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Science Does Not Work That Way: Helix 1×01, Part 2

Posted on January 25, 2014. Filed under: Uncategorized |

Moar Helix pseudo-scientific nonsense!

Spoilers will follow below, but this episode is two weeks old at this point, so I don’t feel bad.

Read Part 1 here.

When last we left our well-intentioned but severely mentally deficient heroes, they were making moronic conclusions about the virus’ avenue of transmission.

It’s Not Airborne, But I Still Don’t Know The Source of the Outbreak or How It’s Transmitted

Then why did you take off the protective gear, again? Ebola isn’t airborne, but the virus particles can be trapped in micro-sized water droplets and be inhaled. I’m going to blanket all future instances of them not wearing BSL 4 personal protective equipment here. Because THEY KEEP DOING THINGS THAT REQUIRE THAT LEVEL OF PROTECTION. Like, for the rest of the episode. So I’m only going to mention it when something bad happens to the characters that could have been prevented if they were wearing the proper gear, instead of the ALL THE THINGS ALL THE TIME that merely could have happened because they weren’t wearing PPE. Like when Major Balleseros takes apart a drain pipe to check for viral stuff. Because if the virus is waterborne him opening up a pipe (which could act as a reservoir) in the infected guy’s lab WHILE NOT USING HIS RESPIRATOR would end fantastically. He doesn’t get infected but I feel like he deserved it for this move alone.

Biohazard Disposal

When Balleseros started fooling around with the pipe, Doreen, on a hunch, asks to examine it, and finds a clump of hair in said pipe, which she instantly determines to be from a rhesus macaque, which is a type of monkey that has physiological responses very similar to humans (which makes them a good animal model for drug testing.) Which, if you remember from last week, is an animal that the squirrely base security guy repeatedly insisted they did not have on the premises.

Setting aside for a moment that I have sincere doubts as to whether a veterinary pathologist could determine conclusively that the hair is from a rhesus macaque by sight (and they don’t show our intrepid band of scientists doing any tests to confirm that, but I also am not a veterinary pathologist so I can’t definitively call BS on Doreen calling it by sight alone), this hair, in that pipe, is grossly negligent on the part of whoever put that hair there. YOU DON’T WASH BIOHAZARDOUS MATERIAL DOWN THE FREAKING SINK. For instance, my university requires that all solid organic biohazardous material be incinerated and that all liquid organic hazmat be autoclaved (heated under intense pressure). At my undergrad, we didn’t throw away even non-pathogenic materials without autoclaving them first. Of course, if Peter’s lab has been washing biological material from potentially infected animals down the sinks, this could explain the source of the outbreak: Peter’s lab was staffed by idiots.

“Monkeys Are One of the Main Sources of Zoonotic Transfer”

Yay, show! This is a correct statement. Zoonotic transfer is the name for transference of a disease between humans and non-humans, like monkeys. Patient zero in most Ebola outbreaks usually contracts the virus by handling an infected monkey or ape carcass, and there are a whole slew of other infections that pass between humans and monkeys.

Interference From Regulatory Agencies

Dr. Walker and Dr. Sinister chat, and Dr. Walker mentions that the base is out of reach of interference from regulatory agencies. This is true; there aren’t any scientific regulatory agencies that have jurisdiction in international territory. That being said, if the scientists from this base want to publish their work, they’re going to have a hard time getting that work into a reputable scientific journal if they have gross ethical violations. Of course, the base is owned by a company called Arctic Biosystems, so they may be solely interested in creating patentable material and may not be interested in publishing just how, exactly, they created their wonder drugs.

“Mutations, mostly”

Dr. Walker asks Dr. Sinister what Peter was working on, and Sinister replies with the above statement – specifically, Peter was working on “speeding up mutations” (which Dr. Walker classifies as “dangerous.”) These statements are dumb for a variety of reasons:

1) Pop culture has taught people to freak the heck out whenever they hear the word “mutant” or any derivation thereof. Guys, a mutation is, and I am not understating this here, literally just a change in DNA. There are several different kinds of mutations that are classified by a variety of different things, like if the change has an effect on protein encoding or protein structure. Now, mutations can cause incredibly severe diseases and lots of different problems if they occur in the human genome. But I think there is this misconception that these diseases are caused by widespread mutation in the genome. They aren’t, usually. They are caused by very specific changes in (usually) one single gene. Sickle-cell anemia is caused by the change of a single amino acid. Huntington’s disease is caused by having multiple insertions of a repeated three-nucleotide segment of DNA in one gene. Mutations in the human genome can also cause cancer. But not all mutations are harmful; there are plenty of mutations that don’t affect the organism in any noticeable way, and some that are beneficial, like the mutations that caused sickle-cell anemia – people who have a copy of the sickle-cell mutation in one copy of their hemoglobin gene, but a normal, unmutated hemoglobin gene on the other chromosome are resistant to malaria.

The takeaway message here is that “mutation” is not equal to “X-Men,” (and don’t even get me started on the vast ocean of  bullsh*t Marvel Comics writers spew about mutation. I love X-Men comics more than any other book Marvel’s putting out right now (except for Captain Marvel and Hawkeye), but dear God in heaven. Genes. Do. Not. Work. That. Way.) but neither does it equate to “Instant Death and Horror For Everyone Involved.” I strongly suspect that the only reason Peter was working on “mutations, mostly” is because that sounds scary in conjunction with a virus.

2) Studying “mutations” is such a broad statement as to be almost meaningless. Anyone working in the field of genetics studies mutations. I am not exaggerating. We usually figure out what a gene does by inducing a mutation in that gene that renders it inoperable, or finding genes in people with genetic diseases and finding where their genome differs from that of healthy people. Is Peter studying mutations in viruses? Okay, which virus? Is he studying immune response to mutated viruses, or what? But Dr. Walker says he’s trying to speed up mutations. Okay, to what end? We already have viruses that mutate very quickly. My lab is trying to create vaccines against those. There isn’t any reason to try to speed up that process unless you’re trying to create viruses that can’t be targeted by the immune system, in which case Arctic Biosystems is probably running afoul of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. Dr. Walker would be correct in stating that speeding up virus mutation is dangerous.

3) Except Dr. Walker didn’t say that; she said speeding up mutations (in the general sense) was dangerous. There are plenty of reasons to speed up rates of mutations in other organisms – if you’re an evolutionary biologist, for example, this would help out in researching species divergence and genetic drift. Life would be a lot easier for everybody if we could speed up the rate of antibody mutation. So speeding up mutation can be harmful or helpful depending on what you’re doing with it. JUST LIKE MOST THINGS YOU CAN STUDY.

Peter Farragut’s Quarters

I know I said I wasn’t going to do this, but jeez. “Doctor” Alan Farragut, head of the CDC Special Pathogens Branch, enters his brother’s quarters with no protective gear whatsoever. Not so much as a pair of gloves. I would like to remind everyone that at this point the only thing these people are sure of is that the virus isn’t airborne. (As I pointed out last time, they actually aren’t sure of that, either, but whatever. In-universe, all they know is it isn’t airborne.) For all Farragut knows at this point, any surface he touches in that room could be contaminated with virus. He doesn’t know if Peter was in those rooms after he was infected; he doesn’t know what all Peter touched in there. He doesn’t know how tough the virus is – can it survive outside of a host organism for very long? HE DOESN’T KNOW. So why, for the love of God, is he running around those rooms, examining his brother’s living quarters, without so much as a pair of gloves? (He’s actually in the room for character development, and so Alan can stumble upon Peter’s video diaries where Peter can be seen sending a hand-signal that would be utterly meaningless to anyone except his brother, signaling danger.)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Okay, so Peter breaks out of the containment room, right? Because obviously he was going to at some point. And Dr. Sinister, asks, not unreasonably, who left Peter in that room with a bone saw. (We’re going to ignore how nobody picked up on him cutting into the air duct with the bone saw, which should have taken him a decent amount of time since bone saws are not designed to cut through metal and since Peter should have been under observation this whole time somebody really should have stopped him before he even breached the air duct. Also, there’s a voice alarm declaring “contamination” every few seconds; if this was an automatic alarm it should have gone off the moment Peter breached the air duct and not however long it took him to cut a man-size hole in the air duct. Although it is possible Peter just used the bone saw to breach the duct and then ripped the duct the rest of the way open – the duct certainly looks as though it was ripped apart.)

