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Study 043 - The Island of Doctor Moreau - Part 3 (Patreon)

Published:
2023-05-18 12:00:05
Edited:
2023-10-06 09:04:21
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

We can't resist crawling back to The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells!

Special thanks to reader Andrew Leman - check out the goods at The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society!

Learn more about Elephants on Acid.

That outro song? Why it's When You Make a Monster by Pitch Black Manor!

Comments

Anna-Elizabeth

Pain. To make a very long story as short as possible, I have a mysterious illness, the myelin was stripped from my lumbar spinal column in early 2018, I was paralyzed from the navel down. With treatment and therapy I learned to walk again. My body will never be what it was before but I walk 5 or more days a week, I can walk miles to buy my groceries and such. They were afraid to prescribe painkillers, I concurred that I do not want to be dependent on opiates. I realized during those months of hospital and rehabilitation that pain would be the price I had to pay to not be helpless. I know people that are addicted to pain meds, and that have accepted helplessness. I sympathize, but I have to let them make their own choices. When my back or my feet hurt, I try to remember being helpless in a trauma bay. What I despise are those people that casually inflict cruelty and pain. It seems like a lack of empathy and reveling in another's misery are valorized and celebrated in these times. So, I try to use my reason and override the pain, and I do not inflict pain and cruelty on others. Choices.

John Escobales

Kate and Leopoldo!! Priceless! 🤣 slid that in like an assassin. After a dirt bike accident I had to have both hip’s replaced. I had walked away from the accident but the impact started a chain reaction that led to arthritis eating the labrum, etc. it took a couple years before I even knew there was any damage. I’m a lifelong martial arts practitioner. It’s been a year since the second surgery and back in the gym but no kicking. Yet. It’s terrifying and amazing what they can do.

Ethan Cordray

I guess I was wrong about the novel not having a cosmic horror element! I'd just forgotten it. But it comes through really strongly in this section, both in Moreau's theological musings and in Prendick's expression of mechanistic alienation. The latter sounds like it could come straight from HPL or Thomas Ligotti, imagining that human consciousness and civilization are the real aberrations amid an incomprehensible universe of fate, instinct, and violence. Gosh, I really think this might be the greatest horror novel of all time.

Jim Cannon

Oh man, a tall beaver callback. Awesome.

Jim Cannon

So I have been reading this book along with you, something I do not usually do, but having failed to read this once I figured I would give it another go. Of course, you don't advertise where the breaks will be (and I have no idea how you're going to squeeze whats left into just one more episode) so I have leap frogged past you every week. Its quite an amazing book; so many ideas and cruelties packed into its pages. This is the sequel to _Frankenstein_ I have been looking for and unable to find. And its been right there all this time!

David Halstead

Maybe Leopard Man sounds familiar because that's the title to a 1943 movie directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by Val Lewton, who also did the movie Cat People, which you covered.

Fred Bednarski

I guess it's time to once again reset the sign: -- It has been [0] episodes since the time traveling romantic masterpiece "Kate and Leopold" has been mentioned. --

DayGloTigerShark

Something that occurred to me about the eponymous doctor's name: Moreau almost sounds like "Moral" if said with the right accent and he's debating the morality of the science-focused version of the old "art for the sake of art" argument. Couple that with someone who is operating on a keyhole-peeping amount of context for the situation deciding he can be the sole arbiter of whether the vivisection is, in fact, moral, and you have an interesting echo chamber of hubris at odds with one run on pure, well, puritanical instinct as to the proper roadmap for medical and scientific progress. I've always been fascinated with Wells' ability to just dismiss any criticism he foresaw about the actual science within the text of a lot of his stories with a sort of "and then he told me the specifics, but I wasn't able to grasp all of it" narrative hand-wave.

