Why Teleportation is a Nightmare: From Star Trek to The Fly

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Think teleportation is just a convenient way to get from the Enterprise to a planet’s surface? Think again. Today on Acceptable Losses, we are peeling back the high-tech veneer of sci-fi’s favorite shortcut to reveal the visceral, molecular nightmares lurking in the buffer. From the very first cautionary tale in 1877 to the absolute trauma of Star Trek’s Tuvix, we’re breaking down the five tiers of teleportation horror. Whether it’s being "telefragged" into a bulkhead, split into your worst primal self, or fused with a housefly, we’re asking the big question: Do you actually survive the trip, or does the machine just build a very convincing replacement?

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Acceptable Losses podcast, where Kirioth is gonna send us screaming, crying, and pissing ourselves through some grim, dark, horrible scenario. But before he does, hey, do you want to get some really cool merch? Do you want to be a weeb for Lincoln? You like sci fi, right? Maybe you should go to shop.orgidate.com and check out the Acceptable Losses collection. I'm sure there's a link in the description. There might be a QR code on the screen. I don't think we do that anymore, but if we do, it's there. There's a link. You should check it out. It's all really good stuff. Hell yeah. Kirioth, how's that Patreon going?

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Patreon is fantastic. It is growing by the week. If you head over to patreon.com slash acceptable lotteries, you get access to episodes early and you get exclusive access to Patreon only episodes. And if you want a taste of that, if you follow us as opposed to supporting in a monetary way, then you'll be able to claim the Threads episode as a free gift. And what a gift it is. And uh we do have another Patreon episode that will be going out very, very soon. 25th, I think it was on the schedule, which is another grim fairy tale, which is a very, very fun one. It's it's dark as hell, but also hilarious. And that is the perfect mix to round out this month's uh platform. And I've immediately forgotten the other one. What was the other one we did? It's grim and it's dark? No way. On this podcast? Who'd have thought it? I think I've somehow lost what I there we go. It's a good life. That's it. Oh, that's right. It's not it's actually not. It's it's not blanked it out. It's good. Kiriath, it's good. It's good. It's good. It is good, it's real good. It's so good that I'm actively trying to forget having read it. Apparently.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

I was gonna say, like the people in that are actively trying to forget.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Oh god, the trauma is is horrific in that one. Um but it is it is good. It's real good. So if you go over to accept patreon.com slash acceptable losses and chuck us a follow, and if you really like what we do, then you can support us over there and get extra stuff for it as well. I love extra stuff. It's the best kind of stuff. Extra stuff? I mean what what he said to complain about. We have nothing.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

He's sure. He's sure though. Well, there's stuff to complain about because as you can tell, I am still not at my usual setup, but it doesn't sound like I'm on a COD headset anymore.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

So we take those little victories. That is a de that is a definite upgrade. It doesn't sound like you're uh going to shout at me from the past about how terrible I am at games. So that's nice. I like it. Or how many times I've procreated with your mother.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

That that too.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

It's not how the kids say it, but that's how I'm saying it today. I would have loved to have heard that back in the day though.

SPEAKER_04 3:15

Oh, I've procreated with your mother several times in the last month.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

She wasn't too bad an accent. I'll give you that one.

SPEAKER_02 3:25

Let's go. Let's go. Let's go.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

So how is our day gonna be ruined today? Well, today we are going to be talking about teleportation. Just as a concept, as a thing, and all of the amazing ways in which it can go horribly wrong.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

God, there's so many examples of teleportation going wrong in sci-fi. No wonder you were like, yeah, today's gonna be kind of a chunky.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Oh Possum has gone absolutely ham on this one. This is also the most like possum script we've ever received, which is saying something because we've got some pretty possum scripts in the past. This is this it this is Possum's thing right here. So we even have we even have a quote, which obviously you don't need to guess anything, but it's the teleportation of the phrase.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

I mean you're right, it is about one for one unacceptable losses. Let's go.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

So mostly in this book, I shall specialise upon indications that there exists a transportery force that I shall call teleportation. I shall be accused of having assembled lies, yarns, hoaxes, and superstitions. To some degree I think so myself. To some degree I do not. I offer the data. And that is from Charles Ford, who coined the term teleportation, with this line in 1931. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 4:54

Also, would we would um the um was it the platform that we did the Patreon shred on, would that count as teleportation? Because technically you're going through um a wormhole of chaos that turns you gray and insane if you see it, and then you kind of come out the other side. Is that that's basically teleportation, right? Oh, the John, sorry, not the platform is the food one. I I kept thinking you go through the platform through a portal and okay, yeah, I just got my name. Yeah, the John, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:27

Funnily enough, the jaunt comes up in this very script. Oh, okay, cool, cool, cool, cool. So the idea of traversing between two places without physically moving has been a mainstay in hypothetical science for quite some time. In fact, you could say it's been around for longer than you think.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

Oh no, why would you do that? Why would you do that? Why would you do that? Possum, why would you do it? Why would you put that in the why would Alright?

SPEAKER_00 5:55

That's fine. That's that's great. One of the earliest instances actually comes from a story by Edward Page Mitchell in 1877. God. Alright. I mean, that's crazy to me. That's so long ago to be thinking about like teleporting. Teleportation, yeah. However, it was the dawn of early science fiction that saw the popularisation of the concept of teleporting as a fundamental pillar in any good sci-fi story, along with things like hyperspace travel and phaser technology. Shows like Book Rogers in the late 30s came up with the concept of elevators that broke down the body atom by atom and reassembled it, whereas the 1956 novel The Star's My Destination described a process of psionic displacement called a jaunt, which, funnily enough, inspired the short story. Comics, of course, were except they spelt jaunt with an E on the end for that one. So Jaunt.

SPEAKER_01 6:51

Oh yeah, I guess I should have given it a bit of breath, giving it a little bit of uh Give it the je ne sais quoi, as they say in the country.

SPEAKER_04 6:58

Well I don't know what accent that turned into.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Le Jaunt? No, I don't know, I don't know, that's Dina. Le Jeunt. Comics, of course, also full of warping and teleportation, but the original series of Star Trek was the standard in which teleportation became semi-normalised. Originally implemented as a cost-cutting exercise because they couldn't afford to have the Enterprise land on a planet every episode, the transporting beam in Star Trek has become a mainstay, and the phrase beam me up, Scotty, has become synonymous with the technology. And this is all in caps, despite never being said in those exact words in any episode or movie with Scotty in it. Which Boston was very keen to point out.

SPEAKER_03 7:45

To be fair, I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

I I assumed at some point it must have been said, or multiple times during like um the original Star Trek series. It's never said, huh?

SPEAKER_00 7:56

It's it's got it's it's gotta be another thing of like the same thing as the the the Star Wars queries like Luke, I am your father. That's not the actual line, is it? No, it's not.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

SPEAKER_00 8:08

Yeah, it's it kind of it comes up a lot, but it's not technically what's actually said, which is it's weird how some quotes just end up being massively popular, and it's like, where's that from?

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Does Fader never say Luke, I am your father? Doesn't he listen to like search your feelings, you know it to be true, Luke?

SPEAKER_00 8:25

I am your father. I'm pretty sure he says something along the lines of no, I am your father, because Luke's like, you killed my father.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Oh no. Oh no, I uh right, it's kind of sort of, but not really gotcha. Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

Just a little bit different, but that's not the quote that survived. The quote that survived is one that he didn't actually say. However, we uh we have to go back to the earliest story to see the real long-standing implication of teleportation in fiction. You see, Edward Page Mitchell's 1877 story was about a man who was able to figure out how to transfer the atoms of a cat across a telegraph wire and reassemble them. However, when he tries to do the same method on himself, the battery of the telegraph dies mid-transit and only his head completes the trip. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 9:15

I vaguely remember hearing about this story, just because I was like, wow, yeah, that sounds familiar, and I was not surprised that only the head showed up.

SPEAKER_00 9:23

Well, the story is called The Man Without a Body, and it serves not only as the first major story about teleportation, kind of on the nose, but you know. Yeah, the title of the name is kind of a spoiler, eh? They they they title books different back then. Yeah. Um the title and plot, uh, but so it was also the first cautionary tale about the process as well, and fiction has really ramped up the potential horrors of such an innovative and essential piece of technology over the years. Yeah, I did the first story about teleportation on the right, it instantly goes to horror. You are absolutely right, Shai. I didn't even think about that.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

I mean, where where else can you? I mean, I guess you could do like um utopian society where everybody can teleport and everything is great, but ah just when you think about the act of teleportation, immediately your brain probably goes to, oh, it's wrong. And you just have sort of a it's sort of a Star Trek Bones mentality of I'm not letting that damn machine tear me apart limb from limb, I'm taking the shuttle craft.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

Yeah. 100%. It's just such a weird concept. You immediately go to th this can't possibly go well. Um As this will uh be predominantly a bunch of Star Trek stories because Possum has been waiting for this moment for so long and is ecstatic to info dump about their favourite franchise. We can look at the concept there as a baseline for the history of teleportation, because despite accidents being seemingly normal on the enterprises of the original series and the next generation, the process is viewed as something that's overall very safe. In fact, in those respective series, people who are anxious and fearful about utilizing them are treated a bit weird and are subject to therapy, like a Reginald Lieutenant Reginald Barclay and Dr. Catherine Pulaski in The Next Generation.

SPEAKER_01 11:13

I was about to bring up Barclay in his uh his his trials and tribulations with uh transporter fear and the way everybody's like, what is wrong with you, dude? It's perfectly safe. We do it all the time. There's like 30 billion teleports a day, and there's like a 0.001% accident rate, you doof. Come on, just let the thing rip you apart atom by atom and replace you on the surface, dumbass. And then as it turns out, there's like and then as it turns out there is actually something in like the little teleport beam that's like trying to latch on to him, and like anyway, that's I'm not gonna go into a synopsis of that episode, but yeah, anyway, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

I mean, in later and more contemporary episodes of the franchise, teleportation is used in favor of turbo lifts and has been perfected. But Star Trek did give us a period of time where this was not always the case. Oh, you about to tell me about the motion picture? Oh, don't worry. We'll we'll get there. Okay. Okay. First, we've got to start in Enterprise, because uh that's where we get to see the first implementation of transporter technology on uh Captain Jonathan Archer's Enterprise. And despite the fact that it's been approved for full biotransference, even the captain is highly reluctant with using it for the first few years of their journey, refusing to even put his Beagle Porthos in the machine. Ensign Hosha Sayso even states at one point, if that machine could move a birthmark, who knows what else it could do. I mean, to be fair, as new technology goes, I I would I would also be a bit like, are we are we sure?