To which Alan begins to reply that he was a little busy keeping Peter from stabbing him in the face with a syringe full of goo. Except, and this is the part that just kills me, Dr. Sinister cuts him off with “Too busy to observe BSL 4 protocols?” And I just. I can’t even. Are you kidding me? That scene with Peter in the isolation room was the only time IN THE WHOLE 27 MINUTES OF THE SHOW THAT THEY’VE COME ACCEPTABLY CLOSE TO OBSERVING BSL 4 PROTOCOLS. THE ONLY %*&#*$^ TIME IN 27 MINUTES. And Dr. Sinister is giving them crap about it. Although, upon reflection, there are zero reasons for there to have been a bone saw in that room in the first place. They weren’t doing anything to Peter that needed a bone saw, and since they don’t need it, that’s just another piece of equipment that would have to be decontaminated after Peter left isolation. And if we’re going to argue that “hey, maybe it’s a fixed piece of equipment in the room” I would respond with “what kind of moron fixes a bone saw in an isolation room” because having a bone saw in the room leads to patients escaping. (Exhibit A: Peter.)

Halothane Gas

Squirrely security guy tells the team that they’ve sealed off the floor Peter’s on, and they’ll just pump halothane gas into the floor, knock Peter out, and retrieve his unconscious body. Halothane is a real gas, and it is suspected by some to be the gas used in the incredibly botched Russian theater hostage situation. So this is an actual gas, and this is an actual application of that gas (although, to be clear, there were 850 hostages taken, and 130 of them died – 128 of those due to the affects of the gas). Good job, show!

We Need Peter Alive

Alan objects to this plan on the grounds that they need Peter alive as he might have antibodies that allowed him to fend off the disease. This, this right here, is why Alan shouldn’t be in charge of this expedition. Right now, his concern should not be potentially recovering antibodies from an infected patient – who is currently THE ONLY infected patient (which he could definitely be proposing solely because he doesn’t want to risk his brother’s life). His priority should be CONTAINING THE INFECTED PATIENT. Peter is an imminent health hazard. He has already demonstrated that he’s irrational, very strong, and very violent. Alan’s team should be trying to contain and subdue him to prevent Peter’s infection from spreading to other people, and if that means that the quickest way to contain him without courting exposure is to risk his life with the halothane, they should absolutely use the halothane. The infection is just too dangerous to not take that chance. Plus, even if the gas DOES kill Peter, they’d still be able to recover viable blood and tissue samples from his corpse. Dr. Sinister points out that he’s got 120 other people to think about, and overrides Alan.

Additionally, I don’t think Peter’s had the chance to make antibodies against the virus yet. It takes 5-7 days for the body to recognize an invasion and start an antibody response to the pathogen. We know Peter was showing symptoms two days before this, and given how fast other people start showing symptoms once they’re infected (which happens next episode because they haven’t contained Peter) the pathogen does not have an incubation phase of greater than three days. I could handwave this away as Alan not knowing when Peter was infected and so believing that Peter may have had the chance, but given what all the show has gotten correct so far I’m kind of inclined to believe that the writers did not in fact know how long that process takes.

Also, the base has a system already set up to pump the halothane. It was built into the base; they didn’t have to MacGuyver anything. That’s…a tad disconcerting.

Alan insists on going with the security team to retrieve his brother. Alan, who is the head of the research team, not trained in security procedures, and has demonstrated that he will put his brother’s safety ahead of that of the other people in the base. Again, why is Alan in charge of this expedition?

“Freezing Rearranges the Tensile Strength”

Major Balleseros and Doreen (I’m not calling her “doctor” until she does something that indicates that her degree was earned at an accredited university, and after this statement I’m on the bubble about calling him a major) have still been on a monkey hunt this whole time. They come across a section of the base to which their RFID chips won’t grant them access. Major Balleseros finds a canister of what the show claims is liquid nitrogen and uses it to “rearrange the tensile strength” of the door lock. Okay. 1) This is the ostensible canister of “liquid nitrogen”.

Setting aside for the moment that that is pretty obviously a canister of compressed air, if there were actually liquid nitrogen in that canister, Major Balleseros would not be able to hold it. Liquid nitrogen has a condensation point of -196C (-321F). To use scientific terminology, liquid nitrogen is really f***ing cold. Metal conducts heat readily enough, so the exterior of that canister would be much too cold to touch with bare skin. 2) I’m not even going to go into the efficacy of putting liquid nitrogen under pressure and how strong the container would have to be to not explode from the liquid nitrogen expanding as it warms up to room temperature and tries to vaporize and therefore expands. 3) This canister is just kind of lying out in a hallway on a shelving unit, so it really shouldn’t be cold anymore, and also should be exploded because of 2. 4) I use compressed air a lot. It’s very handy for cleaning dust out of electronics. Fun fact: when you have a gas under pressure, and you release it from an area of high pressure into an area of lower pressure, the gas inside the container cools off. A lot. When I use a can of compressed air, I have to let out the air in very short bursts and give the can plenty of down time between uses, because otherwise ice forms on the outside of the can and freezes my hand. I would think that doing this with a can of liquid nitrogen would severely exacerbate this effect. 5) You can’t “rearrange” tensile strength, no matter how much you cool the metal. This is a categorically idiotic statement. You’re basically saying “This metal is too strong! I shall rearrange that strength so I can break it!” (Actually, I am pretty sure that is, word for word, 67% of all comic book dialogue ever written in the sixties). What Major Balleseros should have said is that decreasing the temperature of the metal makes it very brittle, which allows them to break the lock.

The Monkey

Balleseros and Doreen are wandering around the lab Balleseros just broke into. They find lots and lots of monkey cages that all appear to have been broken from the inside. They then come across a single solitary monkey. Just want to remind everyone that they are not wearing any protective gear right now. So, if you were wandering around in a dark lab you’d just broken into and come across a monkey that looks pretty obviously diseased and is loose in the lab, with signs that it had broken itself out of its metal cage, would you: a) Turn around and haul ass out of the lab because you know that monkeys bite and also fling their crap and either of those things could infect you; b) remember how violent Peter’s been and wonder if the disease may have something to do with that, wonder if the monkey may be similarly violent, and haul ass out of the lab; c) think “I’m a fully grown human that is well over five times larger than the monkey, and I couldn’t break out of that cage, so I don’t want to tangle with the little beastie that could break out of the metal cage” and haul ass out of the lab; d) try to coax the obviously diseased monkey to you so that you can, I don’t know, put it in one of the unbroken cages, I guess? That are the same make and model as the broken cages. If you answered anything except d), congratulations! You are officially smarter than the CDC representative in this situation. The monkey attacks Doreen, who is able to hold off the monkey (despite it being strong enough to break out of a metal cage) until Balleseros hits it with a piece of metal. Doreen, obviously terrified, asks Balleseros if the attack broke the skin. It did not. She wouldn’t have had to worry about this IF EITHER OF THEM WERE WEARING PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT. I wouldn’t have gone into a lab I wasn’t given access to without PPE, but that’s mostly because I’m paranoid and if the people running the base that had a crazy disease outbreak didn’t want me to go somewhere and I went there, I’d want to be prepared for the worst. It’s also because I wouldn’t want to wander around a lab I was familiar with without PPE, let alone an unfamiliar lab. Even if I wasn’t paranoid, I would think that if two people are wandering around a base with the express purpose of finding the source of the outbreak, they’d want to, I don’t know, maybe wear equipment that could protect them from falling victim to that same source. But that’s just me. By the way – they weren’t even wearing gloves while exploring this lab.
Also, they assume that the monkey didn’t infect her just because it didn’t break the skin. That is not a safe assumption. Doreen should, at the VERY LEAST, be immediately taking a decontamination shower ASAP. Even if the monkey didn’t break the skin, the fact that Peter’s been running around secreting goo means that the monkey could be secreting stuff as well, and they should disinfect Doreen immediately. Plus, monkeys can carry a messload of diseases that aren’t this-particular-virus related that can mess you up, and Doreen should be cleaning anything that monkey touched. She does not.

Also, while that idiocy is going on, the security teams and Farragut are crawling through the air ducts to find Peter. And Alan, the head CDC guy, who has no security training, who has demonstrated he’s more concerned about his brother’s safety than the rest of the base, is wandering around those ducts ALONE. Seriously, this base is run by idiots. Also, he totally finds a dead security guy missing an arm because Peter ripped it off to use the RFID chip.

Visualizing the Virus

Dr. Walker and Dr. Jordan are working in a lab; I have no idea what Dr. Jordan’s doing, but Dr. Walker is looking for the virus under a microscope. This is, to be blunt, idiotic. The very best light microscopes (light microscopes are the kind that you immediately picture when I say “microscope”) have a maximum magnification strength of around 2000x, which means that they can visualize down to around 200 to 250 nanometers. Most viruses average between 20 and 300 nanometers in size. Yes, it is possible that you’ll get lucky and the virus will be larger than 200 to 250 nanometers. But the chances of that are not good, and even if the virus is that small, you still have to find one in the tissue you’re looking at. Which means that if you’re looking at a blood sample you have to find the virus in amongst red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, and a bunch of other things, and if you’re looking in a tissue sample you have to find it in amongst cellular noise. Which is pretty hard to do at 250 nanometers.

