There are a lot of messy loose threads coming out of Godzilla Minus One, and because I’m all about overthinking them, let’s kick it around. If you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want spoilers, better not read this.
First of all, the most obvious, Godzilla gets better. Yep, after literally having the top of his head blown off and literally blown to pieces, Godzilla is back. Ghidorah is the main villain, and if anything he’s just as or even more biologically regenerative than Godzilla – he survives a fuel air bomb explosion, massive electrocution, being frozen solid with liquid nitrogen, and incinerating temperatures.
Tough doesn’t describe these critters.
IT TURNS OUT GODZILLA IS INFECTIOUS
In terms of disturbing implications, this is way up there on the list. We learn that from the first Godzilla attack, a number of badly injured people, including Noriko, were infected with live Godzilla cells, and recovered dramatically, before developing Godzilla-growths like dorsal spines or patches of hide, and dying. Noriko is the only one who has survived so far.
That we know of.
Possibly there are others, people who weren’t badly injured, or avoided scrutiny of the medical system for one reason or another.
Well, that just opens up in all directs.
First – How did they get infected? Godzilla wasn’t injured on his march through Ginza, no one was taking potshots at him. Where do these cells come from? I’m assuming that they’re skin cells which got shed like dandruff, or possibly cells from the interior lining of its jaws expelled when it. No one was in physical contact. It seems that they were caught in the blast wave.
Which means that for humans to be randomly infected, the whole area most have been blanketed with a cloud of Godzilla’s cellular material, most of which landed on rocks, pavement, wood buildings, mixed in with dust and detritus. A lot of it probably landed on living organisms – plants, birds, rats, cats, dogs, humans, and for whatever reason didn’t take root. Maybe it needed an open wound to infect. Maybe uninjured people’s immune systems were able to fight it off. Maybe most of the cells were non-viable.
But still, assuming a wide distribution of Godzilla cells most of which die, it’s unlikely that only humans got infected. Which raises the prospect that within the Ginza area, there are now mutants? Godzilla infected rats, cats, dogs, birds. Given the track record with humans, most of these probably died, and died faster than humans. But the area is a no-go zone, even years later, so possibly whatever is infected is surviving, adapting and just escaping notice. I wouldn’t want to wander the Ginza district at night.
But regardless, whatever’s going on, there’s now a lot more Godzilla and Ghidorah material now spread around the environment. So whatever issues came out of Godzilla’s first attack on Tokyo… Well, they may be back with a vengeance. Stick a pin in that, we’ll come back later.
Luckily, the one good thing… so far, is that Godzilla’s cells don’t seem to be aggressively infectious. This isn’t the Godzilla-flu, or Godzilla-measles. Infected persons don’t spread the infection, Noriko’s husband and daughter have been living in close contact, exchanging hugs and touches, sharing food and in the case of Noriko and her husband, sharing bodily fluids if you know what I mean. No sign of dorsal spines even a year or two later.
But there are medical implications here. Godzilla-cell infection took Noriko from death or the brink of death, back to full health. The Doctor literally wrote her off as a waste of time, but within days she was back, and within a couple of weeks fully recovered. Other infectees made similar recoveries, before the infection killed them.
Wow. So if you could just tame that ‘kill the host’ side effect, you’d potentially have a miracle cure for trauma, burns, broken bones, internal injuries, gunshot wounds etc. Possibly a cure for diseases. Possibly a cure for aging. Consider it – potentially full regeneration, soldiers that can’t be killed, a fountain of youth. That’s extremely promising.
I would expect a major medical effort by the US military, possibly US and Japanese medical research companies. And eventually by Soviet, British, French researchers procuring samples by hook or crook. Any infected corpse that wasn’t cremated is going to be exhumed. The Ginza area is going to be combed over fanatically. We’re talking millions or billions of dollars, several major labs, a lot of research talent zeroing in on the phenomena and its applications.
There’s the potential here for all kinds of medical breakthroughs. And possibly some catastrophic disasters. Let’s put it this way – human trials will be risky, but there’s likely going to be a lot of animal trials – rats, lab animals, dogs, sheep, monkeys, apes. Even if we don’t have mutants from the Ginza excursion, we might end up with them anyway. Or an airborne Godzilla-cell infectious agent.
