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(More) Conspiracy Theories in Fiction
27 Plays2 years ago
Josh and M return once more to the well that is conspiracy theories in fiction. There are a lot of spoilers to that show you probably watched an episode of. You know the one. It ran, what? A season? You probably only saw it on late night TV. Indeed, it rather annoys me now that M didn't talk at all about the "War of the Worlds" TV series. Not the recent French or BBC one. No, the show which ran at the end of the 90s and the early 80s. It even had TV's "The Highlander" in it. Well, for one season. One inferior season. But it was all about how the world had covered up and forgotten about the invasion as seen in the George Pal film. Because, yes, for some reason they decided to make a spin-off TV series in the late 80s to a mid 50s SF film. It even had one returning cast member in a recurring role. Anyway, it had quite a lot of conspiracy theory in it. It's also one of M's guilty pleasures, so why they didn't mention it I don't know...
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Transcript
Overlooked Opportunities and Roles
00:00:00
Speaker
So, first up, commiserations on being passed over again. Yeah, I put so much effort into it this time. I got letters of recommendation from Charles and Brian, colleagues from all over the world put in their support, even the universities threw all its resources into it. And still, nothing. Not a peep. Not even a simple letter to say thanks for trying to get involved.
00:00:24
Speaker
Yeah, it's not a good look, is it? No, I mean I get it to a very competitive area, and really only a few people ever get shortlisted. But I'm respected in my field, I have history in the area, I even said I'd supply my own wardrobe. But no, there's not even the slightest bit of recognition.
00:00:40
Speaker
It's actually pretty insulting. Yeah. And realistically, the next chance will be in four, maybe five years time. And I suspect it'll be too late in my career to apply then. This really was my last chance. Well, the BBC's loss is our gain, I suppose. You'll always be my doctor. Thanks. That actually really means a lot. And I do think shooty gatwa is a good choice. I'm just gutted to once again not even being considered as a possible next doctor.
Introduction to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy
00:01:18
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Dettith. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I'm Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand and in Zhuhai, China, it's Associate Professor of Philosophy and secretly two trench coats wearing a child, Dr. M. R. X. Dettith.
00:01:40
Speaker
I was actually trying to think of the sound effect I could make for that and I was going, I'm actually, I mean, it would be flapping fabric and maybe the scream of something that's just died.
Fictional Conspiracies and Their Influence
00:01:51
Speaker
I mean, it's quite a disturbing thought when you think about it. It actually is, yeah. Yeah, it's kind of proud of that one, to be honest. And you're a parent.
00:01:59
Speaker
So, my parental shortcomings aside, we have an interesting episode for you, I assume. We have an episode that we think is interesting. Yes, yes. That's something we haven't done for quite a long time. There's no point being coy, I suppose. We've actually explicitly said what we're going to be doing in this one a couple of times.
00:02:21
Speaker
We're going to be looking at conspiracy theories in fiction, in our favourite works of fiction, or possibly our favourite conspiracies in works of fiction that we might think are a little bit rubbish, we'll see. Or indeed just conspiracies we know of in fiction, whether we like the fiction or not. So I sort of, when we did this, I thought, oh, I remember we did this that one time, years and years ago, and I look back and found we've done it three times, sort of.
00:02:45
Speaker
The first time was back in April of 2016, where we did an episode that's exactly like the episode we're going to do today, just a thinly veiled excuse for us to talk about pop culture, which is what we do anyway. But then in August of 2016, we did an episode about works of fiction that inspired conspiracies. And then in January of 2018, I see we did an episode because The Guardian put out an article about the top 10 conspiracies in fiction, and specifically literary fiction in that case.
00:03:15
Speaker
So I thought, I thought, oh, it's been, it's, we've only done this once before. It's not going to be, it's, we're not that unoriginal to do it, you know, six years later, but then it turns out we're slightly less original and it's only really been four years. But whatever. So, I mean, the whole, twice, three times a lady is going, once, twice, thrice, four times a podcast.
Podcast Challenges and Content Review
00:03:39
Speaker
It's exactly what it is.
00:03:40
Speaker
That is precisely what it is. I think you've hit the nail on the head so correctly that you better just play a sting and we can get straight into it. So I thought to begin with, actually, the first thing I would like to say is that I still have a bit of the COVID rattle left. So there may be the occasional coughing fit, which depending where it occurs, may or may not be able to edit out. I'll just chuck that out there first.
00:04:07
Speaker
So you're ready for it. But the second thing I wanted to say is that maybe we should quickly run through what we did talk about in those previous episodes, just so that to save people saying, hang on, how come you never bothered discussing this obvious conspiracy, when in fact, we already talked about it before.
Films and Shows Influencing Conspiracy Theories
00:04:24
Speaker
That is an excellent idea. It does mean I can go false flag a few times as well.
00:04:29
Speaker
Does. Do you want to do the list? Do you want me to do the list? You do the list? I'll do the commentary. Yeah, I'll do the commentary. The colour. Yeah. Okay. So we talked about, of course, the Manchurian candidate with a detour into No Way Out. Great Frank Sinatra film. And Salt. We talked about the person slash... Salt is not a great Frank Sinatra film. Frank Sinatra hardly appears in Salt. He appears in an urn in a background shot, but really, frankly, not his best work.
00:04:59
Speaker
No, although it did inspire one of the best tweets I've ever seen, where someone had the poster, Angelina Jolie is salt, and with their comment, oh, and who's Pepper, Renee Zellweger? This is some racist bullshit. But anyway, we talked about the departed and infernal affairs. We talked about Capricorn One, and also Moonwalkers, which does some of the things. Now, Capricorn One, it kind of, you know, is one of the urtexts.
00:05:22
Speaker
of conspiracy theory in fiction, given that many people think that Capricorn 1 kind of inspired moon landing hoax conspiracy theories, even though they're kind of getting the history wrong there. Capricorn 1 was inspired by emergent moon landing hoax conspiracy theories.
00:05:40
Speaker
Which indeed is why we talked about it in the second episode, but we'll get to that shortly. We talked about Dan Brown, we talked about the X-Files and Millennium. We talked about the Princess Bride. Millennium, a show I'd actually be quite happy to rewatch. The X-Files not entirely sure I need to go back and revisit. Certainly not the later ones. I remember the earlier seasons.
00:06:00
Speaker
Yeah, but I'd rather remember the earlier seasons than revisit the earlier seasons. Well, yes, yes, the 90s were a different place. But no, we had the Princess Bride. False flag. We had the longest good night. False flag. Two excellent films that just so happened to feature false flags, we were OK to talk about them. We talked about the book Interface, an early one by Neil Stevenson, which he did with George Dewsbury.
