Hi!  How have you been doing?  Haven’t you been in here just recently?  Oh, that’s right.  We found a few cavities when you came in for your checkup a few weeks ago…one on your upper right incisor, and two on your upper right molars, according to the X-rays.  Let’s take a look inside to make sure...hold on while I get my gloves on here...Ah.  Yes, I think I see them.  The one on your incisor is close enough to the front that we’ll use a porcelain filling so you won’t have a metallic smile.  Blossom, I think we will need the C-2 shade for this.  We can give you regular silver fillings on the molars—no one will be able to see them anyway.

First, though, let’s give you a shot of Novocain to numb you up.  Do you have that ready, Blossom?  Great.  Now, we have it on our record that you usually need a double dosage to keep you from feeling the effect of the drill, so we’ll just make sure that you don’t feel a thing…this will probably sting just a little…ahh...there.  That will take a few minutes to kick in.
 While that’s going on, I need to go use the phone…apparently my soon-to-be-ex-wife has been trying to get a hold of me…

 Ah!  Sorry about that.  It’s a messy business getting divorced…right now my advice would be never to get married in the first place.  And yet…

 Anyway, let’s check inside your cheek.  Can you feel anything?  Oh yeah, that seems nice and numb all right.  Let me know if you start to feel anything.  We can always give you another shot, after all.  It looks like we’re ready to drill now.  Blossom?  Ah, good.  Just relax...this is actually my favorite part of the job!  Heh.

 While I do this, perhaps I could tell you about a movie that I saw on television last night.  Lately I’ve taken to telling my patients stories to keep their minds off the details of the procedure—kind of as a detachment technique--and since most people cannot talk very well with dental tools in their mouths, my conversations tend to be extremely one-sided anyway.  I think I’m just one of those people who think things through better when saying them out loud.

 As I was saying?  Oh, right…late last night I saw a movie that has really given me the need to think about it out loud, so maybe if I tell it to you it will make more sense.  It was called "Frostbytten"—spelled with a "y" instead of an "i".  I guess it was a play on words because the main character was an android, so they tried to connect it with computer terminology.  Though I still don’t understand what any of it had to do with frostbite.  It was an older, low-budget movie from the eighties.  I saw it on a cable channel; I’m not sure which one.  Lately I’ve been sleeping on the couch in front of the TV in our den, and I usually fall asleep with the TV on.  But last night I had trouble sleeping, so I kept channel surfing and channel surfing, and I caught this movie purely by accident.  Now, you probably wouldn’t guess it, but I like to think of myself as a somewhat extreme movie buff, especially movies from the eighties, and I’ve never heard of this movie before.  My guess would be that it was never very successful, except maybe on late-night cable television—I think no one but insomniacs would be watching it then anyway.
 Blossom, could you get some of that excess saliva there?  Ah, that’s better.

 As I was saying, it struck me as a rather low-budget eighties movie at the beginning.  It opens up with a big action sequence and lots of explosions and gunshots like so many big blockbuster productions, but without so much of the realistic special effects.  This is all very good for grasping the attention of guys who like to see a lot of violence in movies, and I have to admit that even I was suckered into the action.  Sure, one might argue that such productions aren’t artistic, but hey, they try to create something fun that the public will want to watch.  I have to give them credit for that.  Besides, not everybody can watch all art all the time—except my wife, maybe—it’s tiresome.  And last night I was in the right frame of mind to watch a few explosions myself.

 Anyway, let’s see how much of the beginning I can remember…it’s a night scene, and this kid appears—a teenage boy—out in the middle of a mine field running away from a bunch of humvees and helicopters with floodlights and barking dogs and a SWAT team running on foot—in short, the works.  It’s like part of some government security program in trying to stop a boy when he can’t look any older than sixteen.

