From the Vault: Anthology of Horror, Volume 3

This one is fun in that one of the anthology episodes we discuss is a Simpsons tree House of Horror episode. Uh So, if you enjoy the moments where we frequently referenced Simpsons episodes, well then this is the main event because we're going to spend a lot of time talking about the Simpsons. Here. Let us be your hang in Kodos. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio's House to Work. Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Gooley Lamb.

I forgot we were doing the voices. Let's see, I am what's my name? Also, I'm Corrosive Joseph McCormick exactly, and we're here with our excellent audio producer death Nicholas Johnson. It is Halloween. It is Halloween itself, I believe. Yeah, And so we are presenting Anthology of Horror volume three. So this will be a sequel to our two previous Anthology of Horror episodes where we look at old episodes of horror anthology TV shows and figure out how they

might often be deeper than they seem. Yeah, I mean, and also sometimes they're not very deep, but we we have a knack for finding some hidden depth in horror and science fiction. Now. In the last episode, which should have been just a couple of days ago, we talked about an episode of The Twilight Zone concerning how you can know whether or not you are in a dream

or whether you are someone else's dream. And we talked about an episode of the old horror anthology Monsters that featured story about ghoules called down Below and related to that to cities dealing with rat problems. Uh So, today I think we were going to start by looking at an episode of The Outer Limits, right, yes, the Sixth Finger.

This is the fifth episode of the first season of ABC sci fi anthology series legendary sci fi anthology series The Outer Limits, which originally ran from through It was created by Leslie Stevens, and unlike a lot of these shows, he didn't have a true horror or sci fi host. It didn't have like a puppet or an actor that spoke to you and introduced everything. But it did have the control voice, which in and of itself is pretty classic. Explain the control voice. So we will control the vertical,

we will control the horizontal. You know, it's like this, this disembodied voice that is taking over your television set and presenting you with some sort of cosmic transmission from the out or Limits. I see, Is this the one that's there's no need to adjust your television exactly? Okay, I think I for some reason confused that I thought that was like an alternate opening to the Twilight Zone. Uh no, no, no, that Twilight Zone is always like

Rod Serling being like you were entering another dimension. Yeah, etcetera. Um. Yeah, the Outer Limits was definitely more in the in the science fiction domain. It was in many ways kind of like the sci fi side of the coin to the Twilight Zones horror, but it also got a little spooky, a little scary at times. Uh and certainly falls under

the domain of our our mission statement here. Now wait a second, sorry, I just realized that the Outer Limits introduction you're doing here, that this might be the first sort of hint or attempt at doing a kind of found footage thing. Right. It's saying like you are receiving a transmission. It's like implying that you're part of the narrative because your TV set is something's being beamed from another place to it. Yeah, to a limited extent. I mean,

once the episode starts, it's pretty leer. You're still safely in television land, but you're also in a place that still feels a little less safe. But this ain't I love Lucy exactly. So The Outer Limits went two seasons and produced forty nine episodes. Again, it's just always amazing just how robust these some of these older seasons television were.

Not all of the episodes are classics, but some stand out amid the all time greatest achievements in science fiction television even today in this sort of golden age of television and television options. Some of the most famous episodes include uh for instance, Demon with a Glass Hand, which was scripted by Harlan Ellison, but the Sixth Finger is also rather iconic. Like a lot of the episodes, it features some alien makeup effects that that are pretty astounding.

A lot of the alien designs on the Outer Limits, uh kind of you know, leaned into old school ideas of what an extraterrestrial might look like. You know. There are a lot of oversized heads and long ears and whatnot, like the rain mutant from the Silent Earth. Yeah, yeah, so some of them are a little bit dated, but but they were still pulled off exceptionally well, shot in black and white, and and and you know, sometimes with

an almost avant garde kind of style. That being said, there are some effects that they pulled off on that show that stand up I think really well today. The Galaxy being I think, is an exception where we had like this kind of sharp contrast of black and white where it seems to be just radiating on the screen. But the Sixth Finger was directed by James Goldstone, who also directed the pilot for a little show called Star Trek. Okay, so that's before Kirk is the captain, right right, Yeah,

And it was written by Ellis st. Joseph, who did a lot of TV work in his career and It also starred British American actor David McCallum, who starred opposite Robert Vaughan in The Man from Uncle. So McCollum stars in this episode as the character Griffiths, a Welsh miner who agrees to let a rogue scientist named Professor Mathers experiment on him, which is of course always a solid

life choice. Mathers played a role, we're told, in the development of atomic weaponry, and he wants to aid humanity instead, and so he has invented of means of speeding up evolutionary development and he wants to try it out on a human being. Now, I can say, in the early nineteen sixties this would actually be not that far fesched of a scenario. I mean, I think there were a number of scientists who were known at the time to have worked on the creation of atomic weaponry who were

deeply publicly regretful of their work. Even Oh yeah, absolutely, I mean to typified for the most part by the the heavily quoted bit from from Oppenheimer Now and become Death, where he himself is of course to quoting Vedic scriptures. Yeah, because certainly the atomic bomb is this uh, you know, continues to to loom over us as this the symbol of of of of great human achievements that are put to work in in the name of our worst impulses

as as a species, as a civilization. Totally and uh and yes, So the idea of someone involved with that wanting to do something that that you know, that it saves us, that changes us, that you know, that puts us in a different direction, I think that that makes perfect sense. And I think a lot of people would

would agree that. You know, this, this period of of of nuclear power, you know, is something we hope it's it's kind of a bottleneck, right, It's like it's a period of extreme danger to the species that we hope to move past, we hope to evolve through. And and certainly, you know, we tend to think of that evolution as

