What Lies Beneath?

That Question Mark Is Important

Because, otherwise, all you lecherous pervs out there are going to be slobbering with the prospects of seeing Michelle Pfeiffer in the bath, thanks to the film 'What Lies Beneath'.  Which, lacking a question mark, is more an assertion than anything else.  Art!

That's all you get

     Besides which, Conrad bets she wore a bathing suit.  Sorry to disappoint you.

     Now that we've got that out of the way, I would like to concentrate on the metal meaty matter of today's Intro, which concerns the Cybermen, prime villains of the Beeb's premier dramamentary, 'Doctor Who'.

     I am not concerned with the most recent iterations that hail from the post-2005 series, which, if Art will put down that nuclear fuel rod he's gnawing on -

     It looks like a robot, it sounds like a robot and it moves like a robot, which rather conceals the raw horror of exactly what a Cyberman is.  Not only these critters, previous iterations have also ventured down the 'sophisticated robot' path.  Art!

     These ones look less like a robot, thanks to lacking an external array of armour plating.  They also manifest a chest unit instead of a patent Tony Stark micro-power source, underlining What Lies Beneath? and why a robot would need to be decked out in such external kit.

     Don't frown, we'll get to the answer in due time.

     What brought this on?  A Youtube vlog by 'SaamuelWho' is what, where he concentrates on the original Cybermen, who appeared in 'The Tenth Planet'.  Art!

     They made an impact that still reverberates sixty years later, and when you witness them in action, there is no question about What Lies Beneath? because it's a butchered humanoid or, even scarier, ex-Hom. Sap.  Art!

     There you go, all hydraulics, metal, plastic and cloth.  Also a portable air-conditioning system, it would seem.  Art!

     What you can't appreciate here is the Mondassian Cybermen's speaking voice, which eschews the robotic monotone of their descendants and is instead a modulated sing-song, still devoid of any passion or emotion.  It just comes across as very wrong, as that seamed mouth-hole opens and words come forth without any discernible lip movement.  Thanks to the cloth covering, rather then inflexible metal, you can trace the outlines of a humanoid head and face beneath.  In turn this leads to 'Uncanny Valley' syndrome, where there is a resemblance to a human face, just not sufficiently close to prevent observers from getting the billy crins.  They still possess hands, except, once again, they are covered with plastic as a replacement skin more durable than the original.

     On occasions there has been a bit of explicit visual confirmation that there is indeed a mass of meat under an armoured coating.  Art!

Yuck.  No wonder they cover it up.

Lytton and his top carapace in the next booth

     This is the unfortunate Gustave Lytton, whose back story is far too long and complicated to mention here <promptly mentions it>.  He was an alien mercenary, from a satellite moon whose population would do anything - for money.  Including, supposedly, working for the Cybermen, as Lytton pretended to do, all the while intending to betray them to the Cryons.  Did I say that Cybermen had no emotions?  Well, their Cyber-Controller took askance at Lytton's betrayal and ordered him to undergo conversion into a Cyberman, a process not entirely completed as seen above.  Aren't you glad I showed What Lies Beneath? Art!

      Naturally there are advantages to having your musculature and skelature artificially boosted, and your epidermis covered with HDPFE, exemplified above as a hapless Hom. Sap. soldier gets knocked across the room.  

     You may be wondering how and why 'The Tenth Planet', made in 1966 in glorious monochrome, is also present in colour for 2017.  No, it's not time travel*.  About 8 years ago the 11th Doctor, Bill and Nardole end up at the South Pole, and bump into the First Doctor, and the Beeb decided to recreate the events of TTP, which fans greatly appreciated.  Conrad must have missed this one, as I don't recall any of the events referenced above.  O well.  Art!

Poor tired Cyberman having a rest

Permanently.

     Conrad is not sure how to square away the suddenly disintegrated carcass within the armour and plastic, but there may a disgusting puddle of glop on the floor that you would do well to avoid, Best By Dates being what they are.

     Sayonara Cybers.

Conrad's Exciting Travel Experiences Yesteryon

Not that exciting, I just like to draw you in.  I had to venture into Babylon Lite (Oldham if we're being formal) to obtain a few bits and pieces, and thanks to my iron will I stayed out of Waterstones.  On the way in there were delays because - Art!

     Two lanes narrowed to one.  Note the absence of any work being done and since it's the weekend nothing is going to be done until Monday morning.  So of course - obviously! - they need to cone the road off 48 hours in advance.  Art!

      What's missing here?

    The ramp.  

     Five minutes earlier the driver had lowered it to allow a lady in a powered wheelchair to board, then it came apart when he tried to fold it back again.  He put it to one side and got off the PuSeV to call the depot, which took a good ten minutes to tell him to empty the bus, during which another empty 409 swanned past.  Fifteen minutes I'll never get back. 

Cutting To The Chase

I need to put up the thumbnail for 'The Frosty 1' as it's a few days since I broached this topic.  Art!

     It took Frosty and a handful of mates nearly an hour to go through every mistake in this farrago of a film, from the glaringly obvious - the flat, dry treeless plains of Spain standing in for the mountainous, snowy, forested terrain of the Ardennes - to incorrect collar badges or uniform piping.  It would take several BOOJUM!s to cover this matter in detail, so I shall end with the end, so to speak.  Art!

     A film so bad Eisenhower came out of retirement to criticise it.  Only to be watched after you've sunk 4 cans of Special Brew.

More Shredders!

O well since you insisted.  Let me see where we've gotten to.  Hmmm.  First one up is deeply boring, a rotating cylinder to filter out dirt.  Art!

     Who knew that dirt was valuable or needed?  Art!

     Another mobile mashing mill that converts timber into sawdust.  Hoorah.  

     This is followed by another two mobile mashing mills creating sawdust mountains, which is rather beating viewers over the head with sawdust.  Art!

     One hopes they have a purpose for all that sawdust.  Bedding for ten thousand guinea pigs?  Then there's another sawdust mill, and an idiot not paying attention to what kind of load he's trying to lift and how far the extensor is extended.  Art!

      This is the third time he's nearly overbalanced his rig.  Expect to see and his 'TAC' on a vlog about stupidity leading to industrial accidents.

     And that's the last of these shredders.  Coming soon: industrial accidents that could have been prevented if the perpetrator didn't have an IQ of 75 or less.

Finally -

This is both creepy and prescient.  You ought to remember that Conrad brought up an illo of the old Dutch website 'Exit Mundi', which, seemingly, was dead and gone.  RIP as of 2016.

     Except not so.  It takes about 5 minutes to load the web page, which has no illustrations, but the imageless thumbnails work.  

It's odd: you can worry about meteors and cosmic explosions all you want, but the biggest killer of all times is already here -- and is doing fine. In fact, life's oldest and most deadly enemy is preparing for yet another devastating attack on the human race. Diseases -- don't ever underestimate them.

Humans and germs have always lived side by side. But every once and a while, the germs attack. Then, suddenly, there's AIDS, or SARS, or what-have-you.

     As I said, as of 2016 the most recent disease of note they of note was SARS.

     Four years later, along comes COVID.

     Goodnight and god bless!

*  Yet.