Yes, the Halloween tradition continues as Robert and Joe dive into the rich history of TV horror and sci-fi anthology shows to focus on STBYM topics that might not otherwise make the show. In this installment, they spin some science and contemplation out of the 2001 episode of “The Outer Limits” titled “Think Like a Dinosaur” and the 1974 episode of “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” titled “The Spanish Moss Murders.”
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This is Ruthless Rob Lamb.
And this is corrosive Joseph McCormick and Happy Halloween.
That's right. We're continuing our Halloween tradition this year, or it's been our Halloween tradition for several years now. Anthology of Horror. This is where we take We each take an episode of a TV anthology series or something related to this tradition, such as in the case of Joe's selection this year, kind of like a Monster of the Week episode, which which still close enough for our work, and then we spend some science or contemplation out of it. Before we switched over and started doing horror and sci fi anthologies, we did the same treatment with creepy pastas in the past. So that's that's what we do in this series. Take a little horror, a little sci fi, and spin it out, squeeze it out, and see what kind of science we can get out of it. However, I think this is likely the final installment of Anthology of Horror. Here on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and mainly because ever since we started doing weird House Cinema. The premise has felt like a little bit redundant, like we get to talk about a weird movie every week. So maybe, at least in my case, it feels a little less special to have this Horror Anthology episode we do every year. And we've also covered a lot of great selections already, So I don't know if listeners out there have strong feelings about this right in, and we will consider now.
I know you suggested that this would be Anthology of Horror the final Chapter, but if we're going by Friday the thirteenth sequel naming conventions, that would have actually been the fourth Anthology of Horror episode we did, which was many years ago. Now this is the ninth, is that correct? Which would that would put us in Jason Goes to Hell territory? So this really should be Anthology of Horror Part nine, Robin Joe go to Hell.
Okay, well, hopefully we can deliver Jason Goes to Hell quality level or above in this episode. All right, Joe, what do you have for us? I teased it a little bit, but what is your selection for this year?
Okay, so, not too long ago, on some episode or other, it came up that I had never seen any of the classic American TV series Colchak The Nightstalker, which was originally broadcast on ABC in nineteen seventy four. I think it ran seventy four to seventy five, only for one season, though I think there are around twenty episodes or so. And my ignorance of this show was so deep that I didn't even realize it had a supernatural element. I thought, I guess this was just based on the name. I thought it was some kind of gritty crime show. I think because I heard night Stalker, I thought about that serial killer and I was like, Okay, it's like a serial killer show. But no, no, no, it's so much more delightful than that. This show is essentially a precursor to The X Files, where instead of FBI agents Malter and Scully, we have a fast talking, rascally Chicago newspaper reporter named Carl Coolchak played by Darren McGavin, whom I knew primarily as the dad, the guy who gets his son a BB gun in a Christmas story.
Well, and of course that's a tremendous role by Darren McGavin there as well, So if you only know him for one role, Like, that's a good one to know him from. You know, it was in tons of stuff. But yeah, he's great in this. As I'll mention in a bit, I think he's he's really holding the show up on his shoulders.
Now. I think any episode of Colchak The night Stalker would count as an anthology entry because it had a monster of the Week format. In each new kper Kolchak would begin by reporting on some weird crime, usually a murder that baffles the narrow minded police detectives. Ah, you know, the victim's teeth were all painted blue? What could this mean? And eventually we discover it means that the deaths were caused by a shape shifting wear tiger or something.
Yeah, the plot that you encounter in these episodes, it's going to be very formulaic. I think I watched a bunch of these back in the nineties on either sci Fi or any probably sci Fi, and I remember liking it. One thing I also strongly remember about it is it being kind of a cross generational hit. I have vague memories that like, both my dad and my granddad would be like cool with this show being on, because you know, kids in the nineties, we wanted to watch Monsters, or I wanted to watch Monsters anyway. But the rest of the show has a very traditional episodic gum shoe feel to it. You know, it feels very classic television in that regard. It's very much a product of its age, but with this strain supernatural twist to it. And then at the center of this you have just an incredibly fun, fast talking and charismatic performance by Darren McGavin, and you just can't help but love him. You can't help but follow him, and you want to see what he does next. And it doesn't matter if you're here for the monsters or you didn't know monsters were going to occur, You're gonna stick around and see where this goes.
Yes, the force of the main character's personality is really the anchor of the show. And now I haven't seen the whole series. I've only seen this one episode now and then read about some others, but I'm going to be watching more. I think it is interesting to compare the dynamics of Kolchak to the show that it is explicitly acknowledged to have inspired The X Files. I know, I think Chris Carter has said Coulchak was an inspiration on the X Files. So the X Files, the investigations there are that the tone of them is largely based on the tension between Molder the believer and Scully the skeptic, whereas in Colchak there's just one investigator, so there are not two characters to bounce ideas off each other and act as foils for one another. It all has to be there inside Darren McGavin, and there is a similar tension within him, but it's different. It's not like part of him is an idealistic true believer who just wants aliens to be real, and another part is ruthlessly seeking out hard evidence instead. I think the tension is between Coolchak's personality versus his observations. So it seems to me that the tension is that Kolchak is naturally a wily, sardonic, no nonsense personality. He talks like a just the facts kind of newsman, and he makes wry jokes about anything that sounds unusual, not just monsters, but unfamiliar science concepts, like he makes jokes about the idea of rim sleep. You know, there's like a guy in this episode, who's undergoing rim sleep a scientist says, and he's like, oh, is he remming right now? And there's like an inflection on that that makes it sound funny. And then he has the same kind of jokes about anything that's outside of a very grounded, working class kind of scope of life. So he makes jokes about the impossibility of pronouncing the scientific names of plants, or about French food items, stuff like that, and yet at the same time he puts the clues together and he does end up believing that the murders are supernatural in nature, and then has to convince other people. He has to convince his boss at the newspaper, the police whatever, that it really was a monster again this time, and not this other poor guy who's being falsely accused of the crime.