SPEAKER_01 12:49

Yeah, a little healthy skepticism, a little bit of like uh, yeah, yeah, this seems great, but also the things that could go horribly wrong or the misuses of this thing could also be absolutely dreadful. Sometimes it's better not to play God.

SPEAKER_00 13:04

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're already on an experimental ship in the depths of space. I feel like adding in a potential way to just get shoved into the endless void of the universe because someone pressed the wrong button. I don't know. I wouldn't be on board for that myself either, to be fair. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. Transporters and teleportation have a wide range of consequences and potential horrors that are as expansive as the genre itself. Though Star Trek set a standard, it's not the norm, and with every variation of teleportation technology, there exists a terrifying downside to it. So today on Acceptable Losses, we're going to warp through a bunch of common accident types that you tend to find in sci-fi with teleportation. We're going to save fantasy for another day. Planescape. Uh obviously, there's no way in hell we'll be able to cover each and every example of each and every common trope, as that would be virtually impossible. So if you have your own favourite, leave it in the comments below. We're going to separate this into multiple sections, and for each section, we'll have a combination of little examples and one bigger example. And uh Char uh Possum really wants to point out that uh the episode of the next generation where the crewmate phases halfway through the floor and dies with blood trickling out of her mouth.

SPEAKER_04 14:22

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

Which is uh the episode in theory, it that doesn't count because that was a subspace and nebula displacement and not teleportation. Uh and in the script is that uh that picture of uh the event's name. Oh no, the guy going, I am aware of the effect I have on women.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

Ah, yes. It's funny, the the one where the ladies like half phase through the floor, that uh I vividly remember that because when I was little, my brother and I were big Trekys, and there was literally a TCG, like a like a collectible card game for Star Trek, and that was one of like the dilemma cards that you have to like solve. And it was just that on this big card, and it just horrified me every time that thing popped up. That was oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 15:15

Oh, it's I don't even like the picture. I really don't. It's just it's wrong, it's wrong, and it's off, and yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's yeah, it's yeah. It's not it's not a good way to go. Uh so for funsies, we're going to go into the first year of transport if you're funsies. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 15:37

Not what I love to hear on acceptable losses. For funsies, let's do this thing. No. No, this isn't going anywhere, Fan.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

It's what's the worst that can happen. Oh wait, we're looking at it. Never mind. Um no, that is absolutely not the worst that can happen in Star Trek. It's not even and also it's not even it's that's not even a transporter accident, so everything I just said was wrong. Let's uh let's just move on. Um so yeah, we're going to uh we're just going to go into the history of transport attack in Star Trek quickly, and you'll see why. It was invented by Emery Erickson sometime prior to 2121. He was the first person to go through and utilize this invention, and he explained its creation in the Enterprise episode Daedalus, which tell you what, you can read this bit.

SPEAKER_01 16:23

Oh, there's actually an episode of the N of Enterprise where like they explain how the teleporters were invented. I believe so. I never I never watched Enterprise because I saw a few episodes of it and look garbage. Anyway, the quote That original transporter took a full minute and a half to cycle through, felt like a year. You could actually feel yourself being taken apart and put back together. When I materialized, first thing I did was lose my lunch. Second thing I did was get stone drunk. Yeah, that does not sound like a fun first transport teleport at all.

SPEAKER_00 16:59

A minute and a half, and you can feel it happening. Oh hell no. Why what I wouldn't even continue working on the technology. I'd just be like, oh fuck this. I absolutely not.

SPEAKER_01 17:11

I feel like I would continue working on it because you know, like that's a proof of concept. Like you can make this thing work. It's not there yet. Please don't mass produce this thing yet because it hurts like hell. But I would definitely keep working on it because this is like groundbreaking stuff, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Maybe get other people to test it for you. Just be like, hey, look, it is it's gonna be so much better than when I did it. Like, why aren't you doing it again?

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Wow, we have these big penal colonies with horrible criminals that we don't know what to do with. Gosh, it sure would be a shame if we use them as guinea pigs.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

You have basically gone straight back to the jaunt with that, haven't you? Let's just get prisoners.

SPEAKER_04 17:55

Oh yeah, that's right. They do that, don't they? I forgot.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

It all comes full circle. It's ingrained now. That's how teleporters we feel. That's criminals. Jesus. I'm just as bad. This is crazy. So uh he later explains that the initial tests were grim and some brave men and women were lost. One of these people would be his son, Quinn. Now, Quinn was one of the first people to test out a transporter, and his pattern would be lost in subspace mid-transportation, randomly phasing in and out as an energy distortion for 15 years. Eventually, Emery was able to modify the transporter on Archer's Enterprise to attempt to phase his son back in, but the matter of his cells had deteriorated over time in space. Reforming him would kill him, and Emery would complete the process, with his son then dying in his arms.

SPEAKER_01 18:53

Boy, we sure do love it here, and acceptable losses. Oh boy, that's that's rough. That's that's that's tough.

SPEAKER_00 19:02

That that flat out sucks. Yep. But but the pattern buffer mechanic of the Star Trek transporter would essentially serve in the future as some form of a USB stick and act as a failsafe in case the transporter was not working properly, allowing for the individual to be stored for a short period of time pretty much as data. Now, sometimes this would be used as a preventative measure, and in a more depressing example, Dr. Joseph and Banger in Strange New Worlds would keep his daughter Rokea secretly in the buffer of the Enterprise, which that whole arc, it was oh boy, it hurt my heart.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

You should be so proud of me, Shy. I was I was chomping at the bit to talk about that. Didn't do it, didn't do it. I let Kiryal say it, didn't interrupt him, didn't jump the gun. Look at me. Look at me, mom. I don't know why, but then the mom really took me out. I didn't jump barely doing your job. Thank you, Shine. If I had suspenders, I would do that thing where you pull them and snap them, you know. Anyway, but yeah, that that whole thing is so depressing, where his daughter is like stuck in the the little area because she's got the the terminal illness that there's no cure for, and he's like, well, one day I'll figure it out, probably, and when I do, I'll just yoink. And then every now and then you see him in an episode where he like grabs her out of like the the her pattern out to tell her a story, and it's the same story every time, and it's very depressing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:34

For two years, yeah. She's in the buff in the buffer, and uh he has to rematerialise her every often, every so often, so that uh she wouldn't essentially fully disintegrate in there. Yeah. I just I I can't even I don't like those scenes. They're very well acted, they're very, very well done, but uh it just it it targets a very specific part of my heart, you know, with two with two companies. I was gonna say, because you're a dad, yeah, yeah. That probably really takes up the heartstrings. Yeah. The slow degradation of matter thanks to teleporter inadequacies was a problem in the early days of the transporter, and it resulted in a very well-known and widely feared condition. Transporter psychosis was a condition that was incurable and was a side effect of the early days of transportation. It's I mean it's on the nose, but that's what Barclay thought he had in that one episode we talked about.

SPEAKER_01 21:30

And everybody's like, you're crazy. There hasn't been an there hasn't been a case of that in like 300 years, you dork.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

You've got what's what is it? Is it what's the what's the word for Oh god, it's the people who think they're ill all the time. Oh, I don't know the term. I don't know what it's called. It might be. They're just like convinced they're ill. Always convinced they're ill. Yeah. The psychosis itself was caused by the breakdown, yes. Thing, okay, awesome. I I I remembered a thing. Thanks, Shy. Um the psychosis was caused by the breakdown of neurochemicals during the transport cycle that weren't able to be rebuilt for one reason or another. The symptoms of transporter psychosis were similar to dementia, and with the addition of violent hallucinations and psychogenic hysteria. Class rough. Yeah, that's not great. A cure would never be found, but advancements in the buffer pattern would render it extinct. In fact, in the next generation episode Realm of Fear, which takes place in 2369, it's stated that there hasn't been a fully confirmed and diagnosed case of it in almost 50 years. Properly remembered it. I tell you what, you're on it, you are on it. You are on it with the transporter knowledge.

SPEAKER_01 22:47

Star Trek, man. I've seen those episodes so many times.

SPEAKER_00 22:53

So we're gonna start our list of uh of horrors when it comes to teleportation. So horror number one, teleportation death. The first one, my funny insurance does what it says on the tennis.

SPEAKER_01 23:06

Yeah, I don't know what I was expecting. I wasn't expecting death.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

Look, it's a it's a it's it's a risk, it's a side effect. You might get it. The first one we're going to go over is perhaps the most merciful on the surface, general teleportation death. Sometimes, you know, you attempt to do something and it just doesn't go well, and you're immediately past tensed. But there's a reason why this is a surface-level thing. Teleportation death can have an incredible amount of complications, and though there's a chance it may be painless, it oftentimes isn't, and can borderline on body horror. The process of coming back incorrectly to the point of death can not only be a terrifying and painful death for you, but it can be a viscerally traumatic experience for those who are there to witness it happening to you. And that picture is yes, uh horrific.

SPEAKER_01 23:57

Yeah, I don't think that's even the worst example.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

No. Um Scotty in the original series episode The Savage Curtain stresses that one of the biggest concerns with a transporter is regarding its power. If the power for the system is insufficient, someone risks coming aboard a mass of dying flesh. Yeah, they sure do. They sure do. What a sentence.

SPEAKER_01 24:23

Yeah, that's that's that is yeah, those those are the examples where it's like, yeah, you know what? I'm I'm I'm with bones. I'm taking the shuttlecraft.

SPEAKER_00 24:31

I yeah, no, I'm good. I've you know, I've I've heard the phrase uh a mass of dying flesh and decided couldn't be me. So And won't be, not today. And won't be. This uh this would unfortunately come to fruition in Star Trek The Motion Picture. A Vulcan named Sonac is assigned to it as its new science officer. He was ordered to the Enterprise by a recently promoted rear admiral Kirk. I don't know why. I always forget that Kirk was made a rear admiral.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh and he uh he loses his rank because he just disobeys orders too much.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

This is the this is the thing where I'm like, who why did they Kirk never felt like Admiral Material to me.