None of which matters, because Dr. Jordan says that this thing is 15 nanometers, which is smaller than any known virus (at least, I’m pretty sure she said 15. She may have said 150. I’m choosing to believe that she picked 15 nm due to the following sentence.) The smallest known virus is porcine circovirus type I, which is only 17 nm in diameter, in which case a virus 15 nm in diameter would be smaller than that. 15 or 150 nanometers doesn’t matter, though; this virus is too small to be visualized on a light microscope. Especially since the virus structure is tubular, so the virus is either 15 nm long (in which case it is really, really, really thin, and wouldn’t be able to be seen with the microscope) or it’s 15 nm wide (in which case it still wouldn’t be able to be seen with the light microscope.)

Also, Dr. Walker mentions earlier in this scene that she can’t find anything matching current known viral structures, not “even icosahedrons” (which is entertaining because the way she says it implies that icosahedron-shaped viruses are unusual, when in fact that is an extremely common shape), so Dr. Jordan tells her to look for obsolete ones. Due to this suggestion, Dr. Walker moments later spots the virus. (Which, again, is moronic.)

This is the “obsolete” structure that Dr. Walker, the supposedly senior CDC field scientist, didn’t immediately recognize as a virus until she was specifically looking for it:

This “obsolete” virus bears a passing resemblance to a little-known modern day virus that looks like this:

That virus? Ebola. Apparently the senior CDC field scientist looks in a sample of tissue from a person presenting with hemorrhagic symptoms using the magical microscope and doesn’t IMMEDIATELY ping on the stuff in the sample that completely looks like a hemorrhagic filovirus (the class of virus Ebola belongs to.) Henceforth, Julia Walker will no longer be accorded the honorific of “Dr.”

Also, let’s take a look at this screen here, for a minute. The red circle shows a scale for the image. That says 8 micrometers. (The “u” looking thingy in front of the m is the Greek letter mu, and it is the SI prefix for “micro-“, which means that you take the base measurement and multiply by 10e-6. So 1 micrometer is 0.000001 meters). 8 micrometers is equal to 800 nanometers. So much for this virus being 15 nanometers. Also, the magnification here is apparently 500,000x (the second measurement from the right), which is approximately 250 times better than you can get with the microscope Walker is using.

Also, while they’re doing this analysis, Dr. Jordan is wearing only a face shield, and Walker isn’t even wearing that.

ALSO, Walker mentions in passing that the “cells are heavily damaged; walls totally deformed.” I would like to know why the senior CDC field scientist isn’t surprised to find cell walls in the human tissue sample she’s examining, since animal cells DON’T HAVE CELL WALLS. Animal cells, including human cells, have only a membrane, not cell walls. Plants have cell walls. People do not.

Spherical Capsid

Dr. Jordan reports on the virus and mentions that it has a spherical capsid and is unlike anything they’ve seen before. The virus capsid is the protein shell that coats the virus. I kind of doubt that the CDC has never seen anything like the virus that totally looks like a filovirus, as previously established. Also, a “spherical capsid” is more properly an icosahedral capsid, and this virus isn’t icosahedral – it has a helical capsid. Missed opportunity, Helix.

More Stuff You Can’t See With Light Microscopes

And, once again, we get to see an image that the microscope they’re using isn’t powerful enough to create. Seriously, if Dr. Sinister would sell the microscope tech they’ve got that would be far more financially worthwhile than this end-of-the-world-level plague he’s got.

Also, that cell that’s being infected looks like this:

I think that’s supposed to be a white blood cell. I think. That’s before infection, by the way. There are many types of white blood cells, but the most common type looks like this:

They don’t say what type of cell this is supposed to be, so I guess we’ll never know what cell in the human body that looks more like a bacterium than a human cell this is supposed to be. Seriously, if any of you guys know what the heck this cell is supposed to be, let me know.

Note also that the 8 micrometer scale did not change despite the fact that we’re now zoomed out.

And with that, ladies, gentlemen, and Zoidberg, we have gotten through the first episode of Helix. There is still plenty more totally-not-actually-science-stuff, so we’ll see if I have the time and inclination to do more of this for Helix.

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Science Does Not Work That Way: Helix

Posted on January 20, 2014. Filed under: Uncategorized |

Last Friday, the former Sci-Fi channel (I refuse to use the current spelling) premiered a new episode of a show that is actually a science fiction show. I was so happy I nearly cried. (On the inside). If I remember correctly, the last true science fiction show the channel had was Stargate Universe, which I hated because it was full of people who should have known better doing stupid things and took everything I loved about Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis (whimsy, shows that don’t take themselves too seriously, likeable characters) and replaced those things with things I didn’t like (DC comics levels of grimdarkness, complete seriousness, characters upon which I actively wished violent deaths). Eureka doesn’t count; for the amount of technobabble that happened and for a town ostensibly inhabited by the most brilliant scientists in the country, there wasn’t anything that really resembled science going on in that show. Alphas might count, but exists in the shared Eureka/Warehouse 13 universe, so I have a knee-jerk instinct to discount it. And basically everything else they’ve been showing has either been reality TV, wrestling, or fantasy. I don’t mind the fantasy shows; they can be fun. I just need them to be offset by some hard core science fiction. And finally I have a science fiction show on the Sci-Fi channel. I’m so happy.

A few things about the show: Helix is on the channel formerly known as Sci-Fi on Friday nights at 9pm central time. The basic premise of the show is that a CDC rapid response team gets called to a private research facility in the arctic after a viral outbreak on the base. The head researcher of the base, Dr. Hiroshi Hitake, who will usually be referred to as Dr. Sinister throughout this post, because this guy screams evil so loudly that it would take a moron to miss the signs of sinister evilness, requests Dr. Julia Walker, a senior scientist with the CDC, respond to the outbreak. The CDC rapid response team is headed by Dr. Alan Farragut, who is the head of the Special Pathogens Branch, and also Dr. Walker’s ex. He caught her cheating on him with his brother, Dr. Peter Farragut, who not only works at the research base (on mutagenic agents, no less), but also happens to be the only patient infected in the outbreak who is still alive (which is why Dr. Walker brought his team in). Also along are Dr. Sarah Jordan, who is acknowledged in show to be the youngest doctor hired by the CDC in a really long time (hanging a hat on it does not change the fact that there is no way that a 26 year old would conceivably have the position she has), Dr. Doreen Boyle, who is a veterinary pathologist from the University of I-Supposedly-Have-A-Medical-Degree-But-You-Really-Can’t-Tell-What-With-The-Stupid-Life-Choices-I-Make, and Major Sergio Balleseros, who is with the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (which is a real thing, by the way).

So the rapid response team gets to the arctic base, and that’s when things start to really go wrong.

Spoilers are going to happen, so watch the show first if you’re going to. Also watch the show if you’ll only be able to think about the problems I’ve brought up rather than the show. Science issues aside, the show is pretty fun so far. Be warned, though – there are some decently gruesome things in the show.

To give you an idea of my scale of gruesome:

I laugh during zombie movies. Not bad zombie movies; zombie movies, period. I can also eat dinner while watching zombie movies. I think Inglourious Basterds is hilarious; I got mad at the parts of Kill Bill that were in black and white because they were too violent for the MPAA. I have dissected a cadaver, and have literally been up to my wrists in intestines before, and not been bothered in the slightest by that. At one point Doreen performs a necropsy on a monkey. There are no discretion shots, but there are a lot of intestines. Watch or don’t watch according to how nauseous you got reading this paragraph.

To be clear: I like this show. I like it a lot. I want to be upfront about that. I am eagerly awaiting the next episode, I enjoy the character interactions, I am enjoying that the CDC’s response team has 3 women on it and 1 guy; I like that the show is creepy, has great suspense, some fun jump scares, shades of John Carpenter’s The Thing, and a reference to Battlestar Galactica in the first ten minutes; I like that while Dr. Jordan is still really stupidly young to have her job, she is earnest without being obnoxious and makes the majority of the intelligent choices that were made in the first episode; I like that Doreen Boyle does not have the body structure of everybody else in television; I like Alan Farragut (which is surprising because the actor who plays him, Billy Campbell, played a guy in The 4400 that made me think I hated him as a person, but I don’t); I like that I don’t have any clue just who the heck Major Balleseros actually works for.

HOWEVER

I have a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry. I am currently working on a Ph.D in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. I am currently working in a lab researching vaccines for hypermutative viruses. While I am watching Helix, the knowledge that comes with these things occasionally reminds me that I am not watching a crack CDC rapid response team take on a terrifying new pathogen; I am watching actors acting out the best the writers could come up with. And sometimes, those writers just do not understand that SCIENCE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.

