Anthology of Horror, Volume 1

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Dr Anton Jess, Professor of Monster Studies, and I am
Professor Griffith Wells Warden of the Howling Pit. Robert and
Joe have a delightfully ghoulish installment of the podcast for
you today, one guaranteed to curdle your blood and expand

(00:31):
your mind in the most cranium popping ways imaginable. It's
a science based stroll through the world of horror, anthology,
television and cinema, The Twilight Zone, the Night Gallery, Tales
from the Crypt Tree, House of Horror, and more So,

(00:51):
stake around bloodsuckers and find out which episodes they picked
and what sorts of scientific subjects they were able to
suck from their Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind

(01:15):
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey you, welcome to
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick. And as you can tell from
our delightful intro there by a couple of colleagues of ours,
we'll just assume it was delightful. It was. They sounded delighted.
They sounded delighted there, but they always even the most

(01:38):
even in the most inopportune of times. Well, it comes
down to the things they delight in, I suppose. But
but what they told you is correct. We're gonna be
talking about horror anthologies today and then we're gonna we're
gonna ring some science from their their desiccated corpses. That
sounds like great fun to me. But Robert, So, by

(01:58):
horror anthology, you mean like TV shows where say it's
it's horror themed and it's not the same characters every episode.
We're we're not so much talking about like Monster of
the Week episode on the episodes on the X Files
are buffy, right, And we're also not talking about them
from modern version of this that you see with American
horror story where each season it's a different story. No,

(02:20):
we're talking about the likes of the Twilight Zone, Night Gallery,
Tales from the Crypt, uh, the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror
personal favorite of mine. Yeah, shows of shows of this
nature where each episode is a self contained story or
sometimes a pair of stories, or a short story and
a like a sliver of a little extra on there.
But they're they're self contained. They're they're essentially horror short

(02:44):
horror fiction that has been translated generally for television. But
then of course you also see uh, cinematic installments of
these shows as well, where you'll have a feature league
length film that consists of say three, four, maybe five
different short horror segments. Oh yeah, maybe we can do
Maybe we can include movies like that in the future.

(03:05):
I think we just did TV shows this time. Yeah,
there are a few, a few kind of branch out
into film a little bit um And of course, of
course we'd be remiss we don't end up talking about
any of these episodes. But Black Mirror, I think is
one of the finer examples of horror at times more
sci fi, but really most of those episodes are pretty terrifying.
I think you could make an argument that Black Mirror

(03:26):
is a horror anthology television series. Now, Robert, I'm a
little at a disadvantage in this episode because you have
seen far more of these types of shows than I have.
I'm I'm big on Simpson's tree House of Horror, but
I've actually seen pretty I've seen no Tales from the
Dark Side, I think, no Night Gallery. I've actually not
seen all that much Twilight Zone. A few episodes you know,

(03:47):
here and there, and The only full Tales from the
crypt episode I've actually seen that I remember is deeply
inappropriate one with Tim Curry, who is the most wonderful
actor ever in in all of acting his three but
it's just too grotesque to even talk about. Well, as
we'll get into, that description can go for just about
every Tales from the Cryptos like great actors and sometimes

(04:10):
great filmmakers, but kind of a deplorable story. Um. Yeah,
if if I've seen a lot of her anthology TV
sit shows, it's because I watched a lot of Sci
Fi Channel and syndicated cable back in the nineties. I
guess you could say it was my my teacher mother
secret lover U to reference the Triosa far Um, But yeah,

(04:35):
I watched like stuff like Ni Gallery, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits,
both new and old. I think on the original Sci
Fi Channel watch Tales from the Dark Side in like
Syndication on Sunday afternoons. It always felt like a particularly
unholy place for it to be. Well, you know what
I do expect to find if we get into If
I go back and start watching shows like this is

(04:56):
I bet I will recognize things from when I was kid,
and we would go on a trip and like stay
in a motel or something like that. And of course
they always had all the channels we didn't get at home,
so they had the sci Fi channel and I just
tuned into whatever in the hotel. And so occasionally I'll
see some crazy movie now and realize I saw a

(05:16):
piece of it as a child on vacation with my
family in a hotel. Well, I didn't have ready access
to Tales from the Crypt. I would what would happen
is occasionally that on HBO was on HBO. It was
really one of the original original HBO programs. But to
watch it, since we were not HBO subscribers, I had
to either hit it and just mainline it during HBO

(05:39):
preview weekends, or more often watched them half scrambled because
I could. It would be like it would be kind
of like pizza colored scrambled versions of it, or sometimes
you know, it would just become black and white. So
there are some episodes of Tales in the Crypt when
I go back and watch them now and I'm like, oh,
I had no idea. For instance, I had no idea

(05:59):
that would Tim Curry playing a female character, because clearly
the first time I watched it. It was too scrambled
for me to tell well in that episode. That's kind
of a mercy, I think. But wow, it's amazing the
things people will will put up with in the search
for for a story that they're into, you know, like

(06:21):
like the idea. I always think it's funny that, you know,
people watch like theater bootlegged videos that, like somebody will
record a movie with the camcorder inside a theater and
people will watch that. That's kind of look terrible, but
I don't. I mean people you're they're hungry for it.
They want that movie. And I guess you were like
that too, watching through through all the static and weird
color variations. Yeah, that was how you got to watch it. Um. Yeah,

(06:46):
So to today's episode for any long time listeners to
stuff to plow your mind. This is essentially the same
concept as the three Creepy Pasta episodes that I did
with Christian where we would pick a creepy pasta stories
and sort of squeeze the science out of them. And
I have to say, we we squeezed all the science
out of Creepy Pasta. I don't think there's there's much left.

(07:08):
So this feels like the next logical place to uh,
to start squeezing horror anthologies. Well, I say, let's get
right into our first selection of the day. All right. Uh,
my selection here for our first one is a Question
of Fear. And this is this is one of my
favorite episodes of Rod Serling's Night Gallery, his horror anthology

(07:30):
series that ran from nineteen ninety three. Uh, and then
of course just eternally on the Sci Fi Channel during
the during the nineties. Is this a picture of Leslie
Nielsen with an eye patch and a mustache? I'm looking
at Yes. This episode starred um Leslie Nielsen as Colonel
Dennis Malloy and it also starred actor Fritz Weaver as

(07:54):
Dr Mazzi. Weaver is terrific and this as well, I mean,
Nielsen is great. And this this is the pre name
could gun Nielsen. This is the serious actor Nielsen. Oh,
he was that way for a long time. What movie
did I just watch recently where he plays a straight character?
I can't remember right now, But of course he was
in Forbidden Planet, was he? Yeah, you don't remember. He

(08:17):
was like the main he was the commander astronaut and
Forbidden Planets, I mean Forbidden planets. Great, it's not great
for the astronaut characters who as usual or just like
some stiff white dudes. Well you could say that Leslie
Neilson was also one of those those stiff yeah white
dudes for sure. Um, he's kind of like put him
in the same category as Peter Graves, you know. Uh

(08:38):
and and like Peter Graves and was later used to
terrific effect in comedy as such as in the Airplane
movies and the Naked Gun movies. Uh. And in this
he's he's pretty great because he plays just a very um,
just a very hard cold character. This colone only plays
he's a fearless mercenary. Uh that has you know, just

(08:59):
been in multiple wars and even after World War two
is over, you know, he couldn't get enough. So it
just continually works as a mercenary and kind of Lee
Marvin type. Yeah, very much, very much a Lee Marvin
type character here also reminds me a lot of the
kind of character that, say, um, Lee van Cliff would
have played. Oh yeah, okay, so in this episode, it
starts off with a gentleman's club and here is Colonel Malloy, uh,

(09:24):
you know, talking it up with the other gentleman there,
and one of the gentleman there, Dr Mazzi, played by
Fritz Weaver, starts talking about an episode at a haunted house,
some sort of an encounter with a haunted house where
it was just too terrifying for anyone to survive, and
of course the fearless colonel here. He starts talking about
just how fearless he is and how fear is a disease.

(09:46):
He says, I'm careful, but I am incapable of fear. Okay,
So this leads to a bet, as of apparently tends
to happen in stuffy gentleman's clubs. Momzy says that he
bets he cannot survive one night in this haunted mansion
without being scared to death. And uh, and he puts
ten dollars on the line. Yeah, that's a load of cash,

(10:10):
and so of course our mercenaries up for it to
prove how fearless he is and to uh and to
to get a nice pay day. He says, of course
I'll do it, so uh. And that's one of the
fabulous things about this episode. It's basically a two person show.
It's just just Weaver and Nielsen so, and you don't
even see Weaver again physically. He only appears on a

(10:31):
television set. So what happens is that Malloy braves the
ghost effects in the house, you know, all these smoke
and mirror effects that seem intended to scare him out
of his pay day. He definitely fires a few rounds
and does some obvious special effects. Uh. And just the
audience is clear that they're special effects, or it's obvious

(10:51):
within the story that they're special effects. I think a
little of both, especially the modern viewers. Uh. The effects
aren't like outright tear double, but anything they're lacking I
think actually enhances this aspect of the episode. So it's
like supposed to be visible to Malloyd that it's fake, right,
or certainly after he's through, you know, emptying his gun
into it, he's like, oh, you're this is in real. Um.

(11:13):
I dealt with the problem the way I deal with
all my problems. I attempted to murder it, uh, and
then I saw that it wasn't anything to be afraid of.
So uh. He eventually, though, he settles into bed, he
has a little coffee for some reason, and then he says,
all right, I'm just gonna go to bed, and when
I wake up, I'm gonna be ten thousand dollars Richard
dreaming of mounting ghost heads on this wall. Right. But

(11:34):
then the second he settles in, iron bar snap into
place over him, and a pendulum starts descending from the ceiling,
and he still refuses to give into the fear. He's like, yells,
all right, Mamsy, you can do this, you can kill me,
but you're not gonna win because look at me, still
not afraid, not afraid to die. And uh. And so
he ends up going to sleep, and when he wakes up,
he makes himself breakfast and Mazy communicates with him via

(11:58):
a live TV train ends mission and he reveals the following.
First of all, Malloy apparently encountered Mazzi's pianist father in
Italy during the Second World War, where he tortured him
for information, pouring gasoline over his hands and setting them
on fire. WHOA, So, as you can imagine Mazzi's for
to find Malloy and to break him. You burn my

(12:20):
daddy's hands, I'll get you for this, right Yeah, So
now we know it's a revenge piece. So Mazzi reveals
at this point that he is a biochemist, one of
the greatest biochemists in the field, and is highly respected
UH in the realm of biochemical warfare. And he says
that he and his colleague recently discovered a way to
convert a complex enzyme in the human body into that

(12:43):
of an earthworm. And by injecting this, he says, quote,
the bones of the body disintegrate without affecting the nervous
system or the vital organs, until the victim is as
near as can be an earthworm able to move on
its belly, but without vertebrae, unable to stand, able to feed,
able to pass waste matter, but unable to use its