00:06:26
Speaker
which was just an interesting example basically. We talked about the Assassin's Creed universe at that time. I don't think the Assassin's Creed film had come out yet. And the world was a better place because of that. Actually the Assassin's Creed universe is interesting because due to antiquated gaming hardware, the last point
00:06:46
Speaker
proper game I played in the Assassin's Creed sequence was Assassin's Creed Rogue, which was kind of the sidequel to Assassin's Creed Black Flag. I now have the hardware to start moving forward through the series again, so I could go to Paris, which is kind of taken to be one of the worst of the recent Assassin's Creed games. And now I'm told the most recent one, which is set in Viking England, takes about 140 hours to complete.
00:07:15
Speaker
Hmm, that's an investment. Yeah, it's an invest, but I don't think I'm willing to make. No. What else did we talk about? Foucault's Pendulum, which will come up again later as well, I think. We talked about the Sleepy Hollow TV series, which must have been showing at the time because I'm pretty sure it vanished into the
00:07:33
Speaker
into the ether fairly quickly afterwards. So I never watched Sleepy Hollow, but I read reviews of Sleepy Hollow and it was one of those shows that kept on getting renewed when people didn't expect it to. So I think it actually ran for about four seasons eventually. The first season was an enormous amount of fun and it just kept getting weirder and sillier. And then I got to the second season and it's like, yeah, I mean, I think you reached peak silly at the end of the first season. It just didn't seem to
00:08:03
Speaker
Couldn't hold my interest, I don't know.
Conspiracies in Literature and Film Themes
00:08:06
Speaker
We talked about your favourite Stargate disinformation plotline, which is... Oh, yes, well, I'm whole extreme. I've actually just finished my rewatch of SG-1 and Atlantis and about to start my rewatch of Universe. And that is a show replete with conspiracy for the sheer fact the central conceit of Stargate is there literally is a portal that takes you to other worlds that the army is keeping secret from the populace.
00:08:34
Speaker
So they have to keep on engaging in the, is it actually right that we're keeping the secret from the kids? Yes, the children are wrong kind of reasoning. Which sort of brought us into various alien invasion conspiracies. So we name checked, they live the the arrival with Charlie Sheen invasion of the body smashes and all its various remakes and sequels and what have you.
00:09:01
Speaker
And Quatermass 2, which I haven't actually seen. I feel I should have seen the various Quatermasses. So the problem with Quatermass 2 is that the only version of Quatermass 2 that we have is, I believe, the film. And the film version is not considered to be a particularly good adaptation of the TV serial. So...
00:09:25
Speaker
Yeah it's probably one of those things, it'd be probably better to read the novelisation, but then the problem is Josh, you don't read books. Not a massive fan of them, no, no, I don't know, I'll find some way of overcoming it perhaps. Finally to round things out, we talked about The Constant Gardener, just because it centres on a sort of a corporate
00:09:45
Speaker
as a pharmaceutical company sort of conspiracy of that, so a slightly different kind. We talked about Watchmen, which is conspiracism, conspiracies ahoy, and we talked about Fight Club as well, which is strange because I thought there was a rule against that, but I guess I must have just been imagining that. Yeah, no, I mean, I think the rule about Fight Club is you have to always bring Fight Club up.
00:10:05
Speaker
Yeah, that sounds much more accurate. So that was it for that episode. And in the second one where we talked about works of fiction that inspire conspiracies, we did mention Capricorn 1 with, as you say, the caveat that it's actually probably not an inspiration, but some people think it is. We talked about, of course, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
00:10:24
Speaker
the Turner Diaries and the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which is that what got Dan Brown going that last one? Yeah, and actually what's interesting about that particular work of fiction is of course the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail take it, well, they claimed in court it was a historical text and they tried to sue Dan Brown for plagiarising it, and as the judge pointed out in the trial, either
00:10:48
Speaker
It's a historical text, so a text of history, and Dan Brown is able to borrow from it because he's writing a historical novel based upon your historical text, or you need to admit it's a work of fiction, and Dan Brown plagiarised ideas from your work of fiction, and the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail stuck with the, oh no no no, it's a work of history, at which point the judge went, well you don't really have a case now, do you? You get to plagiarise history, no.
00:11:13
Speaker
no no no it's long accepted you can you can base stories on histories because you don't really own histories no and then finally in our third article uh third third episode i suppose talking about an article of the top 10 conspiracies in fiction none of which i have read but some of which you have
00:11:35
Speaker
So that covered the illuminatus trilogy with an exclamation mark. Yeah, which I reread and I have to say I did not enjoy the rereading of it. I think it's one of those things I enjoyed it at the time, but as someone in my mid-40s who's a lot more woke than I was in my 20s,
00:11:56
Speaker
It's kind of racist. I know it's actually trying to poke fun at racism, but unfortunately, it does that poking fun at racism by being racist. And it pokes fun at sexism by being a bit sexist. And I just don't think it's dated. Well, also, it's quite clearly a trilogy where they knew how to start it, but had no idea how to end it.
00:12:23
Speaker
Oh, dear. So the list continued with Libra by Don DeLillo. Yep, read that. The Crying of the Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Yep, read that. Lungo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed. So I know authors, but I've never read it. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. Which I think I've read, but I can't recall. I've read a lot of books in my time. I saw that and thought, isn't he the guy from Reservoir Dogs and stuff? But that, of course, is Tim Roth, and I'm a fool.
00:12:53
Speaker
Number six is The Trial by Franz Kafka. A classic. Yes, there's very much a classic. The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow. Haven't read. A little of that. 2666 or possibly 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, 2004. Which I also say I haven't read. Vida by Marge Piercy, 1980. Not every bit either. And of course,
00:13:20
Speaker
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. And of course, there's a lot of conspiracy in Eco's work, from the name of the Rose to the Prague Cemetery. And indeed, his letterworks all seem to be rehashings of the Prague Cemetery. It was very weird, very, very weird. So anyway, so that's what we've talked about before. So if you want to hear us talk about any of those works,
00:13:46
Speaker
You'll have to go back and find those old episodes. And good luck to you, because that was back before we realised we'd be misnumbering them. So I'm not quite sure what they are anyway. I mean, I guess you could just search into Podbean for fiction. We could, yeah. We probably use the word fiction in either the titles or the description. Yes. And indeed, at the moment, the episodes aren't numbered.
00:14:11
Speaker
on the podcast feed anyway, these come up as names because I've given up actually because of the misnomering scandal and the fact that I really have no idea whether the numbering system we've got works. It's just better to only have a kind of unofficial numbering behind the scenes and not confuse people in front of the camera. Indeed. So now, now we can talk about new stuff.