Yeah. I think that's a good summary of the energy here. It's kind of like Moulder and Scully kind of have like an forgive me if if I'm not doing justice to musical genres. They have kind of a shoegaze vibe, and I feel like, I feel like col Shak is jazz anyway. A couple of quick notes just about people involved in this series. The main character was created by Jeff Rice in his novel The Cool Jack Papers, and this was adapted before it was published into the original nineteen seventy three TV movie that kicked it all off. It concerned vampire murders and I think that's where we get the night stalker thing. Also of note is that this episode is directed by Gordon Hessler, who lived nineteen twenty five through twenty fourteen. He directed nineteen seventy Scream and Scream Again, which we talked about in Weird House Cinema.
M okay, And as far.
As the cast goes, you know, if this were a weird House, we'd go deeper. But I will point out that we have the prolific Keenan Wynn who lived nineteen sixteen through nineteen eighty six, playing Captain what mad Dog Joe in this and it's a pretty fun role.
Yes, what do I know him from? I mean he was in a lot of things. You probably know him from Doctor Strangelove.
I think he was in Tarantula. I don't know, have my notes in front of me, but he was very prolific. He was in a lot of stuff.
But another big guest star in this movie, though you don't see his face, it's covered by some fibrous material. Is Richard Keel, the guy who played Jaws in the James Bond series.
Ah, he's just doing a basic big man monster role in this.
Right, Yeah, he's Ega. He's a soggy ega in So to summarize the episode, it's called the Spanish Moss Murders, and it starts with Kolchak intercepting a call in his police radio to the scene of a murder in a fancy French restaurant. He makes some joke about the wine cellar of this restaurant having more than being worth more than the entire gross domestic product of Paraguay, which I looked that up and that would make it worth like billions of dollars at the time, So I think that's a little bit of an exaggeration. But anyway, the head chef of this restaurant has been slain right in the middle of the restaurant kitchen. His body's lying there on the floor between the prep tables and all that. And not only has he been killed, but his body was found in a particularly groo some state, with its chest cavity crushed like a beer can on top of that, there is some kind of weird, wet vegetable matter scattered around the crime scene, described by one character as quote green glop, and the police sagely conclude that the plant matter must be salad. They were in a restaurant after all.
All right, solid police work, right, Yeah.
I think Rob, you've seen more Culchak than me. Is this a theme that like the police don't know what they're doing and Colchak has to be the one to figure everything out.
Yeah, I vaguely remember this being the case. You know, it's like you need an outside thinker because you know the police they're doing they're doing a good job. They're you know, they're not incompetent in this show, but they're used to dealing with normal crimes. Yeah, Cold Shack's expertise comes into play when we're dealing with supernatural crimes.
So Colchak is on the case. Through some crafty investigation involving trickery and trespassing, Colchack starts to piece together a perplexing set of facts connecting a number of different crimes together. People all crushed or killed by severe blunt force trauma to the thorax, all with the same green glop found around their bodies, and after a visit to a local botanical garden, Kolchak is able to ascertain the origin of the green glop. It is Spanish moss, which only grows, he's told in hot and humid conditions nowhere around Chicago, outside of a greenhouse. And I have to make a little observation. Spanish moss is not like usually wet and soggy. So I think I don't know how much experience the writers here had with actual Spanish moss, which is consistently described in this more like they're talking about algae.
Yeah, Yeah, that is weird, isn't it. Yeah, maybe they just hadn't been really exposed to it. But yeah, I don't think of Spanish moss as being humid and wet and drippy and gloppy and so forth.
It's actually rather dry and crispy. In fact, famously, I know I was reading about there was one huge historical fire that was started when some Spanish moss caught fire. It was the Great Fire of nineteen oh one in Jacksonville, Florida, which a huge fire that was started outside a factory that was putting stuffing inside of upholstery for furniture, I think, and the stuffing they were using was Spanish moss. There were piles of it that I guess we're sitting there to dry or sitting out ready to be stuffed into things. Some of it caught fire and it caused this giant conflagration. Anyway, back to colchak, investigation of one victim leads him to the victim's workplace, a university sleep laboratory, where the professor and his assistants are running an experimental treatment on a man with severe narcolepsy by keeping him in an induced coma. Colchak learns that the murder victim was an assistant in the lab who was known for her clumsiness, one time nearly waking up their test subject when she knocked over some apparatus in the room. Beyond that, other murder victims seem to have some connection to a social group of Cajun street musicians who are all originally from Louisiana Bayou Country and have moved up to the Chicago area. Kolchak learns from one of their associates the story of a bogeyman figure from Bayou folklore known as Paramoulfay or the evil father. All the Cajuns would joke to each other, you better watch out or Paramoufay is going to get you. And the stories go that Para Malfay has lived in the swamp since long before the Cajuns arrived. He's wet, he's covered in rot, and festooned with Spanish moss from head to toe. Mothers warn their children that if they get out of line, Paramoufay will squeeze the life right out of them, and the only way to beat him is to stab him with a steak from a Bayou gum tree. Kolchak gets another piece of the puzzle. A prime suspect emerges in several of the murders, a man named Languis who is known to have a grudge against several of the victims, but he has a rock solid alibi. He is the man who has been in an induced coma in the sleep laboratory, so he's being monitored twenty four to seven. There's no way he could have done the murders because he never left the lab he's been asleep. Finally, Colchak pieces it all together. He discovers the truth the murders are being carried out by the sleeping man, but not physically. He is dreaming people to death. His experimental coma is preventing him from dreaming normally. I guess the drug regimen that the scientists are giving him is doing something to his ability to dream, and so his dreams are escaping his mind and becoming a physical entity in the form of the swamp monster paramou Fay.
