[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: welcome to the lore hounds your guides to the Deadlights of Dairy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Alicia, the Red Balloon Bearer, and I'm joined again by Mark the keeper of the secrets of Meturin, stay tuned for Turtle Talk lore later.
[SPEAKER_01]: Mark, welcome!
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks, I'm just glad you didn't call me Mark, Luke O'Cloridium.
[SPEAKER_00]: Poppin'y, that would have been more insulting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm happy to be the keeper of this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Your last name could be a scientific species.
[SPEAKER_00]: Could be.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we know it's not?
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, my brother's a scientist, you never know.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, happy to be here, though.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm afraid John couldn't join us again this week.
[SPEAKER_01]: Probably he'll be back next.
[SPEAKER_01]: We will be looking for him in the tunnels underneath the wellhouse.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we are here today to discuss it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to dairy season one episode four.
[SPEAKER_01]: The great swirling apparatus of our planet's function, which in my estimation is an excellent title.
[SPEAKER_01]: This one was directed again by Andrew Bernstein, who also directed Episode 3, and the writer this time was Helen Shang, who's done lots of past work, but might be of interest to this audience that she's written episodes for Rings of Power and Invincible.
[SPEAKER_01]: And spoilers begin now.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we are going to open up all the spoilers for we're going to try not to spoil anything from the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: That might, I mean, it's difficult to do that, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, how can we actually spoil that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because everything was already spoiled in the movies, which we are allowed to talk about.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're trying not to spoil things that we think are going to happen in this season or next season based on based on the book, except for the stuff that's spoiled by the opening credits.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then movies.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and it's what, yeah, I mean, that because they do talk about some of those things, you know, we know some of the highlights, but yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So for example, we will like I have in the notes.
[SPEAKER_01]: we can talk about a place that's called a black spot, we won't talk about what we know happens in the future of this situation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, but before we actually get into the new episode, we put out a call for we had questions about the barons, and we have gotten answers.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've gotten two answers.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you want to read what Chambaruni wrote to us about the barons?
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey everyone, it's been a while since I've participated, but I was listening to this pot episode today, and I wanted to give my two cents as a new ham sure native, not sure if anybody answered your question yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: The barrens, being referred to by Stephen King, are probably based on randomly found barren lands all throughout the New England region, which are named that because they look barren and have bad soil and rely on periodic fires to help control the growth and to help make the soil better over time.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are a number of barons all throughout New England.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the more prominent ones being Milestandish State Forest and Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, OCP Pine Barons in New Hampshire, and the two most prominent in Maine, which King probably pulled from, are the Kenny Bunk Plains and the Waterboro Barons Preserve.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not sure which one he would be referring to, if either one specifically, because they're both about the same distance away from Banger, about three hours,
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I'd just add to that before we respond, we also got from Jim and the barons in the standpipe when I first read it, I remember struggling with what a standpipe looked like.
[SPEAKER_01]: I also did not have a clear picture of the barons.
[SPEAKER_01]: Finally, a few years ago, I got to go to Bangor and do the SK tours.
[SPEAKER_01]: They take you around Bangor on a bus and show you all the landmarks and Stephen King's books that are in Bangor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, there is the giant Paul Bunyan statue, Beth's house.
[SPEAKER_01]: The drain were George's taken, and of course the Stan pipe and the barons.
[SPEAKER_01]: The barons is a small stream that winds through the middle of Bangor and empties into the Pinot Scott River.
[SPEAKER_01]: on both sides, there are some wooded areas.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the barons, a great place for kids to go and get away from adults, but still be right in the middle of town.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, thank you, Jim and Chumberrooney.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've got one, someone who's actually done the Stephen King tour and a local of New England.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, so which numberrooney describes as the barons is what I would expect based on the name, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: But Jim describes is what we see in the movies.
[SPEAKER_00]: My thoughts are that I have been to one.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't, I have been to milestone to state forest.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is on the way to the Cape.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so one time, because I am a non-native New Englander now and on the way back, we were like, let's go on a hike with the kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I didn't feel barren though.
[SPEAKER_00]: It felt like a forest, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So if it's about the soil composition and all that, that's the kind of thing that would just be
[SPEAKER_00]: not within, you know, I wouldn't be noticing that, just like pulling off the road for an hour.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but yeah, no, this is...
[SPEAKER_00]: stuff I wish I knew when I was reading these book like the the stamp pipe is another thing like it's this water tower but I didn't perceive that reading this not the again I read this novel for the first time when I was like 13 so or something like that and I didn't see that you were not in a series to wait no I was I was in San Diego at that point which is right everything's bearing in a different way though um different kind of bearing right to
[SPEAKER_00]: fascinating stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: We got to get the the new Englander input whenever possible.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, right, especially, and yeah, and Steven King stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mainers, please write in our Wippie Pie's Good.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do people like Wippie Pie's?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it's a controversial discussion in my family, whether the state dessert is worth eating.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'd so, okay, I think I've had Wippie Pie's, is it like cookies with like a marshmallowy filling?
[SPEAKER_00]: a chocolate cookie, but more like cake, almost like a cookie, shaped, chocolate cake, two pieces of it with kind of like either whipped cream or like a maybe like cake icing in the middle.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not really anything more complicated than that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think, okay, then it is what I think it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: And my verdict is, yes, good.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's cake, it's cake with frosting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, Moxie, I have I was just in Maine and I tried to find Moxie to try and I have Moxie is like the state soda.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a locally famous soft drink and it apparently is, you know, in the same way that
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... right herbace complex in the yes um... it's like that apparently but i couldn't find it and i tried and we were just in main over the summer we went to the national park there and i failed uh... bar harbor let me down uh... maybe we did go to banger but i did not go to any convenience stores in banger so uh... anyways right at right in i don't think it's gonna come up in this interestingly enough there is a soda mentioned in this series a few times
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, but that is not the soda that Stephen King like Stephen King doesn't talk about Moxie Stephen King talks about Nazala in a lot of his stories He does it's not like a thing, but it's like
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of one of those running brand names throughout his continuity, and they didn't use that, which makes me think like, what do they, they obviously, the names are so close.
[SPEAKER_00]: They obviously knew about Nazala, is it like, one of them is the sprite and the other is the Coke, like, are we supposed to interpret?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is meaningful, because the fact that they didn't use the name, but they use something so similar, it's not like they don't have the rights to
[SPEAKER_00]: The Stephen King invented soda-brand nazala.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is, this is what the people come for.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a lot of this conversation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fizzola sounds, um, more appetizing than nazala.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I might be mispronouncing the thing that I've only seen in writing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, or whatever, whatever it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fizzola sounds nicer.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, someone's going to write in and be like, no, actually there's a soda in bang or main.
[SPEAKER_00]: Only that is called Fizzola.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a spin-off of moxie.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm learning, I'm learning a lot of things about Maine, so I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Real and fictional.
[SPEAKER_00]: Non-native New Englander here, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So learning as I go.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, well, we do have some lore questions that I know that you know more about about the entity itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to save them until the end.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's been lots of chatter in the discord and questions about this stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I thought it's a good time to address it all, but let's open with our mid-season hot takes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, premise for this episode is as the kids face increasingly terrifying experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: Charlotte attempts to advocate for Hank and general Shaw escalates his efforts.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, what did you think about episode four overall?
[SPEAKER_00]: Can I just say that my, I have a lot of thoughts, but my main hot takes have been erased because I only 20 minutes ago finished watching the long lock.
[SPEAKER_00]: which is available on demand everybody now and I watched it start a watching yesterday and ran out of time and folks we have six or seven hours between us in time zone so we're recording quite early in the morning and I woke up really got cereal I was like I have to finish this movie so my brain is kind of shaken frankly by that so I have to pivot back into
[SPEAKER_01]: Can we just, uh, while you're brain's in that space, curious, whether you're hot takes boiler free obviously for this podcast on the long walk and, and not that you can spoil that one either.
[SPEAKER_00]: Did people talk about that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you do an episode with it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I just watched.
[SPEAKER_00]: I haven't even looked up.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have not done an episode about it, but I have been advocating for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's in my top 10 movies of the year.
[SPEAKER_00]: I really liked it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very, again, not with the people who are here to listen to, but it's Stephen King.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was very disturbing in this just because you know, based on the premise of it, you know that people will fail and die, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's baked in and they do an excellent job.
[SPEAKER_00]: of making you understand these characters through very limited interactions with some of them and love these characters.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, I really liked it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I literally just finished it 20 or 30 minutes ago, so I don't, I haven't necessarily thought super critically about it, but I enjoyed it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting to think about in the context of Stephen King and knowing that it was a
[SPEAKER_00]: not feel like he had a right horror, but it's it's so horrific and dystopian in some ways, but does it fit in with this universe?
[SPEAKER_00]: I probably not.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not natural, but yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But, but yeah, I I found it very gripping and really heartwarming at times and funny at few times and terrifying at other times and well made.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like the I don't remember the director's name, but
[SPEAKER_00]: Gosh, what was it?
[SPEAKER_00]: I just saw it in the credits.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe a bit spotty sort of historically in terms of the reputation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know that everybody loves all of his films, but I think I root highly recommend people to watch it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Francis Lawrence.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, what, what, what am I, why am I blinding?
[SPEAKER_00]: What else he's, um, he did.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am legend, Constantine.
[SPEAKER_01]: I like to both of those.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, yeah, actually like both those movies.
[SPEAKER_01]: Water for elephants, he did the first three, or no, three of the Hunger Games movies, catching fire in the two mocking jays, Red Sparrow, Slumberland, oh, the new Hunger Games Ballet of songbirds and snakes in the long walk.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's going to do the next next year's Hunger Games sunrise on the reefing.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's really fascinating because the Hunger Games is so very much.