00:14:37
Speaker
And the first new thing I'd like to talk about, it turns out isn't a new thing, because the whole reason we thought of doing this is because after talking about KGB agents a few weeks ago, I thought we really need to talk about No Way Out. And looking back through those notes, you might have noticed that one of the very first things we talked about in the other episode was the film No Way Out, but I think that was more impassing.
00:15:02
Speaker
after a discussion of the Manchurian candidate. But I like No Way Out. Now I should say, I suppose we should say right at the front, there will be spoilers aplenty for everything we talk about. So if you're the sort of person who doesn't like having things spoiled, even though the most recent thing we talk about is
00:15:21
Speaker
possibly more than 10 years old, I'm not sure. We'll be talking about the stuff we're going to talk about in Doctor Who and Killjoy, some of that is recent, but actually, most of it kind of reflects that we are two people in our 40s, talking about the pop culture we enjoyed in our 20s.
00:15:40
Speaker
Now, No Way Out, of course, came out in 1987 when I was 11 years old, so I never saw it at the cinemas, but I did hear about it and saw it on TV eventually. It's a good one. I like that it's just conspiracies and conspiracy theories a go-go.
00:15:57
Speaker
So a quick summary of the plot. The film is famous for two things. It's famous for the scene where Kevin Costner has sex with Sean Young in the back of a limo, parodied in Hot Shots Part 2 as I recall, and it's famous for the twisty ending, which we'll get to.
00:16:14
Speaker
But, so Kevin Costner is an officer in naval intelligence, who then goes to work for the Secretary of Defense, played by Jean Hackman. And he meets this woman, played by Sean Young, and the two sort of begin a bit of an affair, but it turns out she is actually the mistress of Jean Hackman.
00:16:34
Speaker
And so Gene Hackman, suspecting that she's been cheating on him, goes and tries to confront her about this. They fight, and Gene Hackman ends up accidentally killing her. And so at first he's going to fall on his sword, but then his devious aide, who, because this is 1987, is a gay man, and in 1987 all gay men were evil in fiction.
00:16:57
Speaker
uh suggests a different a different tactic they say let's let's use this rumor that's always been this rumor or conspiracy theory if you will that's been going around the CIA that um there's this KGB sleeper agent who we've codenamed Yuri inside the CIA that's that's always just sort of been rumored that that came to be managed to get a sleeper in but let's say that
00:17:21
Speaker
the guy that killed her was actually Yuri, and then A, we can make it a matter of national security to track down this guy who she was cheating on you with, and then B, we can make sure that he isn't taken alive when we come to arrest him, and then we can just blame everything on him, he's the scapegoat, and it all works out nicely.
Complex Conspiracies in Cinema
00:17:40
Speaker
Now, wouldn't you know it?
00:17:42
Speaker
The person they put in charge of the investigation to find out who this person is, who they're going to stitch the whole thing on, is Kevin Costner. And so then he has to juggle trying to run this investigation that he knows is going to implicate him and knowing that he's being set up, while also trying to find evidence to prove that Gene Hackman all did it and everything.
00:18:05
Speaker
And so from the start, we have the mundane conspiracies of people conducting affairs and cheating on people with other people. We have the conspiracy theory of a KGB sleeper agent inside the CIA, which is then used as fuel for the conspiracy between Gene Hackman and the guy playing his aid.
00:18:27
Speaker
and then Kevin Costner's busy conspiring against them. It all comes out in the wash he manages to find evidence that sort of ties Gene Hackman to Sean Young which would implicate him. They pin everything on the gay man because once again it's 1987 and gay people are evil.
00:18:43
Speaker
And and it's all sort of sorted out. And then right at the very end, Kevin Costner sitting there looking sad when he's approached to a bunch of people who start talking to him in Russian and and saying what the heck went on with that whole affair. And it turns out that Kevin Costner actually was a KGB mole inside the CIA. And so the people who'd been trying to frame him as a mole turned out they were right without even knowing it. So then there was the extra conspiracy theory of of
00:19:11
Speaker
Well, the extra conspiracy of KGB people inside the CIA. It's just... It's conspiracy theories all the way down. It's a classic Jean-Paul Gautier paradox. Yes. That's where you're accidentally right about French avant-garde fashion. Precisely. That's where you're accidentally right because you did the costumes for the fifth element. And you co-hosted Eurotrash. Ah, Euro... God, does anybody but the two of us remember Eurotrash?
00:19:41
Speaker
That was, I mean, formative memory at university. Very formative. And also unfortunately has never helped my cliche French people because I just always assumed for the first half of watching that series that they were two English people pretending to be French because they were being so outrageously French with their accents. And then someone went, no, you do realize that actually is Jean-Paul Gautier.
00:20:09
Speaker
Oh, he's, he's as French as I think a French person should be. Now I don't know what a French stereotype is. Exactly, you know, Jean-Paul Gautier talks like a non-French person doing a comedy French accent.
TV Shows and Unresolved Mysteries
00:20:24
Speaker
Apparently the other guy put Antoine de Cone. Yep, that's the guy. Put his, put his accent on, like sort of freaked up his accent.
00:20:34
Speaker
But yes, anyway, anyway, that was my first one. Do you wanna do one? Yeah, lost 80, so one which you listed, but of course I watched all the way to the end, lost.
00:20:46
Speaker
Lost as you say the accursed mystery box style of shows are inspired now in your list here you've got outer range which i have not watched and probably won't watch because things like lost kind of did turn me off the mystery box style of shows yellow jackets is the other one which everyone's talking about the the kids who get
00:21:10
Speaker
What's the word I'm looking for? Get stranded in the wild. And there's obviously something that went down because the adults are covering up something that happened during that time of stranding. But of course you then have things like Fringe and of course the accursed heroes, great first season, everything after that kind of terrible. And they're all
00:21:36
Speaker
They're all about having a central mystery, which has someone or some set of people who know more than the audience, and just slowly unpacking the conspiracy piece by piece in a way which is meant to look
00:21:54
Speaker
as if it's building up to some exciting endgame. And then when you get there, you go, well, that was really not worth the journey. So Josh, how much of Lost did you end up watching in the end? Oh bugger all. I watched some of the first season. And that might have been it really, it never really held my interest. And when it became
00:22:16
Speaker
obvious fairly early on that they were just kind of making things up as they go and they were going to just spin things out and never actually answer anything for as long as they could possibly put it off. I hear
00:22:31
Speaker
I mentioned out of range because that's the one that's in the States in cowboy territory. It's got George Brolin in it, I believe. Plus, Brolin involves a mysterious bottomless hole opening up in a field somewhere and people who fall into it travel through time or something.
00:22:54
Speaker
But yeah, I hear the first season essentially ends with someone showing up saying I can explain everything and then it ends. So they don't actually explain anything. And it's just more of the mysterious stuff is happening. If you watch, you might find out what it is.