So, here are some things that Helix did right and a whole bunch of other things they did wrong.

CDC Headquarters in Atlanta

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is, in fact, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Good job, show.

Alan Farragut’s Seaborg Medal

The Seaborg medal is a real medal awarded each year by the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry for achievements in Chemistry and Biochemistry. It has only been awarded since 1987, but it isn’t impossible that Farragut would have one.

Broad Street Cholera Outbreak

Farragut gives an address to new CDC field agents/trainees/whatevers and tells them about the first epidemiological study (which they almost definitely had to have heard before, because we covered this in my ninth grade honors biology class, and I haven’t even taken any courses in epidemiology yet) – there was a cholera outbreak in London, and a physician and a clergyman mapped out where infected patients lived and discovered that they all had access to the Broad Street water pump and then defied local authorities to remove the pump handle and ended the outbreak.

The Broad Street cholera outbreak actually did occur in 1854, and actually did kill 616 people. However, there was no “defying local authorities” to remove the Broad Street pump handle. The physician, John Snow (no relation to Game of Thrones) actually convinced city authorities to remove it themselves. This was the first step towards disproving miasma theory (that diseases are caused by bad air) and the grandfather of epidemiology.

Made You Flinch

I’d like to think that senior CDC officials would be mature enough to not throw around fake vials of cholera to make a point, but I’ve known far, far too many scientists who would think this kind of thing is hilarious.

“Possible Retroviral Outbreak”

Our story really starts when Farragut is called into a meeting with Walker and Balleseros, who briefs them on a “possible retroviral outbreak” on a research base.

They throw the “retro-” prefix in there like it makes this worse than plain old “viral” outbreak. And then talk about going up to the research base to determine if is, in fact, a retroviral outbreak, as if that’s more important than simply containing the outbreak.  A retrovirus is just a virus that reproduces by inserting mRNA into a host cell, which is then reverse transcribed into DNA, which is incorporated into the host cell genome, where the cell replicates the viral DNA for the virus. There are lots of scary retroviruses (ie, HIV); however, there are plenty of horrific viruses that aren’t retroviruses (like Ebola, Marburg, hantavirus, a bunch of other hemorrhagic viruses, smallpox.) So really, they’re just throwing “retro-” around here to make the virus seem scarier to the audience. Whether or not the viral outbreak is due to a retrovirus doesn’t really change the procedures in containing the outbreak, and doesn’t really have implications for infectivity, although it does have some implications for how difficult containment can end up being. (Although from what the virus ends up doing to its hosts, it basically has to be a retrovirus, but we don’t find that out until later. Specifying it as a retroviral outbreak at this stage is meaningless, except to scare the audience, is what I’m getting at here.)

83rd Parallel

Major Ballaseros tells the CDC team the location of the base is a bunch of coordinates that I’m not going to hunt for again, but north of the 83rd latitudinal line, deep in the Arctic Circle. Dr. Jordan points out that the CDC doesn’t have jurisdiction above the 83rd Parallel.

I have not yet found any references regarding the 83rd Parallel being the border for international territory. Doing a Google search on “83rd Parallel” failed to immediately turn up anything regarding international territory. The most I can find is that all of the nations bordering the Arctic have exclusive economic rights within 200 nautical miles surrounding their territorial borders, so I’m going to assume that the CDC actually has jurisdiction in that area. The countries butting up against the Arctic Circle are Denmark, Canada, Russia, Norway, the US, Finland, Sweden, and Iceland. There are two countries with territory past the 83rd parallel – Denmark, via Greenland (not sure if we’re going to count that) and Canada, whose northernmost point is 83^o06’N.  The United States’ northernmost point is Point Barrow, Alaska, which is located at 71^o23’N. The distance between 71^oN and 83^oN is ~1,333 km, which equates to ~828 non-nautical miles for our metrically challenged friends, and to 719.5 nautical miles for anybody who cares. So while Dr. Jordan is technically correct that the CDC doesn’t have authority above the 83rd parallel since the United States doesn’t have territory within 200 nautical miles of the 83rd parallel, she would also be correct (and more precise) in that the CDC doesn’t have any authority beyond Point Barrow + 200 nautical miles. Which does not equate to the 83rd parallel. So, yes, technically correct, but a meaningless statement.

Conflict of Interest

The reason that Dr. Farragut’s team is called in is because his brother is one of the infected patients. I don’t know what, exactly, the CDC’s rules on conflicts of interest are, but it would be criminally negligent to put this guy in charge of the investigation and containment into a disease that has infected his family member. Surgeons aren’t allowed to operate on family members because they are emotionally compromised in that situation. Farragut shouldn’t be allowed within 200 nautical miles of the research station because he is bloody well emotionally compromised in this situation, which will be made abundantly clear given some of the choices he makes later in the episode – Peter Farragut is obviously unstable and needs to be contained using whatever force necessary; he intentionally tries (and succeeds) in spreading the virus to other people. If the head of the CDC response force wasn’t his brother, Peter probably would have been shot before he infected more people.

BSL 4 Protocol

This stands for Biosafety Level 4 protocols, and is a real thing. These protocols are used “for work with dangerous and exotic agents that pose a high individual risk of aerosol-transmitted laboratory infections, agents which cause severe to fatal disease in humans for which vaccines or other treatments are not available,… and various other hemorrhagic diseases.”

So far, so good. They go into the situation with a TV show’s approximation of the correct hazmat gear and start off talking about using the correct protocols regarding decontamination in hot areas. Dr. Walker points out that these procedures could eat up a lot of time. Dr. Walker is supposed to be a senior researcher/field operator for the CDC. Dr. Walker spends most of her time not doing anything that supports that description.

Dr. Farragut, Dr. Walker, Dr. Farragut Love Triangle

Dr. Alan Farragut was married to Dr. Walker, who he then caught in bed with Dr. Peter Farragut. In real life, only an idiot would allow these people near that base. But this level of personal drama between scientists is completely plausible, because scientists are people and do stupid things when they want to get laid.

Not Actually A Science Criticism

I just want to take a moment here to sincerely congratulate the effects department. That whole base, and the helicopter, are CGI. And I can tell, just barely, that they are CGI, but only just. Bravo. This is Sci-Fi channel A-game FX, right here.

Quarantine – Lack Thereof

Dr. Sinister (aka Dr. Hitake) has not put the research base into quarantine. This is stupid. He handwaves it away by pointing out that the only people infected worked out of Peter Farragut’s lab and that there are no other infectees. It doesn’t matter that there were no other infectees – because in actuality, Dr. Sinister ostensibly only knows that he doesn’t have people displaying symptoms, not that nobody else is infected. People can be carriers of a disease – they have the virus, they are contagious, but they don’t show symptoms of the infection. At this point supposedly nobody knows enough about this brand-new pathogen to be certain that there are no other infectees. All they know is that there are not yet other people presenting with Peter’s symptoms. In reality, any normal person in this situation would have put the whole base in quarantine, especially given the exotic nature of the virus. But, then again, it is Dr. Sinister, and I get the distinct impression he’s not at all interested in containing the virus.

“Jet fuel to jelly”

The helicopter that took the CDC team to the base lifts off to nearby military base Camp Eisenhower (not a real base, and only 200 miles away, apparently) because, according to the security guy, the temperatures can get down to “minus seventy” which turns “jet fuel into jelly.” Now, some helicopters do use jet fuel. The type of fuel depends on the type of engine, and some helicopters use jet engines. However – assuming this guy is talking about degrees Fahrenheit (which I think is a safe assumption, given that he’s got an American accent, and this show is produced for an American audience), this statement is a gross exaggeration. According to Wikipedia (because I have already spent two hours writing and researching this and I am 10 MINUTES into the show, and I am not going to spend more time finding and analyzing climate data), the average winter temperature for the part of the arctic they’re in doesn’t dip below -40-50^oC, which translates to -40 to -58 degrees Fahrenheit. Jet Fuel grade A-1, which is used mostly outside the US, has a maximum freezing point of -47^oC, which is -52^oF.  However, there is another grade of jet fuel – grade B – that is used in cold climates instead of A-1 because it has a lower freezing point. I haven’t found that point, exactly, but the type of fuel the helicopter would be using at that latitude would be either grade B or a military grade fuel, which would have an even lower freezing point. So it is possible that during the winter time the temperatures would be low enough to freeze jet fuel. Except… it is broad daylight outside. The arctic is very dark in the wintertime, so while I can’t tell when, exactly, this is happening, I can surmise that it isn’t occurring from October to March. Which means that it isn’t winter. Therefore, since the average temperature in that part of the world between April and September doesn’t get too far below -20^oC ((NP 7-8 is closest to their location), which is about -4^oF, we can officially debunk the jet fuel turning to jelly. That doesn’t mean that a helicopter sitting out in the middle of the arctic would enjoy the experience, and that the fuel lines wouldn’t be damaged, but the jet fuel is not freezing.