[SPEAKER_00]: So many other games, yes, somebody read the long walk and then wrote the Hunger Games for a young adult audience, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I haven't read the long walk yet, but so we can keep it simple for now.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I like it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I highly recommend it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot to dive into into that movie, but um, and it shows a key actor with this show, too.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure does.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and um, yeah, I hope it's not the same continuity.
[SPEAKER_01]: He plays with his name, Kali, something in the movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, Joshua, Ajak, who plays Tanyaul, who we're going to talk about later in this episode, he plays a key character in the long walk too.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he becomes more prominent as the movie goes on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So two recommendations.
[SPEAKER_01]: See you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so to say my heart takes by this episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, but we're halfway through the season.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm enjoying the show.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm nerding about it a little bit and like questioning things, but also enjoying things in a way that maybe I wouldn't, if I wasn't so familiar with the property.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think this episode is a great encapsulation of that aspect because
[SPEAKER_00]: On the one hand, I'm so into this like 15-minute sequence with the glue, but on the other hand, I'm like covering my eyes a little bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, don't, don't mess it up, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm here for it for the most part.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know where they're going with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I like this episode overall.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know kind of where it fits in in terms of my sort of ranking with the other episodes because I was so distracted by a lot of the lore talk.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of backstory in this episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: It kind of takes over in a sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, and I think from a filmmaking perspective, it's a little confusing because it makes me wonder,
[SPEAKER_00]: where we're going for two more seasons, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: They're already, they've given us stuff from 1908.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're giving us stuff from, you know, hundreds or thousands of years ago or whatever, are we going to get to season three and be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we already know what happens in 1908 or whatever, everybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's so many of my,
[SPEAKER_00]: my things that could be construed as critiques in the season are almost just like, I wonder if or I hope you can.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like I'm not, I don't think it's bad what they did here, but it makes me, um, it just raises so many questions just from a sort of like, how are they going to sustain this and make this satisfying?
[SPEAKER_00]: and for the most part, the characters are pretty endearing and that can be enough, you know, like if we get to 1908 and we understand the lore way too much, but they create a cool set of characters for us to follow and they're well written.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I just watched a movie where a bunch of kids walked for two hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was gripping.
[SPEAKER_00]: And every minute of it, I was super into it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like, there could be, there's an argument for getting this all out of the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, we want to hear about, we want to know what happened with the...
[SPEAKER_00]: 1908.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, they're going to make a mention.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, there's Bradley Game Asker in the 1930s.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: They spoiled that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're going to spoil the history of Pennywise or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, spoil that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we can get to what I said to two or three episodes ago, which is the reason you go to Stephen King.
[SPEAKER_00]: is for the character development, and for the human drama, and maybe we can do that now.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the jury's out on this episode, I think, in terms of how it, like whether it's successful or not, but I enjoyed it, and I'm fascinated by what this show is doing, and I think in general, I would say that about the show.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I think in terms of, you know, I said earlier that like I think it's difficult to spoil this story at all because we don't know what's going to happen with this batch of characters aside from the fact that like we know will has to survive to grow up to have Mike as a kid we know we know that.
[SPEAKER_01]: um we know leave where his father has to survive because he's in the movies um the on that we don't really know what's going to happen to most of the individual kids so well it's sorry sorry leave Roy's in the movies
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he can be in the, in the, so yeah, this is, again, spoiler for the future, for the movies, which are set in the future, but, you know, anyway, it's just, it's difficult to spoil here, but in the movie version, which is a bit different from the book version, Mike's parents died in a fire, and, and he was raised by his grandfather, Lever, I after that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I sort of thought it was uncoller something like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't remember what it is in the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the book, it's his parents definitely did not die.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm to the part now where I was just listening to a chapter about Mike and his parents.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, it's a shame that they are.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were in a different direction in the movies.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's a spoiler that I didn't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like, that's actually interesting for the scene with the river later, because I was wondering.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, fear of your your father and Korea, you know, you're here these stories of him getting shot down or whatever or is this premonition or something, but it's not a premonition if he's alive in the 1980s.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, um, okay, anyways, interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for educating me on that point.
[SPEAKER_00]: I forgot that about I haven't seen the film since I probably saw the itch after two when that came out might have been the last time I saw those films.
[SPEAKER_00]: I need still need to check them out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, as far as, yeah, for this, like as far as the lore around the entity itself, I knew that you were nervous about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so when I saw this, I was like, oh, this is actually did not go as far as I think Mark feared, you know, this really kept it in a safe, vague enough space that I hoped that you were happy about that, you know, not disturbed by that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I mean, I think that's last episode, there was some critique about the whole running around the graveyard shenanigans.
[SPEAKER_01]: But now we are back to a real proper scare, one of like one that really rivals the whole birthing scenes.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I know a lot of people have eye horror.
[SPEAKER_02]: Ha ha.
[UNKNOWN]: Um.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that they have shown that they are experts, the makers of this show, in creating the tension and making a squirm, just little details like that eye stalk scene that I referenced where she's, I mean, we're pass boilers, where she's cutting at her eyes and then it transitions
[SPEAKER_00]: Echoes of the game of thrones, there's like a season where Sam, episode where Sam is cleaning the trees or something and he's slapping waste buckets or whatever and then it shows somebody like pouring porridge or something and just like, oh, yeah, I love it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm still traumatized five years later.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and then yeah, I just, I like to see the characters, um, more of the adult characters pulling together.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that that's where the second movie got it wrong most for me is, is not really, in making me feel the reality of the adult friendships as much as the child friendships.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm hoping that Charlotte and Rose become besties after this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, those are pretty much my hot takes.
[SPEAKER_01]: I will save my further thoughts for the breakdown.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you have any final hot takes before we get into the break in the episode itself?
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's get into it.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to break down the episode.
[SPEAKER_01]: One group of characters are plot arc at a time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, welcome back.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's start with a square squad mission.
[SPEAKER_01]: The kids rush their newly developed photos from the Cemetery, shenanigans last episode to the police station trying to exonerate Ronnie's dad Hank Grogan.
[SPEAKER_01]: Only defined that the adults can't see any of the ghosts they saw, most of which seem to have disappeared.
[SPEAKER_01]: After police chief Clint Bowers belittles and dismisses them, they regroup.
[SPEAKER_01]: They decide that they need to begin by gathering more information about what they're dealing with.
[SPEAKER_01]: Digging into Dary's dark past or answers.
[SPEAKER_01]: So would you, we're used, I mean, I guess none of us were surprised that the photo thing didn't work out.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was kind of, we'll help me clarify something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you seen the episode more than once did you watch?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do a second watch?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so help me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it that the photos actually have changed or that the adults can't see?
[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't sort of clear like, wait,
[SPEAKER_00]: Or the ghosts in the photographs in the adults are just Pennywise blind or has Pennywise can't you see them either anymore except for except for Pennywise.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone can see Pennywise, but the adults were like, well, that's just a statue and the kids are like, it's a clone.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a creepy clone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that fits in with my expectation.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was surprised by it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That fact.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was wondering, whoa, did the photos get like transformed or whatever?
[SPEAKER_00]: I expected the adults would not be able to see it, but I thought it would be more of the
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, this is not this is a very frustrating but understandable expected kind of moment, right that even if when you got six kids or whatever it is insisting on a thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The chief.
[SPEAKER_00]: is going to be incapable of believing them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I noticed something looking outside, if I ever become mayor, by the way, like, don't let me do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when it says like, when you go dry through a town and it says like, welcome to Boston, Massachusetts, mayor, Michelle Wu, and there's like a sign, and I'm like, they paid somebody to make a sign, like there's a vanity to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I noticed, and I don't think Michelle Wu did that in Boston, but towns do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then it says,
[SPEAKER_00]: Clint Bauer's and I looked at the sign and the sign is old.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm thinking He's been I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's been in that role a long time and there's obviously the vanity element like really you commissioned a sign Come on because chiefs often times he's an elected position, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's a presumption that of permanence that he has which is Interesting and so if we think of somebody who is under the spell of dairy
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the guy who's been the police chief for over a decade has to be so far deep, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because you couldn't be in that job ignoring child murders and stuff like that if you were able to be critical and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I felt like with a very small sort of symbol out front of the police department, they were able to telegraph just how
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of baked in to the town and it's, I guess, ambivalence, the chief is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, and we know obviously that his son becomes a chief, because his son is the chief at the time of the original movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, I mean, he, there's a sort of stagnant.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's, it's not an active corruption.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like a stagnancy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, but yeah, he's climped our sucks.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to talk about him again later when we get back to talking about Charlotte.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I really enjoyed the, we have now our, I'm calling him in the square squad.
[SPEAKER_01]: they've come together fully and we have some conversations where they are strategizing, they're like, okay, so the photo thing didn't work what's next.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I find it interesting that it's Will, my canlons father, Mike from the original movies who becomes the librarian, it's Will who says, the first thing I do is find out if there's a history of stuff like this happening in dairy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, oh, interesting, here's some fun one day, we'll think similar.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can I stop you right there?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think Henry Bower's dad is chief of police in the timeline later.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I think he's just like a policeman.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I mentioned that a couple episodes though that it feels like that family has fallen in prominence in the generation.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we know of Butcher, I think his name is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Henry Bower's dad is sort of a...
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you know, abusive dad drinking problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, but he's an alcoholic cop, maybe not a chief of police, but he's okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if he's a policeman, I don't know that he's a, that makes a lot of sense then.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, no, I just think it's, I'm always curious because of course, what ties the, the movies together with these episodes of television, we're going back in time.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there are, again, inherent spoilers where things like, we know, yeah, we know Mike's going to exist, therefore, Will cannot die, that's sort of thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now we get a tease that Lily will not ask her mom about growing up in Dairy, which is understandable because her mom's been awful to her.
