The Core Disaster Moviesode of 2003 | Episode 99

Hey everybody. Before we begin today's presentation, it occurred to me that the best way to indulge in today's stupidity is in the format of video, which, as a special thank you to you for another great year, I have edited together and made free at patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo, no strings attached, just my hopes for a happy holidays and a fantastic New year. Thank you again, and on with the show. You ever watched one of those big blockbusters sci fi action adventure movies that turns out to be so bereft of technical and scientific merit or accuracy that you almost start to like it? Me neither, Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world on today's very special charismas Disaster Movie Sode. We'll start by joining the shortest, worst, and probably my personal favorite business presentation of all time. Will learn how the US government tried to spite its enemies by giving the planet the al Daran treatment twice, and we'll meet the man tasked with fixing all of this and saving the earth and everything on it, but who doesn't even know how to put on a coat. We haven't done this in a while, but it was so popular that it is my distinct pleasure to bring you this very special presentation for today's story, currently sitting at thirty four percent on Rotten Tomatoes. A movie that critics called a modestly fun exercise and disappointment and as aggressively loud and obnoxious as it is tiresomely stupid. A movie I saw in the theater and spent a good chunk of saying that's not how that works, that's not even a thing. A movie that can't and won't give you back your two hours and fifteen minutes which I sat through so you didn't have to. It comes with a mixture of pride and thankfulness and apologies and a sprinkle of Christmas cheer that, without further ado, I present to you the two thousand and three Aaron Eckhart disaster masterpiece, The Core. Grab your popcorn and your safety glasses and kick your kids out of the room, because otherwise this is definitely going to make them stupid. And let's begin the year is maybe two thousand and three, maybe it's twenty thirty, it's not super clear. We begin our day in Boston in an office tower overlooking what appears to be a small street festival. It's a celebration for Green Earth Day, with vender stands and portable carnival rides and Harry Krishna's for some reason. Also not sure why they just wouldn't celebrate regular Earth Day. Yes, maybe they have some aggressive trademark lawyers or something. Anyway, I think the larger point is this serves to remind us that the Earth is our only home, using vegetarian hot dogs and non biodegradable latex balloons. But we're not here for the guilt and the flyers. We are here to join a trio of youngish looking Brooks Brothers business nerds, bumping elbows excitedly about to enter a lavishly appointed conference room to give the presentation of their lives. Their leader, Tom makes an odd observation that his watch has stopped, which I'm sure that's fine. Besides, as they remind themselves, thirty million dollars is on the line here, so off they go as they enter the room before a full panel of executives. Their leader Tom says before we begin, and almost immediately the room begins to melt as he becomes woozy and collapses into the boardroom table. Everyone is expecting him to splash dramatically headfirst through the glass, but the table says no. Instead, he thuds cartoonishly like a human shaped ham, with his cheeks splayed out like an airbag and a look on his face that says, I regret nothing, but also I'm not home right now if you include the thud. His presentation lasted all of eleven seconds. Meanwhile, while the executives are squeaky dragging his corpse off to make sure the table's okay. Outside, we don't immediately see if they've accidentally rerooted highway traffic through the street festival, but there is enough screeching tires and truck horns to cover one of our traffic disaster episodes. There are at least half a dozen unrelated fatal car accidents in this one intersection below. To all appearances, everyone just forgot how to drive, and not just that. It's more like they forgot how to breathe. There are people on the street doing the same face squad as tom upstairs. Apparently they just turned off and went full paper weight. One lady clings lifelessly to a small carousel ride, just sweeping the sidewalk as it goes around and around while people run for their lives. But from what, we have no idea. Meanwhile, in a University of Chicago lecture hall, a man named doctor Joshua Keys is teaching a class of students who look so bored they look like they've auditioned to be in a sequel to the nineteen eighty seven Mark Harmon movie Summer School. Doctor Keys is at the front of the room, using a trumpet to try to show them how sound waves can help us understand the underlying architecture of our planet. When two FBI agents interrupt and tell him to come with them if he wants to live. They're pretty humorless, and I don't know if they had clearance to shoot him if he didn't obey, But between the two of them, maybe one of them blinked, and neither of them managed to eke out a smile. We can tell doctor Keyes is nervous because as they escort him away, in what has to be the strangest thing that we have yet seen today. He evidently has completely forgotten how coats work, and his is halfway wrapped around him like a swayed straight jacket. This was an eighty five million dollar movie, and this was the best take they had. He also tells he doesn't know what not knowing means. He doesn't know what security clearance is, and he doesn't even know what a jet is. He looks and sounds insane, and we are forced to wonder if they're removing him because it has become apparent he is too dangerously underqualified to teach well. They jet him off to