No, I get that the psychological angle has some interesting possibilities but isn’t an original idea of mine and has already gotten itself an official mulling-over; I’m just saying the bit where Erskine grabs the drink away from Steve, as if it had slipped his mind until that very moment, suggests that, hey, maybe it’s not something profound about the character of recipients or something puzzling about modifications to the treatment; it could just be, like the guy just said, what they drank the night before.
It may have been retconned but I seem to remember that the man who was recruited to become Captain America in the '50’s eventually went insane and explanation was there was some critical element only known to Erskine that was forgotten.
There was also a comic where some rich overweight man kidnaps Banner and forces him to use gamma rays on him transforming him into a morbidly obese blob which Banner explains with his theory that the process actually magnifies a person’s characteristics.
But their was another comic where the Leader gamma bombs a town and less than 1% of the people survive and transform. So you’d have to be awfully lucky to even survive at all.
Wizards and Witches in the Pottiverse are just people with a disability (and, yes, it is inheritable). They cannot function in the modern world. They have no understanding of simple technology. They have little understanding of standard social situations outside a closed environment - like a school. But, rather like idiot-savants, they have exceptional skill in a particular area, that is really rather useless (except for party tricks) - magic.
Ever wonder who made the rules about ‘No mixing with the Muggle World’? It was Muggles! They don’t want wizards or witches roaming about in society with normal people, stuffing things up with magic, or invoking deadly paranormal creatures. So they have placed them in special areas where they do not come into contact with the real world, and can do little harm (except to themselves) - a school, a village, and a sheltered workshop - the Ministry of Magic.
The Muggles in charge keep this a secret, because otherwise do-gooders would be on the case demanding Wizards be able to join in regular society and encouraging them to use their ‘gifts’ - and whenever that happens, it’s been a disaster.
It’s canon in the comics that attempts to re-create the Super-Soldier Serum usually kill the test subjects.
It’s canon in the comics that the Heart-Shaped Herb is poisonous to most humans, but grants power to a small fraction of the population (most of whom are members of the Wakandan royal family).
Which leads me to believe that the Heart-Shaped Herb is the secret ingredient in the Super-Soldier Serum.
I like this one.
When I saw the movie Toy Story, I thought it was a canny retelling of Cain and Abel. It’s kid’s movie, so no one gets killed in a jealous rage, but Buzz is the new favorite, Woody is jealous of Buzz and defenestrates him, and Woody is banished. Woody even gets a mark burned into his forehead. Woody has to decide if he’s his brother’s keeper.
I assumed everyone else would see it that way, too, but the people I saw it with thought I was crazy. The only person who knew the story of Cain and Abel was really religious, and he seemed to be offended by that reading, saying Cain and Abel was about disobedience, not brotherhood.
I don’t think it’s that original, but I’ve never seen this reading of the movie anywhere.
Actually, watching some of the movies gave me the sense that “magic” was an analogy to modern technology, upon which contemporary westerners have become disturbingly dependent on. It does not seem to have been the author’s deliberate intent to convey that message, but it is unquestionably there.
Never thought of it that way before, but I like it.
Here’s my take sort of along those lines:
As a young and idealistic Time Lord in his first life, the Doctor was part of a group, including his wife and children, that attempted something extremely daring even by Time Lord standards: they sought to alter the creation of the Universe in such a way that evil either wouldn’t exist or at least would be an impotent absurdity incapable of ever harming anything. (Observe the Doctor’s admiration of the small-scale version of this implemented on Traken).
But their plans went horribly awry when they discovered that the Powers That Be (such as the White and Black Guardians) have mandated the cosmic order. One result of the failure was that the Doctor and the rest of his family bar granddaughter Susan are now for all eternity on mutually incompatible timelines; if the Doctor exists, his family doesn’t and vice-versa.
When timelords mate they establish a lives-long telepathic bond, only broken when one of them dies. But the Doctor’s wife isn’t dead, exactly; she’s just… gone. And this has left a gaping psychic hole in the Doctor’s mind. One that he unconsciously and inadvertently keeps trying to fill. This manifests as a series of human female companions (whom the Master mockingly suggested the Doctor was actually having sex with- bestiality by Time Lord standards) who the longer they stay with the Doctor the more bonded with him they become.
