This is Past Was Close Behind, a feature that spotlights moments, exchanges, etc. from older comics that take on a brand new light when read in concert with later comic books or events. Basically, stuff that looks hilarious in hindsight.
This is another one where I can't find the e-mail of whoever suggested it, which suggests to me that perhaps someone send it by another contact (if not, then I just misplaced the e-mail and that's on me. I could have sworn it was an e-mail suggestion, but I can't find anything). Feel free to write in if you'd like credit for the suggestion!
Today, we look at a Flash Annual that eerily predicted the Matrix living batteries.
In the hit 1999 film, The Matrix (by Lana and Lilly Wachowski), one of the key moments in the film is when Morpheus reveals to Neo not just the existence of the Matrix (an elaborate virtual reality simulation that living machines are keeping almost all of the people on Earth stuck in), but WHY the robots are doing this to the humans. He tells Neo, "The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world, built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this." While doing so, he holds out a copper-top D cell battery. So the robots are using Earthlings as batteries because humanity nuked the world in trying to defeat the robots, which blocked out the sun and kept the robots from receiving solar power, so they turned to humans instead for batteries...
Morpheus continued, "The human body generates more bio electricity than a 120 volt battery and over 25000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion the machines had found all the energy they would ever need."
Of course, lots of scientists have taken issue with that idea over the years. In a fun piece for Esquire about the idea, Matt Miller asked Robert Hurt, a Caltech-based visualization scientist who has worked on many NASA projects, including the Spitzer Space Telescope, who first pointed out that the human batteries bit "happens to be my least-favorite plot device in a sci-fi movie in decades." before he explained why the robots' plan did not make sense (or at least was very impractical:
Humans consume quite a lot of high-energy products (food, oxygen) and the only thing they produce that could count as ‘energy’ would be basically heat. But if you took all the food and just burned it you’d get WAY more heat out of it. You can chalk it up to thermodynamics and entropy; some systems just don’t process efficiently and basically you can count on getting less energy out than you put in.
Over the years, people have come up with a lot of good "No-Prize" explanations for the battery stuff in the Matrix, like that the robots are actually using human's brains for computing or something like that, but, well, I mean, Morpheus flat out SAYS what the robots are doing, so I think we just have to chalk it up as minor implausibility in a really cool movie.
Anyhow, the topic at hand is the fact that three years earlier, J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray drew an ERRILY similar scene in a Flash Annual. The 1996 DC annuals all had the theme of "Legends of Dead Earth," which would tell stories set in the distant future where someone (most typically, the Martian Manhunter) would spread the tales of a long dead Earth to other planets in the universe. The idea is basically that the creators can just tell a sort of futuristic Elseworlds story BASICALLY riffing on an established DC hero.
In this story, "Silent Running," Peter J. Tomasi, J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray (early in the respective careers of all of those outstanding creators), this planet had once been a green world but was now plunged into an Ice Age. The people of the planet worshiped the life of the Flash....
Two brothers, central to the Flash cult, discover that one of the brothers, Bryan Mallory, is basically energized by something (perhaps the Speed Force?) that allows the one (fairly evil) brother, Tristan Mallory, to capture his brother and use the energy created to get rid of the ice on the planet and bring back the greenery.
We then fast forward another three hundred years, and a virtual paradise has been created, but we discover that the whole society is built around people sacrificing their children so that Tristan Mallory, the head of the cult can suck out their life energy while all being fed by his brother, Bryan, who powers the machinery...
And when we pull back and see the pods that the people are all in, it is eerie in how similar it as a set-up to the Matrix. This, of course, is not an altogether shocking idea, naturally, as I'm sure this concept had existed in science fiction long before this Flash Annual, but it is still really interesting to see just how similar it appears to the Matrix human batteries from the film...
In the end, Bryan is freed from his captivity and he battles with his brother, complete with a Flash costume provided by a mysterious old man (who turns out to be the Martian Manhunter. In the end, Tristan, and his scheme of sucking out the life forces of innocent people is defeated. The problem, though, is that now the planet is giving into the Ice Age and there's no way to stop it. Well...there IS one way, but it will require a stunning sacrifice, and it is one we hear about at the end of the story, where the sister who saved Bryan from captivity admits to her students that yes, the current paradise that they all live in is powered by Bryan, who will never die and just live on in captivity to save the rest of the world...
Good stuff.
Thanks to whoever made this suggestion!
If anyone has a suggestion for some hilarious in hindsight stuff, let me know by dropping me a line at brianc@cbr.com!
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January 19, 2021 at 08:26PM
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The Flash Eerily Predicted the Matrix | CBR - CBR - Comic Book Resources
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