“I think Pacific Rim is unrealistic now because instead of everyone banding together to defeat COVID, the governments just gave up and abandoned everybody-”

Are you kidding me? Pacific Rim 100% predicted this kind of thing. That’s literally what the Pacific Perimeter Program was about. Once the PPDC decided fighting kaiju was too expensive, they just gave up and chose to ignore the problem by putting it behind a big wall. Pacific Rim is literally about the people who were abandoned by the institutions that were supposed to protect them and kept on trying anyway.

The thing about Pacific Rim is that it’s an allegorical fairytale.

The Jaegers are an allegory for the things we can’t do alone without burning ourselves out. Yeah, it’s possible to pilot a Jaeger solo for awhile. But nobody can last the whole fight. If you try, you will collapse under the strain sooner or later. You will die.

The drift is about the necessity of making yourself vulnerable to someone, letting another person in, so you can lift this otherwise impossible burden together. Because if we isolate ourselves, if we don’t face the mortifying ordeal of being known, we will change nothing, and we will die alone.

Hello Pacific Rim fans, today I am doing a post on the topic of how rangers get into the conn-pod, and take control of the Jaeger, plus do a quick look at conn-pod interiors in general! I’ll be using pictures sourced from movie-screencaps.com to illustrate the process.

Before I proceed, I’d like to remind folks that Lady Danger’s canonical name contains a racial slur. It will be depicted here in screenshots, but I encourage fans to use the name “Lady Danger” in casual conversation, fanfiction etc. It doesn’t matter if the name was referencing an old engine, it doesn’t matter if no harm was intended by it; a slur’s a slur.

Before the rangers enter the conn-pod, they must first suit up. This isn’t something they can do on their own - they have a dedicated team of assistant techs to help them into their drivesuits. As we can see here, Raleigh and Yancy Becket’s team have the name of their jaeger printed on the backs of their jumpsuits:

If you read my earlier post on jaegers, you know that drivesuits come in two layers. Here’s Raleigh and Yancy already wearing the first layer, while one of their technicians assists:

Next, the technicians help them into the drivesuit’s second, armored layer. On the right side of the first image is the area where the drivesuits are kept when not in use:

And then we have this thing that’s pulled out of a special storage box and put over the spinal area, connecting the back of the armor together:

We also see Yancy and Raleigh pull on their helmets, and this strange liquid drains out. (It makes me think of the orange juice Raleigh was drinking earlier.) It’s not clear how common this feature is, but we know it’s not universal - the refurbished Lady Danger doesn’t have this, and Cherno Alpha’s helmets don’t look it would even be possible.

Next up, the pilots enter the conn-pod. Note those two light gray things on the floor in the first picture; that’s part of the Pilot Motion Rig. Also note the dark gray things hanging from the ceiling in the second picture; that’s also part of it.

Once the pilots step into the bottom part of Pilot Motion Rig, metal clamps lock their feet into place. On the right, Raleigh is already locked in; on the left, Yancy is not yet locked in:

Meanwhile, more technicians help pilots get into the upper part of the Pilot Motion Rig.

At this point, something magical and wonderful absolutely terrifying else happens: the floor pulls away, leaving the pilots standing like:

If you look down once the floor’s pulled back, it’s uh. Quite the view.

In the case of Lady Danger, a nuclear-powered Mark-3, this is where technicians drop the head to connect it to the body. (The head is stored separately to reduce radiation exposure that might damage the delicate circuits.)

At this point, the Beckets are looking at this in front of them:

As the head connects, the pilot-to-pilot protocol is engaged, the computer system fires up, and the Beckets see a LOADING screen:

In the Anchorage Shatterdome, Lady Danger was wheeled out through a door on a rolling platform. At this point, the neural handshake was activated with a countdown of fifteen seconds.

The neural link is established, and you got two people in control of a Jaeger!

From here, stuff often depends on the specific jaeger, as control systems can be pretty different. For example, we see Raleigh and Yancy holding these round things in the arms they’re controlling at the beginning of the film, but the refurbished Lady Danger doesn’t seem to use them, and neither do the other jaegers.

I’d also like to contrast Cherno Alpha’s drivesuits with Lady Danger’s drivesuits for a moment, just to emphasize how different designs can be. As you can see, each pilot’s drivesuit has cables connected to the arm they’re controlling:

Also as I was looking at pictures of jaeger interiors, I noticed something curious about Lady Danger vs. Striker Eureka.

The original Lady Danger has a high console like this:

The refurbished Lady Danger has one positioned lower:

Striker Eureka has both a high and low console:

So make of that what you will, lol.

And that’s the basics of boarding and controlling a jaeger! If you haven’t seen it already I also recommend checking out my other post on jaeger lore, where I compiled everything I could find out about them from various Pacific Rim medias. And you might also read Drifting, as conceptualized by Travis Beacham if you’re interested in knowing more about the drifting aspect, and maybe Drift Hangover Lore if the possibility of sentient jaegers appeals to you.