(13:04):
arms and legs except to assist with a slithering motion
in the manner of an earthworm. I can't help but
notice this sounds like a better and more interesting version
of a movie I don't like to talk about. Yes,
I have long thought about this. We've had a couple
of movies that have come out over the past ten
years in which a deranged scientist wants to turn somebody

(13:27):
into a creature of some sort, generally a lesser invertebrate.
And and I find that all of those men like that.
The concept is initially revolting and appealing, but then you
realize it's not really dealt with in any depth. It's
only rolled out to to revolt the audience, whereas in
this episode, I feel like it is it is leveled
in a in a very intelligent way. Uh so, so yeah,

(13:51):
to continue going. Malloy initially doubts this. He's like, you're
you're full of it, but Mazi tells him, oh, well,
why don't you look in the cellar and see what
became of my colleague and says that he was a
large man, but now he's reduced to something like a slug.
And indeed, earlier in the episode, when when Leslie Nilsen's
character is looking around the mansion, one of the things
he encounters is this unexplained trail of slime through the cellar. Uh,

(14:16):
and there's this it's it's it's it's a legitimately creepy
moment and certainly seems a little different from the uh
the ghost effects that are thrown at him. So then
he tells Molloy. Massy tells Mooy that the transformation is
going to take time, but that he's going to go
down in medical history, and there's no stopping it. He said,
you can after you leave here, you can tell the police,
you can go to a specialist. But first of all,

(14:37):
the specialists probably won't believe you, and even if they do,
they're not going to be able to help you because
this cannot be reversed. Wait, so at this point he's
done something to Malloy. He's like injected him or something.
That's what he claims. Yes, em Malloyd calls his bluff,
but but he's already beginning to give in the fear.
Massy tells him, Uh, look, you should just wanted to

(14:57):
check your inside forearm. I believe that is you'll find
an injection point. We drugged your coffee, and I snuck
in and injected you while you were asleep. And and
if you still don't believe me, then go into the seller.
Go into the seller and see what my colleague became.
And at this point he's like really working Malloy up.
And Molloy begins to move towards the seller and he

(15:19):
sees the trail of slime this time, uh, you know,
working through the hallways and descending into the cellar. And
then he turns around and he tells Mazzi that he
still isn't that there's no way mass is gonna win,
that that that that he Malloy is going to win,
and then he shoots himself with his own gun. And
at this point, um Mazzi uh admits he says, actually

(15:42):
I win because there's nothing in the seller that's pretty good. Yeah,
I mean I this is just my retelling of it.
So certainly the episode itself is a is a finer
version of the tail than my synopsis here. I love
the Uh. It's a common thing, apparently in horror to
just talk to people through TVs. I'm thinking about those
saw movies And isn't there a segment in Creep Show

(16:06):
where somebody talks to somebody through a TV? Yes, I
believe it is actually Leslie Nielsen. I think so, in
the bit where Ted Danson and I can't remember the
other actor's name, where they're buried up to their necks
in the surf in the sandy, and Leslie Nielsen's like, moaha, ha,
I'll talk to you through a TV. Yeah, that's a
that's a nice connection between this episode and Creep Show
horror anthology film, which, incidentally enough Fritz Weaver is also

(16:30):
in in the crate segment. He plays the professor. Uh.
That works with how Hobrook's character. Oh okay, and he's
fabulous in that as well, like he's he really should
go down as more of a horror anthology legend. Well,
I I got to see this episode. This is pretty
creepy just hearing you describe it. Yeah, it creeped me out.
Then it still creeps me out now even though there's

(16:51):
no actual transformation, it's described so well. It's a it's
set up so well that you don't even care like
it it It doesn't deflate the horror of it when
when you have this final twist at the end. But this,
uh yeah, particularly this concept of transformation into an earthworm,
I feel like there is a lot of dread here

(17:12):
and it and uh and I'd like to know discuss
a little bit why uh we feel that sense of
dread when we imagine being turned into what is essentially
a noble organism, uh, the earthwork. Now, I can think
of quite a few culturally common body transformation or deterioration phobias.
People have phobias about loss of teeth. That's a common

(17:34):
when people have nightmares about losing their teeth. Uh, there's
like the penis retraction phobia. You know, people have genital
deterioration fears, but I've never heard of bone disappearance phobia before.
That's a new one. Uh, it's it's a great one. Though.
There's actually an episode of The Ray Bradberry Theater from
the eighties which has a similar plot line, in which

(17:56):
I believe Eugene Levy plays an individual who goes to
a doctor for some sort of skeletal issue and he
like removes his skeleton and reduces him to a like
essentially an invertebrate. Oh so he like becomes a human
jellyfish basically. So perhaps it's not explored enough the the
bone removal or disintegration um sub genre body horror. Well, Robert,

(18:17):
I assume you're going to tell me something about the
science of earthworms, right, Yeah, this gave me a good
excuse to look into the science of earthworms. And I
have to apologize to earthworms and humans who have been
transformed into them, because you know, we could do a
whole episode just on the importance of earthworms and the
evolution of earthworms. That's probably true of any of the
subjects we discuss in this episode that we could probably

(18:40):
expand them into a whole episode of their own. Yeah,
if we were. If I was a little more of
a grown up about it and was and didn't want
to just use these things as an excuse to talk
about night gallery. Um the so yeah, the uh, we're
talking about the annelids here from the analytic phylum, which
includes all the segmented worms such as earthworms, leeches, and

(19:03):
a whole host of polychete marine worms such as the
bristle worm, which I recently got to see on a
vacation in Costa Rica in the tide pools. Yeah. Um,
what do they look like? Are they bristly? They are
bristly And if you touch them, especially with a five
year old touches them, uh, they will they will sting you.

(19:24):
But the child was fine. It was a friend of
my son's. Okay, yeah, he was fine. He got that.
But he did get to have a very up close
and personal experience with with the bristleworm. Um. So, the
this particular phylum contains more than nine thousand species and
six thousand species of earthworm. They live everywhere except Antarctica,
and there are even bioluminescent earthworms. Oh I don't think

(19:46):
I knew that. Uh yeah, I found a couple of
great sources on them, in particular Dr Frank Anderson and
Dr Samuel James. They did a blog post at Biomedical
Central titled the Evolution of Earthworms. So earthworms are fabulous,
their their ecosystem engineers working, draining, aerating the soil. I
feel like nowadays most people realize that, hey, have you've

(20:09):
got worms living in your garden? Earthworms, they're they're doing
the Lord's work. That's good. But what did we not
always realize that worms were good for the soil? Well,
it seems like we didn't. I mean, you can look
back to the writings of say Aristotle, who referred to
them as the intestines of the earth, which is in
many ways true. It seems like a good thing, right,

(20:29):
you don't want to not have intestines. But but apparently
before Charles Darwin came along with his interest in earthworms,
there was this idea, at least in the Western world,
at least in in Europe, in Britain specifically, that earthworms
were kind of a pest in your garden, that they
weren't really doing anything get them out of there. By

(20:50):
the way, Dr Anderson and James. One of the things
they discussed in their their article is that roughly one
third of the earthworms species in North America were introduced
for Europe or Asia, and some were introduced into northern
forests which had been free of earthworms since the end
of the Last Ice Age roughly eleven thousand years ago.
Oh wow, I've never thought about that, the way um

(21:13):
like the soil fauna has to recover after areas have
been covered by glaciers. I guess yeah. I believe we've
touched on this in the past on the show. Maybe
it was a very old episode about the idea of
of earthworms being brought in by by colonial forces from
the from the Old World into the New World. Anyway,

(21:33):
But earthworms, there are a lot of them out there.
The largest is the giant African earthworm. Uh. It's typically
typically reaches fifty four inches or one point thirty six
ms in length, but its record length is twenty two
ft or six point seven ms. What. Yeah, Now, even
this species before anyone pictures like a full Leslie Nielsen

(21:54):
transformed earthworm, Uh, this species was still the giant here
was still less than an inch in diameter. Uh so
nothing that could scare a man to deathness seller that
makes me wonder what are the upper limits of Like
how how filament like an organism can be. Like at
some point you would think that the strains of moving

(22:16):
something that long and that thin would want to rip
it apart or something. I guess that's why, because you
see them remaining so thin, you don't see them reaching
sandworm or gravoid size. So Anderson and James that they
believe that the ancestor of all living earthworms probably lived
over two hundred nine million years ago, making earthworms about
as old as mammals and dinosaurs. They based this estimate

(22:39):
on DNA sequencing as well as the fossil record, which
they said, you know, ultimately doesn't tell us a lot
regarding earthworms, but it does give us leech cocoon fossils
from the late Triassic two one million years ago, so,
which presents a minimum age for leeches and earthworms. But
the idea of a human becoming an earthworm, the loss

(23:00):
of our vertebrate status, I think it terrifies us because
it also, you know, it reduces us to the activities
mentioned by dr MASI right, moving, eating, producing waste, and
these are all things we do naturally. But but we
tend to focus on all the other aspects of our
human existence. I mean, sometimes to the point where we
want to reject our inner worm. You'd say, I think

(23:21):
generally bones are pretty important to our lives. Yeah, I
agree with that. We we need our bones. But but
but also just the idea that the worm doesn't do
anything else, I mean does a lot. Again, but to
the sort of the human perspective, digging around in a
garden and not knowing what the earthworms are doing, all

(23:43):
it seems to do is just food goes in one end,
poop comes out the other. It crawls around. It is
like just the stripped everything more interesting away from the
certainly the human experience and the mammalian experience as well. Well. Yeah,
I mean a common feature of body horror. You know,
long before we had David Cronenberg, we had older strains

(24:04):
of body horror, the kind of horror that's based not
saying a monster chasing you, but in the transformation of
yourself into something you don't like or recognize. I mean
that the most common version of that is say reduction
to what people would consider a lower strata of animal existence,
you know, being made into a beast that's less than human.

(24:26):
Oh yeah, I mean I can't help but think, of
course of Offcas, the metamorphosis. Yeah uh though, of course
that that beast like he was turned into. I think
the term directly translated into translates into something like vermin,
but it's often interpreted as like a you know, a
cockroach or something like that. But yeah, he the weird

(24:47):
thing there is he retains all of his mental faculties.
You know, he has full sentience. He's just said his
body transformed. I absolutely love that story. That is. I
think that is the only horror story that I've actually
read in a foreign language. I read it in German class. Yeah, yeah,
what was it like in German? It was. It was
a cool experience. I've since forgotten any you know, smidge

(25:07):
of German that it was. That was that Reading that
story in German was the absolute peak of my, my, my,
my German language reading ability. Well, it sounds like a
good peak to climb before committing to the valley forever.
So I mentioned Charles Darwin earlier. Charles Darwin, of course,
the famous naturalist who gave us the theory the theory

(25:28):
of natural selection. He was quite interested in earthworms, and
in fact they were the subject of his last book,
eight ones, The Formation of Vegetable Mold through the Action
of Worms. And despite this, you know what makes him
dry subject matter? Perhaps, Uh, it was still the most
successful book published during his lifetime. And uh and uh yeah,

(25:50):
And according to Anderson and James, it was pretty key
in changing Western views on earthworms. Uh. They were no
longer soil pest. People realized they had importance and tying
in without directly with our Night Gallery episode, it's it's
success inspired an eight eight two Punch, which was a
publication punch magazine. I guess you would call it um.

