investigations
Speaker 3: there are that the tone of them is largely based
Speaker 3: on the tension between Molder the believer and Scully the skeptic,
Speaker 3: whereas in Colchak there's just one investigator, so there are
Speaker 3: not two characters to bounce ideas off each other and
Speaker 3: act as foils for one another. It all has to
Speaker 3: be there inside Darren McGavin, and there is a similar
Speaker 3: tension within him, but it's different. It's not like part
Speaker 3: of him is an idealistic true believer who just wants
Speaker 3: aliens to be real, and another part is ruthlessly seeking
Speaker 3: out hard evidence instead. I think the tension is between
Speaker 3: Coolchak's personality versus his observations. So it seems to me
Speaker 3: that the tension is that Kolchak is naturally a wily, sardonic,
Speaker 3: no nonsense personality. He talks like a just the facts
Speaker 3: kind of newsman, and he makes wry jokes about anything
Speaker 3: that sounds unusual, not just monsters, but unfamiliar science concepts,
Speaker 3: like he makes jokes about the idea of rim sleep.
Speaker 3: You know, there's like a guy in this episode, who's
Speaker 3: undergoing rim sleep a scientist says, and he's like, oh,
Speaker 3: is he remming right now? And there's like an inflection
Speaker 3: on that that makes it sound funny. And then he
Speaker 3: has the same kind of jokes about anything that's outside
Speaker 3: of a very grounded, working class kind of scope of life.
Speaker 3: So he makes jokes about the impossibility of pronouncing the
Speaker 3: scientific names of plants, or about French food items, stuff
Speaker 3: like that, and yet at the same time he puts
Speaker 3: the clues together and he does end up believing that
Speaker 3: the murders are supernatural in nature, and then has to
Speaker 3: convince other people. He has to convince his boss at
Speaker 3: the newspaper, the police whatever, that it really was a
Speaker 3: monster again this time, and not this other poor guy
Speaker 3: who's being falsely accused of the crime.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think that's a good summary of the energy here.
Speaker 2: It's kind of like Moulder and Scully kind of have
Speaker 2: like an forgive me if if I'm not doing justice
Speaker 2: to musical genres. They have kind of a shoegaze vibe,
Speaker 2: and I feel like, I feel like col Shak is
Speaker 2: jazz anyway. A couple of quick notes just about people
Speaker 2: involved in this series. The main character was created by
Speaker 2: Jeff Rice in his novel The Cool Jack Papers, and
Speaker 2: this was adapted before it was published into the original
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy three TV movie that kicked it all off.
Speaker 2: It concerned vampire murders and I think that's where we
Speaker 2: get the night stalker thing. Also of note is that
Speaker 2: this episode is directed by Gordon Hessler, who lived nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty five through twenty fourteen. He directed nineteen seventy Scream
Speaker 2: and Scream Again, which we talked about in Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: M okay, And as far.
Speaker 2: As the cast goes, you know, if this were a
Speaker 2: weird House, we'd go deeper. But I will point out
Speaker 2: that we have the prolific Keenan Wynn who lived nineteen
Speaker 2: sixteen through nineteen eighty six, playing Captain what mad Dog
Speaker 2: Joe in this and it's a pretty fun role.
Speaker 3: Yes, what do I know him from? I mean he
Speaker 3: was in a lot of things. You probably know him
Speaker 3: from Doctor Strangelove.
Speaker 2: I think he was in Tarantula. I don't know, have
Speaker 2: my notes in front of me, but he was very prolific.
Speaker 2: He was in a lot of stuff.
Speaker 3: But another big guest star in this movie, though you
Speaker 3: don't see his face, it's covered by some fibrous material.
Speaker 3: Is Richard Keel, the guy who played Jaws in the
Speaker 3: James Bond series.
Speaker 2: Ah, he's just doing a basic big man monster role
Speaker 2: in this.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, he's Ega. He's a soggy ega in So
Speaker 3: to summarize the episode, it's called the Spanish Moss Murders,
Speaker 3: and it starts with Kolchak intercepting a call in his
Speaker 3: police radio to the scene of a murder in a
Speaker 3: fancy French restaurant. He makes some joke about the wine
Speaker 3: cellar of this restaurant having more than being worth more
Speaker 3: than the entire gross domestic product of Paraguay, which I
Speaker 3: looked that up and that would make it worth like
Speaker 3: billions of dollars at the time, So I think that's
Speaker 3: a little bit of an exaggeration. But anyway, the head
Speaker 3: chef of this restaurant has been slain right in the
Speaker 3: middle of the restaurant kitchen. His body's lying there on
Speaker 3: the floor between the prep tables and all that. And
Speaker 3: not only has he been killed, but his body was
Speaker 3: found in a particularly groo some state, with its chest
Speaker 3: cavity crushed like a beer can on top of that,
Speaker 3: there is some kind of weird, wet vegetable matter scattered
Speaker 3: around the crime scene, described by one character as quote
Speaker 3: green glop, and the police sagely conclude that the plant
Speaker 3: matter must be salad. They were in a restaurant after all.
Speaker 2: All right, solid police work, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think Rob, you've seen more Culchak than me. Is
Speaker 3: this a theme that like the police don't know what
Speaker 3: they're doing and Colchak has to be the one to
Speaker 3: figure everything out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I vaguely remember this being the case. You know,
Speaker 2: it's like you need an outside thinker because you know
Speaker 2: the police they're doing they're doing a good job. They're
Speaker 2: you know, they're not incompetent in this show, but they're
Speaker 2: used to dealing with normal crimes. Yeah, Cold Shack's expertise
Speaker 2: comes into play when we're dealing with supernatural crimes.
Speaker 3: So Colchak is on the case. Through some crafty investigation
Speaker 3: involving trickery and trespassing, Colchack starts to piece together a
Speaker 3: perplexing set of facts connecting a number of different crimes together.
Speaker 3: People all crushed or killed by severe blunt force trauma
Speaker 3: to the thorax, all with the same green glop found
Speaker 3: around their bodies, and after a visit to a local
Speaker 3: botanical garden, Kolchak is able to ascertain the origin of
Speaker 3: the green glop. It is Spanish moss, which only grows,
Speaker 3: he's told in hot and humid conditions nowhere around Chicago,
Speaker 3: outside of a greenhouse. And I have to make a
Speaker 3: little observation. Spanish moss is not like usually wet and soggy.
Speaker 3: So I think I don't know how much experience the
Speaker 3: writers here had with actual Spanish moss, which is consistently
Speaker 3: described in this more like they're talking about algae.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, that is weird, isn't it. Yeah, maybe they
Speaker 2: just hadn't been really exposed to it. But yeah, I
Speaker 2: don't think of Spanish moss as being humid and wet
Speaker 2: and drippy and gloppy and so forth.
Speaker 3: It's actually rather dry and crispy. In fact, famously, I
Speaker 3: know I was reading about there was one huge historical
Speaker 3: fire that was started when some Spanish moss caught fire.
Speaker 3: It was the Great Fire of nineteen oh one in Jacksonville, Florida,
Speaker 3: which a huge fire that was started outside a factory
Speaker 3: that was putting stuffing inside of upholstery for furniture, I think,
Speaker 3: and the stuffing they were using was Spanish moss. There
Speaker 3: were piles of it that I guess we're sitting there
Speaker 3: to dry or sitting out ready to be stuffed into things.
