S6E24 – OSP 21 – “Down to Earth”

Ransom, Weston, and Devine attempt the journey back to Earth.

S6E23: “Down to earth” (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Drop-In

• Dr. Hal Poe

Quote-of-the-week

A lighted door was open. There were voices from within and they were speaking English. There was a familiar smell. He pushed his way in, regardless of the surprise he was creating, and walked to the bar. ‘A pint of bitter, please,’ said Ransom.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

Episode Movie Title

Chit-Chat

• David
  • Jonah Losh, came up with a new term for this. Since I have been identified (quite correctly, I might add) as a Pfifltrigg, “Batsian Rigidity” may also be called:
    • “Pfifltrigidity” (Fif-ul-trij-ity)
    • “Pfifltririgidity” (Fif-ul–tri-rij-it-y).
  •  At the Wade Center, a new garden named “Aslan’s Garden” was dedicated to Marjorie Mead.
• Matt
  • Annoyed that we’re not using his favourite quote-of-the-week option.
• Andrew
  • The weather is still thundering outside his window.

Toast

• Drinks
  • Today we are all drinking bitter! Matthew Boland has very generously sent each of us a bottle of something he brewed which he calls “Ransom’s Bitter”…

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• Foreign language “cheers”
  • “Geonbae” (Korean)
• Patreon toast
  • Patience

Story Recap

Taken by force to Mars by Weston and Devine, Ransom escapes, taking refuge with the planet’s inhabitants and learning their language.

Ransom and his abductors are eventually brought back together at the island of Meldilorn. They are interviewed by Oyarsa, the tutelary spirit of the planet who asks about their motives for coming to his planet.

Using Ransom as a translator, Weston outlines his plan to spread mankind throughout the galaxy, “replacing” the local inhabitants of any planet they find. After hearing Weston’s scheme, Oyarsa announces that they are to be sent back to earth and never allowed to return.

The story so far…

Discussion

01. “The final chat with Oyarsa”

The chapter begins with this line from Oyarsa:

“You have shown me more wonders than are known in the whole of heaven”

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

The three co-hosts thought that Ransom told him about the Incarnation, death, and Resurrection of Christ, which is the same conclusion reached by Murphy Thelen in his adaptation:

02. “Ransom’s choice”

Heading home

Ransom is invited to stay, but he decides to go back to earth. Ransom declines:

‘Love of our own kind,’ he said, ‘is not the greatest of laws, but you, Oyarsa, have said it is a law. 

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

Oyarsa promises to protect him during the journey by not allowing Weston and Devine any weapons and sending the eldila with them.

Oyarsa’s assessment of Ransom

Oyarsa diagnoses Ransom’s chief issue as fear, suggesting that the homeward journey could be purgative and medicinal:

‘You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little fearfulness… For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

There are echos in Prince Caspian and Till We Have Faces:

Then, after an awful pause, the deep voice said, “Susan.” Susan made no answer but the others thought she was crying. “You have listened to fears, child,” said Aslan. “Come, let me breathe on you. Forget them. Are you brave again?”

C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (Chapter 6)

Long did I hate you, long did I fear you. I might —

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 4)

03. “Ransom’s commission”

Resistance

Oyarsa gives Ransom a commission, to monitor Weston and Devine:

But I lay also a command on you; you must watch this Weston and this Devine in Thulcandra if ever you arrive there. They may yet do much evil in, and beyond, your world… I begin to see that there are eldila who go down into your air, into the very stronghold of the Bent One; your world is not so fast shut as was thought in these parts of heaven… Watch those two bent ones. Be courageous. Fight them. And when you have need, some of our people will help.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

Matt referred to the author John Edlridge, author of Wild at Heart.

04. “Prophecy”

Matt quoted a line from the final chapter:

And we have also evidence—increasing almost daily—that ‘Weston,’ or the force or forces behind ‘Weston,’ will play a very important part in the events of the next few centuries, and, unless we prevent them, a very disastrous one. We do not mean that they are likely to invade Mars—our cry is not merely ‘Hands off Malacandra.’ The dangers to be feared are not planetary but cosmic, or at least solar, and they are not temporal but eternal. More than this it would be unwise to say.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 22)

It seems to me that this is the beginning of more comings and goings between the heavens and the worlds and between one world and another—though not such as the Thick One hoped. I am allowed to tell you this. The year we are now in—but heavenly years are not as yours—has long been prophesied as a year of stirrings and high changes and the siege of Thulcandra may be near its end. Great things are on foot. If Maleldil does not forbid me, I will not hold aloof from them.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

There are echos of this in The Magician’s Nephew:

It is a very important story because it shows how all the comings and goings between our own world and the land of Narnia first began.