(26:12):
They had a cartoon that depicted worms evolving into monkeys
and monkeys evolving into men in you know, kind of
a spiral around a cartoon version of Charles Darwin Well.
I feel like I should know the answer to this question,
but I honestly don't. Are is a worm like organism

(26:32):
at some point believed to be part of our philo
genetic history? Or is or have worms always been separate
from whatever became vertebrates and eventually became us. Well, there,
they've been a lot of studies over the years looking
at nematodes in particular. Um Like, if you just do
some searches for uh, human genetics and worms, you'll find these, uh,

(26:56):
these articles. And I was tempted to go into those
deeper here, but then realized that's it's really deserving of
a of a whole episode. But but either way, I
mean whether or not some type of worm is a
direct ancestor. Obviously we share common ancestry, so the question
is how much do we have in common? Well, I
was looking at a paper that goes into this, a
bit titled Earthworm Genomes, Genes and Proteins The Rediscovery of

(27:21):
Darwin's Worms, and this was by strussan Baum, Andre Kylie
and Morgan was publishing two thousand nine in the Proceedings
of the Royal Society b SO. I I'd like to
read just a section where they referenced Darwin here and
in particularly the referencing that illustration I talked about with
the worms transforming into monkeys. Quote. The illustration is a

(27:44):
humorous construct, but an examination of the earthworm structure and
function reveals cells and tissues and cell types with vertebrate counterparts.
Earthworms are ce limit protostomes, possessing an anatomicle and functionally
differentiated alimentary canal with brush bordered absorptive epithelia, a closed

(28:08):
blood circulation with hemoglobin in free suspension, an organized nervous
system with cepholic ganglia and neuro secretary activities, a multifunctional
tissue for which carbohydrate metabolism and storage properties are reminiscent
of mammalian heptocytes, a series of paired tubules in each

(28:30):
segment with renal urine forming functions, and a systemic immune
system comprising leukocite like cells. So I realized there's a
lot of the very technical information there that I had
to stumble through. Uh, but you know what it's basically
getting down to is that, yes, we're very different from earthworms.
I'm not saying that earth worms and humans are basically

(28:51):
the same thing, but when you start looking at genetics
and just sort of life itself, we're not that different.
They've got a lot of similar anatomical counterparts, some of
the same stuff you'd see in mammals, and in a
way you can see them as a reduced version of
what we are. Right Um, and in fact, when you

(29:11):
look at our genes. Uh. One thing that the author's
pointed out here is the earthworms share something like two
d and twenty genes um of their of their then catalog,
that eight thousand, one hundred twenty nine gene objects with humans.
And that's more than with fruit flies sixty eight genes
or nematode worms forty nine genes. Despite the importance of

(29:31):
fruit fly and nematoed genes in human research, there's so
you know, so there are a whole lot of vertebrate
homologies in there. They wrote in summary that more earthworm
genes are conserved between earthworms and humans. Provides anecdotal support
of the original Punch Cartoons strapline quote, man is but

(29:51):
a worm. That's wonderful. And I like how they have
fundamentally conclusively proved that you can inject somebody with an
zimme and turn them into an earth No no, no no,
no no, that's still pure science fiction. But but I
think maybe it does lean into the idea that it
is science fiction and not just pure sorcery. Like there

(30:12):
there there is a connection. There are there is a
wormy slimy trail descending through the Haunted House of Human
Evolution if we dare follow it. Well, I have greatly
enjoyed following the slimy trail, Robert. Yeah, I think that's
part of the fun of going after these, like sort
of picking an episode from an anthology series and then
just seeing what kind of science you can problicbly squeeze

(30:35):
out of it. Um. On that note, let's take a
quick break, and when we come back, I believe you
have a selection for us. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
All right, we're back, okay, Robert. Treehouse of Horror. Do
you have a favorite Treehouse of Horror of all time? Oh? Well,
I have a I definitely have a favorite episode, yes,
that I watched last night, because it has some of

(30:56):
the best segments it has. It has the shinning oh yeah,
which I referenced already in the episode. It also has
Nightmare Cafeteria, the one where the you know, the all
the teachers in the lunch room are turning to cannibalism
and eating the children. But it also has has one
more just really stellar segment. Yes, and this is of
course the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment Time and Punishment,

(31:21):
one of the great Simpsons treeouse of horror shorts of
all time, maybe maybe the best one ever, So I'll
give you the quick rundown. Homer Simpson breaks the toaster
by getting his hand jammed in it twice. Uh, the
best gags ever on the show. It still makes me
laugh every time. The second time he gets his hand
jammed in there, so I think Lisa's like, Dad, your

(31:42):
hands still in there, and He's like, there's just so
much fabulous screaming and sprawling about. Anyway, So toaster's broken.
He has to do some repairs. So in doing so,
Homer accidentally turns the toaster into a time machine that
takes him back to the Cretaceous period, and upon arriving,
he recalls the advice his father gave him on his

(32:04):
wedding night, which is, if you ever happen to travel
back into the past, don't change anything, because the ripple
effects through time could be disastrous. Unfortunately, of course, Homer
ends up killing bugs and you know, generally messing stuff
up in the past. And so Homer comes back to
the present the first time to find a kind of
nineteen eighty four scenario where ned Flanders rules the earth,

(32:28):
a kind of nineteen a diddle for if you will,
and uh, it's just too good. So eventually Homer he
goes back through time again to try to fix things,
and every time he changes something in the past, the
future changes in horrible ways. Finally, in the end he
settles for a present in which things are basically normal,
but everybody has forked lizard tongues. He says like, yeah,

(32:51):
good enough. Yeah uh. And of course this seems to
be based on Ray Bradbury's short story A Sound of Thunder,
which was originally published in Collier's Magazine and teen fifty two.
And by the way, Robert, I think I'm to understand
you have not seen the two thousand five movie version
of A Sound of Thunder with Ben Kingsley and that
dude with an attitude from Saving Private Ryan. No, I

(33:13):
haven't you sent me a trailer for it? And somehow
I totally missed this movie ever even existed. It has
some of the most deliciously awful c g I monsters
of all time. It's you know, that kind of early
two thousands c g I that at the time people
just thought was amazing, and now you can't look at

(33:34):
it without laughing. Yeah, it's it's a. It's a shame,
you know. It's like, it's not like some of the
stop motion animation you find in older some older horror films,
like this is the Puppets. Yeah, yeah, puppets like this.
Maybe maybe you know, our taste will change, Maybe we'll
look back on them in ten years and we'll love them.
Right now, it's very difficult. Well, I mean I do

(33:55):
love them, but not for the reason they were expecting
people to love them. It's hilarious like reading movie reviews
from the late nineties and early two thousand's where critics
will say, like, well, this movie wasn't very good, but
at least it has dazzling special effects. Some people were
just they're out of their minds in the late nineties

(34:15):
and early two thousands for these c g I movies
that looks so bad you cannot keep your eyes focused
on them. You have to look away. I remember seeing
the Spawn movie when it came out and thinking, oh, well,
that that had some pretty cool looking action in it. Yeah,
and I recently like glanced back like a glant. Granted
I didn't watching him full I just watched a few
scenes on YouTube, and I was just really astounded at

(34:37):
how bad the c G I was, it's it's amazing.
But anyway, this movie, it takes this story. At one
point there's this monster, this kind of like a baboon
velociraptor hybrid. It's just amazing. But anyway, so what what
is uh the plot of A Sound of thunder ray
Bradberry's original story, Well, it involves hunters traveling back through
time to go on a safari through time and kill

(35:00):
al Turannosaurus Rex. And so this time travel safari in
the story is believed to be safe because scouts have
gone ahead and selected an animal that was about to
die anyway, so killing it shouldn't change too much about
the past. But then in the story, won one of
these safari guys. I think this rich guy pay in
to go on this trip. He sort of goes off script.
He falls off this levitating path that they've constructed, uh,

(35:23):
and he changes too much about the past, especially in
the end by discovering that he crushed a butterfly under
his boot. And so then when they return to the future,
everything's weird. English words are spelled different, and a fascist
politician has come to power. It's a fabulous story. I
should also point out that. I think it's the third
season of the Ray Bradberry Theater had an adaptation of

(35:45):
this that I think was actually scripted by Ray Bradberry,
and I remember as being pretty good. Yeah, so do
not feel like you only have that that awful c
g I film to fall back on. But but isn't
it interesting that probably more people have been exposed to
this concept through The Simpsons then through the Ray Bradberry Theater,

(36:06):
or certainly that the writings of Ray Bradberry. Oh, I
think that's how it often is. I mean, lots of
classic sci fi stories ended up as Simpsons episodes, and
that's what people primarily know them from. Just like I
bet more people of roughly our generation know the Tale
of the Monkeys Paw as the Twisted Claw episode of
Are You Afraid of the Dark. I mean it makes sense.

(36:28):
We're essentially talking about folk tales and myths, and these
things evolved, These things change with the teller historically, and
so it makes sense that they should change with the
teller even today. Yeah. But so this is sort of
a timeless story in a way, because it's illustrating a
concept that if you've ever really thought about time travel
and what it would mean if time travel into the

(36:50):
past could exist. If you think about it hard enough,
you're likely to stumble across some version of what's come
to be known in in chaos theory and meteorology and
mathematics as the butterfly effect. Now, there are plenty of
popular misconceptions about the butterfly effect. You heard about it
in Jurassic Park and stuff. One of the common misconceptions

(37:10):
is that the term actually comes from Ray Bradberry's story
A Sound of Thunder, Because what do we find out
at the end that this guy stepped on a butterfly
and he sees it on his boot and realizes, oh no,
that caused these cascading effects through time and changed everything. Uh,
this is not the case. That the term does not
come from that story. In reality, credit can be given

(37:31):
to the m I. T. Meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz, who
was discussing the accuracy of weather prediction models. And Lorenz
found while working on meteorological computer programs that extremely tiny
changes in initial inputs would lead to huge differences in
predicted weather patterns over time, such that unavoidable errors in

(37:55):
our inputs will probably always make weather fundamentally unpredictable be
on to certain distance into the future. And you actually
know this from your own experience. Right, you look at
today's weather forecast, it's probably pretty accurate. Tomorrow's is probably
pretty accurate. You try to go seven days into the future,
it's it's kind of a crapshoot. Then, in predicting, say

(38:17):
whether a month into the future, is almost useless. And
this is because even though we have very good weather
prediction models at this point, their accuracy just deteriorates over
time because of the amplification of tiny initial differences that
you can't ever totally eliminate. So you know, uh, you

(38:37):
you make a tiny, tiny, you know, many many decimal
places behind the zero change to some initial input in
a weather prediction model, and then you run that, run
that alongside something with the original input, and one day
into the future they'll be pretty similar. But five days
into the future they will be dramatically different. So whatever

(39:00):
you've got slightly wrong today, however tiny that error is,
will mean you just can't predict the future in a month.
And illustrate this concept, Lorenz used the image of a bird,
I think a seagull or a butterfly flapping its wings,
leading to changes in the weather that would create a
tornado that you wouldn't have had otherwise. Now, one thing
I also want to make clear is that this is

(39:22):
talking about the predicted movements of like specific weather patterns
and events. Right when they're trying to say where rain
will be at a certain time, and how the front
the you know, the the air fronts will move and everything.
We can, on the other hand, make some solid predictions
about whether just based on climate and statistics. For example,
you can predict it is much more likely to be

(39:44):
raining in Seattle tomorrow than it is to be raining
in Death Valley tomorrow, and you you are likely to
be correct based on those predictions made on on the
basis of knowledge about climate and statistics. But still, if
you're trying to predict far in the future with specific
movements of weather patterns, you're you're gonna have a really
hard time doing it. Another misconception about the butterfly effect.