Speaker 3: Some of it caught fire and it caused this giant conflagration. Anyway,
Speaker 3: back to colchak, investigation of one victim leads him to
Speaker 3: the victim's workplace, a university sleep laboratory, where the professor
Speaker 3: and his assistants are running an experimental treatment on a
Speaker 3: man with severe narcolepsy by keeping him in an induced coma.
Speaker 3: Colchak learns that the murder victim was an assistant in
Speaker 3: the lab who was known for her clumsiness, one time
Speaker 3: nearly waking up their test subject when she knocked over
Speaker 3: some apparatus in the room. Beyond that, other murder victims
Speaker 3: seem to have some connection to a social group of
Speaker 3: Cajun street musicians who are all originally from Louisiana Bayou
Speaker 3: Country and have moved up to the Chicago area. Kolchak
Speaker 3: learns from one of their associates the story of a
Speaker 3: bogeyman figure from Bayou folklore known as Paramoulfay or the
Speaker 3: evil father. All the Cajuns would joke to each other,
Speaker 3: you better watch out or Paramoufay is going to get you.
Speaker 3: And the stories go that Para Malfay has lived in
Speaker 3: the swamp since long before the Cajuns arrived. He's wet,
Speaker 3: he's covered in rot, and festooned with Spanish moss from
Speaker 3: head to toe. Mothers warn their children that if they
Speaker 3: get out of line, Paramoufay will squeeze the life right
Speaker 3: out of them, and the only way to beat him
Speaker 3: is to stab him with a steak from a Bayou
Speaker 3: gum tree. Kolchak gets another piece of the puzzle. A
Speaker 3: prime suspect emerges in several of the murders, a man
Speaker 3: named Languis who is known to have a grudge against
Speaker 3: several of the victims, but he has a rock solid alibi.
Speaker 3: He is the man who has been in an induced
Speaker 3: coma in the sleep laboratory, so he's being monitored twenty
Speaker 3: four to seven. There's no way he could have done
Speaker 3: the murders because he never left the lab he's been asleep. Finally,
Speaker 3: Colchak pieces it all together. He discovers the truth the
Speaker 3: murders are being carried out by the sleeping man, but
Speaker 3: not physically. He is dreaming people to death. His experimental
Speaker 3: coma is preventing him from dreaming normally. I guess the
Speaker 3: drug regimen that the scientists are giving him is doing
Speaker 3: something to his ability to dream, and so his dreams
Speaker 3: are escaping his mind and becoming a physical entity in
Speaker 3: the form of the swamp monster paramou Fay.
Speaker 2: So it's a sleep dream manifestation, kind of a.
Speaker 3: Toolpot exactly, and in the form of the bay U
Speaker 3: boogeyman covered in Spanish moss that this sleep subject grew
Speaker 3: up hearing about. So I guess presumably the monster in
Speaker 3: this story could have been anything. It could have been
Speaker 3: whatever it was that this man had in his mind.
Speaker 3: But because this is the folklore he knows, it assumes
Speaker 3: this form. It's kind of like Wes Craven's New Nightmare.
Speaker 3: You know, there's an entity that could take any form.
Speaker 3: The form it takes is the form you imagine. So
Speaker 3: it becomes Freddy Krueger.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or of course reminds one of Goser as well.
Speaker 2: Choose the form of the destructor.
Speaker 3: Yes. So Kolchak explains his theory to the police commander
Speaker 3: in the sleep lab. To mad Dog Captain mad Dog
Speaker 3: Keenan Wynn here and the professor is ordered to wake
Speaker 3: up the test subject in order to stop the mayhem.
Speaker 3: But it doesn't work. Langua will not wake up, and
Speaker 3: instead he dies. Jack thinks that, well, that's tragic, but
Speaker 3: now at least the trouble is over, until he discovers
Speaker 3: water and Spanish moss in his desk drawers. He thinks
Speaker 3: that there's like that the ceiling. The plumbing in the
Speaker 3: ceiling is leaking, and that's why there's water everywhere. But nope,
Speaker 3: Paramoulfa has been stalking around his desk in the newspaper office,
Speaker 3: and this seems to mean that Paramoufay has escaped his host.
Speaker 3: Even though the dreamer is dead, the dream lives on independently,
Speaker 3: and now the dream knows the reporter is on to him.
Speaker 3: In the end, Kolchak has to confront the monster by
Speaker 3: tracking it to the sewers and staking it with a
Speaker 3: bayou gum tree branch that he stole from the botanical garden.
Speaker 3: The sewer confrontation, I feel like, is a little anti
Speaker 3: climactic for me because you never get a great, great
Speaker 3: look at the monster. He's kind of a big shaggy
Speaker 3: vegetable sasquatch played by Richard Keel.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, the lighting's pretty good, so it's not unforgiving,
Speaker 2: but yeah, it's a bit dark. I mean, it's obviously
Speaker 2: not the most robust monster costume ever committed to film.
Speaker 3: But I love the concept of the monster, even if
Speaker 3: it's not the most impressive looking thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 3: The idea of this shaggy creature dreamed into existence and
Speaker 3: covered head to toe in Spanish moss, just a shambling
Speaker 3: mess of plant matter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's a It's an admirable plot. It
Speaker 2: all fit, all the pieces fit together, and then at
Speaker 2: the same time it feels wild and weird enough that
Speaker 2: it could have been a symbol via like an improv
Speaker 2: theater audience shout out plot elements, like all right, what
Speaker 2: do we have? Okay here, I hear rim sleep, I
Speaker 2: hear Cajun boogeyman, I hear French cuisine. Okay, let's put
Speaker 2: all this together.
Speaker 3: Now. I was really hoping to discover that Paramolfa would
Speaker 3: be a real piece of Bayou lore that I could
Speaker 3: dig into, but alas I came up short on this.
Speaker 3: All the sources I could find that looked solid at
Speaker 3: all seem to trace back to the Culchak episode. There
Speaker 3: are some websites that claim Paramol Fay is an independent
Speaker 3: folk tale, but they don't cite any sources and they're
Speaker 3: just kind of websites. So I don't know. I couldn't
Speaker 3: find anything that looks solid that says this is an
Speaker 3: actual story that goes anywhere back further than the TV show,
Speaker 3: So I can't say for certain, but I will say
Speaker 3: my best judgment is it looks to me like this
Speaker 3: creature was invented for the show, though I think it
Speaker 3: may be based on existing folk beliefs. There are many
Speaker 3: monsters of the swamp. One example that it could be
Speaker 3: based on would be like the rugaroo, sort of a
Speaker 3: Francophone American werewolf legend.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the rugaru connection is pretty solid here. Which,
Speaker 2: by the way, if you ever go to the zoo,
Speaker 2: the Audubon Zoo down in New Orleans, they have one
Speaker 2: on display. That's a lot of fun. But yeah, I
Speaker 2: feel like vay connection to that creature, like maybe that
Speaker 2: was even the original concept. And they're like, we have
Speaker 2: another episode that has a werewolf in it. Let's go
Speaker 2: a different direction here. I didn't do an exhaustive search.
Speaker 2: It seems like you went a lot deeper. But I
Speaker 2: did crack open Carol Rose's books and see if she
Speaker 2: had any mention. The only the closest thing she mentions
Speaker 2: is a different supernatural father, and that's Pierre Futard or
Speaker 2: Father Spanker, which is a French kind of uger character
Speaker 2: that's also a monstrous Christmas kind of crampist creature that's
Speaker 2: a counterpart to Father Christmas. So she doesn't listen any
Speaker 2: kind of you know, swamp Spanish moss creature. So I
Speaker 2: think you're right. I think it's an invention for the show,
Speaker 2: but a fun invention and one that feels like it
Speaker 2: could be real enough. So there you go.
