It’s your basic “boy-meets-girl, boy-becomes-cryptid” story, really. A woman walks into a laboratory, and the chemistry experiment begins.
As we’ve discussed, the three steps to getting the audience to like a character is to make a friend, make a joke and make a plot point, and Dr. Alec Holland is about to do all three in record time. The appeal of Swamp Thing is half superhero-action and half romantic drama, so it’s only going to be effective if it can get us to believe in Cable and Alec as a couple, during the limited amount of time before he explodes.
So this meet-cute needs to be practically automatic, establishing that both parties are smart, funny and attractive, and getting them to challenge each other in sparky mini-clashes that are interesting to watch. The time-honored method is to get the characters to stick their hands in a murky water trough, looking for an imaginary animal.
Cable doesn’t know what Alec is working on yet, and frankly, neither do I. She walks through the crowded lab for the first time, past some test tubes, computers, potting soil and miscellaneous. And there are the two doctors, crouched over a water trough, with one hand each immersed in the algae-ridden water.
The movie establishes that Alec and Cable share a sense of humor in the most direct possible way. Cable makes a joke — “Lose a contact lens?” — and Alec looks up at her, smiles, and says “Funny!” And now they’re a couple.
He’ll do that again in a minute, responding to another one of her jokes with a positive evaluation, and I have to admit, there are worse ways to run a meet-cute.
They want to establish that Alec is eccentric and playful, so Alec says, “Well, don’t just stand there, give us a hand!” She’s put off, but he says “Please?” with a little twinkle in his eye, and a twinkling Ray Wise is hard to resist.
“I dropped a cooper’s digger,” he explains, and that’s how you get someone that you just met to stick their hand elbow-deep in pond scum. “Would you look under the rocks, please?”
So she looks under the rocks, tentatively, because why are there rocks in this thing. “What’s a cooper’s digger, anyway?” she asks. “Some kind of shovel?”
And then, the big reveal. “Nah,” he says, “just Alessandro!” And like a conjurer pulling a slimy wet rabbit from a slimy wet hat, he hoists a wriggling, squealing mammal up into the air by his tail. “He’s got a little one-celled animal living in his fur that makes a terrific host.” So that’s how you construct a meet-cute, I guess, if you’re entirely out of your mind and you don’t know how science works.
As our new cast member looks directly into the camera and says hello to the folks at home, I have several important questions to ask about Alessandro.
I’ll start with the most obvious: what the fuck is a cooper’s digger?
Because this is a new form of life, as far as I know. The internet informs me that there’s no such thing; if you search for “cooper’s digger” all you get are quotes from Swamp Thing, plus a greyhound from Australia that may have been named as a Swamp Thing reference, and if you scroll down too far you get some bottom-feeder porn keyword scrapes. That’s it. A cooper’s digger is not a thing.
There’s a Cooper’s hawk, if that helps, but that’s the only Cooper’s animal that I’ve come across. If Cooper discovered anything else worth naming, then they must have kept it to themselves.
The actual animal that’s being taken for a swing around the set is an opossum, a species that tends to get ordinary descriptive names like Bushy-tailed opossum, Big-eared opossum, Osgood’s short-tailed opossum and Bishop’s slender opossum. The only one that comes close to having a luxury name is the Four-eyed opossum, which has little white patches above its eyes that don’t look even vaguely like a second set of eyes. (Looking up pictures of Four-eyed opossums is not worth your time; I learned that lesson the hard way.)
Anyway, the point is that it’s not a cooper’s digger, and I can’t imagine why Wes Craven thinks that it is.
Okay, further questions about Alessandro.
Why is he under the water? Alec says “I dropped a cooper’s digger,” but how do you drop an animal in a scummy water trough? Why does Alec even have a scummy water trough? The water trough is over in a corner of the lab, so what was Alec intending to do with Alessandro when he walked him all the way over to the corner and accidentally dropped him?
If Alessandro was dropped in the water trough, why is it difficult for them to find him? A mammal who’s been submerged in water is usually pretty easy to find, because it’ll be splashing around, trying not to drown. Is Alessandro an amphibian? Even if there is an explanation for why Alessandro was just sitting motionless under the water, quietly practicing his snorkel technique, how hard would it be to find him? He’s huge and furry; two people sitting on the floor and feeling around for him should have found him within a couple of seconds.
And how could Alessandro be under the rocks? Also, why are there rocks in your scummy water trough? I still can’t get my head around even having a scummy water trough in your laboratory in the first place, but if you’re going to have one, why fill it with rocks?
Why are they keeping Alessandro in a little fish tank so small that he can’t even stretch out in it? Why is Alec covering the tank with a piece of wood, presumably held down with that big rock? How does Alessandro breathe in there? Does he just not need to breathe at all? Is a cooper’s digger some kind of supersoldier opossum that can survive in airless environments?
Also, why is there a one-celled animal living in his fur? Does that animal live on other cooper’s diggers, or is Alessandro particularly blessed? If you need a one-celled animal to run experiments on, is there another place to store them besides another animal’s fur?
And how can a one-celled animal be a terrific host? It’s only one cell. What could it be a host for? You try to put something on top of a one-celled animal, you’re not going to get very far. Is the one-celled animal a parasite? Is Alec trying to infect a parasite with another parasite?
Then Alec tells Linda, “I want you to run up a new variation on the formula with that little host on Alessandro’s fur,” and what on earth could that mean? How do you run up new variations, and what does Alessandro have to do with it? Is the one-celled host an ingredient, a test subject or a co-author?
And that new variation that Linda runs up? That’s the one that explodes when you drip it on the floor. What has that one-celled host been doing, all this time? Is it mixing up tiny little one-celled Molotov cocktails? Is Alessandro sitting in his little fishtank, plotting revenge?
I swear, if Alessandro peels off his rubber mask and it turns out that he’s Arcane in disguise, I am going to lose it. I don’t get paid enough to handle this shit.
We check in with Adrienne Barbeau
3.8: Beauty, and the Other One
There are a few visual continuity errors in this scene. The first one is very small: when Charlie looks up at Cable and tells her to get someone to take her into the swamps, there’s a Coca-Cola can on the desk behind him. As Cable walks through the room, the Coke can isn’t on that desk anymore — but we do see it in a different place, next to some flowerpots.
The more obvious one is that in one shot of Alec holding up Alessandro, the animal is soaked in green slime, and in the next shot, he’s totally clean and dry. He’s messy again by the time Alec puts him into the fishtank.
That also applies to the human characters, who all have magically dry forearms that we don’t see them clean off.
We check in with Adrienne Barbeau
3.8: Beauty, and the Other One
— Danny Horn