Is Carly a vampire?
How else can you possibly kill someone by biting them on the hand? It takes a really long time to bleed out (episode 5).
shareShe went all Rick Grimes on that big guy's wrist. Yeah, it wouldn't incapacitate him instantly, but she was really doing some damage and his panic didn't help. Think wrist slashing but worse. The wound is jagged and gaping, unlike clean wrist cuts which usually clot before the person bleeds out (unless they're lying in a bathtub full of warm water which prevents the clotting). The show hasn't told us exactly what Carly did in the future but if I had to guess, she was a soldier.
shareShe went all Rick Grimes on that big guy's wrist.
I like this.
And yeah, she does seem to be the soldier/enforcer of the team. share
In episode 4 Hall refers to Carly as the team's "tactician". So yes, I assume she is a soldier.
shareIn episode 3, as they were preparing to go on the bogus mission to save the kidnapped kid, they gather in Carly's apartment and she pulls a huge case full of assault grade weapons, saying she got the supply from another team. This clearly makes her the soldier of the team, although they are all clearly well trained: Marcy at the library and the kill shot in David's place, Mac at a shooting range, Trevor at the school with his previous buddy bully). Only Philip seems sort of weak but this may be a reaction to both his addiction and depression.
shareWhich is, a glaring flaw, in all that kind of stories, except the Matrix.
Neo could download "kung fu" to his brain, because his body wasn't real the necessary "training" would have been applied.
In this case they might be "trained" but it takes up to 5000 hours to train your brain-muscle-reaction to follow those movements and capabilities to a pro level. It takes lots of practice to be a surgeon, because you hand has to learn certain micro movements, which are partly stored in the muscles themselves. The cook can chop an onion fast, because he "feels" his hand-eye coordination to perfection.
Just "reprogramming" the brain would do only half the job. They move to new bodies, with different heights, sizes and muscle systems - it would take month until they adapt to them even on a semi professional level. And they would have to train every day. Nobody of them is depicted going to a gym or shooting range or practicing surgery in an hospital.
I was trying really hard to not think about the biological absurdities implied in this series and you just ruined it :). Forget muscle memory, this starts with the brain. Its not a machine with predetermined fixed structure that is ready to store and use any data. This is a biological structure where the synapses networks are created both from DNA information and during the learning period in early childhood and are different for each person. So I accepted this whole premise as an interesting psychological and philosophical "what if" thought experiment.
shareThere is a scene where carly is working out and gorging calories to presumably get her new body into combat shape. This is soon after she had previously lamented her new body as being "soft" to mclaren. Not that this overcomes the very valid points that are made here, but it does show that the travelers are individually somewhat addressing this issue. And this is a sci-fi show about time travel after all. So you kind of have to inherently suspend a reasonable amount of disbelief in order to enjoy it...
shareWho's to say the nuances of "muscle memory" (which despite the term is not actually stored in the muscle) can't be imprinted along with everything else - including the compensating adjustments required for a body of differing height, weight, and build? We're talking about people who can transmit a complete human consciousness into the past. Once you've got that part licked the rest is fine-tuning.
shareWas about to reply with the exact same thing. Nicely said. People aren't quite thinking this through. Knowledge is knowledge. Sure someone with a perfectly honed body in the future going back into a fat lazy slob is going to be slower, weaker, etc. and would have to work to compensate for those relative deficiencies, but undoubtedly bodies are chosen to be as close a match as possible to begin with, and then Travelers have to contend with whatever differences can't be included in the "package". This is sci-fi, after all.
I must mention that it's absolutely untrue that "muscle memory" entails information encoded into the muscles themselves, meaning the poster who suggested this to above is dead wrong. That's unadulterated nonsense. Everything is controlled by the brain in humans. But the other half of that post makes some good points. A person's learned, practiced, refined, actions and physical behaviors are going to be geared toward the body they were in. Changing every small detail of that body, even minute aspects like height, mass, hearing, heart rate, finger length, kidney function, eyesight, nose size, bone density, etc. are going to require acclimation.
However, we're told that they train for this... extensively. Probably through simulations. They're prepared for those differences so that they can compensate to the best of their ability, and as you suggest it's even possible they're "packaged" to accommodate what's known about the host body they're being sent into. The show itself depicts characters taking action to compensate for differences (e.g. the character who finds her body "soft" and takes action to start remedying that situation). Yes this is ultra sci-fi gobbletyguke, but a little common sense can go along way, and obliterates many of the complaints in this thread.
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I'm something new entirely. With my own set of rules. I'm Dexter. Boo.