 So, the boy is just running along, not even trying to dodge the bullets that are whizzing past his head, and then you see him take about five or six slugs right into his back.  Without even flinching, he turns around and his eyes are glowing bright red—in the fake kind of way that you get with eighties movie technology—and somehow he just fires a missile right out of his hand and blows up the path in front of the people chasing him.  And he turns back around and keeps on running.  Ha!  It was cheesy to watch it, but I liked it.

 Anyway, after this opening sequence, the same kid wakes up in bed in his own room, and it’s played off like the whole action sequence in the beginning was just a dream.  He gets up and the credits roll, you hear this peppy eighties music play while he gets ready for school.

 You know, it really takes me back.  I was a teenager back in the eighties, and I really miss the music and the movies.  The whole attitude back then just seemed better than it does now…maybe life just seemed a bit more optimistic, a bit more innocent…or maybe it’s just because I was younger then with a more naïve outlook on the world…  And here I am now, workin’ the drill, playing in people’s mouths...not what I expected to be doing, but that’s another story.  In any case, I really do reminisce the whole genre of eighties culture.  So when this movie took on the semblance of the average teen movie from the eighties, I was thinking, hey, cool.

 How are you holding up--good?  Good!  Now for the next tooth...

 So the boy gets ready for school.  And he stops to look at a picture taped to the mirror in his room.  This is so typical—they have the teenage boy  have a crush on some girl, and make him obsess about her when he thinks he’s alone.  Haven’t you heard that before?  It’s such an overused plot device.  Ok, maybe it’s just me.  Anyway, so then he ties a bandanna around his head—oh, I remember when that was the fashion!  It seems so long ago!—and then he goes downstairs to say a quick goodbye to his mother, and runs out the door to meet up with his friends. Now—going on with the archetypal teen movie setup, he talks to his friends about the girl he has a crush on, and how he wants to ask her out but she’ll think he’s a dork, and he doesn’t have the guts to talk to her anyway.  Of course.  His friends do their job by trying to convince him that he just needs to go over there and talk to her regardless, yada yada,  but of course this doesn’t give him any more incentive, because he’s just too scared.

 Blossom, saliva...

 Anyway, where was I?  Oh yeah, he’s doing his little teenage angst bit.  At lunch he’s eating with his friends, and still looking over to where the girl is sitting—the girl he has a crush on, I mean.  There he is, staring and trying to pretend that he’s really not staring at her and blushing when his friends tease him about it.  She can even see him and knows that he’s watching her, but she doesn’t do anything about it.  The movie really doesn’t give her hardly any chance to explain her actions or lack of actions—it’s like she merely exists from a distance without any real sort of personality or character definition.  It’s a shame that they couldn’t do any more for her in the movie.  I think it would have been a much better picture if they explained why she did what she did.  Oh well, it was a cheaply-done movie anyway, so what can you expect?

 Well, he sees her after school, and finally he’s psyched himself up to go ask her out.  So he’s standing in front of her,  looking very flustered and slowly getting his words out until he manages to say something like, ‘I’ve been in love with you for a long time’, and other phrases that might sound cute if they didn’t come off as being really cheesy.  And to her credit, she’s really polite and patient as she listens to this, like she’s almost touched by his emotions.  When he finishes she tries to turn him down gently but her words are chosen so poorly—she says she’s sorry, he seems like a really nice guy but she doesn’t think that the two of them would look quite right together—what’s that supposed to mean?  Is she afraid of what her friends would say if she, a popular girl, went out with a boy who didn’t fit in her social circle, or maybe she just thought he was a complete and total freak and wanted nothing to do with him!  They never explain her motives, or what’s going on inside her head at all, and it seems like an outright trend in these kinds of movies—that the rich, popular kids have to be complete assholes to the main characters—it’s like these strings are being deliberately yanked to get the audience to sympathize with the hero, without any attention to why they would act so rottenly.