So it's a sleep dream manifestation, kind of a.
Toolpot exactly, and in the form of the bay U boogeyman covered in Spanish moss that this sleep subject grew up hearing about. So I guess presumably the monster in this story could have been anything. It could have been whatever it was that this man had in his mind. But because this is the folklore he knows, it assumes this form. It's kind of like Wes Craven's New Nightmare. You know, there's an entity that could take any form. The form it takes is the form you imagine. So it becomes Freddy Krueger.
Yeah, or of course reminds one of Goser as well. Choose the form of the destructor.
Yes. So Kolchak explains his theory to the police commander in the sleep lab. To mad Dog Captain mad Dog Keenan Wynn here and the professor is ordered to wake up the test subject in order to stop the mayhem. But it doesn't work. Langua will not wake up, and instead he dies. Jack thinks that, well, that's tragic, but now at least the trouble is over, until he discovers water and Spanish moss in his desk drawers. He thinks that there's like that the ceiling. The plumbing in the ceiling is leaking, and that's why there's water everywhere. But nope, Paramoulfa has been stalking around his desk in the newspaper office, and this seems to mean that Paramoufay has escaped his host. Even though the dreamer is dead, the dream lives on independently, and now the dream knows the reporter is on to him. In the end, Kolchak has to confront the monster by tracking it to the sewers and staking it with a bayou gum tree branch that he stole from the botanical garden. The sewer confrontation, I feel like, is a little anti climactic for me because you never get a great, great look at the monster. He's kind of a big shaggy vegetable sasquatch played by Richard Keel.
Yeah. I mean, the lighting's pretty good, so it's not unforgiving, but yeah, it's a bit dark. I mean, it's obviously not the most robust monster costume ever committed to film.
But I love the concept of the monster, even if it's not the most impressive looking thing I've ever seen. The idea of this shaggy creature dreamed into existence and covered head to toe in Spanish moss, just a shambling mess of plant matter.
Yeah, I think it's a It's an admirable plot. It all fit, all the pieces fit together, and then at the same time it feels wild and weird enough that it could have been a symbol via like an improv theater audience shout out plot elements, like all right, what do we have? Okay here, I hear rim sleep, I hear Cajun boogeyman, I hear French cuisine. Okay, let's put all this together.
Now. I was really hoping to discover that Paramolfa would be a real piece of Bayou lore that I could dig into, but alas I came up short on this. All the sources I could find that looked solid at all seem to trace back to the Culchak episode. There are some websites that claim Paramol Fay is an independent folk tale, but they don't cite any sources and they're just kind of websites. So I don't know. I couldn't find anything that looks solid that says this is an actual story that goes anywhere back further than the TV show, So I can't say for certain, but I will say my best judgment is it looks to me like this creature was invented for the show, though I think it may be based on existing folk beliefs. There are many monsters of the swamp. One example that it could be based on would be like the rugaroo, sort of a Francophone American werewolf legend.
Yeah, I think the rugaru connection is pretty solid here. Which, by the way, if you ever go to the zoo, the Audubon Zoo down in New Orleans, they have one on display. That's a lot of fun. But yeah, I feel like vay connection to that creature, like maybe that was even the original concept. And they're like, we have another episode that has a werewolf in it. Let's go a different direction here. I didn't do an exhaustive search. It seems like you went a lot deeper. But I did crack open Carol Rose's books and see if she had any mention. The only the closest thing she mentions is a different supernatural father, and that's Pierre Futard or Father Spanker, which is a French kind of uger character that's also a monstrous Christmas kind of crampist creature that's a counterpart to Father Christmas. So she doesn't listen any kind of you know, swamp Spanish moss creature. So I think you're right. I think it's an invention for the show, but a fun invention and one that feels like it could be real enough. So there you go.
Yes, Now, what about the monstrous qualities of Spanish moss itself? I wanted to get a bit into this here. The funny thing about Spanish moss, most scientific sources will acknowledge this right at the top, is that it is neither Spanish nor is it moss, which is pretty funny. But I'll deal with those one at a time. So regarding moss, the species name of Spanish moss is Telanzia eucinioides, and it's taxonomized within the flowering plant family Bromeliacee, also known as the bromeliads, along with the pineapple plants. So Spanish moss is a cousin to the pineapple And I feel like you can almost see it, Like if you get up real close to Spanish moss and you look at the weird curling stalks and leaves that kind of remind me of pineapple leaves in a strange way. They're obviously much smaller, but you can almost see the family resemblance.
Yeah, I'm looking at some close up pictures right now, and yeah, I can lean into that.
True mosses, of course, are more distantly related. They belong to a division of non vascular, non flowering plants called Bryophytes. Spanish is not a moss at all. It's also not Spanish. It is native to north, South and Central America, so in the United States it's only found in the south along the Gulf Coast and up the East coast to around Virginia. Chicago is no place for a Spanish moss man to thrive.
Yeah. When I think Spanish moss, I always instantly think Savannah, Georgia, because we have some some beautiful examples of it there, especially in the out there in amid the tombstones.
Yeah, in North America, it's going to be, especially in like coastal areas around the American South. But if it's not Spanish in origin, why is it called Spanish moss? You know a lot of things just have like a country name applied to them and they're not from that country at all, And this is one of those cases. The origin story that I've seen most attested here is that the naming convention comes from early French explorers in the Americas who thought that the plant looked like the big beer words of Spanish conquistadors, so they called the plant Spanish beard.
Well, that's another reason that one might lean into creating a monster based on it, right, because it's already compared to a part of a person's look in general features.