more or less biological and more cultural, more political. But in a science fiction story, you know, it makes sense to go with the more literal interpretation of that, like human beings need to evolve beyond this point of extreme danger. So I'm going to put a human being inside of a crazy sci fi contraption and see what kind of you know, peaceful being comes out the other side, right as you increase our oldie to destroy ourselves in one another. It seems like every year that goes by, we're just

sort of like barely eking. You know, we're just making it if we don't use that power unless you change us somehow, that it would be inconceivable to us to use it right now. To be clear, evolution, as we've discussed plenty of times on the show, is a process of mutation and natural selection that takes place across the vast periods of time due to various environmental stressors. Would you agree with that? You're more Darwin's bulldog on this

show than I am. I mean, our modern picture of evolution I think has become a little bit more nuanced, and that we we learn more and more things that uh that affect it, like epigenetic factors possibly and things like that. But yeah, basically, I mean the standard model is that there is variation and then there is selection by the environment. And yeah, the big thing, of course, the way this happens in nature is it happens over

many generations. The way evolution is often conceived of in stories like this is it basically just means like changing somebody like changing an individual's body in their lifetime, which would be different from biological evolution. That would be more

like that, I don't know, bioengineering of the body. Yeah, and and also I mean the other thing too, is this this model in this science fiction story it has this It kind of implies that there's an exact map of our evolution inside of our bodies, inside of our genes. You know, is if like we're a Pokemon and you can look at a chart saying like how it advances to its final form, if I have my Pokemon references correct,

I don't know my Pokemon all that well. But but still yet it implies that there's like a certain path that an organism should take and it's all written in the genes, as opposed to being this process, uh you know, being you know, driven by this process of natural selection that depends so heavily upon environment. So on one hand, it's a tad silly to think that some manner of

mad science process could simply speed up human evolution. But again they're trying to make a statement here, so we'll roll with it, okay, So as Griffith evolves and there there this is a this is a real talking. By the way, as far as um you know, anthology shows Go and Outer Limits tended to be I think a little more cerebral than the many of the other anthology and you know shows that would come in its wake.

There's a lot of discussing what this means and discussing, uh, you know, how we might apply it to our understanding of the world. And so Griffith's you know, he goes through these prod like a I guess a treatment of evolution. Then he comes back out and he's changed, and he talks about it, and he goes back in, he gets another treatment, he comes back he's even different. But basically

these are the changes biological and mental that take place. Okay, First of all, he gets an extremely over developed cortex like a giant alien melon head, which again is very impressive makeup effects, but at the same time it's kind of a dated look for our idea of like a far future speaking. Okay, so just to clarify, basically is the idea that this is naturally how humans would evolve if we were allowed to just you know, keep living for thousands of years. But the scientist has figured out

a way to get us there. Down the already mapped path ahead of time, right. I think that's what the model is here. We just have to sort of, you know, take their word for it on the sci fi process that's getting it to us. Sure, so huge yet great Now, as the title implies, one of the other major changes is that there is a sixth finger on each hand, so a total of twelve digits on the hands. Now

better to press nuclear launch buttons with yeah. In addition, long l fears, which you know isn't I don't really have a good discussion lined up for that, but there are L fears uh, mental powers such as telekinesis, vastly enhanced intelligence and ultimately enhanced empathy and understanding, and in the original script, he also eventually develops a means of photosynthitus and lives on pure light and kind of transcends

into a being of light. In the show, however, he attempts to push himself even further in evolution, but his wife betrays him out of love and turns him back into his original self, you know, turns back the dial on the evolution machine to try and get the you know, the man that she loves back in the room. But the process ends up killing him. It's just too much for him. So it all makes for a great mad science tale and one that I think works well thematically.

Plus McCallum has that kind of like old school Leslie Howard Delivery, you know which show, which I really love, because if you're watching a show like The Outer Limits of the Twilight Zone, you do have to you find a reason to love some of the more you know, by today's standards antiquated uh aspects of say acting or pacing or even the effects. And Joe, I have a picture of of the the being here for you, and it certainly anybody wants to see this. Just look up

The Outer Limits the sixth Finger. You can also find it on like Hulu or Netflix, naming pretty much everywhere. But you can also find lots of images of this. It's very iconic cost him. Okay, so first of all, I see the giant melon head and that look that looks great because you fit so much brain in there.

I am immediately imagining some problems having to do with birth, like the size of the human birth canal, which you would have to assume it would also evolve to be much bigger to allow a birth of that kind of creature, though I believe it's it's widely thought that we're already pretty much as sort of the limits of what our bodies will allow in terms of cranial size, right, I mean, And the other thing that comes to mind is our

discussions in our episode on brain soup and liquefied brains. Uh, the actual size of the brain would not be as important as the number of neurons within it, right, So, I think by our modern understanding, it was kind of it was very much in vogue at the time to to see, like, you know, outside craniums as being a sign of super intelligence and your fictional creatures. But I think nowadays we realize that would not be necessary. But I mean, like I are you mentioned this island Earth.

It shows up in a lot of sci fi from the mid century that you've got aliens with huge old heads. I guess because they're very smart. But also I like how he's got extremely defined facial bone structure, like this guy has cheekbones to die for? He does, yes. And then of course there are the lf ears, which, again we don't really have anything to say about them. I'm not sure what point of ears would really accomplish evolutionarily.