No matter how you slice it – the simple fact of Godzilla cells being infectious is going to change the world in all kinds of ways. Maybe the changes are small and subtle, assuming the research doesn’t go anywhere. Or it may be profound – outbreaks of mutants, super-soldiers, Godzilla-men, medical research breakthroughs, you name it.
THERE’S A LOT OF MONSTER BITS LAYING AROUND.
We know from the Ginza excursion that just walking around on land and firing off his atomic breath, Godzilla must have shed a huge amount of live cells in the environment. Call it Godzilla-shedding, or Godzilla dandruff.
Well, here we are at round two. Even under normal conditions, there’d be a huge amount of shedding.
But we don’t just get shedding. Godzilla gets buildings physically dumped on him. So literally, his hide gets scoured, and instead of it just floating off him, its’ going to get mixed in with all the detritus of the rocks and building fragments. So this rubble is going to have contamination levels orders of magnitude over an open environment.
At the end Godzilla gets hit with artillery, all kinds of impacts there, that’s bound to knock a few bits off. Notably, before that Godzilla gets bitten all over, at least a half dozen times by Ghidorah, bites that cut into the flesh and shed blood and tissue. At one point a Dorsal fin is ripped out, complete with blood and flesh attached. At another, Godzilla loses an entire forearm.
This version of Godzilla weighs in at about 20,000 tons. We can assume that the missing forearm is at least a thousand tons. The dorsal fin is probably several hundred tons. There may be as much as fifteen hundred to two thousand tons of intact Godzilla material, laying around most of it in two distinct piles, and likely lots of smaller chunks, clumps of blood and flesh, smears on rocks all the way down to microscopic cells.
For that matter, there’s a lot of Ghidorah likely laying around. We don’t know if Ghidorah has the same ‘dandruff’ issue that Godzilla does. But if so, the creature touches down in multiple locations, so there are a lot of little potential infection vectors to shed.
We don’t see Ghidorah get injured to the same messy degree that Godzilla does, but at one point it’s knocked down out of the sky really hard, and hits with massive impact. That likely shed some tissue in the local area.
During the battle, at one point, one of Ghidorah’s heads was torn off, leaving a spray of blood and flesh bits between the severed head and the body.
Finally, of course, the battle ends with a rapidly mutating Ghidorah being blown to bits by Godzilla. Well, there’s a problem. Unless Godzilla completely and totally incinerated every bit of Ghidorah… There’s probably Ghidorah bits littered all of Ginza. Perhaps as many as a couple of thousand tons. It’s not unreasonable to assume that five to ten per cent of Ghidorah’s body mass might have been scattered all over the landscape. Possibly a lot more.
But maybe there’s nothing to worry about. Maybe all these cells die off quickly when separated from the main host. After all, Godzilla and Ghidorah’s tissues are only incredibly durable, resistant to liquid nitrogen freezing, incineration temperatures, massive electrical shocks, explosives and opportunistically parasitical and infectious.
Sure, there’s probably nothing to worry about.
There’s only at least a couple of chunks of Godzilla and an unknown number of pieces of Ghidorah hanging around in the range of hundreds of tons each, which might be large enough to be viable. And possibly many more chunks in the ranges of hundreds of pounds. We don’t know what the lower limit of viability for these tissues are, or how long they’re likely to endure.
All of which suggests that Ginza likely has massive contamination and clean up issues, which have not even been addressed. There seems to be very little clean up of the Ginza district. And more than that, it’s likely that there’s a huge amount of potentially harvestable live or dead material for explorers and researchers.
Now, I’ve talked about the potential medical and biological applications.
But it goes way beyond that. Godzilla and Ghidorah are both so huge as to be biologically impossible. They shouldn’t be able to even walk, or breathe at their size, but they move easily, their skeletons don’t collapse from the weight, and they each take incredible amounts of punishment including falls from heights that should have cause them to explode on impact. So hide, bones, tendons each stronger than anything we’ve seen – you could build a space elevator if you could crack the composition of those. Material’s scientists would go mad for the opportunity to study bits of flesh and bone.
It doesn’t stop there – Godzilla seems to be a walking nuclear bomb, with an atomic-blast breath ray. Physicists, biologists, a dozen disciplines would go wild for that.