[SPEAKER_01]: and now we'll be learning this episode her mom's basically just like living on valium to deal with everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that begs a question will Lily's mom be a character next season and will she and Lily come to a better understanding this season if her mom has been through similar in her childhood.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting, the age thing could work, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: She would be pretty young last cycle, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is interesting because I feel like they, the language of the universe, they tell us a lot about your experiences as a kid by how you are as an adult, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we don't have a lot of,
[SPEAKER_00]: We've talked about this before, but the adults that are woke so to speak often are the ones who may be having encountered something so her mother is either
[SPEAKER_00]: a kid during the last cycle who didn't wasn't a loser put it this way that was one of the other kids who was on the peripheral of it or she's so traumatized by what she experienced that she's been you know, sedating herself as an adult so that's an interesting it's different from what the way we see the other most of the other adult reactions sort of right like like Rose hasn't forgotten about
[SPEAKER_00]: the glue right she's an adult though I think generationally she'd be a little bit different but oh that's interesting yeah yeah because that's two cycles ago right but Lily's mom is sort of a different manifestation of that so I would believe that but they would I think that they would be kind of carving out a new a new path for the way that someone copes with it
[SPEAKER_00]: like an impossible or a negative thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, one of the losers kills himself when he finds out it is back as an adult.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stan, the first scene in the novel, I think it is, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: He is him committing suicide when he gets the letter or the call from Mike saying the monster's back.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he obviously wasn't able to cope with it as an adult, sort of.
[SPEAKER_00]: emotionally healthy way, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So this wouldn't be out of the norm, but but it is very different.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say from how they've shown other adult handling.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I would say well, two things.
[SPEAKER_01]: One is that Lily's mom, if she did experience something like this, maybe that actually informs the way she's so awful to Lily, like she thinks she's protecting her.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and then the other thing I would say, I would say the big difference between her and Rose is that Rose grew up being told this story over and over as a warning.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: We see with 10, you know, later her nephew that this is a story that the children of mature and we'll say that's that that's what they are calling.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if that's, yeah, I guess that's what they're calling the entire tribe.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, yeah, that is what that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the whole tribe is called that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's at least a group of them, but I think it's maybe there, you know, the translation of their names for themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: Interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, we're going to talk about culture and that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, but Rose, she, it's something that she's been told over and over since she was a kid.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it sticks with her in a different way, I think.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that there's something to be said also for the difference in culture where this is something that I've complained about with, um, you know,
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't talk about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, no, no.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is what we see happening with, particularly the white adults and dairy, whereas someone like Rose is like, we do.
[SPEAKER_01]: We talk about it over and over, so you never forget.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, that's a fascinating, just differences like the experiences might be different.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's different history, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The tribe has been here longer, but also actually the real terror of the creature didn't exist until the colonists were there anyways, actually, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's when the real mass occurring started.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the, right, but that was before, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It was time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, oh, sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's 300 years ago, whatever, but like culturally, there's actually a similar era of shared history.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like sure Pennywise was there thousands of years ago, but they pretty much weren't interacting with the forest.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would just leave it alone, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Millions, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Millions, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, they were on the other side of the sea.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, so the earth is only as few thousand years old, Alicia.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I shouldn't go there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't need to poke anybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, the, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where was I?
[SPEAKER_00]: Sorry, distracting myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's early in the coffee's kicking in.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have the same history.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can't say that it's like, oh well, there's so much more time that the tribe has versus the sort of,
[SPEAKER_00]: colonists, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The American or British settlers.
[SPEAKER_00]: But though it's the transmission of information that is just so different.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you think about what dairy would be like if every day at dinner, the dinner table, the families of dairy said, let's talk about the cycle of the creature.
[SPEAKER_00]: And those kids were primed to be aware of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe not every day, but like think how much death would
[SPEAKER_00]: be averted if that was the case, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and, and how different the tribe is able to somehow resist the, the spell, so to speak.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't know if some of their land is literally outside, maybe outside of the boundary of dairy, that they're not going to talk about the pillars and all that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll talk about all that later.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, it is interesting that the backgrounds and how rose and thus tenial are probably a bit more prepared.
[SPEAKER_01]: Although tenials we already talked about was born between the cycle.
[SPEAKER_01]: So anyway, yeah, the cycles, by the way, one of the questions is going to come up at the end.
[SPEAKER_01]: But for now, let me ask you about the other, the adult ally that Lily does have at this point in the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: We got a name for her, Ingrid, is what they're calling the woman from the head height, housekeeper from the asylum.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do we trust her?
[SPEAKER_01]: She says she remembers kids going missing.
[SPEAKER_01]: She forgot about the Bradley gang massacre.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she's just being so helpful and, you know, believing, lily and encouraging, lily and her group of friends to stick together.
[SPEAKER_01]: And do we think, I think we all agree.
[SPEAKER_01]: She knows something.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are theories.
[SPEAKER_01]: Have you heard the theories about who she might be?
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_01]: that the theory is that she is Mrs. Kirch from the second movie, who is the daughter of Bob Gray, who is the basis that the entity used the basis for Pennywise from, so she could be that child
[SPEAKER_00]: She, she'd be way too young for that, though.
[SPEAKER_00]: The woman's like, no, she's in her late 60s.
[SPEAKER_00]: No way.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know.
[SPEAKER_01]: She is, though.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_00]: She won the genetic lottery.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, my God, if I look 20 years younger, what I'm in my 60s.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, so she's in her, so okay, so she could be the, you're saying that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Bob Gray is a real, Bob Gray is a novel, is a novel that, is a moniker that sometimes
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, he's a real person, but Penny was also referred to himself as Bob Gray sometimes in like the just like when he's masquerading as a human or whatever, so Bob Gray's actual clown that existed in the 1908 timeline, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's and you're saying that she could be his daughter.
[SPEAKER_01]: right and we've seen we've seen a young girl clown in the ninth night we flashbacks last week briefly and we we know yeah Bob Gray we've saw him in the movies the 2017 and 19 movies that yeah we've seen a picture of him is indeed played
[SPEAKER_01]: by Bill Skarskard as it's Pennywise, so we know that that's a character that exists, and then there was that whole thing where adult Beverly in the second movie went to visit her old apartment and there was a Mrs. Kersh there who talks about her father being about Gray and then turned into in a turns out it was Pennywise who was pretending to be this woman.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we don't that was probably not the real Mrs. Kersh in the second movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if that is, we've met one character named Kersh and this TV show, which is the butcher.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, oh, I was going to say not the pharmacist.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the butcher.
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it Kersh?
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kersh and Kers
[SPEAKER_00]: again it goes back to this like what's the behavior like she's carrying the adult it seems that's that's a good sign but there is a lot of urgency in this conversation she's kind of like well
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, good things come to those who wait.
[SPEAKER_00]: Friends stick together.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like she's saying these kind of like, really, um, platitudes, platitudes, sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the word.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like heartwarming things, but like she's not like, uh, stick with your friends, the way, trust me.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's not, right.
[SPEAKER_00]: If she was somebody who had witnessed the monster, like that was kind of like, so to speak, a loser back in 1908, there would be a little more fear or a little more kind of urgency to what she's saying.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you're saying like, this is someone who's somehow connected to Pennywise in a more sense of like, I just don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're, she did not need to be in this episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: That scene didn't really give us much except that like.
[SPEAKER_00]: So other than remember this character, yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's she's gonna matter later and whether it's hopefully it's the season and not just next season.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're like, oh, remember this woman that you thought was 40, who was actually 60, who now looks 30, like, they're like, and then that would be different actress.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, but two seasons later, like, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I don't know what it is, but they're setting something up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll have to see.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, it does remind me, you know, you were saying about it's not like she's warning her urgently, which is something we saw a bit with Rose with Charlotte, you know, Charlotte's like, is there something weird about this town and Rose is like, let me just say, keep your family close exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, no, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: No ambiguity there.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a little emergency there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, and that's the question is if she is this, um, if she is a child of Bob Gray, then that still doesn't answer is she a good or a malevolent, you know, has she been influenced by Pennywise and issues somehow, like some sort of helper of him, like we see Henry Bauer in the second film or
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, or is she like, oh, I know and I'm trying to actually help Lily Warren against him.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's in a very interesting theory that so far tracks for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, Madeline's still.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, she has proof.
[SPEAKER_01]: Any proof that she's, I think she's not my age.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, 67 years old.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, my gosh.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what good for her.
[SPEAKER_00]: Good for her.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, we can move on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now that my sense has been shattered of perspective.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Speaking of preservation, I think it's interesting we get into, we've referred to before about how Pennywise likes to quote unquote salt, his meat with fear, and that's why he torment characters for a while before actually going for them.
[SPEAKER_01]: is explaining that there's the adrenal gland, it releases adrenaline, and that is an cortisol for that matter by the way, and that is the quote unquote salt of the meat that Pennywise likes, which is very interesting because Hunter, it's a group of hunting territory, and they try to avoid stressing the animals because adrenaline and cortisol makes the meat taste worse.
[SPEAKER_01]: like the muscles get tense, so it's tough meat.
[SPEAKER_01]: The stress responses decreases the glycogen in the muscles, which after death glycogen, you want it to have the right balance, so it converts into the right balance of electric acid, which makes it taste nice when you cook it, you know, keeps the meat tender and pink and flavorful.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this prolonged fear response is kind of the worst for this, so just quoting grassfed cattle.com.
[SPEAKER_01]: But a stress process for an extended period of time, the changes are even worse.