SPEAKER_01 25:13

I'm not I'm not I'm just saying You keep him as the captain of the Enterprise and only the captain of the Enterprise. Don't promote him. Although actually I think he says that. Like he that's the advice he gives to Picard. Don't let him don't let him take you out of the chair, don't let him promote you. It's bullshit up there. Just be captain, make a difference.

SPEAKER_00 25:29

Yeah. Yeah. At the time, the USS Enterprise is near the end of its 18-month complete refit, and its new captain, Decker, has requested that Sonar continue his studies and was of the belief that the Enterprise was staying in dry dock for at least another twenty hours. Kirk tells him that it's leaving a lot sooner than that and expects him to be on the ship in an hour. Kirk is aware of an alien threat that needs handling, and he obviously wants his favourite ship so that he can handle it personally. Eventually, Command of the Enterprise is given over to Kirk, and as he's preparing the ship, we are informed that someone is attempting to transport over, but there's a red line on the transporter. It's not fully functional due to the refit being rushed, and the materializing isn't working. They rush to the transporter room where Janice Rand is desperately telling Starfleet to abort the transport, but it's too late. Sonak and another officer partially materialise in the transporter room, but they are unable to fully phase in. Their bodies look contorted and disfigured, and the officer screams before their bodies disappear. Kurt gets a hold of Starfleet and asks them if they rematerialized on their end, and headquarters informs him that whatever it was they received mercifully didn't live long.

SPEAKER_01 26:44

Yep. I I vividly remember that scene and just being absolutely horrified by it. But yeah, that's not just like your body getting body horred. They got merged together into one lump of excruciatingly awful, painful, torturous. Oh god. It's it's so bad. Like, even though it probably only lasted for like a few seconds, it probably felt like an eternity. Like I can't even imagine, dude. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's quite literally too much to take in. It's yeah, that that scene unsettles me every time. And then I remember the whole point of the motion picture was V'ger, and I'm just like, okay, it's all better now. I don't care.

SPEAKER_00 27:32

Well, funnily enough, uh, you mentioning you know Dr. McCoy being, I I don't I'm not really on board with this whole transporter thing. The fact is Cook makes fun of him as if he didn't watch two people like scream and die.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

As if he didn't witness this exact thing. And like saw it happen, my guy. What could you do?

SPEAKER_00 27:56

We were there like keys, man. You don't want to use the transporter, you pussy. It's clearly fine. What are you talking about? Two people died like ten minutes ago.

SPEAKER_01 28:07

Crazy. Oh, according to the novelization of Star Trek the motion picture, the transporter inverted them. They firm with they formed with their internal organs outside their bodies. Oh no. What the hell? Yike. Oh god.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

Oops, all trauma. A particularly grim instance of a transporter death comes in the form of the Deep Space Nine episode of The Darkness and the Light. Solaran Pryn was a servant for the Kardashian Empire, particularly at Ghoul Pirak, and was disfigured after a Bajoran resistance cell bombs the Ghoul's house. He built up more than the usual Kardashian hatred for the Bajorans during this time and sought ways to bring down their resistance cells. The attack on the Bajoran resistance fighters caught the attention of the Federation, thanks to Major Kirineri's investigations on Deep Space Nine, and they'd move in to preemptively rescue them. One of these members was an informant named Trentin Fahler, and they would attempt to beam her aboard the runabout. However, Pryn had covertly planted a device on her clothes. This device was a remat detonator that's designed to botch the pattern of anyone planted with one during the materialization process as a means of brutally killing them. It's so fucked up. It's so my god. And that's the game we saw earlier.

SPEAKER_01 29:33

Yeah, I I I I don't I don't remember that episode of Deep Space Nine, but God, you invented a way for like putting this thing on someone, botches the transport. Oh dude, that is a whole nother level of fucked up. Yeah, that's that's horrific.

SPEAKER_00 29:52

It's bad. The the detonator caused a huge power surge within the transporter's pattern buffer and messed with the integration matrix, which meant that Wolf and Jadseer Dax attempted to transport Fowler's pattern to the secondary buffer, but the surge maxed the settings out, scrambling the beam. And uh this is how the end result is described in the episode script. So got another got another one for you here.

SPEAKER_01 30:17

Alright, great. They both look with horror at the as the they both look with horror at the transporter stage as it flashes wildly with uncontrolled energy. Finally, Fala materializes on the pad, but she's been horribly burned and scorched. She's crumbled to the deck, dead. Dax and Worf react with a mixture of revulsion and grief at the sight. Yeah, that's not good.

SPEAKER_00 30:44

That is that is not how you want to go out. Absolutely not. No, no. Now, horror number two. Telefragging. Telefragging? What? It's it it's a classic doom maneuver. Telefragging are like telefragging an enemy. Hell yeah. Um I think could you do it into no, I can't remember. Um, but yeah, it's uh it's the concept of teleporting into someone else, all objects teleporting within a person. Oh keeping my mouth shut. I'm trying to think it was it's because I read Team Fortress as you put it in, shy. Was it Unreal Tournament? Could you do it as well? I can't remember. I played a lot of Unreal Tournament back in the day, but I can't remember whether you could do it in that or not. I mostly just remember playing the the same level phobos over and over again. Um I never played Team Fortress like at all. I can't I can barely remember playing it. I don't think I ever got into it. The first one, yes, but the second one not so much. Um so yeah, this is uh this is the act of appearing inside a person, or you know, objects appearing inside a person via teleportation. In the episode of uh of Enterprise Strange New World, a crewman named N Ethan Novokovich is a beamed back from the recently discovered planet which the crew decided to call Archer 4 after their captain, Jonathan Archer. This transport was attempted during a fierce windstorm, and as he rematerialized, it was clear that he brought a good chunk of the surface up with him before he collapsed unconscious on the transport room floor. The debris that was blowing around him at the time, including sticks, rocks, and leaves, had been embedded in his skin. Yeah, that's not great.

SPEAKER_01 32:36

That's that sucks. Also, you'd think that you'd think that teleporters would be good enough that they could like phase all that out. Like even if it is like really stormy and dusty and whatever, you'd think that they could pick up the pattern of just human, but I guess if there's enough debris and dust and shit rolling around, it's bound to happen, question mark.

SPEAKER_00 32:56

This is also enterprise, so it's like the early Oh. I thought you said Strange New World. It's it yeah. The episode is Strange New World. Oh, right, right. And that is early Enterprise before.

SPEAKER_01 33:08

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's this is literally before uh TNG. Right, right, right, right. Or before the original series, even. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:16

So it's it's still the it's still the one where the notes not that long ago, a guy was like, it took a minute and a half, and I could feel all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah, yeah. Gotcha, got you. Not quite up to standard at this point, I might suggest.

SPEAKER_01 33:30

I keep thinking Strange New World is like advanced because it's like one of the more recent shows, and it's like, no, no, no, this is like before Kirk. Kirk is like a cadet in this show.

SPEAKER_00 33:40

It's you know what, it I I get this this is only a mild thing. Enterprise being called Enterprise confuses me a little bit because no one ever says Star Trek Enterprise, so that already set like separates it out a bit. But then Enterprise has got the episode Strange New World, but there's also a series Strange News Strange New World, yeah, and Strange New World is is after Enterprise but uh but before TNG, but it's named after an episode of the thing that was already before TNG anyway, not TNG, the original series, like that but it came out after all of them, and so my like my internal when was this is so screwed, yeah. It's just all over the place. I mean the fact that I I was I defaulted to TNG, which is true, it was before TNG, but it wasn't. I always default to it too.

SPEAKER_01 34:36

Like I've done that like at least three times this episode, dude.

SPEAKER_00 34:42

Because it's the best one. That's that's agreed. It is. It is.

SPEAKER_01 34:46

I'm sorry, Deep Space Nine fans, but I just Deep Space Nine great, but TNG is the I think is the uh obvious king of the franchise.

SPEAKER_00 34:56

The first series wasn't great, but it you know improved massively after that. So you know we can we can let him off for for one dodgy for one dodgy season. Yeah. So in the next generation episode, the Schizoid Man, the Enterprise is forced to jump into warp while a transport is being executed, which is quite uh an exceptionally dangerous manoeuvre. Um normally want to do that. Um there's a huge emergency occurring and the away team needs to be offloaded. Geordie Beforge warns Deanna Troy that the effects may be weird, but doesn't explain properly. As Troy transports in, she says, This might sound crazy, but for a moment I thought I was stuck in that wall, referring to the wall a few metres to the side, to which Wolf says, For a moment, you were.

SPEAKER_01 35:46

I mean, given that like they're trying to do a transport at warp speed, yeah, it it doesn't surprise me that for a minute her pattern probably was stuck in something. All over the shop.

SPEAKER_00 35:58

Yeah, probably. This wouldn't be the first allusion to something like this happening within the walls of a ship. In the original series episode Day of the Dove, Spock advises against ship-to-ship transporting and states that it's rarely been done because of the accuracy needed, because if you mess it up, you'll materialize inside a deck or a wall. Oh, yeah, yeah, you would. An ongoing theme in the show Fringe, which is another show that Possum loves, is the thinning of the barrier between the primary universe and an alternate universe. It would take quite a bit of time to explain why the barrier is thin, but the context needed here is that the thinning of this wall is causing extreme damage to the alternate universe, and terrorist organizations in the alternate universe are attempting to fracture the primary universe, utilizing technology to draw things from their universe into the primary one. In the episode Jacksonville, an incident occurs in New York City where a hyperlocalized earthquake damages one building, killing everyone inside. But somehow the building is still standing. When the fringe investigation team is dispatched to look into the incident further, they discover that what actually occurred was that a building was pulled directly from the alternate universe and slammed into the primary universe, fusing the occupants in the building into the various walls and doors in a catastrophic manner. I love fringe.

SPEAKER_01 37:24

I'm so happy to hear that Possum is also a big fan of Fringe. I I haven't I haven't met many of them, but you know.