That's true. I want to get back to that in a minute now. An interesting thing that makes Spanish moss different as a plant is that it is an epiphyte, which means an organism that grows on other plants. Epi means on top of fight means plant. So it's an epiphyte. If you've ever seen it in the wild before, You've probably seen it hanging off of the limbs of trees, especially trees like live oak and cyprus. Now you might assume, just by looking at it dangling off of tree limbs the way it does, that Spanish moss is a parasite killing the tree that hosts it. And you also might remember the botanical body horror that we talked about in our episodes on mistletoe from several years back. In that case, one that is totally going Cronenberg on its host plant, that seems not to be the case with Spanish moss. A lot of sources flatly state that it is just not parasitic at all. It does no harm to the tree. According to this opinion, it would probably be best considered a commensal organism, So in this case, the idea would be Spanish moss benefits the tree is unaffected. However, it seems to me like the exact symbiotic equation is perhaps debatable, and some sources say Spanish moss might have a mild negative effect on the host tree, possibly just by blocking sun from reaching some of its lower leaves or something like that. But it's not like drilling into the host tree and sucking it, sucking nutrients out of its sucking water out of its vascular system, and stuff like that the way that mistletoe does.
So.
According to most sources, at least, Spanish moss is probably not a parasite. It's certainly not an obligate parasite, though it seems to prefer tree. I think you can see it sometimes growing on other substrates, even inanimate ones. And it does not leach sustenance directly from its host tree. So if it doesn't act like a vampire to the host tree, and it doesn't have roots going into the ground, how does it get its water and mineral nutrients which plants need. Well, it gets these things from the air. Spanish moss is an air plant, so it absorbs moisture from the air using little scales on its leaves called trichomes. So when rainfalls or when fog swirls, when mists rises off the ground, the Spanish moss will be there waiting to get its cut. And as this tangled, shaggy collection of hair like leaves, these fibers, all winding together, it does have a very uncanny appearance. It can form these ghostly drooping masses like the wispy hair of a witch, or like old bits of cobweb tangled up in the branches. But if you look close, the structure is interesting. Rob I've got some pictures for you to examine here. People at home, you might want to look up close ups of Spanish moss, especially to see the tri combes. If you see magnified images, like through a microscope, you can see all these little these little scales lifting up like flaps off of the surface of the leaves.
Yeah. Yeah, it's very intricate.
And these scales are what the plant uses to trap moisture from the air. However, that means that in order to survive, the Spanish moss does need what will at least at some point be a warm, sunny, humid environment. So, as Colchak discovered, you're not going to find it growing around Chicago, except maybe in a steamy sewer, though I guess there it wouldn't have access to the sun. But during cold and dry times it can apparently go dormant, so it can kind of like keep the water that it has stored just kind of close up and then wade out dry times, but it will eventually need favorable conditions to come back, and the tricombes are also used to trap mineral and chemical nutrients that the plant needs. Those can be dissolved in the water that it absorbs, or it can I've read also that it can sort of like just catch debris from the air. It can catch dust, bird droppings, whatever, and try to make use of that for its nutrients. Now, because Spanish moss has to survive by trapping whatever water vapor is in the air for some monstrous flavor, we can call this breathing fog. Because it has to breathe fog. You might imagine that water is precious to it. What little it can get must be preserved. But plants also need to breathe in a way in order to perform photosynthesis. In order to power their metabolism, they have to exchange gases with the atmosphere, taking in carbon dioxide and water and then using sunlight to power that chemical reaction that generates the carbohydrates for the plant, and then of course oxygen as a waste product, which is useful to us. But breathing exchanging gases with the atmosphere can be dangerous when you are living on a razor's edge of hydration when you have to get all of your water out of the air itself. And specifically, the danger comes when a plant opens the little holes in its leaves called stomata to absorb CO two from the atmosphere. When it opens up like that, it can lose moisture through those little openings, especially under a hot sun. So Spanish moss uses a specially evolved type of photosynthesis to avoid this. It's called crass Eulacian acid metabolism photosynthesis usually CAM photosynthesis for short, and this is an adaptation found in plants that survive in especially arid conditions. Under this regime photosynthesis it actually has two phases. There's a day cycle and a night cycle. So during the day, when the fronment is hot and dry, the plant keeps its stomata closed so it doesn't lose water through the holes under the burning sun. But nighttime is the right time. When the sun goes down, the stomata open up and they absorb CO two and you specially adapted structure chemical structures in their cells to fix the CO two and store it until daytime. Then when the sun comes back up, the stomata close once again, and the plant cells release the stored co two harvested during the night for photosynthesis to take place under the sunlight. So you could argue that Spanish moss feeds by night and then closes the coffin lid to digest during the cursed daylight.
Ooh, very nice. That's seasonally appropriate right there.
So actually, I think Spanish moss is the is the perfect thing to cover the body of a monster that roams in the nighttime.
Though.
You know, something that just occurred to me about the episode is how come the monster in Kolchak always attacks in the night. The guy is sleeping all day in all night, so shouldn't he sometimes be dreaming it during the daytime?
Unless he's aware of how cam photosynthesis works. You know, it's a shame they didn't go into all this in the episode, because Darren McGavin could have been like, cam photosynthesis? Is it camming right now?
That is what he'd say. Okay, Rob, are you ready for yours?
Yeah? For mine. You know, if you've listened to the show, and if you've listened to Weird House Cinema, you probably know that I have a soft spot for the nineteen nineties Outer Limits revival. They produced a ton of episodes, more episodes of this in the original Outer Limits series. I think they were all filmed in Canada, often used very Canadian cruise and very Canadian casts, and of course often dealt with you know, it was a science fiction series, so it's more likely to involve elements that we can discuss here on the show, as opposed to shows like Night Gallery or Tales from the Crypt.