Washington, DC and force them into the secret underground tunnels beneath the US Government Publishing office, just down the street from the Capitol Building. The passages are filled with military personnel, and by this point he has corrected his coat and looks like an adult. He finds himself unexpectedly reunited with an old friend, a biochemist named Serge Leveck, who is kicking the absolute mared out of a vending machine, and without explanation, they are put in a large room full of vehicles and military equipment, including armored personnel carriers and what appears to be some kind of anti aircraft gun, none of which makes sense, and none of which they noticed, including all of the tables with the dead bodies under tarps. They're just so into glad handing and carrying on about how bonable Surge's wife is, and they don't even take notice of what should have been the overpowering stench of corpses off gassing all around them. And our view is from above, and a few of them appear to have urinated, and they nearly track through a giant puddle apiss as they reminisce. Devoid of all senses, they are caught completely unaware until one of the corpses, so fresh that rigor hasn't even set in, swings its arm and pats Doctor Keys on the bum, at which point Doctor Keys definitely tracks through and stands in a large puddle of urine without comment, just shock. At this point, a man with a wallpaper of badges on his chest and insignia from the military subtly threatens them with death, then introduces himself as General Tom Purcell, and then tells them that at ten thirty that morning, thirty five two people inside a ten block radius in Boston, all dropped dead for whatever reason, thirty two bodies were immediately squeegeed off the street, packed into an airplane, flown four hundred and fifty miles to DC, snuck into this building and arranged on tables just so that these two people could take guesses on what happened. This could have been an email. And I can't help but feel for the poor families who are all, what do you mean you don't know where my husband's body is. Doctor Keys almost immediately guesses that, because they weren't sneezing or anything first, that clearly they must have all had pacemakers and were attacked by an empulse from an electromagnetic weapon. It's a hell of a guess, and perself seems to like it. At that same time, on the other side of the ocean, in Trafalgar Square in London, thousands of squeaky birds begin running into the ground, into statues, buildings, tourists, you name it. Glass is falling, some one loses an eye, people forget how to drive. A double decker bus flips onto its side, and these do not sound like any kind of pigeon I've ever heard before. But as quickly as it begins, it stops. They just fly off, and I don't know, maybe they go attack Bristol. We just don't know. So back in Chicago, with a seeming emp attack on pacemakers and the one hand, and a bird demic in London in the other, the gears in doctor Key's head start spinning. He tells his subordinates that he will illegally sign off on any PhD thesis they can scribble as long as they help him with two quick things. First, plot every example of every living creature that followed or traveled along the Earth's magnetic field lines in the last two years, along with every strange atmospheric condition, every plane crash, everything, that's all. And second, they need to create a three D model of the planet with all of those historical field lines laid over it. Oh, I guess three things. Really, They then just need to map out every anomaly and quantify it all into computer code. Whatever he's after, it's obviously worth his breach of academic integrity, pending conviction for professional misconduct, and of course the destruction of the institutional reputation of the University of Chicago. And I need to point out that sixty seconds before making this grand request he had to ask how birds fly. This same man who couldn't figure out how to button up a code but also somehow correctly guessed the pacemaker correlation in Boston. His intelligence is at best wildly inconsistent, and now he has a theory about what's been happening, and he quietly prays that he's wrong. He does this by literally saying be wrong, over and over to keep things interesting. Let us now travel several hundred miles above the Earth's surface and join the crew of the u u US space shuttle Endeavor as they appear to do a few carefully plotted spinny spins over Australia in preparation for re entry into Earth's atmosphere for a landing at Edward's Air Force Base in California. Commander Robert Iverson is floating feet first from the space toilet, kind of crop dusting everyone before taking control of the shuttle from Major Rebecca Childs, who, as it turns out, is the youngest person to ever be in space. And we're just gonna call her Beck or Beck's from now on. Anyway, it's time to land, and they're gliding their way in, pressing all the appropriate buttons and switches, skimming along the atmosphere, whipping up all kinds of plasma trails behind them, which makes everyone pretty happy at Houston. When the coms drop out, they're interrupted as they enter the atmosphere, and when they are restored, some intern at Capcom notices they are all of a sudden weigh the hell off their expected flight line. Not sure if Iverson nudged the stick while reaching over to scratch something or the earth just sped up underneath them when no one was looking, but a Microsoft alert pops up, saying they are now one hundred and twenty miles off course. This means they are now headed straight for downtown Los Angeles. Commander Iverson says, we are not going to crash into Los Angeles, and literally two seconds later, Capcom says, these dudes are definitely going to crash into Los Angeles and they're going to do it at three hundred knots. They're all losing their ship, and becks improvises