 |
The Matrix
"Broadcast Depth"
Online comic
Story and art by Bill Sienkiewicz
2001 |
Some precocious Potentials spell
trouble for the Calappidae.
Read the story at
the Internet Archive
Didja Know?
This story originally appeared on the official Matrix
website in 2001. It was later printed in
The Matrix Comics, Vol. 2 published by
Burlyman
Entertainment, a comic book publisher founded by the Wachowskis.
The original online posting of the story included a hidden link
to a short video of a CGI rendering of the Calappidae
hovercraft that is, of course, not available in the book or
accessible on the Internet Archive. A copy of it can be found at
the
Matrix Wiki.
Characters appearing or mentioned in this story
Maggie (dies in this story)
Mary Lena (dies in this story)
Stephen Rollins (dies in this story)
Lisa
Ashley
Parr (dies in this story)
Meade (dies in this story)
Didja Notice?
Maggie's ship is the
Calappidae, also lovingly
referred to as the Grey Ghost.
Calappidae is the Latin name of a
family of crabs. The ship is quite different-looking from
any other Zion hovercraft seen in the Matrix
series. It does look rather like a crab of the
Calappidae family.
Maggie remarks that her twin 8-year old daughters are
possible Potentials and are being tested to see if they have
"the right stuff". The phrase "the right stuff" originated
with the 1979 book The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
(and even more so, the 1983 film based on it) about the
Project Mercury astronauts of NASA in 1958-1963. The term
"right stuff" meant having the high physical and mental
attributes to make it as the first U.S. astronauts. The
popularity of the book and film have made the term popular
in modern culture as a catch-all phrase for "having what it
takes" to get a job done.
On page 15 of the story, Maggie tries to give a
surreptitious, loving goodbye to her daughter Lisa and muses
that the girl is looking at her like she's speaking Urdu.
Urdu is a Persianized form of the Hindustani language,
spoken largely in Pakistan and India.
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