What little of the nineties Outer Limits I've seen is mostly stuff that you've referred me to, but by large I'm impressed, Like, well, it's a mix of things. The episodes don't always look the most amazing, but of the stuff I've seen, typically the writing and the acting is quite solid.
Yeah. Typically if you're just going in blind on a nineties Outer Limits episode, you can expect it to be well acted, overly serious, with a mix of solid practical effects. Usually there's some nice sets like this is a show that really had to think and rethink how to create a spaceship or alien hallway multiple times per season, and they generally did a pretty good job. The digital effects, though, ye are generally not that great to look gap.
I'm going to say regarding the sets, it has a quality. I don't know exactly what this is I'm noticing, but it looks like other TV shows made in Canada in the nineties. Like the sets remind me of the sets from Are You Afraid of the Dark? The Nickelodeon horror TV show with you Know shot in Canada in the nineties. A lot of things shot in Canada in the nineties look like this to me. Film nerds out there, tell me what is it? I'm noticing? What is that nineties Canada look?
Yeah, And if memory serves I may be wrong in this. I think we filmed all these in and also around Toronto. So you know, anytime you need like an urban environment, you need some skyscrapers or what have you, there's a certain mix of buildings that are going to be considered for those shots. But an you're right, yeah, I love the nineties Outer Limits. The lesser episodes are often going to have a weaker message or more ham fisted message, and the opening and closing narration can also be a bit hammy, as it tries to like compose a really grandiose idea for this episode that is sometimes present and sometimes feels kind of tacked on.
I agree. I thought with this episode in particular, it might have been better without any of the narration, because I feel like the narration just tried to put an overly simplistic spin on what was actually a morally complex episode.
Yeah. Like, I feel like the ending to this one, they nailed the landing, there's no need to say, and the plane landed successfully, and like, no, we just watched it. It just didn't. So the episode that I selected is from the seventh season of The Outer Limits. I believe this is actually from two thousand and one. It is titled Think like a Dinosaur.
You might really expect the episodes going in a different direction than it does based on that title.
Yeah you think you think, I don't know, walk like an Egyptian or I don't know, do the Dinosaur'll get into what the title means. But it's based on the nineteen ninety six Hugo winning novelette of the same name by James Patrick Kelly. It was directed by Jorge Montesi and it stars Enrico Colintoni. This is an actor, by the way, who played Veronica Mar's dad on Veronica Mars and he also played the character of mathisar in Galaxy Quest. It also stars Linnea Sharples.
I would say Enrico Colantoni is especially good in this I've liked him in everything I've seen him, and you know, he's great and Veronica Mars and all that, but he really is the heart of this episode and his performance holds it down.
Yeah yeah, maybe not on the same level as holding it together as as Darren mcavan, but still solid, solid performance that grounds the episode. Oh. I should also point out if you want to watch this episode, lucky you, because if you get Prime, this show is back on Prime. It was on Prime like early in the pandemic, and I watched a number of episodes like virtually with some friends. We would do it every Monday night, and then it vanished and we had to like watch it via like scrambled versions on Daily Motion I think, and like sometimes where they had it was completely the footage was backwards or mirrored so that all the text was weird I think, so that like it couldn't be detected by bots or something I don't know, and the quality was suspect. But now it's back on Prime. The quality is as good as it's going to get for the nineties outer limits, maybe even too good considering some of the effects.
Okay, tell us the plot, all.
Right, So what we have here is a good old fashioned teleportation horror yarn, one of my favorite sub subgenres of horror. So in the story, this is what the scenario in the future a technologically advanced reptilian alien species called the Hanen, but dubbed dinos by humans. They facilitate a form of teleportation that has allowed human beings to travel to new worlds and explore the wider waters of the galaxy. Now, the process here is very clinical, presented as something it can do undergoing anesthesia, and many humans seem to feel a great deal of anxiety about the process, anxiety that the emotionless pacifist Dinos do not share. So the Dinos carry out most of the process, but a human supervisor has to hit the final switch, because the system works by scanning a comatose individual at point A, sending the information of that individual to point B, where the machine over there recreates an exact duplicate of them, and at this point there are two of the individual with identical bodies and identical brains, identical memories. It then falls to the human supervisor at point A to hit the switch that incinerates the comatose individual, the original individual, the one who is doing the quote unquote traveling. This termination of the original individual at point A is called balancing the equation.
Now, I should note that they explain the experience of the what they call the jumper in this story as as being continuous. So they say that you close your eyes here at the jumping station and then you open them on this wonderful planet that you're being transported to, so that they suggest that it's just going to be like being here and then being there.
Right, But as we'll see, like deep down, everybody knows what this means, and you know, I should point out and we'll get into this more in a bit, but I mentioned anesthesia. Anesthesia seems to be like a common reference point or starting point for fantastic interpretations of this, and it's also involved in sort of the wider philosophical contemplation here. You know, what does it mean when my consciousness changes? What does it mean when my consciousness seems to cease for an amount of time? You know, it's that weird experience of suddenly, oh, whatever happened happened, and I'm suddenly awake again after the fact. I'm conscious again after the fact. And so you see this reflected in other treatments of teleportation, in say Stephen King's The Jaunt, or also you see it referenced in like cryo sleep scenarios and other science fiction. Yeah, so anyway, that's the setup, the sort of technological world building setup for the episode. The plot concerns essentially three characters. You have Enrico Colintoni's Michael Burr. He's the human supervisor at the lunar jump station. He's the one who hits that incineration switch. Then you have LINEA. Sharple's Kamala Shastri it is pronounced Kamala in this episode, who has arrived at the lunar station to jump to a disc world where she's going to study an alien civilization. And then you have David James Lewis playing this character Will Carson, who it takes a little bit to figure out what he's there for, but he's a replacement tech who is actually a psychological observer sent by the company to make sure that Burr can handle the job.
Because a lot is writing on Burr doing his job correctly.
