... Really? That's the title I'm gonna go with here? Of all the titles for a Weird Science entry that I could think of, the first one that springs to mind, the first one that I choose, is "The Krailie Conspiracy"?
Wow. I mean really, just. Wow.
That title sounds like some sort of arcane, cryptic fan theory about Marble Hornets, or possibly even the title of a Marble Hornets fanfic. Alternatively, it sounds like someone mixed The Bourne Trilogy with Marble Hornets, and that, unlike half of the forest epileptic trees that grow wild in this fandom, not only kind of makes sense but is far too fucking awesome to exist on this sinful earth.
Anyway, the reason I came here today is because I want to talk about something... off I noticed in a recent Marble Hornets entry. Specifically, Entry #69, wherein Tim and Jay go looking for something back where everything started, and find a bunch of burnt tapes.
Seems an average enough entry from MH, right? Definitely sets up some important plot points with those tapes, too, but this isn't about that. No, this is about what seems to be an oversight on the part of the MH crew. You see, as much as I love Troy and co. and find them all to be pretty nice guys, they aren't trained to write scientific fact into their series about a tall, faceless creep. Granted, when you're using Slen- Sorry, I mean The Operator, you're not gonna focus on scientific fact, you're going to focus on telling a good story, and these guys are great filmers and storytellers, but not that great at science. What I'm saying is, they might not have done their research 100% with this one, and it has to do with how those burned tapes appeared in this entry.
First, let me explain a little bit about recording stuff on tape for those younger Hornets in the audience that weren't born in the VHS era. Before DVDs became a thing, there were all sorts of formats for films, home movies, and TV show episodes. We tried just about everything to get our movies in a home video format, including giant laser-read disks the size of a damn tire rim that you had to flip over halfway and that didn't even hold as much data as a CD-ROM did. The most ubiquitous form of home video format by the time I was born in 1991 was the VHS tape.
The way a VHS tape worked was through a magnetized plastic tape that held video data. Don't ask me how in the Hell it worked, because honestly I don't know, I was maybe 7 at the time. And when you were done watching the video, you had to rewind the tape back to the other side so you could play the tape again. Hence the old video store saying, "Be Kind, Please Rewind", because some assholes would rent movies, not rewind them, and then bring them back so the next person would have to rewind the tape to watch the film. It was annoying. Now, thing is, we used tapes like these in video cameras too - yes, just like Alex in Marble Hornets, we too had those little cassette tapes we recorded shit on, you stuck them in the side of your video camera in a flip-open thing, and you hit record, and it would record it on the tape. Then you could either replay it in the camera (if yours was a fancy flip-screen thing), or you could put it in a special VHS player sized cassette and watch it on your TV. If that's not enough, even longer ago we put actual VHS-sized cassettes in these big ol' cameras you had to hold on a tripod or on your shoulder, and... yeah. Technological advances really make things a lot easier, don't they?
Now, here's where I have a bit of a problem with Entry #69 and its burned firepit tapes. The way the tapes burned should not have been possible, given the levels of heat even a small fire can get up to and the way the plastics in a VHS tape tend to melt.
Let me explain this to you guys, because I know most of you out there probably don't give half a thought to plastics. First thing you should know is this: Plastics are all polymers, from the Latin words "poly", meaning many, and "mer", meaning unit. Many plastics we use in everyday life form chains of these little mer units, something like this: mer-mer-mer-mer-mer-mer, where each "mer" is one single repeating unit, and each dash is a covalent bond. depending on how organized or loose the chains are in the plastic, we can call a plastic amorphous or crystalline; in general, the more crystalline a plastic is, the more brittle it is, and the more amorphous it is, the more it tends to flow in weird ways, like chewing gum. Yes, chewing gum's a plastic, in fact, it's polyethylene in one of its most amorphous forms. Now you know why I don't chew bubble gum. These chains can also sometimes crosslink with other chains to strengthen the plastic and form nearly unbreakably strong bonds (which in fact, is how epoxy glues work), but I won't go into that because it's not important here. Look it up if you're intrigued.
Now, VHS tapes, like the ones above and just like the ones Alex Krailie used in filming his disastrous student film project, are made of a couple different types of plastics. The casing is made out of polypropylene (a very tough and ubiquitous plastic), the reels are made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC, used in piping), I'd hazard a guess that the clear windows are polystyrene (a brittle plastic unless foamed) due to experience with how brittle they are, and the magnetized tape is a polyethylene (the same stuff found in garbage bags) ribbon coated with things called pthalates (which, due to their alignment on the polyethylene chain, can hold a magnetic charge, and therefore can be used to record data). That last type of plastic product is commonly called mylar. Now, judging by the kind of tapes Krailie used (the small ones you put in a handheld camera), I'd guess that the four plastics in most use here are the same as for the bigger VHS tapes - polyethylene (mylar), polypropylene, polystyrene, and PVC.