a plan to land in the Los Angeles River, which, if you're familiar, is a river in name only. It's actually just a concrete floodplain covered in bridge stanchions and old grocery carts. Thankfully, somehow the shuttle turns out to be an incredibly maneuverable and awesome air and ground vehicle, which kind of goes against everything I know about the Space Shuttle. But boy, am I glad I'm wrong, because they whip around over Dodger's Stadium and make a straight line towards the river. They nosedive the thing right into the river basin, hit all the brakes they've got, slalom around pillars and pylons, drop the landing gear, which amazingly just whips back up into the belly of the shuttle in less than two seconds, which drops them hard onto the ground, where they then spin uncontrollably before finally coming to a stop, not in flames and pieces, but instead mere feet away from some comically unaware bridge worker who could not hear the sound of one hundred and sixty five thousand pounds of skidding metal over the sound of an angle grinder. Later that same day, with all doctor Key's impossible requests completed and the computer code compiled, Doctor Keys ambushes a man named doctor Conrad Simsky outside but appears to be the Vancouver Art Gallery, and convinces him into reviewing his theory. Why he agrees to this I cannot say. Anyway, After reviewing his cryptically awful dissertation, Simsky's all nah, but Keys is all Johan and leaves saying that she is about to hit the fan. Next thing you know, Doctor Keys and Serge are now drunk in a bar when guess who drops by. It's those same two FBI agents. And I don't know what their impression of him was the first time, but this time they tell him that they have no sense of humor and are in fact willing to shoot him. This time. They dragged him to Virginia, to the Pentagon, where a roundtable of vice admirals and intelligence officials are there to hear how doctor Zimski discovered an earth shattering problem. He just wanted doctor Keys there in case anyone needed water or anything. They described how the Earth is basically a whole lot of dirt surrounding a core of trillions and trillions of tons of hot liquid iron spinning at one thousand miles per hour, and how we are just insects living on the skin of it all physics one oh one hot metal moving fast makes an electro magnetic field, which on Earth we used to deflect all kinds of radiation from space and the Sun from unwinding our DNA and cooking us where we stand. And then because reasons, they explained that the outer core has stopped spinning. I'd explain how this happened or how they even know this to be true, but that information was not made available as part of the source material. It was just sort of glossed over, hoping maybe no one would notice. They said the results would start with a plane or two flipping out of the sky, followed by the death of every electronic on Earth, followed by crazy static lightning superstorms with hundreds of lightning strikes per square mile every minute. And after that it gets bad. Once the field collapses, the Sun's radiation and solar winds would fry them like an aerosol soaked apple. They say they have three months until they're living in the Stone Age, and a year before the entire surface and all life on it are barbecue away into dust and blown into space. Doctor Keys then invites them to throw up, but the Lee General keeps his barf to himself and challenges them to restart the core. Sure, it's the size of Mars, and it's a superheated hyperfluid of molten iron and nickel at nine thousand degrees fahrenheit, two thousand miles down and a thousand miles thick. And sure the pressures involved are in the millions of pounds per square inch, but see what you can do. It is worth pointing out the deepest humanity has ever dug or drilled into the earth was seven miles using a two inch drill head. So the big issue is, even if they knew how to do it, they can't actually get there. Now, this is the point in the film where I start to squirm in my seat a little. Having watched this a few times now, I have a theory that the field dropped early and they all died mid sentence, and the rest of the film is some kind of after life dream. You are going to need to suspend your disbelief for the rest of the story. It'll be worth it, though. The next thing we know, we are choppering to a massive, rusted over warehouse somewhere on the Utah Salt Flats. It's at this point I should mention every time we see doctor Zimsky, he will be lighting a cigarette. He has literally done this every time we have seen him on screen so far. We are here to visit doctor Braselton, and I'm just gonna end up calling him Bras at some point. Well, braz hates doctor Zimsky for stealing his research. They have a little back and forth about it, and doctor Keys is like, yeah, I get you. Doctor Brazlton is the man to meet and skipping right into it. He has taken the concept of using the same kind of ultrasonics we use to blow up kidney stones and turned it into a rickety old back to the future three looking device that uses high frequency pulse lasers to melt a perfectly cylindrical hole right through a mountain. And because reasons that we don't understand, doctor Brazleton has not been swooped up in a global bidding war with every scientific and political powerhouse on the planet. He's just a guy in the desert creating miracles of science by himself for the last twenty years. And he didn't have a long beard or clean xboxes on his feet, he doesn't talk to himself in the third or fourth person, and he has managed to invent, for no good reason whatsoever, every single item that they are going to need to get their mission under way. Whatever that is. He then goes on to unveil a new super material he whipped up in his spare time that's strong enough to withstand even his crazy laser device. When asked, he says it's called