00:23:14
Speaker
probably won't. It can be done well and it can be done badly. And I think it's done badly when they start without actually knowing what their own mystery is, which seemed to be the case with Lost. They sort of had a bit of a framework of some stuff.
00:23:33
Speaker
but then didn't really seem to have any sort of an endgame. So I'm going to come back to Lost, but I need to ask a question. Did you watch Alcatraz? No, which one was that? So that was the Sam Neill. Prisms from Alcatraz disappeared in what appeared to be a miraculous breakout from the prism, but actually it turns out that they've reappeared in the current day as if no time has passed.
00:23:59
Speaker
And so there's a special team which is based in a hidden basement in Alcatraz, who are trying to get the prisoners back. So did you ever watch a show called The Lost Room? Yes, I liked The Lost Room.
00:24:14
Speaker
So it's basically trying to make the lost room, but with people rather than objects. So all the prisoners have some kind of weird or mysterious power, and they want to basically put them back in the box and resolve whatever the event was allowed them to get out. And that was taken to be the next lost. And I think the problem was, A,
00:24:37
Speaker
The ending of Lost burnt a lot of people, so suddenly advertising a new show as being it's the next Lost was a way of people going, hmm, yeah, but Lost didn't really end very well, so I don't really need to see another one, which is what I think is going to be the problem with the new Game of Thrones prequel series. A lot of people will be thinking, yeah, but Game of Thrones ended kind of terribly, so why do we need another one?
00:25:04
Speaker
And also, the actual first few episodes of Alcatraz were kind of awful. They were, as I say, kind of awful. They were just, frankly, very awful. But loss is interesting because first season, great. Second season, which I think was when the writer's strike occurred, kind of paddling in place. Third season starts doing interesting things, actually becomes quite interesting from season four onwards.
00:25:32
Speaker
And then the last season is terrible because for some reason, even though Watts's face had left the show early on to go off and do his Star Trek films and his Star Wars films and stuff like that, the writers who were left are going, oh, with JJ Abrams.
00:25:52
Speaker
he had a final episode in mind we're going to keep to that final episode even though it makes no narrative sense given where the show is gone so they spend the entire last season basically forcing the narrative arc of the show away from where it was going to the ending that JJ Abrams originally came up with rather than going well JJ Abrams isn't here anymore we could just
00:26:20
Speaker
in the show our own way. And what's particularly interesting, having said it's already interesting, is there's a fan edit of the last season of Lost, which basically reduces the showdown to about eight episodes, cuts out a lot of the annoying plot lines, the flash sideways and the like, and actually it works. So someone has managed to take the last season of Lost
00:26:47
Speaker
edit the last season down into something which turns out to be a perfectly adequate ending to the show after all. So there was enough there to get to the end, they just completely ruined it.
00:27:00
Speaker
Actually, one of the things about Lost that caused me to give up on it quite early was that the involvement of Carlton Cuse, who was an executive producer and the joint showrunner with Damon Lindelof, because Carlton Cuse was the showrunner on The Adventures of Briscoe County Junior, which was a spectacular show. One of my favourite shows, one of my absolute favourite shows.
00:27:22
Speaker
I love dearly, which had a mystery thing, which fortunately, the show wasn't sort of built around as much, but it had this mysterious, it was a sort of early weird west thing. It was a western show. It has this magical orb with supernatural powers. And
00:27:41
Speaker
I had The Adventures of Briscoe County Junior set on DVD, which had a bunch of DVD extras. And one of them is an interview with all the writers in Carlton Cues. And at one point, one of the writers says to Carlton Cues, so Carlton, what was the all begin? And he's like, Oh, it was a
00:27:58
Speaker
was a thing with the, and sort of trails off, the whole joke being that he introduced this mysterious thing with no plan, with no idea of what it actually was, just having it being a thing to drive the plot forward. And I thought, okay, so that's the way he does things, that's not a good sign for lost.
00:28:17
Speaker
I did think though the comparison, I think one of the reasons why Heroes did so well in its first season was that it seemed to learn the lesson of lost. It was really the anti-lost in its first season. It would bring up mysteries and then resolve them quickly or it would sort of set things up and then later when something would happen, you could look back at the earlier episodes and say, aha, they were working towards that whereas lost.
Effective Conspiracy Storytelling in Fringe
00:28:43
Speaker
would either introduce mysteries and just sort of forget about them or trail off, or would introduce some amazing new twist and then sort of say, and it's actually been behind all the stuff all along, but that that was the first time that it was mentioned, and that obviously just sort of bolted it on. So because you didn't watch Lost, you probably don't know about the infamous Jax tattoo episode.
00:29:07
Speaker
I do not know. So the actor who played Jack Matthew, I can't remember his last name. No, that's Chandler. Yeah. That would be a very different show if Chandler was in Lost. He had a tattoo and they decided they were going to give the tattoo a backstory in Lost. So they devote an entire series of flashbacks to when he gets his apparently cursed tattoo in Thailand.
00:29:34
Speaker
And people were going, this is obviously a case of a show spinning its wheels where they have decided to spend 42 minutes explaining why a character has a tattoo. Was there a deep and significant meaning? It never came up again. It never came up again.
00:29:54
Speaker
Right. So yes, actually, I have to say I'm a slight hypocrite in that I did make a point of keeping up with what was going on and lost by like reading episode summaries on the internet. So I did kind of want to, there was sort of a sick fascination and seeing it spinning its wheels and stuff like that. But I certainly wasn't going to watch the episodes to find out, but I did actually sort of stay clued in on a bunch of what was going on.
00:30:21
Speaker
And of course the other one which you've got on the list is Fringe. How much of Fringe did you watch? I didn't watch the last season, which was obviously a case of a very good idea.
00:30:33
Speaker
It was obviously a case of, they're like, okay, this will be the last season, we'll wrap up all the plot lines. And then they're like, hey, we've renewed you for another season. And they went, oh shit, what are we gonna do now? And yeah, so the first couple of episodes in, I was like, okay, no, this is not worth the trouble. I'm going to pretend that he ended at the last season and that's that.
00:30:52
Speaker
I enjoyed Fringe, and Fringe did have a really nice conspiracy. And that was a small-scale conspiracy. It was basically two scientists hiding the fact that they had created a bridge from one version of reality to another. And then the fact that, despite the fact they were hiding this, it was actually causing huge effects to the other universe, which was beginning to break down because the bridge wasn't adequately closed.
00:31:17
Speaker
And so the way that the conspiracy kind of just generally expanded as government agencies found out about the problem and then tried to resolve it. And as you put in the notes, it kind of showed how lost could have been done, which is kind of ironic given it was also started by JJ Abrams.