Speaker 3: Yes, Now, what about the monstrous qualities of Spanish moss itself?
Speaker 3: I wanted to get a bit into this here. The
Speaker 3: funny thing about Spanish moss, most scientific sources will acknowledge
Speaker 3: this right at the top, is that it is neither
Speaker 3: Spanish nor is it moss, which is pretty funny. But
Speaker 3: I'll deal with those one at a time. So regarding moss,
Speaker 3: the species name of Spanish moss is Telanzia eucinioides, and
Speaker 3: it's taxonomized within the flowering plant family Bromeliacee, also known
Speaker 3: as the bromeliads, along with the pineapple plants. So Spanish
Speaker 3: moss is a cousin to the pineapple And I feel
Speaker 3: like you can almost see it, Like if you get
Speaker 3: up real close to Spanish moss and you look at
Speaker 3: the weird curling stalks and leaves that kind of remind
Speaker 3: me of pineapple leaves in a strange way. They're obviously
Speaker 3: much smaller, but you can almost see the family resemblance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm looking at some close up pictures right now,
Speaker 2: and yeah, I can lean into that.
Speaker 3: True mosses, of course, are more distantly related. They belong
Speaker 3: to a division of non vascular, non flowering plants called Bryophytes.
Speaker 3: Spanish is not a moss at all. It's also not Spanish.
Speaker 3: It is native to north, South and Central America, so
Speaker 3: in the United States it's only found in the south
Speaker 3: along the Gulf Coast and up the East coast to
Speaker 3: around Virginia. Chicago is no place for a Spanish moss
Speaker 3: man to thrive.
Speaker 2: Yeah. When I think Spanish moss, I always instantly think Savannah, Georgia,
Speaker 2: because we have some some beautiful examples of it there,
Speaker 2: especially in the out there in amid the tombstones.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in North America, it's going to be, especially in
Speaker 3: like coastal areas around the American South. But if it's
Speaker 3: not Spanish in origin, why is it called Spanish moss?
Speaker 3: You know a lot of things just have like a
Speaker 3: country name applied to them and they're not from that
Speaker 3: country at all, And this is one of those cases.
Speaker 3: The origin story that I've seen most attested here is
Speaker 3: that the naming convention comes from early French explorers in
Speaker 3: the Americas who thought that the plant looked like the
Speaker 3: big beer words of Spanish conquistadors, so they called the
Speaker 3: plant Spanish beard.
Speaker 2: Well, that's another reason that one might lean into creating
Speaker 2: a monster based on it, right, because it's already compared
Speaker 2: to a part of a person's look in general features.
Speaker 3: That's true. I want to get back to that in
Speaker 3: a minute now. An interesting thing that makes Spanish moss
Speaker 3: different as a plant is that it is an epiphyte,
Speaker 3: which means an organism that grows on other plants. Epi
Speaker 3: means on top of fight means plant. So it's an epiphyte.
Speaker 3: If you've ever seen it in the wild before, You've
Speaker 3: probably seen it hanging off of the limbs of trees,
Speaker 3: especially trees like live oak and cyprus. Now you might assume,
Speaker 3: just by looking at it dangling off of tree limbs
Speaker 3: the way it does, that Spanish moss is a parasite
Speaker 3: killing the tree that hosts it. And you also might
Speaker 3: remember the botanical body horror that we talked about in
Speaker 3: our episodes on mistletoe from several years back. In that case,
Speaker 3: one that is totally going Cronenberg on its host plant,
Speaker 3: that seems not to be the case with Spanish moss.
Speaker 3: A lot of sources flatly state that it is just
Speaker 3: not parasitic at all. It does no harm to the tree.
Speaker 3: According to this opinion, it would probably be best considered a
Speaker 3: commensal organism, So in this case, the idea would be
Speaker 3: Spanish moss benefits the tree is unaffected. However, it seems
Speaker 3: to me like the exact symbiotic equation is perhaps debatable,
Speaker 3: and some sources say Spanish moss might have a mild
Speaker 3: negative effect on the host tree, possibly just by blocking
Speaker 3: sun from reaching some of its lower leaves or something
Speaker 3: like that. But it's not like drilling into the host
Speaker 3: tree and sucking it, sucking nutrients out of its sucking
Speaker 3: water out of its vascular system, and stuff like that
Speaker 3: the way that mistletoe does.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 3: According to most sources, at least, Spanish moss is probably
Speaker 3: not a parasite. It's certainly not an obligate parasite, though
Speaker 3: it seems to prefer tree. I think you can see
Speaker 3: it sometimes growing on other substrates, even inanimate ones. And
Speaker 3: it does not leach sustenance directly from its host tree.
Speaker 3: So if it doesn't act like a vampire to the
Speaker 3: host tree, and it doesn't have roots going into the ground,
Speaker 3: how does it get its water and mineral nutrients which
Speaker 3: plants need. Well, it gets these things from the air.
Speaker 3: Spanish moss is an air plant, so it absorbs moisture
Speaker 3: from the air using little scales on its leaves called trichomes.
Speaker 3: So when rainfalls or when fog swirls, when mists rises
Speaker 3: off the ground, the Spanish moss will be there waiting
Speaker 3: to get its cut. And as this tangled, shaggy collection
Speaker 3: of hair like leaves, these fibers, all winding together, it
Speaker 3: does have a very uncanny appearance. It can form these
Speaker 3: ghostly drooping masses like the wispy hair of a witch,
Speaker 3: or like old bits of cobweb tangled up in the branches.
Speaker 3: But if you look close, the structure is interesting. Rob
Speaker 3: I've got some pictures for you to examine here. People
Speaker 3: at home, you might want to look up close ups
Speaker 3: of Spanish moss, especially to see the tri combes. If
Speaker 3: you see magnified images, like through a microscope, you can
Speaker 3: see all these little these little scales lifting up like
Speaker 3: flaps off of the surface of the leaves.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's very intricate.
Speaker 3: And these scales are what the plant uses to trap
Speaker 3: moisture from the air. However, that means that in order
Speaker 3: to survive, the Spanish moss does need what will at
Speaker 3: least at some point be a warm, sunny, humid environment. So,
Speaker 3: as Colchak discovered, you're not going to find it growing
Speaker 3: around Chicago, except maybe in a steamy sewer, though I
Speaker 3: guess there it wouldn't have access to the sun. But
Speaker 3: during cold and dry times it can apparently go dormant,
Speaker 3: so it can kind of like keep the water that
Speaker 3: it has stored just kind of close up and then
Speaker 3: wade out dry times, but it will eventually need favorable
Speaker 3: conditions to come back, and the tricombes are also used
Speaker 3: to trap mineral and chemical nutrients that the plant needs.
Speaker 3: Those can be dissolved in the water that it absorbs,
Speaker 3: or it can I've read also that it can sort
Speaker 3: of like just catch debris from the air. It can
Speaker 3: catch dust, bird droppings, whatever, and try to make use
Speaker 3: of that for its nutrients. Now, because Spanish moss has
Speaker 3: to survive by trapping whatever water vapor is in the
Speaker 3: air for some monstrous flavor, we can call this breathing fog.