 Excuse me.  Where was I?  Yes—our hero is devastated, but he tries to brush it off and act like nothing is wrong.  He starts to walk home from school, but with this look on his face that’s like mixed confusion and pain (or at least that’s what the actor was trying to make it look like, I think), like he has no idea how to handle being dumped, and he can’t understand why it’s making him feel so...oh...crushed, I guess.  Then as if he’s having a heart attack, he puts his hand to his chest and cries out in agony—it looked really funny to see this horrible kid actor try to pull that one off!  People look at him like he’s insane.  He breaks into a run and dashes down the street.

 One more tooth.  Okkkay, we’re doing good here...

 Now this is the part of the movie that struck me as being absolutely surreal and bizarre.  The boy—you know, I don’t remember what his name was—though I remember all this other stuff!  Anyway, he’s running through some inner-city neighborhood and suddenly puts his other hand to his head like he’s having a migraine, but he keeps on running.  And he still goes on like that when all of a sudden these words flash across the screen:  PUSH THE RED BUTTON.  It comes so unexpectedly in the movie that it almost made me jump—like a subliminal message that wasn’t subliminal at all, but a very obvious, deliberate message.  It keeps flashing across the screen, especially when the camera shoots from his perspective:  PUSH THE RED BUTTON.  PUSH THE RED BUTTON.  PUSH THE RED BUTTON, and on and on until he finally darts into an alley, gasping in pain.  The message is flashing faster and faster and more and more frequently while he’s standing there in this dark alley, and he yanks off his bandanna in a hurry and puts his right index finger to his temple, under the spot that he had covered up by the bandanna.  And it’s weird, there’s a little red dot kind of like a zit on that spot, and he holds his finger on it for one long, still minute.  It looks like he has a gun pointed to his head.  The message flashes one more time:  PUSH THE RED BUTTON, and he presses his finger into his temple until a soft click goes off, and the lights suddenly go out in his eyes and he collapses to the ground.

 And that’s when a big gust of wind blows through the alley, like one of those cheap dramatic techniques used in a lot of films to show that hey, the atmosphere of the movie’s gotten all tragic and deathlike.  So he’s lying there on the ground, and a girl comes out of one of the back doors to a pizza restaurant that opens up into the alleyway.  She’s carrying bags of trash to the dumpster, and so she doesn’t see him right away, and she almost goes back inside when she sees the figure lying there next to the wall and she’s thinking, Oh my God, there’s a dead body back here, and then she gets closer and realizes that it’s her friend what’s-his-name from school.  Of course, it has to be convenient to the plot that he lands right next to where his friend can stumble on to him.

 Oh, are you starting to feel that?  Hmm, maybe you need another shot of Novocain.  No?  Are you sure?  Well, all right then...
 Where were we?  Ah, yes, Blossom, dead guy...hey, what a coincidence!  That’s the name of the girl in the movie—Blossom, just like our hygienist here.  Coincidence, don’t you think?  I mean, how many Blossoms are there in the world?
Anyway, the Blossom in the movie looks over this guy and feels no pulse, so she thinks he’s dead and starts freaking out, and that’s when this large van pulls into the alley.

A small, wiry woman in a lab coat jumps out with a huge remote control device in her hand, and fiddles with the controls as she runs up to the boy’s body.  She’s muttering something under her breath in Russian—as least, it was supposed to be Russian because later on she says that she was a Soviet scientist or something.  Then it clicks that this woman is the same person who was playing his mother at the beginning of the movie.  When she works with the remote control, the boy’s eyes open kind of dull and half-asleep and he starts breathing again.  Like it’s a miracle or something—he gets up and moves around, but then it all gets very creepy because he doesn’t seem to have any conscious knowledge of what he’s doing—he’s like a zombie or something.  He walks over to the van and gets in, and meanwhile Blossom sees all this and freaks out even more.  The scientist/mother looks really irritated and pulls out this large hypodermic needle and drives it right into the girl’s leg, knocking her unconscious.