(40:06):
I think a lot of times people interpreted exactly the
wrong way. It's like the opposite of what it means.
They think that it means you can identify small changes
that lead to big effects in complex systems, and this
is the opposite of the point about the butterfly effect.
The butterfly effect is specifically about the lack of deterministic
predictability in complex systems with sensitivity to initial conditions, and

(40:31):
the technical term for this would be deterministic non linear systems.
Nonlinear systems are systems where the outputs are not directly
proportional to the inputs. You know, you can slightly vary
an input and get big changes in the difference of
the output. So the point is not that you can
see a tornado and actually trace it back to a
butterfly flapping its wings. Rather, the point is that weather

(40:54):
systems emerge from complex interactions over time with extreme sensitivity
to initial conditions, meaning that if you move far enough
back in time, you could not have predicted that a
tornado would emerge. It's not about predicting the future of
a complex system based on tiny initial changes. It's about
how complex systems are more and more unpredictable the farther

(41:15):
into the future you try to predict. This, of course,
is one of the fundamental concepts of chaos theory, and
maybe maybe we should come back and devote a full
episode to this one day with special guestian Malcolm. I've
never really thought to look critically at whether the way
I M. Malcolm tries to apply chaos theory and Jurassic
Park is a legitimate application of that theory. Maybe maybe

(41:36):
the maybe it is, I don't know. That would would
actually be fun to just to do a breakdown of
the original Jurassic Park film. Uh And it would give
us more opportunity to rail against what Jurassic Park, especially
the recent films, are doing the understanding of dinosaurs. I'm
really into kids now whose favorite dinosaurs are fictional dinosaurs
from this most recent movie, and I feel like it's

(41:57):
a shame. Real dinosaurs are good enough. Come on, Yeah,
it's like everybody they're like, Oh, it's this blue velociraptor
or something. I don't know, I haven't seen it yet.
Maybe it's wonderful. I suppose I should just be played
that they're interested in dinosaurs at all. But they're just
so many wonderful actual species, and our current scientific understanding
of them I feel like should be reflected to some
extent in our fiction totally. Uh So, it's pretty widely

(42:20):
accepted that something like the butterfly effect applies to whether
I think there are actually are some who dissent and say, no,
it's just you know, problems with our models or something.
But the question is would it apply to the biological
history of Earth? Would stepping on a fish seventy million
years ago change the present substantially? And how would it

(42:40):
change the present? Unfortunately, this is not a question that
I think has a firm scientific answer. I think this
is just something people we don't know what the answer
to this question is. Uh. One thing I think, though
I could be wrong, is that I think stories like
this often get the scale of the changes wrong. Like that.
It's interesting these stories tend to assume kind of nonsensical

(43:03):
esthetic changes around the margins of reality. But where the
broad strokes are the same, uh. You know, example would
be Ned Flanders still exists, the Simpsons, the Simpsons still
exist there apparently the same people. Uh. Ned Flanders is
still the Simpsons, Simpsons next door neighbor, but is also
the dictator of Earth, you know. And I know that's

(43:24):
a parody. I'm not trying to like rag on the
Simpsons for that, but it's a It's a good parody
because it highlights the kind of absurdity that you see
in stories like this, like in a Sound of Thunder,
the idea that you'd still basically have the same uh
people existing in the same like candidates running for offer
It's office, but a different one of the candidates one yeah,

(43:46):
and the back to the Simpsons, like why would everything
be the same except for the tongue? Right? So, I
you know, I could be wrong, but I would tend
to say, just intuitively and based on you know, using
the weather analogy, that butterfly effect type changes from deep
into the past would result in let's say, larger amplitude
changes tens of millions of years down the road, bigger,

(44:09):
bigger amplitude changes than which candidate wins an election. Would
people even exist if they did with the same individual
people even exist? I don't know. It seems kind of doubtful.
There's that great scene in that episode where Homer sits
on a creature emerging from the water yes um, which
I love that because I feel like it kind of

(44:29):
calls back to um paleo art in our science textbooks
where you're told about the evolution of life and you
see this picture of some sort of creature waddling out
of the water talking about like life coming from the
sea and then becoming terrestrial. But it it can it's
kind of accidentally put this idea in your mind that
there was one fish. There's one creature like that, just

(44:53):
like this is the one and if you sat on it,
it would change everything. Yeah, that that kind of misconception,
Like one fish got brave and it climbed out of
the water, and if it hadn't done that, there never
would have been uh any kind of like water to
land dwelling vertebrate transition. Yeah, I mean maybe that's part
of like an American exceptionalism, right, kind of kind of

(45:17):
you know, accidentally drained into our science like that fish.
Really it was a freethinker. It really changed everything. It's
the great Man theory of history. And of course we
got no time for that. But hey, this story also
deals to the practical effects of time travel, something that unfortunately,
again is in in the speculative realm. But at least

(45:39):
we can offer some informed criticism even if we can't
have a like, you know, a proven scientific theory about
time travel. So one of the things we often point
out on the show is that, of course time travel
into the future is easy. In fact, you're doing it
right now in more ways than in more than one,
more than one way, more way than one, more ways
than one anyway. You are traveling into the future, of course,

(46:01):
at a rate of one second per second. But beyond that,
you are in fact time traveling into the future in
the way that many stories imagine, meaning you're going into
the future faster than other things are because of time
dilation effects, You're closer to the center of gravity of Earth,
so you are actually going into the future faster than

(46:22):
objects farther away from the center of gravity of Earth
that are moving at the same velocity as you. Also,
because you're moving faster, that's dilating time in a way,
speeding up your travel into the future. If you get
in a spaceship and travel even even faster than you
will even more greatly speed up your relative travel into
the future. You will get old slower than things that

(46:44):
are not traveling with you in that fast moving spaceship.
So yeah, time travel into the future is totally real,
proven feature of relativity, and it's just it's actually almost
kind of easy. Um. On the other hand, we often
talk about how time travel into the past is perhaps
it's impossible, and if not impossible, at least very very hard. Uh,

(47:05):
the ways in which it has done. I was I
was reading a post about this, UH on Sean Carroll's blog,
The physicist Sean Carroll, Caltech physicist. He writes a lot
of great, you know, popular science writing these days, and
he's got a great blog. One of his posts from
two thousand nine is called rules for Time Travelers, where
he just says, Okay, if we were to try to
make scientifically accurate time travel movies, what would happen in them?

(47:28):
He argues that traveling into the past is difficult, it
might not be impossible. If you can do it, it
would be based on what's you know, basically like bridges
through space time known as closed timelike curves. And if
it is possible to travel into the past, one of
the things about this is that it is not possible
to change the past. So you might be able to

(47:51):
travel back in time, but you couldn't create a paradox
by say, going back and killing your grandfather or whatever,
so that you never existed. In fact, act, anything you
went back into the past and did, you would find
was in fact already part of the past in the
future that you came from that's the paradox of the
whole situation, right I mean, and that, yeah, that makes

(48:12):
it kind of weird because that seems to sort of
create a paradox as well. Like it's the closed time
loop like you see in the original Terminator movie. Uh,
there's a boy who exists or a person who exists
only because somebody from the future was sent back in
time by him to become his father. So like, how
how did that closed loop get initiated? So anyway, backward

(48:35):
time travel still generally smells rotten to me. But but
Carol saying, if it's possible, if it's possible at all,
you can't change the past. You you know, whatever's done
is done. That just is the past, even if you
can go back. Also, another point he makes is that
you can't travel back in time to before the time
machine was invented. He says, you know, maybe you can

(48:58):
travel back to a point you know, you've got a
time machine later and you can travel back to when
the time machine was made, but you can't travel back
to the Middle Ages or something like that, because you
get paradoxes again, which takes some of the fun out
of our time tap travel fiction. But it also would
explain why we haven't been visited by time travelers. Oh yeah,
I mean that's always a great question. Now you might

(49:21):
be thinking, okay, but wait about wait a minute, what
about like forking branches of time? You know, can't you
like fork off into different branches of time? You know?
Even Sean Carroll, he he adheres to the many worlds
theory of quantum mechanics, right, so he thinks that the
universe is constantly branching off into different realities based on
the wave function of quantum mechanical objects and events um.

(49:43):
But but even if you accept that, there's no reason
to think that traveling back into time would somehow give
you access to different quantum realities. It just seems like
you know, you're here, You're here, this is the one
you have access to. You can't interact with other quantum
realities by def mission, you can't interact with them. That's
what makes them different realities. So, unfortunately, I don't think

(50:06):
you you know, if you don't like the your lot
in life today and you want to change things, I
don't think you can do it by going back and
stomping on a fish or even a butterfly. Still great,
episode of tree House of Horror so good, and and
I do recommend that Ray brad Berry a theater episode
as well. I believe you can find the full thing
on one of the video streaming sides. If you love

(50:28):
bad movies, I also recommend the two thousand five movie.
It's it's one for the c g ages. All right, Well,
let's move on to another one, shall we. All Right, So, Joe,
you've flown with me before, Yes, so you probably have
observed that then I'm kind of a slightly nervous flyer.
I like to try to be a calm, reassuring presence,
trying not to raise my voice around you when we're

(50:50):
getting onto an airplane. Yeah, and I have to say,
you know, I don't have anywhere near the difficulty that
I know some people struggle with when it comes to flying.
But yeah, I've I've found myself grow more anxious when
it comes to flights in recent years. And I've I've
been able to successfully uh manage this to to a
certain degree with a little uh Zanex, a little Steve

(51:13):
Roach and be an electronic music, maybe a little biosphere
uh and and that seems to do the do the job.
It makes me a more pleasant flyer. It makes me
more pleasant to be around when I'm flying. But so,
given this reality, I couldn't help but discuss the classic
Twilight Zone episode from October of nineteen. Uh, Nightmare at

(51:35):
twenty thousand feet based, I should point out on the
Richard Mathieson short story alone by Night. Isn't it great?
How many of these shorts come from great short stories
by sci fi writers. Yeah. I mean we're gonna get
to some that are not based on terrible stories, but
but yeah, so far we've been talking about some big

(51:56):
names here. Uh Richard Matheson, Uh what is was a legend? Um?
This episode, of course is famous because it also started
with him Shatner. Uh so just a quicking Oh yeah,
he's he's pretty good at this. But and he was
in at least a couple of Twilight Zones, maybe more.
I remember there being at least another one he was in.