Speaker 3: Because it has to breathe fog. You might imagine that
Speaker 3: water is precious to it. What little it can get
Speaker 3: must be preserved. But plants also need to breathe in
Speaker 3: a way in order to perform photosynthesis. In order to
Speaker 3: power their metabolism, they have to exchange gases with the atmosphere,
Speaker 3: taking in carbon dioxide and water and then using sunlight
Speaker 3: to power that chemical reaction that generates the carbohydrates for
Speaker 3: the plant, and then of course oxygen as a waste product,
Speaker 3: which is useful to us. But breathing exchanging gases with
Speaker 3: the atmosphere can be dangerous when you are living on
Speaker 3: a razor's edge of hydration when you have to get
Speaker 3: all of your water out of the air itself. And specifically,
Speaker 3: the danger comes when a plant opens the little holes
Speaker 3: in its leaves called stomata to absorb CO two from
Speaker 3: the atmosphere. When it opens up like that, it can
Speaker 3: lose moisture through those little openings, especially under a hot sun.
Speaker 3: So Spanish moss uses a specially evolved type of photosynthesis
Speaker 3: to avoid this. It's called crass Eulacian acid metabolism photosynthesis
Speaker 3: usually CAM photosynthesis for short, and this is an adaptation
Speaker 3: found in plants that survive in especially arid conditions. Under
Speaker 3: this regime photosynthesis it actually has two phases. There's a
Speaker 3: day cycle and a night cycle. So during the day,
Speaker 3: when the fronment is hot and dry, the plant keeps
Speaker 3: its stomata closed so it doesn't lose water through the
Speaker 3: holes under the burning sun. But nighttime is the right time.
Speaker 3: When the sun goes down, the stomata open up and
Speaker 3: they absorb CO two and you specially adapted structure chemical
Speaker 3: structures in their cells to fix the CO two and
Speaker 3: store it until daytime. Then when the sun comes back up,
Speaker 3: the stomata close once again, and the plant cells release
Speaker 3: the stored co two harvested during the night for photosynthesis
Speaker 3: to take place under the sunlight. So you could argue
Speaker 3: that Spanish moss feeds by night and then closes the
Speaker 3: coffin lid to digest during the cursed daylight.
Speaker 2: Ooh, very nice. That's seasonally appropriate right there.
Speaker 3: So actually, I think Spanish moss is the is the
Speaker 3: perfect thing to cover the body of a monster that
Speaker 3: roams in the nighttime.
Speaker 2: Though.
Speaker 3: You know, something that just occurred to me about the
Speaker 3: episode is how come the monster in Kolchak always attacks
Speaker 3: in the night. The guy is sleeping all day in
Speaker 3: all night, so shouldn't he sometimes be dreaming it during
Speaker 3: the daytime?
Speaker 2: Unless he's aware of how cam photosynthesis works. You know,
Speaker 2: it's a shame they didn't go into all this in
Speaker 2: the episode, because Darren McGavin could have been like, cam photosynthesis?
Speaker 2: Is it camming right now?
Speaker 4: That is what he'd say. Okay, Rob, are you ready
Speaker 4: for yours?
Speaker 2: Yeah? For mine. You know, if you've listened to the show,
Speaker 2: and if you've listened to Weird House Cinema, you probably
Speaker 2: know that I have a soft spot for the nineteen
Speaker 2: nineties Outer Limits revival. They produced a ton of episodes,
Speaker 2: more episodes of this in the original Outer Limits series.
Speaker 2: I think they were all filmed in Canada, often used
Speaker 2: very Canadian cruise and very Canadian casts, and of course
Speaker 2: often dealt with you know, it was a science fiction series,
Speaker 2: so it's more likely to involve elements that we can
Speaker 2: discuss here on the show, as opposed to shows like
Speaker 2: Night Gallery or Tales from the Crypt.
Speaker 3: What little of the nineties Outer Limits I've seen is
Speaker 3: mostly stuff that you've referred me to, but by large
Speaker 3: I'm impressed, Like, well, it's a mix of things. The
Speaker 3: episodes don't always look the most amazing, but of the
Speaker 3: stuff I've seen, typically the writing and the acting is
Speaker 3: quite solid.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Typically if you're just going in blind on a
Speaker 2: nineties Outer Limits episode, you can expect it to be
Speaker 2: well acted, overly serious, with a mix of solid practical effects.
Speaker 2: Usually there's some nice sets like this is a show
Speaker 2: that really had to think and rethink how to create
Speaker 2: a spaceship or alien hallway multiple times per season, and
Speaker 2: they generally did a pretty good job. The digital effects, though,
Speaker 2: ye are generally not that great to look gap.
Speaker 3: I'm going to say regarding the sets, it has a quality.
Speaker 3: I don't know exactly what this is I'm noticing, but
Speaker 3: it looks like other TV shows made in Canada in
Speaker 3: the nineties. Like the sets remind me of the sets
Speaker 3: from Are You Afraid of the Dark? The Nickelodeon horror
Speaker 3: TV show with you Know shot in Canada in the nineties.
Speaker 3: A lot of things shot in Canada in the nineties
Speaker 3: look like this to me. Film nerds out there, tell
Speaker 3: me what is it? I'm noticing? What is that nineties
Speaker 3: Canada look?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And if memory serves I may be wrong in this.
Speaker 2: I think we filmed all these in and also around Toronto.
Speaker 2: So you know, anytime you need like an urban environment,
Speaker 2: you need some skyscrapers or what have you, there's a
Speaker 2: certain mix of buildings that are going to be considered
Speaker 2: for those shots. But an you're right, yeah, I love
Speaker 2: the nineties Outer Limits. The lesser episodes are often going
Speaker 2: to have a weaker message or more ham fisted message,
Speaker 2: and the opening and closing narration can also be a
Speaker 2: bit hammy, as it tries to like compose a really
Speaker 2: grandiose idea for this episode that is sometimes present and
Speaker 2: sometimes feels kind of tacked on.
Speaker 3: I agree. I thought with this episode in particular, it
Speaker 3: might have been better without any of the narration, because
Speaker 3: I feel like the narration just tried to put an
Speaker 3: overly simplistic spin on what was actually a morally complex episode.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Like, I feel like the ending to this one,
Speaker 2: they nailed the landing, there's no need to say, and
Speaker 2: the plane landed successfully, and like, no, we just watched it.
Speaker 2: It just didn't. So the episode that I selected is
Speaker 2: from the seventh season of The Outer Limits. I believe
Speaker 2: this is actually from two thousand and one. It is
Speaker 2: titled Think like a Dinosaur.
Speaker 3: You might really expect the episodes going in a different
Speaker 3: direction than it does based on that title.
Speaker 2: Yeah you think you think, I don't know, walk like
Speaker 2: an Egyptian or I don't know, do the Dinosaur'll get
Speaker 2: into what the title means. But it's based on the
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety six Hugo winning novelette of the same name
Speaker 2: by James Patrick Kelly. It was directed by Jorge Montesi
Speaker 2: and it stars Enrico Colintoni. This is an actor, by
Speaker 2: the way, who played Veronica Mar's dad on Veronica Mars
Speaker 2: and he also played the character of mathisar in Galaxy Quest.
Speaker 2: It also stars Linnea Sharples.