unobtainium for short, because the full name has thirty seven syllables, and unobtainium, as stupid a word as that is, is actually a term that's been used in real engineering since the nineteen fifties to describe a hypothetical or impossible material and need to make a design work. So yeah, it's lazy, but at least it's not unoriginal. Oh And he then goes on to unveil the prototype for a ship he's also been working on that has an impossibly strong and powerful shell, strong enough to resist oh, I don't know, a magical trip to the Earth's mantle and core. Unlike everything else that is known in physics and geology, thermodynamics, solid state physics, material sciences, metallurgy, chemistry, mechanical and structural engineering, on optanium gets stronger the more pressure it's under, And to celebrate his accomplishments, they hand him a check for fifty billion dollars and tell him he has three months to make all of his projects work flawlessly. Now this is all still pretty hush hush, and we as the audience, don't even know what we're doing yet. So they're going to need to keep rumors off the Internet, and to do this, we now find ourselves joining the Feds committing a warrantless home invasion of a young computer hacker named Theodor Finch who prefers to be called Rat. While they're breaking his door down, he's running around his apartment excitedly, shoving discs and hard drives into his microwave, his toaster, his garbage disposal. Also that he can say nothing, they offer him jail or a job controlling the entire world's Internet so nobody could talk about their super secret plan in exchange for xenotapes and hot pockets. We still don't know what the plan is, so we return to Washington once again. As it happens, Becca's heroic plan to save the Shuttle and the people of Los Angeles got her sacked, but on second thought, she is now re hired and together with her former shuttle commander Bob Iverson, they are now going to be piloting doctor Brazltan's supertrain or magic bus or whatever we're gonna call it. So finally, after doctor Keys spends full minutes fighting with a necktie, they unveil the plan to the press, which now completely He confuses me on why they needed a hacker to keep it a secret, but you know writing, and here's the plan. So doctor Brazzleton had three months to build a ship strong enough to reach the center of the Earth, and a lot of cigarettes died so doctor Zimsky could finish the math on how to use nuclear explosives in the core to restart the planet's interior rotation like they were swirling water in a bathtub. They didn't want to detonate it like Alderon. No, they wanted to carefully restart its core. And at this point Bob Iverson spoke up. He did apologize, pointing out he was not an expert in these matters, but he did wonder out loud how it would change things if the core ended up being thicker or thinner than they calculated, and how it would affect how the explosions would function in practicality. This was an important moment in the film. It was as if he had stepped in from a different movie, a more rational and way considered film where scientists question their own assumptions to arrive at the absolute truth of a situation. But in this film, Zimski said yeah, yeah, yeah, and shut them down by saying that the core could be made of cheese, and science is all guesswork. It's not the kind of thing they have etched into the walls of MIT. But here we are, as the ship somehow came together. We realize it is made out of magic and can do magic things. But it did not yet have a propulsion system, so they whipped up a small experimental nuclear reactor to help push it along. And I don't know how long you've been listening to the show, but experimental nuclear reactors have been a problem since episode one. The ship was divided into six compartments like cars on a train, the locomotive, navigation, living quarters, engineering, the bomb compartment, and an entire compartment dedicated to weapons control. Oh and if any compartment became damaged in any way, it could be ejected to save the rest of the ship. Of course, the compartments were lined like a train, so if they lost anything forward of the bomb compartment, the mission was over, I'm thinking, but maybe I'm overthinking. The entire world had come together to build this thing in utter secrecy, which frankly again makes no sense because as people go, people are terrible at keeping secrets. I guess that's why they had Rat unethically controlling and destroying free speech around the world with his private trojans and viruses and what not, just to make sure no one was the wiser. Meanwhile, Becca and the crew spent time in simulators trying to prepare for what they are about to experience, which is being voluntold to climb into an untested death machine full of nuclear bombs and a tweaky new kind of untested nuclear reactor, to laser their way at high speed through the entire Earth's mantle, and fly around inside the exquisitely dense outer core, dropping set bombs like the Easter Bunny, and then somehow getting out of there before getting blown up or crushed or incinerated. Anyway, Commander Bob gave Becks a speech about how the fact that she was such a great pilot made her a crappy leader because she had never had to purposely kill someone before. Dot dot Dot. It's not really much of a pep talk, and there wasn't much time for her to feel sorry for herself, remember that warning about the crazy static build up and the superstorms while Rome was pretty much destroyed by lightning, starting with the most recognizable monuments of course, and seeing this general Purcell was all, okay, good stuff, Let's get that ship in the mud. The plan was to drop it vertically straight down into the Mariana's Trench, which is the deepest point on Earth, which was a plan to save them time digging through the mantle, and it worked perfectly, no questions