Occasionally they manage to displace this bond onto another male and end up suddenly leaving the Doctor for another man (Jo and Leela are examples). In Sarah Jane Smith’s case when she was recovering from a bout of being hypnotically controlled (“The Hand of Fear”) she briefly came to her senses and wondered why she was sticking with the Doctor. This convinced the Doctor (yes, he did hear her diatribe) that he had to leave her behind for her own good; he’d done the same to Susan after it became clear she’d never leave him. Nonetheless Sarah ended up pining for the Doctor for the rest of her life. The Doctor out of loneliness had allowed Rose to become particularly close to him and he had to cut her off as well which was especially traumatic to them both; as a result Martha practically instantly fell for the Doctor when they met soon afterwards.
Many commentators have said that we live in a world where we’re surrounded by what’s effectively magic. Most people have only a vague knowledge of how the machines and electronics around them work but simply trust that the wizards who created these things know the details and can fix them if need be.
In Israel, a Smart phone is called a “magic” phone.
Or else what we see in the opening credits- the secret agent getting gassed in his apartment- is the former secret agent getting executed because he knows too much, and the Village is a sort of Purgatory in the afterlife that his soul has to overcome to pass on.
Coming back around to that first sentence, note that Jo Jo Grant explicitly says the man she falls for reminds her of The Doctor — adding that he’s fighting for everything The Doctor has fought for, and referring to him as “The Professor” — and, just in case we’d miss the parallel as strings get pulled for facilitation’s sake right before she heads off on an expedition with the guy:
DOCTOR: You got on to your uncle at United Nations, didn’t you?
JO: It’s only the second time I’ve ever asked him for anything.
DOCTOR: Yes, and look where the first time got you.
My working hypothesis for the Farscape TV series was always that the wormhole displaced John Crichton as much in time as in space. That the biological compatibility of multiple races (such as the Luxans and Sebaceans) was caused by them all being descendant species of humanity, at a distant remove. But that so much time had passed (tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years or more) that any ancestral memory of a common origin was long since lost.
This wasn’t a hard assumption to make, and I was by no means the only one. Several episodes involved time travel, and it was made very clear that it was dangerous to change the past, but no mention was made of travel to the future at any point. The issues with the theory is that John managed to return to a ‘present’ day Earth before the end of the series, separated by only his personally elapsed time as far as shown. But this could be easily be the creation of yet another unrealized reality, similar to others he had created and tried to correct. He just didn’t realize it.
For that matter, we could have a wonderful paradox, in that travelling back to his ‘present’ / Farscape’s past, he is creating the future he is aware of, by leaving Peacekeeper technology behind and multiple samples of Alien DNA (because you know they picked over every sample they got). Which to me made the story far more crazy, but yet fun.
Sadly, the currently accepted fan cannon is as supported by Peacekeeper wars, that humans were grabbed in our prehistory and modified to serve as troops to enforce order. But I still think my theory was more fun.
I’d say we live in a world where we’re surrounded by ignorance rather than magic. There’s nothing unknowable about how electricity works. And anyone can learn the skill if they wish; no octarine or midichlorians or wizarding genes required.
This one was extra-good.
Mine: in The Matrix, Neo (and Morpheus and Trinity and all their pals) never escape the Matrix. Their ship, and the whole human-machine war, is just another simulation scenario — a “meta” one to house that small fraction of the population which rejects (or too strongly questions the reality of) the main, 1990s-world sim.
We could have learned this, if the Wachowskis had ever made a sequel. Sigh.
PS: in the real reality, humans are being held by the machines not as power sources (how ridiculous!); it’s their neural processing power the machines want. That’s why all they keep is the brains.
My theory about Star Wars prequels:
The entire Anakin-Padme relationship is the result of Anakin subconsciously using the Force to manipulate her into “loving” him and when he turned on Padme at Mustafar that link was severed and she realized she was basically mind-raped into being pregnant with his children—that’s what “broke her heart” and led to her death.
@dorvann Nice, dark, but nice. I’d go deeper though. Perhaps Anakin’s repeated nightmares about Padme dying and in pain come from a deep held realization that either she’d realize what he had done and her future emotional agony over it, or (deep darkness) a fear that with the birth of the children, that they would take first place in her heart. A place he always realized he had not earned or was worthy of. He therefore gave himself an excuse to destroy her (and them) before they could ‘betray’ him.
Anakin was always good at being a victim after all.
No they aren’t. They’re just called “smartphones” - or really just telephones, since it’s been at least five years since I’ve seen anyone with a non-“smart” phone (and nobody has landlines any more).
Really? what does what they’re called translate to?