Yeah, because the Dinos are like, this is great, this is this technology is wonderful. It's going to change everything you do. It's going to ensure the long term survival of the human race. But you've got to prove to us that you're able to handle this. The Dinos refer to humans as weepies because they see them as is way too emotional. They make a big deal out of this whole destroy yourself at point A to travel to point B, and they do not want to continue with it if humans cannot handle it. So in this scenario again, Kamala Shastri traveling to a distant point in the galaxy or whatever. It seems like everything is going to going as plan. She's a little nervous, but she's up for it. But then during the procedure, the transmission is interrupted. Reconstitution at point B cannot be confirmed, so the jumper at point A cannot be incinerated. So Kamala wakes up screaming still at point A, and essentially we're unsure if her double has awoken at point B and she is traumatized by the pain and terror she felt in the jump chamber, and Burr is there he tries to reassure and you know, says some kind words, is very compassionate, but she's like, I don't think I can go through it again, and he assures her, you don't have to, you know, don't don't worry. You don't have to worry about it. Then if you don't want to give it a second try. This is entirely voluntary. But at this point even Burr's commitment to teleportation technology is put to a severe test when the Dynos confirm that Kamala has arrived at Point B. They tell him and Carson insists as well that now he has to balance the equation by killing the original Kamala. So he struggles with the ethics of this, but goes forward with it by convincing her to simply go through with the teleportation. It's like, you've got to get back in there. You've got to continue your mission, with the idea of being that she won't be scanned and transmitted this time. She doesn't know this. She'll just be incinerated and that will balance the equation. That will only be one Kamala. And she's on this distant planet exploring this new civilization, and at this point he almost pulls it off, but she gets cold feet again and the truth comes out, and so now Burr is under even more pressure to balance the equation, and there is no way around the fact that he's contemplating just cold blooded murder and being asked to kill her, and she knows that that is the scenario as well. And what's at stake here is like the continuation, like you said, of the entire teleportation program, the advancement in continuing survival of the human species. So a lot of pressure is put on him at this moment.
There's a background scenario that they discussed, which is that humans have destroyed the environment of Earth, that Earth is close to uninhabitable at this point. Humans have polluted the environment so much, and that in order to have a chance at survival, they're going to have to be able to teleport en mass to these unspoiled worlds. But the Han and like you said, they're unwilling to let humans do this unless they prove that they can handle the technology that they can quote balance the equation.
Now, at this point, my summary is not going to really do it. It's going to sound a lot more rushed because this is a part of the episode that I think really depends heavily on the performances, but this is what happens. We see Berg grab a cool looking sci fi gun from a safe, something that you might see in time Coop or something, and we think he's going to go killer at this point, but when he runs runs into her in the complex, he tells her that he's arranging to have her smuggled safely back to Earth on a routine shuttle, so that seems to be in motion, and then he's confronted by Carson and he knocks Carson out, So yeah, it seems like, all right, he's gone rogue. He's doing the moral right thing here for the individual. Maybe not for the greater good, but for the individual. And then he leads her to an air lock. But then he has this change of heart. We see flashes back to this background information about him having lost his family, lost his wife, and he has a change of heart and instead he blasts her out the air lock. Clearly this was not an easy choice for him to make. He's just emotionally destroyed by this. Two years later we see him once more. He's still apparently the supervisor there at the Lunar Teleportation station and the teleporter is being used and it's receiving somebody who is it, Well, it's come on on her return to the lunar station from her studies on that distant planet, and she greets him warmly, telling him, Hey, you were my jump supervisor. Don't you remember remember me? You were so nice to me, you were so comforting, And he says flat late, no, that was somebody else.
And then the narrator comes in with some I think over overly simplified, kind of hammy summary of everything we just saw.
Yeah. Yeah. When I was watching these episodes with with some with some friends, we would always make fun of the ending narration, especially if the episode was a bit bad or confusing, because you knew he'd come in and try and wrap it up with a tight little boat.
Now, I think there are a lot of really interesting things about this episode, and it raises a lot of the great questions about about teleportation as a technology, if you were to imagine something like it actually existed. Some of the same questions applied to the idea of like mind uploading or you know, transferral conciousness to a machine substrate or something like that. I think one of the really interesting things in this episode is that the essential thing that Burr has to do has not changed. In both cases. He is supposed to destroy the body of the jumper at the origin point while they while they go on living at the destination point. The only thing that has changed is that in this scenario, the jumper at the departure point has had time to wake up and become conscious of the fact that they're still here. But otherwise it's the same. So there's something where like, it doesn't feel like murder if they knew what was going to happen going in and they're destroyed instantaneously at the departure point. As long you know they understand, they get to live on at the destination But something about the fact that she has had several seconds of being awake now and she's like, well, now that I'm here, I don't want to die at this place. That changes the equation. And I think that's interesting because it plays with our intuitions about what would or would not be murder in a strange scenario like this.
Absolutely, yeah, it's just this level of it certainly reminds one of various sort of moral thought experiments where it's like, okay, you're going to flip the switch and you're going to save the human race. But somebody that you don't really see or know in another room's going to die. And then if they're okay with that, well, okay, here's a different version of the scenario, etc.
Though I guess it also raises these some questions about like where is consciousness located and is it possible for consciousness to be continuously transferred if that concept even makes sense, because again, the jumpers talk about the idea that well, they don't mind that their body is going to be destroyed at the departure point because they're just going to close their eyes and wake up on this other planet. They seem to have confidence that their consciousness will con tinue in some way. But what does that mean?
