Well. As Phobos looks compared to his "father" Carter, the First Scientist looks most like.... Rico.

I was thinking it may have been a result of Spaceman Stiff, but the nose is all wrong. Maybe Stiff had a partner.

Yikes, even the entanked Phobaby looks like he's plotting something.

According to Ebert's law of Economy of Characters (look it up!), Arthur Wellington has got to have something to do with something sometime soon. He's the only character in the encyclopedia who has no story yet... that I recall. Just one hufhufhuf at a meeting early on. Not sure how he's an "old war dog" at two years Carter's junior.

My guess is that Phobos' "father" is not Carter, but Earth.

We don't know how Spaceman Stiff died. No life on Mars before the Earth people came, but plenty of active machines. I wonder if the "Krell" devices "sampled" Stiff's DNA (killing him in the process) and used it as the basis for Phobos in a manner more or less like the current plan to resurrect Mammoths in the modern age from their ancient DNA.

Well, this was quite a week.

Siooo... A bajillion years ago, a vaguely Mezoamerican civilization of humanoids flourished on the surface of Mars. Then they all died in a suspicious manner that probably has nothing to do with octo-turtles, leaving behind a deserted planetary surface with a basement full of awesome machines. Just before the end, they saw that the planet next door could be fertile ground for the seeds of intelligence, and built a powerful interplanetary brainial stimulator, designed to guide the evolution of life on Earth towards something resembling the perfect Martian form, and then to teach the people of Earth to build pyramids and Mars-bound spaceships, making them a kind of dreamy shadow of a memory of Mars' past glory. Mars then entered into a sort of incestuous relationship with its own Terran offspring by means of Carter, whom we can now picture as something like this:



(If there's ever a Westward movie, I would love to see this casting choice made.)

Phobos is the product of this illicit pairing, carrying within him the memories of the ancient god-emperors of Mars, which is why it is so hard for him to take orders. A troubled, withdrawn youth, so unlike the extroverted, happy-go-lucky Martians of the past, he spent his traumatizing childhood alone, raised by machines in the bosom of a dead planet, surrounded by ghosts of ancestors he never knew, waiting for his absentee father to return across the gulf of space. Deep within him, a desire to protect Humanity, the last remnant of the ancient Martian civilization, the last shred of identity and meaning he has in this uncaring cosmos, and an irrational, pathological desire for revenge against the natural force of entropy that took his true heritage away from him aeons before his birth.

... Do I get it about right? :P

Also:

D'awww, baby Phobos!

And I can't believe it took this long for someone to say that.

Well, bay area john did allude to his adorable plotting.

Coochiecoochiecoo!

Spock: "On Vulcan, the 'teddy bears' are alive, and they have six-inch fangs."

So do the babies on Mars.

"Red they were, and beady-eyed."

No wonder the Martian Phobos can survive in a Terran atmosphere and gravity.