Ghidorah can fly! That should be utterly impossible. It’s able to control gravity and levitate objects with its gravity beams, and exercise enough control that it can pick up buildings and drop them wherever it wants. And its red beams, what exactly are those? We don’t understand gravity, but what Ghidorah does with it would revolutionize science.
These two animals pose huge challenges. Their tissues, particularly their viable live tissues may hold the secrets to everything from nuclear fusion to anti-gravity. Again, there’s fodder here for major research projects – literally a line up of Nobel Prizes for the next twenty years.
Assuming any or some of these secrets can be unraveled, consider the implications – potential fusion power, or new forms or methods of fission power generations. Potentially force field technology. Or anti-gravity – no more rockets, space stations and moon bases built with anti-gravity. It’s not clear whether these secrets can be unraveled – likely they wouldn’t be unraveled quickly, if at all. Even unraveled it might take years or decades to find applications. The world could change, but if it does, it could be slow or quick.
Even if the secrets of the tissues couldn’t be unraveled directly, there’s still a chance that you’d find strange applications. For instance, if viable tissue samples could be persuaded to reproduce… which given the regenerative qualities shown is far from impossible, you might find a whole new technology, or series of technologies built around live monster tissue in batteries or canisters, hooked up to engines, or devices.
Or considering that there my be thousand ton or hundred ton fragments with regenerative qualities – there may be new mutated Kaiju regrowing from them. Perhaps mini-Godzillas and mini-Ghidorahs, or potentially mutated variations – instead of a Ghidorah, a Rhodan. Instead of a Godzilla an Angilas, Gorosaurus or Minilla, or stranger.
WHAT EXACTLY IS GHIDORAH?
In the newsreel that introduces Ghidorah, it’s descried as emerging from or being found at the site of an apparent meteor strike. At one point, someone asks or speculates that it’s from outer space, but the scientists present refuse to endorse the view – possible but not proven, and not given a probability.
Ghidorah’s original form is some kind of tentacle blob that absorbs other life forms – visibly an elk and a bird, possibly other animals. At some point, it enters a chrysalis form or shell, which then hatches out to its dragon form.
Speculation is that it’s combined the DNA of a lot of life forms.
Well, except there’s nothing that comes close to fitting. It’s got wings, but these are bat-wings, not bird wings. It has horns, but these look like goat horns, not elk antlers. It’s overall structure is reptilian, particularly dragonlike, where did it get dragon DNA? Or reptile DNA? Even if it absorbed a lizard or two, the Elk would have outweighed everything else by factors of hundreds – that’s a lot of cells and DNA to contribute, that should have drowned out everything else.
And what sort of DNA contribution produces three heads and two tails? Was Ghidorah on the verge of splitting into two or three animals?
Okay, let’s back up – what are Ghidorah’s qualities. First – incredible resilience and durability. It stands up to Godzilla’s atomic breath for several seconds – nothing else came close. It survives a terminal velocity fall from hundreds or thousands of feet up – do the math on the kinetic energy involved in dropping 25,000 tons a mile at an acceleration of roughly 10 meters per second (he should have exploded on impact). Survives fuel air explosive, incendiary temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun, multiple lighting bolts, liquid nitrogen. The only other object on Earth this tough is Godzilla.
Notably, Ghidorah has incredible regenerative/mutation abilities – spontaneously growing extra heads and a second tail, and later, incorporating Godzilla cells directly and immediately copying. The only other thing on Earth which shows similar super-fast biological transformation is Godzilla, who regenerates a severed arm within seconds.
So the inference is that Godzilla and Ghidorah may be related. Since Godzilla came first, the further inference may be that Ghidorah is derived from Godzilla.
But if so, why did Ghidorah not simply emerge as a second Godzilla? Godzilla – the main form, doesn’t seem to mutate at all, it just regenerates to its original form. It replaces its jaw, rebuilds its head, and regrows an arm. But it doesn’t grow multiple heads or multiple arms.
Why doesn’t it? Maybe that’s the question. What exactly is keeping Godzilla as Godzilla, given that it could potentially grow a third or fourth arm in seconds. Why isn’t Godzilla metastizing all over the place?
I’m assuming that Godzilla has some sort of internal governor or cellular blueprint that sticks with the Godzilla plan.