Speaker 3: I would say Enrico Colantoni is especially good in this
Speaker 3: I've liked him in everything I've seen him, and you know,
Speaker 3: he's great and Veronica Mars and all that, but he
Speaker 3: really is the heart of this episode and his performance
Speaker 3: holds it down.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, maybe not on the same level as holding
Speaker 2: it together as as Darren mcavan, but still solid, solid
Speaker 2: performance that grounds the episode. Oh. I should also point
Speaker 2: out if you want to watch this episode, lucky you,
Speaker 2: because if you get Prime, this show is back on Prime.
Speaker 2: It was on Prime like early in the pandemic, and
Speaker 2: I watched a number of episodes like virtually with some friends.
Speaker 2: We would do it every Monday night, and then it
Speaker 2: vanished and we had to like watch it via like
Speaker 2: scrambled versions on Daily Motion I think, and like sometimes
Speaker 2: where they had it was completely the footage was backwards
Speaker 2: or mirrored so that all the text was weird I think,
Speaker 2: so that like it couldn't be detected by bots or
Speaker 2: something I don't know, and the quality was suspect. But
Speaker 2: now it's back on Prime. The quality is as good
Speaker 2: as it's going to get for the nineties outer limits,
Speaker 2: maybe even too good considering some of the effects.
Speaker 3: Okay, tell us the plot, all.
Speaker 2: Right, So what we have here is a good old
Speaker 2: fashioned teleportation horror yarn, one of my favorite sub subgenres
Speaker 2: of horror. So in the story, this is what the
Speaker 2: scenario in the future a technologically advanced reptilian alien species
Speaker 2: called the Hanen, but dubbed dinos by humans. They facilitate
Speaker 2: a form of teleportation that has allowed human beings to
Speaker 2: travel to new worlds and explore the wider waters of
Speaker 2: the galaxy. Now, the process here is very clinical, presented
Speaker 2: as something it can do undergoing anesthesia, and many humans
Speaker 2: seem to feel a great deal of anxiety about the process,
Speaker 2: anxiety that the emotionless pacifist Dinos do not share. So
Speaker 2: the Dinos carry out most of the process, but a
Speaker 2: human supervisor has to hit the final switch, because the
Speaker 2: system works by scanning a comatose individual at point A,
Speaker 2: sending the information of that individual to point B, where
Speaker 2: the machine over there recreates an exact duplicate of them,
Speaker 2: and at this point there are two of the individual
Speaker 2: with identical bodies and identical brains, identical memories. It then
Speaker 2: falls to the human supervisor at point A to hit
Speaker 2: the switch that incinerates the comatose individual, the original individual,
Speaker 2: the one who is doing the quote unquote traveling. This
Speaker 2: termination of the original individual at point A is called
Speaker 2: balancing the equation.
Speaker 3: Now, I should note that they explain the experience of
Speaker 3: the what they call the jumper in this story as
Speaker 3: as being continuous. So they say that you close your
Speaker 3: eyes here at the jumping station and then you open
Speaker 3: them on this wonderful planet that you're being transported to,
Speaker 3: so that they suggest that it's just going to be
Speaker 3: like being here and then being there.
Speaker 2: Right, But as we'll see, like deep down, everybody knows
Speaker 2: what this means, and you know, I should point out
Speaker 2: and we'll get into this more in a bit, but
Speaker 2: I mentioned anesthesia. Anesthesia seems to be like a common
Speaker 2: reference point or starting point for fantastic interpretations of this,
Speaker 2: and it's also involved in sort of the wider philosophical
Speaker 2: contemplation here. You know, what does it mean when my
Speaker 2: consciousness changes? What does it mean when my consciousness seems
Speaker 2: to cease for an amount of time? You know, it's
Speaker 2: that weird experience of suddenly, oh, whatever happened happened, and
Speaker 2: I'm suddenly awake again after the fact. I'm conscious again
Speaker 2: after the fact. And so you see this reflected in
Speaker 2: other treatments of teleportation, in say Stephen King's The Jaunt,
Speaker 2: or also you see it referenced in like cryo sleep
Speaker 2: scenarios and other science fiction. Yeah, so anyway, that's the setup,
Speaker 2: the sort of technological world building setup for the episode.
Speaker 2: The plot concerns essentially three characters. You have Enrico Colintoni's
Speaker 2: Michael Burr. He's the human supervisor at the lunar jump station.
Speaker 2: He's the one who hits that incineration switch. Then you
Speaker 2: have LINEA. Sharple's Kamala Shastri it is pronounced Kamala in
Speaker 2: this episode, who has arrived at the lunar station to
Speaker 2: jump to a disc world where she's going to study
Speaker 2: an alien civilization. And then you have David James Lewis
Speaker 2: playing this character Will Carson, who it takes a little
Speaker 2: bit to figure out what he's there for, but he's
Speaker 2: a replacement tech who is actually a psychological observer sent
Speaker 2: by the company to make sure that Burr can handle
Speaker 2: the job.
Speaker 3: Because a lot is writing on Burr doing his job correctly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because the Dinos are like, this is great, this
Speaker 2: is this technology is wonderful. It's going to change everything
Speaker 2: you do. It's going to ensure the long term survival
Speaker 2: of the human race. But you've got to prove to
Speaker 2: us that you're able to handle this. The Dinos refer
Speaker 2: to humans as weepies because they see them as is
Speaker 2: way too emotional. They make a big deal out of
Speaker 2: this whole destroy yourself at point A to travel to
Speaker 2: point B, and they do not want to continue with
Speaker 2: it if humans cannot handle it. So in this scenario again,
Speaker 2: Kamala Shastri traveling to a distant point in the galaxy
Speaker 2: or whatever. It seems like everything is going to going
Speaker 2: as plan. She's a little nervous, but she's up for it.
Speaker 2: But then during the procedure, the transmission is interrupted. Reconstitution
Speaker 2: at point B cannot be confirmed, so the jumper at
Speaker 2: point A cannot be incinerated. So Kamala wakes up screaming
Speaker 2: still at point A, and essentially we're unsure if her
Speaker 2: double has awoken at point B and she is traumatized
Speaker 2: by the pain and terror she felt in the jump chamber,
Speaker 2: and Burr is there he tries to reassure and you know,
Speaker 2: says some kind words, is very compassionate, but she's like,
Speaker 2: I don't think I can go through it again, and
Speaker 2: he assures her, you don't have to, you know, don't
Speaker 2: don't worry. You don't have to worry about it. Then
Speaker 2: if you don't want to give it a second try.
Speaker 2: This is entirely voluntary. But at this point even Burr's
Speaker 2: commitment to teleportation technology is put to a severe test
Speaker 2: when the Dynos confirm that Kamala has arrived at Point B.
Speaker 2: They tell him and Carson insists as well that now
Speaker 2: he has to balance the equation by killing the original Kamala.
Speaker 2: So he struggles with the ethics of this, but goes
Speaker 2: forward with it by convincing her to simply go through
Speaker 2: with the teleportation. It's like, you've got to get back
Speaker 2: in there. You've got to continue your mission, with the
Speaker 2: idea of being that she won't be scanned and transmitted
Speaker 2: this time. She doesn't know this. She'll just be incinerated
Speaker 2: and that will balance the equation. That will only be
Speaker 2: one Kamala. And she's on this distant planet exploring this
Speaker 2: new civilization, and at this point he almost pulls it off,
Speaker 2: but she gets cold feet again and the truth comes out,
Speaker 2: and so now Burr is under even more pressure to
Speaker 2: balance the equation, and there is no way around the
Speaker 2: fact that he's contemplating just cold blooded murder and being
Speaker 2: asked to kill her, and she knows that that is
Speaker 2: the scenario as well. And what's at stake here is
Speaker 2: like the continuation, like you said, of the entire teleportation program,
Speaker 2: the advancement in continuing survival of the human species. So
Speaker 2: a lot of pressure is put on him at this moment.
