I like to read into the characters of the hosts. Joel and Mike both seem resigned to their confinement, but where Mike always seems actually miserable, Joel strikes me as numb to the point of detached amusement. Jonah of course, being an intrepid space hero, is far too restless to do well in captivity, and has come the closest to escaping the Satellite of Love (as far as I remember, from the episodes I’ve seen.)
Now, I know technically as the audience we are all being experimented on by extension, but please, for a moment, imagine you’re a lowly grunt at Gizmonic Institute. You usually keep to yourself and stay under the radar, but one day you knock a couple of beakers of acid on the floor and your boss decides there’s a better use for you than mopping floors — and before you know it, what you thought was a routine polishing of the knobs on the mad scientist’s life-size lunar module turns into an unwelcome launch into orbit. You’re trapped on the SoL, routinely forced into a movie theater which you suspect subscribes to non-Euclidian rules of dimension and volume and forced to sit through agonizingly bad movies. You have to cannibalize the ship’s parts to make robot friends to keep you company, and to create dubious devices to use in the invention exchanges the Mads subject you to. And most perplexing of all, you have no idea how you survive on this satellite, because every time you ask where the food comes from or how to service the life support systems, you’re told to just relax!
How long would YOU be able to survive under these conditions? Would you be the type to just kick back and do your best to endure the experiments with your bot buddies, or would you be trying to escape and make it back to earth?
I watch cheesy movies all the time, like building and inventing stuff, and function best when I don’t have to directly interact with other humans. So yeah, I’d probably actually sign up for that job.
I’d be alright at first, but the inability to escape would turn my cabin fever into a Cast Away situation complete with Wilson, to whom I would talk since I couldn’t make the Bots myself.
Good as in yield successful results or good as in, “Yeah, I’m fine with this?”
As an introvert, the idea of hanging with a few robot friends and watching movies holds great appeal to me. i think that I’d be in my element meaning that, if my captors hoped to glean information as to how to break human brains, I wouldn’t give them much of an idea.
I’m also assuming that the experiments we see on screen are the ones that get administered. Watch one bad movie a week, and spend the rest of the time goofing off and working on a wacky invention? I could totally handle that.
If every day was The Gauntlet? I’m not sure I would survive that, even with the help of my robot friends.
If the intent is to amuse others, then I think I’d be a terrible test subject. Plus, I’m more of a reader than a movie watcher. I like movies and I love this show, but I don’t tend to watch a lot of movies so I’d be terrible as a test subject unless I had some books and a few notebooks to write it. I’d even be okay with Tom’s typewriter.
I feel like this is a delicate balance of being upbeat enough to keep your head “in the game” but also wry/sarcastic enough to enjoy riffing. I’m not sure how long I’d last, but I think I’d have fun doing it until I went 'nanners.
I mean…free room and board. Can’t beat that despite being in space. Plus you still get stuff sent up to you every now and then.
Though if someone tried to conk me on the noggin they’d have a problem. My dome is a bit too solid for that (wearing an 8 hat size can do that to you).
Well, going by the OP’s statement, we’d be in Gizmonics…and they might pay pretty well. I mean even a janitor level job like Joel’s eventually netted him a managerial job at a resturaunt, which he would have had to have enough money to travel from Australia to get.
Also Mike’s temp job must have been better than he let on to have all the funds that the bots used for their various things.
Thinking about it, probably the bots would end up driving me more insane than the movies after awhile. They’re going crazy from the movies too (or they’re already crazy? Hard to tell sometimes) and some of the stuff they get up to would make me go beserk haha
I would watch a convoluted plot about you as the test subject trying and succeeding to convince the mads to bring your wife on as part of the experiment.
Your wife, though, might not be as thrilled