Ghidorah doesn’t. Ghidorah is incredibly more mutation-friendly than Godzilla. It grows extra heads, for Pete’s sakes.
But Ghidorah doesn’t mutate constantly – its first dragon form remains stable until it’s electrocuted and walloped by a fall. Later it maintains its three headed form with stability, until it starts absorbing Godzilla cells and mutating into a Godzilla-Ghidorah.
What’s going on?
Well, let’s ask why it mutated.
Consider the mutation from Dragon to Triple-header. Ghidorah literally fell from thousands of feet, that’s a hell of a fall. Maybe it’s skeleton was shattered, spine broken into vertebra fragments, all sorts of internal injuries. Even worse – lighting strikes probably charted burn paths all through its body.
Maybe the regenerative function checked the blueprint, tried to rebuild the dragon form, but found the damage, from impact trauma, smashed skeleton and charred burn paths was so great that it just read wrong. Part of it around the head rebuilt the head. But another part of it couldn’t find the head, maybe there was a wall of fused tissue cutting off communication with the head, and so it adjusted by just building a new head… twice. Result, three heads.
Once it’s back functioning, the whatever controls the ‘blueprint’ goes… ‘Okay, I guess its three heads now.’
Ghidorah’s forms and powers might simply be copying errors from trying to reproduce the Godzilla template, with gaps in the record, or jury rigging damaged or incomplete base materials.
It might be that Ghidorah started off as some piece of Godzilla that had very specialized properties, and so its ‘blueprint’ was skewed from the start – an eyeball, a piece of brain, stem cells, bone marrow fragments, etc. Something that in regenerating turned into a jello roll, and tried to incorporate other forms to bridge DNA gaps (or whatever Godzilla and Ghidorah use for DNA).
How does it get from the sea, where Godzilla’s head is blown off, to the mountains inland? And why does it register as a meteor strike?
As a wild speculation, we know that Ghidorah has gravity powers – there’s no way it can fly without gravity powers, not without either wings the size of several football stadiums, or wings beating hundreds of times a minute, either way with massive air disruption. Or for that matter fly at several times the speed of any living thing, to chase and catch aircraft. So gravity powers to fly. And gravity powers in its beams.
Well, if the two incarnations of Ghidorah have gravity repulsion…. Maybe a stray Godzilla fragment had that same gravity repulsion too. Godzilla gets his head blown off. A substantial, but specialized chunk is blown off, repels gravity ends up floating in the upper atmosphere until finally losing energy and crashing down to Earth… Where it soaks up nutrients and rebuilds, regenerating a body according to some badly damaged and incomplete blueprints?
Ghidorah may not be the only offshoot. Godzilla was apparently killed in the water in his first movie, chunks were scattered around, and in fact, Godzilla was severely injured twice before that, with a mine and a warship firing guns at him. So there may have been a mass shedding of decent sized chunks into the water, some of which might well be reconstituting themselves in the ocean beyond our site.
Hell, if we accept the possibility that Godzilla’s cells may infect Fish, then simple cell shedding as well as the chunks dislodged by injury may well be contaminating the local sea ecology and spreading. If I were the government, I’d be engaged in rigorous testing of fish and sea life in the waters all around Japan.
Or maybe the same accident or nuclear test that mutated Godzilla mutated whatever became Ghidorah, and it just took longer and the proto-Ghidorah traveled further? Or maybe both Godzilla and Ghidorah’s are extraterrestrial?
But for two creatures this exotic and durable, with these remarkable qualities, showing up within a couple of years of each other, and within a very small geographical area does seem like a suspicious coincidence. Odds are there is some kind of connection.
But if Ghidorah is derived from Godzilla tissues, mutated, then that has implications for the Minus Universe. If there’s one strangely mutated offshoot of Godzilla, then that opens the door for others. Possibly a lot of others, and a lot of potential variants. This isn’t the Showa universe, or the Heisei world or Legendary-verse.
Cells this volatile, capable of infecting humans and animals, regenerating new arms or extra heads within seconds, without any apparent source of mass, capable of manifesting effects utilizing the primal forces of the universe…
Between the possibility of a plethora of new monsters, a literal series of hydras that birth new ones every time they’re blown apart, and the endless clouds of potentially infectious cells spread around, there are major challenges. That’s literally a threat to human civilization, and perhaps even all life on Earth.