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