So we all know that every episode of MST3K begins with a remind that “it’s just a show. I should really just relax.” But I think every fan out there has blatantly ignored that advice on multiple occasions. We are all obsessed with the show and thus cannot resist dissecting it in a fashion better fit for “Star Trek.” MST3K basically celebrates its lack of continuity, from casually joking about Servo’s arms not working to not even acknowledging Frank’s tendency to come back to life one week later without fanfare. Sometimes a shallow explanation is made, like citing the existence of an air duct on the way to Servo’s seat in the theater, but, most of the time, the poor continuity is just part of the humor. So I would like to dedicate a weekend discussion to “The Science of Mystery Science Theater.” What explanations have you come up with for aspects of the show that aren’t meant to be explained?
Okay, I’ll give you one I’ve conjectured on: Why was it called “The Satellite of Love?” Perhaps Gizmonic Institute was building the rocket to send couples into space and show them romantic movies to study their, um, reaction? Hmmm?
And how DOES he eat and breathe? What do you think?
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Whenever my MSTie mate, Val, asks a continuity question of one of their movies, my standard answer is,
“Forget it, Jake. It’s MST.”
I do enjoy the host segments, but why do the Mads even give Joel/Mike a break from the movie every 15 minutes or so? It seems it would be more punishing for them to have to watch the movies straight through (and it’s not like the commercials only came right before or after the host segments).
everybody….just relax ;)
“During the Sci-Fi years, the nannites took care of all the repairs to the ship and bots. And where did they come from?”
Crow himself answered that when the Nanites were introduced…he won a couple at a fair (like goldfish) and they just reproduced.
The SOL explanation from “MST: The Movie” doesn’t work because Joel was calling it the Satellite of Love since the KTMA days. It is taken from the Lou Reed song and it is also a reference to “S#!t out of luck” which goes with “Deep 13” which the number 13 is tied to everything bad from folklore days including excrement so therefore, “Deep s#!t”. Joel Robinson naming his “prison” a Satellite of Love was (I think) in keeping with his “stick it to the Man” mentality that kept him from breaking in the face of all those bad movies and was born of the show’s over all “pop and folk sensibility” (which got 86’d the second Mike took over).
I’m still trying to figure out that “reason” that Joel gave for not rescuing Mike and the Bots in “Soultaker”…and how the manager of a hot fish shop launched a rocket into space without some country on this planet shooting it down for violating their airspace…
Ok, I think it was actually explained before but what are Hamdingers? I picture them being like a genetric 7-11 like version of the frozen White Castle Cheeseburgers get at a grocery store.
I’m still stuck on New Crow not just failing to remember Mike in Revenge of the Creature, but also failing to remember meeting him at Revenge of the Creature for a couple weeks after that. I guess it was supposed to mess with we-the-viewers’ heads by putting something confounding up rather than explain his change of voice and apparent stroke, but …
Well, maybe his having a stroke is the best explanation for that. Or a not-quite-right memory duplication from a body transplant or something. Which just raises other questions, of course.
WHy does Cambot’s appearance keep changing?
Okay, I know the off-camera reason, but…
Here’s one: Why do the bots have their own rooms, if only Joel was supposed to be up there in the first place?
Oh, wait. Maybe the SOL was built with some multipurpose rooms.
Well, there you go.
Here’s the one that has always bugged me.
Did Joel ever lie awake at night thinking “why did I use the parts to control when the movies and end to make those damn robots?”
And more importantly, did Mike ever lie awake at night cursing Joel for his short-sightedness in the matter?
#33 – Gizmonic Temp
“And how did Mike climb down a ladder to Earth in ‘Werewolf?'”
One rung at a time.
Not much mystery to the Satellite of Love/Lou Reed reference…
I always thought Frank was calling Dr. F “Steve” in reference to local Twin Cities morning show “Good Company” starring Sharon and Steve.
Same thing with “Rocket Number 9”–I always just figured this was an obvious reference to the Sun Ra track of the same name.
Do we all agree that within the reality of the show itself, the Satelliters know and have always known that the Mads were broadcasting the experiment as a TV show ?
To Dr. Batch comment #45
Crow tells Mike during the Leechwoman episode that he won two nannites and the county fair..and..well…uh-huh-huh-huh…..
