Pilot organ in Tupperware¶
The pilot organ in Tupperware is the iridescent, brain-like organ that Donald McManley cuts from the skull of a dead skinwalker host at the Roosevelt police station, and which the duplicate Andrew Howard takes charge of in a plastic food container. (Walkers 08)
| Type | Item (biological specimen) |
| Aliases | the organ; the brain |
| Holder | The duplicate Andrew Howard |
| First appearance | Walkers 08 |
Description¶
The organ looks at first like a brain, with swirls of purple and green iridescence, "like gasoline" in Zack's words. Long tendrils hang limply from the bottom, and McManley points out small suckers on them. It sits in a cavity carved out of the skull, which is thinner than normal, and light shines up through the mouth because a path runs from the back of the sinuses straight into the skull cavity. The host's own brain is a raw, irritated lump at the top of the spinal column, perhaps a twentieth or thirtieth of normal size. (Walkers 08) It is the "pilot" of the host body; see pilot and host biology and skinwalkers.
Properties¶
McManley guesses that the pilots latch onto the blood vessels coming off the host's brain and feed from its blood supply, and that without much of a digestive tract they can only digest simple foods such as starches and sugars. This fits the sugar that has been disappearing around Ballard. He rules out the idea that a pilot could take over an ordinary person, since there would not be room. Of the host he says: "This is not a person. This is a vehicle. Somebody made this. And whatever you killed inside of it was its pilot." Anatomically the body is that of a child in an adult's size, "like a 200-pound baby." (Walkers 08)
Later, the prisoners in the cell are found slumped and empty-headed. Dante's Kurt concludes that "whatever was in these guys' head instead of a brain just scuttled into the ceiling tiles." The team plans to check the ambush bodies by shining a flashlight through an eye into the mouth to see whether a pilot is still inside. (Walkers 08)
History¶
During the autopsy of the dead gunman, McManley, who is using break-room Tupperware as bins for the organs he removes, finds no stomach, about eight feet of malformed intestine, and a small fatty liver. When he opens the skull he lifts out the organ. Kurt's reaction is "What in the Goosebumps fuck is that?" McManley says he will put it in a Tupperware "because that's where we are right now." (Walkers 08)
Rita's Andrew asks to hold it, and McManley hands him the Tupperware. Andrew stays fascinated by it throughout the autopsy, and he takes the box back from McManley to point at the suckers. (Walkers 08)
Andrew is, in fact, the duplicate. At the end of the session Rita tells the table that she had been acting subtly on her faction's behalf, stealing the sugar from the break room and deliberately getting hold of the Biz's blood so the faction could begin preparing a copy of him. The other characters do not know. See Andrew Howard (duplicate). (Walkers 08)
The episodes do not show what became of the Tupperware afterward.