“Camp Eisenhower is only 200 miles away”

Squirrely security guy tells them that the helicopter will be close by – at Camp Eisenhower, which is only 200 miles away.

1) There is no “Camp Eisenhower” in real life; but that’s fine. People can make up military bases in fiction for convenience. 2) As previously established in the show, the US does not have jurisdiction above the 83rd parallel. Which means that the research base is not within 200 miles of the US’s borders, and I’m not sure about international law vìs a vìs putting military bases in exclusive economic zones. Which means that Camp Eisenhower is either in international territory (which would have interesting legal repercussions and I’m pretty sure would cause Russia to throw a fit) or in Canadian or Danish territory. If they ever nail down where it is, that will be interesting.

RFID Chip Insertions

The base uses subcutaneous RFID chips to allow people access to various parts of the base. Why the would want to chip visiting CDC scientists is beyond me, and I’m 95% confident that they only have subcutaneous chips in order to give Peter a good reason to rip somebody’s arm off (which he does later on.)

I am confused as to why the CDC people aren’t confused as to why this guy is trying to insert RFID chips subcutaneously using what is very clearly a pipette.

They look like these.

That button he’s pressing in the top picture doesn’t provide enough pressure to clear the end of a pipette tip clogged by the digested bits of cellular membrane, let alone punch through human skin. Then again, Farscape used pipettes for everything except their intended purpose, so I guess I can’t fault them for recycling that brilliant idea too much. That still is a $300 dollar prop, though, unless they got it used.

On an unrelated note, I’d be pretty leery of letting a security guy inject something that big into my hand without seeing his medical credentials first. You can see the red light there from the chip; that is the smallest possible size the chip could be. And that is definitely big enough to mess up nerves if it’s not put in there properly.  Also, inserting something that big into your hand hurts. A lot. Inserting smaller things than that (like pencil lead, and yes, I have two pieces of pencil lead imbedded in my hands, and one of those is actually clearly visibly embedded in my knuckle, and holy mother of God did they hurt going in) hurts. A lot. This was done without anesthetic and people barely flinched. Also, there was no sterilization of the injection site, and no sterilization of the injection device between people, which you would think one of the CDC people (being responsible for disease prevention and control) would have objected to. THAT IS A BLOOD-BORNE PATHOGEN HAZARD. I mean, jeeze, tattoo parlors are supposed to unwrap brand new needles in front of you before they give you the tattoo. I would think the cutting edge research station could do AT LEAST that well. On the bright side, he is holding the pipette correctly.

Base Architecture

This looks really cool, but it’s a stupid design. That’s a heck of a lot of wasted space. It’s also wasted space that has to be heated. The power consumption at this place has to be enormous. Also, Dr. Sinister says there are only 106 scientists working here, with 15 support staff. This space, right here, in this image, could house AT LEAST a fifth of those people’s labspace if it were filled with labs instead of air, and they go down several more levels of that size. So either Dr. Sinister is lying about the number of people at the base (and he does arbitrarily lie about a lot of stuff) or this base is really stupidly bigger than it needs to be.

48 Hours

Dr. Farragut says he needs base security to start tracking down everyone Peter came into contact with for the past 48 hours. Except-

Peter Farragut looked like this:

Farragut should know that Peter was symptomatic two days ago at the latest, since that information should have been included with any briefing sent to his team. Even if he didn’t know when Peter started showing symptoms, seeing as how they don’t yet know how infectious this virus is or how it is spread, Farragut (and Dr. Sinister) should be tracking down ANYONE AT ALL that Peter came into contact with since he was infected, not just people he’s been in contact with for the last 48 hours. In the real world, they’d also try to track down anyone that THOSE people came into contact with, and on down the line, which is why Dr. Sinister should have put the base in quarantine, because that’s effectively the entire population of people that could have been exposed to this virus at this point. If you don’t know how a disease is spread, how long it takes from infection to showing symptoms, if a person is contagious before they start showing symptoms, etc, you don’t take chances that just because nobody else is showing symptoms yet that there aren’t any infections.

Suiting Up

Here, Drs Walker and Farragut tape their gloves to their supposedly BSL 4 level personal protective equipment (PPE). BSL 4 PPE is required to have positive pressure. That means that the air pressure inside the suit is higher than the pressure outside the suit. So if the suit isn’t air tight – like it accidentally gets ripped – then air will be forced out of the suit, which pushes particles that could potentially contain pathogens AWAY from the rip in the suit. Therefore, these suits should be air tight to begin with. As in, not having gloves secured to the suit using tape.

And this isn’t like an under layer of protective equipment, which the BSL 4 PPE will be worn over. This is cropped from a picture taken while they’re examining the heavily infected Peter Farragut, who I cut out of the picture because occasionally I can be kind to you. That’s tape holding the glove to the sleeve.

BSL 4 equipment looks like this.

Those suits all look really puffy because of the higher air pressure inside the suit than out.

I don’t really have a huge issue with this, because their suits as least look cool and have their own self-contained breathing unit without being horrendously expensive like actual BSL 4 PPE would be, and we got some exposition while Walker and Farragut were taping each other up. But the moral of the story is that that is not BSL 4 PPE.

“We Don’t Have a T1 Link Because It’s Obsolete”

Dr. Jordan asks squirrely head of security guy if they have a T1 link; he responds no. She replies that that is too bad, since it will now take forever to upload the data back to the CDC in Atlanta. He responds that they don’t have a T1 link because they’re obsolete; instead, the base uses SONET – synchronous optical networking – which gives them speeds of “10 gigs a second” because they have to be fast as they only have access to a satellite for an hour each day.

It is plausible that they would only have access to a satellite for an hour each day; I personally think that as expensive as that base had to be, in the real world they would have a dedicated geosynchronous satellite, but it’s certainly plausible that they wouldn’t and would have to worry about down time in between satellite access.

T1 lines are real. Synchronous optical networking is real, and can get line speeds of greater than 10 gigs per second, which is a definite improvement over T1 lines’ 1.5 megs per second. I don’t really see what either of those things has to do with the satellite that the base has access to for an hour each day, because both SONET and T1 are LAND LINES. They both use fiber optics to transmit data. Therefore, it really doesn’t matter how fast T1 and SONET can transport data, because NEITHER OF THOSE THINGS WOULD BE USED TO UPLOAD DATA TO A SATELLITE, since we are not stretching fiber optic lines between arctic research bases and space. What’s really amusing is that, later on in the third episode, somebody destroys a structure resembling a cell tower which knocks out base communications. To clarify, it seems like their comms with the satellite were taken out (why do we need the SONET, again?), but strangely enough, taking out this external tower also seems to have taken out the intra-base communications. Why the heck the internal base comm system is routed to a tower outside of the base entirely is completely beyond me.

“You Seem To Know A Lot”

Dr. Jordan comments that “You seem to know a lot about medicine and technology for a head of security” to squirrely head of security guy. Who responds with “Dr. Hitake taught me everything I know.” (Dr. Hitake is Dr. Sinister.)

Yes, I can tell that Dr. Sinister, who won’t quarantine the base when common sense says to, who lies to the CDC a bunch, who I’m pretty sure orchestrated the outbreak and then brought in the CDC for some convoluted reason that I hope is explained at some point, taught you – you who use pipettes to insert RFID tracking chips and don’t know the purposes of T1 and SONET lines – everything you know.

Tensile Strength of Restraints vs. Dr. Alan Farragut’s Upper Body Strength

Peter breaks out of his restraints, goes nuts, and tries to stab Alan with a syringe full of Peter’s nasty, virus-ridden blood. From what I can tell – it’s hard, because Peter’s thrashing around – Peter DOES NOT have restraints around his wrists. Which means that he broke the restraints themselves instead of ripping them from their attachment points to the bed. This website sells medical restraints with a tensile strength of 1400 lbs  for just under $40. So I’m going to assume that the cutting edge arctic research base has restraints that are at least that good. Which means that Peter Farragut can exert enough force to rip something with over half a ton of tensile strength. That’s fine; apparently the virus gives its host a measure of superstrength (which is better shown later in the episode, and is also one of the reasons that the virus is probably a retrovirus). After mucking around online for half an hour, I didn’t find anything resembling a satisfactory measure of the amount of upper body strength the average adult male possesses, but I feel pretty justified in concluding that the guy that broke out of the medical restraints should definitely win the stabby fight with the guy who is a (figuratively) giant nerd.

The Instantaneous Sedative

After Peter goes nuts and tries to stab Alan in the face, Dr. Walker grabs a syringe, fills it with some type of sedative, and stabs Peter in the leg with the syringe.

