Latho makes his move!
It’s a pretty toddling move, admittedly, and lacks in elegance. But Latho’s legs are simply a bit too short and wonky to move in a much more elegant way. Plus they’re pretty inconsistent in shape, but that’s mostly a problem of how lax I am at referring to my reference sheets.*cough*
But from here on its legs won’t hinder Latho any further, since it smartly trades them up for a much larger number of arms, aka tentacles. Which doesn’t make Latho’s movement any more elegant, but much faster. And, more importantly, much more wriggly and writhing, which is an absolute win as far as Latho’s opinion is concerned. A plushy body might be pretty comfortable from the get-go, but Latho probably still feels that the body he just slipped into is more natural for it.
Why Latho returns to the place of his initial landing on this planet for its transformation, I can’t really say. Perhaps just because it’s such a well-established cliche, or perhaps Latho needed to get something from its spacecraft. Some sort of transformation charm, perhaps, or just a diagram helping to arrange the countless tentacles properly. Whatever it was, it didn’t make it to the status of official McGuffin, apparently, or we would have heard of it.
In between, Latho makes a valid observation on the difficulties of climbing into or out of a coffin. You couldn’t really call that a design flaw, since coffins aren’t actually designed for getting into or out of under your own power. But it has turned out to be a serious flaw for depictions of vampires and other revenants in movies. Letting the actor simply climb out of the coffin on camera…works, and some filmmakers have actually gone down that route. But there’s just no way to make it look dignified, let alone elegant, so it really doesn’t jive with the kind of regal image a typical vampire character is supposed to present. The smarter directors just keep it off-screen, and those that go all-out invent some kind of staged, otherworldy way for the revenant to rise.
I’m actually well aware of the problem, but I still kept the camera on the action. Latho isn’t a terribly dignified or elegant character to begin with and certainly nowhere near a vampire lord in appeal – while the way it scrambles about here doesn’t look impressive, it’s really no worse than usual.
And Latho turns into Nyarlathotep immediately afterwards, so the earlier image gets obliterated immediately…and the whole planet will meet a similar fate soon.
More on Thursday.