Here’s a proclamation that will not surprise anyone: I’m a geek.
If you’ve ever seen me on a podcast that would be in the top three things you would notice about me. My geekiness, however, extends beyond what is considered acceptable among polite company. My mind never sleeps, and it’s always looking for stupid stuff to dwell on. It’s not a gift; it’s a particularly interesting curse. Interesting because my geek-tuned mind can be fun at parties, assuming all participants are suitably high or drunk.
That geek mentality was firing on all cylinders while I was watching The Martian for the forty-eighth time.
The story is one that I absolutely love. Mark Watney (Matt Damon), the botanist on a Martian expedition, is incapacitated and left for dead by his crew on the red planet. He then is forced to use his wits and knowledge to survive on a very inhospitable planet while his crewmates and the folks at NASA try to get him home.
What results is cinematic gold. I LOVE The Martian as a film. But every time I watch it, the geek in me explodes in references. I can’t even help it. With every scene, my geek brain begins to regurgitate pointless crap. And one particular scene deserves specific mention here.
In The Martian, Sean Bean is Mitch Henderson, the man responsible for the personnel on the mission that mistakenly left Watney on Mars. When absent-minded but brilliant astrophysicist Rich Parnell (Donald Glover) comes up with a way to rescue Watney from Mars, the big-wigs at NASA set up a secret meeting to discuss the viability of attempting the rescue. In a geeky move, the meeting is called Project: Elrond.
Normally, that’s no big whoop. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a pop culture phenomenon and it’s safe to assume that many people would be familiar with many aspects of the movies, even in the fake universe of The Martian.
Except that Sean Bean is Boromir in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Suddenly, my geek mind jumps to warp speed. Does that mean that the events on Middle-Earth are canon with the events on the near-future Earth depicted in The Martian? If not, who played Boromir in the trilogy? I’m sure the folks at NASA who saw the movies would recognize Boromir sitting in their conference room! Is this like the scene in Last Action Hero where the kid tries to convince Arnold Schwarzenegger that he’s an action movie star by taking him to Blockbuster to show him the display for The Terminator, but the version of that move in THAT universe stars Sylvester Stallone instead of AHNOLD? So is Boromir played by Pierce Brosnan in The Martian‘s universe? Oh my God is Goldeneye somehow in canon with The Martian AND Lord of the Rings???
I’d keep going, but I think I developed a brain aneurysm thinking about all this. And I can’t even stop it from happening!
If all of this sounds like the kind of Six Degrees madness a film nerd would concoct, you wouldn’t be completely wrong. It’s a by-product of my desire to find connections. Things like continuity and connectivity drive me insane. It’s something ingrained into me thanks to a deluge of comic books and recent MCU/DCEU movies. Everything is connected, and any proof of a connection sounds the geek alarms in my head.
But I recognize that sticking to that continuity is counter-productive. If everyone rigidly stuck to the rules of continuity, geek brains like mine would eventually explode. That’s because if all TV and movie series followed the comic rules of continuity, the interconnections would drown out our thoughts.
To explain, I have to go to the origins of a brilliant thought exercise. It was penned by Dwayne McDuffie and features Tommy Westphall.
Tommy Westphall is an imaginary character. He was an autistic child whose father was a doctor in St. Elsewhere, a TV series from the 80s. Think of it as Grey’s Anatomy, but with Denzel Washington, Howie Mandel, and Ed Begley, Jr. Westphall figured very prominently in the series’ final season when it was revealed in the final episode that the events of the series were just a figment of his imagination. It’s a convoluted piece of crap, but that’s how they ended the series. Tommy Westphall imagined the entire series.
That wouldn’t be a big deal to anyone other than a diehard fan of the series. Yes, the cop-out that the whole series was a dream pissed fans off back then. Think Super Mario Bros. 2, except it lasted for eight seasons.
It’s what happened afterward that started a geek phenomenon. And it involves the late Dwayne McDuffie.
McDuffie passed away in 2011 at 49 years old. Considering I’m near that age now reminds me of how mortal we all are, regardless of age. He was also more successful than me when he left us, which reminds me of how much I have wasted my life until now. Then again, I spent about ten of those years playing World of Warcraft. Is that really a waste of life?
(Thinking: Yes. It definitely is. SHIT!)
