Episode summary: Can plants talk? In Search Of investigates.
Bike summary: 2.1 miles, 108 calories.
TV reaction:
As first episodes go, this is an odd choice. I know people in the 70s and 80s had strange pseudoscientific fads like pyramid power, crystals and the intelligence of dolphins and whales, but what was going on that made a show about the supposed psychic and empathic powers of houseplants compelling TV? (Although having seen the ads that accompanied the Star Wars Holiday Special, maybe this was dangerously exciting by 70s standards?) I would have led with the Bigfoot episode, which opens with a tense, dramatic reenactment of a cabin supposedly being beseiged by Bigfoots.
Not much about the episode sticks out to me, other than Nimoy's frankly creepy insinuations. "Children are more accepting of new ideas than adults", "Have plants been speaking to Man for millions of years?" "Your honor, the plants told me to kidnap the children". (I made that last one up.)
It feels a bit unfocused. There's a bit at the beginning where some guy is trying to teach kids to "feel the plant's life force" or something, a woman doing an experiment with playing music to plants, some Kirlian photography showing plant "auras" and a guy with a polygraph machine trying to see if plants can feel others' pain, first by scratching himself with a scalpel and then by scratching a producer with it. Nothing really ties it together. It really needed something like an explicit thesis of vitalism or maybe the Gaia hypothesis to bring it together. Also, I find it interesting that they didn't talk about Peter and Eileen Caddy's garden in Findhorn, Scotland, which they claim flourished because of their spiritual practices.
Podcast:
No Nimoy Fashion Report yet.
The kids in the beginning are doing "plant Reiki" according to Jeb (I think, it might be Blake). The guy teaching them to empathize with mulch is Billy Meier, who made the photo the "I want to believe" poster is based on. It's apparently from The X-Files, but I know it from poster sales at college in the late Aughts and Vice TV ads in the Boston subway. (Meier also claims to be the reincarnation of Jesus and Mohammed, among others, and is in contact with extraterrestrials, like someone who really likes the All Myths are True trope. Per Wikipedia, he's also an anti-Semite.)
Jeb and Blake really focus in on polygraph guy, who they find really squicky for the way he does the "experiment" with plants feeling the pain of others. They keep describing him as "stabbing" with the scalpel, which makes me think of Young Frankenstein, but it's more of a scraping motion. Also, polygraph guy was an interogator for the CIA, which makes me wonder if they let him go because he wanted to recruit plants as spies (maybe Timothy Zhan saw this?).
They mention that the Mythbusters recreated the "play plants music" experiment (NB: I want to look up this experiment because the episode presents it like this woman got a doctorate for a science fair project, while kids these days build fusion reactors for their science fairs), but while the experiment on In Search Of found that classical music was great for plants and acid rock the worst for them, I think the experiment on Mythbusters found that plants preferred heavy metal to other types.
Conclusion
Ultimately, we know what plants would say if they could talk.
No comments:
Post a Comment