 Now, what’s with all the saliva here?  Do you think we want your spit?  Heh heh!  Just a little dentist humor.  Ah, never mind—we’re done with the drilling now!  Bet you’re glad to hear that.  Blossom, is that thermal liner ready?  Ok, you need to rinse your mouth out anyway.  You know how the vacuum on the spit cup works, right?  Good...  Ah, that’s it.  Ready?  Well then...

The next scene starts out with Blossom waking up in a lab somewhere, on a sofa surrounded by tables with beakers and Jacob’s ladders—it looks like the typical mad scientist science fiction laboratory.  There’s also a computer terminal—it really dates the movie because it looks so old compared to what we use now.  It might have been an Apple IIE.  Everything in the room gives off this impression of a cold, sterile scientific environment—controlled and calculated.  Off to one side of the room the boy is sitting on a table, looking awake but unconscious.  The scientist/mother is doing something to the side of his head.  So Blossom sees this and suddenly for the first time she realizes that her friend isn’t human, he’s a robot—that’s her word for it.  Then she does this sort of gasp characteristic of girls in science fiction/horror movies.  This gets the scientist’s attention, and she walks over to the sofa where the girl is still sitting and looking confused.

Ok, let’s get a clamp back here...almost ready for the silver filling.  Here, we need to suck up some more of this spit here...
So.  The scientist/mother is standing over her, and at an angle where you can still see the boy sitting motionless on the table in the background.  She introduces herself rather quickly--Hi, I’m Dr. Bognikova, blah blah, and goes back to what she was doing.  While she’s fiddling around with switches and buttons she goes into a long, detailed speech which I’ll try to tell you as much as I can remember.  It seemed to be the point where the movie tried to explain itself.  But the whole time she was talking, she was constantly in motion—messing with some wiring, adjusting knobs on a mysterious machine, fusing things together—pretty random stuff meant to make her look busy.  She never stopped doing something.

So anyway, she was Dr. Bognikova—now why I can remember that name and not the boy’s I couldn’t tell you.  She was a Soviet scientist working on artificial intelligence or something, but the communist government exiled her to Siberia.  Somehow she escaped to the United States, and under a false identity she’s lived as an American citizen, secretly working on the android that was supposed to be her masterpiece.  The result was the boy—artificial life who looked exactly like a real human being, and who could be programmed to act like a real human being, to the point that no one could tell that he wasn’t as real as everybody else.  He even had imperfections programmed into his everyday physical and mental behavior, so he wouldn’t appear extraordinarily athletic or smart.  The crowning touch, anyway, was that he could also feel emotions and act irrationally—but this could be controlled like any other feature, and essentially this creation was actually a sophisticated puppet which she guided with a remote control.  Trying to use her creation to get back in good graces with the Soviet government that had turned its back on her, she used him on nocturnal espionage missions to uncover secret U.S. documents, which she then sent back to Moscow.  The boy was the perfect weapon—because she had made him virtually indestructible and extremely deadly, but to everyone else he looked like a shy, mild-mannered teenager incapable of infiltrating secret government headquarters.

Ah, how are we doing?  Good, now we’ll get that other molar back here...

Where were we?  Oh, yeah, the boy’s really an android, but here’s what takes the cake—he has no idea!  He thought that he was just like any other teenager living with a single mother, and he had no more suspicions of his true identity than you or I would have wondering if we might be robots.  The idea never came up, and the doctor made sure of that.  She said that originally she had programmed him with the knowledge of his true identity, but he wouldn’t stop reading philosophy and depressed himself by feeling some sort of existential crisis.  Right after that she purged him of that information.

She said that her mistake was to let him fall in love.  It was a normal teenage thing that she thought he needed to do, but she chose the wrong girl for him to fall in love with, and of course he got his heart broken.  This was bad, she explained, because it shorted several valuable circuits in his chest cavity that protect a nuclear bomb built into his heart.  That’s right—he had a bomb!  In order to keep that bomb safe from discharging, she had to remove the memory of the girl he had a crush on, so the pain of rejection would no longer hurt him and damage those circuits closest to his heart.  Sounds cheesy to hear it, don’t you think?  But the point is that he was nuclear.  And the scientist had been erasing his memory to keep him from killing everyone—leaving him numb instead—that’s what was going on when Blossom woke up.