Speaker 3: There's a background scenario that they discussed, which is that
Speaker 3: humans have destroyed the environment of Earth, that Earth is
Speaker 3: close to uninhabitable at this point. Humans have polluted the
Speaker 3: environment so much, and that in order to have a
Speaker 3: chance at survival, they're going to have to be able
Speaker 3: to teleport en mass to these unspoiled worlds. But the
Speaker 3: Han and like you said, they're unwilling to let humans
Speaker 3: do this unless they prove that they can handle the
Speaker 3: technology that they can quote balance the equation.
Speaker 2: Now, at this point, my summary is not going to
Speaker 2: really do it. It's going to sound a lot more
Speaker 2: rushed because this is a part of the episode that
Speaker 2: I think really depends heavily on the performances, but this
Speaker 2: is what happens. We see Berg grab a cool looking
Speaker 2: sci fi gun from a safe, something that you might
Speaker 2: see in time Coop or something, and we think he's
Speaker 2: going to go killer at this point, but when he
Speaker 2: runs runs into her in the complex, he tells her
Speaker 2: that he's arranging to have her smuggled safely back to
Speaker 2: Earth on a routine shuttle, so that seems to be
Speaker 2: in motion, and then he's confronted by Carson and he
Speaker 2: knocks Carson out, So yeah, it seems like, all right,
Speaker 2: he's gone rogue. He's doing the moral right thing here
Speaker 2: for the individual. Maybe not for the greater good, but
Speaker 2: for the individual. And then he leads her to an
Speaker 2: air lock. But then he has this change of heart.
Speaker 2: We see flashes back to this background information about him
Speaker 2: having lost his family, lost his wife, and he has
Speaker 2: a change of heart and instead he blasts her out
Speaker 2: the air lock. Clearly this was not an easy choice
Speaker 2: for him to make. He's just emotionally destroyed by this.
Speaker 2: Two years later we see him once more. He's still
Speaker 2: apparently the supervisor there at the Lunar Teleportation station and
Speaker 2: the teleporter is being used and it's receiving somebody who
Speaker 2: is it, Well, it's come on on her return to
Speaker 2: the lunar station from her studies on that distant planet,
Speaker 2: and she greets him warmly, telling him, Hey, you were
Speaker 2: my jump supervisor. Don't you remember remember me? You were
Speaker 2: so nice to me, you were so comforting, And he
Speaker 2: says flat late, no, that was somebody else.
Speaker 3: And then the narrator comes in with some I think
Speaker 3: over overly simplified, kind of hammy summary of everything we
Speaker 3: just saw.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. When I was watching these episodes with with
Speaker 2: some with some friends, we would always make fun of
Speaker 2: the ending narration, especially if the episode was a bit
Speaker 2: bad or confusing, because you knew he'd come in and
Speaker 2: try and wrap it up with a tight little boat.
Speaker 3: Now, I think there are a lot of really interesting
Speaker 3: things about this episode, and it raises a lot of
Speaker 3: the great questions about about teleportation as a technology, if
Speaker 3: you were to imagine something like it actually existed. Some
Speaker 3: of the same questions applied to the idea of like
Speaker 3: mind uploading or you know, transferral conciousness to a machine
Speaker 3: substrate or something like that. I think one of the
Speaker 3: really interesting things in this episode is that the essential
Speaker 3: thing that Burr has to do has not changed. In
Speaker 3: both cases. He is supposed to destroy the body of
Speaker 3: the jumper at the origin point while they while they
Speaker 3: go on living at the destination point. The only thing
Speaker 3: that has changed is that in this scenario, the jumper
Speaker 3: at the departure point has had time to wake up
Speaker 3: and become conscious of the fact that they're still here.
Speaker 3: But otherwise it's the same. So there's something where like,
Speaker 3: it doesn't feel like murder if they knew what was
Speaker 3: going to happen going in and they're destroyed instantaneously at
Speaker 3: the departure point. As long you know they understand, they
Speaker 3: get to live on at the destination But something about
Speaker 3: the fact that she has had several seconds of being
Speaker 3: awake now and she's like, well, now that I'm here,
Speaker 3: I don't want to die at this place. That changes
Speaker 3: the equation. And I think that's interesting because it plays
Speaker 3: with our intuitions about what would or would not be
Speaker 3: murder in a strange scenario like this.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah, it's just this level of it certainly reminds
Speaker 2: one of various sort of moral thought experiments where it's like, okay,
Speaker 2: you're going to flip the switch and you're going to
Speaker 2: save the human race. But somebody that you don't really
Speaker 2: see or know in another room's going to die. And
Speaker 2: then if they're okay with that, well, okay, here's a
Speaker 2: different version of the scenario, etc.
Speaker 3: Though I guess it also raises these some questions about
Speaker 3: like where is consciousness located and is it possible for
Speaker 3: consciousness to be continuously transferred if that concept even makes sense,
Speaker 3: because again, the jumpers talk about the idea that well,
Speaker 3: they don't mind that their body is going to be
Speaker 3: destroyed at the departure point because they're just going to
Speaker 3: close their eyes and wake up on this other planet.
Speaker 3: They seem to have confidence that their consciousness will con
Speaker 3: tinue in some way. But what does that mean?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, in this we can't help but
Speaker 2: think of the think in the anesthesia example, you know,
Speaker 2: and really like sort of like just everyday ideas of like, well,
Speaker 2: am I the same person when I wake up in
Speaker 2: the morning, that sort of thing, you know. Really yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: comparisons between sleep and death that, as we've discussed in
Speaker 2: the show, go you know, back into the earliest times
Speaker 2: during which humans were able to contemplate these things, and
Speaker 2: and that brings us, I think, to the dinosaurs, the dinos,
Speaker 2: the haunins, because that's another element of the plot here
Speaker 2: that we don't you kind of have to come back
Speaker 2: and think about it more yourself, because they don't get
Speaker 2: into it as much, at least in the episode. Is like,
Speaker 2: what is the thought process of these of these dinos
Speaker 2: who are again presented as being like dinosaur creatures, but
Speaker 2: they're not. They're not depicted as being like completely quote
Speaker 2: unquote cold blooded, Like they're not cruel, They're just calculates,
Speaker 2: and it seems like they have made the decision and
Speaker 2: don't seem to put a lot of effort into it
Speaker 2: really that hey, you know, when one teleports, one is
Speaker 2: going to destroy a version of themselves and recreate a
Speaker 2: new one to carry out a particular task or goal, etc.
Speaker 2: And they don't think it's a big deal. And so
Speaker 2: I was thinking a little bit like, well, what would
Speaker 2: that mean, where does that come from? How much of
Speaker 2: that would be cultural? Because you can imagine a scenario
Speaker 2: even with humans where if they're regularly undergoing this kind
Speaker 2: of teleportation, you would maybe have a lot of cultural
Speaker 2: ideas surrounding it, maybe even religious ideas surrounding it about
Speaker 2: the nature of the self and the soul and how
Speaker 2: that has continued through this technological leap. But also maybe
Speaker 2: there's something about the Hannans that, you know, maybe they're
Speaker 2: more use social where the sacrifice doesn't mean as much
Speaker 2: because the individual doesn't mean as much, and that's just
Speaker 2: part of their just genetic program.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. They are portrayed as mostly
Speaker 3: benevolent but just not swayed by emotional considerations, and so
Speaker 3: I think their point of view is that they're not
Speaker 3: harming the jumper by killing them here because they're already
Speaker 3: alive somewhere else. So it doesn't matter what the jumper
Speaker 3: at the destination, at the departure point actually wants, Like
Speaker 3: if they wake up and say, no, don't kill me,
Speaker 3: it's like that is just not of importance. You know,
Speaker 3: they're fine, They're somewhere else now, and so this is
Speaker 3: just sort of like a mistake to be cleaned up.
