Plan 9 from Outer Space

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Plan 9 team members Tanna and Eros discuss potential implementation issues

“Let's face it, the last 8 plans must have been really shit.”

~ Oscar Wilde on Plan 9

“Yeah, I remember when the brits tried that against us.”

~ Andrew Jackson on Plan 9

“This movie was...very...well...and it is worthy to...be seen.”

~ New York Times on Something Completely Different

While initially supported as "the best Plan from Outer Space ever" by Plan from Outer Space planning consultants, Plan 9 from Outer Space proved to be highly flawed, as was discovered during the plan's implementation phase.

Background

As is well-known, the long series of Plans from Outer Space were originally devised to prevent Earth's human race from devising Solaranium-based weapons technology, capable of exploding star-emitted photons (including those of Earth's own Sun) and potentially extinguishing all life in the galaxy. After the first eight plans failed to gain much attention from Earth's curiously disunited governments and corporate-dominated media establishment, the Plan from Outer Space planners were forced to implement Plan 9 from Outer Space as a last resort. Later investigations suggested that Plans 1-8 from Outer Space may have failed because the operatives charged with carrying out those plans had simply forgotten to include proper postage. In any event, Plan 9 from Outer Space was finally set in motion on Helix 67283.468 (Earth Date October 31, 1959), with disastrous consequences.

Plans 1-8

The original eight plans were all disastrous failures which completely failed to attract any attention on Earth. Each was outlined, proposed, and submitted by members of the Plans from Outer Space planning consultants (Local 817), and led to the dismissal of several members.

• Plan 1: An internet petition was used to persuade Earth not to develop the Solaranium bomb, which ultimately failed due to the absence of internet access on Earth at the time, and the fact that many of the petitioners signed more than once under screen-names such as "GoNzO_1337" and "Vampira_da_goth".
• Plan 2: Lasers were used to carve messages into fields urging the people of Earth not to destroy the galaxy. Unfortunately, a drunken programmer turned this message into meaningless circles and patterns which only confused and horrified local farmers.
• Plan 3: A megaphone was used to communicate the message from orbit; however, the planners did not consider that space is a vacuum, and so the messenger suffocated while attempting to shout.
• Plan 4: Uncyclopedia is dumb. Wikipedia is much better. :) 75-minute film on the subject.
• Plan 5: Was never completely planned, as the team of consultants eventually fell into an argument about the stupid Earthlings with their stupid, stupid ways.
• Plan 6: A laser was shone on the moon to communicate the message to Earth; this failed due to the poor lighting effects that were available for the mission, making the overall impression of the message seem dated and cheesy.
• Plan 7: Ambassadors were sent to Earth, but never made it to the surface due to the fact that their landing vehicles were lowered down from the mothership on string-like cord which made them too wobbly to successfully land.
• Plan 8: The absolutely final plan that was to be used before resorting to the violence and destruction that was Plan 9 involved beaming an urgent message directly to an Earthling's brain concerning the Solaranium bomb. This Earthling would then be able to persuade the world not to create such a destructive weapon. Unfortunately, the consultants decided to beam this message to Edward D. Wood, Jr., who used the idea to write a film script which is widely considered one of the worst ever written.

After each of these plans, which had each been guaranteed to succeed, had failed, the Plans from Outer Space planning consultants had no choice but to initiate the unspeakable PLAN 9.

The Plan

Leading the implementation team was Commander Eros, a 274-helix veteran of over 650 different Plan from Outer Space implementation missions. Assisted by the able (though relatively inexperienced) Lt. Tanna, The Leader was "supremely confident" that Plan 9 would succeed, despite the failure of the previous eight plans. Problems arose almost immediately when Tanna began to express reservations about the rather ghoulish nature of Plan 9 from Outer Space, which involved resurrecting human corpses from a cemetery ^[1] and setting them on a path of destruction that would eventually lead to the extermination of all mankind. Eros, a diehard anti-human of unquestioning loyalty to The Leader, was forced to spend valuable mission time convincing Tanna of the need to destroy the puny Earthlings who, with their stupid minds, were clearly stupid, stupid, stupid. Surprisingly, this constant repetition was less than completely effective.