Ben A

I am thoroughly enjoying your coverage of Dr. Moreau. For what it’s worth, whenever I teach my evolutionary biology course to anthropology students, the question about human-chimpanzee hybrids comes up. (And no, not because I bring it up…) The whole sordid history you all discussed is actually well known in evolutionary circles, and thankfully that highly unethical series of events never happened. But attempts to hybridize humans with other apes is not likely to produce viable offspring. For one, there are probably barriers that prevent eggs and sperm from being able to merge (this is called a prezygotic barrier). In addition, there is a major chromosomal mismatch between humans and chimps—two of the chromosomes in chimpanzees fused together somewhere along the human lineage that split from our common ancestor. This may cause fundamental developmental problems even if sperm and egg can fertilize. (It’s not always a terminal problem, since horses and donkeys can produce sterile but viable offspring—mules and hinnies.) This is a long way for me to confirm that Tim Burton must have used genetic engineering for those poor out of work ape hybrids.

Derek Scott

Doc M is COLD blooded. Also love the throwback to Stuart Gordon (May the Elder Gods bless him) knowing a gang of weird experiments from the Herbert West episodes.

Andrew M. Reichart

“But now I gotta make it look like a dog cooked it. So I’m really slammed.” Hardest I’ve laughed in a week.

Alan Ricks

One of my favourite Moreau adaptions is 1972’s The Twilight People which is a low budget Filipino production by the great Eddie Romero and features Pam Grier in one of her earlier roles as Ayesa the Panther Woman and I think the fangs really worked for her. Also on the subject of Humanzees, I CHALLENGE anyone to read The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale and not CRY their eyes out at the hate and violence heaped upon the lead characters from the fanatical bigots that can’t accept interspecies love.

Steve

My new shibboleth is the Warrior Pumas of Leicestershire. In fact, I'm sure an ancestor of mine wrote a story with that title that I'm sure would be perfect for this podcast.

Steve

There doesn't have to be a good reason beyond experimentation. We voted for Brexit for no good reason and nothing good has happened. Sometimes that's just the price you have to pay.

Christine M

Interesting that you talked about rabbits eating their babies - just this week I learned that deer eat birds when they get a chance! Not only has it been caught on nest cams, but a Field & Stream article reports, "Researchers in Canada trying to catch birds in mist nets only succeeded in providing an easy meal for the whitetails that ate the birds right out of the netting." Appropriately, I learned this strange fact from a horror game called Scarlet Hollow, which seems like something weird fiction fans would enjoy!

Innsmouth Gold

Actually, speaking as one born just on the edge of hearing for Bow Bells, Chad wasn't far off with cock-ney. The earliest recorded use is 1362 in William Langland's "Piers Plowman" where it is used to mean "a small, misshapen egg", from Middle English coken + ey ("a cock's egg")." However the current meaning is said to come from its rural use as a pejorative term for "effeminate town-dwellers". The Reeve's Tale of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (1386) has a "cokenay" as "a child tenderly brought up" and, by extension, "an effeminate fellow" or "a milksop." By 1600, this meaning of cockney was being particularly associated with the Bow Bells area (that's St Mary-le-Bow church in Cheapside, not Bow church in Bow.) Hence, anyone born within the sound of Bow bells is said to be a cockney, though the term is now more widely used for anyone from the East End of London. Not Dick van Dyke though lol

nils hedglin

I like the fact that Andrew Leman has a good more episode tags than Lovecraft.

Jerome Arnold

I wanted to add that another reason that the leopard-man might sound familiar is its reference in Robert E. Howard's story "Wolfshead" (episodes 307 and 308). {"Ju ju!" he whispered fearsomely. "Fetish man!" Suddenly an idea came to me. I had heard vague tales, little more than hints of legends, of the devilish leopard cult that existed on the West Coast. No white man had ever seen one of its votaries, but Dom Vincente had told us tales of beast-men, disguised in skins of leopards, who stole through the midnight jungle and slew and devoured. A ghastly thrill traveled up and down my spine, and in an instant I had Gola in a grasp which made him veil.}

Z.A. Kahan

For more "Humanzee" goodness, check out "A Report to an Academy" by Franz Kafka for what a former ape thinks of all this.