00:31:37
Speaker
Yeah, it did seem to have learned some lessons, but yeah, that was a good one where a few episodes in, they introduced the concept of these observers, these weird bald people who just sort of stand there watching and appear to have mysterious powers, and then mentioned that they've always been watching things, and then you could go back to the previous episodes and realize you could actually find one of these guys in a background scene of every episode before that, which was... And then they ruined the observers by making them the villains of the last season.
00:32:07
Speaker
of the last season, yes, yes. The less said about that, the better. But anyway. Oh, and of course, we can't go past that single episode with Peter Weller. Yeah, I was going to bring that up. That's actually one of the best time travel episodes of American Science Fiction.
Real-Life Events in Fictional Narratives
00:32:24
Speaker
Look it up. So what now? I might as well bring up the other one. My other excuse for doing this, which is who framed Roger Abbott?
00:32:32
Speaker
Yes, you and your obsession with what happened to the streetcars in LA. Yeah, well, because a decent chunk of the plot of who friend Roger Abbott turns out to be based on the General Motors streetcar conspiracy, which is sort of the idea that General Motors and other companies
00:32:54
Speaker
essentially brought up a bunch of public or mass transit systems, specifically to close them down so that America's main form of transport would be the automobile. Now, I don't have had a chance to talk with Brian Alkely, because Brian actually has some scuttlebutt about this particular conspiracy theory that goes actually a lot more complicated and slightly less conspiratorial.
00:33:22
Speaker
than than it is generally accepted to be. Yeah, yeah. Now, my understanding is that it is more complicated than that. But it's something people talk about. And it's it's certainly who friend Roger Rabbit takes a spin on it. We're in we're the bad guy. It turns out to the company that he owns bought up the red car in in Los Angeles and
00:33:45
Speaker
specifically to shut it down because he saw the future and the future as freeways and lots of lots of car traffic and stuff like that. It's all a little bit silly, but apparently I hit a quick read up just to see
00:34:00
Speaker
just to make sure I'm not wrong and that it was officially blamed on that and they said apparently they based those sort of the conspiracy bits of the plot a little bit on the film Chinatown which also is based around that stuff so I think I don't know if it was directly based on
00:34:17
Speaker
the GM conspiracy, or whether it was based on things that were based on the conspiracy. Now I do want to point out Christopher Lloyd seems very much like two trench coats stuck in the skin of a child in that film. He very much does in that film, yes. I think. Didn't Zemeikis got him because he had already directed him in Back to the Future and I think Christopher Lloyd wasn't convinced that he'd be a good bad guy, but I think he made a very good one.
00:34:44
Speaker
Oh, yeah, no chilling performance. And that he always seems slightly old before the reveal of what he actually is. And they go, Oh, of course, suddenly, a lot of his movements and the way he acts makes complete sense.
00:34:59
Speaker
Now, here's one maybe you can tell me about. Just as I was thinking up things about this, I then realised that the series Gaslit is on TV right at the moment, which is all about Watergate. But I understand it's based on the Slow Burn podcast, which I haven't listened to, but you have, is that right? So, yes. So it's based on a story in the Slow Burn.
00:35:22
Speaker
series on Watergate and unfortunately I've completely forgotten the name of the person it's about, which is the wife of one of the conspirators in the Watergate cover-up.
00:35:37
Speaker
No, sorry, it's not the wife. She was a socialite at the time who basically found out about the conspiracy and then was gaslit by everyone involved to make it seem as if she was mad and had no idea what was going on.
00:35:53
Speaker
And so the show is about the gaslighting of someone who knew what was going on, was trying to tell people what was going on. And the authorities made out that she was a drunk, she was an unreliable narrator, she was having domestic issues in such a way that no one would take her seriously. I was hoping that was typing in the background, she was trying to get the person's name for me because it's just gone out of my head completely.
Killjoys and Its Conspiracy Narrative
00:36:20
Speaker
Yeah, Martha Mitchell, that's the wife of John Mitchell, who was the Attorney General. And yes, there we go. Yes. I haven't watched any of the episodes of Gaslit that have been released at present. I understand there's a lot of
00:36:35
Speaker
sort of there's comedy essentially in these serious 1960s men sitting around obviously being incompetent idiots and yet getting away with stuff because it's the 60s and and if some dame accuses you you can just say she's a she's a drunken probably probably got one of those uteruses that's wandering all over her body like Socrates said you know
00:37:00
Speaker
Oh, sorry, I was just thinking Socrates. When I want to know how women work, I always consult my... I go to the ancient groups. I don't think there's a single woman in any of the Socratic dialogues at all. I would be surprised if there were, yes.
00:37:21
Speaker
Um, yes, I sort of almost thought, ah, should we wait until all of Gaslit has come out? And then we could include that here. But I thought, no, no, we're doing this and we're doing it now. Gaslit can just come later, I suppose. Do you want to do Killjoys then? I watched, I watched some of the first season of Killjoys and quite enjoyed it. But I think I was sort of watching other series at the time and it fell by the wayside and I never got back into it.
00:37:45
Speaker
So Killjoys is a recent Canadian science fiction show. I think it ended about two years ago now after a five year run. It starts off as being a somewhat slight and inconsequential callback to 80s style science fiction. So it's about... I thought it was trying to be a bit of a serenity substitute for people who never got over that show's cancellation.
00:38:10
Speaker
kind of I mean the thing was I she never liked Firefly so I'm so the fact that I like Killjoy is gonna I'm just not seeing the comparison here and that might just be because it was robust people in space
00:38:24
Speaker
Yeah, so it's about three mercs who work for a police agency who basically call in Marx. The first season is very much about going on individual missions and the realization that there's something going on in the background which may be involving the higher echelons.
00:38:44
Speaker
of the company they work for. And eventually you start getting this quite elaborate conspiracy plot line about there being this green goo that if people get infected by it, they become somewhat non human, they lose emotional responses basically and gain super strength.
00:39:04
Speaker
and the fact that there appears to be a kind of plot to get the green goo into as many people as possible. But then you also discover that there are some people infected with the green goo who are somehow able to resist the conditioning of the green goo who are trying to destroy the green goo. And then the plot gets even more complicated as you find out that characters have backstories which indicate that they're clones of characters who have been infected with green goo in the past and the like. And it's just
00:39:33
Speaker
It's so elegantly placid on a season by season basis. So whilst there is a kind of overall plot arc to all five years, each season builds towards a conclusion, sets up a new status quo, and then the next season moves from that status quo on to the next one. Also, each season features a major character, or sorry, a major side character being killed off.
00:39:59
Speaker
And by the time you get to season three or four, you're going quite like all the side characters. I don't really want them to kill off this particular character. And so you get invested as you move towards the end going, who are they going to kill this time? Because I don't think I'm very happy with them killing all of these people. So yeah, well worth watching.
