Little Shop of Horrors Thoughts

I've recently been involved in a production of Little Shop of Horrors. This is one of my favourite musicals and thought I should state a few things about it that have been going through my brain.

My first encounter with this musical was through my brother at a very young age, at the same time as he introduced me to the Rocky Horror Show soundtrack he introduced me to LSOH. I remember at the time being very taken with the fact that it had a song in it that used the word shit. I'd never heard swearing in music before and this was a very big and cool thing as far as I was concerned.
Over the years I then got to see the film itself and then finally a few productions of it.

Imagine now this is an analysis of the show for some sort of English essay...

The plant is telepathic and can perform telesuggestion:
There is ample evidence in the script that the plant has the ability to influence the events around it with telepathic means. notice how the first woman who buys $100 worth of roses arrives perfectly as needed and responds perfectly to get the maximum possible effect. The plant clearly can influence people's thinking.

Now one theory I've had for a while is that the reason the plant needs blood is that it gains language skills and access to the human condition from its consumption of blood. Some could argue that it could get it's language skills simply by listening in and learning as a child would. I don't buy this as it learns language far faster than a human child would; and without ever making any mistakes. But learning from blood makes no sense, there is know information in blood about language, so the only explanation for the plant's language skills is again telepathy. From this we can be secure that the plant is able to both read minds and influence them; at quite some distance too.
Moving back to the consumption of blood, the plant gains sustenance from blood purely as an animal or a flytrap would. If this is true, why insist on human blood? This is an alien plant after all so it must be able to process any type of blood, it simply prefers to go after the blood of the dominant species of whatever planet it visits. Again though this makes no sense, if you were an alien species bent on world conquest your first imperative would be to multiply your numbers, once you were secure in your numbers only then would you go onto attack the dominant species. Clearly world conquest is not its highest concern. It must gain its blood from the highest status species. The plant either has some religious or moral objection to gaining power through eating lower animals, it must gain power from those who it is most at risk from. This to me is actually a very sporting attitude and one you seldom see in nature.

It has been in my mind for sometime, but a comment in the show's program really drove it home to me. Seymore is a classic doomed figure. His fall was not only inevitable it was all for the love of a woman and such blind desire proved to be the downfall of both of them. At each step Seymore is doing his best for his love and is still tormented by his every decision. He is a moral character and never actually kills anyone himself, yet is tormented by the accidental deaths that surround his actions. This is not surprising yet it is still tragic how his story finishes.

The plant is virtually indestructible. This is made abundantly clear in the end as Seymore tries to kill it with poisons, a gun and a machete. With the story as it ends, what hope does humanity have?
Well lots actually. Rat poison doesn't really have much effect on terrestrial vegetation so we'd expect the same on extraterrestrial vegetation. Maybe he should have tried some herbicide.
The bullets are likewise unsurprisingly ineffective. Try shooting a tree with a revolver and see how easily you kill it. As for the machete, again take a few swings at the average tree and see where it gets you. Yes you'll hack bits off, but the tree itself carries on. Hell on some plants you'd actually help it, after all Seymore himself sings "I've cut you back hard like I'm s'posed to" and laments how this doesn't help the plant be healthy.
So no the plant is almost certainly far from indestructable - he just used totally the wrong methods. He's started to think of the plant as an animal and that is his failure in killing it. You'd expect better from someone who was supposed to know his plants.