Moloch and the Great Computer

While on sabbatical I have been watching Babylon Berlin - truly excellent German noir series based on books, set in Berlin during the Weimar period (my only gripe is the people they picked for voiceactors are kinda dull, but it improves/you get used to it - I wish there was a subtitle option though). Anyway, no spoilers but in S3, the mystery is on a stage production for a movie. As I watched it progress, I suspected that the general flavor and backstory of the movie itself was based on Metropolis, and lo and behold came across something interesting. I haven't watched Metropolis in a long time, but when I reviewed it:

clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZpaWOLjWx0

In this sequence, Freder, the wealthy son of the city's ruler, goes into the undercity after a girl he saw and sees for the first time what it is really like to be part of the "underclass". After witnessing an accident, Freder sees the massive machine in another way - it transforms itself in Moloch, a pagan god that demands human sacrifice. Freder then awakens to the understanding of the costs of doing things in this manner, how dehumanizing it was, etc. all in the name of the march of progress, and watches the medics and others take the dead and hurt workers out. The inter-title for the movie is: "The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart" and this is something that the machine of Moloch cannot do.

All this to say that I think that it could have been an influence on the development of the gameworld, though exactly how depends on the particular splat and which version of the canon but it's still interesting. From Mage, you have Autochthonia, where the Computer was moved to, that eats mage avatars. You have MECHA labor camp, where quint is harvested from mages.

Yeah I think Mage was inspired by this scene for the Computer. Also om nom nom nom.