There are two total monsters in the Iron Lung franchise. In the game there’s this frog like creature that may not even be a frog but it’s probably a frog. In the movie however there’s the one you see below, it’s been nicknamed ‘Ellie’ as it’s believed to be an eel. These are official models of Ellie done by the lovely artist deadlymelodic on instagram.
I specifically want you to look at the spindly/vein like appendages in the front of ellie.
“What are those?” You may asking, those my good friend are the underdeveloped lungs of an amphibian. How do I know? Well, one day I was watching a documentary that covered a rainforest, part of what it covered were glass frogs and I won’t go too into detail but this information may help.
The female glass frogs eggs of which are usually set on a leaf above water and are protected by the male. These eggs have their own unique protection system where the older frogs when threatened will leave the eggs and continue their development in water. However, when the camera panned over the leaf to show the eggs, I spotted something curious. A little tadpole with those same ‘vein like’ appendages. The documentary didn’t specify what exactly they were but I googled it and found that they were the underdeveloped lungs of the tadpole.
(Not a glass frog)
Now, this idea ties into something else, something you might have already realized. Could this technically mean that ‘Ellie’ isn’t an eel and is instead a tadpole? As a tadpole, could she grow more? Does she need to grow more? Why isn’t she in an egg? And so on so forth.
Now, that may be quite a few questions but while I am not a biologist in many ways I am insane so.
Remember how I mentioned that the more mature glass frog tadpoles would leave the eggs if they felt threatened then continued development in the water?
I assumed that the tadpoles would continue growing if needed, but the mature tadpoles had fully developed lungs (as in the little spindle lungs weren’t there) so they were perfectly fine. But here’s my thought process with Ellie:
1) does she need to grow? Ellie is her own little creature, we don’t know if she truly needs to eat. She had a mouth, ‘lungs’ apparently, but we don’t know if she needs to eat. I’m assuming she does because despite her odd and rather suspicious existence she is an organic creature and probably has organs. It’s very possible that, before the SM-8 was sent down, Ellie has this entire time been feeding on the little food she was given, the other convicts sent down before Simon as the SM-8 probably wasn’t the only one before him.
This could hypothetically mean that at some point Ellie had been disturbed, either by the SM-8 or sometime before that, because it’s very likely that Ellie knew to follow Simon around and hunt him because that was her only source of food. Again, this is an animal. And a starving one at that. So when food is delivered to it in a bronze platter that she just needs to break through? Count her in. (If you look back through the photos Ellie looks incredibly thin, especially along the spine.)
2) If Ellie grew, could it go on land? With this whole spitball tadpole Ellie theory, if it did grow, then it’d mature into some type of frog or toad, but that’s going along with whether or not she can/needs to grow. Again, presumably Ellie isn’t a new development. She has at least been there since before the SM-8 and presumably before. That type of a creature, with how big she is, needs at least some time to grow to that size. While she probably doesn’t abide by normal biology and physics so I can’t really use them too much, she might at least abide by them at least a little bit as she is composed of at least a quarter of all the missing life.
Look back to the lungs coming from the gills, to my knowledge no or very little tadpoles leave the eggs when their lungs aren’t developed fully. So, hypothetically, Ellie could have once been in an egg but was disturbed enough to break out of it and then likely killed whatever disturbed her. She was likely disturbed by one of the previous SM missions but which one we’ll never know.
And this final part to wrap this up…
3). Are there other creatures like Ellie on the other blood oceans should they also exist in the movie? In the game, it’s stated that there are four other blood oceans. They probably exist as there wouldn’t really be any reason to change the information on the terminal, so we’re gonna say they are. But anyway. Since Ellie is alive on one of the blood oceans could this mean that there are other similar creatures in said oceans? Usually amphibians lay a whole bunch of eggs, but with Ellie’s size in her immature state it’s unlikely that there are a few if any other creatures like her in the other oceans.
Since there are four blood oceans though it’s a cool idea that there could be other creatures on the other moons, but we’ll never really know for sure as the story of the Iron Lung started with and ended with the convict.
Anyway, bunch of other stuff as the other two moons aren’t owned by the COI and probably by Eden which may tie into their cultist ties and probably why they have them in some regards, but. ANWAY. BYE!