Oh man, this seems like something that has to have been explored in a kind of speculative paper, like somebody who's an expert on the morphology of the ears and how they help you here, How would you hear differently if you had l f ears. I don't know, we should come I bet we should come back to that, because there is a good answer for it. Uh. You know, there's a whole world of of elve and ear structure that we could discuss in the future. But what I

want to talk about is that extra finger. Okay, so we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we will get into the the five digit rule invertebrate evolution and we'll discuss the possibility of a sixth finger

coming into play. All right, we're back. So we've been talking about the classic Outer Limits episode The sixth Finger, about a man who speeds up his own evolution within his own lifetime and he gets a gigantic melon head, he gets really defined facial bones, beautiful cheekbones, he gets elf ears, but he also grows a sixth finger. And so Robert, you looked into what it would mean to grow a six finger is that kind of thing possible? Why or why would not we Why wouldn't we see

that in human evolution or primate evolution. Yeah, it's really it's really fascinating because, first of all, the five digit

rule does run pretty deep invertebrate evolution. According to Michael Coates, Associate professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago and co editor of Evolution and Development, writing for Scientific American, the condition of having no more than five fingers and toes probably goes back before the evolutionary divergence of amphibians and amniots, birds, mammals, reptiles. We were talking three hundred and forty million years ago.

Go back three hundred sixty million years ago, and there's evidence of tetrapods with six, seven, eight digits. Uh. The the decrease to five or fewer came about alongside the development of sophisticated wrist and ankle joints. So basically, the creatures with more digits had simpler skeletons and simpler limb mobility, and they were generally, you know, something along the line of flippers. Because we're talking about creatures of the water here.

But as these limbs evolved to allow certain organisms to stand or to push off with those limbs essentially, you know, as they move towards being land creatures, we see the reduction of digits, and indeed we tend to see, you know, the further reduction of digits because the rule of evolutionary thumb here is that it's easier to lose something than it is to gain something. Absolutely. I mean you can see that with many tetrapod mammals to for example, look

at a dog's paw. I mean, they have a sort of vestigial other thumb type thing up there on the on the leg, but basically they got four toes that go go down on the ground. It's the what the do claw? Yeah, yeah, up there? Or I mean even look at the feet of ungulates. Yeah, I mean, horses are a great place to look because we see how far it's reduced now. But you know, various prehistoric horses

had three or four toes. And when animals actually do gain digits well, uh Coats points out that the lack of true six toed or six fingered creatures in today's fauna quote highlights some sort of constraint. For instance, one of the rare cases we see of you know, the creature gaining digits is the marine reptile uh Ethosaurus. This is the these sixty years ago. We've talked abou about them on the show before. They essentially are dolphin like creatures.

They have that same sort of shape, but they they are reptiles um and as a result alt to returning to the sea, they eventually developed paddles that sometimes had you know, quite a number of digits in there. Okay, so the athosaurs, like the marine mammals of today, in their evolutionary history, went to land and then went back to water, right, Yeah, So, which again lines up nicely with this idea of of as long as you're a sea creature, you can have multiple digits within that paddle.

But when you start using that paddle increasingly again over you know, generation after generation after generation, if it's used to push off, if it's new, used even to hold up your weight, it becomes increasingly um more beneficial to have fewer digits in that at the end of that limb. However, we do see creatures like the mole and the panda, both of which benefit from remodeled wrist bones that essentially serve as a six finger, but which are not true fingers.

And if you haven't seen a picture of this, I encourage everyone to look up pictures of panda's paw or the laws of a mole, and you will. You know, if you start doing some counting, you'll be like, okay, one too, three, four, five, and oh kind of six again not a true thumb. But for the panda, for instance, it serves as a thumb. It has like the roll

of a thumb in helping them handle food. The panda, of course, is the herbivore of the bare world, and and the and it has to eat constantly, and therefore it has eventually used the point where it needs a little extra thumblike appendage to get the job done. Meanwhile, for moles, uh, this extra little thumblike appendage it helps them tunnel through the earth, so being almost more like a flipper, Yeah, help it swim through the earth. Yeah.

These are, in Coats's words quote, rather baroque solutions to the apparently straightforward task of growing an extra finger. So you know, if we're going to think back to our outer limits example here, it would be far more likely that one would grow some sort of you know, you know, a paddle of a pseudo finger as opposed to growing

a full finger. No matter how many keyboards you're having to use, no matter you know, how many you know, you know, mad science gadgets you're having to manipulate with your far future digits. But I want to talk about another even more amazing example from real world biology. And for this we have to turn to the world of the Lemur, as recently reported in Smithsonian. The I I Lemur known for its weird looks and it's elongated middle finger which it uses to fish grubs out of trees.

You may have seen this in various documentaries before. It looks like a tree goblin and it's I think it has unfortunately suffered from like superstitious killings in the past, but it has this it's nocturnal, and it has this fabulous super elongated in some people's eyes, and I think it's creepy middle finger which it uses you have to fish out a grub and uh and then it's it's you know, it's this highly specialized digit and once it gets the about I was reading that it will also

like pluck the top of the grub. Off and like suck the inside of the grub out, like it is just a highly evolved grub the eater. But in addition to this, it also boasts an extra tiny thumb or pseudo thumb, complete with a fingerprint. This according to Adam Hearstone Rose, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University, It's a pseudo thumb made of bone and cartilage, but it can be moved in three directions, much like a human thumb. Now you might wonder, why, why why

is this creature so greedy for crazy digits? It already has this super elongated specialized digit. What does it need an extra digit for? You know what? I realized The II hand reminds me of I just looked it up to see it again. It reminds me of the of klaus Kinsky's hands in Werner Hertzog's nose fur Aw too, He's got the long nails and the creepy fingers. Yeah, it does. It does seem like a true creature of

the night, doesn't it. But basically it seems to have developed this this additional pseudo thumb because the other fingers are elongated and specialized like Essentially it's lost that middle fingers specialized usage, and so it has had to develop a pseudo thumb to make up for that special specialization. And to be clear, you'll you'll sometimes find a six finger occurring on a human as a as a birth defect.