00:40:23
Speaker
It's got a delightful kind of green or grey goo conspiracy theory about infiltration of the echelons of corporate and governmental interests, and then, of course, the revealers to exactly what's going on. It also has the perfect ending for a show in that they resolve the major plot line and then they strongly suggest, actually, their adventures are going to continue. We're just not going to be watching them.
00:40:52
Speaker
So the characters continue doing the thing they do best.
Heist Films and Plot Holes
00:40:55
Speaker
And you go, well, that's good. I mean, they achieve the end. Now they get to live life happily ever after. Yeah, it's barely, barely relevant to what we're talking about. But um, forever, the one with Eoin Griffith, I thought had the best first season finale I've ever seen and that it
00:41:18
Speaker
works as a the end of chapter one if they were to get a second season they could continue it well but it also acts as a nice sort of ending point and as it turned out this it never did get renewed so it made a very nice ending to the whole season. Which one was forever again? The one where Yeo and Griffith is immortal and every time he dies he reappears in a body of water somewhere else and there's a and Judd Hirsch plays his son
00:41:47
Speaker
who he adopted in World War II and who now looks old enough to be his father. And there was the evil immortal who's just messing with him because he's hundreds of years older and has just sort of got bored with life and figures might as well just be evil. See, to my mind the show which only got one season had a perfect ending and I would love to have seen more was Wonderfalls. Yeah, I never got into that one.
00:42:13
Speaker
Oh wonderful shot. Which one's Wonderfalls and which one's Joan of Arcadia because they both sort of blurred together for me. So Wonderfalls does Caroline de Havonas as someone who works in a tourist store and then one day an animate object start talking to her telling her to do things and she doesn't really want to do the things they tell her to but they won't shut up.
00:42:36
Speaker
Right. And Joan of Arcadia is where she thinks she's getting messages from God to do things. I don't know. I didn't watch it. I never watched Joan of Arcadia. Unfortunately, I think it ended up going on for longer than Wonderfalls did. Anyway, back on conspiracies. So the first time around, we talked about alien invasion as a genre, which is always full of conspiracies. But of course, crime, crime films, and in heist films,
00:43:02
Speaker
another genre where you just can't do them without having them full of conspiracies and possibly counter conspiracies and conspiracy theories. The ones I find interesting about that are the ones where you end up with plot holes due to the fact that you don't get to see them planning the conspiracy and sort of find out things afterwards. So I mean there's the famous plot hole that everybody likes to talk about in Die Hard where
00:43:31
Speaker
They've got the three. They've drilled through a bunch of lots, but then there's the electromagnetic lock sealing the vault shut that they have no way of opening. But it turns out that no, Hans had a plan all along, and he was counting on the fact that the FBI would shut power to the building, which would turn off the electromagnetic lock, and then everything would work out. But the people always point out, this was a meticulously planned operation.
00:43:53
Speaker
And yet nobody but Hans Gruber knew that this thing was going to happen. So there must have been at some point in the planning where they're like, OK, so we're going to get through these. Then there'll be the electromagnetic lock we have to get through. How are we going to do that? And Hans Gruber said, oh, don't worry about that.
00:44:08
Speaker
It'll be a surprise. And these are hardened criminal mercenaries like, oh, I love surprises. Okay, let's wait and find out what happens. See, I was thinking more about the ambulance hidden in the van. The van who in an earlier shot we know is empty. Completely. A great kit set or inflatable ambulance they're able to construct very quickly.
00:44:33
Speaker
I have to say, I've seen Die Hard many, many times. It wasn't until I saw a documentary about Die Hard this year, might have been last year, where someone pointed out that plot hole that I actually noticed it in the first place. And as they talk about how the fact that they were
00:44:52
Speaker
sort of writing the film as they went a little bit and it got to the point with okay saying what's the getaway plan and someone said okay how about they have a there's a van in the back of their truck and that's well like an ambulance thing and they're going to get out on that and it's okay sweet and so they write in a scene where a van drives out of the back of the truck
00:45:06
Speaker
then they were watching a test screening and some and then somebody noticed right at the start as you say there is a shot where you see them getting out of the back of the truck and there is clearly nothing inside it except for them and their guns and someone's like oh god that's a big cut plot hole and the guy basically said nobody's gonna notice by the time they get to the end of if we've made a good enough film nobody's gonna care which i think is
00:45:31
Speaker
Which is true, and also it's not as if people had VHS tapes to go back and slowly scroll through the footage in those days. It's the kind of continuity era that we notice now, because you can just instantly rewatch scenes or go back to the beginning by the time you get to the end of that rollercoaster of a film. It's basically gone. Now, the other thing to note, because we talked about Frank Sinatra, this was meant to be a Frank Sinatra vehicle. It was.
00:46:01
Speaker
Yeah, it was technically, was it a sequel? It's based on a book, for one. Yeah, so it's a sequel to a much more Frank Sinatra-like character. Yeah. So it's a sequel to a film that Frank Sinatra had been in. So ostensibly, if they had actually made it as a straight sequel, the Bruce Willis character, you'd get Frank Sinatra saying, yippee-ki-yay, which I think would, or as you know, it would be Frank Sinatra singing, yippee-ki-yay.
00:46:36
Speaker
I've heard multiple screenwriters talk about the fact that every film has plot holes and it's not necessarily about avoiding plot holes, it's about making the story engaging enough that people don't care about the plot holes.
00:46:52
Speaker
which actually brings you to the other one I wanted to talk about in this vein, which was Man on a Ledge. Did you see that one? I did not. I was initially thinking Man on a Ledge was Man on a Wire, which would be a very different film, although probably quite different film.
00:47:10
Speaker
No, Man on a Ledge, it's a sort of low budget heist film. Sam Worthington plays the titular man on the ledge. And the whole point is he's standing on the ledge of a tall building as a distraction. And so while the police are trying to talk to him and get him down from off of this ledge, his two accomplices are busy heisting their asses off at a nearby building breaking into this vault.
00:47:36
Speaker
And it's a good film. I actually quite enjoyed it, which is why the massive plot hole at the end of it, like...
Predictable Actions and Meticulous Villains in Films
00:47:45
Speaker
It was a case where the plot hole was so big that even though I was enjoying the film, I had to go, hey, hold a second. Because basically, he's got an earpiece in, so he's in communication with his two accomplices. And as they're busy breaking into this vaulty place, at one point, they come across a sensor which wasn't on their plans, and they're not ready for it.
00:48:13
Speaker
And so they're busy talking to him. They ask him, okay, there's a sense here, we don't know what to do. And it's all a wacky scene because he's talking with a police officer at the same time. And so he's trying to sort of speak in coded terms so that they know what he's talking about. But the police officer doesn't realize he's giving instructions to his accomplices. But he basically tells them that it's a temperature sensor.