The answer to the “Steve” question comes from an interview with the Brains themselves. They said that they used the name “Steve” because it called to mind a “strong” male archetype like the ones you see in action/adventure movies from previous eras (ostensibly, Steve Reeves, etc).
Here’s a big plot hole I just thought of: Joel built the bots, including Cambot. If Dr. Forrester’s plan was to sell the experiments to cable tv, how was he planning to do that (and watch Joel’s reactions to the films) before Cambot existed? Unless Forrester built Cambot, which would explain all of the different Cambots: as technology progresses, Forrester sends the SOL a new Cambot.
@56 Joseph Nebus — I always though that New Crow’s “forgetting” of Mike was more of an attempt to tweak Mike, rather than any actual memory loss.
If mike and the bots have a time machine why don’t the three of them just go 5 minutes into the past and hide out on earth?
But again, most importantly,
if wasn’t cheese, what was it?
#28 – That is a possibility. But since Mike almost killed himself on the railings, that really didn’t seem to work, did it? Unless, of course, Tom wanted to make sure that he was the one who took Mike out and not Gypsy…
#24 – So, since it was specifically said that the experiments were being recorded and sold to cable TV, how come nobody at Gizmonic Institute said, “Hey, that’s Forrester on that show! What happened to him anyway? Has anyone checked the basement recently?”
I always took that as a subtle dig at the network – no one would ever find out because nobody watches Comedy Central.
Here’s a big one from Soultaker:
We all know that Joel made his way up to the SOL in whatever bucket of bolts he cobbled together on Earth after discovering that the satellite was going to start malfunctioning after ten years. And when he returns to the SOL, he cheerfully informs Mike, Servo and Crow that he’s come to “fix things”.
Fix things. Not rescue them and bring them to Earth. And Mike and the robots generally accept this. Is this a sign that Mike, Servo and Crow have resigned themselves to being stranded in space forever? Yes, Mike does ask about the possibility of Joel bringing them all home, and we know that Joel says he “doesn’t want to”, following it up with the big rah-rah speech about how being stranded in space made him a man, and how it will do the same for Mike Nelson.
Again, they just accept this. And poor Mike Nelson is more flabbergasted at the sighting of TV’s Frank down in Castle Forrester than the fact that someone had traveled all the way up to the Satellite of Love without any assistance whatsoever from Brain Guy, fixed the satellite, and then went home after specifically stating he didn’t come to rescue them. Oh, and there’s that matter of Mike being envious of Joel’s career as a fast food restaurant manager down on Earth. Not once does it occur to him to perhaps curse Joel for stranding them again in a satellite that’s guaranteed to start going haywire in another ten years!
Sometimes I wonder…does Joel’s reluctance to take Mike and the robots back to Earth hint at a deeper connection between the original host and the Forrester family? Or was Joel’s spacecraft simply not big enough to accomodate a second adult male and three robots? We may never know.
Personally, I would have brought back Joel for the very last episode, where he, wracked by guilt at leaving Mike, Tom and Crow on the satellite, visits Castle Forrester, where he “accidentally” brings down the satellite. Better yet, he could have taken his ship back up to rescue them personally from the SOL.
Speaking of the final episode…isn’t it amazing that the Satellite of Love didn’t begin its freefall into Earth’s atmosphere until just moments after the movie ended?
#22 That brings up a new issue, if relief shuttles bring up new supplies, why not hop on board and escape back to Earth?
How did those pasty Sumerian-types from “The Mole Men” get into the SOL?
If Mike can dive down the SOL (like he did in Horrors of Spider Island, to see if they’d become languid and murmuring) couldn’t they try that to escape from their orbital captivity?
@#1 There’s plenty of out-of-universe answers for why Frank calls Dr. F “Steve”, but my favorite in-continuity answer: Steve was Frank’s boss when he worked at Arby’s, and Frank just calls him that absent-mindedly. Like when a kid accidentally calls their teacher ‘mommy’.
It’s such a huge ship, yet we only see two rooms?
(That’s what I always found funny about “Red Dwarf” too. They live on this massive ship, yet I think the show only showed about 5 or 6 rooms over like 7 years)
#72- There have been a few theories concerning Joel’s not rescuing the crew.