SPEAKER_00 37:32

I mean, based off that, I do want to watch it now because that it sounds very cool.

SPEAKER_01 37:38

Yeah, my my mom and I bought like the first like five seasons, or I don't know how many seasons it had, bought a bunch that we would binge watch that shit all the time.

SPEAKER_00 37:46

I'm gonna I'm I'm gonna get on that. I might get on that tonight, genuinely, because ramming buildings into each other from other universes is extremely my sort of nonsense.

SPEAKER_01 37:55

So Oh yeah, literally, like the first episode is like this uh crazy viral disease that gets let loose and it turns you translucent, and you can see inside them as you slowly like die. And it's like her boyfriend that she has to save from this, like as he's like translucent and like slowly dying, and she has to find a way to fix it, and they have to resort to fringe science and this absolute mad lad scientist. And and if you've ever seen Mighty Ducks 1, um the the main character from that is like the main guy. It's it's great, it's great. Everybody should watch Fringe that sounds absolutely wild. Great, it's great. It's great. It's a lot of body whore and weird shit though. So if you're squeamish about that, you know. Why would you be listening to Acceptable Losses? What am I talking about? We're probably gonna do an episode on Fringe. Anyway, go ahead. Teleportation.

SPEAKER_00 38:47

Possum has heard that before we've even finished recording. The ears have just gone. Possum's been acting like that.

SPEAKER_01 38:54

I feel a disturbance in the force.

SPEAKER_00 38:56

Yeah. Yeah. They're not sure why, but they they've been they've been called. Yeah. Another franchise that dealt with the fear of telefragging quite a bit was the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica. In this show, the technology used for warping ships was essentially instantaneous teleportation. It's never fully explained, but the heavy implication is that an airtight bubble is formed around the ship, be it a Battlestar or one of the raptors or vipers used for space combat. And a course is plotted and assured is completely clear. When the ships snap out of reality, it runs the risk of extreme damage to anything near them, as made evident when a jumping viper tears off the side of a ship. When the ship reappears, it makes a sonic boom. However, due to the nature of the show where the humans were attempting to outmaneuver the Cylons at a rapid pace, the movements and jumps can be out of sheer desperation without proper calculations. Blind jumping is almost always a potential death sentence and can result in the ships appearing in random places without any sort of idea as to what happened. Or even worse. In the season two episode, Lay Down Your Burdens, an attempt to rescue the leader of the human resistance on the planet Caprica, Samuel T. Anders, results in the rescue team being forced to blind jump into the atmosphere as a means to swiftly land and escape. Due to the nature of the blind jump, most of the arriving raptors and vipers are able to break atmosphere perfectly fine, but we get a pretty unfortunate description of one of the rescue raptors jumping in and phasing in the middle of a mountain, killing everyone on board instantly.

SPEAKER_01 40:33

Ooh, that sucks. You never want to phase into a mountain. Oh boy. At least it's quick, I guess. Shy, what the hell? Sorry to pop in unannounced, I say, as I teleport inside a man exploding him. Wow. That's great, Shy. That's just you get away with words. What a quip. One excellent quip. Love it. That's a that's that's gotta be like a sci-fi Leon Kennedy Resident Evil quip that's coming up, right? Sorry to pop in.

SPEAKER_02 41:09

Leon!

SPEAKER_00 41:11

Oh god. In one instance that still lives in Possum's nightmares is the 1988 episode of Doctor Who, The Remembrance of the Daleks, the one where Daleks could go upstairs, which was scary as fuck at the time. The Doctor, the seventh one played by Sylvester McCoy, successfully sabotages a Dalek transporter, causing a Dalek that's transporting to successfully transport half into itself, causing half to be the shadow of the Dalek and the other half being the organic, squid like flesh. Lovely.

SPEAKER_01 41:48

I never saw the old uh Doctor Who's, but that sounds awful. Cheavers. Pardon me didn't realise they were organic on the inside. I thought they were just robots.

SPEAKER_00 41:57

Yeah, they've got like they're like little d weird fleshy squid squid guys that just pilot their robotic bins around being angry at people. It's it's to be honest, their design is quite cool. Oh for sure, yeah. It is just it is just the fact that they are a horrific threat to the universe, and then if one of them breaks open, it's it's like the most shitty, underfed, spread-out starfish you've ever seen in your life. It's like yuck. Wild, wild design on that. Yeah, definitely. Now we have our third horror, which is the split. So we're gonna step into the next concept here, which is the idea of one individual splitting into two. And this one has a pretty big pendulum swing of implications. In some aspects of the concept, the split is something akin to a personality split, where one half is the evil version of a person and the other half is the good half of the person. Not technically teleportation, but Red Dwarf does a good version of this, where they're trying to replicate food and they get it horribly wrong, and they replicate Red Dwarf and the crew, except the new Red Dwarf and the crew are evil freaks.

SPEAKER_01 43:22

Wait, they're trying to replicate food and they replicate like their ship, but evil?

SPEAKER_00 43:29

You've got to remember uh a British comedy show from way back when. It's all about incompetence. They basically are able to take a piece of like take an apple or a strawberry and then create two versions of it out of one, but when they first do it, um one of them takes They made an evil strawberry. It's full of maggots, like absolutely full of it. They didn't make an evil strawberry. So he takes Mr. takes a bite and he's like, it's It's sort of like gooey. Oh, he's very good. And he's just taken a bite out of maggots with a strawberry shell. Yeah. But you know, they out they ramp up the power to try and make that so it doesn't happen, and instead they accidentally split red dwarf. Um in fact, no, there's an evil one and a good one. The good one, they recite poetry and eat delightful grapes and sing to each other, and the bad one, um, basically uh non-consensual bondage is on the agenda. So it's alright.

SPEAKER_01 44:34

I mean, I guess it's it's the evil one, it's the chaos one. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:40

It's a good episode. I'm not entirely sure how well it's aged. It's been a while since I've watched it, but you know.

unknown 44:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:45

But technically, technically, sort of not uh whatever. So there is a there is a deeper and darker implication when it comes to the creation of a clone, as in some aspects of fiction, this is essentially the point of teleportation. Scientifically, there's a belief that there's no actual way to fully transmit an entire person from one place to another. And the only way that this could actually be accomplished is by copying the matter of a person and recreating them somewhere else, leaving either an empty shell behind or leaving the original person behind. This is explored very much in both the book and the film The Prestige in the form of some steampunk science. But the thing that we're going to go over today, before we hit this section head on, is the philosophy book Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfitt. I told you this is the most possum script we've ever had. Oh told you that when we started. Oh, oh, a hundred percent. You see, you you're really seeing what I mean here. Oh yeah. Excellent for it. I I had no doubt. In this book, which is pride predominantly about self-identity, he has a section about what we believe ourselves to be. In this section, he goes into the idea of teleportation as a means of discussing who we are and who we were, and the section opens with a thought experiment. So I've got I've got another quote for you here. Uh you're you're so glad you've got a uh a decent microphone again, aren't you?

SPEAKER_01 46:08

Oh yeah, man. I I I love that we're quote heavy on the uh body horror teleport episode. Thanks for that, by the way. Really. So I enter the teletransporter. I've been to Mars before, but only by the old method, a spaceship journey taking several weeks. This machine will send me at the speed of light. I merely have to press the green button. Like others, I'm nervous. Will it work? I remind myself what I've been told to expect. When I press the button, I shall lose consciousness and then wake up at what seems a moment later. In fact, I shall have been unconscious for about an hour. The scanner here on Earth will destroy my brain and body while recording the exact states of all my cells. It will then transmit this information by radio, traveling at the speed of light. The message will take three minutes to reach the rep replicator on Mars. This will then create, out of new matter, a brain and a body exactly like mine. It will be in this body that I shall wake up. I don't like that. I know, like, I know essentially more or less, kinda sorta, that's how a lot of like popular teleporters work. But um don't don't like the way that sounds where it's just like, yeah, no, you will die, and I guess we'll just put you into a copy of your body.

unknown 47:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:30

Like that's not repairing you. That's just yeah, that's that's them making a new shell for you to inhabit.

SPEAKER_00 47:38

Yeah. And this is this is part of it, which is that he then asked the fundamental question that has no good answer here. Is this a method of travel or not? Is the person who exited the teletransporter on Mars the same exact person as the one who entered the teletransporter on Oh, oh, it's like that sh oh, oh I see. Yeah, you're not even in a new shell.

SPEAKER_01 47:58

Like technically I I thought it was a thing where it was like, oh yeah, they like keep your consciousness and then just like beam it into the new shell. I misunderstood that you just completely die and a copy of you is just running around, and that's not actually you.

SPEAKER_00 48:13

But if that copy of you has all of your memories and all of your personality and everything that you have done is what they have done, is that still you or is that just a different version of you whilst you don't get to continue existing? I I hate it. I absolutely hate it. It gives me the ick, it makes me think about existential stuff, and I don't want it.

SPEAKER_01 48:38

I don't want to jump the gun and ask if there's a something something coming up, so I'm just gonna let you move on to what's uh the the next example of it. Okay, I was gonna say, like, is is that sort of like what happens in Soma, right? Because that's kind of sort of what you're doing in that game too. Anyway, yeah, go ahead. Next example.

SPEAKER_00 48:59

Well, in the original series episode, the enemy within, Captain Kirk experienced a transporter malfunction thanks to the inclusion of a strange yellow ore within the transportation grid on Alpha 177. Kirk would rematerialise on the ship just fine, but sometime later a second Kirk would appear and walk out of the transporter room unnoticed. The clone cook, which we'll call the negative Kirk, would begin to act erratically, demanding copious amounts of saurian brandy and walking around drunk. Sounds like my kind of guy. Not knowing there were two, conversations between him and the other crew would be disregarded by the primary Kirk, who said that those interactions never happened. This would culminate in negative Kirk attempting to force himself on the ship's yeoman, Janice Rand. Fortunately, she's able to fight him off and leave a large scratch on his face. She runs to Sick Bay and tells everyone that the captain attempted to assault her, and Primary Kirk denies this. Deducing that there's too many corroborated stories to ignore, Spock determines there must be a second Kirk or an imposter on the ship. Now, the source of the transporter issue is determined, and the primary cook makes an announcement that there's a clone on the ship, which results in an unnecessarily funny scene of negative Kirk screaming, I'm Captain Kirk in the captain's quarters that only someone like Shatner could pull off. I can picture it, I can hear it. You genuinely can't hear it.