Yeah, and you know, in this we can't help but think of the think in the anesthesia example, you know, and really like sort of like just everyday ideas of like, well, am I the same person when I wake up in the morning, that sort of thing, you know. Really yeah, yeah, comparisons between sleep and death that, as we've discussed in the show, go you know, back into the earliest times during which humans were able to contemplate these things, and and that brings us, I think, to the dinosaurs, the dinos, the haunins, because that's another element of the plot here that we don't you kind of have to come back and think about it more yourself, because they don't get into it as much, at least in the episode. Is like, what is the thought process of these of these dinos who are again presented as being like dinosaur creatures, but they're not. They're not depicted as being like completely quote unquote cold blooded, Like they're not cruel, They're just calculates, and it seems like they have made the decision and don't seem to put a lot of effort into it really that hey, you know, when one teleports, one is going to destroy a version of themselves and recreate a new one to carry out a particular task or goal, etc. And they don't think it's a big deal. And so I was thinking a little bit like, well, what would that mean, where does that come from? How much of that would be cultural? Because you can imagine a scenario even with humans where if they're regularly undergoing this kind of teleportation, you would maybe have a lot of cultural ideas surrounding it, maybe even religious ideas surrounding it about the nature of the self and the soul and how that has continued through this technological leap. But also maybe there's something about the Hannans that, you know, maybe they're more use social where the sacrifice doesn't mean as much because the individual doesn't mean as much, and that's just part of their just genetic program.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. They are portrayed as mostly benevolent but just not swayed by emotional considerations, and so I think their point of view is that they're not harming the jumper by killing them here because they're already alive somewhere else. So it doesn't matter what the jumper at the destination, at the departure point actually wants, Like if they wake up and say, no, don't kill me, it's like that is just not of importance. You know, they're fine, They're somewhere else now, and so this is just sort of like a mistake to be cleaned up. Whereas the human point of view is, oh, now there's a person in front of me who wants to live, and that that is extremely important, like the fact that this person is conscious and they want to live, gives them just as much right to live as the person at the destination point, and the dinosaurs don't see it that way. They're like, well, no, this is the way it works, and you know, she as long as she's fine. They're what, the one that's here doesn't matter anymore.
Yeah, they don't. Again, they don't understand it. They kind of mock the human emotion in this respect, calling us wheepies. You can imagine memes they might create, like, oh no, a weepee accidentally made two sandwiches and now it's sad, that sort of thing. But I should also mention they made the strange choice in this episode to have the Hanens speak in an almost unintelligible monster voice. Yes. Yeah, like though the monster the dino will be talking, you just can't understand it. You have to run it back to figure out what it's squawking about.
Yeah, jump the chain back. It's kind of crypt.
Keeper, Yeah, like crypt Keeper, sketchy, but but harder to understand.
Well, Also, they established that they're getting the humans are hearing the Hanen through a real time translation device, so it's like translating their sort of squawks and language into English. For the jump operators. But hold on a second, why does it make them sound like the crypt Keeper. If it's doing that anyway, shouldn't the machine just give them the kind of the serie voice.
Yeah, they're like, it's it's set to Cryptkeeper. We don't know how to change it back to Angela Lansbury. This is just what we have to use now. Of course, the central treatment of the whole episode has to do with this, this idea of teleportation, the recreation of the self and and and the I guess it's not even really a question about like the continuation of the soul like it at Herd. Here it seems to be clear that someone is dying and then a new person is being created. And I really wasn't aware of this until I started researching this episode. But it turns out this entire central premise lines up with the work of Derek Parfitt, a British philosopher who specialized in personal identity, among other subjects.
Parfit's come up on the show before. We may have talked about him, Was it in our episode on astronomical suffering?
Maybe? I think so. Yeah. He he wrote about a number of topics, so it's not like he's not like a one idea guy, and he's very influential. So he lived nineteen forty two through twenty seventeen, and in his nineteen eighty seven book Reasons and Persons, he explores exactly this scenario. And I'm unsure if Kelly, the author of Think Like a Ninosaur, based his fiction on this, or if, as with swamp Thing and swamp Man, we have an uncertain case with a possibility of independent development in different fields.
Swamp Man being another philosophical thought experiment about the idea that like, if your body was destroyed by lightning and then recreated out of different molecules by a lightning strike and a swamp like, what relation would that other you have to the original?
You?
Right?
Right?
So again Parfitt's book Reasons in Persons, in chapter ten what we Believe Ourselves to Be, he presents a thought experiment in which he is commuting to work on Mars via a machine called a tele transporter, in which the subject loses consciousness and wakes up a moment later, or seems to wake up a moment later at their destination. In reality, however, it's explained, really an hour takes an hour passes in between losing consciousness and reawakening. The original body is scanned, recorded in every detail, and destroyed. Traveling at light speed, the information takes three minutes to reach Mars, and then, using that information that had been sent, the replicator machine on Mars creates a new brain and a new body out of new matter. So then Parfitt goes on to layout a scenario that involves interruption and accidental duplication without destruction of the original. The added wrinkle is that while the machine failed to destroy the original body and brain, it also inflicted a heart condition that will be fatal in like forty days. Also in the thought experiment, the scanning is supposed to destroy the individual as part of the process. It's not like there's this switch that you hit for incineration. It's like all part of the process.
So it's not a separate decision that an operator has to.
Make right, right, And it makes more sense, I guess. In the fictional treatment, he writes quote simple teletransportation as just described is a common feature in science fiction, and it is believed by some readers of this fiction merely to be the fastest way of traveling. They believe that my replica would be me. Other science fiction readers and some of the characters in this fiction take a different view. They believe that when I press the green button, I die. My replica is someone else who has been made to be exactly like me. So he uses the thought experiment to discuss what he calls two kinds of sameness, qualitative identa and numerical identity. So the scanner and replicator produce a double that is qualitatively identical but not numerically identical. In other words, the two are otherwise the same, but they are not literally the same person in a physical sense. Again, like new matter was used to make, there's no physical connection between these two beings.