(52:18):
Yeah what was he? He was in one that had
like a what was it a jukebox napkin napkin dispenser? Yeah?
Why why did I think juke box it like to
spit out fortunes or somethingthing to that effect. Yeah, it's
like a fortune cookie Napkin Dispenser. I'm blanking on the
details is not nearly the famous as this episode. So
in this one, William Shatner plays a nervous flyer who

(52:40):
witnesses a creature on the wing of the plane during flight. Um,
and he has a in in the episode he has.
He's just bouncing back from a nervous breakdown a board
of flight, so everyone's doubting him when he starts reporting
seeing a creature on the wing of the plane. Uh,
this so what what is essentially a grimlin? Though it's
kind of a yetti suit. It's a combination of a

(53:01):
yetie suit and it also kind of looks like that
dog down the hall and the scene in the Shining. Yeah,
it's not a great monster suit, but the episode is
so solid it somehow works. And I guess it makes
sense that it would be furry if it's at such
a height. You know, it's cold up there. Um, I
should point out I said it's a grimlin. Well it's
a pre Magwa Grimlin of a pre Gremlins and Grimlins

(53:23):
to gremlin, not the Joe Dante kind. Right, Yeah, this
is you know, essentially the folkloric creature that messes with technology,
an idea that spread especially during World War Two. So
if something went wrong with your airplane engine, you'd say
they're gremlins in there, right. So in this episode, the
crew attempts to st date and I think they even
give them a pill shatter or not the gremlin, right,

(53:44):
they don't. Nobody sees the gremlin. They're just like, here,
take this pill. Crazy person. Um. By the way, good
luck trying to get any kind of sedatives out of
out of the crew of your flight. That's the policy.
You can't ask for them. You have to say you
see monsters and then you'll get them. Yeah. So he's
raving about the creature and finally like the plane lands,

(54:07):
he's rolled away in a straight jacket. But as he's
rolled away, he sees the claw marks on the outside
of the plane, the proof on the engine that the
monster was tearing apart the plane. He was right all along.
He's not the insane person. In fact, he's the only
sane person of course, this Uh. This this episode was
also recreated in the three film Twilight Zone, the movie

(54:29):
in which John Lithgow played the lead played the nervous
flyer UH, and he's absolutely wonderful in that. Uh. And
oh and by the way, George Miller of Mad Maxi
directed that that segment in the film. I like the
gremlin in the in the movie version. Yeah, there's the
movie version. Grim one is a lot more frightening. And
then also there's a Treehouse of Horror that did this

(54:50):
as well. When they do it with the school bus,
right tear at five and a half feet Uh yeah,
it's it's pretty wonderful as well, and then does a
great job of delivering exactly the same story essentially, except
with it's on the outside of the school bus right.
Uh yeah. And then when they put barton the ambulance
at the end, it follows him under the ambulance. Yes, yes,
that's a nice twist, like they added it sometimes the

(55:11):
Treehouse of Horrors, like they add a little extra element
to the existing story and it really works. So the
science of this, well, uh, you know, we could probably
have a really rich discussion about flying anxieties in general.
We've touched on it before in our Escape Pod episode.
You know, we we we trust ourselves over to the
machine and the people, companies and regulations that ensure everything

(55:34):
is working. There's a loss of agency and flying, and
I feel like it's you're just you're constantly reminded or
are reminding yourself about the potential undesirable possibilities. I mean,
it's it's like standing atop of mountain when you look
out and you see the height that you have achieved,
not through any skill of your own, but just through

(55:55):
the technology and people surrounding it. It's like being deposited
on the top of the mountains a little bit less empowering. Yeah,
airplanes are are sort of great to look at it
when you're thinking about fear, because they combine so many
different kinds of phobia triggers for people. Um, of course,
there's just fear of like heights and stuff, you know,

(56:16):
looking out the window and looking down that that can
upset people. There is fear of an accident of the
plane crashing, But there's also just a fear that has
always been more salient for me whenever I've had airplane
fear is mainly what it is is, Um, what do
you call it? Fear? It's a sort of a type
of a variety of claustrophobia, I guess where um, not

(56:36):
being able to leave a place when you want to.
You know, the idea that like, Okay, for so many hours,
I'm stuck here and I could not get off if
I wanted to. Yeah, the most I can do is
go through a lot of rigamar role to walk down
the hallway and you can use a very difficult bathroom,
uh and potentially have to wait in line. Yeah, I

(56:57):
guess that's the type of fear. There's also just like
I know, airplanes are or a particular type of agoraphobia
trigger for some people, where you know, like the fear
of losing control or having a panic attack or something
like that in a public place, and that itself can
trigger anxieties. And then on top of that, you've got
the travel anxieties leading into it, you know, because inevitably

(57:17):
you had to get to that airport, you had to
get through security, security, and you know, maybe customs if
you're on the other line, like they're they're all these
other stresses added on top of it makes for you know,
a very stressful day of travel. Really, in my experience,
there would be a lot of problems solved if airports
would actually just play you knows music for airports yeah,
instead yeah, on the TV, instead of instead of eno

(57:42):
I don't get it. Yeah, play me something calming, just
like enos music and just scenes the scenes from Legend
of Unicorns drinking water. That's all I need. No goblins.
So I guess the thing we should talk about is
the idea that this is a nightmare at twenty feet
What what is and feet about? Right? Uh? To put
this in perspective, the top of Mount Everest is twenty

(58:05):
nine thousand and twenty eight feet above sea level. But
that's also quite a bit below the Carmen line at
three thirty thousand feet, which is generally considered the rough
boundary between the atmosphere in space. And I say rough
because it's not like the atmosphere just stops. There's more
of a tapering off. Now for modern flyers such as ourselves,

(58:26):
we're generally working with a cruising altitude. And cruising altitude,
you know, that's that's when you've achieved, you know, the
altitude that you're gonna have for the main portion of
your flight. You're not ascending or descending. You're just achieving
an optimal altitude, optimal speed, et cetera. But it's generally
going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty three

(58:46):
thousand feet to forty two thousand feet. So, according to
the USA Today article of what is the altitude of
a plane in flight, the upper limit is generally the
domain of private jets because that's gonna be more about, Yeah,
we want to get where we're going. Uh, you know,
price isn't much of an option. But with commercial flights,
everything is kind of a careful algorithm, like, how can

(59:07):
we do this in the most cost effective way possible
and the safest way possible. But for the rest of us, Yeah,
we're gonna be, you know, somewhere closer to that thirty
three thousand uh foot altitude. It's gonna be this sweet
spot where the air is thin enough to reduce drag
but there's still enough oxygen for the engines. Plus it
allows them to fly overmost weather, which is located further

(59:28):
down in the troposphere. So we're talking about minimal turbulence,
which is exactly how I like to consume the word turbulence. Now,
I would guess at normal cruising altitude because cabins have
to be pressurized, Like you couldn't just like breathe the
air at that height, right, Yeah, since we're flying above
ten thousand feet. Airliners are are pressurized, hence those little

(59:50):
drop down mass for oxygen in the event of cabin depressurization. Now,
of course, the Twilight Zone episode, the original one takes
place in the early nineteen sixties, so it made me think,
what sort of altitudes were we talking about here? Well,
I was reading Longing for the Golden Age of air
Travel Be Careful what you Wish For by history professor
Janet bed Narnick on the conversation, and she points out

(01:00:14):
some key factors in flying during this time period, and
as the title implies, why you'd be better, far better
off flying now as opposed to that Golden Age, no
matter how cool it looks on you know, stuff like
mad Men. Yeah, but can you smoke a pipe on
a plane today? Well, yeah, these are the things people
get nostalgic about. I guess if they're smokers. So she

(01:00:35):
points out that prior to the introduction of jets in
night a transatlantic commercial flight might last something like fifteen hours,
and they had a maximum cruising altitude altitude of ten
to twelve thousand feet, meaning that they couldn't fly over
bad weather. So you thought modern delays were bad, No way,

(01:00:55):
basically like if the weather was bad, you just too
bad to fly through it, and then it wasn't gonna happen.
The then you had the propeller driven Boeing Strato Cruiser
come along, for example, that could seat fifty first class
passengers or one coach passengers and it could cruise at
thirty two feet above most of the weather. But during

(01:01:16):
its heyday, only fifty six were active in the entire world.
So that's the other thing we have to realize now,
it's like the commercial flight world is just so much
vaster than it was in the in previous times. Later
we got the d C six and the d C seven,
both pressure pressurized planes, but they had to fly at
lower altitudes guess what we're talking twenty feet. So that's

(01:01:40):
where we I think come back around to uh to
the to the Twilight Zone episode. Uh. Here For the
for these flights, turbulence was common, the engines were difficult
to maintain, and this resulted in frequent delays. Uh. So
this just matches up perfectly with the Sigrid Jim idea,
the Twilight Zone concern about the you know what the
engines are doing, engine malfunction and turbulence, uh all happening

(01:02:03):
at around twenty thousand feet. Now, I must notice in
in Nightmare twenty feet that the windows on the airplane
look very large compared to the windows on a plane today.
You know, I didn't. I didn't look into this as much.
I wonder if that's just so you can see the
monster through it, or that he used an actual fuselage. Yeah.
I didn't research that particular aspect of it. So but

(01:02:25):
Nerik also makes some other important notes about safety at
the time, because ultimately this is a film about airline
safety and fear of of of bad things happening during
a flight. She points out in the nineteen fifties and
the nineteen sixties, US airlines experience at least a half
dozen crashes per year, most leading to fate to the

(01:02:45):
fatalities of everyone on board. Compare that to seventeen, the
safest year on record in commercial air history, zero accidental
deaths in commercial passenger jets, and that's with many more flights,
tremendously more flights. UH Dutch aviation consulting firm UH to
seventy estimated that the fatal accident rate for large commercial

(01:03:08):
passenger of flights is point zero six per million flights,
or one fatal accident for every sixteen million flights. I
would suggest by that calculation that it appears gremlins are
either extinct or endangered. Yeah, that would seem to be
the case. Like this is ultimately a story that speaks
more to an earlier age of of commercial air travel,

(01:03:30):
despite the fact that every time I fly. Legitimately, every
time I fly, if I look out the window and
I see the wing, I think of this Twilight Zone episode. Yeah,
not that I like freak out about the possibility of
an actual gremlin, but I still I can't help but
think think about it. It's just always been there. But
I'd like to turn to the biological element of Nightmare
twenty feet. What sort of organism can actually become a