SPEAKER_01 50:28

Yeah, yeah. If you even if you haven't seen the episode, if you know Shatner, everybody does, you can hear it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:35

But the Kirk that made the announcement was uncertain and meek, something unbecoming of the once resilient captain. The negative Kirk finds makeup and applies it to the wounds that Rand inflicted on him and begins to cause chaos around the ship in a cat and mouse game before being subdued by Spock. Negative Kirk is restrained to a biobed, and Primary Kirk pleads with him to use his mind and not his savagery. You see, Primary Kirk is more docile and anxious than the negative Kirk, and even though the Negative Kirk is a representation of undiluted primal recklessness and violence, it's two parts of the same whole. All humans have some dark side to them, and in that dark side lies strength that is tempered and repurposed by the reasonable self to become commanding. Despite the primary kirk's objections, the negative kirk needs to be reintegrated with him. You've gotta be meek to be like, oh maybe we let him let him hang.

SPEAKER_02 51:32

Well him around.

SPEAKER_01 51:34

Yeah. You gotta you gotta get the two halves back together. You just gotta.

SPEAKER_00 51:40

A meek Captain Kirk is just it's just it's just not just not on. It's it's the a universal constant has been broken there.

SPEAKER_01 51:48

Um also shocked that the yeoman was able to uh fight off Kirk because Kirk is regularly fist fighting aliens with axes and lizard people and stuff like that in gladiatorial combat. And although I guess he doesn't actually want to like kill the yeoman or like destroy the yeoman. He's just he's just bad. Off his face. Yeah, he's definitely off his face. As they say across the pond, off his face.

SPEAKER_00 52:20

You see Mika got the knowledge of Kung Fu, but he's too big of a pussy to use it. You're on a roll today.

SPEAKER_02 52:34

Oh god. Jesus Christ.

SPEAKER_00 52:42

So on the transporter pad, they've repaired the damage and they have a test subject, a canine that was brought up from Alpha 177 and split in two. Uh the dog is a it's actually a dog with a cardboard horn for those keeping a score at home. Um one of the dogs is sleepy and timid, while the other is snarling and evil. They subdue the snarling dog and place it on the transporter next to the calm one. They energize them in an attempt to fully merge them back, but the singular dog that sits on the platform is dead, dying of the shock of two halves being forced together. Which, you know, um it's a risk. Fair and valid, yeah. I mean, I I I get it, yeah, yeah. The negative Kirk attempts to escape again, but is eventually captured after the strain of escape is too much, crying about how he wants to live before collapsing. The crew believes that the Kirk fusion will be successful because both Kirks will be aware of what's happening, as opposed to, you know, a confused and terrified dog with a collarbought horn. The fusion ends up being successful, and Kirk stands in the transporter room as one confident man ordering a rescue of the away team which have been freezing on the surface this whole time. Right. You know, it works out. I d I feels like a gamble though. Oh, they're both sentient and aware, so they won't die of shock.

SPEAKER_01 53:59

Yeah, you would think it would cause more of a shock. Like, at least the dog didn't know, I guess. But I don't know, maybe, maybe I don't know, it's whatever. It it all worked out in the end. Hooray, Kirk is Kirk.

SPEAKER_00 54:11

I don't know, that's how shock works, but it hey, it worked out for him, that's all the masses. Um The awareness of the situation on the surface implies that Kirk was aware of the things occurring before the fusion, which suggests that he's not only acutely aware of his docile half's actions, but also the terror and violence of his negative half as well. In a that's that's got an implication that I'm not a fan of. Um time to find a new yeoman. Paul, just just trying to do a job. Yeah. Negative cook running around being a lunatic, and it's just she's she sat there like, we should really get that away team back.

SPEAKER_03 54:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:56

They're freezing mental at her. In a less yin and yang, more an identical clone instance, the next generation episode Second Chances, William Riker is with an away team on the planet of Nevala 4 while an evacuation is occurring at a science outpost. The USS Potemkin is attempting to beam people out, but a distortion field is resulting in difficulties. The distortion makes it so there's only brief windows in time in which they can beam in and out. In order to overcome them and successfully beam Riker out, a second confinement beam is initiated with the hopes that both beams could be integrated in the transport buffer. This was excessive as one beam was successful at transporting him to the ship. Unbeknownst to him, however, the double beam combined with the distortion field resulted in an identical duplicate of Riker being created and being left on the surface. Believing that the transportation failed, the planet side Riker would wait for the Potemkin to return.

SPEAKER_01 55:55

Classic, clessic teleport malfunction making an evil clone or clone. Classic, classic. Everybody knows uh the the Riker clone. Everyone. Yep, yep.

SPEAKER_00 56:08

It's such a good one as well. It's such a good example of it. Eight years later, the USS Enterprise would return to the planet and Riker would lead an away team to the same science outpost and they would encounter the duplicate. The clone Riker believes that he had to have been reported dead, but Commander Riker tells him that he made it off the surface that day. Of course, the eight years of difference between them made them two completely different men. Left alone on the planet and afraid he was abandoned, turned this Riker into an impulsive and reckless man, and he had trouble reacclimating on the Enterprise as the crew tried to figure out what to do with him, because protocols within the Federation would not allow them to abandon a Starfleet officer, even if he was a clone of one that had achieved a higher rank. I mean, it's such a horrific position to be in for the poor clone.

SPEAKER_01 56:59

Because this isn't this isn't a situation of like good kirk, bad kirk. This is like clone riker, but he got abandoned, and well, I'm kind of evil and reckless now because I've been alone for eight years and I thought I was abandoned.

SPEAKER_00 57:14

Yep. Yep. That's I mean, that by itself, just the knowledge that you know they didn't come back for you, that is bad enough. But then for them to come back and be like, oh, not only were you abandoned, but we didn't even know you were there.

SPEAKER_01 57:29

Like we just you weren't even a yeah. We just we just stumbled on you by happenstance because we got the one we wanted. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:37

Wild, horrible situation. Um prior to the events that resulted in his creation, Riker was in a relationship with Deanna Troy, and when the clone encountered her, he felt like no time was lost at all. Oh, just the hope of seeing her again helped him survive for those eight years. Oh no.

SPEAKER_01 57:55

I had forgotten the stuff that happened in this episode. Oh man. Yeah, he's he's a close dooming Deanna's awaiting for him.

SPEAKER_00 58:05

Yeah, that's that's not good. It's I I I forg uh you know, I it's been a while since I've watched that episode, and it really does just get worse. It's really just sucks. It just sucks all round for him. He would turn on the Riker charm and attempt to seduce her and leave with her, as she also saw the man that Riker once was in his eyes. Now, Captain Picard was able to get the clone's Riker a position on another ship, the USS Gandhi, and this was a big pull for Picard. The clone, despite being his own man and a Starfleet officer, had been out of commission for almost a decade, and this was one of those he pulled a lot of strings to get this done things. Despite this essentially, you know, being a redux of the heartbreak Troy experience eight years ago, and even though she's offered a chance to go to the Gandhi with the clone, she declines. The clone prepares to leave, and Riker gives him his trombone and remarks that many of his things are both of their things. The clone states that he'll go by Thomas, which is Riker's middle name, and he leaves. Which, for the ending of that episode, from what I remember, was like okay, okay.

SPEAKER_02 59:10

It's up for the dude, but you know. Not bad.

SPEAKER_00 59:13

Could have been way worse. He got he has a life. He can build a life of his own. This is nice. Yeah. However, unfortunately, Riker's reckless streak would follow him well into the future, and he would defect from the Federation briefly and join the insurrectionist group, the Macquis, and pose as William Riker to help further the agenda of them. He would steal the Defiant from Deep Space Nine and would eventually be sentenced to life in a Kardashian hard labor camp. Eventually he would be released or would escape, but the extent of what he experienced while imprisoned remains unknown. He could have he could have been alright, and then he just had to go off and screw it up.

SPEAKER_01 59:51

Well, I mean, to be fair, that that eight years alone changed him to such a degree that you couldn't have expected him to just be like, oh yeah, I'll just be a normal Starfleet officer, everything will be fine, hunky dory. Yeah. It's a lot of trauma. It's a lot of trauma.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:09

Yeah, yeah. In the Outer Limits revival episode Think Like a Dinosaur, which is based off of a short story with the same name, Earth is in a dire state. Overpopulation has run rampant, and the atmosphere on the planet is becoming increasingly hostile to the point where trees are extinct. What the hell? Um I mean, at that point, you're done. Game over. That's it. No trees, surely.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:34

You can surely you can replant something, right? And Yeah, but extinct.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:42

No gone forever? Hell no. Yeah, that's unfortunate. Rough. Humanity needs to reach out to the stars. Unfortunately, a new ally is able to assist. This ally is a race of dinosaur-esque aliens known as the Hannon. The Hannon have set up shop on the moon and have loaned humanity jumping technology so that instant transportation is a possibility. The Hannon are a bit confusing to the humans as they seem to be exceptionally cold demeanour-wise, showing no emotion. The emotions of humanity do bother the Hannons too, and they refer to humans as weeps. Wow. Alright. Alright, cool. Cool, cool, cool. Who am I to dress? I can't get over them calling humans weeps. It's it's so like I don't I don't it just feels like yeah, look at these absolute, absolute pathetic crying little children.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:43

Dinos dinosaur, more like dino slur. Sheesh. They've got that dinoscorn. No, that's bad, but no, we're gonna. We're gonna be thankful they ain't calling you soft pink bitches. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think in I think that's what they do in Avatar. Like um um Nitiri is just really mad at humans for always coming and like ruining everything, and I think they call them pink skins. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:12

I mean, you know, to be fair in Avatar, 100% justified. We two showing up and just ruining it. Trying to colonize the planet against their will. Yeah. Yeah. Getting that unobtainium and the and the the what is it, the sink the the the the poet whale oil that makes you immortal up that other.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:30