And in fact, since we're celebrating Halloween, it's worth noting that Hannibal Lecter in the books um has an extra digit on his left hand like that that occurs, but it is not, you know, it's not a naturally you know, evolved feature. So you're probably wondering where does this leave

our six fingered man in the outer limits. So Griffith kind of essentially dodges the question when at one point of scientists actually asked him about the six finger, like what's what's up with that extra finger, and he just kind of starts talking about something else. But but it's implied, especially given the prior scene in which he played as a piano, that it enables the better manipulation of interface tools like the keys of a piano or the keys

of a computer, etcetera. Now, if again, this is suggesting this would be selected for an evolution, that would imply that at some point people are like dying or not reproducing as much because they can't type as fast. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's where we get into some some problems with this this model if you look at it too closely. Um. I also had to realize as I was typing up notes for this, I was hyper conscious of how little

I actually use my pinky fingers while typing. Now, ultimately I'm probably using some sort of weird hybrid of of actual typing with a little hunt and peck thrown in there. But yeah, I don't know that I use my pinkies all that much, if at all, Unless I'm doing some sort of weird hot key, I definitely use mine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's that's semicolon, you know, for cle and sentences. No, yeah, I wait, I gotta think of okay, yeah, okay, yeah, I do it, Okay, all right, to each is all right.

I'm not bragging. I mean no, no, I mean I thought, because my pinky fingers are way better than yours, well you know they're not. They're not holding me back. I'm just saying that, like, you know, when I catch myself typing, I'm like, I don't think the pinkies are really carrying their weight here. So it's kind of silly to imagine a scenario in which being able to type extra hard and be able to hit like crazier hot keys on a keyboard would would have this kind of impact on

human evolution. At the same time, maybe it's for the next level of PC gaming. Yeah, that's but But on the other hand, it is true that habitual tool use has led to the evolved state of the modern human hand, including thumb length. So tool use has shaped our bodies, it has shaped our hand in the past, so it's not ridiculous to say that the future human evolution would

continue to reshape the human hand. But there you would be contending with the fact that I think there's you know, in the environments that we mostly live in today, not being able to use a tool as well doesn't usually mean that you're going to, you know, on average, have fewer children than the people next door. That that seems like a thing that would be more the case in

like a hunter gatherers survival scenario exactly. Yeah, And ultimately we have to remember that you were no longer subject to purely natural selection at this stage of the human experience. You know, it's it's more of an unnatural selection. We also have to consider the potential of directed evolution that we will, in the future continue to figure out ways to manipulate our own genes, which brings up the possibility that perhaps our far future selves have simply added on

an extra finger. Right, it's not a situation where we evolved when, but we realize, hey, having two pinkies on each hand would be nice. Let's do it, and then we just we just do it. We just check it off on the menu of g manipulation, which which reminds me of Less Grossman's The Magician and the sci fi

uh TV series that's based on it. There's a there's a dark wizard in the show called the Beast, and he has an extra finger on each hand because in the in The Magician's casting spells involves a lot of like fine manipulation of your digits, like sort of like the the use of moodras and whatnot. Uh So, if you had an extra digit on each hand, you'd be able to cast improve variations of spells. You'd be able to cast spells that a normal individual with five digits

would be incapable of. Well, that makes me wonder who invented those spells then, I mean, I guess they're of his own creation. Well, yes, and of course there are a lot of inhuman being entities in this world as well. He could be going to them for such spells. However, uh, you know, discussing this idea of like, you know, growing extra fingers to manipulate technology, etcetera. As Peter Ward pointed out in his Scientific American article The Future of Man,

how will evolution change humans? We also have to consider, you know, not only like computer interfaces like keyboards, but more drastic interfaces, some of the sort of futuristic mind computer interfaces that we've discussed in the show before. Um. He points to a quote from George Dyson in his book Darwin Among the Machines. Quote, everything that human beings are doing to make it easier to operate computer networks is at the same time, but for different reasons, making

it easier from computer networks to operate human being. Darwinian evolution, in one of those paradoxes with which life abounds, may be a victim of his own success, unable to keep up with non Darwinian processes that it has spawned. I think there's a lot to that. I mean, I would say, I mean, this is in the nineteen nineties, before you could anticipate a lot of the stuff that's going on now with say social media, in the many ways that

our our technology is influencing us. But yeah, just one thing I would say here is that this person probably lived through the transition from command line computers to graphical user interfaces, and so the obviously having a graphical user interface makes it way easier for people who don't know much about how the computer works or understanding directories and commands and all that stuff to use it because it's intuitive. It's easy. You just look at the thing, you recognize that,

you click on it. All that, but also those graphical user interfaces I think led to all of the ways that computers are now just completely attention monopolizing devices. Absolutely. So Ward basically concludes that we'll have to go one of three different ways as humans continuitive to evolve. Uh. There's these There's the stasis direction where we mainly just stay the same but with minor tweaks, and also a kind of merging of races. There's also a speciation in

which we break off into different species. Uh, you know, and hopefully none of them are are more locks, because ultimately a speciation is the model that H. G. Wells explorers in the time machine. And then he also talks

about the board grout, which is symbiosis of machines. I find it kind of hard to believe that there could be human speciation unless you're talking about space colonization, like fully separating human populations from one another so that they cannot physically come together at all for you know, hundreds

of hundreds of years. Even if you sent some of them below ground to man all the machines and keep the surface world running, well, I guess it would depend on whether you could go back and forth between I mean, I think as long as humans stay in physical contact with each other, I find it hard to believe that there will be actual human speciation. But then, yeah, space colonization does seem like that creates a kind of like