I think we’re ready for that C-2 shade now.  We’re using a porcelain filling for this incisor because it’s close enough to the front that we don’t want you to have a metallic smile—this shade is close enough to your natural tooth coloring to make it blend in and look natural.

You know, I don’t know what got to me more--the fact that she could remove all traces of love from someone’s memory or that he was nuclear.  He supposedly had the power to blow up the world by pressing a button, and he never knew it.  Maybe this is a case of Cold War paranoia in the film industry, who knows.  It was the eighties, after all—and the Russians were made to look so evil back then.  With the Cold War long over, who are we supposed to be afraid of now—US?  There’s still a lot of bombs out there...

Ah, but that’s depressing.  There, that looks just about right—the perfect shade to match your tooth.  Now it’s time for the light cure machine.  Ah, thank you, Blossom.

Ah, now where was I?  Oh yes, Dr. Bognikova tells Blossom the whole spiel.  Then she tells her never to say anything about what she has just seen or heard—or else.  The girl agrees—it’s probably the only thing she can do, because this lady is just scary, what with the power she has at her disposal.  She’s like her own mafia.  So Blossom gets sent home, given that she’s shaken up and disturbed, and she lies awake at night thinking about what happened—though she doesn’t tell anyone about it.
The next day at school, the boy reappears, acting like nothing is wrong.  He passes the girl he used to have a crush on when he’s walking through the hall, and he shows no reaction—it’s like he doesn’t even notice her at all.  His friends ask him about her, and he gives them all a weird look and tells them that he has no idea who they’re talking about.  Only Blossom knows what’s going on, but she keeps her mouth shut.  It all just comes off as really odd—it’s almost exactly like the first school scene at the beginning only his behavior is completely devoid of any recollection of the other girl or any feelings of love or emotion.  He’s not sad, and he’s not in pain—he appears totally numb to his surroundings, to the extent that he’s now acting more like a mechanical, inhuman automaton.

After that day he appears to act more naturally.  Well, perhaps "natural" is the wrong word, but the way he behaves around his friends gives the idea that he is completely recovered from the experience.  He laughs, jokes, acts more like a real human being, like at the beginning of the movie, but without the heartbreaking crush.  Instead, he’s now acting like he has a crush on Blossom.  Not only does he pay more attention to her but he blushes and stutters when he’s talking to her.  Later, when they’re alone, he slowly, nervously—and with much effort—asks her out on a date.

Now, what choice does she have?  She’s the only one who knows that the last girl who turned him down caused him to almost blow up the world.  So they go on a date.  And he tells her that he loves her.  No surprise there, but of course it surprises Blossom—she still remembers that only a few days before he was madly in love with someone else.  But she does her best to be polite and not actually hurt his feelings—though maybe more out of fear that friendly concern.  I think I’d be afraid.
At this point I really have to wonder why that last scene happened.  Was it all part of a plot steered by the Russian scientist?  Or did it have to do with the fact that she, an outsider, knew the secret and this was a way of keeping her under strict surveillance?  Or was it something else?

Anyway, now let’s polish up these areas.  Finishing burs, Blossom...

What happens next—ah yes, then Blossom is sitting in class, sometime later, and she’s writing in her notebook.  She has a line drawn down the middle of the page—on one side is written "If I tell him" and on the other is "If I don’t tell him".  And she has pros and cons listed underneath for each.  After class she meets up with the boy, fidgeting nervously like she’s still trying to decide whether or not to tell him the truth about what’s going on.