Yeah, it's like it starts with an A. It's like an eye something. But yeah, you and you need to go up through the hard palette uh into their brain to get it, and that's why they whale them. Anyway. This isn't an avatar episode, though, possum. We could do an avatar episode. Anyway, teleportation.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:50

No. To be fair, we'd only need to do an episode on one of the films because that wasn't the same. They're all the same.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:00

I still love them, but they are they are all the same. More or less they're the same movie three times.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:06

I've got one story and I'm gonna tell it five times, and you're gonna like it, apparently. And I do as well. Um we've got we've got humanity, we've got the Hannon with their transportation technology, and the technology provided at Tool and Transfer Station on the Moon has a caveat to it. The tran the teleportation technology creates an exact duplicate of the person who enters, but it leaves the original behind. The Hannon stressed that the equation must always be balanced as copies cause more problems than they need to, so the transport operator has a disintegration button that needs to be manually pressed once the transfer success is confirmed on the other side. Yikes. That's yeah, that's rough. Uh confirmation is meant to be rapid, so the pressing of the button is almost always instantaneous, is, but an issue arises during the training of a new operator, Michael Burr. During an attempted transportation of Kamala Shastri, whom Michael was very friendly to during the jump prep, to a newly discovered planet called Gend that serves as a new starting point for humanity, there's a lag in the transfer. Confirmation is not given from Gend, leaving the original Kamala at the station. The procedure is aborted, and Kamala has to be monitored by Burr. Burr is an emotional wreck, unfortunately, because shortly being before being assigned to this jump operator gig, his wife Karen had died. He spends time with Kamala and begins to grow fond of her. After some time, Michael receives word that the process of the transfer has been completed and he must balance out the equation. If the equation is not balanced, the Hannon will likely rescind the usage of their teleportation technology.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:57

Oh yeah, that's that's not that's not good.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:00

I don't like balancing of equations and uh This is the worst version of this technology by far. You've got to literally murder someone every time they want to go somewhere. What the fuck? That's not good, that's not great, that's I don't like that. Like it's this is this is actually it's not teleportation, it's instantaneous cloning. Yeah. They've made it teleportation by just having you manually murder the person that's been cloned.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:32

What the f Yeah, yeah. Not yeah, not like I said, not really clon yeah, it's it's cloning after murdering, which is not teleportation as we know it, or at all.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:47

They're they've just they've miss they've misnamed what they've created. They've created the ability to instantly clone people like in faraway places, and then they're gone. Yeah, no, no, it's it's teleportation. Because there's only one person left at the end of it. And then it's like, okay, but what do you mean so there's one person left at the end of it? How do you achieve that? Oh, we just kill the first person.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:09

Yeah, that's that's like if you like, you know, fax someone a document and then shred the original. It's like, look, teleportation. No, no, that's not what that is. Not even remotely close to what that is. That's not how that works.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:27

Oh my god. Well, funnily enough, Michael is exceptionally reluctant to off Kanala and is having trouble facing the inevitable. He attempts to coax her back to the chamber to tell her that the process needs to be completed, but she gets suspicious. She asks him why she needs to go back in there, and he says that he needs to balance the equation. Before each jump, the jumper signs an agreement and a contract confirming what's going to happen to their original bodies. It's not an original body, it's just a person. A body implies there's nothing in there. That's not the case here. This is Oh man. Yeah, this is this is not good.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:04

This is just bad. It's just not yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:07

It's just As far as Kamala was concerned, she was going to close her eyes and open them on Gend. She yells at him, telling him to stop saying balance the equation, fair, and call it what it is. He needs to kill her. He's unable to do so, and he promises her that she can he can help her escape. So they make their way to an airlock so they can commandeer a ship and return to Earth, but Michael is reminded of his wife again. Her death was caused by the excessive pollution on Earth. If the technology they have to potentially escape the horrors of Earth vanishes, more may die, including his daughter. He needs to not think like a human. He needs to think emotionlessly, like the Hannon. It's clear to him at this point that their lack of emotion is likely a direct result of the technology they use, and they have become cold because of it. He steps out of the airlock and traps Kamala inside, opening it, killing her, and parents in the equation. Oh boy.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:06

So he's he thought like a dinosaur, which are cold blooded. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:11

Oh 100%. Um God. Two years later, he's still working at the Tullen station racked with guilt, and through the teleporter, Kamala Shastri appears. Her time on Gend is over, and she's returning to Earth. She looks at Michael and remarks on how he was her jump supervisor a few years prior and says, Thank you for being so kind to her as she jumped through for the first time. Oh Michael knows that she has no idea about the botch jump or what he had to do with her remnant body, and politely says, I'm sorry, that was someone else. Yeah, that's fair.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:51

Yeah, that's fair. That oh boy, that's uh that's a that's that's that's a lot. That's a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. That's uh that's a whole lot a lot. That's absolutely horrifying.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:02

Yeah, I don't like that just atrocious.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:06

Uh when when when Shai put up that that that uh episode clip of Think Like a Dinosaur, I was like, ha ha hee hee, goofy dinosaur. This is gonna be stupid. Nope. Nope. It was it was oh it's just it's just awful. Yeah, yeah, terrible.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:23

Yeah, and as as Shai says, it's not real Kamala. She's like Oh, that's right since she jumped back via dinosaur teleporter.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:31

And her clone clone is getting killed.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:34

Oh, that's right. That's oh boy, that's uh it's it's just it's it's all bad. It's all bad. Yeah, that's the that's the facts of the facts talking to him. Yeah. Oh god.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:46

It's the uh that's the worst. That's I mean, here's the thing. I I you know, obviously, I I've read the script through before we started. It's it's it's one I think I think sometimes what happens is I read them through, then as I read it out loud, as opposed to just to myself, saying it actualizes it in some way. Like I don't know how else to explain it. There are things which I will just read and go past, and then when we get to it in the episode, I will get to it, I'll say it out loud, and it's like something in the back of my brain goes, Wow, we really didn't pick up on how fucked up that is the first time. That is messed up.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:24

That is real bad. Oh god. Yeah, that's happened to me a couple times with like um uh Realm of Ridiculous uh scripts where I'm just like, oh yeah, casually. I was like, Oh yeah, I read the script, and then I read it out loud to like Brick, and I'm like, oh, that's terrible. That's yeah, why didn't I pick up on just how bad that thing was that I've read several times?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:47

Yep, yep. Yeah, there we go. Don't worry, it gets worse. You like sci-fi, right? Yeah. Garsh. Oh man. Man, yeah, fuck those dinosaurs. They come up with an with an awful system. Absolutely terrible. Now, we do have our fourth horror, The Wrong Place. Now, this is not like inherently Grimdark. The concept of a teleportation misfire is a common one and generally serves as a monster of the week concept where the intended destination of the teleportation isn't met. Sometimes it can be benign and just can be like a silly gag, like in the animated series episode BEM, where honorary commander slash independent observer Ari and Bem, a Pandronian, which Possum does not have the time to get into because despite it being a thing from the goddamn animated series, it's actually a really cool concept, and they're really glad they were brought back in lower decks, just as a note. Um it sets in coordinates for the crew to transport in on. The goal was to have them transported safely on the side of a cliff, but they messed it up, and so it just results in Spock and Kirk falling off the cliff and into a lake.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:56

So not terrible, just yeah, just I mean d depending on how much of a misfire it is, it could either be ha ha, gag, I fell into a lake, or you know, why am I ten feet underwater? Yeah. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:12

I mean sometimes this misfire can result in someone being sent very far away, even through time itself. And since Possum loves to say things to DK that makes him sad about the state of the world, the best example for a teleportation misfire in Star Trek is courtesy of the Deep Space Nine two-part episode Past Tense. In this episode, Captain Benjamin Sisko, Dr. Julian Bashir, and Lieutenant Commander Jadir Dax are transported from the year 2371 to the year 2024.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:44

Oh yeah, there is a that's I forgot all about the time travel episode in Deep Space Nine.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:51

It's crazy that that just happens. Like, tra from the way that it's been explained how transporters will work sort of, just going back like 300 years, insane work. Crazy, yeah. Um but they are sent back to San Francisco in a sanctuary district. In the Star Trek universe, the early the very early 2020s were struck with extreme social and economic problems. And the city of San Francisco, at the behest of the government, erected sanctuary districts as designated places for individuals who are homeless or financially destitute. They were a direct result of the suspension of the Federal Employment Act of 1946, meaning that unemployment was essentially illegal, and it was the responsibility of the government to ensure economic stability in the country. The nature and truth of what it was like inside these sanitary districts was unknown to the rest of the nation. Originally they were set up as a voluntary place where people could go and get government help, but the conditions would disintegrate by 2024. The districts became wildly overpopulated, and they served as a dumping ground for not only people who are facing financial issues, but also those who could not afford health care. And those placed into these districts were forbidden to leave by the government for their own protection. At the time of them being transported in, the very end of August of 2024, the economy was in ruins and unemployment levels were at an all-time low. The stopgap measure of the sanctuaries failed, and they were nothing better than debtors' prisons. On September 1st, 2024, Gabriel Bell, who was accidentally killed by Cisco, so he had to pretend to be him to ensure that reality remained the same. Classic, classic, classic. Took over a processing center in Sanctuary District A with a group of rioters. The Bell riots, as they were called, resulted in federal employees being held hostage while Gabriel Bell was able to broadcast the internal conditions of these sanctuaries to the rest of the nation. The Governor of California would order the National Guard to retake the centre and hundreds of residents would be killed, including Bell, allowing Cisco to escape without botching the historical continuity of the events. However, despite the deaths, the information hit the web about the truth of the conditions, and the public opinion would shift before their full abolishment was inevitable. In the twenty fourth century, the existence of sanctuary districts was viewed as one of the darkest chapters in Earth history, and if there had not been the Bell Riots, the Federal Federation of Planets may never have been formed. Lot of pressure there on Cisco not to fuck it up royally.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:29

Yeah, a lot of pressure. But yeah, that was that's one of the more popular episodes of Deep Space 92. I can't believe I forgot that one happened because it's got a very poignant message that it is uh setting up and telling. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:47