The creepiest theory that I’ve read, is that Joel was a ghost, and that’ why he didn’t bring M&TB back with him. It may also be why Frank needed to get Joel’s soul.
thebutcher #4: As for the breathing thing, I can buy that Joel/Mike can breathe on the actual ship, but in the vacuum of space, having hot chocolate with Pearl? Don’t think so!
Perhaps the Widowmaker has Spelljammer-style gravitics, and thus is surrounded by its own atmospheric shell, allowing for what we see happen in Time Chasers.
Why does a satellite have a movie theater?
Speaking of the last episode and Gypsy…..
So given her large (and no doubt voluptuous!) size how did
she survive the crash to earth? Was she pulling a Bernie Madoff
scam off on Mike, the bots, and Mrs. Forrester to accumulate the
funds to begin her software company? P.S., one possibility, the
extra Cheese Coop Crow from Time Chasers may have become a Wisconsin
cheese mogul and formed a partnership with Gypsy.
And what ever happened to the nanites?
#79 – Actually, the Cheese Coop Crow mosied over to Minnesota and became Governor.
In the MST Movie, every time Tom says “Remeber, We’re parked in the dinubrian slime devil lot.”, the Trekker in me SCREAMS to the high heavens! It’s Denebian Slime Devil Tom!!! Get it thru your thick dome! It never stops bugging me.
Also, in Time Chasers, when Crow goes back to convince Spare Crow not to talk to Mike, He changed his timeline so when Spare Crow stays in the cheese factory, Crow should cease to exist. I hate Time Travel.
@ “Why was it called “The Satellite of Love?”
I always thought that one was obvious. First, someone on the writing staff clearly liked Lou Reed’s song of the same name, so it made it a fun reference and also a name that added an atmosphere of its own to the show. Second, the acronym “SOL” (s**t out of luck) is certainly fitting for an orbiting satellite with hapless passengers marooned on it forced to watch bad movies. Great layered meanings for a clever comedy show full of obscure references and play-on-words gags.
There’s a simple answer to every one of these continuity questions.
“Because it’s funny.”
what is a load pan bay?
Here’s another thought that struck me. The whole purpose of this experiment is to drive Joel (or Mike) mad by making him watch horrible, crappy movies, right? Now, when Dr. F and Larry/Frank send them the movie to watch, they usually know what they’re sending, and I’m not just talking the title. They know about the content of the movie (Rock Climbing, Joel!), which, to me, indicates that they’ve actually seen the movie. Judging by their behaviour, they can be classified as mad. Therefore, it seems likely that by choosing the movies themselves to make Joel/Mike insane, they have actually made themselves insane. Ergo, they are the proof of their own theory. QED.
I say just stick to the show’s mantra, “It’s just a show, I should really just relax.” The continuity errors never bother me. I still love the show and I always will. Now whenever I hear SOL, I always think “Satellite of Love” rather than what it really stands for. That’s how much I’m obsessed. :-D
What DID happen to the nanites?….Did they just get bored and leave by themselves….or …did Joel take them with him (in the episode SOUL TAKER) after he fixed the sattilite for Mike and the Bots?….I do not know, really…I am just throwing some ideas around about that.
Not that it bothers me, but:
Just how did the Umbilicus (from Seasons 6 and 7) work, anyway?? And wasn’t Gypsy connected to it at one point?? And then after that it was just a hatch on the bridge of the SOL, right? What the Heck?
–
I always thought the disregard for continuity was just another bit of “B-movie Mise-en-scène” that MST3k displayed over the years, along with the cheap looking sets and special effects, the wacky sci-fi scenario, and the quirky-oddness of some of the actors and characters (Every time Joel flubs a line and keeps going, I think it is intentional).
–
Really though,
half the genius of the show is hid in the phrase “repeat to yourself, “It’s just a show, I should really just relax.””
@gorto #84 “what is a load pan bay?”
I take it you don’t have cats?
What ever happened to Dr. F after he became the Star Baby! He was last seen in Pearls arms.
@ #84- I think the load pan bays are… um… how the ‘bots “relieve” themselves.
Time to get dirty.
Is there salt-peter in the SOL’s water supply to keep Joel and Mike from having any “urges”? If not, then that might explain that stuff that was “not cheese”. :blush:
I guess Joel had his projects to keep him occupied.