asked. Even terribly cged whales came to watch as the magic superlaser ate through the stone in bedrock and mantle and whatever like. It wasn't even there. I mean, their entry was met with an earthquake and falling rocks and exciting music and a steering issue that threw them into a spiral. But when it came to it, the lasers cut through the rock at an almost magical speed, matching their velocity the whole way. And don't ask me how since I cannot keep a Wi Fi signal in my bathroom because it's too far from my router. But somehow for reasons, mission control was able to keep real time radio contact and also a kind of radar that actually allowed them to track the vehicle's position beneath the Earth. Now my understanding is, of course you point radar at the ground and you're going to see ground. But again, here we are. I just have to assume doctor Razzleton designed a special device and his off hours that allowed them to peer through the entire planet and create a full MRI quality three D visual cat scan of the globe and everything happening inside it as they made their way happily through the mantle on the way to the core. It took them the next twelve hours to travel seven hundred miles or eleven hundred and twenty kilometers. They're doing just under highway speed, with no slowing down and no stops along the way. And the only wirl probably had to worry about is if they ran into something so dense that the laser wouldn't let them through in time and they would explode. And just now that they're having this conversation for the first time, they also realized there could be empty pockets of space somehow inside the mantle that the computer wouldn't know what to do with because again they're only talking about it now, so they never programmed it for that kind of thing. And at this point they barely had time to buckle their seat belts before they hit one of those empty spaces and crash endlessly and dramatically, finally halting in an unbelievably massive crystalline cave. Now, as far as I know, they should have just popcanned and crushed right where they stood, but instead they put on spacesuits and went for a walk outside to see what the hold up was. Commander Bob gave up as well placed pragmatism and skepticism and delivered the line, well, at least we know our suits can handle the pressure. I might trust them to protect me from bees, but not sharks, let alone eight hundred thousand plus pounds of pressure per square inch. Their guess was they were inside a geode wrapped inside cobalt. It was a little like watching a space movie from the early nineteen hundreds where humans arrive on the Moon, hit their knees with their hats and say, smell that moon air. The laser could cut through literally anything, except in this case, a single shard of crystal, and at this point the roof of the cave began dripping and then pouring lava. While everyone else returned to the ship, Commander Bob decides to stay outside and watch the laser warm up while standing right in front of it. He is not incinerated as you would expect. Instead, he was splorked through the brain by a dagger sized piece of crystal that pierced his suit. Instead of instantly condensing to the size of a soup can or bursting into flames, he just stood there for a bit before falling backwards into the lava which had been building around them, and disappeared beneath the waves. Now lava is melted rock. He should have spacked onto the surface and just kind of stuck to it like a hot dog on a flaming hot pan, and then slowly incinerated. But nope, for whatever reason, he goes glug lug lug, and then there's a spot waiting for him at Arlington, And with that the ship started up, slid into the lava, and they got back on their way. Rest in peace, Commander Bob. The next part of their adventure was piloting something with the maneuverability of a subway through a field of diamonds the size of apartment buildings. One of those diamonds clipped the weapons control pod and oh, no, Surge is in there. The emergency door slam shut, and Keys was all, no worries, We'll just pop right out of there. But Becca was at the switch and she kind of froze up. She opens the door, and maybe Surge lives, and maybe they all die, and maybe the whole world dies with them. And I'll save you the very teary details of his slow and agonizing death. But they had to watch as Serge got slowly crushed to death over a video monitor. And I cannot emphasize enough how insanely slowly this happens. There was all kinds of screaming and crushing sounds. This was Becca's first professional kill, and Keys did not make it easy on her. He totally lost his ship. He even rubbed a hand drawn card from Serge's kids in her face, and he totally let her have it. We then panned a mission control where they overheard the whole thing, and they're all doing that MM and thinking that they would rather be evaporated by the sun than be on that ship. Right now. And for reasons that I am chalking up to bad editing, I'm assuming that Keys went and smoked to join in the back to try to calm down, because in the very next scene, Keys and Becca are now friends again, bearing a smiling look, and off they go. It is a bizarre transition in a movie filled with bizarre choices. I guess it doesn't really matter. A minute later, they finally break through the mantle and we are now in the core and picking up speed. Turns out the core was a lot runnier than they had guessed, so Simsky and Brass start doing some math. They were going way too fast and all of their calculations were now way off. Plus, the core material was so thin that the energy waves from the explosion would turn out to be too wet fart to actually work. On the plus side, at least Commander Bob was dead, so they didn't have to hear him say I told you so, and Zimsky was all, well, that's that, let's go home. Their commander was dead, their payload specialist was dead, their