Yeah, now we do have horror number five, which is splice. Because this is arguably the the darkest one. Um the merging of two things into one, but unlike you know with telephragging, the one thing is sentient, aware, and functional. In some respects, this can be taken as a degree of hybridization depending on the fiction, but in other senses it can serve as a very strong standard when it comes to morality debates. So obviously, we've got to talk about Tuvigs.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:20

Oh, I'm so happy that's the first example. That's the one, right? Yeah, that's the Tuvics, yep. The morality and yeah, yeah, go ahead. You you tell it. You tell it, you're the most.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:30

So in Voyager, you've got Chief Security and Tactical Officer Tuvok, and you've got morale officer and head chef Neelix, and they are well, sorry, Tuvok is a Vulcan, Neelix is a Talaxian. They're on an away mission to collect a flower that might serve as a good nutritional supplement for the ship, since Voyager is struggling with resources due to everything that goes on with Voyager. Um they don't have a great time. Um they pick some of the orchids and are ready to be transported up. However, there's what's described as a minor glitch with the imaging scanners that's being worked on. Thing is, as they materialise on the ship, one entity stands in the transporter room wearing a uniform that looks like a security officer's but has the pattern of the flashy shirts Neelix would commonly wear. The entity says that it's both Tuvok and Neelix, and after a conversation with Kez decides to call itself Tuvics.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:32

I didn't think that's how it worked, but that's how it works.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:36

It's the it's the it's the plot submatrix that malfunctions sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:45

I need to remember that and use that stealing that's so hard.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:58

I'm just gonna have to try and remember that I've said it so I can use it again. Um so Tuvix wishes to go back to work, but Captain Janeway isn't sure. At a meeting, Tuvix believes that maybe the orchid served as a catalyst for the merging as a form of symbiogenesis. Janeway sends a shuttle down to get more samples, Tuvix goes to work. Tuvix has the memories of both Tuvac and Neelix and shares their respective traits. Classic Vulcan logic, but also charming and fun. He easily integrates with the crew and is treated very well, but many of the crew members have issues because it's quite a major loss that's hard to come to terms with. Still, Tuvix works well on the ship and is better at both of the respective jobs they had before they merged. On the surface, orchids are transported up with other objects and they always beam in fully fused. The EMH doctor attempts to undo the merging of these things, but it always fails. Could take months or years to figure out, could also be fully irreversible, and in that time the crew begins to adjust to Tuvics, and he becomes an almost essential member of the team. Like, he is integrated.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:08

Oh yeah. Yep, yep, yep. He's fully integrated. He's he like you said, he's he's better at his job than Tuvac or Neelix were solo at their jobs.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:19

And gets on with everybody as well, which is I mean, it's it it becomes difficult to say the least, because the doctor is able to fully find a way to reverse the process after testing it on Tuvix's genome, so he can program the transporter to allow for reversal to take place. Everyone's happy about this, but Tuvic says to the doctor that he failed to account for one variable, which is that he does not wish to die. Over the past few weeks, Tuvix has been integrated with the crew, and the crew accepted him as a new face and increasingly close friend. It was as if the other two men had died, and Tuvix was just here now. Janeway says that it's funny because if they had the ability to separate them as soon as Tuvix appeared, she wouldn't have hesitated, but now after several weeks, he's taken responsibilities and made friends. At what point, she wonders, did he become an individual and not an accident? She calls Tuvix to the room to speak with her about the choice she needs to make and wants his perspective. Tuvix is surprised and asks why it's not his decision, and Janeway says that she needs to speak for Tuvok and Neelix because they don't have individual voices anymore. The two men had families and friends, but Tuvix stammers that restoring them is an execution of him. Janeway asks if he believes that his existence was an execution of the others, and he says no. It's unfortunate that they're gone, and he cares about them deeply. Without them he wouldn't exist. He thinks of them as his parents and knows them intimately. And Janeway says that then he would know that Tuvok and Neelix were both men who would gladly give their lives to save another before Tuvix says the following. So I've got another quote for you.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:56

Oh man, you're gonna make me do the the the Tuvix quotes? Jesus. You're right, Captain. This is the Starfleet way, and I know there'll be some people who who call me a coward because I didn't sacrifice myself willingly. Believe me, I've thought of that. But I have the will to live of two men. Look at me, Captain. When I'm happy, I laugh. When I'm sad, I cry. When I stub my toe, I yell out in pain. I'm flesh and blood, and I have the right to live. He's invoking the uh rose by any other name clause. Yeah, yeah. It's I mean it's it's it's good speech. It's good. It's good speech. It's a tough situation to be in, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:34

Yeah. Tuvix goes back to his original his to his tactical duties after a while, and in the middle of a tactical test, it's clear that tensions are high. Janeway exits her ready room and asks to speak to Tuvix alone, but he declines, saying that everyone should hear what he has to say. She asks for him to come with her one more time, and he declines again. She says it's an order and asks for security to come to the bridge. Tuvix yells to the bridge saying that if you know, is everyone going to stand and do nothing while the captain commits murder? The crew stands silently watching, either afraid to interact, or with a grim degree of acceptance as to what's about to happen. He attempts to run to the turbo lift but gets grabbed, and Janeway tells security to let him go. And Tuvix says his final words, each of you is going to have to live with this, and I'm sorry for that, for you are all good, good people. My colleagues, my friends, I forgive you. Damn. And they never think about him again.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:36

There is. It's not even the weirdest couple of weeks they have. Yeah. It's crazy. They haven't even done the the gear of hell, I don't think.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:47

I mean, the doctor can't actually do the procedure because he can do no harm and he can't take Tuvik's life against his will.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:56

That's right, I forgot about that part.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:59

Yeah. So Janeway does it. Yep. Janeway has to do it. Ugh. Neelix and Tuvok return as if nothing happened, and Janeway says that it's good to have them back. She steps out of the room and stops for a moment before walking away. We don't know whether or not Tuvak and Neelix have Tuvic's memories, but considering he had theirs, it's kind of likely that they had his. And they never speak about him again. Maybe they were all just like, I don't want to remember that whole situation because it makes me horrifically sad. So let's just all agree.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:41

To go.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:44

Lobotomy to go. And a large diatoke.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:51

Oh my god. Now we couldn't we can't talk about like splice without talking about the fly. Because Ah, certainly, certainly.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:02

These splice.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:04

Yep. The the the the the kind of oh what is it like the the I'm trying to think of the word, like the focus point, the one that everyone knows. Um There are few creators capable of exemplifying the absolute horror of teleportation than the master of body horror himself, David Cronenberg, and he proved this in his 1986 film, The Fly, a very loose adaptation of the original novel and movie. This film covers multiple examples of teleportation horror, including general teleportation, death, merging into one being, and telephraging. So, you know, the fly's got it all.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:39

Oh yeah, it does, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 1:24:42

It does have literally all those examples, doesn't it? Yep. That's why it gets its own special section. It's it's it takes teleportation and really highlights how absolutely atrocious it can go. God, yeah, I I I haven't seen it in a minute, but yeah, that's wow, that is crazy. The film follows the brilliant scientist Seth Brundel, a molecular physics genius who is obsessed with mastering the art of teleportation with his telepods. During a dinner where he meets journalist Veronica Ronnie Quaif, he convinces her to come by to see how it works. There's a problem with the teleporter though. It can successfully send through inanimate objects, but living things just don't work. For example, when a living baboon is sent through the transporter, it comes out the other teleporter inside out. Which is not ideal. He can't stop thinking about the flesh in quote marks, and even as he begins a romantic relationship with Veronica, his mind is fixated on the flesh. Bet it is.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:45

I don't feel like that one. No, you should. That was a good one.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:51

Uh his intimate evening with Ronnie inspires him to reprogram the computer and is able to successfully transport a second baboon without any sort of visible harm. Instead of celebrating with a romantic evening, Ronnie rushes out. She has to deal with an issue at the magazine where they were threatening to publish the teleport story without her consent, but Seth viewed this with incredible paranoia. He was afraid that she may have been rekindling her relationship with the editor at the magazine, and he is distraught. He drinks himself silly and decides to teleport himself as revenge for the infidelity he believed she was doing, failing to take precautionary measures. He activates the teleporter, comes out the other side, and is perfectly fine.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:31

However, Yeah, I was I was waiting for you to to to get to the very, very, very important part of that story. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:40

Oh the the the eponymous fly. Um in a few short days he would begin to start feeling different. Initially he believed that this is because he and Ronnie reconciled, but it was deeper than that. He would be stronger, have more stamina, but also become more arrogant and violent. He thought this was a good thing and would insist that she go through the teleporter herself so that she could benefit physically as well. She is not up for this, unsurprisingly, and he goes to a bar. At the bar, his arrogance results in him getting into an arm wrestling match with another patron, and his extreme strength results in giving his opponent a compound fracture, literally forcing the bone through his skin. Yeah, it's gross. Yeah, I I explicitly remember that in a in a way that I don't like.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:30

It's just Yeah, also when what what year was the fly the movie came out? Yeah, for for for when it came out, this was a disgusting movie.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:41

I mean it still is, but off It holds up in that it was atrocious for the time and is also atrocious now. It's right up there with the thing. Yeah. He would uh hook up with a random girl named Tawny and try to coax her into the teleporter before Ronnie would intervene. He'd throw them both out so he could ponder by himself. As he sits in the warehouse alone, his fingernails would begin to fall off. At this point, he knew something was wrong. No shit.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:13

Not before, not with the superhuman strength or anything, but oh nails are falling off. I guess something went wrong. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:19

He would review the telepod's computer and find that there were two life forms in the telepod at the time of the teleportation. Him and a house fly. The teleportation was successful, but there was a catch. He was fused with this fly at the molecular level. So I just Now I'm just remembering bits and pieces of this film and how horrendous it is. Um he would begin to lose bits and pieces of his body, which he would store in jars. He theorized that he was becoming something new, neither insect or human. He would begin to refer to himself as a brundle fly. Like he's clearly losing his shit at this point. It's worth pointing out, just in case you weren't sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:59

Also, out of context, you're like, oh yeah, the common house brundle fly, it's like it kind of sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. I see like that. It's fusion of brundle and fly. Negative. Yeah, yeah. The screen says if secondary element is fly, what happened to fly? Fusion, assimilation, did brundle absorb fly? Negative. Fusion of brundle and fly at molecular genetic level.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:26