As you can see, this is an intramuscular injection. There are some really big veins in the leg, but they aren’t that close to the surface, and stabbing somebody in the leg with a syringe without trying to hit the vein will guarantee that you don’t hit the vein. Veins are hard to hit even when you’re trying to hit them. Just ask any phlebotomist or heroin addict. Peter takes roughly 8 seconds to completely stop trying to stab Alan in the face. It take about 14 seconds for him to go slack enough for them to take the syringe away from him. For the record, this is impressive restraint. Usually, syringe + sedative = instant (<1 second) sedation in television and Hollywood. As this site points out, intramuscular injection could take anywhere from three to fifteen minutes to go into effect. So no, Peter shouldn’t go down that quickly unless the virus caused his system to interact with the drug in some weird way (hypothetically possible), but neither should any of the other people who have ever been sedated, ever, on camera, and since it usually takes those people a millisecond to go down, I’m giving the show credit for effort.

Or alternatively, they were using the “instant sedative” trope and wanted to demonstrate that Peter got a boost to his constitution score from the virus because he was NOT instantly sedated. In which case, bad show. Go stand in the corner.

“We’ve Designed A Way to Inhibit The Signaling Pathway Responsible For Genitalia”

LOL NO, no you did not.

Doreen is tasked with examining the animals in Peter’s lab to figure out what the heck is going on. She discovers that the rats in the lab do not have sex organs, and asks squirrely security guy what the heck is up with that. And he responds with the section title. And I facepalmed. I don’t know what advantage, exactly, rats sans genitalia confers on the research process, and the show doesn’t really elaborate on that. I, personally, would rather have drugs tested in a system that has sex hormones produced by sexual organs so that the potential for interaction can be determined, and since some drugs negatively impact sexual organs, I’d want to know about those effects as well. But that’s just me.

At any rate, there is not one single signaling pathway responsible for sex organ development in mammals. There are a whole bunch of things that have to happen for sex organ development, and all of those things would have to be blocked to inhibit their development. A much better statement, vague enough to be plausible: “We designed a drug to suppress genital development.” Leave the specifics out of it. The technojargon sounds smart until somebody who knows what they’re doing hears it, at which point you sound like a moron.

“We don’t have any monkeys”

Doreen asks to see their monkeys. Squirrely security guy replies they don’t have monkeys. Doreen calls BS. Doreen is absolutely correct in being skeptical on this front. This facility obviously has a lot of money and was set up in international territory in the arctic out of the reach of any prevailing laws so they didn’t have to worry about certain (any) ethical constraints. They absolutely should have monkeys since there’s no reason for them not to have monkeys, and a whole bunch of good reasons for them to have the monkeys. But squirrely security guy is almost correct that they don’t have monkeys (there is one hanging out somewhere, and Doreen will find it with her face in a little bit. No, it does not maul her face, although that wouldn’t have even been a concern if she was adhering to BSL 4 safety protocols at the time.) He just fails to mention that they had monkeys. Tenses are important.

Retrovirus or no?

After they open up a body bag of one of the other two infected patients, and find that all of the patient’s tissues (except the bones) have liquefied to black goop (I didn’t post a picture because I am nice), Dr. Walker questions if Farragut is still thinking retrovirus, because it looks more like a hemorrhagic fever. This is a smart statement, because so far they don’t actually have any reason to think this is a retrovirus, and a lot of reasons to think it’s a hemorrhagic virus. Hemorrhagic viruses destroy tissues (people infected with Ebola can bleed to death inside their skin from the visceral tissue destruction), which would account somewhat for the tissue liquefication. As of this moment, there are no known hemorrhagic retroviruses. Farragut points out that they aren’t seeing tissue degradation; they are seeing tissue annihilation. This virus destroys not just internal tissues but also skin, which is basically dead cells, and not usually affected by hemorrhagic viruses. So the CDC people are finally being intelligent, and discussing how they’ve never seen anything that quite fits these symptoms.

“Get Started On the Assays – I Need to See This Thing to Beat It.”

Assays can give you a lot of information about a virus – reactivity, binding properties, stuff like that. They will never visualize a virus. Dr. Alan Farragut will never see a virus using an assay. Unless we’re talking about figuratively “seeing” a virus by seeing its properties, in which case the use is okay, but I kind of doubt that the scientists were talking in the figurative sense. If Farragut wants to “see” the virus, he’d be looking to crystallize the virus, sequence the virus, or get it under an electron microscope – not run assays on it.

Also, vaccines have been developed without knowing the virus structure (see smallpox). So I think the CDC head of Special Pathogens Branch is being a tad melodramatic in his pronouncement that he needs to see the thing to beat it.

It Isn’t Airborne

Doreen determines via a test that the virus isn’t airborne. Basically, she took a tank of uninfected rats and connected it using a tube (that allows the passage of air and not rats) to a tank with an infected rat. Since the rats in the uninfected tank show no signs of symptoms, they conclude that the virus isn’t airborne. This would be a fine test, except at this point THEY DON’T HAVE A TEST FOR THE VIRUS BEYOND “IS IT SHOWING SYMPTOMS?” As previously stated, frequently, animals can be carriers for diseases – meaning they are infected with the disease, but don’t show ANY SYMPTOMS. So until they get a test for the virus, something not having symptoms doesn’t mean anything. They don’t actually KNOW whether or not the thing’s infected. They also don’t know how long the virus incubates – how long it takes from being exposed to the virus to showing symptoms of the virus. So they have no way of knowing if those rats actually are infected or not.

Also, right after she makes this determination, Doreen takes off her helmet and respirator. This is the single stupidest thing that anybody’s done to date in the show. Just because you have concluded that it’s not airborne DOES NOT mean you get to start ignoring BSL 4 protocols. BSL 4 protocols are specifically for use in cases where you are working with a highly infectious and/or exotic agent THAT YOU DO NOT HAVE A CURE OR VACCINE FOR, and for hemorrhagic agents. I’d like to remind everyone, once again, that they don’t even have a proper screening diagnostic for this virus yet, let alone a treatment or vaccine. So NOBODY should be taking off protective equipment in hot areas, especially since they don’t even know how the outbreak started in the first place. Plus, the virus is hemorrhagic, so they shouldn’t be taking off the suits EVER when they’re in hot zones. And even if she concluded everything in the lab was completely safe, and that there was absolutely no need for BSL 4 protocols, it’s Farragut’s call when they stop using the BSL 4 protocols.

And, that dear children, are all the problems I found in the first 20 minutes and 36 seconds of Helix. It took me over seven hours to make this post, so subsequent posts will happen if I feel like it and have the time.

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The Mann-Spider War: Day 2: IT IS ON LIKE DONKEY KONG

Posted on March 17, 2013. Filed under: Uncategorized |

So. As some of you may know, the relatively peaceful but uneasy ceasefire that I have enjoyed with the Arachnid Nation for the past two years ended abruptly on Friday, March 15. As I was sitting peacefully in bed, an arachnid commando attempted to assassinate me, striking swiftly from the Crevasse Region in a rushing attack designed to catch me off guard whilst I was surfing the internet. Obviously, this cowardly attempt failed, although the unit in question was able to successfully escape back into the Crevasse Region while I was regrouping on the other side of the room. (Please note that a crevasse region is the space between one’s bed and the wall, and not whatever your sick internet mind was thinking.)

I interpreted this invasion of my living space as an act of war, and so declared it upon the Arachnid Nation.

A Brief History of the Mann-Spider War to date:

I was not always at war with the spiders. When I was much, much younger, I had two spider friends. Their names were Helen and Billy. Helen was large and brown, and Billy looked like a really tiny wolf spider. We got along swimmingly. And eventually, Helen and Billy died. And I held full funeral services for them. I’m not kidding about this. I seriously held a funeral for spiders. I dressed in my Sunday church clothes and I made my parents and brother and sister stand there for five minutes while I said a prayer and sang what we’ll generously refer to as a hymn. Those little arachnids got better funeral services than three of my four hamsters.

I don’t know what happened to sour relations. But sour they certainly did.

The hostilities portion of this whole mess got started several years ago (the exact date was not recorded) when, while I was cleaning a crevasse region in my room at my house, I happened upon a flippin BROWN RECLUSE SPIDER living in the region. He had made a web and everything. My mother insists that it was not a brown recluse and that I was overreacting. Which is funny, because this summer when I had funny itchy painful red marks on my torso and said it was shingles and she and my dad and sister had a pow-wow later where they all sat around and laughed and made bets that it was hysteria or a heat rash and then IT TURNED OUT TO BE STUPID SHINGLES she said the exact same thing. In regards to overreacting, not that the rash was not a brown recluse.