[SPEAKER_01]: The persistent high acidity in the meat caused by long-term cattle stress will actually begin breaking down the meat, almost as if the body is digesting itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: The meat becomes dark, soft, mushy, and sticky, very similar to bruised meat, and will have a very limited shelf life.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the industry, these types of cattle are called dark cutters, yuck, so it's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I suppose this is like the gaminess in wild meat comes a bit from this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, you don't want it to be exchange, so extreme.
[SPEAKER_01]: So maybe it is the gamier flavor and also Pennywise is not human.
[SPEAKER_01]: So maybe Pennywise really likes this flavor, do you?
[SPEAKER_01]: Any thoughts about the salting of the meat?
[SPEAKER_00]: Humans are not universal.
[SPEAKER_00]: My dog will like walk up and sniff your socks when they come off your hand, love it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like the dog, like animals, other predators like stink in a way that humans don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do think,
[SPEAKER_00]: either either A, you're right, that last postulate there that, like, okay, well, Pennywise might like it, even though it tastes worse, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: B, kids are just wrong sometimes, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Though this feels a little bit, I think people might view this a little bit, like, the Midi-Clorians thing, like they're trying to give, like, a chemistry explanation for the force.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it is, I mean, but this is the explanation from the books.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, but the the salting of the meat, they don't say that it's a adrenaline that causes that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's fear.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what is fear?
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the release of adrenaline and cortisol.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fear is a to to Pennywise, fear is a is a mystical, uh, it's I don't know that there's science causing that to be true.
[SPEAKER_00]: I understand that Pennywise likes fear, but that could be a cosmic thing, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't mean it's literally a chemical.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the fact that the kid says was it
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah, meat tastes like I think they say that the chemical makes meat taste better and you're saying that that grassfed cattle.com, which couldn't possibly have an angle in this.
[SPEAKER_01]: They say the opposite, that's not, I mean, like this is, you know, I quote a grassfed cattle.com because they had that thing about the dark meat, but this is just, I grew up knowing this because a group and hunting can change, like the Japanese have developed special,
[SPEAKER_01]: the way they kill fish in order to avoid this happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is known, this is just scientifically, it is what it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think we should be questioning that aspect of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I don't mean to question it at all to be honest.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just it's just interesting that Pennywise, something that humans actively avoid is something that Pennywise seeks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which totally it's.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's surprising at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know that it.
[SPEAKER_00]: has necessarily a lot to do with the chemistry is what I'm saying, I guess.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's something we can we take on a face value.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it doesn't matter is the important thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like whatever it is Pennywise Pennywise likes the the result that he gets or she gets after the chase right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So whether that would be true to a human hunting or not is is irrelevant really.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't really know how we see moms, pills, to stop from feeling scared.
[SPEAKER_01]: Mother's little helpers, which is what they literally would call diasopem, which most people know is valium.
[SPEAKER_01]: Back in this time, to the point that the Rolling Stones made a song called Mother's Little Helper.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I wonder if that takes away the flavor because you don't have the stress response when you're on valium the same way?
[SPEAKER_00]: maybe we'll find out.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, right, because the kids have the stuff now, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, except Lily drops at least some of it in the toilet.
[SPEAKER_00]: She lost it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe we'll see some of the super chilled out kid that's immune to Pennywise.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is, you know, is it?
[SPEAKER_00]: But see, this is exactly I think what Stephen King wouldn't want us to do is like wonder, well, what if you took a drug that increased your level of susceptibility?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, if you were on a a psychedelic or something that increases your, you know, sensitivity to this kind of stimulation, would that make Pennywise like you more?
[SPEAKER_00]: And probably we're not supposed to
[SPEAKER_00]: one of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know that he loves it, but I think he did, like, he has, I don't think Stephen King is himself a scientist, but I do think he's thought about that in the writing of the book and provided the seeds of that that they're just making slightly more explicit in this show.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I can get beyond that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love Rich.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was, you can see like that he feels a certain, we learned last week.
[SPEAKER_01]: He feels a certain amount of privilege that, you know, he sees the experience in the U.S. despite being Cuban, he sees his experience in the U.S. differently than Will does.
[SPEAKER_01]: And here we have a mouthing off to the police officers at the point.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, Rich, shut up.
[SPEAKER_01]: but he's also the good comic relief later like just his the kids actors responses and his timing and stuff is great when you know Mike's talk or sorry Mike when Will's talking about this whole yeah he's talking us to eat us and he's like that's a horrible theory it's just a theory that's a horrible theory so I enjoyed rich this episode even though he made me cringe with the cops
[SPEAKER_00]: I think this kid is one.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to see this kid like turn into a comic actor like grow up like he's he's pretty good.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not in it as centrally as the others yet, but I really like his presence.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think he's really important to the sort of Richie Tozier aspect of the losers like the kind of jokester.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not quite the same by the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: What we had a last name, it's not Tozier, he doesn't have much to it's a Ricardo Santo or I think was his name, which is definitely like, I don't know if people want to keep on that theory, but I think probably it's unlikely, but yeah, I love this little guy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's Ricardo Santos and, and, and also, um, you know, I wondered for a minute, it was like, oh, well, maybe he dies in March, names her son after him, but now that March is one eye down at the end of this episode, I think that she is probably not Margaret Tosier either, because there was no eye trauma in Richie Tosier's mom.
[SPEAKER_00]: that that's ever mentioned.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, Richie's, we talked about this last time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, if there's a whole lot of back crazy backstory there, the fact that it doesn't come up in the novels or the films is is significant.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, yeah, we see briefly his mom in the film and she does not have any I mean, yeah, she could have had a replacement I or something, but there's no scarring or anything like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I guess I'm laying to rest for now.
[SPEAKER_01]: the rich is richy choirs, even though he seems so much like richy choirs in personality.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure, yeah, but you know, you know how many Owens are in my kids like sports teams and that just names are names, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So rich, we got more of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're having this conversation because of the name also, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think if we accept the name is just a name like
[SPEAKER_00]: that we can think about the personality as being a Kingian trope, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: King has the bully, King has the comedic jokester.
[SPEAKER_00]: King often has the sort of, there's the like token girl in some of these stories, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Which is not true in this, obviously.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's just sort of an archetype
[SPEAKER_01]: Alright, let's switch gears and talk about the hand lens.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you want to set that up?
[SPEAKER_00]: The haunted hand lens.
[SPEAKER_00]: Will's mother Charlotte finds the graveyard photos in Will's room, and he confesses to her that they feel there is something after them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Charlotte, an easy about the recent murder of other children, pressures Leroy to take Will on a boy's bonding day that weekend.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when they go fishing, Pennywise attacks, praying on Will's worst fears of his dad burning to death in battle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Winley Roy sees the marks on his son's wrist, where the entity grabbed him, his own questions grow, especially after a second Pennywise sighting at home.
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, he's growing frustrated with his wife, who he feels is putting the family in danger with her activism.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now stepping in to help Hank Grogan's defense, unable to sit back and let a black man take the blame for a crime everybody knows he didn't commit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Alright, so where do you want to start with this section?
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's start with Will talking to his mom.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's interesting that we don't see him say the word ghosts or monster or clown.
[SPEAKER_00]: We, they talk about the photo and he sort of expresses the sort of general distress.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's something after us, but does he say more?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like how similar when he's talking to his dad later?
[SPEAKER_00]: He's opening up to his parents in kind of a surprising and refreshing way and a good for him that they're kind of believing them, they're not dismissing him, but is he really explaining it or is he keeping the deliberately keeping the kind of cards close to his vests so they don't think he's, you know, hallucinating or whatever, what do you think on that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, so part of my one ding against Charlotte so far, she was totally snooping, but that is a the mom thing to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, but I was also, I was like, wow, will is much more open with his parents than the kids in the story normally are, but then indeed he pulled back from
[SPEAKER_01]: the supernatural explanation.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he's afraid to, I think, maybe sound unhinged to his mom, even though I think she's starting to get there herself anyway.
[SPEAKER_01]: At least, yeah, at this point, at least he hasn't had
[SPEAKER_01]: other than the graveyard, he hasn't had at this point in the episode, the big scares himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: So by the end of the episode, he's had more of the big scares himself, but then his dad is the one who witnesses them more.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we see him at first pulling back from the supernatural explanation.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's going to change.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do think it's interesting that so we have the fishing trip
[SPEAKER_01]: the yellow eyes is in the water and pretending to be his dad burned from having gone down a flight in war because that is Will's greatest fear for his father and says instead of you'll float to it's you'll burn to.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought the same thing, so similar.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that's intentional for sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then Lee Roy, we were wondering, because of his lack of fear response, does that mean Pennywise can't mess with his visions?
[SPEAKER_01]: But apparently, that does not mean that, because Lee Roy can see the marks on Will's wrists from where he was grabbed in the water.
[SPEAKER_01]: He can see the red balloons.
[SPEAKER_01]: He sees the red balloon by the lake.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then after Will sees Pennywise or some clown figure outside of his bedroom window, Lee Roy sees the red balloon there as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, he's definitely witnessing this.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do we think?
[SPEAKER_01]: So Lee Roy in the whole lack of fear response.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've talked about that a lot.
[SPEAKER_01]: But is he feeling anger instead of fear?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think the question can also be asked just like how much of this is deliberate is does Pennywise want will to see those balloons or not will does Pennywise want Leroy to see those balloons or is he inadvertently like how much do we know how much Pennywise knows of this military organization like there's a psychic
[SPEAKER_00]: guy with the shining, investigating him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there, Pennywise seems to know that, right, interacted with Dick.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like, does he know that this is connected to the Lee Roy?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I don't know to what extent what the real motives for the military group is.
[SPEAKER_00]: We, we, we know what they're, they seem to be after which is a weapon or whatever, but, you know, this dagger or whatever it is, or Pennywise himself is a weapon.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the, the degree that it knows,
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, my gosh, there's actually a real threat here, or is that still not clear, or is it does it know something we don't, which is like, this isn't a real threat.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, these adulterers just furthering my, my sort of aims, and how Leroy fits in with that isn't interesting aspect, right, because the lack of amygdala making him not feel fear doesn't necessarily have anything to do with.