weapons specialist and weapons control system had been crushed into a cube like an illegally parked car. They didn't know if they could still arm the nuclear devices, and even if they could, their math was now screwed, rude, and their plan was trash. He hopped on the phone with General Purcell again no idea how, and told them to warm up Plan B, Project Destiny the hell is that you ask? It was short for Deep Earth Seismic Trigger Initiative. It was basically a geological superweapon that allowed the US to control seismic activity anywhere in the world and trigger earthquakes wherever they like. Plan B was to use Destiny to fix this, even though it is just now being revealed that testing Destiny is most likely what caused the whole problem in the first place. The explanation for this backup plan is that you can give someone a heart attack with electric paddles and then turn them back on again with another jolt. So let's just try that. They're basically going to whack the TV to get better reception. I myself feel like they're trying to hit alder On twice with the same death star beam. And they didn't feel like they had any choice. The world was heading for a disaster of biblical purpose, real Wrathagod type stuff, fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, sees boiling every volcano on the planet blowing at the same time, forty years of darkness and earthquakes, the dead rising from the grave, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. Well, this is where Keys proposes planned sea, which to quote is somehow we fix this. And the word somehow sets Zimski off, probably because he hasn't had a real smoke since they left, and he freaks out, screaming till Brazleton gets up and punches his lights out. Then everyone looks at each other and agrees it had to happen sometime at this point to underscore how little time they had left. Back on our side of the dirt, rat was monitoring a heartbreakingly large tear in the Earth's electromagnetic field right over scenic San Francisco Bay, not Buford, Wyoming, No, specifically targeting easily recognizable landmark filled San Francisco. A beam of microwave radiations slowly panned over the bay, and for reasons it stops moving and parks itself right over the Golden Gate Bridge, and it did some weird stuff. It gave one guy arm cancer, then started melting holes through twenty six feet of payment and steel trussing, which was somehow more vulnerable than rubber car tires and also didn't bake their passengers in the vehicles like cookies in an oven. The span melts and splits, and cars burst into flames as the careen over the edge as the bridge collapses, and then and only then does the beam continue its merry way, incinerating a path through the Bay area along with half the city. It also fried the electrical grid on the entire West coast, so General Purcell gets laser happy and wants to fire Destiny asap before they potentially lose even more power and won't have enough energy to fire it at all. While the brass are slap fighting over it, Keys quietly asks Rat to slow things down. Yes. By now his job had ballooned from social media manager to it for the entire and Western military infrastructure, so he can monitor the Earth's core and control energy grids pretty much just whatever he likes. But as he works his magic trying to control Destiny on a desktop computer, he faced repeated lockouts and failures and warnings, and in all seriousness, we watched Commander Bob get his brain poached. We watched Surge get slowly smushed to death while looking at pictures his children drew, But watching Rat well up with tears of frustration at having a bad day at work is one hundred times more emotionally impactful. Meanwhile, a low ground still in the goop, Simsky offers to help with Plan C if they just give him a cigarette. He gave them the idea of instead of setting all the bombs off at the same time and watching the blast radius peter out into the core material, they detonate the nukes in sequence, like stones building up ripples on a pond, letting the ripples reinforce each other through geometric progression. So Plan seed became. They hot wire the nukes, which I'm not sure how they know how to do. That, seed them throughout the core at measurements that had to be accurate to the inch, which doesn't sound right. Then detonate them in a sequence that had to be accurate to the millisecond, which also sounds unnecessary. And then they simply had to outrun the biggest nuclear shockwave in history. Sounds simple enough, but they can't just PLoP nukes out of the back of the ship. They'd get crushed by the pressure before they detonated, which to me says they didn't exactly tell us how running the Earth's core supposed to be, but the pressure down there should compress and contain any blast they make pretty well for starts. The core material is thicker than water, and if you set off a nuke at the bottom of the Marianas where they entered, the water would clamp around that explosion almost incompressibly. The pressure down there is about sixteen thousand pounds per square inch, or about eleven hundred times sea level atmospheric pressure. And the only other place you'd find anything like that in our Solar system would be somewhere on Jupiter. Now, to belabor my point, the pressure inside the upper core of our planet is about twenty million pounds per square inch, or one point three million times atmospheric pressure. But again, I'm not a Hollywood technical consultant or writer, so what do I know anyway? To distract us from all that, they decide to eject the bombs inside the different compartments of the vehicle, which would by the time needed to detonate with the insane precision needed before the pressure could b loop the bombs into a condensed puck. Of course, because the vehicle wasn't designed to just split apart like that, they now have to reverse centipede the