Implementation Phase

Later, during the initial phase of the Plan, Eros was nearly killed by one of the resurrected corpses when a control device malfunctioned. (These should not be confused with members of the US Republican Party, undeniable though the resemblance certainly is.)

Though saved by Tanna from the lumbering artificially-animated corpse, Eros nevertheless suspected her of causing the malfunction herself by deliberately sabotaging the device. Despite this incident, the Plan was still on schedule by the end of Stage II, just as the animated corpses were set to begin terrorizing the human population. (No, they did not stand for Congress.) A crucial mistake was made, however, when one of the team apparently left a hatch open on their spacecraft, TLS Wobblingpieplate 349, allowing three armed humans to enter the ship. The humans managed to secure one of the control devices, and overpowered Eros and Tanna on the bridge after a violent struggle, during which Eros was severely injured. At that point, Plan 9 from Outer Space was doomed to failure. Tanna inexplicably allowed the humans to escape with full knowledge of the spacecraft's internal design, and attempted to fly the damaged ship back into orbit, only to have the engines suffer catastrophic failure during the climb out of Earth's gravity well. Engulfed in flames and unable to control the newly-installed and over-sophisticated "fly-by-wire" propulsion system, the ship exploded while still in the planet's atmosphere, and both crew members were presumed lost.

Post-Mortem Analysis

The plan is often criticised for the poor quality of its mechanical constructs.

While the Plan was theoretically sound, it had several inherent flaws.

1. Corpse-animation technology was, at that time, insufficiently powerful when applied to unusually large human cadavers. It was later perfected on a moribund former US actor, however (see Ronald Reagan).
2. Ships of the period lacked updated security systems that might have prevented, or at least made the crew aware of, enemy infiltration.
3. Perhaps most importantly, it is unlikely that the reanimated corpses, while terrifying, would have physically survived a human nuclear attack, given only the crude quantum-energy personnel shielding technology available at the time.
4. Little or no consideration was given to the problem of reanimated-corpse speed and coordination. Though sufficiently terrifying, the corpses' lack of physical motor skills made it difficult for them to catch and kill even slow-moving enemy personnel.

Several helixes after the Plan 9 Disaster, it was discovered that Commander Eros had become severely addicted to KW-923™ during a previous mission and had managed to skillfully hide his symptoms from his superiors. The effects of the drug were to make the once-reliable Eros irritable, impetuous, and compulsive, likely to crumple under even moderate pressure and stress. Visual logs transmitted to Homeworld prior to the disaster attest to Eros's intemperate and overdramatic behavior. Likewise, further investigation uncovered evidence that Tanna was, in fact, secretly a member of the Interplanetary Lesbian Resistance. It is now believed that she deliberately left the hatch open that allowed the human raiding party to enter the spacecraft, ultimately leading to the Plan's failure. It has even been suggested that her ultimate intent was not to return to Homeworld at all, but instead to fly the ship to Sausalito, where fellow ILR agents may have been stationed.

Recommendations

Given these facts, our conclusion is that a second attempt to implement Plan 9 from Outer Space, using more recent technology and a security-class II (or higher) implementation team, would stand a 97-percent chance of success, with a 3-percent margin of error — well within The Leader's newly-published guidelines for Plan from Outer Space Pre-Implementation Strategic Analysis. However, it would perhaps be best to wait for the results of Plan 11 from Outer Space before moving forward with re-implementation.

Plan 10 from Outer Space was made for TV in 1994. It took place somewhere in Utah. No, that doesn't mean that Donny Osmond is an alien.

Footnotes

1. ^  Curiously, humans dispose of their dead by interring them in the soil, rather than by promoting them to upper management.

See also

• Miserable failure
• Plan B from Outer Space