00:48:35
Speaker
and they need to do something clever. I can't be like spray it with a fire extinguisher or something. They do something to mask their temperatures so that they're able to get past the sensor and continue on into the vault.
00:48:47
Speaker
Now at the end of the film, they do the typical heist thing where it looks like everything's gone wrong, the alarms go off, everybody rushes in, it looks like the heist has failed, but then it turns out that's what they wanted all along, because although they could get into the place, the actual vaulty bit that they really wanted to get into, which was owned by the bad guy of the film, they didn't have a way into that. So the whole point of was to break in
00:49:09
Speaker
trigger the alarms so that when he comes in to open the vault to check that none of his stuff has been stolen, then they can get the drop on him and get it. And so when this is all revealed, they show you how they deliberately triggered their own alarms, and it was by placing a bunch of heat packs under that heat sensor. And at that point, it was like, hang on.
00:49:30
Speaker
The heat sensor that you spent quite a bit of time establishing they didn't know was there, and yet now you're telling me their plan hinged on the fact that they were going to set that sensor off with a bunch of heat packs that they brought with them. It was such a jarring sort of a hang on. That doesn't even make a little bit of sense that it took me right out of the whole thing. It's quite strange.
00:49:54
Speaker
So in another case, we should see Stan Worthington as a movie star. And apparently we only get four more Avatar films with him as the star. But yes, another film where if you'd actually seen the planning of the conspiracy, it suddenly wouldn't would have been obvious that it didn't make any sense from the star.
00:50:15
Speaker
I must bring up at this point, though, the film bound, the film that the Wachowskis did that gave them the clout to make The Matrix, which was notable at the time for basically being a lesbian love story. And so most of the commentary was for girl on girl action. But what I really like about that film is that it's one of the few cases
00:50:37
Speaker
where some conspirators come up with a plan that involves a person who they have no control over acting in exactly the way they predict. They make their plan, they execute it, and the person acts in a completely different way and their plan totally turns to crap and they have to scramble to save themselves. Because there are so many other films out there that seem to involve someone where people, either the good guys or the bad guys,
00:51:02
Speaker
are able to predict exactly what the other person is going to do in this situation. And I mean, think about the oceans films, every single oceans film is predicated on the fact that and I can't remember his first name, it's called Jimmy Ocean. Jimmy Ocean is able to accurately predict how people are even going to breathe in a particular room.
00:51:26
Speaker
Or the Mission Impossible ones, the later ones. Anyway, I watched the most recent one and that bugged the crap out of me because every, every sequence was, they come up with a plan, the plan falls apart and they have to improvise a whole bunch of crazy stuff. And then at the end of it, the bad guy pops up and is like, haha, that's exactly what I wanted you to do. You've fallen into my trap. And it's like, you,
00:51:49
Speaker
They were, you had no way of knowing they were going, they didn't even know they were going to do that. And yet somehow this was all, all according to your plan. It just, and it sort of kept doing that. And then at the end, the bad, the good guys do that to the bad guy. When the bad guy does something and suddenly the good guys pop up and it's like, ah, that's exactly what we wanted you to do. It just really bugged me, to be honest.
00:52:12
Speaker
I watched the most recent part of the film the other day. Which one was that? Oh, is that the one where he died? No time to die. No time to die. It's very long. Very, very long. It's incredibly long.
Saw's Complex Conspiracy Layers
00:52:25
Speaker
Actually, the earlier one, which is the one with Rami Malek in it? No, that is no time to die. That is must be the one with Javier Bardem in it.
00:52:37
Speaker
where he's able to sort of exactly predict where Bond's going to be and is able to launch subway cars through walls at him or something.
00:52:47
Speaker
That one seemed to have a bad guy with a meticulous level of planning that didn't actually appear to be in any way possible. I mean, it's the problem of escalation in films like this. You need to make each villain more impressive than the last, which means you have to kind of make them more god-like than the last, and then you get to, as you say, being able to go, aha!
00:53:09
Speaker
I predicted you'd do this particular thing, but I had no idea that you knew what you were doing. And that's how I was able to predict you'd do the thing even you didn't know you were going to do.
00:53:22
Speaker
Or, much like the show Sherlock, where by the end of the final season, they've sort of raised it to, no, these people have actual superpowers, like Sherlock Holmes has his powers of deduction, Mycroft has super deduction, and then their hidden sister is actually an X-Men villain. It was just...
00:53:41
Speaker
quite a bizarre progression. Yeah, Moriarty is able to predict how Holmes is going to act after Moriarty's death, which actually, one thing we haven't talked about, the grand conspiracy that is the Saw films. Yeah, I've never watched a full Saw film, I have to say. So I've watched
00:54:00
Speaker
All of the Saw films, at least twice apart from the most recent one with Chris Rock, which isn't actually technically a Saw film, it's spiral from the Book of Saw, so it's kind of a side story. And whilst I kind of love the way that they've been able to retroactively make a giant conspiracy from the Jigsaw Killers,
00:54:24
Speaker
weird and I mean it is weird they try to make out he's this kind of ethical mechanism for how he punishes particular people even though that he just appears to be cruelty through and through you do have in the jigsaw killer someone who is able to not just predict what his protege is going to do when he dies
00:54:44
Speaker
but how his protege's protege is going to react when she dies, leading to his other protege getting revenge on his protege's protege. And then also finding a backup plan so his wife is going to be able to deal with the protege's protege to ensure the other protege is able to deal with another protege. And you're going, wow,
00:55:09
Speaker
I mean, you probably could have had a very successful career working for the intelligence agencies, but instead you decided you wanted to build death traps instead. I mean, it's a lifestyle. It is a lifestyle.
Doctor Who's Conspiratorial Time Lord Society
00:55:24
Speaker
It's a choice.
00:55:25
Speaker
Right, well, we're coming up to the end of the usual length of an episode we do, so maybe we should get into your last one, which is, of course, Doctor Who. Yes, good old Doctor Who. So there are actually quite a lot of conspiracy plotlines in Doctor Who. I'm only going to focus here on the conspiracy theories and conspiracy plotlines involving the Time Lords, because one thing which we discover from the Fourth Doctor onwards
00:55:51
Speaker
is that Timelord society is very secretive and actually quite corrupt. So we don't even find out about the Doctor's people until the end of the second Doctor's run. So in the war games, the Doctor gets into a situation such as to get in contact with his people.
00:56:08
Speaker
and we discover his people are all time travelers like himself. They've got the ridiculous name of the Time Lords, which somehow has managed to go from being the most ridiculous name for a people to something that kind of works within the canon.