whole thing and risk their lives in increasingly awful ways to manually release the pods. To get the first one going, someone had to make a one way trip into a crawl space filled with nine thousand degrees fahrenheit or five thousand degrees celsius core fluid. And don't ask me how, but they're suit had been designed to withstand half that amount, which in any other circumstance would have been a triumph of material engineering that would have had Brazilton's face etched onto Mount Rushmore. But no, And so they drew straws to see who was dipping into this soup. And because black people don't survive in horror movies or action movies, or disaster movies, or science fiction movies, or thrillers or crime dramas or monster movies or war movies, it was Brazlton. And actually he cheated, He bent his straw and chose to go out like a hero, speech and all, and we get to listen to him whimper and grown in agony for a full two minutes of screen time before he finally dissolves, but at least he pressed the button or whatever. They begin dropping the nukes in order bingo bango, ejecting them no problem, while meanwhile, Ratt is trying to figure out how to transfer all the power from Project Destiny to Coney Island. I don't know why he hates Coney Island so much, and there was no explanation for what would happen when enough power to taser the Earth's core is shunted into a neighborhood one square mile or two and a half kilometers in size. My guess is it would be evaporated in one giant electric blue woomph, turning all thirty thousand residents into ozone. And then Rat would spend the rest of the weekend scrubbing the Internet of any mentions of it. Meanwhile, back aboard the ship because drama, Before they could set off the second last nuke, they got hit by an underground energy flare, and while the cabin jostled around like a drunk bus, one of the bombs broke free and they played hot potato with it till it came to rest on Zimski's previously three dimensional legs. He is superdoomed, and he goes out sucking and blowing his beloved cigarettes and recording his final thoughts for posterity into a portable tape recorder until he remembers how explosions work and vaporizes with his thoughts. And now it all came down to Keys. He didn't have enough plutonium to make the final charge big enough, so he literally pulled the core out of the engine plunked it beside the bomb. And here's another thing. To this point, we have watched the rest of the crew be broiled or crushed to eject the pods. But now that it's keys turn. For reasons, his pod just had a big red button on the door that said eject. I mean anyway. So Keys and Becca, now out of power with all of the bombs dropped, sat and waited, most likely dying of radiation poisoning from the reactor. I imagine when Keys had a breakthrough the unobtainium. Yes, you would think we would never mention it again because it's such a maguffin. Well. Keys argued that Brazelton's unobtainium converted heat into energy, which is entirely new news, or his brain was damaged from the lack of oxygen. I'm just saying that, up until now it has converted pressure into a magic force field, and now all of a sudden it converts heat into energy, and very quickly a pilot and a school teacher managed to rewire and Jerry Rigg Braselton's technology, which I'm almost certain at this point was smuggled here from the future. Either way, there is literally no other explanation for how gifted he was, and no greater indicator that Becca and Keys figuring out how to turn the heat from the outside of their ship into rocket fuel using nothing but wires and hoses is insane. When I suggested a long time ago that there were moments in the theater where I pointed and just had to say that's not a thing, well, this was one of those times. This whole movie has been an exercise in proving that I don't know how science works, and their plan works perfectly. Next thing you know, they are riding the shockwave from the explosion like a missile right back to the sunshine, and at this moment the entire world was rocked by a rolling earthquake. Which cleared the weather and repaired the sky, but did not, for reasons, completely erase all buildings and monuments around the world. And now, based on the CG on the monitors and separately out of ship view, they found them dodging and weaving and steering through tunnels at something like four hundred miles an hour without touching a thing. And then a subtitle comes up letting us know that they did this impossible maneuvering for sixteen straight hours before they found a gap between two tectonic plates near Hawaii. Four hours after that, not dead from exhaustion, they literally popped out of a pre existing hole in the ground and took a break on the bottom of the sea. And for reasons, everyone from Control HQ, the General rat, the coffee guy, well, they all now find themselves on the bridge of an aircraft carrier off the coast of Hawaii. But the ship they're looking for is sitting at the bottom of the cold ast ocean with no power and no communications. And apparently the unobtainium gives them the sonar signature of a rock. So how they were tracking them all this time in the Earth's core. I'm not going back to that anyway, Using the same level of magical intuition that allowed Keys to figure out the pacemaker at the beginning of the film, Rat now figures out that whales like ultrasonics, so if they just follow whales, they're going to find the pod. I mean, we're running out of screen time, and that keeps it easy. Now, as a social media manager for the government, there's no reason he should know this. And second, in one of the more expensive shooting locations you can find, Rat from way down the flight deck runs towards the control tower yelling about the whales and how his voice is so preposterously loud, loud enough to be heard on the bridge from halfway down the flight deck, which