(01:03:53):
factor at that altitude? Well, I mean, I know there
there are bacteria that live in outs, but are there
are there large animals that fly up that high? That's
a great question because we're talking about some extreme heights here, right, Um,
And again, well, you know we require pressurized cabins and

(01:04:14):
or masks to to survive up there. Everything has to
be uh, you know, temperature, The temperature has to be
carefully maintained. But evolution delivers certain bird species to these
lofty heights as well, and yes, some of them can
pose grave danger to flights. These are of course referred
to as bird strikes um, which which are when they occur,

(01:04:35):
can be pretty pretty terrible. I've read that most bird
strikes are encountered at below ten thousand feet. I've also
read that most are actually occurring below three thousand feet,
so I think that should give you an idea. Like
most of the birds are are are operating at at
lower altitudes. When you fly above the weather, you're probably
flying above the birds. So as with most things in

(01:04:58):
air travel, the majority of the dangers are going to
be closer to take off and landing, not at cruising altitude.
Right and and again they can be pretty dangerous, especially
in the event of a double bird strike, where like
both engines are hit by the birds. Still, major accidents
are few, but we have to consider some of the
birds that do get up to some crazy heights. So

(01:05:18):
I just want to run through a few of them
here before we get to the like the King of altitude. Uh,
there are migrating white storks which can reach sixteen thousand
feet or forty eight hundred meters. They're migrating bar tailed
godwits that can that can actually reach twenty thousand feet
or six thousand meters. There's the bar headed goose which

(01:05:40):
can get up to twenty nine thousand feet or eight thousand,
eight hundred meters. And these guys fly over the tallest
mountain ranges on Earth. Why do they go up so high?
Do you know? Well, with the earlier species we're talking about,
like this ends up being a part of their migration. Um.
But the king of all this, the king of altitude,
is definitely Ruple's vulture also known as Ruple's Griffin. We're

(01:06:05):
talking a maximum altitude of eleven thousand, three hundred meters
or thirty seven thousand, one hundred feet. So these are
these are vultures. They're extremely keen of I you know
there they have evolved to fly above it all and
uh and taking everything beneath. But they can get up
to just crazy altitudes. Uh, They're just unchallenged in their

(01:06:26):
ability to do so. Now. Fortunately they're found only in
the South region of Central Africa. This is a belt
stretching across the continent just below the Sahara. But Indeed,
a bird strike entailing Ruple's vulture actually occurred over the
Ivory Coast at an altitude of thirty seven thousand, one

(01:06:46):
hundred feet or eleven thousand, three hundred meters on November three.
According to Serious Vulture Hits to Aircraft over the World,
a two thousand report by the International Bird Strike Committee,
outside temperatures were frigid, there was almost no oxygen, and
yet here comes this, uh, this vulture and it hits
the plane. So that I think is one of the

(01:07:08):
you know, these are some of the few examples of
organisms that are actually going to be going about their
normal business, like large organisms, organisms large enough to pose
a potential and slim uh, you know, threat to commercial flights.
By the way, I also ran across a story from
in which a Ruple's vulture escaped from a bird show

(01:07:30):
in north the lack Sheer, Scotland, and her name was
Gandalf and uh and after she escaped, airports in the
area were put on notice and there was no evidence
that she was, you know, ever recovered or anything. Fly
you fools. But but it's it's like it's kind of
an alarming story because it's like, oh, this bird has escaped,
and it could there's a very slim chance it could

(01:07:52):
pose a danger to commercial flights in the area. But
we should remind you that even with the Ruple's vulture
flying around, some are out there. Flying is generally pretty
safe these days. Yeah, it's far safer than driving when
you break down the statistics again, commercial flying not necessarily
getting in the airplane that your dentist buddy owns. Right,

(01:08:14):
we're talking about commercial flights again, seventeen safest year on record. Um,
you really don't have to worry about green ones on
the wing of the plane, only about the Langaliers land
the plan. Speaking of late nineties c G. I right, yes,
for real, man, that's a good one. I love that
short story though. That was that was definitely a Stephen

(01:08:35):
king Well. I think it was more of a novella,
but it it definitely harkened back to some of those
Twilight Zone type scenarios. I've never read the story, but
I remember seeing that on TV sometime around back when
it came out, and oh man, that was one where
maybe even maybe even the critics of the time, we're

(01:08:56):
not wowed by the c G. I. Yeah, they were
essentially like the critters, the crits from the critters movies,
there were just these big c g I mouths like
eating the Sky. It's a shame because the original story
it is a lot of fun. I do recommend it.
I mean, don't read it on a plane, for God's sake,
but uh, you know, do read it when you're on
the ground. Okay, we need to take a quick break,
but we will be right back with more horror, anthology science.

(01:09:20):
Thank you, thank you. Alright, we're back. So what do
you have for us, Joe, Well, you just did a
Twilight Zone episode. I feel like I gotta do a
Twilight Zone episode they had. There's so many thoughtful episodes
of the Twilight Zone, and perhaps because you know, it
wasn't just pure hard it also had a lot of
science fiction in it and just sort of weird fiction
in general. So here is a sci fi horror episode

(01:09:40):
of the Twilight Zone. This is one of the classics.
You probably, I bet the majority of you out there
listening already know the story here, but for those of
you who don't, I've got to tell it. It is
to serve man. Uh. This is one that was written
by Rod Serling based on a story by a writer
named Damon Knight. It was originally aired on March second,

(01:10:00):
nineteen sixty two, and it's just got a twist to
put him Night Shamalan to shame. It is the best.
So here's Rod Serling's teaser for the episode, respectfully submitted
for your perusal. A cannement height a little over nine feet,
weight in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds,
origin unknown motives. Therein hangs the tale for in just

(01:10:25):
a moment, we're going to ask you to shake hands
figuratively with a Christopher Columbus from another galaxy and another
time this is the Twilight Zone. Oh well, that's already
a terrifying possibility here. So it's got a guy named
Lloyd Bachner in it as he's a Canadian actor as
this government cryptographer who who is tasked with decoding and

(01:10:49):
alien books. So I actually I should say first aliens
show up. They're called the Cannimates. They're played by Richard Kiel,
who ended up playing Kyle or Kiel Do you know
how you pronounce it? I was heard Ko, but could
be drastically wrong on that. He's the guy who played
Jaws in the James Bond movies. He was, he was,
he got yeah. Uh. And so he plays all of

(01:11:09):
these aliens. They all look the same, uh and uh.
Richard keel In In like some weird head makeup, shows
up on Earth and he speaks to the United Nations
telepathically and he's like, Hey, we're here to help you.
We're gonna solve world hunger. We're going to make we're
gonna make war disappear. We're gonna solve all your problems
and make life on Earth great. Don't you want that?

(01:11:31):
Don't you want this free new energy source that you can,
you know, power a whole country for a few dollars
a day. Don't you want all this great stuff? And
people are, they're hesitant at first, but they're like, well, okay.
And so Jaws brings a book with him that has
like a title in these alien glyphs on the cover.

(01:11:51):
He's like reading things from this book as he's promising
stuff to humanity, and they get a copy. The humans
grab a copy of the book and they bring it
to this government cryptographer and they're like, can you decode this?
Tell us what it means? And so he works on it.
He's got a colleague named Patty who works on it. Uh.
It proves too difficult to decode, except that Patty decodes

(01:12:13):
the title and figures out that the title is to
serve Man. Well, that sounds noble and wonderful and and
really works out well for us exactly, So they can't
decode the rest of the book, but to serve Man
and that sort of puts people at ease. They're like, Okay, well,
the book there is about how to serve humankind. That
that sounds like a good thing. So people start getting

(01:12:33):
on spaceships to go with Jaws to his home planet
where they will be given I think that at one
point they're talking about how they've even got baseball on
the Cannibate's planet, uh, to go to the Basically it's
like a forever vacation where everything is just going to
be awesome, so that people are getting on the spaceships
to go there. And then the big twist that comes

(01:12:54):
at the end is right as the main guy is
about to get on the spaceship to go to the
cannon it's plan in it and uh and and live
out his days at the the baseball resort or whatever,
Patty comes yelling at him don't get on the ship.
It's a cookbook. It's so good to serve Nann. I

(01:13:16):
believe the Simpsons of period this as well to a
limited extent, right, how to serve mill House for dinner?
Oh oh, I'm vaguely I don't remember when that which one?
I don't I can't remember which episode it was, okay,
but they definitely touched on it at one point. Now,
I don't want to be too literal about interpreting the

(01:13:37):
science of the story, because if you really wanted to
be nitpicky, you could point out a million really funny details.
And its like, there's one point where to try to
make sure that the aliens intentions are actually good, they
hook jaws up to a to a polygraph. It's just
like they give him a human polygraph to to see
if he's lying about wanting to help them. And another

(01:13:59):
thing that's funny is they bring in this cryptographer to
decode this alien book, but to decode it to what
like cryptography usually consists of trying to decode encoded messages
to ann language where you're like, you know where it
will code out to some kind of script that you
already understand. How would you decode an alien language when

(01:14:21):
you have nothing to start with. Yeah, and I like
the idea that they could they could figure out nothing
from the inside, like no content but just the title.
Yeah it's great. But anyway, Okay, the main thing I
wanted to talk about, ignoring all that other stuff, is
the idea of aliens invading in order to eat us,
or perhaps more realistically another option, just to eat earth

(01:14:43):
life in general. Maybe not focused on us, but just
here to eat things. Okay, so not just to say,
harvest the resources of our planet or to do something
to our star, which we've discussed and you're talking about,
like just just just tear into the biomass of Earth.
It's a very common theme in sci fi horror, and
at a glance it sort of makes sense because you

(01:15:05):
think about, like, okay, so what do human invaders do
when they invade a country. Well, a lot of times
what they'll do is they'll just like raige your village
and take all your food. They want food, they need
all your steal all your grain and stuff, and then
they'll move on, or they'll land on an island, and
if there's a particular flightless bird or or some sort

(01:15:27):
of a turtle or tortoise that is, uh, you know,
notoriously unable to defend itself and and perhaps even trusting
to a fault of humans. They might just eat them
all or just every time they come back, harvest as
many as they can and eat them on the ship,
or just kill them and not eat them human as
did the did that too. Yeah, uh yeah, that that's

(01:15:48):
a little maybe maybe we don't want to think about
that comparison. Uh but okay, so would they want to
eat us or eat our food? I came across an
interesting opinion about this. This was in a chapter from
a book called Aliens, The World's Leading Scientists on the
Search for Extraterrestrial Life, published in seventeen by Piccador. And

(01:16:09):
this book was edited by the Iraqi British physicist Jim
al Khalili. And there's a chapter in this book that
was written by the British astrobiologist Louis Dartnell where he's
talking about what would aliens actually want with Earth? Why
would they be interested in coming here? And he's making
the case that a lot of the stuff that people