Anyway, the reason I know this  spider was a brown recluse is because it looked like this:

Now, I didn’t actually intend to start a war when I bravely delegated its extermination to my mother and her trusty vacuum cleaner in a cunning display of good leadership and tactics. I personally don’t think it unreasonable to request that highly poisonous spiders NOT SET UP SHOP WITHIN THREE FEET OF WHERE MY FACE SLEEPS. And I don’t think it unreasonable to back up that request with sucking death.

But the Arachnid Nation would not stand for my defense of myself and my living space.

In the coming years while I still permanently lived at the house, there were three separate attempts on my life THAT I KNOW ABOUT. There were probably more, but spiders are usually pretty incompetent at planning so I expect that they managed to foil themselves, not unlike when the FBI foils the terror plots that they themselves set up. I realize that this is not a perfect analogy, or even actually really an analogy at all, but I felt like pointing out that this is a thing that the Federal Bureau of Investigation spends time and money doing, instead of arresting actual terrorists.

Anyhoo, those attempts were, in chronological order:

• Woke up to spider crawling on my comforter 8 inches away from my face. Responded by sounding the alarm in a calm and coherent manner that did not, contrary to whatever my mother says, sound exactly like a screaming little girl. Although, in my defense, I was a little girl at the time.
• Found spider entrenched in shelving unit in head board. The spider was entrenched a foot away from where my face sleeps. Responded by sounding the alarm in a calm and coherent manner that did not sound exactly like a screaming little girl.
• Spider air born commando rappelled down from a hallway ceiling to land on my shoulder in what I have to assume was a botched attempt to hit my jugular. Responded by having a conniption fit and refusing to go in that hallway until Mummy and Daddy dusted it.

When I finally went off to college, by and large the hostilities seemed to have ended. There was the occasional flare-up that needed to be put down, but things were going well enough that in my junior year of college I was comfortable enough with the state of affairs to routinely walk up stairs to my apartment that were infested with spiders. This is my senior year, and up until now I haven’t really had any problems except for that one time last year when I found a spider crawling around in my laundry that I was sorting for laundry day that Dad wouldn’t help me deal with because apparently you are no longer allowed to delegate spider killing duties when you are legally old enough to buy the alcohol that you put the spiders into and then light on fire.

The Current State of Affairs:

On Friday, March 15th, I declared the following on Facebook:

Day 1 of Operation Arachnid Annihilation:
I opened hostilities for the day with chemical warfare. Since the arachnids have seen fit to invade my living space, I thought it poetic to respond in kind. I unleashed the full power of 1/8 of a can of Terro Spider Killer on the spider domiciles in the contested stair region of the house.
THIS IS WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU COME INTO MY HOUSE AND GET UP IN MY SPACE, [censored]*.
I look forward to day 2. I have another operation planned, but will not share it for operational security. I have only shared this much because I like to gloat.

End quote. *This is actually me censoring a word that I had already censored. Because my parents read this blog, and I don’t want them to know that I know the word that I censored on FB. Which, for the record, you can say on broadcast television.

Well, I clearly shouldn’t have let them know I was coming. I mean, I knew it was probably a bad idea at the time; it’s right there on the Evil Overlord list – don’t gloat. But I did anyway.

And after a night of hanging out with my friends and watching “Wizard People, Dear Reader” with a bunch of my friends and learning that I don’t dislike Riesling white wine, I had decided to push off Operation: Death From Above until tomorrow. Also, although she has not mentioned anything, I do feel something that is within the same neighborhood of being in the ballpark of feeling a little bit bad about how my downstairs neighbor has had more people over in the past two days than at any other point in the year that I can remember, and the entryway of our house smells…well, it smells like the fine spider-killing product produced by Terro. It smells A LOT. So I figured maybe Operation: Death From Above could wait a couple of days until the house didn’t smell like it was being fumigated.

The following video is what transpired this evening.

A few notes:

I do mention that I captured 2 centipedes (a house centipede and a disgusting normal centipede) and then only mention one carcass. This is because my roommate and I sat and watched the two slowly suffocating (I enjoyed the show, by the way) and the normal centipede only lasted about 8 hours before dying. The house centipede was still going strong the next day. So, since house centipedes actually do a lot of beneficial things like eat cockroaches and other household pests, and more importantly, because my roommate and I were impressed with his will to survive, we let the little bugger go outside the house. And I left the normal centipede lying out on our living room floor for the next 24 hours, and then nailed to my bulletin board for something like three months.

Operational security will be tighter from here on out. You will not know ahead of time what I’m planning, but you will definitely know what transpires.

And on that note:

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Things I Like: Las Drogas

Posted on December 2, 2011. Filed under: Uncategorized |

Good evening all ye gentlefolk. I know it’s been awhile. And I’m calling you gentlefolk because less than an hour ago a rather irritated woman referred to me as “that gentleman coughing over there,” so gentle has been on my mind. I’m also calling you gentlefolk because it sounds uppity and hoity-toity and I feel like talking that way because today I passed one of the most profound passages of adulthood: I went to the doctor by myself without Mommy and navigated the murky waters of insurance payment with only a little bit of help from Mommy.

(Although in my defense, if I had an insurance card – which is something that pretty much everybody thinks I should have, apparently, so I suppose I should figure out how to get one – I could have done it all without Mommy.)

I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that I once again have a sinus infection. The good news is that I’m not in Virginia, so an uncouth slackjawed yokel quack a highly trained and paid medical professional didn’t look at the green viscous fluid oozing out of 5 of the 7 orifices on my head and diagnose me with severe allergies. (I learned this week why snot turns green when you’re sick (but it doesn’t when you have allergies, Dr. Dumba Guy!) As some of you know, I have disembowled a corpse and literally been up to my wrists in the contents of its lower intestinal track. I ate food about a half an hour before that, and the thought did not even occur to me that I should be disgusted. Knowing all of that, I want you to consider how disgusting something has to be in order for me to think it’s gross. So I’m telling you now – green mucous is really, really, really gross and it makes me feel faintly sick inside to think about how much my body has produced during the past week.)

Anywho, I’ve been feeling lousy since Sunday but kept telling myself it was probably a cold and I’d be over it in a few days so I should suck it up and just deal until I got over it. Ironically, that last sentiment was probably stated verbatim at some point on Sunday by a blood relation of mine, or at the very least thought really, really loudly. So to anyone who had that thought – I TOLD YOU I WAS SICK.

After going through the contents of six different boxes of Puffs in five days, 4 of which were completely full before I got to them, I figured I should maybe go see a doctor. The first problem with this was that my campus doesn’t have an onsite clinic, so I needed to go off campus to Trinity, the local clinic. The place isn’t exactly close, and there was no way I would be able to walk there and back without walking in the dark, so that wasn’t happening. I finally resolved to try the free campus medical shuttle, except then I figured out that I wouldn’t be able to get to the clinic and back during the medical shuttle’s operating hours. I then decided to try borrowing my roommate’s car. This was problematic because I didn’t know where my roommate was. At this point it was about 4PM and I was in the College Center, hoping my roommate was working the Control Desk so I could borrow her keys. She wasn’t there. Then I tried asking my boss if she knew where my roomie was. She didn’t, but she was willing to call her cell phone since mine was dead. After all of this, I finally got in contact with my roomie to find that my roomie was perfectly willing to loan me her car, but our mutual friend was out at a clinic until five and using the car.

Instead of assuming that these were all signs that God didn’t want me to leave campus and was in fact actively working against my efforts to gain medical attention, I went back to my apartment and eagerly awaited five. At precisely 4:57PM, I heard a knock from the door in the creepy stairwell and threw caution to the wind and answered the door without taking the time to grab my rammer, which is like a hammer except instead of hitting nails I use it to hit rapists. At precisely 5PM I was driving to Trinity.

I learned an interesting fact about administrative staff in medical centers. They all assume that if they don’t have your medical information on file then you have an insurance card to give them. As I previously mentioned, I don’t have an insurance card. I did, however, have the foresight to get the policy and group numbers from Mom a few days ago, so I used my fallback of looking pathetically earnest and clueless (which was easy because even though I have felt like crap for the past week the fact that I was going to be getting drugs soon made me so very, very happy), at which point the nice receptionist lady took pity on me and sorted it out.

I then waited for an hour, which was not enough to dampen my spirits because I spent that time thinking that however long I sat in that lobby it still wouldn’t be as long as that time in Virginia and that irregardless of a bus crash nobody would be getting in ahead of me who hadn’t been there already.