It's kind of like how you can have two copies of the same book that are at the same time the same book, but they're also two different objects.
Right. Likewise, though, he points out that numerically identical individuals can also become qualitatively different. Quote though our chief concern is our numerical identity. Psychological changes matter. Indeed, on one view, certain kinds of qualitative change destroy numerical identity. If certain things happen to me, the truth might not be that I become a very different person. The truth might be that I cease to exist, that the resulting person is someone else.
And in fact, the strange thing is that our bodies and minds are constantly undergoing physical change, and yet we have the conscious experience of it seeming to be that life is continuous. It just feels like you were the same person you have been your whole life, but physically you're always changing.
Yeah. Yeah, physically at a cellular level, things are changing where we're not exactly the same matter that we were years back, and then major events, as he's pointing out, have a huge impact on us. The episode closes with this idea as well, which I thought was right, thought was really nice. The Kamala, who is beamed back to the lunar base is one numerically different. This is the third version of her in the story that we don't see, the second, the one that's on that other planet. This is all due of course to the scanner destroyer replicator technology, but she also so seems to be qualitatively different as her as her experienced studying an alien civilization has greatly impacted her. There's even a new tattoo on her and a different hairstyle to sort of drive this home visually.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, Burr is numerically identical to the man she knew before, that she met before, but it seems that he is qualitatively different as well, forever changed by the horrendous series of events that he went through, namely the murder he committed to keep the teleportation machines running. And and of course she is completely oblivious to this because the version of Kamala that she is did not witness any of this and was not the one murdered. And so that final line just hits nicely. He's like, no, that was someone else, Like that was a that was a different me before I was changed by what happened.
I think this raises another interesting philosophical question, kind of a moral philosophical question, which is, imagine that the error scenario had never happened. You know, you never had the scene where he has to hunt down a jumper with a gun and blow them out of the airlock. It like, murder them in a very explicit way, and he was still just pressing the button to incinerate the body. Is there anything morally wrong going on there? If we assume that everything that the characters assume is true, So assume that it is basically painless. That the conscious experience of the person undergoing it is that they close their eyes here and they wake up at the destination point. There's not actually like a person to suffer or to be denied life or whatever that there's just a continuous conscious experience and all of that. Is there anything morally wrong with what you're doing by pressing the button to incinerate the person at the departure point? I don't know. I think that's a really interesting question to ask, because you could say, even if nobody is so, and the person who's jumping gets to continue to live, so in whatever normal way we would think about it, they're not being murdered, you'd still have to wonder if there is some kind of subtle moral violence going on just by the repeated pressing of a button to destroy a human body like that, Like, is that conditioning the person who has to do the button pushing in a way that degrades them morally in some way?
Yeah? Yeah, it's a rich field for thought here, And to be clear, Parfitt goes into a great more detail in the book, and of course uses this thought experiment as a leaping off point to discuss identity and self at great length though it's all it's all very, very readable and absorbable, so I do recommend picking that up. And I did not not have time to seek out and read the original novel Lette Think like a Dinosaur. But I understand, of course it is quite good as well, and I'd be interested to hear from anyone out there who has read it and can compare it to the outer limits adaptation. And of course yeah, in terms of human consciousness and identity. You know, we could easily go on and on here, but I thought I might close out. I was reminded of a brief mention from an article that we reference in our shadow episodes? Do we actually see shadows? On Jay Store Daily? By Roy Sorensen, He writes the optics of the Chinese moists focused on shadows rather than light. They defend the literal truth of Chiangxu's aphromism, the shadow of a flying bird never moves, for shadows last only an instant. The Chinese dialectician Kung Sun Lung three twenty five through two point fifty PCE appears to have extended the objection to the bird. At each moment the bird is where it is, and so is not traveling since the bird is always at rest, the bird no more moves than its shadow.
I guess to try to map that onto our questions about teleportation and human consciousness. You know, would consciousness survive the body being destroyed in one place and recreated exactly in another.
Uh.
You could maybe take the view that consciousness is not continuous anyway, that that is merely an illusion and there are only instants of consciousness that are that are mistakenly thinking that something is is traceable from one moment to the next, and in fact there is not.
Yeah, absolutely, I don't know.
If I buy that, but that's an interesting way of seeing it.
Well that I guess that's one of the great things about this about it, about this particular quandary, but also questions about consciousness in general, is that there's I mean, I guess there's some wrong answers out there, but you can generalize and say there are no wrong answers like this. These are all just thought experiments and ideas that that tease at the reality and make us sort of turn our perceptions on their head and reconsider what they are and what we are.
Well, yeah, I think a lot of the thought experiments about consciousness. They don't necessarily provide evidence to help us discover the true nature and origin of consciousness. They don't always help us discover what consciousness really objectively is, but they do help us better understand our intuitions about consciousness, which are often quite vague, and these thought experiments can make them clearer. Yeah. Anyway, good Outer Limits episode.
Yeah, I recommend checking out. It's one of my favorites. It's one of my wife's favorites. I think she she'd seen it before our I did years ago, and she always brings it up as an episode worth watching. So I would agree not all of the Outer Limits episodes are necessarily worth watching. Again, there are some weak ones, but this one's a strong one, all right. And on that note, we're going to go ahead and close up Anthology of Horror volume nine. Thanks for listening, joining us on this quest, and we'd love to hear from everyone out there. If you have thoughts about the episodes in particular or the show's in particular that we discussed here, write in. And if you have thoughts about the subject matter that we discussed about consciousness and the self about Spanish Moss and different interpretations of it right in we would love to hear from you. Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind as a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have a listener mail episode on Mondays. We have a short form Monster Factor Artifact episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. And hey, if you use any of the social media platforms, do check us out and follow us there there, I've and running again on Instagram. We are stbym.
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