The real suspension of disbelief here comes with the transfer itself. I happen to believe recording the information content in a human brain (while a daunting task) will eventually be possible. But to beam it over the airwaves to another body without some sort of intermediate receiving equipment? I won't say that's categorically impossible, but it seems highly unlikely. And without time travelers already here you couldn't build said equipment. It's just an assumption you're making for purposes of the story. They're four hundred years ahead of us, somehow they've found a way.
shareNicely stated.
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I'm something new entirely. With my own set of rules. I'm Dexter. Boo.
The term "muscle memory" is best described in wikipedia:
"When a movement is repeated over time, a long-term muscle memory is created for that task, eventually allowing it to be performed without conscious effort. This process decreases the need for attention and creates maximum efficiency within the motor and memory systems."
This means you have to "feel" the exact muscle group to use this effect. I doubt tech is so advanced in the future, that they can simply "upload" some sort of generic muscle memory that adapts . That would require some sort of all day nano tech which seems to be even advanced for them (as seen in the 10th episode).
Soldiers who got a seriously damaged arm-shoulder section and often need to sometimes full retrain their arms from the beginning. The "memory" if you will doesn't match the new structure of the arm.
The "soldier" in the team seemed to train regularly, but the doctor girl doesn't seem to spend month in surgery to train her skills. And it would take month for the FBI guy to shoot like this.
A bit "Suspension of disbelieve" doesn't mean you can't enjoy a show. But this is not star trek mumbo jumbo coil crystal circuit. It tries to be a little bit more honest ;)
So, suspension of disbelief... how about a short guy with a scrawny figure, who invented a little known martial art called judo, and made it serve the undying devotion of the emperor and his Japan?
Yet, both are true. The point I'm making here is that not everything comes down to strength, and that sometimes the will of a person can be stronger, than that of others. Except for Grant, the members were chosen to be missed by nobody, but still capable to carry out the mission.
Marcy did not train in our hospitals because from their POV we're antique, besides unless it's a back alley butcher somewhere, her cover would've been blown.
Grant. We can only go by Forbes that he wasn't the best shot, except... we can't ascertain his body couldn't do it either. He wasn't fully in the game because he and his wife lost their baby so by the time they partnered up, he let his skills slip. Bear in mind, even Oswald slipped back to marksman level before he shot Kennedy, so it can be ebb and flow.
I live in the Gordius Apartment Complex, my interior designer was M.C. Esher.
That description is dead on target and in line with what I was saying. You summarize it here perfectly.
This means you have to "feel" the exact muscle group to use this effect.Precisely. Every small body part, organ, etc. would have an impact here (e.g. throw off balance, disrupt hand-to-eye coordination, even affect breathing due to pulmonary differences, heartbeat variation, etc.), even things that to some may seem inconsequential like foot length, baseline heart rhythm, eye placement, and all the items I mentioned in the previous post plus anything else that can be thought of. The unconscious rote actions that become second nature through practice would undoubtedly be impacted if all that was being transferred to the past was an exact copy of the data stored in the brain of the Traveler being sent back. But here's the rub, something I alluded to previously (along with other factors like their intense training prior to deployment):
If a futuristic advanced artificial intelligence has the ability to transplant the data from a human brain across time into a brain in the past (the core conceit of which immediately puts the entire premise of the show into the realm of extreme sci-fi fantasy) by overwriting what's stored in existing synapses that we're told right there in the show is an image or package that's prepared by the Director (i.e. the A.I. behind it all), it of course also has the ability to read the brain of that target host brain as well,. In fact, it's reasonable to conclude it would have to do exactly that as part of the process. Therefore, it can correlate the deviations between the sender and receiver body, leaving the data necessary in a new package that it prepares and sends, an amalgamation of Traveler and host that accommodates physical deviations between the two bodies to the utmost degree possible.
Therefore...
I doubt tech is so advanced in the future, that they can simply "upload" some sort of generic muscle memory that adaptsIs a highly dubious claim. Not only is it not how it would be accomplished (what I state above is how it'd be done), but such "advanced tech" is clearly within the capability of the A.I. since the base premise of capturing a human brain as packaged data and beaming it across time (perhaps via tachyon transmission) far exceeds the technology of that piece you for some reason doubt. In other words, what’s sent isn’t an exact copy of the original brain. It’s a combination of both brains, a prepared package that leave the Traveler’s memories, history, personality, etc. intact, transposing existing muscle memory data from the host as necessary.