a certain hard divide. It is it is the equivalent of having a species wind up on an island and um and and co eval. So War doesn't specifically chime in on the six finger thing. He doesn't reference that, but he does dismiss the idea of giant brained futurized humans like we see in the sixth Finger. He says, quote, the big brain vision has no real scientific basis. The fossil record of skull sizes over the past several thousand generations shows that our days of rapid increase in brain

size are long over. Yeah. In fact, we we already peaked, right, We're we're our average brain sizes in the modern world are smaller than they used to be. Yeah. But ultimately, this episode of Outer Limits is not just about biological evolution, is about the evolution of of what it means to be human? Uh, you know, can is there a potential for us to change in a more meaningful way? Can we become, for instance, more empathetic? Can we become more

present as a species kinder? Uh? This is the idea that the episode is playing with and hoping for and and ultimately, like that's where it gets to at the end with this, he the character, while he's still more human, is you know, possessed by this this quest for vengeance against the people who operate the mind in which he works. And by the end of it, he has evolved beyond

these feelings of vengeance. Like there's a period in the in the episode where he wants to use his crazy you know future brain powers to go you know, wreak havoc on them, but by the end of it he realizes, no, that is not the way. Well, I would say, I think it certainly is possible for us to become more empathetic, um, uh, you know, less vengeful and violent and all that kind of stuff. But I don't think you necessarily need biological

changes for that to happen. I mean, I think we've seen massive changes in the levels of like violence and vengefulness you see in the average person across different societies through time, and the main changes are through like culture, like like social norms, how children are educated, what's acceptable socially within your friend groups, and the culture. Right, So

changes in the software as opposed to the hardware. Yeah, but then of course we have to we have to consider like the rate of which software can change, at the rate of which it may evolve, uh, you know how and no matter how pleasant uh a human civilization's current software, maybe how much has to happen to it to make it well to to use a naughty word on this show, devolve into some lesser state. Well, yeah,

I mean, I guess that's the danger. I mean, yeah, cultural changes can can be undone, maybe as quickly as they can be done, or even quicker. By the way, I was reading about the original script and the production of this episode of The Outer Limits, and according to the Outer Limits companion by David J. Scoe, uh Dorothy Brown, the ABC sensor at the time, had objected to the Darwinism and promotion of evolution inherent in the sixth finger

so one. In fact, one of the early deletions from the script was a speech on the topic of evolution. Well that's funny, I mean again, like to really explore the what's happening to the character in the episode is not actually Darwinian evolution. But but that's funny. Yeah, I mean, I guess it does rely on the idea that there's like a roadmap for our species generally, which also is not part of Darwinian evolution. So it's not like not really hitting the viewer over the head with, you know,

a hardcore speech on evolution. But I think just the mere fact that they were citing evolution and speaking speaking of evolution um and the works of Darwin as being you know, something that we can actually you know, hang our scientific hat on. Um, they were afraid it was going to offend people. Well yeah, I mean I I grew up surrounded by that kind of opposition and and sensitivity to ideas about evolution. But I I don't know, despite that, I'm kind of surprised that it made ABC

censorship priorities. Yeah, especially in a show like this, which you know, ultimately is you know, kind of high minded and stuffy. Well, I guess also trading and science fiction, which would have had a you know, a certain amount of appeal to younger audiences as well. But still absolutely say, this is a pretty solid episode of The Outer Limits.

I think it stands up really well today. You have to go into it knowing you're not going to get an action packed, um you know episode here this is this is a very talky episode mode, but it's it's really solid, well shot, well acted, um worth checking out. I think a lot of the best anthology, sci fi and horror episodes are not actually action packed. Uh. They often tend to be rather subdued, just dealing with a

strange idea as discussed by a handful of characters. Yeah, and you know, sometimes you do see this kind of unevenness to the perceived budget of a show, like you know that some of those anthology episodes maybe they had a had a few more bucks to spend on the cast, on the locations, and some are essentially kind of bottle episodes where there's just like one set or it's it's almost kind of a stage piece, but there's you know when it when it's really well done, you know that

will certainly get you there to serve. Man, is an action packed either is? Yeah, it's just and that's the one that we talked about last year. Right, speaking of Joe, what is your selection your final selection for this year's Anthology of Horror Episodes? Well, I wanted to talk about my favorite all times since Treehouse of Horror episode Citizen Kang.

This is from Simpson's tree House of Horror seven. It originally aired October, and I think this is this is not only one of my favorite uh Simpson's bits, ever, I think it is some of the best political satire in American media history. Yeah. This this is just a great tree House episode period. I rewatched it the other night with the family, and I must have seen it a dozen times in the in the past because in addition to Citizen Kang. It also contains the genesis tub.

