Mulvey's Lunar Oxygen Rebreather (or... The Tube)

One of the things that was suggested in early versions of the script was for Mulvey to be doing something (anything) while Grimmauld was arguing with him. I heard the same kind of comment from several people so I decided to introduce Mulvey's intent to go to the Moon here.

He's trying to build a device that will allow him to breathe on the lunar surface. Most of the Victorians had mixed ideas about what mysteries the Moon was hiding and a big one was whether there was an atmosphere or not. In Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, the French Adventurer Michel Ardan plans to travel aboard the projectile and, upon arrival, wants to hunt for whatever game might be found there. In  Around the Moon, one of the men aboard the capsule fancies seeing buildings of some kind on the dark side of the Moon. For my story, Mulvey and Grimmauld actually do land on the Moon, and they do need these tanks. I wanted something similar to the tanks in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

I drew an early storyboard that illustrated some kind of tube like device with a light on it, but of course I would have to build it. And what I discovered was that my initial drawing wasn't really detailed enough to look physically interesting.

So I did a better, bigger sketch of it but that still didn't really work out, as it still looked like a tube. In fact, Teresa frequently asked while I was building the damned thing "So how is your tube doing, honey?" which had implications I wasn't sure I wanted to answer.

What it came down to is improvisation while I was building. So under the tutelage of Dr. Grymm, I finished it up and while it still looks like a tube, it also looks like it does something.