The late Mr. McDuffie was most known for his writing and production on the Ben 10 and Justice League Unlimited series. But his craziest contribution to geek culture was his argument against continuity in visual media. His argument, named the “Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis,” is pretty heady stuff for geeks like me.
It asks one simple question: if Tommy Westphall imagined a universe, and if continuity in a universe is so important, how many universes did Tommy Westphall envision?? The answer: an infinite number!
McDuffie’s 2002 article, called The Six Degrees of St. Elsewhere, argued that intra-series continuity like those seen in comic books should not be so rigidly enforced in other mediums. Using St. Elsewhere as an example of how inane continuity can be, he wove the kind of web film and TV geeks still add to till this day.
Strap in, folks. It’s gonna get strange up in here!
The St. Elsewhere universe was pretty self-contained, but it did cross over into other TV series. Ed Begley, Jr.’s Dr. Ehrlich and Alfre Woodard’s Dr. Turner did a stint on Homicide: Life on the Street. In that show, Richard Belzer played Sgt. John Munch, a character who would later become a staple in the Law & Order: SVU series. Munch also appeared in HBO’s The Wire and was mentioned in 2010’s BBC series Luther. He also showed up in an episode of The X-Files. John Munch really gets around, right?
But if Sgt. Munch is connected to St. Elsewhere through another show, does that mean that every series Munch touched, and their continuities, are also part of the made-up universe in Tommy Westphall’s head?
You should seriously follow the Tommy Westphall Universe Theory page. To date, netizens and fellow TV show geeks have connected an astounding 419 shows to Tommy. It’s an amazing example of both the power of the geek mind and inanity of following continuity. Just knowing that Tommy Westphall imagined Weyland-Yutani blows my mind and makes me question a few things!
Of course, being a geek, I start finding connections that are not in continuity. Again, I can’t help it. I’m a geek, and the connections just manifest in my brain unwillingly. They don’t even have to make sense, they just have to be there. Here are a few of my silly connections:
- The crew of Ares III, the space mission that left Watney behind, includes Major Rick Martines (Michael Peña), the mission’s pilot and Watney’s friend. Whenever I see him, however, I will forever see Luis from Ant-Man. Holy shit, what if he recounted the events of Watney’s rescue via an Ant-Man-like montage?
- Kate Mara is also part of the crew as the mission’s system operator, Beth Johanssen. Except she’s the Invisible Woman from Fant4stic, right?
- Come to think of it, the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) is part of the crew, too. He’s Dr. Beck, the mission’s flight surgeon. How crazy would it be if he had the metal arm with the Communist star on it?
- On Earth, NASA is run by…Harry from Dumb and Dumber (Jeff Daniels)???
- If Boromir is canon in The Martian, that would mean Gandalf (Ian McKellen), Legolas (Orlando Bloom), and Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) are canon, too…right?
- Wait! That means McKellen’s Magneto from the X-Men series is canon as well! So is Bloom’s Will Turner from The Pirates of the Caribbean and Mortensen’s Tom Stall from A History of Violence! Does that mean that Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) has a connection to the Ares III mission? How funny would it be to see Jack Sparrow ride Ares III into the sea?
- And oh yeah, by the way, CHILDISH GAMBINO (Donald Glover) is part of the team trying to get Watney back to Earth. Well, along with Wong (Benedict Wong) and either Baron Mordo from Doctor Strange or The Overseer from Serenity (Chiwetel Ejiofor), depending on your first inclination.
- Glover is also Aaron Davis in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Davis was mildly hinted to be Miles Morales’s uncle. As in, the Marvel Ultimate universe’s Spider-Man Miles Morales.
- Why do I see so many Marvel references? And WHY IS HARRY RUNNING NASA???
I could be here forever with this, and The Martian isn’t the only movie I could do this with. Imagine how strange John Wick would be if he was actually Neo. Or, worse, Theodore “Ted” Logan. What if Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is really a Jedi? Or, worse yet, Valentine from Kingsmen: The Secret Service? How much money would I throw at a screen to see Eggsy (Taron Egerton) on Mars with a lightsaber???
Okay, my brain hurts really hard right now. I’ll take a break from this geek-gasm. But I know I can’t be the only one who sees crazy non-continuity connections like this. Throw some at me! Let’s go absolutely nuts with this! What’s the craziest connection you could throw out?