Oh boy. He would develop the ability to climb on walls, and in order to eat, he would need to vomit enzymes to dissolve his food. I hate those parts. That's so grim. It's awful. He would reconnect with Ronnie, but he would realise something in this process. He was losing human compassion, and he was being driven by something primitive that he couldn't control. He had to figure out a way to save his humanity. So he would install a program on the telepod computer to see if he could somehow dilute the genes of the fly in his body with human DNA. And Ronnie would learn something grim. She was pregnant. Worse, she does not know if the conception of this baby was before or after Seth had teleported. She has nightmares of giving birth to a gigantic maggot. I mean, this is the one where if you're not a fan of body horror, uh stay away. Absolutely stay as far away as you can. Yeah. Don't even Google image that shit. Just don't bother with go away. Don't this is not the series for you. She would go to Brundle in an attempt to tell her tell him about the pregnancy, but he would interrupt her, warning that she can't keep visiting him because he might harm her. He would find out that she was pregnant while overhearing a conversation, and before she could get an abortion, Brundel would kidnap her and beg her to carry the child. It could be the last remnant of his untainted humanity. She would refuse and beg to leave. Her editor, Stathis Borrens, would break into the lab with a gun in an attempt to rescue her, but would be nearly killed by the Brundelfly, who would dissolve his left hand and right foot with the vomit enzymes. Yeah, he sure does.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:02

I hate those parts revives, the enzymes. Oh, they're so close.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:07

They are absolutely atrocious. Yeah, they're really bad. Well done.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:11

Way too well done. It's so unsettling.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:14

Like, oh it is literally the thing of you're too good at your job and you need to stop because it's making me uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:22

I swear to God, Shy, if that Discord message that says Shy is typing ends with a gif you found of the enzyme parts, I will scream.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:32

I swear to God. It was going for a while, and I was like, if this is a massive image dump, I'm gonna be not hugely happy. Oh okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:43

Oh, well, it's I'm okay, but it's not it's it's not the worst thing ever.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:47

It's yeah, okay. I mean it's it's not good because it's the Brundelfly evolution, but yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:55

Yeah. God. Desperate to keep her from escaping, he would reveal a master plan to Ronnie. He would use the telepods, including the original prototype pod that had sat unused, to fuse himself, Ronnie, and the unborn baby into a singular entity so that they could be the ultimate family that transcended the human form. Yeah. Yeah. Have you seen the terrible idea with uh with Nicholas Cage? The what? That was the colour out of space. No, I haven't. Oh, okay. There uh the well uh the the mum and her son get fused together by the Leah's Eldritch magic, and uh it's one of the most horrific things I've seen in a film. Did you say this was the colour of the space? Colour out of space. Colour out of space. It's an adaptation of a Lovecraft um story. And it's actually, I would say it's actually pretty good. Okay. It's got cage, I believe, being mental, as cage can only be. But it makes sense in that film because everyone's losing their shit. Sounds like something we could do an episode on. I like it. I think it's a decent adaptation. It's creepy, it's weird, it's hellish. It's yeah, it's it's decent. Okay, okay. So the Brundlefly attempts to drag Ronnie into the first telepod and she would strike at him, knocking his jaw off and triggering the final transformation of Brundle into a complete and total monstrosity of a fly, as his remaining human body parts fall off of him and onto her. The creature would drag her and trap her in the first telepod, and it would make its way into the second one and begin the activation process. Stathis, still alive, would manage to sever the cables connected to the first pod with his gun, which gave Ronnie the opportunity to escape. The Brundelfly would witness this happen and would attempt to break out of the door, but the process of teleportation was already happening. The breaking of the door would happen at the exact moment the transportation fully initiated, and the Brundelfly would be fused with the metal chunks of the door deeply embedded into its body. Yeah. Again, it's so well done.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:01

It's yeah, it's it's a lot. It's it's yeah. It's a lot, a lot. It's a lot, a lot, a lot. Again, even by today's standards, it is unsettling and difficult to watch this movie. Yeah. This is like, oh yeah, I saw the fly once. Do you want to watch it again? Not really.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:20

I consider it a a one-off experience, and we'll stick with that, thank you. Yep. Yep. The brundelfly would drag itself out of the pod it was teleported into slowly as pieces of door were sticking out of its back prevented it preventing it from walking, would stare at Ronnie, who held on to Stathy's shotgun. As it crawled out, she would hold it facing the ground crying, and the Brundlefly would lightly grab it and motion it towards his head. Silently he was begging her to kill him. Ronnie hesitates for a moment before taking the shotgun and finishing the brundlefly off for good, before falling to her knees in terror and grief.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:59

Hooray, what a happy ending. Also, Shy said TLDR, novel size meshes, I'll shorten it. Go watch it even if you're not a fan of body horror. It's a great, it's uh great drama about person you love slowly dying, losing their mind in front of you. If you've had uh relatives with some terminal diseases or deteriorating mental issues, it will hit real close to home. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:23

Yeah, that's fair. That is fair. Yep, yep, yep, yep. It's there's like the the body horror stuff is very well done. There's a huge amount of shock value, but there is like a lot of stuff happening underneath that that is like is worth it for sort of pushing through the body horror if you're not a human. A fan of it, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:44

Yeah. Because it's it's oh boy, it's it's a it's well the body horror stuff is a lot. You know there's a fly two? Oh god, is there? That can't be good. I remember watching the first part of it, and there's this weird like birth scene, and it was just terrible. I think it's I think Never do a sequel. Never never do it. Is it what's her face from this one that like has to give birth to like mutated baby or something? Or I don't remember what it was. It was awful. I didn't watch the whole thing. I watched like 10 minutes and I was like, nah, fuck this dude. She did give birth to a maggot. It came true. I don't remember exactly what it was. I just remember being like, nah, screw this movie. Fuck this, I'm out. Ah, the Titanic 2 effect. Oh no, don't say Titanic 2. There wasn't no, no, no, no, we're moving on. What's the next thing? Oh mate, oh mate, there's more than one sequel to Titanic. Nope, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Uh fucking any of it has son is mutated into Brundlefly 2. He teleports with bad guy and takes all his human genes. Bad guy ends up as a freaky monster and our protagonist entirely cured. That's so stupid.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:52

Absolute dog shit. Yeah, that's awful. That's terrible. Terrible, God. Well, in terms of our horrific examples of teleportation accidents, the fly is like the the the king of the king. It's it's it's got everything. It's got the splicing, it's got bits of you know furnishing stuck into people, it's got telephragging, it's got it's got it all. So I think that is that's a good place to call the the uh the horrors of teleportation as a whole. And what we'll do is we've got a silly story about teleportation, which we will add to our our Patreon episodes for the upcoming month. And we'll we'll do we'll do that one then. Do it as a nice palette cleanser for uh whatever horrible stuff we end up covering for Patreon for the next batch. Because, you know, hooray! It's increasingly clear to me that at the end of those sessions we need something that isn't entirely dreadful purely because of you know maintaining sanity.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:58

And honestly, the fly is like, like you said, it's such a peak teleportation horror story that like that feels like it'd be hard to go to like a goofy, lighthearted teleportation after doing the fly.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:11

Oh, the fly yeah, it's it is it is uh the example. The example. Thing it's gonna be an episode on letter note. You think so, Shy? Well I'm also I'm also thinking we've got nine minutes until you've got to go. Well, I've I've I've got a little more than nine minutes, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:31

If you I mean if you're okay to hang around, we can just cut all of that out and we'll do the and we'll do the the the sort of silly conclusion.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:38

Nah, let's just we'll just we'll just end with that. That's okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:41

Better safe than sorry, right? Yeah. No, that's that's fine.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:45

I just I just didn't want you to like I know we're mid-sentence, but uh for anyone wondering why we're for anyone wondering why we're going on about this, internet in my place still not great. Uh my brother is being very cool and letting me use his setup. However, he is a college professor that needs his computer to literally teach the future of our nation mathematics. Uh and so, you know, I only have so much time at his uh workstation at home. It feels contrast. Oh, yeah. The contrast between what my brother does and what I do is so crazy, dude. The the mathematics professor and the podcaster. Oh no, yeah, Chi. Uh listen, I don't like to give my brother credit, but yeah, you got the dumb brother out of the two of us, dude. You a hundred percent got the dumb one. Like, I don't like to compliment him, but yeah, it's it's it's sad too. I'm a wrong on the weekly. So sorry about it, y'all. It just is what it is. Anyway. But yeah, that was the teleporter accident. That's that's how my parents got uh the two of us. Is it was it was all a teleporter accident. They invented teleportation, they have it, they're just like, oh, look what happened to our kids. We have to destroy it. We have to, we can't let the modern society have this technology. He said we cannot afford to create more weaves. We got the mathematician out of it, it's fine. Destroy it, destroy it, no more weaves. Can't believe this has happened. My god, my god. We must make a moral and ethical decision. Love a little self-depreciate deprecating humor to end the day. Just as a treat, as a little num nom.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:45

Just a little treat, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:40:46

Yeah, just a little treat. Yeah, yeah. T is a community college. All right, let's everybody settle down, okay? Fucking god.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:00

That's why your name is TK. Full name is Derek.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:04

His brother's name is He's also a DJ on the side, apparently. Oh my god. Alright, Kyria. Take a and end this. End this with the with the 12 gauge shotgun to the mutated fly's head. End this.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:22

Thank you for listening, everyone. As uh as we stated, we will do we will we will do uh some silly teleporter stuff over on Patreon, so go and check that out. And we will see you and you will listen to us. What happened there? Oh no, I've been teleported into the wall. It's happened. I've been teleported into the wall.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:43

We have to end on him losing the sentence, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:41:48

That has to be the end. I can't do outros on this. I don't understand. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:55

Once again, Kyriath has broken under no pressure.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:58

I genuinely don't understand why I cannot do outros on acceptable losses. I I can do them on my channel, no problem, but I can't every time I try and do it, my brain goes, Well, it can't be too close to the one I use for my own videos, uh, but I don't know how else to do it, so it just fucking spirals into nonsense. Yeah. And I I can't react quick enough to save it. And that's why you'll keep doing the outro.