C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

Are Narnia and the Ransom Trilogy connected?!

05. “Lift-off”

The state of the crew

Weston was pale and haggard from a night of calculations intricate enough to tax any mathematician even if his life did not hang on them.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

Devine was noisy, reckless and a little hysterical. His whole view of Malacandra had been altered overnight by the discovery that the ‘natives’ had an alcoholic drink, and he had even been trying to teach them to smoke. Only the pfifltriggi had made much of it. He was now consoling himself for an acute headache and the prospect of a lingering death by tormenting Weston.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

Provincial Knowledge

He became vividly conscious that his knowledge of Malacandra was minute, local, parochial. It was as if a sorn had journeyed forty million miles to the Earth and spent his stay there between Worthing and Brighton. He reflected that he would have very little to show for his amazing voyage if he survived it: a smattering of the language, a few landscapes, some half-understood physics—but where were the statistics, the history, the broad survey of extraterrestrial conditions, which such a traveller ought to bring back?

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

Malacandrian Mythology

The distinction between history and mythology might not make sense on Malacandra:

They were gigantic feats of engineering, about which he had learned nothing; feats accomplished, if all were true, before human history began . . . before animal history began… Or was that only mythology? He knew it would seem like mythology when he got back to Earth (if he ever got back), but the presence of Oyarsa was still too fresh a memory to allow him any real doubts. It even occurred to him that the distinction between history and mythology might be itself meaningless outside the Earth.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

06. “From Malacandra to Mars”

 It had ceased to be Malacandra; it was only Mars

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

07. “The Heavenly Return”

Although he still has moments of doubt, his perception of the Heavens has been changed:

Not space but the heavens

But already it had become impossible to think of it as ‘space.’ Some moments of cold fear he had; but each time they were shorter and more quickly swallowed up in a sense of awe which made his personal fate seem wholly insignificant. He could not feel that they were an island of life journeying through an abyss of death. He felt almost the opposite—that life was waiting outside the little iron egg-shell in which they rode, ready at any moment to break in, and that, if it killed them, it would kill them by excess of its vitality

…he had felt some such lift of the heart when first he passed through heaven on their outward journey, he felt it now tenfold, for now he was convinced that the abyss was full of life in the most literal sense, full of living creatures.

… He hoped passionately that if they were to perish they would perish by the ‘unbodying’ of the space-ship and not by suffocation within it. To be let out, to be set free, to dissolve into the ocean of eternal noon, seemed to him at certain moments a consummation even more desirable than their return to Earth.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

Andrew mentioned Lewis’ poem Stephen to Lazarus.

Detecting Angels

He saw none of them; the intensity of light in which the ship swam allowed none of the fugitive variations which would have betrayed their presence. But he heard, or thought he heard, all kinds of delicate sound, or vibrations akin to sound, mixed with the tinkling rain of meteorites, and often the sense of unseen presences even within the space-ship became irresistible.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

it was this, more than anything else, that made his own chances of life seem so unimportant. He and all his race showed small and ephemeral against a background of such immeasurable fullness. His brain reeled at the thought of the true population of the universe, the three-dimensional infinitude of their territory, and the unchronicled æons of their past; but his heart became steadier than it had ever been.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

08. “The hellish journey and facing death”

Weston is taking them closer to the Sun in order to catch-up to Earth:

All three of them were awake for twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four, enduring with dilated eyeballs, blackened lips and froth-flecked cheeks the agony of thirst. It would be madness to increase their scanty rations of water: madness even to consume air in discussing the question… And still the thermometer rose. The walls of the ship were too hot to touch. It was obvious that a crisis was approaching. In the next few hours it must kill them or get less.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

Unfortunately, they discover that the moon is between them and Earth:

In sight of harbour they were being forced to turn back to the open sea.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

09. “The Eagle has landed”

There was nothing for Ransom to do. He was sure, now, that they were soon to die. With this realization, the agony of his suspense suddenly disappeared. Death, whether it came now or some thirty years later on earth, rose up and claimed his attention. There are preparations a man likes to make.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 21)

These scenes reminded David and Matt of various movies:

Congratulations to listener Zack Zvosecz, who managed to guess the movie Matt was referencing when he spoke about creatures which resembled the pfifltriggi – your Pints With Jack glass is in the mail!

Wrap-Up

Question-of-the-week

The three humans have a horrible trip back to earth. What’s the worst trip you’ve ever taken?

What do you think happened during the time between Ransom falling asleep and waking up back on earth? How do you think they safely landed?

Question(s)-of-the-week

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