Happy monster punching, or whatever it is you people do out there. *Slinks back into the bog*

Screencap source: movie-screencaps.com

Why, though? Pacific Rim creator Travis Beacham explained on his blog:

Well, the mechs are dropping like flies and some ambitious but uncreative contractor comes to the world’s governments and says, “Hey guys, how about you pay me to build you a nice big anti-kaiju wall.” He need not even care if it works really. And, well, politicians tend not to be an especially imaginative lot. They get walls. They like walls. They have faith in walls. It’s a word they can really sell. It sounds very resolute in speeches, very firm and uncompromising. A “wall.” In short, it’s meant to read as the sort of infuriatingly reductive idea that mediocre politicians tend to swarm to.

If Tumblr goes down, we’re going to lose Travis Beacham’s blog - which is currently an invaluable source of Pacific Rim lore and history. It would be excellent if people could archive it in any way they can - screencaps, archive services, copying posts into documents, etc.

(Image Source: Tales From Year Zero)

So here’s an interesting little detail in Pacific Rim: A lot of the people in the Bone Slums/Exclusion Zone are wearing face masks that are stained blue. Here’s some pictures from the film (again, thanks movie-screencaps.com!), brightened to make it easier to see:

So what’s up with that? Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, & Monsters has the answer:

During pre-production Costume Designer Kate Hawley sent Production Designer Andrew Neskoromny a photo of an Asian factory where indigo fabric was being dyed. “Everything gets stained,” recalls Neskoromny. “People’s clothes, their fingers, their nails, just everything. I said, ‘Oh yeah, that looks great. We’ve got to do a bit of that.’” Hawley took the idea even further. “The idea is that the blue blood has got into people’s bodies,” she says. “and you can see bits of blue coming through their breathing masks, like a little subtle poison.”

It’s an interesting touch - and it’s one that leaves me with some questions. Other sources have it that kaiju blue is so potent that it can dissolve sidewalks, and based on that information you’d kinda expect people who’d inhaled enough kaiju blue for it to show up on their masks to be a lot worse off than these fairly healthy-looking people. So do the toxins in kaiju blue break down relatively quickly? Or does Hannibal Chau have an effective treatment? Or maybe even the local kaiju church? Or is it something else?

Another interesting thing that many people miss about Pacific Rim is that it has some… things to say about religion, especially the Catholic Church. It can be easy to miss because it’s not all spelled out for you, but once you see it, you’ll never unsee it.

First, let’s take a look at Raleigh’s speech from the beginning of the film:

There are things you can’t fight, acts of God. You see a hurricane coming, you have to get out of the way. But when you’re in a Jaeger, suddenly, you can fight the hurricane. You can win.

This speech here establishes that when you fight kaiju, you aren’t just fighting monsters. You’re defying God himself.

“You’re reading too much into it!” some of you might say. “‘Act of God’ is just a legal term for massive disasters.”

Ah, but I’m not reading too much into it. Because this line was originally found in the draft script, which was way more explicit in linking the Precursors with the divine.

In the draft script, the Precursors aren’t just some random alien invaders. They’re actually the creators of our universe, and we’re just a pesky little accident that happened on the planet they want to live on.

The character of Ivo Czerny, who had drifted with a kaiju brain, was given this dialog:

I looked into the abyss. I’d been infected with the truth – that this is the end of us. We are the vermin of the gods. There’s no point in putting up a fight…

A different character, Commander Kaz Takada, says:

We call the enemy the Precursors… I may as well tell the world the gods want us dead.

The character of Newt Gotlieb is given this dialog:

I don’t care if they are the creators of the universe. I like the universe.

And I’m not a creationist.

So, Raleigh’s line wasn’t just a careless reference to a legal term. It was introducing the story’s thesis.

In the final version of the film, we don’t have all of this explicit dialog. And yet, the sentiment is still there. How do we know this? For one thing, the Precursors are modeled on Catholic clergy. Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, & Monsters, quotes Guillermo del Toro as saying:

We gave the Precursors elements of ecclesiastical royalty, dividing them into cardinals and bishops.

Fun fact: If we go to the old Art of Pacific Rim page on The Internet Archive and check the filenames, we can see that this Precursor - the one who stares up at Lady Danger as it goes 'splodey - is a Precursor Bishop.

(Screencaps from quiteunlikely.net)

Further establishing the link between the Precursors and the Catholic Church are the costumes of the BuenaKai nuns:

(Screencap from movie-screencaps.com)

A better picture of the costume can be found on PropstoreAuction. If you want to see the whole thing, go there; because I’m going to crop it because the whole thing’s pretty big. Anyway, you can see that their costumes include cornettes and stoles.

(By the way, there are also kaiju monks. This isn’t a girls-only club like the Netflix cartoon would have you think.)

Now, forget everything you know about Uprising or The Black, and consider all of this in the context of the anti-authority themes in Guillermo del Toro’s other work. This casts the nature of the Precursors and the hivemind in a somewhat different light than many of us are used to. These aren’t just scary aliens. This is a civilization built on ideals of rigid hierarchy and total dominion. And they’re also essentially theocrats.

What’s also really interesting is that when you take all of this together, it means that the kaiju spiritualists aren’t actually wrong in regarding the kaiju as divine beings sent by the gods. They’re just assholes for aligning themselves with a malefic divine.

You don’t really see it in the Pacific Rim movie itself, but in concept art there’s huge machinery that’s used for in repairing Jaegers. Here’s an example - a welding machine:

Look at this beast. Operating this machine definitely requires training and there’s no way they’re letting you use that thing if you aren’t certified. This is why j-techs are very sexy, they are certified to use the big machines.