Speaker 3: Whereas the human point of view is, oh, now there's
Speaker 3: a person in front of me who wants to live,
Speaker 3: and that that is extremely important, like the fact that
Speaker 3: this person is conscious and they want to live, gives
Speaker 3: them just as much right to live as the person
Speaker 3: at the destination point, and the dinosaurs don't see it
Speaker 3: that way. They're like, well, no, this is the way
Speaker 3: it works, and you know, she as long as she's fine.
Speaker 3: They're what, the one that's here doesn't matter anymore.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't. Again, they don't understand it. They kind
Speaker 2: of mock the human emotion in this respect, calling us wheepies.
Speaker 2: You can imagine memes they might create, like, oh no,
Speaker 2: a weepee accidentally made two sandwiches and now it's sad,
Speaker 2: that sort of thing. But I should also mention they
Speaker 2: made the strange choice in this episode to have the
Speaker 2: Hanens speak in an almost unintelligible monster voice. Yes. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like though the monster the dino will be talking, you
Speaker 2: just can't understand it. You have to run it back
Speaker 2: to figure out what it's squawking about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, jump the chain back. It's kind of crypt.
Speaker 2: Keeper, Yeah, like crypt Keeper, sketchy, but but harder to understand.
Speaker 3: Well, Also, they established that they're getting the humans are
Speaker 3: hearing the Hanen through a real time translation device, so
Speaker 3: it's like translating their sort of squawks and language into English.
Speaker 3: For the jump operators. But hold on a second, why
Speaker 3: does it make them sound like the crypt Keeper. If
Speaker 3: it's doing that anyway, shouldn't the machine just give them
Speaker 3: the kind of the serie voice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're like, it's it's set to Cryptkeeper. We don't
Speaker 2: know how to change it back to Angela Lansbury. This
Speaker 2: is just what we have to use now. Of course,
Speaker 2: the central treatment of the whole episode has to do
Speaker 2: with this, this idea of teleportation, the recreation of the
Speaker 2: self and and and the I guess it's not even
Speaker 2: really a question about like the continuation of the soul
Speaker 2: like it at Herd. Here it seems to be clear
Speaker 2: that someone is dying and then a new person is
Speaker 2: being created. And I really wasn't aware of this until
Speaker 2: I started researching this episode. But it turns out this
Speaker 2: entire central premise lines up with the work of Derek Parfitt,
Speaker 2: a British philosopher who specialized in personal identity, among other subjects.
Speaker 3: Parfit's come up on the show before. We may have
Speaker 3: talked about him, Was it in our episode on astronomical suffering?
Speaker 2: Maybe? I think so. Yeah. He he wrote about a
Speaker 2: number of topics, so it's not like he's not like
Speaker 2: a one idea guy, and he's very influential. So he
Speaker 2: lived nineteen forty two through twenty seventeen, and in his
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty seven book Reasons and Persons, he explores exactly
Speaker 2: this scenario. And I'm unsure if Kelly, the author of
Speaker 2: Think Like a Ninosaur, based his fiction on this, or if,
Speaker 2: as with swamp Thing and swamp Man, we have an
Speaker 2: uncertain case with a possibility of independent development in different fields.
Speaker 3: Swamp Man being another philosophical thought experiment about the idea
Speaker 3: that like, if your body was destroyed by lightning and
Speaker 3: then recreated out of different molecules by a lightning strike
Speaker 3: and a swamp like, what relation would that other you
Speaker 3: have to the original?
Speaker 1: You?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: So again Parfitt's book Reasons in Persons, in chapter ten
Speaker 2: what we Believe Ourselves to Be, he presents a thought
Speaker 2: experiment in which he is commuting to work on Mars
Speaker 2: via a machine called a tele transporter, in which the
Speaker 2: subject loses consciousness and wakes up a moment later, or
Speaker 2: seems to wake up a moment later at their destination.
Speaker 2: In reality, however, it's explained, really an hour takes an
Speaker 2: hour passes in between losing consciousness and reawakening. The original
Speaker 2: body is scanned, recorded in every detail, and destroyed. Traveling
Speaker 2: at light speed, the information takes three minutes to reach Mars,
Speaker 2: and then, using that information that had been sent, the
Speaker 2: replicator machine on Mars creates a new brain and a
Speaker 2: new body out of new matter. So then Parfitt goes
Speaker 2: on to layout a scenario that involves interruption and accidental
Speaker 2: duplication without destruction of the original. The added wrinkle is
Speaker 2: that while the machine failed to destroy the original body
Speaker 2: and brain, it also inflicted a heart condition that will
Speaker 2: be fatal in like forty days. Also in the thought experiment,
Speaker 2: the scanning is supposed to destroy the individual as part
Speaker 2: of the process. It's not like there's this switch that
Speaker 2: you hit for incineration. It's like all part of the process.
Speaker 3: So it's not a separate decision that an operator has to.
Speaker 2: Make right, right, And it makes more sense, I guess.
Speaker 2: In the fictional treatment, he writes quote simple teletransportation as
Speaker 2: just described is a common feature in science fiction, and
Speaker 2: it is believed by some readers of this fiction merely
Speaker 2: to be the fastest way of traveling. They believe that
Speaker 2: my replica would be me. Other science fiction readers and
Speaker 2: some of the characters in this fiction take a different view.
Speaker 2: They believe that when I press the green button, I die.
Speaker 2: My replica is someone else who has been made to
Speaker 2: be exactly like me. So he uses the thought experiment
Speaker 2: to discuss what he calls two kinds of sameness, qualitative
Speaker 2: identa and numerical identity. So the scanner and replicator produce
Speaker 2: a double that is qualitatively identical but not numerically identical.
Speaker 2: In other words, the two are otherwise the same, but
Speaker 2: they are not literally the same person in a physical sense. Again,
Speaker 2: like new matter was used to make, there's no physical
Speaker 2: connection between these two beings.
Speaker 3: It's kind of like how you can have two copies
Speaker 3: of the same book that are at the same time
Speaker 3: the same book, but they're also two different objects.
Speaker 2: Right. Likewise, though, he points out that numerically identical individuals
Speaker 2: can also become qualitatively different. Quote though our chief concern
Speaker 2: is our numerical identity. Psychological changes matter. Indeed, on one view,
Speaker 2: certain kinds of qualitative change destroy numerical identity. If certain
Speaker 2: things happen to me, the truth might not be that
Speaker 2: I become a very different person. The truth might be
Speaker 2: that I cease to exist, that the resulting person is
Speaker 2: someone else.