[SPEAKER_00]: whether the sort of spell of indifference that Pennywise can cast upon the adults would affect Leroy, but it doesn't seem to be effectively right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So is that anger is that, I mean, I think if we talked to Nicole, like she probably wouldn't let us just say that, no amygdalae equals no fear, because fear is a complex emotion, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's something like he still doesn't want his son to get attacked by something in the water, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Rather he feels actual
[SPEAKER_00]: like fear or not.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's self preservation at least.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It.
[SPEAKER_00]: his meat might not be being salted but that doesn't mean he's not still like oh my gosh this is crazy so why did he see that balloon is it because of Pennywise or despite Pennywise like his would everybody be interfacing with this little piece of evidence in the same way or is Leroy uniquely capable of seeing the scratches seeing the balloons etc.
[SPEAKER_01]: Another related question that I had is, does Pennywise show up when they're strife at home?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, does Pennywise wait for there to be friction in the family and play upon that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because we have here, things are getting more tense, as I said, between Charlotte and Lea Roy because he's like, stop putting yourself out there and thereby putting the entire family out there with all of your activism.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was a little bit like it did make my blood anger spike a little bit to see Pauli kind of spying on Charlotte in a way, accidentally spying on Charlotte and seeing her go to the police and then clearly running back and reporting to his bestie like, you know what your wife's up to?
[SPEAKER_00]: What was he doing just hanging out?
[SPEAKER_00]: He was like an agree.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's just standing by the building.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he's kind of weird, but.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know, that guy hasn't shown like bad motives to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we don't know anything about Paulie yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: We really don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jerry's still out, I guess.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as of now,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, he's at least telling his, he told the friend.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't go in, he told the right, he didn't go in, tell somebody else that we don't want to know.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it goes back to that question that we've talked about a couple of times, which is bad things happen in dairy, are they because of it, or do they kind of also bring it out?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so does hostility in the home?
[SPEAKER_00]: happen because of Pennywise's presence or is he more available to infiltrate a household when that household has strife?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think either could be true.
[SPEAKER_00]: We see the kids in the novel and in the movie, like it's moments of stress that things might happen, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Panic and things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think yes and would be the answer to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The arguments
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's interesting though, because the arguments between the parents, there's like a nobility to that family's drive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that's an, they're having like a mature disagreement on how to handle their family and how, how visible to be in the society.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like there's nothing shameful about the argument that they're having.
[SPEAKER_00]: This isn't a child abuse situation or like some of the other, or alcoholism, like some of the other family's drive we see in the novel in the films.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so this doesn't really feel like a dispute about how much of an activist you should be in a name, doesn't feel really like Pennywise's in, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not the kind of thing that shoot fuel Pennywise much.
[SPEAKER_00]: Depending on where they settle, though, where they end up.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I don't know, maybe it could be fueling Lee Roy kind of ignoring in a typical to every way the issues, you know, that so they have this exchange between Charlotte and Lee Roy where he says to her, don't be looking for trouble.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she says, there's going to be trouble and anywhere we go of referring to the fact that they are black.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the country you swore your life to defend.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just making it worth defending, which, again, in case it's not clear, I'm always on Charlotte's side, except when she's snooping in her son's room.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then later, he's blaming her for things like, see what you did, someone's watching the house.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the someone watching the house was obviously Pennywise.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Charlotte did not cause that to happen, but Levery's ready to blame her.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think Charlotte in 2025, eyes is the person we're supposed to be more sympathetic.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's also tough for me to, like, we haven't seen Lee Roy contribute to the systems of oppression, but I can't criticize the man for saying I'm going to try to
[SPEAKER_00]: be with the system and try to see what good I can do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we haven't seen him abuse and put down his his friends in the black community like so I don't I don't want to say 100% that Leroy's wrong and she's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's an approach to him being a soldier that maybe could still be supportive of her mission sort of her her activist principles that maybe he's not being supportive of that uh
[SPEAKER_00]: would be better, but it's hard for me to totally say I'm on her side.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like I want to believe that her path is the righteous path, but I also know that.
[SPEAKER_00]: a lot of people died or had their lives ruined by taking that activist path and I don't begrudge somebody in the 1960s for saying, you know what, I'm just going to level up my rank in the military and my family doesn't maybe eventually won't get targeted by the racist, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that's that maybe he's naive, maybe he's not, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: Or maybe it's targeted more, maybe maybe he's wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe he's not supporting the long arc of history Bending towards justice, but it's hard.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this guy was what born in the, born in the 20s or something like that, or no, the 30s probably, it's hard for me to say that he's wrong in that environment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but, you know, they can both be right sort of, I want her to be right, though, right, to the same, to the same, to fast forward a little bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I want to think Hank Grogan, dude, really, it's worse for them to think you slept with a white married woman than to kill kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to think that's insane, but I also know that maybe it's not insane, that for him it might actually be worse to have slept with a married white woman in that era, in that culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want that to be true, but it's hard for me to say that's not logical on some
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you familiar with the story of Emmett Tell?
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was seven years before this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, it was Emmett Till was a, for anyone who doesn't know he was a black kid from Chicago who went to visit, I think it was a Mississippi.
[SPEAKER_01]: He went to visit family or something.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he just was, I was speaking to a white woman in the street.
[SPEAKER_00]: Talk to the wrong person.
[SPEAKER_01]: right and and he was accused of hitting on her basically you know this is like a teenager and he was he was killed very horribly very heart yeah i would say
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a movie called Till, which is from his mother's perspective.
[SPEAKER_01]: They got some attention a few years ago, but I honestly think the depiction that will never ever leave my head of this comes from Lovecraft Country, the horror show that happened a few years ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you like this show, absolutely watch Lovecraft Country.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was wild.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's wild.
[SPEAKER_00]: That shows wild.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, though, Emmett Till,
[SPEAKER_00]: did nothing and was murdered for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: This guy is going to be killed for forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he's going to be probably killed in Shushing for murdering kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like the option is not should I face accusations about sleeping with a white woman and ruin her life and probably get killed by a mob.
[SPEAKER_00]: versus should I just be a guy who works at the theater?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, he's facing possibly execution, but certainly shoshank and probably getting shipped in shoshank by somebody or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to believe that obviously the child murder is worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: But
[SPEAKER_00]: because this isn't Mississippi.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is Maine, but I can't tell you it is worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's a certainty he has that it would be just as bad and worse for the woman.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like he obviously has some kind of affection for the woman.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do we think?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is this a random person or is this going to turn out to be important who the one that I mean, I think for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: My mind immediately jumped to like, is this is this power's wife or something like that or somebody prominent.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that would be a wife for yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: if we think of like what would lead to I know we said butch powers is a police officer but he's also a drunk near do well child abuse or fallen somewhat far from what seems to be a sort of respectable clint powers so maybe if that is if it comes out that is respectable at all based on what we've seen.
[SPEAKER_01]: in the community?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I think he's.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, his son becomes a police officer too.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so maybe he's seen with the same respectability.
[SPEAKER_01]: People sure were upset when Henry Bauer's killed his father in the movies.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, Clint Bauer is, to me, is the worst of the adults.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think Clint Bower is exactly a good example of dairy being dairy.
[SPEAKER_00]: That probably people think, like I said, I think chiefs are often elected position.
[SPEAKER_00]: This guy might keep people up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Might think he's the best guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Might think he's the bees' knees.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's exactly what sucks so much about dairy.
[SPEAKER_00]: The adults will someone who's an enabler of this evil like and perpetuates it is exactly what they need from the police chief.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we're supposed to see from what we see of his kid and what we're seeing of Clint, that there is a difference in social status there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm just saying, well, okay, if it is that his mom had a, or like, Clint's wife had an affair with a black man who then is lynched later in the season for that, or something like that, that could explain the sort of
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of thing that could drive somebody to be in a user later and a drunk and things like that for his, you know, 10-year-old son right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just, I'm spinning out on what would be, like, could there be that would be a possible way in which the actual woman in this equation matters.
[SPEAKER_00]: As opposed to because they could just say,
[SPEAKER_00]: never tell us who it is and it does because it doesn't have to matter we have enough sort of to cause this story moment in this character moment for Hank without it actually being somebody that matters oh it's ingrid it's like like some character the the town mayor's wife or somebody that somehow is a prominent it they have a choice it either matters or it doesn't
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the thing I think is that he's worth thinking of him as making a darkly rational decision, which is to say, I would rather be convicted of child murder than found out to be having my fair with this woman.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he's still Emmett Till did not make a choice to, like, he was, he talked to some lady in town and got killed for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: did the, I'm sorry to say, but irrational behavior of sleeping with a married white woman in Maine in 1960s.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that doesn't, that doesn't mean it's not understandable.
[SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't mean there isn't emotions that made it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe they're in love and it's the best thing he ever did.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, but we think of him as being almost
[SPEAKER_00]: self-preservationally rational.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I would rather go to Shawshank than face what's going to happen if they catch us.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yet that same man, some number of months earlier, or whatever, or days earlier, made the
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not a self-destructive decision to do this, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's interesting, because he's not saying it didn't happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: He actually had an affair with this woman and he lost his self-preservation in making that decision.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sorry to say, but in the 1960s, in this universe and dairy, as he understands dairy clearly, that is unfortunately a risky choice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely not going to speak out against what he's about him having the affair.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it is interesting that, you know, I assumed when Clint Bauer's was saying, like, oh, we have a witness who saw you outside.
[SPEAKER_01]: I assume that that was just someone making stuff up, but it turns out, yeah, he really was out of the house during the murders and someone really did see him.