I must have fallen asleep after that, because the next thing I remember is waking up on the sofa to see the TV showing some infomercial about a psychic network.  How frustrating!  The one time I actually wanted to stay awake and see the rest of the movie, My insomnia goes away.  Ah well, I guess I needed the sleep...

But after I woke up, I couldn’t get back to sleep anyway.  I tried, and I was lying awake tossing and turning, but all I could think about was where the movie left off and how much I wanted to know what would have happened next.  So there I was, racked with insomnia—again—when there wasn’t anything better to do than try to dream up how the movie might have ended.
They could have ended the movie with the boy never finding out the truth about his secret identity, though I doubt that’s what they would have gone with.  What then—he could have gone on to lead a perfectly normal day life and no one would be the wiser.  Heh!  Maybe he would grow up to be a dentist.  Or maybe not, if he was forever trapped in the body of a teenager...  But by night he would still commit felonies for his "mother".  True, he’s saved the weirdness and the agony of discovering that he’s not really a natural human being, but at the same time this would be a bit of a dull ending—not to mention anticlimactic to the plot.

If Blossom had told him the truth about himself he might have gone ballistic and tried to confront his creator.  Maybe his "mother" would use her remote control to turn him back to her side, perhaps even using him to attack Blossom for her betrayal.  If she doesn’t try this, then maybe he would turn suicidal to save the world from himself, if he could find a way of killing himself without hurting anyone else.  Or his suicide could accidentally detonate the bomb in his chest cavity and destroy everyone.  A bit more unlikely, but still a possibility.

Here, go ahead and rinse your mouth out now.  Ah, we’re almost done...

Then I was thinking of how Hollywood  would have ended the story.  Blossom starts to tell him, but she’s interrupted when the CIA shows up to arrest the boy.  That night he unconsciously breaks out of jail and goes straight to Blossom’s house, with the CIA tracking him.  Grabbing her out of her sleep, he carries her back to the scientist’s lab.  There’s a confrontation between Blossom and the scientist, a scuffle over the remote control that determines the boy’s actions, and the button controlling his consciousness gets bumped by accident and suddenly he’s wide awake.  Blossom blurts out everything, just in time for the CIA to burst into the room and hold everyone at gunpoint.  The scientist—she has the remote control by this point—she threatens to push the button that will detonate the bomb inside him, thereby destroying the world.  Then somehow, by sheer willpower—Hollywood won’t try to explain how—the boy knocks the control out of her hands and the CIA arrests her.  As they take her away on charges of federal espionage, he reaches for the control and crushes it between his now-awakened superhuman strength.  Never mind the fact that destroying the control with the detonation button probably would have set the bomb off anyway.  After that, he wins Blossom’s heart a little too easily for real life and they live happily ever after.
Ah, where did that blue paper run off to?  Ah!  Here we go—bite down on this, and we’ll check for any rough spots...looks good to me.  Do you feel anything sticking out of place?  No?  Good!

Perhaps this ending leans a bit more towards the ridiculous, you think?  Well, then again, so is Hollywood.  It’s just like them to take a story and ruin it with a cheap, easy ending, just because it would be too hard to tell it the way it really happens—with a sadder ending!  I mean, when does life ever end so easily?  I’ll tell you, it never ends, sometimes no matter how much you wish it would—and it’s never simple, either—take it from me!  Sometimes I wish I could be an android like that—every time something goes wrong, someone comes along to take away all the pain and erase your memory of anything unpleasant.  And you wouldn’t have to care about anything anymore...you could just...shut yourself off.

I’m sorry, I think my train of thought derailed just now.  Where was I?  Ah, yes...our work here is done.  If you find any rough spots later that we failed to polish, just call and we’ll take care of it.  Try not to eat or drink anything for the next half hour or so if you can help it, and even then, avoid really hard, chewy foods for a little while.  Blossom will schedule an appointment for you to come back in for a checkup in six months.  Remember—it’s important to take care of your teeth.  I don’t want to see you in here too often!  Heh, heh, okay, have a good day!