(01:16:29):
usually imagine aliens would want to come here for doesn't
make any sense that they want water, or they want
raw minerals or something like that. He just you, oh,
that's one too, with all those things. He points out,
how you know that's either and that's not actually a
concern for anything they would want, or they could get

(01:16:50):
this more abundantly elsewhere. And so here's Dartnell's case about
whether aliens would want to eat us. So, the cells
in our bodies are made of large collections of specific
organic molecules. You've got proteins, which are chains of amino acids.
You've got the nucleic acids like DNA and RNA, which
are chains of bases and sugars, and then of course

(01:17:10):
you've got the best part, the membranes and the phospholipids uh.
And so in order to keep our bodies alive and
working properly, we need to have steady incoming streams of
those molecular building blocks. So we eat other life forms
like plants and animals in order to get them. You
can't survive obviously just by like eating sand or tree

(01:17:31):
bark or salt and ammonia. You need to get specific
organic molecules like sugars, amino acids, and fatty acids in
order to survive. It's also true that your digestive system
is specifically evolved to break down certain kinds of stuff
like Earth plant matter and Earth animal flesh, and it
is it has specially tailored enzymes for breaking down those

(01:17:54):
molecules likely to be found in the stuff your ancestors
were eating. Yeah, it's also worth our ending. You know,
we eat a lot of creatures and plant life on
this planet. It's easy to forget that there's a whole
lot of stuff we cannot eat. There a lot of
a lot of species that are just not on the
menu for us. Most of the mass of planet Earth

(01:18:15):
you can't eat. I mean that. Yeah, there's a lot
of stuff you just can't get nutrition from. Even if
it contains raw atoms that you might want, you know
that would be useful, your body doesn't have a way
to break them down properly, doesn't have the right chemical
enzymes and stuff to separate out the parts that you
would need or put together the parts that you would need.

(01:18:36):
Your digestive system is shaped by what was available to
the creatures that you evolved from. Now, Unfortunately, most other
life forms on Earth have these useful molecules. In some
nutritionally available way other animals on Earth are nourishing to
us because we came from a common ancestor and we
share common biochemistry. So in order to get nutrition from

(01:18:58):
eating us and alien would need to share our biochemistry.
And in order to do that, we would either need
to share a common ancestor, and unless they're coming from
somewhere else within our solar system, which seems unlikely at
this point, it's not likely we would share a common ancestor,
or we need to have the same biochemistry by coincidence.

(01:19:19):
So what are the odds of sharing biochemistry by coincidence?
Dartneil rights, well, that's certainly possible for all we know.
Perhaps our DNA based life is the only way you
can make self reproducing life forms out of the chemistry
available in the universe. Darkneil points out that quote, a
whole variety of amino acids, sugars, and fatty molecules are

(01:19:41):
actually found in certain meteor rights, having been produced by
astro chemistry and outer space, and so maybe extraterrestrial life
would be based on the same basic building blocks as us.
So the point there is that we haven't found life
beyond Earth, but we found a lot of the chemical
building blocks of life beyond Earth. Uh, and maybe our

(01:20:03):
way is a common way or even the only way
for the universe to put evolution in motion and create
the possibility of intelligent life. But then Dartnell points out
a big complication. Quote. Simple organic molecules like amino acids
and sugars can exist in two different forms, mirror images
of each other, in the same way your two hands

(01:20:25):
are similar shapes but can't be placed exactly on top
of the other. These two versions are known as a
nantiomers and it turns out that all life on Earth
uses only left handed amino acids and right handed sugars,
whereas non living chemistry produces even mixtures of both kinds.

(01:20:46):
So yeah, picture that what he's saying about holding your
hands on top of each other. They're they're the same shape,
but you can't put one on top of the other one.
You have to invert one of them in order for
them to match up. And with three dimensional things, that
means that they're not chemically the same. Actually you can't
use one for the other. And in science, this this
handedness of sugars and amino acids is known as chirality. Uh,

(01:21:11):
the fact that all life on Earth uses only left
handed amino acids and right handed sugars. That's known as
homo chirality, and it's a fascinating mystery to people who
study the chemistry of life. Why why not the other
way around? Or why not both both chiralities are and
presumably always have been available out there in the universe.

(01:21:31):
So why did life on Earth end up using only
these kinds? Why only left handed amino acids and only
right handed sugars? And in fact, Dartnell points out that
chirality is a good way to know that traces of
life we find, say on Mars, are actually authentic. So
imagine you've got a rover on Mars and it picks
up amino acids somewhere on the surface of Mars and

(01:21:54):
they employ the opposite biochemical orientation, so you've got right
handed amino acids. Then we could know that they were
genuinely alien and not simply contamination from Earth life that
we took along with us on the rover by accident.
And so Dartnell writes, quote, so here's a fascinating thought.
Alien invaders could be based on exactly the same organic

(01:22:17):
molecules amino acids, sugars, etcetera. But they still wouldn't gain
any nutrition from eating us, as the origins of life
on their own planets settled on the opposite in anti amours,
we'd be mirror images of each other on a molecular level.
And of course, if this applied to us, meaning we
couldn't be nutritious to them, it would also apply to

(01:22:37):
our food sources. It would apply to all life on Earth,
so they'd be like, oh that Earth food, I can't
handle any of it. In fact, it might even be
toxic to them. I was looking at a paper from
in pl os one by jiang in son Um about
how how bacteria are able to sort of break down

(01:22:59):
right handed to mino acids, and one of the things
that they talk about is how right handed amino acids
are toxic for life on Earth. And it's actually important
that back to bacteria do some breaking down of these
right handed amino acids, or else they would accumulate to
toxic levels in the environments. Oh, man, I there has
to be some hard sci fi that explores this possibility.

(01:23:21):
What did aliens come here to eat us but then
we poison them? Well, I mean just the idea that
their reflections on a molecular level and therefore incompatible with
us or our food. Yeah well, I like that idea
that like they could they could, in theory even look
exactly like us. They could have bodies that are very
so they were just toxic to each other, Like contact

(01:23:42):
and sharing organic molecules from each other would be poisonous,
Like if it was the movie Alien Nation and you
had to have like left handed food restaurants and right
handed food restaurants, and there was you know, it was
you know, there's certainly discrimination there, but also the fact
that the each species can only eat a certain type
of matter of organic matter. Yeah well, I mean, but

(01:24:04):
the thing there is that if you assume their ecosystem
is their planet is also from a single common ancestor
maybe it would be that all of their planet uses
the opposite chirality of us, meaning that it's not just
like we need different food, but every bit of life
in their whole world would be toxic to us, and
all the life in our world would be toxic to them.

(01:24:25):
So like in order to interact, we almost need to
like you know, be be sort of sealed off in
a way. Oh wow, Well see that's a wonderful sci
fi concept there. So anyway, I thought that was an
interesting possibility. Even if they wanted to serve man, it
might the dinner might not go so well. I like
that we were taking some of the anxiety out of
our Twilight Zone episodes here. Don't have to be as

(01:24:47):
afraid of creatures on the wing of the plane. Don't
have to be as afraid of alien civilizations coming to
our planet to cook us and eat us well. I mean,
the downside of that, thinking about the incompatibility of to
for biochemistries, is that you could have aliens that meant
well and that didn't want to eat us, but you know,

(01:25:07):
just wanted to make contact and actually be helpful, wanted
to serve man in the original naive sense of the understanding,
but just brought with them a bunch of molecules that
are deadly to us, which brings us kind of back
to the Christopher Columbus idea, doesn't it. Well. I wouldn't
say that Christopher Columbus meant well. I know that's not
what you were saying. No, no, no, but just the
idea that on a biological level ends up bringing death

(01:25:29):
and also on a cultural level as well. Yes, like
that even if Columbus had actually meant well, he wouldn't
have been able to help, bringing death along with him.
All Right, I feel like we're going pretty long here,
but I think we have time for just one more story, okay,
And this one comes to us from Tales from the Crypt.

(01:25:50):
It aired in the fifth season, episode five. This was October.
I love how most of these episodes actually aired during
October something it and it was titled people who Live
in Brass Hearstar's alright, So this one, this is a
delight because this is one of four episodes directed by

(01:26:11):
Russell McKay, the visionary director who gave us Highlander one,
Highlander one and Highlander two, Highlander two, Yes, and most
of the great music videos of the nineteen eighties, Total
Eclipse of the Heart. That was him, Wild Boys, that
was him. How do you say his name? Malkakey It's
it's I believe it's more kay. It's m u l

(01:26:32):
k h y. I've never been able to pronounce that,
but yeah, the the visionary behind Uh Highlander various other films.
And I do mean that authentically, like there is a
visual style to his work. There's an intensity that you
just you know what when you see it. A thing
that I think I rediscovered this year upon going back

(01:26:55):
to the first Highlander movie, and it's your insistence, is
the actually the first Hilander movie is almost as bad
as the second one. It's pretty bonkers. Yeah, but what
we'll say that for for an upcoming episode. Oh yeah,
we've still got Science of Highlander two coming out. Yes,
before the year's up, that episode will finally come to fruition.
We're not joking. Yes, it's real. So this episode of

(01:27:18):
Tales from the Crypt, Uh, it's like a lot of episodes.
It's a wealth of just wonderful acting, talent, spectacular gore effects,
a notable director, and the script that well depends on
how you look at it, right, it's I mean, it's
easy to take these scripts out of context and dream
about what a stronger, uh you know, rewrite could have
done for it. But on the other hand, the material

(01:27:40):
is the material, and the whole premise of the show
is that these are retold classic horror comic shorts, you know,
from the the you know, the golden age of horror comics,
and they you know, tend to throw some sort of
a heel character through the Ringer with the murderous or
supernatural circumstances taking place. Yeah, it's generally uh, there there's

(01:28:01):
some kind of nasty dude and he gets his come
up and through some kind of supernatural karma. Yeah, nasty
meets nasty, and then there's a joke about it. There's
not a lot of nuance. It's uh, these were horror
stories essentially for for for for kids and uh, but
with completely inappropriate content. Oh yeah, it was. That's the
other thing. All of these stories are so inappropriate you

(01:28:24):
go even going back now and watching these these episodes,
like some of them are just like so cringe worthy. Uh.
And I'm not sure that it's a flaw. It's like
it's kind of what you get. It's that stales from
the crypt. It's it's gross, it's inappropriate. Yeah, and yet
there's something wonderful about it. So this particular episode definitely
brings it with the cast because this one started Bill

(01:28:46):
Paxton and Brad Dorrif. That's of course Bill Paxton from
Aliens the Terminator, um and uh and Brad Dorrif played
Worm Tongue in the Lord of the Rings movie, was
the voice of Chucky. Then it's so many fabulous films
over the years. One fell Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Yeah,
that was another one of his big accomplishments. He was

(01:29:06):
also in What Wise Blood I think? Oh yeah, he
was in Exorcist three. Yes. Yeah, he's a fabulous character actor.
So already you have some wonderful talent to work with here. Uh.
They play brothers, Billy and Virgil. Billy is a mean
spirited slime bag fresh out of prison, a performance by

(01:29:27):
Paxton that reminds me a lot of his vampire character
in Uh Near Dark, you know, just just a bad person,
and his brother is essentially Lenny from Steinbeck's of Mice
and Men, so they have that kind of relationship. Billy
talks Virgil into an ice cream factory high school, which
goes all wrong. They're gonna steal a bunch of ice cream,
They're gonna steal some money from a safe, but they

(01:29:48):
end up just murdering some people instead, and as a
fallback plan, they go after the ice cream truck driver
who originally turned Billy in for stealing from the company,
a man by the name of Mr Bird, and Mr
Bird is played by veteran character actor Michael Lerner, Oh,
the producer from Barton Fink. Yeah, he was nominated for

(01:30:08):
an actor for that role. He's tremendous and he's he's
great in this too, like everybody's great in this. But
here's the twist, here's the grotesque tales from the crypt twist.
Mr Bird turns out to be two men conjoined twins,
and the episodes grizzly payoff is that while the brothers
succeed in killing one of the twins, they shoot him.