[SPEAKER_01]: So.
[SPEAKER_01]: Charlotte, though, I am a bit worried about how she's handling her, first, the first time she came, was a masterclass to see how she held her composure with this police officer.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second time she came back, she came spit and fire, and I'm going to have, you know, the president after you and named drop saw these big politicians who would support her cause and, you know, it's kind of elbows her way into being able to talk to Hank.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm worried about that, about how Clint is going to respond to being treated that way, even though it is more satisfying to see that rather than her being like yes, sir.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then the other thing was when she's talking to Hank, she's like, I promise I'm gonna get you out of here.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, oh God, now I know he's not getting out Charlotte.
[SPEAKER_01]: Stop making promises to this man.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my God.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am worried about Hank and I'm worried about Charlotte too.
[SPEAKER_00]: Totally.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think...
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, having lived my whole life in, quote, northern states, which is to say California being a part of the north even though it's quite far south and and New England.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've knowing people that are from the south and stuff like that, including black folks who are from the south, like a difference is,
[SPEAKER_00]: community right so like racial oppression and things like that have been worse traditionally throughout American history in the southern United States with obvious exceptions but there's often this case where there's at least a critical mass in this black community and things like that and so I say all that because she is going in guns blazing to the chiefs office that second time but there isn't an infrastructure of activists here right she maybe has the support of some of the
[SPEAKER_00]: people she's met, but there might have been in Shreeveport, Louisiana, a bit more of a movement that she could do what she's doing in a context.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas you could, a bad thing could happen to her and nobody would be there to kind of, I mean, to say nothing of the supernatural forces that keep people silent and dairy, that there isn't anybody there to go tell one of the black newspapers in Chicago or whatever other towns that would share this information like Emmett Till, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like so,
[SPEAKER_00]: it is she is behaving in a way that is clearly referential to this larger movement.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's talking about JFK and MLK and all these sort of figures that would in her head have her back, but yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: is that infrastructure or those networks set up in this part of Maine, that could at least protect her or at least be her backup in the sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's scary situation just putting herself in.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is another reason why I'm glad they've been setting up a friendship between her and Rose, because Rose might be coming from somewhat different place, but she is a local activist who is used to
[SPEAKER_01]: dealing with in working within these frameworks of like, oh, we're from the North.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not racist, but yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I, I can't wait to see Charlotte and Rose team up to take on the system.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's what I'm hoping we're going to also Charlotte, you can see, you know, I was so surprised by how.
[SPEAKER_01]: she the way that she was like really like I said coming in guns blazing the second time she went to the police office because you can see at home how tactical she is like with her own husband she
[SPEAKER_01]: She seems like she's going to tell him about what's going on, about will, you know, sneaking out at night, going to the graveyard, things like that that would obviously really upset Lee Roy.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then she diffuses a situation by telling Lee Roy about Will has a crush on a girl, instead.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, Lee Roy's very,
[SPEAKER_01]: relieved to find out that it's a girl of color, so that his son wouldn't be subject to the fears that Hank is experiencing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then, of course, it's who's daughter is, is she, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Comes out later, and that's not right, right.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not the woman that the girl that he would want is his, for the think of his account, there doesn't seem to be many options, so
[SPEAKER_00]: right, but I don't think that's what he had in mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: No girl he likes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it happens to be the person that is being investigated for a child murder right now, not not what Leeroy had in mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: Although I will say his eventual son Mike's mother's name is Jessica, so.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is there a Jessica?
[SPEAKER_00]: Have we seen Jessica yet in this show?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think so.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, we haven't.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, no.
[SPEAKER_01]: So maybe she moves to town later.
[SPEAKER_01]: Alright, let's keep with the, with the Lee Roy influence side of the story, I'll set up the black spot.
[SPEAKER_01]: General Shaw has granted Dick Halerin and his friends permission to lean up an unused building nearby for their own use, as they clean, Lee Roy stops by to ask Dick about the mission involving the mysterious entity.
[SPEAKER_01]: He asks Dick what he knows and Dick has a vision of his grandmother warning him to be careful.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, we talked a bit about that from the shining and talk to sleep last week.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we don't need to go into that more, but just to remind people, you know, that's his grandmother is the one who taught him about the shining and he did have an abusive grandfather, but we haven't seen anything about him yet in the show yet, have we?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, and I think we're supposed to probably conjecture that his grandmother is not alive anymore at this point.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's unclear whether we're supposed to think that's literally her ghost, which is very much possible with Dick Haloran, or if it's just a vision.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's fine either way.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't need to have the exact clarification there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I wanted to call that just we have two needle drops with this plot arc or two in the season, you know, the I don't I don't write down the songs, but we have Ray Charles and Bo didly right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's sort of we get a fix and up the place montage to the boat to believe, which is which was a fun sort of throwback kind of use of music.
[SPEAKER_01]: yeah yeah this is i call the these the good vibes montages of the episode you know this is where the happy spots were actually them setting up we would call it the black spot we know that's what it's called it's just let's just refer to it by its name and allow people who don't know that to do the leo pointing meme when they eventually say it in the show uh but i did see
[SPEAKER_01]: critique online where people are like, oh, it's great that, you know, the Dick and his friends have a place to hang out and other people who are like that's infuriating that they need a separate place so that the races don't, uh, yeah, rain on their parade whenever they go off their drink.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's infuriating, but it's easy for us to say, you know, like it sucks that they need that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I said, a couple episodes ago, this made it the safe spaces.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: To what extent is this going to be in conversation with sinners, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That starts with the same kind of premise.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need a spot.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, folks want to make money and that spot that might not be true here.
[SPEAKER_00]: But like,
[SPEAKER_00]: can we have this spot that's really just for us where we can unlined and it's sad that that's necessary but um and this isn't even nearly as overtly hostile as that setting right in terms of the south right obviously this is dairy it's way more hostile than any real world place usually is but um they still they just they're not comfortable in the the mainstream bar or whatever they were they were in and yeah it's it sucks but quite understandable
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, before we get into take a break and get into the climax of the episode, I just want to talk for a minute about Lee Roy in this scene with Dick, because there's a couple things going on with him.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have questions about what's going on inside Lee Roy's head, and Dick's head for that matter, since he's the one with the shining, but we see Lee Roy, he comes to kind of, it seems like he's trying to get information from Dick which makes sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it seems almost like he's eager to do the mission at first and Dix liked calm down, you know, and actually really want to get deeper into this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm wondering where we think if we think he's changed his mind by the end of that, but there's also a moment that stood out to me where Levo kind of roughly grabs Dix arm, which was kind of like, whoa, that was, that was a flash of anger there, but then
[SPEAKER_01]: Lee wrote, oh, sorry, Dick, his face in response made me wonder if he had a vision when Lee wrote grabbed him.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you think about Lee Roy's behavior in this part of the episode?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what to think yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think probably we're going towards him having a sort of change of heart in terms of his enthusiasm for what's happening here.
[SPEAKER_00]: But his specific interactions with Dick, I don't know, it's interesting because they're playing a little fast and loose with how often we see.
[SPEAKER_00]: what Dixies, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It did seem to imply that Dix saw something, felt something, he shined there, but they didn't show it to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like the grandmother.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not, doesn't have centrality in the story enough that we see everything he says.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, really no idea there, but there's something, there's something that he feels about Leroy that, you know, whether it's from the whole thing where
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to see inside you because I don't like the idea of no fear it's disturbing or if there's something else, I'm not sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure how much we're supposed to read in there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do think it's, uh, I like the, in the official podcast, they interviewed the actor who plays Dick Haller in this week, and he said in his own mind, he sees this season as, uh, in some ways, a bromance.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm using the word bromance.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that's where he used between Dick, and he calls him low-roy.
[UNKNOWN]: But, haha.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that, you know, it's talking about the adult friendships, I do wonder where that's going to go, because their entire relationship has been both antagonistic, but also in some ways they are allies to each other in ways that other people can't be to them for various reasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: On that note, let's take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to talk about the two major set pieces that close out the episode.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, Mark, you want to set up the best frenemies?
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: Marge clearly misses Lily.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when she asks her to eat lunch together, it's part of a cruel trick to embarrass Lily by making her think a popular boy is interested in her, who then plans to publicly shame her all to impress the patty cakes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Marge has second thoughts about it, and is about to tell Lily the truth when she finds herself in the middle of her first Pennywise scare.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her eyes seem to have turned into tubes, like some infected snails she learned about in science class.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a panic, she runs to the wood shop and tries cutting off one of her eye tubes, naming herself.
[SPEAKER_00]: When Lily holds her down to stop her and take the weapon from her, the next class walks in, finding a situation where it looks like crazy Lily has attacked her former friend.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's whole set up and payoff for was really, it was one where this show keeps doing things where I think it's going to zig and then it zags instead, and this was a key example about like, oh my gosh, you're worried about Lily poured Lily is going to be humiliated and then it turns out nope, it's not about that at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: flat worms, burrow into land snails.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, they hijack, jack the brain.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of like cortisol.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I just want to point out like, uh, uh, in the last of us.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, ends up creating these eye stalks that attract birds.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we see marges horrified by this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is what's bothering her.
[SPEAKER_01]: But here's my question.
[SPEAKER_01]: Your eyes grow into stalks is your first instinct to cut them off.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's actually interesting you mention that because I pause the episode in the middle of this and Just started researching this this, but research meaning like Wikipedia and stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, Luko Claridium paradoxome.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think my instinct would be to cut them off.
[SPEAKER_00]: But interestingly enough, that actually apparently can work.