#90: Well Pearl did say that she had to kill Clayton by snuffing him out with a pillow after he grew up again and started down the same road as before in Creature’s Revenge.
I proposed a theory back when the episode guide on this very site made it to season 8 oh, so long ago, that the Bill Crow was in fact Timmy, who had arrived at the edge of the universe, hopped aboard the SOL and fulfilled his fantasy of becoming Crow so well that he himself believed it! He either did away with the real thing or somehow prohibited him from coming back aboard later (or perhaps, the real Crow, like the actor portraying him, had just had enough of bad movies and decided life at the edge of the Universe was better).
“I do enjoy the host segments, but why do the Mads even give Joel/Mike a break from the movie every 15 minutes or so? It seems it would be more punishing for them to have to watch the movies straight through (and it’s not like the commercials only came right before or after the host segments).”
I’ve noticed that, generally, the breaks come right around when the movie in question starts to get – for want of a better term – ‘good’. This doesn’t hold for all breaks in all movies, of course, but there have been some where the guys have to leave just as the plot begins to make sense, or when an action sequence is about to start, or … well, you get the picutre. Gotta get ’em outta there before the good (or at least mildly interesting) stuff happens.
#56 – Crow’s Forgetting of Mike:
Crow’s forgetting Mike was all solved in episode 803-The Mole People, when Crow was doing an archeological dig on the bridge, and was finally convinced by Mike & Tom that he was suppressing everything.
It was then that he suddenly remembered them both and greeted them.
I guess the problem is that many people dont see the episodes from 801-809 so stuff like that isnt talked about much.
How do the bots “eat”? RAM chips aside the bots frequently ask for sandwiches and eat waffles and seem to know what stuff tastes like but how can they do that without having digestive tracts or tastebuds and the like?
And why *would* they need a ‘load pan bay’ anyway? I mean, real robotic and mechanical devices, like cars, tend to have closed systems. You don’t really need to change and/or flush fluids except very infrequently. So why do the bots seem to need to flush their fluids so frequently?
#97 – You’re only assuming they don’t have some form of digestive system. They don’t have to be direct parallels to traditional robots. Remember, Joel had to make them out of whatever parts he could find, and he couldn’t make them dependent upon the SOL power system, as that would shorten his own life expectancy. Given his inventiveness, I could see him coming up with a way for them to “consume” things, extract power from them, and then excrete the remaining stuff.
As for taste, we have equipment (mass spectroscopy, e.g.) which can determine the chemical makeup of an unknown substance. Just attach that to a neural network with a preference system, and there you go. Remember in episode 1004 (Future War) when Pearl sends up the LSD-laced veggies and Crow lists out the ingredients? I’d imagine it might work something like that ; )
I have not seen every episode, so my theories may be easily discredited. I propose that the Mads had nothing to do with the design or construction of the SOL, and that having 1 person on board watching movies was probably not its original purpose. The fact that the theater seats 6+ people and that there is all kinds of stuff at Joels disposal suggests that the SOL was built for more people and the Mads basically stole it for their experiment.
I would also like to question whether or not Joel built Gypsy. If she controls the higher functions of the Satellite, she either came with the ship, or Joel originally had to control everything himself. Maybe he built Gypsy first as a relief and enjoyed the company, so he then built a couple friends he could actually converse with out of what was available, including “special parts”.
About the break J/M&tB take from the theater. If I’m not mistaken, the Mads(usually) watch them watch the movie. The periodic breaks may be for the Mads’ benefit.
Why didn’t Joel save Mike and the bots? Maybe he didn’t know that another human was shot up(he did seem surprised to see Mike). Perhaps Joel went up at great expense to save the bots, under the pretense of “fixing” the satellite(he thought somebody would be watching and would try to stop him). When he found out Mike was there and he knew he couldn’t bring him back too, he quickly made the decision to not seperate the bots from Mike and just went ahead and made the repairs and was on his way.
I can offer no explaination for the existence of Cambot. I think on that subject, all we can do is Just Relax.
@ “What do you think?”
I think continuity and consistent reality were not of hardly any concern on MST3K. If anything, such matters were deliberately ignored for the sake of comedy. Cataloging inconsistencies can be fun, but in the case of MST3K they can hardly be called mistakes.