(01:30:29):
He's shot in the head with a shotgun. When he
emerges through a beated curtain, it turns out there the
other one lives and he gets his vengeance. The final
shot of the episode, after he's killed the brothers shows
the surviving Mr Bird twins sitting in his ice cream
truck making his rounds with his decaying twin hunched over
in the back seat. And this is I didn't even

(01:30:53):
touch on some of the just truly bizarre elements of
this episode. For instance, Billy Bill Paxon's character totally does
not need to have a butter eating addiction butter, and
he's like eating sticks of butter throughout the whole film
for no reason. With no payoff, like he already had
a pretty good, you know trope character. Here Bill, you know,

(01:31:15):
Bill Paxton is playing a slime ball. It's wonderful he
was born for this role, and you're throw in the
butter for some reason. There's also a part where Virgil
is reading a comic book and it is Predator versus
Jesse James, which doesn't I have no problem with. I
love it, but it's just such a random element to
throw in us the original Cowboys versus Aliens. It really was. Yeah,

(01:31:36):
I would love to see it. Uh it's give me
Jesse James versus Predator. Uh So The science question here, though,
of course, is could this happen? If one conjoined twin
were to die, would the other one be able to
live on in this grotesque? Grotesque manner? So to begin with,
I do have to point out again that Tales from
the Crypt is pretty far from any sort of fair

(01:31:58):
or reasonable portrayal of joined twins or just humanity in general.
The show and the comics they're based on, they tended
to have a real freak show vibe concerning any sort
of deformation, birth defect, mutilation, or even just something is routine.
Is identical twins. You know, everything was played for weird,
everything was played for grotesque, and the stereotypes are pretty

(01:32:20):
broad and grotesque too. So you don't go to Tales
from the Crypt to think about how to model thinking
about medical conditions. No, not not at all, and yet
that's kind of what we're doing in this this segment.
So here we go. So scientifically, conjoined twins are monozygotic
twins who were joined at some region of their bodies,

(01:32:42):
and the details depend on exactly where the conjunction is situated.
So the exact cause of conjoined twins isn't fully understood,
but a major theory here is that the fertilized egg
is going to split into a monozygotic set of twins,
but it doesn't fully separate and they remain connected. So
the bird twins here are represented as terada catadidama conjoined twins.

(01:33:06):
These are lower body conjunctions and more specifically, they are
pyg pagus twins, meaning they're back to back joined at
the rump. So this accounts for roughly nine I've also
read seventeen percent of conjoined twins, but don't let that
number foe you. That still means that they're extremely rare occurrences. UM.

(01:33:27):
These individuals. They commonly share the gluteal region, terminal spine,
and lower gastro intestinal, urological and reproductive tracks. So surgical
separation of conjoined twins in general, it ranges from simple
to near impossible, depending on the conjunction. In many cases,
it's a highly risky surgery with potentially fatal outcomes for

(01:33:48):
both patients. However, successful separations of phygo pagus conjoined twins
have occurred, and uh, you know, with various cases presented
in medical literature. Uh. And the cases of separation do
tend to be presented in medical literature like these are
these are generally, you know, the more certainly, the more complicated.
UM separations are exactly the kind of thing you're gonna
find written up in a journal. But a separation is

(01:34:12):
not what we see in this episode of Tales from
the Crypt one twin is killed via shotgun blast of
the head, and the other continues to live, dragging him
around while he kills off the two brothers and then
continues his ice cream rounds. Could this happen? Uh? Well,
broadly speaking, no, yah, And I don't think that should
come to anybody's surprise given it again, this is tales

(01:34:33):
from the crypt. Dr Eric Stratch a pediatric surgeon at
the University of Maryland Hospital for Children. He actually covered
the matter in the Esquire article how to separate a
conjoint twin on his deathbed. Yeah, he was interviewed or
interview segment was used in that article. He did not
write it, but he pointed out that once one twins
heart stops beating, the blood stops pumping, and the vessels dilate,

(01:34:57):
then the living twin will essentially bleed into the dead twin.
And this will happen quickly if the physical connection between
the two is large enough, but with smaller cases there
will be an infection in a matter of hours. And
in these cases it's technically possible that surgical separate separation
could save the living twin, but he didn't think it

(01:35:17):
had ever been attempted. Again, in many cases, separation might
not even be possible under ideal conditions, much less like
an emergency UH intervention scenario. So while we may be
able to accept the idea that they're surviving, bird twin
murders his brother's killers, the idea that he goes on
to drive the ice cream truck around. Seems a bit

(01:35:39):
of a stretch, now, Robert, I see you've attached a
panel from a comic, so that this one was based
on I guess something that was told in the comics
before it was on the show. Yeah, this one was
definitely based on a comic. Those comics managed to come
up with some really gross stuff that that became only
grosser when it was translated to HBO. Yeah, that the
comics were big about, like the just the visual visceral horror,

(01:36:02):
and the show did a great job of of portraying that. Yeah.
This this panel that I found from it, which which
is easy to find if you do just a Google
search for for the title of this episode, which was
also the title of the comics people who Live in
Brass Horses. Uh. Yeah, you just see the the ice
cream truck driver climbing out of the back of the
truck and he just has this this rotting corpse attached

(01:36:24):
to the back of him with flies buzzing around it. Uh.
It's it's horrifying, grotesque, insensitive, everything you would expect from
the tales from the crypt Robert, and you're reading about
the actual uh, like the surgeries involved here and stuff.
Do you get the sense that, um, that medical science
is making a lot of progress in in how to

(01:36:46):
help conjoined twins, especially in cases where they do need
to be separated. Yeah, I mean it seems to be
the case. But at the same time, it's like so
many of these cases they are they're different. Each one
has its own individual challenges, and they's rare. It's rare. Uh,
And you know when it, when it does pop up,
they're also going to be a lot of arguments potentially
about is this the thing to do? Is is this

(01:37:08):
is this the morally correct um medical intervention if there
is such a risk to both patients, Because there are
some heartbreaking accounts in the literature where an attempt is
made to separate to conjoin twins and they simply both die,
they don't neither one actually survives the surgery. Right. Well,

(01:37:29):
I mean, I guess I was specifically thinking of cases
where it is medically necessary in order to save them
or or create better health outcomes to separate them. I mean,
I don't think we should just assume that all can
joined twins naturally want to be separated. Yeah, Basically, it
comes down to just the complexity of the of the connection.

(01:37:50):
Like if if the connection is is smaller and more simple,
and then it can actually be a pretty safe procedure
as I understand it. Um then there are just other
cases where it is going to be kind of like
the malin everest of surgical intervention. And and yet sometimes
depending on the situation, it may be something that has

(01:38:11):
to be done. This is yet another thing that I
think I might deserve a deeper look sometime in the future.
Oh yeah, absolutely, we've only just we've we've only we've
barely brushed the surface of of twins and certainly conjoined twins.
And obviously there's a lot of a lot of fascinating
information out there about you know, the lives that led

(01:38:32):
by actual conjoined twins and not the you know, the
cartoonish examples that we see in like Tales in the
crypt which sadly it tends to be. This is the
kind of thing that tends to be one's first introduction
to conjoined twins. In the same way that unless you
have identical twins in your classroom growing up, and if
you're not encountering them in your life, your first example

(01:38:53):
to to identical twins is likely going to be some
sort of weird horror show. Example, when you're five and
you watched Dead Ringers. Well, let's hope not, but certainly
you can watch The Simpsons, right, The Simpsons had the
Treehouse of Horror where evil Twin was separated from him
and his living in the attic. I wonder, I mean,
is the belief in evil twins actually a fairly common

(01:39:15):
thing or does everybody understand that's not real? I hope
everyone understands that. I mean, I have friends with with twins,
and um and I I've talked to them a little
bit about just you know, to the point where they
just want to avoid any like creepy twin content. I
don't don't blame them, um but I basically I think
comes down more to the to us untwinned individuals where

(01:39:39):
we see this, we see two identical individuals, and we
think of there's all the potential self exploration, like what
if I were two people? What would that mean? Would
have one represented my best qualities and one my my
you know, my my my my darker qualities. And of
course meanwhile, these twins are are two separate people were
just trying to live their lives and we're staring at them,

(01:39:59):
trying to gaze down our own navel or write a
grotesque horror story. Yeah. The the looker, the person who
looks at another is the real monster, you know, because
they always want to make monsters out of people who
are just people. Yeah, all right, So there you have it, Uh,
Anthology of Horror, Volume one. Because if everyone liked this,

(01:40:20):
maybe we'll do it again next year. Maybe this will
be our new Halloween thing. Uh. And if it is,
what would you like us to cover? I guess this
means before then, I'm gonna have to go back and
watch some some horror anthology series I am. I am
under exposed at this point. I had a hard enough
time picking just the ones that I did today, though

(01:40:41):
I guess I'd never run out of Treehouse of Horror
episodes to pick tree Yeah, Treehouse tends to be a
nice like overview of great anthology works in places. Other times,
of course, they're parioding featurely linked films. I think Twilight
Zone and Outer Limits, Black Mirror. These are great places
to look to tales from the crypt little bit harder.
I ran into a lot of dead ends and bad

(01:41:02):
puns before I decided to uh to talk about this one. Well,
it is a forest of dead ends and bad puns,
as I'm to understand. All right, Well, hey, everybody out there,
you have a year to catch up on higher anthologies
as well, and to suggest episodes from those anthologies you'd
like us to consider covering in the future. In the meantime,

(01:41:22):
check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That
is our our mothership. That's where we'll find all the episodes.
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you'll find our store where you can pick up some
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on it, or it calls back to a specific episodes

(01:41:43):
that we've covered on the show. Big thanks as always
to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and Tarry Harrison.
If you would like to get in touch with us
directly to let us know feedback about this episode or
any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just
to say hi, let us know where you listen for
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of stuff. You can email us at blow the Mind

(01:42:04):
at how stuff works dot com for more on this,
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