This is where Lise's tooth grows a civil of civilization after it gets a little static shock from Bart, which is very similar to a tale by George R. Martin that was adapted by the nineteen nineties revival of The Outer Limits more or less along the same time. And then this episode also has The Thing and I, which is a great more of sort of a straight up horror piece, which contains twist ending that I have to say is nearly identical to the twist ending of a

certain top twenty nineteen horror film. Okay, well, let's not say any more than that. I think you know the one, right, Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about, but I don't want to spoil it for anybody else. All Right, we need to take a quick commercial break, but we will be right back. Thank Okay, So this Simpson's tree House

of Horror again. It aired at the end of October nineteen, and at the time it actually aired, the United States was right in the final days of a presidential election that was pitting incumbent Democratic President Bill Clinton against Republican Senator Bob Dole from Kansas. And in this tree House of Horror segment, alien invaders Kang and Kodos, who are from a certain ringed planet who they prefer not to

mention um. They plot to take over the world by body snatching both Clinton and Dole and taking their places in the election as lookalikes, and the idea is stated pretty dire actually by Kang and the guys of Bob Dole. A reporter asks the Kang Dole Senator Dole, why should people vote for you instead of President Clinton? And Kang Dole responds, it makes no difference which one of us you vote for. Either way, your planet is doomed, doomed

replacing both. That's a good idea, right, Yeah, then there's no risk, right either way, they're gonna win. Yeah. So in this uh, in this little plot, Homer becomes aware of the alien takeover plot because he happened to be on the alien ship when Clinton and Dole were replicated. So he decides he's got to reveal Kang and Kodos

for what they are. So he runs on stage at an event I think at the Capitol Building where both candidates are speaking, and he rips off their disguises, revealing them both as hideous space reptiles, but Kangan Kodos seem unfazed, declaring, it's true we are aliens, but what are you going to do about it. It's a two party system. You have to vote for one of us. And then some in the crowd suggests voting for a third party candidate,

and Kodo says, go ahead, throw your vote away. So the Americans, of course, end up electing Kang, who immediately enslaves all humans and he puts them to work constructing a giant laser to aim at some third, unspecify, unspecified planet. And then Marge laments the state of affairs that they're they're suffering under right now, and Homer smugly declares, don't blame me. I voted for Kodos. I think this this might be the best nine minutes of political science, satire

and American pop culture history. Uh. And I don't want to be misunderstood there based on some of the themes in the episode, because, of course, a major theme here is the pointlessness and futility of some parts of the democratic process. I don't want to be mistaken for saying I think it makes no difference who you vote for

for president, or that all politicians are the same. You know, I think that's the kind of thing that it's like easy to say and feel superior or about saying when you don't want to put in the work to learn what's going on and what's at stake. Right, it was the kind of statement I would have found very attractive when I was like a first year college student, kind of intellectually lazy but wanting to stake ammorl claim. Yeah, I're wanting to to differentiate yourself from you know, the

politics that you might have been born into. It's easier. Instead of saying, actually, I disagree with you completely and I go to this side, you can just say, oh, I think I don't sorry, I don't go for any of it, right, Yeah, you know, I can remember being like that. I wanted to have a strong opinion without having to do the work to earn an opinion. So

I don't think that way anymore. But at the same time, while I don't generally feel the field that's always true about elections, I think there is some real cutting wisdom in that satire, because even though it's not the case that all politicians are the same, in elections don't matter people often overestimate how much their democratic choice will make

a difference to particular issues they really care about. I mean, there's so many big problems that you thought electing the right person might solve, and then that person was elected and the problem stayed the same or got worse. But even more than that, I think this episode is brilliant at highlighting the absurd and nonsensical conclusions often reached by group choice algorithms that we follow in our politics. And that's sort of what I wanted to look at here

in relation to this episode. In that mein, I want to explore the question of whether or not the election of Kang is an example of the Abilene paradox. Robert, had you ever come across this concept before? I don't believe I had no. Yeah, I I think this is very useful to have in your tool kit of of concepts to apply to the world, because it's absolutely something that explains many unfortunate group behaviors in politics, in business, even in like family vacations and and hang out with

your friends. Uh So, this paradox was explained in a nineteen seventy four paper by the George Washington University scholar Jerry B. Harvey, which was published in the journal Organizational Dynamics, and I'm going to give a kind of updated scenario here for you to consider. So imagine the following scenario. You are hanging out with your friends p J, Nancy, and Jamie Lee. It's October. You're all just finished babysitting.

You're at Nancy's house carving a pumpkin, and you're watching an old Howard Hawks movie on TV, The Thing from Another World. You're hanging out, You're having an okay time. But then suddenly Nancy says, hey, does anybody want to go out and see a movie? And p J says, yeah, that could be cool. Let's see what's playing. So you look up show times at the local theater and the only show left tonight is a midnight showing of The

Purge seventeen as the World Purges. Uh So p J says, yeah, we could see that if you guys want, and Nancy says, yeah, okay, I could be down to go to the Purge, and Jamie Lee says sure, if you two want to see it, I'm in. So since all of your friends agreed, you resign yourself. You say, okay, let's see it. Tickets are fourteen dollars apiece. Uh. The movie stars Fred Durst and

Tim Allen. It's three and a half hours long. At multiple moments, you consider leaving the theater, but you don't want to go out alone and leave your friends behind, So you sit through this whole terrible movie, and when the credits finally roll, you leave the theater with a throbbing headache, and you immediately ask why did we do that to ourselves? And Jamie Lee says, I don't know. It sounded pretty bad to me, but I thought the rest of you wanted to see it, And Nancy says, well,

I didn't want to see it. I just thought the rest of you did. And p J says, well, don't look at me. I just said I was okay with it if you guys wanted to go. Weren't you the one who suggested it? And Nancy, the one who did suggest going to a movie finally says well, I just thought you guys might be bored hanging out at the house. So it turns out that none of the four of you actually wanted to see this movie, and yet somehow you collectively decided it would be the best thing to

do with your time together. Everybody agreed on a course of action that nobody individually wanted. Robert. Can I assume

this experience is somewhat familiar to you? Yeah? Maybe from I think probably the best example I can think of is like when as a family when I was a kid, sometimes we would agree on what to watch, and you know, sometimes it's something that one of us had a definite steak in, but other times it kind of felt like this where we ended up agreeing to watch a movie just because it was it was a major film that came out, and we're like, Okay, I guess we're watching

Oh uh God. I can't even think of a good example of just something, you know, whatever the big mainstream family film was that had to hit theaters and was now on VHS Christmas with the Cranks. Well, maybe not that bad, but but stuff stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah, So this would be a prime example of what Harvey calls the Abeleyan paradox, and the name Abolean paradox comes from the story Jerry Harvey tells to open his paper.