Speaker 3: And in fact, the strange thing is that our bodies
Speaker 3: and minds are constantly undergoing physical change, and yet we
Speaker 3: have the conscious experience of it seeming to be that
Speaker 3: life is continuous. It just feels like you were the
Speaker 3: same person you have been your whole life, but physically
Speaker 3: you're always changing.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, physically at a cellular level, things are changing
Speaker 2: where we're not exactly the same matter that we were
Speaker 2: years back, and then major events, as he's pointing out,
Speaker 2: have a huge impact on us. The episode closes with
Speaker 2: this idea as well, which I thought was right, thought
Speaker 2: was really nice. The Kamala, who is beamed back to
Speaker 2: the lunar base is one numerically different. This is the
Speaker 2: third version of her in the story that we don't see,
Speaker 2: the second, the one that's on that other planet. This
Speaker 2: is all due of course to the scanner destroyer replicator technology,
Speaker 2: but she also so seems to be qualitatively different as
Speaker 2: her as her experienced studying an alien civilization has greatly
Speaker 2: impacted her. There's even a new tattoo on her and
Speaker 2: a different hairstyle to sort of drive this home visually.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, Burr is numerically identical to the man she knew before,
Speaker 2: that she met before, but it seems that he is
Speaker 2: qualitatively different as well, forever changed by the horrendous series
Speaker 2: of events that he went through, namely the murder he
Speaker 2: committed to keep the teleportation machines running. And and of
Speaker 2: course she is completely oblivious to this because the version
Speaker 2: of Kamala that she is did not witness any of
Speaker 2: this and was not the one murdered. And so that
Speaker 2: final line just hits nicely. He's like, no, that was
Speaker 2: someone else, Like that was a that was a different
Speaker 2: me before I was changed by what happened.
Speaker 3: I think this raises another interesting philosophical question, kind of
Speaker 3: a moral philosophical question, which is, imagine that the error
Speaker 3: scenario had never happened. You know, you never had the
Speaker 3: scene where he has to hunt down a jumper with
Speaker 3: a gun and blow them out of the airlock. It like,
Speaker 3: murder them in a very explicit way, and he was
Speaker 3: still just pressing the button to incinerate the body. Is
Speaker 3: there anything morally wrong going on there? If we assume
Speaker 3: that everything that the characters assume is true, So assume
Speaker 3: that it is basically painless. That the conscious experience of
Speaker 3: the person undergoing it is that they close their eyes
Speaker 3: here and they wake up at the destination point. There's
Speaker 3: not actually like a person to suffer or to be
Speaker 3: denied life or whatever that there's just a continuous conscious
Speaker 3: experience and all of that. Is there anything morally wrong
Speaker 3: with what you're doing by pressing the button to incinerate
Speaker 3: the person at the departure point? I don't know. I
Speaker 3: think that's a really interesting question to ask, because you
Speaker 3: could say, even if nobody is so, and the person
Speaker 3: who's jumping gets to continue to live, so in whatever
Speaker 3: normal way we would think about it, they're not being murdered,
Speaker 3: you'd still have to wonder if there is some kind
Speaker 3: of subtle moral violence going on just by the repeated
Speaker 3: pressing of a button to destroy a human body like that, Like,
Speaker 3: is that conditioning the person who has to do the
Speaker 3: button pushing in a way that degrades them morally in
Speaker 3: some way?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, it's a rich field for thought here, And
Speaker 2: to be clear, Parfitt goes into a great more detail
Speaker 2: in the book, and of course uses this thought experiment
Speaker 2: as a leaping off point to discuss identity and self
Speaker 2: at great length though it's all it's all very, very
Speaker 2: readable and absorbable, so I do recommend picking that up.
Speaker 2: And I did not not have time to seek out
Speaker 2: and read the original novel Lette Think like a Dinosaur.
Speaker 2: But I understand, of course it is quite good as well,
Speaker 2: and I'd be interested to hear from anyone out there
Speaker 2: who has read it and can compare it to the
Speaker 2: outer limits adaptation. And of course yeah, in terms of
Speaker 2: human consciousness and identity. You know, we could easily go
Speaker 2: on and on here, but I thought I might close out.
Speaker 2: I was reminded of a brief mention from an article
Speaker 2: that we reference in our shadow episodes? Do we actually
Speaker 2: see shadows? On Jay Store Daily? By Roy Sorensen, He
Speaker 2: writes the optics of the Chinese moists focused on shadows
Speaker 2: rather than light. They defend the literal truth of Chiangxu's aphromism,
Speaker 2: the shadow of a flying bird never moves, for shadows
Speaker 2: last only an instant. The Chinese dialectician Kung Sun Lung
Speaker 2: three twenty five through two point fifty PCE appears to
Speaker 2: have extended the objection to the bird. At each moment
Speaker 2: the bird is where it is, and so is not
Speaker 2: traveling since the bird is always at rest, the bird
Speaker 2: no more moves than its shadow.
Speaker 3: I guess to try to map that onto our questions
Speaker 3: about teleportation and human consciousness. You know, would consciousness survive
Speaker 3: the body being destroyed in one place and recreated exactly
Speaker 3: in another.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: You could maybe take the view that consciousness is not
Speaker 3: continuous anyway, that that is merely an illusion and there
Speaker 3: are only instants of consciousness that are that are mistakenly
Speaker 3: thinking that something is is traceable from one moment to
Speaker 3: the next, and in fact there is not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, I don't know.
Speaker 3: If I buy that, but that's an interesting way of
Speaker 3: seeing it.
Speaker 2: Well that I guess that's one of the great things
Speaker 2: about this about it, about this particular quandary, but also
Speaker 2: questions about consciousness in general, is that there's I mean,
Speaker 2: I guess there's some wrong answers out there, but you
Speaker 2: can generalize and say there are no wrong answers like this.
Speaker 2: These are all just thought experiments and ideas that that
Speaker 2: tease at the reality and make us sort of turn
Speaker 2: our perceptions on their head and reconsider what they are
Speaker 2: and what we are.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I think a lot of the thought experiments
Speaker 3: about consciousness. They don't necessarily provide evidence to help us
Speaker 3: discover the true nature and origin of consciousness. They don't
Speaker 3: always help us discover what consciousness really objectively is, but
Speaker 3: they do help us better understand our intuitions about consciousness,
Speaker 3: which are often quite vague, and these thought experiments can
Speaker 3: make them clearer. Yeah. Anyway, good Outer Limits episode.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I recommend checking out. It's one of my favorites.
Speaker 2: It's one of my wife's favorites. I think she she'd
Speaker 2: seen it before our I did years ago, and she
Speaker 2: always brings it up as an episode worth watching. So
Speaker 2: I would agree not all of the Outer Limits episodes
Speaker 2: are necessarily worth watching. Again, there are some weak ones,
Speaker 2: but this one's a strong one, all right. And on
Speaker 2: that note, we're going to go ahead and close up
Speaker 2: Anthology of Horror volume nine. Thanks for listening, joining us
Speaker 2: on this quest, and we'd love to hear from everyone
Speaker 2: out there. If you have thoughts about the episodes in
Speaker 2: particular or the show's in particular that we discussed here,
Speaker 2: write in. And if you have thoughts about the subject
Speaker 2: matter that we discussed about consciousness and the self about
Speaker 2: Spanish Moss and different interpretations of it right in we
Speaker 2: would love to hear from you. Just a reminder that
Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow Your Mind as a science podcast with
Speaker 2: core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have a listener
Speaker 2: mail episode on Mondays. We have a short form Monster
Speaker 2: Factor Artifact episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set
Speaker 2: aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
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Speaker 3: O Skull of Skulls Pauseway. If you would like to
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