This poses a problem when it comes to something called the glass transition point. In laymen's terms, the glass transition point (Tg) of a plastic is the point at which a melting plastic becomes brittle, like glass. This can also happen at super-low temperatures, because some plastics and other polymers have Tg values below the freezing point of water. Of course, melting point also differs for each plastic, and each plastic melts in a different way. For reference, here's the glass transition and melting points for the four types of plastic found in a VHS cassette tape:
- Polystyrene, crystalline: Tg = 90-100 °C, Tm = 240 °C
- Polyethylene, BoPET (Biaxially-oriented Polyethylene Terephtalate, Mylar): Tg = 80 °C, Tm = 250 to 260 °C
- Polypropylene: Tg = 0 °C, Tm = 130 °C
- PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride): Tg = 83 °C, Tm = 160 °C
Now for reference, the hottest your typical outdoor fire can get is about 1000 to 1,200 °C, since fires don't usually burn with white-hot flames in your typical campfire. The lowest temperature possible for a fire that has a visible flame is 525 °C, if the flame is just barely visible. It's possible Krailie used wood or leaves with a fuel or lighter-started fire to burn his tapes, judging by the small amount of damage that was inflicted on the tapes Jay finds (the ones that aren't completely melted). And therein lies the problem - the tapes Jay discovers in Entry #69 should be entirely useless to him, because all of the plastics used in the manufacture of tape cassettes melt at temperatures well below your average small campfire made from burning twigs and leaves. Even if Alex used coal for his fire, that's still a high enough temperature to decimate any plastic he threw into it almost instantly, even if the fire was burning with a relatively cold flame.
So the question is, did Marble Hornets fail thermodynamics and polymer chemistry forever, or is there some kernel of possible truth to what allowed certain tapes to be saved? Well, the answer is yes, depending upon where the tapes were in relation to flame proximity. That is, how close where those tapes to the actual fire itself? Notice in Entry #69, Jay not only finds some tapes off to the side of the mass of destroyed burned tapes, but he also digs under them to find some tapes that were spared the full heat of the flames. This makes perfect sense - heat rises, including that of a flame, so it's feasible that any tapes far enough off to the side of the actual fire, or located beneath tapes that were actually burning in the fire, could be spared a good amount of the actual heat and therefore might not fully melt the casing. They might reach their respective glass transition points for each cassette casing, but it's likely that the actual tape cassette would survive.
However, there's one problem here - the casing and tape reels inside could not possibly survive the actual heat, unless they were buried far enough under the actual burning tapes, or were really far off to the side. In fact, if you were to burn a VHS cassette, the plastic casing would melt first, then the tape reels, then the clear windows, and finally the mylar tape inside. You still couldn't salvage a fully burned tape even if you had the film; the heat would pretty much destroy it. So the answer is, yes, there's truth to what Jay finds in that firepit in the park - you really can have tapes that are spared the full wrath of a flame, if you get lucky and some are far enough away and the flame isn't very hot, but all this assumes that Krailie burned the tapes in such a way that they were all unsalvagable. However, as we see in Entry #69 above, this is very clearly not the case - a good handful of the tapes survived pretty much intact, and in fact the next two entries show footage from those tapes functioning perfectly fine and being almost totally undamaged (and they were probably enhanced by Jay, too, but you never know just how much actual work the guy had to do on them to make them function properly). It seems pretty obvious to me that Alex did not burn the tapes as well as he thought he did (hey, the guy clearly wasn't operating on all mental cylinders by this point in time), and with that, I now put on my Proxy Mask to start speculating as to what went on here. It seems pretty clear to me that Alex was in a rush to burn those tapes before someone (Jay? Hoody? Tim? Another former MH cast member?) found them, which leads me to four possible conclusions:
- Alex was in a rush to burn the tapes so that Jay did not find out the truth about something. This to me seems the most likely because, personally? I really do not trust Alex to be a half-decent guy at this point. It seems to me he'd probably burn these tapes because he doesn't want Jay to find out about something he did, which is pretty seemingly backed up by Entry #71 (which I'm not linking here or discussing any further because seriously, SPOILERS!). Now he might not want Jay to know something he did to save his life, of course, but it just as easily could be something bad, which again, see Entries #70 and #71 for backup here, but there's other possible explanations for Alex's actions here. Such as...
- Alex was in a rush to burn the tapes because he was being chased. Chased by what? Possibly Masky, but probably the Operator, which would mean that Alex is possibly trying to burn some of these tapes to get his tall, faceless stalker off his ass, and he's burning them in the vain hopes that doing so will get Creeps McSlender to actually leave him alone. After all, he might believe that the Operator is only after him because he caught it on camera, and if he destroys all record of the being from memory, or otherwise gets rid of the records (say, by foisting them on an old friend who won't stop asking about them), then maybe he'll finally be rid of it for good. Which, sorry, Alex, but that doesn't look too likely. Then again, if he thinks getting rid of evidence might be a good way to ix-nay on the erator-Opay, then it might also be the case that...
- Alex was in a rush to burn the tapes because these specific tapes are more dangerous than the others. Maybe they reveal something pressing and important about the Operator. Maybe they are more likely than the others to cause stalking to happen; Alex might have discovered and recorded something crucially important but incredibly deadly to the knowledge of anyone viewing it. He might even have seen and recorded something pretty damn sanity-shattering, lived to tell the tale (minus his full mental faculties), and realized that for anyone to see this tape would be a horrible disaster. However, it's just as probable that...
- Alex was in a rush to burn the tapes because the Operator told him to. Yes, this would mean Alex is either a Proxy, or is working in cahoots with the Operator of his own will for some unknown reason. Um, I dunno about you, but I highly doubt based on the events of the past four years and what happened during his failed Marble Hornets project that Alex is doing this totally of his own free will. And no, sorry, you can't apply the Help3r rules here, because the grandfather clause protects Marble Hornets in this case and Proxies as puppets or tools (rather than "people with purpose") are an established thing in this universe. So, it's not entirely unfeasible to assume that Alex might be one. Stranger things have happened in this series, after all, and it wouldn't be the first such reveal in a Slenderseries...