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I'm something new entirely. With my own set of rules. I'm Dexter. Boo. share
prepared by the Director (i.e. the A.I. behind it all), it of course also has the ability to read the brain of that target host brain as well... Therefore, it can correlate the deviations between the sender and receiver body,
Nice speculation, which was clearly disproved by Marcy 1.0. share
The issue with Marcy 1.0 is that her brain had "bad sectors", so to speak, areas of physical synapses that improperly handled data. The A.I. took that data at face value, revealing a flaw with how it performed it's function (a flaw that it possibly learned from and corrected, but who knows for sure). More to the point, when you copy a file to a drive it first has to read that drive so it knows what sectors are available to write to. However, when it performs this operation it may not detect if a sector is bad, and still write part of a file there, resulting in corrupted data. It's only logical that any operation of this nature must be able to read in order to write. The deviations I'm speculating about are data, not physical structure. Marcy's brain had physical issues the Director missed, just like a file copy can miss that a sector is bad as it writes to it. When they repackaged it they rewrote the originally transferred image onto areas of the brain without physical damage.
Damn I'm going to miss having discussions like this when this board is gone. FU IMDB!
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I'm something new entirely. With my own set of rules. I'm Dexter. Boo.
I'm going to miss having discussions like this when this board is gone.
My sentiments, exactly. And being a bit of a luddite (or something) I don't want to learn to navigate a whole new structure (reddit, for example). I'm terrible at adjusting to any new environment. share
That is the big flaw of the entire show. And it does not end there.
Marcy's brain should not be nearly capable to operate at those levels. The brain of a person with a mental disability is not fully functional. It is not bad software running on a good system, it is simply an overall bad system. She should still be mentally disabled no matter who "downloads" into her. It's supercomputer software running on a 166 MHz processor from the mid nineties.
Their physical abilities should largely correspond to their bodies. Leaving aside "muscle memory" (which is a false term btw. The reaction is stored in the nerve clusters in the spine) and just talk about muscle. The women shouldn't have nowhere near enough to do what they are doing. (Side note: I am picking the women here because out of the team they are the only ones who have done physically challenging things and whose body's had no reason to be capable of it. The junkie did not do much and the other two guys are a fit FBI agent and a high school athlete. I am not picking on the women because they are women) Sure, you can train angles and leverage and all that but a punch is still a punch and the impact corresponds to muscle mass. A person like Marcy hammer-fisting a big guy in the chest (as she did in the first episode) should leave him standing there and laughing at her.
But that is what suspension of disbelief is for, right?
Marcy's brain should not be nearly capable to operate at those levels. The brain of a person with a mental disability is not fully functional. It is not bad software running on a good system, it is simply an overall bad system. She should still be mentally disabled no matter who "downloads" into her. It's supercomputer software running on a 166 MHz processor from the mid nineties.
Every disability and every case is a bit different. Some conditions are systemic, involving the entire brain, and some result from localized damage, i.e. parts of the brain are okay and other parts are crippled or completely dead. Marcy's case sounds like the latter. The download is obviously adaptive enough to write information only where it can be retained, but without the "re-format" being planned in some intelligent way the result is not stable with time. This is essentially what Grace did for the new Marcy.
There are cases in real life where two thirds of a person's brain were destroyed and yet somehow they made a full recovery. Their activity patterns aren't normal, some areas are more active than you ever see in a normal human brain, apparently to compensate for all the dead regions. Granted it's rare for people with massive brain damage to be unaffected - although the fact that it's known to be possible means that people with four hundred years of medical knowledge over us could probably engineer such an outcome. On the other end of the spectrum patients sometimes suffer pinprick sized lesions that cause huge impairments and changes of personality, or even death. Our brains are the most complex system we know of by far. There's so much we don't understand. Why a few peoples' brains can rewire themselves, relocate processing centers like the visual cortex, and basically regain all functions after a major trauma, while most others cannot, is just one more mystery. share
To be fair, this is a bit of a recurring flaw. All of the characters seem to be able to not only perform actions the original couldnt but also somehow the synapses in their brains are reformed to remember things from the brain of the traveller. Memory is not consciousness. I think Philips memory is the most obvious abuse of this but also somehow Marcy no longer has the severe learning disability that existed in the hosts brain while Trevor does still have the concussion.
Its like both brain memory and muscle memory are transferred with the consciousness but then certain things are not like when Philip says that he cant remember his own face and he can tell the difference between the heroin and whatever else the dude in black also injects him with.. Then you have Marcy performing surgery and Carly handling high powered rifles, something which neither of those bodies have been trained to do and neither should have the required dexterity or strength to do.
You sort of just have to accept the rules of the situation as presented and unless humans someday actually manage to transplant a consciousness into another body this is something we will never really be able to cite a real world example of. For all we know, things like dexterity and muscle memory may be that the brain learns how to manipulate our bodies to do things in a specific way or it may be 100% down to developing the muscle mass in minute parts of our bodies allowing the brain to do things it already knows how to do but is obstructed by a body not physically developed to do such things.
All of these things seem to not make sense but we cant really say with any authority that it would not work exactly as presented even though it defies our current understanding of the body/mind.