is famously one of the loudest workplaces on the planet. Again, no idea. I'll also say he delivers the second worst on screen scripted run of any actor until Maggie graces awkward flappy arms trotting in the Taken Movies. Anyways, he yells it, and three billion dollars of military hardware jump into action. Find a pod of whales circling and jumping out of the water, practically pointing to the sunken craft, and a chopper pilot with sonar locates the ship and puts it about eight hundred feet below the surface. At this point they send down frogmen to attach towing cables to hoist it up, which again just re listen to the absolute body horror I described in our recent Edmund Fitzgerald episode about what happens to you just trying to visit five hundred feet. We saw the divers with simple air tanks doing backward rolls off of dinghies, so I have no idea how they were able to do this. Maybe the whales hooked everything up for them. Who knows. And at this point, with our tail so close to coming to an end, there's only one awkward thing left to deal with. As Becca and Keys are lifted to the surface, sharing their last private moments together, we have to wait and see if they will kiss. They've been through a lot, their adrenaline is high, and this is a movie and some ladies got dragged to it, so you think it might be nice if there was just maybe even one smooth which to give the romantics in the audience something to glom onto. Nope, Instead, they pivot and plan a revenge plot to let the world at large know about the sacrifice of all of those who did not have a big red escape button to save them throughout the mission. One week later, Rat walks into a cybercafe bringing his own hot pocket, and from a public computer uploads a document titled Unsung Heroes to every news outlet on Earth, at which point they all learn about how america secret spy laser they kept hidden in the Alaskan Wilderness nearly destroyed all life on the planet. And then when their magic bus could not SENTI Pete its way through the Earth's core on time, their backup plan was to blast this thing off again, just to see what would happen. Remember the end of that Spider Man movie where Aunt May catches Peter in the costume and she yells, what the It's a little like that where our movie ends on a happy note, where the world's collective rage is just building and we smash cut to credits. I'm guessing The Core two would have been a political dystopian movie where the world as a whole comes down hard on the American government for its crimes against humanity. When I saw this movie back in two thousand and three, I left thinking, well, if people are dumb enough to buy a ticket. I'm certain that they're dumb enough to believe this is how science works. I do hope you enjoyed our time today, and now, with this being our last episode of twenty twenty five, there's just something quick I would like to say. Doomsday is entering its sixth year, and there are a lot of things that make this show unique amongst podcasts. A lot of shows survive at the whim of production companies and corporate sponsors. They're built from the top down. But Doomsday doesn't exist because some network exist. I believed in it. It exists because actual people do. It's just you, me and a microphone. This show is built from the bottom up, and it has been my honest privilege to bring you these stories over the last six years. I don't do this for you so much as I do this because of you, which to my way of thinking, makes this more of a collaboration. And I think because of that it makes me the world's most grateful show host and a lot of the time because of that, I feel like I have a more meaningful relationship with my audience than any other podcast host. And if anyone tries to tell you different you can tell them to take it up with me on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram at doomsday podcast, or drop me an email to doomsday pod at gmail dot com, and I will bark in their face like a dog until they apologize. Together, we make something that shouldn't even exist, but it does anyways. And because of this, I thank you, and I ask you to thank yourselves. But enough of that for the moment. I just wanted to take a minute to tell you about some initiatives for the new year, talking about T shirts and minisodes and a card game and stickers and bark bags and hugs and possibly a secondary show format and a lot more, even a next installment of Sleep Manuals, but we'll talk about that later. And I know every year I end up saying, well, I'm glad that's over, but I really don't want to do that at the end of twenty twenty six, so I spent two full days working out sound issues and figuring out how to remove ads from the middle of the show. So I am expecting a lot less complaints about ad placements. And if that cheers you and you're feeling the spirit of the season and you dream of a world with zero ads, I invite you to check out patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo, where not only are the episodes longer and early, they are mercifully ad free. Again to this point, blame iHeartRadio. If you're just looking to raise one corner of my mouth before the years through a small donation through Buy Me a Coffee dot com, slash Doomsday is always appreciated, and of course, as always, if you can spare the money and had to choose, I ask you to consider making a donation to Global Menic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They are often the first and sometimes only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic dot Ca. On the next episode, I don't know what the worst or least favorite school field trip you ever took was, but in our next episode we will be joining one which I think you will agree deserves two frostbitten thumbs down. It's the hood Field trip disaster of nineteen eighty six. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.