[SPEAKER_00]: So,
[SPEAKER_00]: Can I talk about this, this flatworm for a second, so please?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really, it is the, uh, Cordiceps last of us fungus sort of comparison is good, but this is a rare parasite that has multiple sort of levels of parasitism in its life cycle.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the snail is just,
[SPEAKER_00]: an intermediary, uh, post to attract, it grows these long colorful pulsating eye sockets to make the snail look like a caterpillar, which then gets eaten by a bird.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the bird is the actual final destination, but it doesn't seem to do much negative to the bird.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just that the bird is the way that it spreads, right, because the bird, it'll infect the gut.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kloaka, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And it'll poop out eggs, which then spread in the poop gets eaten by the snails, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but.
[SPEAKER_00]: Interestingly enough, to the whole cutting it off, it said I read that, sometimes a bird will because the pulsating, throughing gross, I stalk tubes, or where their parasite is.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's it called?
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's a term for the, I can't remember, the something sack or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: It will sometimes get bit-knoth and then the snail survives.
[SPEAKER_00]: So actually, I don't think it's common, but the snail, that snail would be without an eye or whatever, but that is the entirety, essentially, of that parasite.
[SPEAKER_01]: So maybe they didn't share that part, but maybe the video where they're learning about these, the snail infection, maybe they did say that, and that's why March was driven to take that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe, but oh.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is, so I have to say this, it looks really stupid when it starts growing out of her eyes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do not like the way it looks, the CG of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, the human terror of this moment is excellent, like the, again, the moment where she's looking in the mirror and it grows is really dumb, but her running around and trying to rip it, it cut it off and putting her head under the, uh, whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: saw is it, I, you feel it this really and you mentioned earlier like I terror like I'm the generation that was way too young when fire in the sky was on and I watched that and that scene in that movie as a guy who was already afraid of UFO stuff like to see I don't know fire in the sky.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my god, fire in skies of UFO movie and it came out probably in the early 90s and there's a scene with an alien abduction and just this guy just gets there's just he's strapped to the chair by the aliens and a needle goes right through his eyeball and
[SPEAKER_00]: that ever since then, man, just the idea, like, I'm at an optometrist, like, blinking, blinking.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't you can't touch my eye?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I have like an eye thing now.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, so the idea of this and cutting off, oh, man, it got me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just wish they hadn't shown us it grow, because it just, it just didn't look right to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: It looked kind of goofy, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But she did a great job.
[SPEAKER_00]: The actress who played
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, considering she was running around with some apparatus trapped to her head, did a really good job looking just absolutely terrified.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you ever watch Station 11?
[SPEAKER_00]: Haven't.
[SPEAKER_01]: OK, yeah, she's just an incredible job there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, yeah, I mean, I didn't have the problems you did with with the CGI with the I stocks growing, but yeah, overall I just thought that this was a really effective square is really effective scare.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was um, really just well constructed how the misdirective like where we're worried about Lily and then it's like, oh my god, no March.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we, at least saw that moment before it started to happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's interesting, the timing of when it's happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: It started to happen the moment where Marge was going to be brave and step forward and say, Lily actually, we're playing a trick on you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: But regardless, it ends up saving Lily from the trick.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then it's worse because now Lily looks like she was, I mean, assuming that Marge is going to be like,
[SPEAKER_01]: but it doesn't look good.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, but what is she gonna say she was doing?
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Marge is showing herself to be not a good friend, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what.
[SPEAKER_01]: She doesn't want to go to the Sanatorium.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't know that.
[SPEAKER_00]: That means she's going to point at Lily and say she tried to kill me with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, God, what do you call that thing?
[SPEAKER_01]: The she's all or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's all exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I don't know that she's going to finger the blame in that way, but he's she going to say I actually had this whole hallucination in her head.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe she thinks that it's a hallucination at that point with my eyes or I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, um, we'll see what happens.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hopefully she's finally done with the patty
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, because God, that was, I don't know, like I was a little surprised by how far she was almost going to take that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's one thing to ditch your friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we can all.
[SPEAKER_00]: empathize with a little bit of like social ladder envy when you're in adolescence like oh I found me the cool kids liked me or whatever except for those of you in the listener that were the cool kids if so screw you the rest of us were envious they were like I don't know even though even the cool kids that's the whole terrible thing about middle school is that they were all secretly self-conscious and self-loving also right so
[SPEAKER_00]: we can empathize with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I wasn't like wishing I was a cool kid and also setting up my friends to be totally pumped by the cool kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that is she did cross a line there that it's interesting to see like is she going to now that she's had this experience does she reconnect with Lily and her
[SPEAKER_00]: new and meet her new friends and does she deserve to be kind of welcomed into the fold as someone on the Pennywise killing squad.
[SPEAKER_01]: She's lost an eye.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'm willing to give her a big grace now.
[SPEAKER_01]: She was so cute.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's paid.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's paid for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: But
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not we're not we're not at King in King novels.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have bullies.
[SPEAKER_00]: That will kill a kid.
[SPEAKER_00]: So whether it's Hank Bowers in it or
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, either southernlands character in stand by me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't remember his name, but in the body, like you'll get, you'll have a bully that will take it to extremes that I think fully never saw a bully go to as a child.
[SPEAKER_00]: So maybe with a little lack of loyalty is kind of nothing in the Stephen King universe and Marge is pretty pretty forgivable relative to some of the potential that we could have with someone living in dairy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just want to point out in this section that we also did see an ad for the duck and cover turtle that we've seen before because never forget this is prime-cold wartime, but this does lead us into turtle talk.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the final part of the episode, the glue of the western wood.
[SPEAKER_01]: While Rose gently pries into the life of military wife Charlotte for insights into what the military once in the western woods, General Shaw tells his soldiers to allow Daniel and his friends who have been spying on the base in, so that he has an excuse to arrest them.
[SPEAKER_01]: With Daniel and custody, he sends Dick Halerin in to pry into his mind to find out where they can find what they're looking for, while Shaw and Li Roy watch from the other side of the glass.
[SPEAKER_01]: Roughly entering Daniel's mind, Dick witnesses a young tenial talking to his ant rose who asks him to repeat the tale of the glue the monster in the western wood.
[SPEAKER_01]: Young tenial tells of a meteorite that fell to earth millions of years ago corrupting the area.
[SPEAKER_01]: The native people who settled there learned how to avoid the entity, leaving it to the western wood, where it seemed to be stuck.
[SPEAKER_01]: Learning it feared the pieces of the rocky cage in which it had landed, they shaped a shard of the space stone into a ritual dagger.
[SPEAKER_01]: However, as the white settlers came, they did not heed the locals' warnings about the western wood, and Pennywise fed on them, growing in strength, its territory stretching further than ever before.
[SPEAKER_01]: A single dagger was no longer enough to hold it at bay.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Shikopuah warrior Cesskui says that it is time to leave their land, but her daughter and Nakani does not want to go.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nakani leads a group of her friends into the western wood, the glues territory to find the cave holding the remaining spacestone that was once the glues cage.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nakani and her friends plan to take more of this stone and create more weapons against the glue.
[SPEAKER_01]: When Cessquee learns what her daughter has done, she gathers a group of warriors to find them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most are killed, but Nakani survives.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the stone is recovered, she leads her tribe and burying 13 shards around the western wood to cage the glue.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are the beacons the U.S. military is now seeking.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dick questions Daniel interrupting the vision and Daniel tells him that he will find the tunnels to the shards under the old well.
[SPEAKER_01]: So first of all, Dick's super creepy at the end, like I almost thought it was a penny-wise incarnation, the way he slow claps and then does that wicked smile.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sorry, where when I think of Daniel's vision.
[SPEAKER_00]: He, like, yeah, he is so sinister.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why is he so sinister with that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like he has to know, especially after seeing the vision.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, look, he's got a job.
[SPEAKER_00]: I get it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We could argue whether Dick should be doing this job and should be like invading this guy's mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: But does that not give you also empathy for this guy?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, it was weird to see Dick behave kind of almost maliciously toward him.
[SPEAKER_01]: like this guy he's had a grudge for for the whole story like we've had you ever even met this this young guy yeah because he was you at first he was like I'm sorry this is going to hurt because tenio really fights him about you know getting into his head impressively i have to say like i don't know how normal that is but he fought him off it seemed quite well yeah you have to wonder how many of these characters do you have a bit of the shining themselves
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is something that could tell us, I think, and he's not telling anybody yet, at least.
[SPEAKER_01]: I also think it's interesting how they show the tapping literally tapping into his third eye, like he's tapping his fingers against the center of his forehead, and then he does this really notable thing where he kind of covers his whole face with his hand, so that his fourth finger can be right in the third eye.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is just interesting because it's, we don't see such a theatrical portrayal of the shining really ever.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's just, is this, are we supposed to take it to understand, this is what it takes when somebody is really resisting effectively.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it seems like he can kind of just in passing read people's thoughts normally.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but that's not enough here, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: is does this always take such a kind of effort or is it just because Daniel is, you know, sort of uniquely capable, it seems of blocking that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it didn't, is it the same in the book that the entity came to Earth millions of years ago?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think so.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's all right.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not moving.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, I thought it was like centuries, but anyway, yeah, it's been a long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's nobody.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, they don't do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: The tribe doesn't know either, because I haven't been there millions of years.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just sort of like assumed maybe to be now you could maybe radio carbon date that meteorite or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's all long time before any living memory or even
[SPEAKER_01]: of the tribe that was living there one wondering like did did the entity feed on dinosaurs are we supposed to read something into having some influence in their demise.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Did dairy move as the plates shifted in Pangea split.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: That that crosses into.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know that we're supposed to wonder.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I mean, we see it prefers to eat children because of the salting of the fear meat.
[SPEAKER_00]: But
[SPEAKER_00]: Presumably a lot of those soldiers and colonists that was eating were adults, most of them, probably.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's diet can change, so does it?