When I finally did get taken back, a nice lady came in and took my vitals (I didn’t have a fever, which is not surprising and makes me mad because this proves that I can in fact be sick and in need of antibiotics and not have a fever, which would have been useful proof to have for Mom during the twelve years during which she determined whether or not I was sick enough by her standards to avoid attending school that day.) She took my medical history and got the general gist of what had been going on, then got a doctor. The doctor came, listened to my assessment, told me that the lingering cough I had had for the month prior to this was probably mild bronchitis and that both should be cleared up by taking Augmentin, which she would have the pharmacy across from the street fill out. This whole thing took under ten minutes. I think Virginia is feeling inadequate right now. I hope it is.

Then I had to go to the pharmacy to get my prescription filled. Here we ran into some trouble, because the nice overworked lady behind the counter asked me for something called a “bin” number. I looked at her with my best “please-help-me-I-am-a-clueless-college-student-who-has-never-had-to-do-this-before-ever-and-I-have-no-idea-whatsoever-what-I’m-doing” face, which did not actually tangibly help the situation but did have the effect of making the nice lady take pity on me and be really nice. She eventually called my Mom, who did supply the “bin” number. And that is how I dealt with insurance TWICE today. Like a boss. A pathetic boss, but a boss nonetheless.

One other thing I want to mention here: Generations before me – do not EVER whine to me about how rude today’s youths are. Because I have to say – out of the four people who interacted with the pharmacy ladies, the two who loudly talked about the incompetency of the nice lady – WHO WAS STANDING TEN FEET AWAY FROM THEM – were above the age of forty. The woman who just wasn’t getting her prescription fast enough (this would be the “gentleman” lady, so at the very least she was politely calling me a guy) and loudly let everyone know that she was dissatisfied with the level of service and having to be near “that gentleman coughing over there” was over fifty. (I found this really funny because the guy I sat next to (who had also just come from Trinity, and recognized me from the waiting room and said hi) had pneumonia but wasn’t showing any symptoms. Between the two, I think the lady would probably rather have the sinus infection than the pneumonia, but that’s just me.) The only person out of the bunch who treated them as the competently educated and overworked professionals that they were was me. I am twenty. And that fact would not stop my Mom from giving me a slap if I treated the people who were helping me the way those three treated those ladies.

So, to make a short story long, I am currently in bed chilling with my drogas. That I got. By myself. Because I am awesome.

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Snarky Cinema: Resident Evil: Afterlife

Posted on December 11, 2010. Filed under: Uncategorized |

Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010, slowed down beyond any hint of good taste directed by Paul Anderson)

So yeah…that happened. I’m kinda at a loss at where to even start here.

You know, what, no I’m not. We’re going to start off with the slow-mo. Now, I place the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of The Matrix and 300. You see, in The Matrix competent-ish direction used slow-motion to show you cool action sequences that would otherwise be happening too quickly to fully process. 300 used ramping (slowing up and speeding down – in fact, read this post on Cracked.com on the subject; just scroll down past all the color stuff; it’s number 3 ) to play up the comic book/graphic novel stylistic elements of the movie. That’s all fine and good; the slow-mo for these movies adds to them, rather than detracts from them.

Dear Paul Anderson – I don’t know where you got the idea that it was acceptable for you to make a ten minute long opening sequence that would literally have been maybe five minutes long played at normal speed, but please. Knock. It. Off. You know what was nice about the opening credits? NOTHING. Three minutes of slow motion rain falling on a person is not clever, it is not stylistically acceptable, and it is annoying as $*&^. You made an action movie*. An action movie based (incredibly loosely) on a video game. You get to use slow-motion a couple of times during the movie, usually during explosions. YOU DO NOT USE SLOW MOTION TO PAD TWENTY (*@&@#@-$*&^(*& EXTRA MINUTES ONTO YOUR RUNNING TIME. If other people start getting bored during fight scenes, it’s time to take your finger off the slow button, and have somebody slap you upside your head.

*Resident Evil stopped being a horror franchise right around Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Side note: when that movie was coming out, some of the voice-over advertising done by the Sci-Fi channel was done by this British chick. And whenever she said “apocalypse” it was all clipped and Britishy sounding and funny. This is probably one of those things where you just had to be there.

Okay, rant overish. But yes, the slow-motion was more gratuitous than male pencillers drawing Power Girl. Crap, that’s a comic book reference none of you will get – um, how about “the slow-motion was more gratuitous than the violence in Kill Bill. Including that part where Uma Thurman pulls the dude’s eye out of his socket. And then cuts a bunch of people’s legs off.” There. You all should get that reference.

The acting was sub-par as usual; it was a lot more annoying than usual though because what with the gratuitous slow-mo during the fight scenes we did not get any relief from the mediocre acting via cathartic violence. The dialogue was pretty clunky; I again can blame that on Anderson because he wrote the thing. I have listened to better dialogue written by apathetic high school students being forced to write after-school special skits for a grade that they don’t think is worth it.

The special effects were actually pretty good; at no point did I find myself going “Hah…that was bad!” (Quite honestly I might have enjoyed it more if there were some special effects failures.) Now, as for the decisions about what special effects to make in the first place – here is where we got the let down. Alright, so zombies with tentacle mouths are kind of cool and somewhat creepy and at least lifted from the game the series is based on (on a side note: Mr. Anderson, you are not allowed to use slow motion as a tool for building suspense. Lulling us into boredom with five minutes of a character walking down a hallway and then pulling a jump scare is a really annoying tactic. Knock it off.) Zombie dogs that split in half the better to have gigantic massive jaws with which to eat you sounds like a good plan until you realize that it really and truly looks like someone embedded a sarlacc in a Doberman. (For those of you who don’t know, the sarlacc is the thing with the teeth in the desert in Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi or as I like to call it, Star Wars VI: That Kiss is a Whole Lot Funnier Now.) They also threw The Executioner from the video game series in there as well. This was another one of those “It Seemed Like a Better Idea On Paper” ideas again. He ends up looking kind of a lot like a rancor (the thing Luke kills with the gate and the rock…you know what, just watch Star Wars already. Star Wars is to ResEvil as Harry Potter is to Twilight fan fiction.) He also wields a hammer/axe thing that is literally as tall as he is. And he’s ten feet tall. Now, while this is an excellent video game boss, it does not translate particularly well to the silver screen.  At one point this guy who is ten feet tall with a ten foot tall unwieldy and unbalanced hammer-axe wanders through normal-people sized hallways and sneaks up on our protagonists without making any noise at all. Which really stretches the believability of this movie.  Also, he went down far too easily. And once again the fight with that bugger took place almost entirely in slow motion. You know what? The audience should not get bored watching two hot chicks kill a ten foot tall rancor monster with a hammer-axe in a prison shower. But we did. Arg.

Speaking of chicks in showers – I have no idea if Mr. Anderson was shooting for lesbian subtext in this film, but I did half expect the leads (who are both female) to start making out. It was kind of funny and was one of the more entertaining aspects of the film, though.

The plot for the movie wasn’t terrible for a ResEvil film; it had far too much sitting around doing nothing and gratuitious slow motion than actual fighting, so that was kind of annoying.

I should probably mention that I didn’t watch this in 3D; I don’t know if it was converted in post or not (and thus whether the 3D was good or not) and I honestly don’t care. This isn’t Avatar where the lack of any other redeeming qualities can be ignored in favor of the cinematography, so good 3D wouldn’t save this movie anyway.

Questions I Have:

1) Dear Chris and Claire – okay, Alice put a shotgun blast through Wesker’s head. I mean, you could see the hole and everything; it was gaping and kind of hard to miss. So when Wesker went down long enough for you people to shoot him, why did you empty a couple of clips of small caliber bullets into his chest? What precisely did you think was going to happen there? I mean really – when has shooting zombies in the chest ever done anything more than buy a couple of seconds of time? Good lord – I mean, was it at all surprising that Mr. “I-Can-Shake-Off-A-Shotgun-Blast-To-The-Brain-Stem” Wesker got up after that one? Were you not honestly expecting that one?

2) Alice – How exactly are you loading your shotgun with quarters? I’m pretty sure shotguns do not work that way. Also, when did you have time to (highlight for spoiler) plant the bomb that kills Wesker? You really didn’t have time what with wandering off from everybody and not telling them where you were going and all that. Also, don’t think I didn’t notice all the Clone!Alices fighting in heels. That was stupid and annoyed me. No one fights in heels. Except in comics.

3) Dear Mr. Anderson – when, exactly, did the walking dead add “tunnel engineering” to their skill set? Also, I’m pretty sure that if it was a simple matter of tunneling underneath the building and through the layers of concrete that make the foundations of buildings that the prison our protagonists were holed up in would have not been a particularly secure prison.

3/10; I have certainly sat through worse movies but I can’t recall when, exactly. -2 circumstantial bonus because of the slow-mo. Falls squarely under the heading of “so bad it’s bad.” I mean, I like crap like this and this movie was painful. Again, mostly because of the slow-mo.

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