00:56:24
Speaker
we get a little bit of Time Lordy stuff under the Third Doctor. So Time Lord tells the Doctor that the Master is around the place at the beginning of the second series for John Pertwe. We get with the Three Doctors an attack upon the Time Lord planet, which I don't think is even named in that episode, and the Time Lords kind of give the Doctor back his ability to travel through time. And then in The Deadly Assassin,
00:56:52
Speaker
the first time the Doctor ever visits his home planet of Gallifrey in the TV series. We get a conspiracy by the Master and Chancellor Goth to frame the Doctor for the murder of the President of the Time Lords. You get a large, not large scale, you get a small scale conspiracy of the Doctor's biggest nemesis and a member of the Gallifrey and High Council involved in a conspiracy to
00:57:21
Speaker
give the master back his life force, because the master has regenerated now too many times and is about to die, by framing the doctor in such a way that the doctor's investigation of what happened is going to allow the master to get access to Time Lord relics that will allow him to gain life force back using the power source of the planet.
00:57:47
Speaker
And this basically starts off an entire run of conspiracy-centric Timelord storylines. So with a few seasons later we get the invasion of time where the Doctor returns to Gallifrey and is involved in a conspiracy to stop an invasion by double-bluffing every single person in the story.
00:58:10
Speaker
So initially we think that the invasion of Gallifrey is one particular alien race. It turns out to be a double bluff, and it's another alien race. And the Doctor appears to be working with that alien race, but actually he's working against them to find out who the original alien race that wants to invade the planet happens to be. So it ends up being conspiracies within conspiracies.
00:58:35
Speaker
Then a few seasons later with Peter Davidson and the Five Doctors, we get the discovery that there's been a conspiracy in Time Lord society to hide the dark history of the early dark ages of the Time Lords and the fact that in the old days they used to enjoy having
00:58:53
Speaker
games of death where they would pit people against enemies from out of time. And it turns out that the new president of the Time Lords is basically working with various dark powers to cause issue for the Doctor.
00:59:10
Speaker
we get with remembrance of the Daleks, the suggestion that the Doctor was actually one of the main characters in that dark history of the Time Lords. So the Doctor's involved in a conspiracy to cover up the fact that he's a lot older and more than just a Time Lord. And so in the classic series, we get every single time the Time Lords come up post Tom Baker,
00:59:38
Speaker
a realisation that actually Timelord Society is just a naturally conspiratorial one. And that's kind of continued with the modern series. So Russell T Davies had the idea that the Master himself, or herself, now that we've got the Missy Master duality, was created by Timelord Society in order to ensure that the Timelords would survive the Time War
01:00:07
Speaker
by allowing the master to escape Gallifrey during the time war so that when Gallifrey was destroyed they'd be able to use the master as a way to trek themselves through time to avoid the consequences of the end of the time war, which of course then got rebooted under Stephen Moffat where it turned out that there was
01:00:30
Speaker
a conspiracy by the doctors to save Gallifrey from the end of the time war entirely by basically forgetting that they had set up a system to move Gallifrey out of the way of the Dalek invasion fleet.
01:00:48
Speaker
And under Chris Chibnall, we now have a new conspiracy where it turns out that the Doctor isn't even a Time Lord, but comes from another universe entirely, and Time Lord Society is based upon her DNA, which created the ability for Time Lords to regenerate, and Time Lords have been keeping that secret from her in perpetuity.
01:01:15
Speaker
Yeah, I haven't watched the most recent... There are the coughs. I've been waiting for them to show up. I haven't watched the most recent seasons of it, to be honest. I think I was just a little bit all doctored out with Peter Capaldi. I started watching the Jodie Whittaker ones and my interest just kind of slightly drained away. I'm not really sure why. But yes, the whole time as child things seemed like quite a swerve.
01:01:44
Speaker
Well, except that it's not because Chibnall's actually building on things that have occurred in the classic series. So there's a very famous Tom Baker story called The Brain of Morbius, which was released on VHS as The Brian of Morbius, which I think is a much better title.
01:02:07
Speaker
And in the brain of Morbius, the Doctor engages in a battle of wills with another exiled Time Lord. And this particular battle of wills allows you to, they kind of trade regenerations. So if you lose, you end up going all the way back to the beginning of your regenerative cycle and you die. And as the Doctor is fighting Morbius, he starts going back so you get to Pertwee and then Troughton and then Hartnell.
01:02:36
Speaker
And then suddenly there are three or four other faces in that list, which aren't Morbius's faces, they appear to be earlier incarnations of the doc who have never seen before. And so Chibnall's basically been building on little hints like that in the show's history, because the show has never been consistent with its canon at all, and gone, well,
01:03:01
Speaker
actually this has kind of already been admitted to so I'm just going to make something of it so yeah it seemed like a big swerve at the time but avid watchers of the show were going oh oh you're connecting a lot of dots and suddenly suddenly this isn't quite the big swerve that people are making it out to be after all oh how about that well I think um
01:03:27
Speaker
As we have said numerous times in the past, any excuse to raise on about popular culture is something we will grab in both fists. And we've done so, and I think we've sort of, we're at around the limits of a regular episode and possibly the limits of our audience's patience, I don't know.
01:03:46
Speaker
And I don't see anything else in our list that we're going to talk about, so shall we just bring things to a close? I think we shall. Very well, well then of course we should mention that after this we're going to talk about other things probably not related to popular culture, and the bonus episode for our patrons. We're going to talk about Mars, we're going to talk about the Gulf War, we're going to talk about Paul Joseph Watson, because
01:04:15
Speaker
I guess we have to. We should at least mention him. We should mention him, yeah. And I don't know, possibly any other bits that we could have mentioned this episode but forgot to at the time, I don't know.
01:04:28
Speaker
So, if you would like to hear about possibly Mars, the Iraq War, or Paul Joseph Watson, and recent developments concerning them, then you want to be one of our patrons. If you are, jolly good. If you're not, go to patreon.com and search for the podcast that's going to the conspiracy, and you can sign yourself up for as little as a dollar a week.
01:04:47
Speaker
That's a New Zealand dollar too, isn't it? So that's like... Oh no, no, no. It's $70. Even better than that, Josh, it's a dollar a month. A dollar a month, that's what I meant, yes. It's bugger all, is what I'm saying. So go for it. Or not, because, you know, once again, you've listened all the way to the end of an episode, and just bless you for that. That's quite, quite enough. Quite enough, I think. And I suspect many people listening are going, yes, that is quite enough.
01:05:13
Speaker
It really is. Yep. So before things go on any further, I'm just going to, going to abruptly bring them to a close, uh, in my usual way of saying goodbye. Durango. The podcasters guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M.R. Extenteth. You can contact us at podcastconspiracygmail.com and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, Soylent Green is meeples.