It's similar to the story I told, but it's about a family in Texas making a long drive to a Baleen in a non air conditioned car in hot weather. It's a completely miserable experience, as you would expect. And it turns out nobody actually wanted to go to Abilene in the first place. Every member of the family just thought the other family members wanted to go and then

failed to communicate their actual preferences. And as Harvey puts it in this article, the Abilene paradox is the fact that quote organizations frequently take actions in contradiction to what they really want to do and therefore defeat the very purposes they're trying to achieve. And any characterizes the Abilene paradox says not a failure to manage disagreement, but a

failure to manage agreement. Uh So, when I first read about this at some point in the past couple of years, I was like, oh my god, this kind of thing. I recognize so much of this in the world. How have I gone this long without a name for it? It seems to me to be a problem for group choice at all kinds of levels. Again, you mentioned you know a family trying to to decide what movie to see, but you know a group of friends trying to decide what to do, how to spend their Sunday, or a

democratic society trying to elect their leaders. Many kinds of group choice problems I think arise, of course, from the inability to manage conflict. But this is the opposite. Harvey argues that even more group choice problems arise from the inability to manage agreement. And another real world example that

Harvey gives in his paper is the Watergate scandal. He he quotes a number of people involved in Nixon's came the Nixon campaign's dirty Tricks team, who all claimed privately that they had doubts not only about the morality about but about the practical wisdom of their scheme that to each of them privately seemed like the payoffs were not

really worth the risks. But they each assumed they were the only ones with such doubts, and thus acted along with the rest of the group in a way that hurt all of them, even though they privately most or all thought it was a bad idea. Uh So, it's like Nixon wants to purge, Lily wants to purge. So I guess, I mean, I don't really want to purge, but if everybody's in the mood to purge, I guess

I'm in right and uh. In a lot of his paper, Harvey just analyzes what he sees, or like the he he thinks the common organizational symptoms of the Abilene paradox. For example, he talks about the idea of action anxiety. Yeah. He explains this by quoting Shakespeare's Hamlet. He says, action anxiety is that which quote makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not,

of which, of course, is what you know. Hamlet talks about the idea of going on through pain rather than like ending it and going on to see what undiscovered country lies beyond the grave. Um. But it's a fear of acting on your actual preferences, an environment that makes pursuing the path that you don't want seem like the less scary option than asking for the path that you do want. Well. That's also touched on a little bit

in Macbeth. Right, idea about it having waited so far through the blood that it's better to just go on through to the other side of this this blood lake than to turn back around, even if turning back around is what you really want to do. Yeah, And he and Harvey roots a lot of this actually and appeals to human psychology. He says, you know, some of our greatest fears are expressed as negative fantasies about fear, about

fears of separation and ostracization. You know, it's like terrifying to be the one to step out and say, I'm going to challenge the momentum of this group that you know that like whether it's even in simple things like going out to a movie. Like you're going out to a movie with friends. I mean, maybe you're comfortable enough with the friends to say no, actually I don't want

to do this. But like a lot of times, especially if you don't know people as well, you'd rather just not be thought of as the jerk who said let's not do it. Yeah, because you're engaging, and you're you're kind of engaging in this group. Think you know, it's something as simple as say, like a group of friends getting together to to play Dungeons and Dragons. You know you're not, you know, you're not a dirty tricks counsel or whatever. You know you're not. All you're doing is

just trying to hang out and play a game. But you know, still don't want to shake the boat if somebody wants to get fried pickles, you know, um, even if you really don't care for fried pickles all that much. Right, But maybe the person who suggested it doesn't either, and

they're just saying because they thought somebody else did. Yeah, And so you reach a point where every week you order fried pickles, even though nobody's really crazy about fried pickles, and everybody probably feels a little bad about eating them every week. Yeah. So in the end, Harvey comes up with a couple of recommendations for diagnosing and dealing with UH with abilene paradox is in a business context. Unfortunately,

there's no special magic trick. Basically, he says, he thinks the best way to deal with it is for an authority figure who detects a situation like this to call a meeting, frankly, articulate their doubts in a group setting, and then ask others to share their honest thoughts. If you're an authority figure, you have you know, it's safer for you to go out on a limb and question the direction that you're going in, all right, I mean,

that's that's why they make the big bucks, right. This, This is the this is the moment when they can really earn that higher pay that the higher pay grade right right be the authority figured that comes in and shuts down, uh, you know, things that nobody really wants to do, or that there's no real advantage to doing

from a business standpoint. Yeah. Now, in the political context, I think the Kang in Kodos situation kind of highlights a satirical absurd version of this, with the idea that uh, you know, obviously humans would all recognize like, okay, we we are all in agreement. We're in agreement. We don't want either Kang or Kodos. That's the position shared by

everybody voting at this point. But they're able to cause this action anxiety about organizing any kind of third option, the idea of throwing your vote away on any kind of third party candidate. When you've got Kang in Kodos,

there is going out on a limb. You fear ostracization, you fear being separated, you fear being different, and so eventually they just kind of decide, well, which one will I take, Hanger Kodos, And despite everybody agreeing that neither option is wanted, but it keeps everybody together I mean, humanity is united at the end in their enslavement to these uh, these terrible alien overlords. No they're not. They're still bickering. Don't blame me. That's genius of it is there.

I mean, they're essentially unified, but they still have the mindset of division. Uh uh yeah. And so I think the way around that, of course, would be that it requires some kind of uh risk of leadership for somebody to say, hey, wait a minute, can we try to organize some way to get around this too? You know, the two options we've got here that we all agree we don't want. That sounds like a really wicked problem

to deal with them. Well, yeah, I mean, I think the point the writers are making there is that we're just not good at organizing that kind of agreement effectively. Now, what do we do about the fact that we're often not good at me and ing agreement? And this leads to repeated absurdities like the kang and like the election of kang Um. Well he actually Harvey ends his paper

with a strangely philosophical note for an organizational dynamics paper. Uh. He says that, you know, sometimes these situations simply cannot be resolved, and he calls to mind the myth of Sysyphus, the character from Greek mythology who was condemned to forever repeat the task of pushing a boulder up a hill, only for it to fall back down to the bottom again, making a mockery of his effort. Says, not only painful

but pointless. Uh. And in Albert Camus version of the myth, he adds a detail that sometimes, in his endless loop of absurd toil, Sisyphus would get near the top of the hill, but then release the boulder of his own accord, letting it roll back down to the bottom on purpose. And Harvey says, in this act he could transcend the

absurdity of his struggle. Uh. And I think this is sort of the bull's eye of existential philosophy, right, life is absurd, and you transcend that absurdity by recognizing your radical freedom and acting authentically, which means basically without lying to yourself about the absurdity of life. Like this is when you write in a third candidate, Now, I think actually in this case it might be more like voting for Kang or not voting or something what While recognizing

the absurdity and unwinnable nous of the scenario. So I don't know if that's the best thing to do in the alien election. I would say, actually try to organize the third party. But I think the uh, this whole discussion actually does bring us back to real questions about the field of astro politics. I mean, this is something I think we could devote whole episodes to in the future. There's actually a field of study and people have written about like what would happen if aliens arrived on Earth?

Like what would be the political response to that? How would different world economic and military powers behave? Uh, you know, would we all ban together, would we put aside our differences and are elf interest and say we need to organize an act together as Earth? Or would aliens be able to exploit our petty grievances and our differences and turn us against one another? And I think, unfortunately, I

think there are some pretty good signs pointing towards the ladder. Yeah, I mean, our only model for intelligent life in the cosmos is our model of intelligent life of of a technologically advanced civilization. And when we look at the way that uh, you know, certainly the way the civilizations have interacted with each other. And I certainly look at the way that you know, Western colonization, how that transpired. We see time and time again basically the Kyan Kodos model.

Manipulate their their leaders and their leadership, corrupt their uh, their their rule, and work one side against the other,

ultimately overpower and bring enslavement and death. I mean, that's that is the story of of human history, sadly, and so when we look to the stars, you know, there are plenty of people have said, well, that's basically what we can expect based on our models, based on our knowledge of our self, knowledge of how we work, that is what we can expect from a superior technological force. Like we want to imagine the independence day scenario where

we all come together and join forces. But I don't know, I don't want to be overly optimistic. Yeah, I mean, you know, unless we look to our optimism in the sixth finger. And I think a lot of people have I mean a lot of certainly the various um New Age religions that have popped up around the idea of aliens. You know, they look to aliens as a possibly we're all we're all messed up in this world and we're you know, we we have just committed crime after crime,

and we're shackled to the terror of history. Maybe something will come down from above that has evolved beyond this state and that can guide us, that can help us find this new uh, you know, shape of being. Uh. And you know, maybe that's the case. But again, if we're looking at our own example of intelligent life, I'm not sure that that's going to happen. I wouldn't put hope in aliens being being a good influence on us. I wouldn't put hope in us biologically evolving beyond our

our petty grievances and all that. I think the hope lies in culture, unfortunately, and thus it is up to people like writers and political leaders and those kinds of figures to help shape human culture in a way that that allows us to to act collectively in our own best interest. I know that's not the easiest thing to put hope in, but I think that might be the only hope personally. Yeah, I mean, well, that's that's that's the hard answer. That's a difficult answer, but it's that's

that's the one that requires us to work. That's the one that requires us to do the heavy lifting here. Yeah, we've got to fix our own problems, mostly using words. All right, I'm sure we'll come back to this topic in the future of Oh, I definitely. I think we could do some stuff on astro politics. Absolute, yeah, yeah, I would be down for that. Absolutely. But there you have it. This is gonna be our third installment of

the Anthology of Horror uh kangan Kodo's willing. We will return next October with at least one at least a volume four, if not a volume four and five, And of course, ironically that'll be pretty much just uh you know, right before the the the peak moment of American politics heading into the next presidential election. Probably won't do politics when then, probably not all right. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow

your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find them. You can also find the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. But again, this was how our Anthology of Horror Volume three, Volume two came out Tuesday, and we reran volume one over the weekend. Also, if you want to check out our other show, Invention. You can find that at invention pod dot com and that's available everywhere you get your podcasts. Oh and also the fiction podcast the Second oil Age

launched as well. The first three episodes of that are live wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, congratulations man, well, thank you, thank you alright, Uh, so that's it for this episode. Certainly we have not seen all of the horror anthology episodes out there. Uh, we're not familiar with all the shows. So from now until next October, if you have specific episodes of various anthology shows you would like us to consider for next time, let us know.

If they're just whole shows, whole buckets of content that we're not aware of, please enlighten us. One of the cool places you can find us for that, uh is our our Facebook discussion group. It is the Stuff Table Your Mind discussion module. Go check that out huge. Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.

No wait, death, Nicholas Johnson. That's right. If you would like to get in touch with us directly with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio is the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.