[SPEAKER_01]: It ate before humans were around, so.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, it must have eaten some, but maybe not also.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also possible that it was essentially hibernating until humans.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't really know.
[SPEAKER_00]: this is some it is some kind of an eldritch god from the totash darkness as it's called in in the dark tower from outside of the universe basically the space between worlds and it is possible
[SPEAKER_00]: is uniquely like predisposed to eating humans or sentient beings and they maybe just didn't need to eat or didn't choose to eat animals or maybe it was eating.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like a calorie thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think it's like, oh, I have to eat that bear now because I have an eaten and I feel like it.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you told me that it didn't need until humans arrived, that's believable, because we don't know really the rules around this thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it doesn't, it's not operating on the same digestion and calorie consumption and biological rules that the rest of us are operating under.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, so since you brought up the Tota Ash Darkness and we get the mention of the children of Meturin is what Rose calls the group that she intangular part of.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you want to talk to us about Meturin, the turtle?
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's actually interesting because
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a couple lore questions and feedback that I kind of maybe I don't want to ruin.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wonder if we should jump to a couple of those that are related to this and then talk because I don't want to then respond to Danny and say, oh yeah, we already talked about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So Danny, do you want to read what Danny says?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I guess there's a few too, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So...
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe let's read the, can we read the, the, it history once kind of all as a mass and then respond to them?
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe?
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, um, one, there was a general question.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not sure who first brought it up, but just what is the gender of it?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it, it's, it's been mentioned that in the, in the movies that it may be as a female spider laying eggs or whatever.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, he because of Pennywise thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's one question.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, the other is is Aaron asked does dairy lie within the Western wood or is it just that it has more power to do its thing during the cycles and can reach dairy?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that this is answered by the whole, um, feeding on the stupid white colonists who don't listen to, you know, and it gets stronger.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that Rose answered that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But to clarify that though, does it seem that, so they create these pillars that are the outer boundary?
[SPEAKER_00]: Are we to understand that dairy, modern dairy falls within the inside of those pillars?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, no, because there are still woods in modern dairy.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that it's just escaped.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's boundaries like so we saw they bury the meteorite pieces in at least a one is inside of a turtle shell and then sealed them with smoke snacks.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, it does beg the question of why did they dig up a car?
[SPEAKER_01]: We still like I assume the car was going to be one of the beacons.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, apparently the meteorite shards are the beacons.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe.
[SPEAKER_01]: But an effects of question is the meteorite cage.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is the meteorite cage kind of be used as a weapon simply because they believe it can be in the same way we see in the movie that Yeah, I'm thinking of the 1990 movie where Sling shot slug.
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it same for any turns?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the asthma inhaler.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just because he believes it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, okay, sorry, but, but the, and this is a legitimate question, like I interpreted the beacon, sorry, excuse me, the pillars, with the 13 pillars, with the shards, outs being extended past the woods, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And also they say that if it weren't for those, this thing would have spread and taken over the world, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So,
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know that it has any capacity to go beyond and this is a little bit red-conning the novel like look we don't we don't know what nobody knows anything in the novel in the movie but but like they sort of question whether dairy is it that why is because they don't understand why dairy can't why it can't leave the area and they sort of
[SPEAKER_00]: Sort of arrive at that it has some sort of spiritual connection to dairy that is almost inseparable that they are sort of one in the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this would disrupt that in the sense that no, there's actually a barrier.
[SPEAKER_00]: But so I feel like maybe they're telling us that this town that let's say the Western wood is a mile or a couple miles that they built these pillars further out after it is expanded.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that the settlers just naively constructed the town within the boundary.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is not my reading at all because the town existed, at least in some capacity, in 1908, when it was more restricted to the wood and the wellhouse, the old well, that was not in the Western wood.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is, we know it's home.
[SPEAKER_01]: So... One need of a street.
[SPEAKER_00]: But but we don't know that that so this happened with the shards and all that happened way this isn't in 1908, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, not about 300 years or 200 years, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So how do we know that the tone of dairy wasn't built within that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like there's nothing to say that the well, well, house is not there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think that what we're going to see, we know, and I can say this, it's in the open and credits, it's referenced in the old movies, the 1908 version of the story, often these stories end with a massacre, and that ends with the old ironworks explosion during an Easter egg hunt.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, so I think what we will see in season three would be 1908 is how, because we see that Rose and Shaw when their kids and their, and Rose is like, this entity is in the western wood.
[SPEAKER_01]: Stay away from the western wood, um, we get out of that western wood.
[SPEAKER_01]: It can't follow us.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think what we'll see in this season three is how it breaches that barrier in 1908.
[SPEAKER_01]: it's out, even.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but why can't it go to San Diego and Tim book too?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like why is it?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it sounds like it's a grown but not like to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I wonder how much of this is going to get clarified.
[SPEAKER_00]: So by the way, on the gender question, they sort of come to understand because
[SPEAKER_00]: Pennywise, or the creature that is it, is spawning potentially has eggs that they destroy in the novel.
[SPEAKER_00]: That they go, oh, it's a female, but I just wonder, like, what does female and male even mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: At that point, this is a sexual reproduction.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think it made it with another it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been here for millions of years, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So it maybe doesn't matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's genderless.
[SPEAKER_00]: Pennywise adopts a male form, but Mrs. Curse is a female form, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are two more pieces of feedback that definitely lead us to want to talk I think about the turtle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, Passen 20 says, yeah, this 27-year cycle I still don't understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: It must be in hibernation state.
[SPEAKER_00]: And by the way, do we know for how long it is active when 25, 27 years comes around?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like does it go underground again once its appetite is full?
[SPEAKER_00]: Josh Lewis says, maybe it's a space cicada.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that one,
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know, but it's a couple years at max of it feeding and they even be a few months.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but then more I don't know if you have anything like as Danny has the real lore question here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you want to comment on that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I would say that it's not it's they've made it clear.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not exactly 27 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about 27 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it could be like 25 or 30.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that honestly, like the real answer is because this is about the gap between a generation of parents and children so that, you know, I can repeat like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the unofficial answer.
[SPEAKER_01]: The lore answer.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: You might have a better idea of that than I do.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting because it's not.
[SPEAKER_00]: 19 which brings me to the next lore.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is Danny.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why 13 pillars?
[SPEAKER_00]: They could have so easily made it 12 to maps the spokes that hold up each end of the beams.
[SPEAKER_00]: What the heck is that Mark says?
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll talk about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if you're going to have a million turtles in every episode, 19 would have also made more sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is complete gibberish for non-dark tower people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, Daniel.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we can call you that.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, so 19 is a number of significance.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you read Stephen King, 19 is everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: 19 is something that matters a lot in the dark tower.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stories in a way that becomes almost meta, where it's like, why does this number matter?
[SPEAKER_00]: They sort of draw attention to the fact that this number matters and the nonsense of it and the meaningless of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is a number with some power in this universe that we don't even really need to explain because it's pretty much unexplainable.
[SPEAKER_00]: If this was 19 pillars, or 12, as we'll talk about in a second, but also if it's cycle was 19 years, that would also be interesting, but to that I would say the yet novel predates.
[SPEAKER_00]: probably five of the Dark Tower, if not six of the Dark Tower Null, so a lot of this stuff was not cooked yet in Stephen King's brain.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if he's obsessed with the number 19 yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: Weird Alphans, 27 is the number in Weird Al songs, but he doesn't start that at the beginning of his,
[SPEAKER_00]: Songs, it comes 27 gets mentioned in later albums.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it may be similar to that with Stephen King and don't at me if I'm wrong on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe the first weird I'll song ever has the number 27 in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: OK, so the beams, what are we talking about here?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is, I sent you a message, at least right after I watched the episode and I said, we finally have to talk about the turtle.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason for this is these pillars.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I do think Danny is on to something by asking why not 12, because if there were 12, this would be very synergistic with the rest of the dark tower universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's not, but 13 is sort of zodiac-ish.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the tele-house sort of zodiac-ish elements, like super zodiac, you know, go ahead, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: For the people who are, because I have read enough of the Dark Tower series to understand a bit, that it becomes a plot point about the beams where they, you know, you talked about it, was it Charlotte?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, talk about it, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: But where you, the beams are pointing you towards something, so they find where the beams start and then this is kind of how they start to locate the
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, I'm going to explain this in a way that doesn't spoil any important
[SPEAKER_00]: plot points in the dark tower or other steaming king novels, but does spoil like some of this stuff I'm about to share, you don't learn until dark tower books six books seven, but it's just cosmology, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm treating that in a lower-hounds podcast as everybody wants to know that nobody's going to be mad if they finally read Song of Susanna books six and they're like, oh, but Mark already told me this bit about matter and, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in the Stephen King universe, mostly as expressed by the Dark Tower, but also there's probably aside from the seven or eight novels that constitute the Dark Tower story.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't matter why it's or eight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are also other novels that like the green mile, for example,
[SPEAKER_00]: Text technically takes place in the same universe, but nothing in there really matters to the larger universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if we look at insomnia or it or we talk about Dr. Sleep.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dr. Sleep, those those novels actually very much Salem's lot his second novel very much
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a multiverse in the Stephen King universe, and there's a sort of central hub world essentially called mid world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we call it mid world, but mid world is also a section of the mid world world, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: They have sort of different regions, but they kind of call the whole theme mid world.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the middle of mid world or on the in the world of mid world is something called the Dark Tower.
[SPEAKER_01]: which by the way, middle-earth much, but anyway, so I go ahead.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, but it's interesting because part of the...
[SPEAKER_00]: part of what Stephen King is doing in the dark tower specifically, the story is it's remixing, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm about to talk about the even the name mature and the name of the turtle is a literary reference and we'll get to that in a second.
[SPEAKER_00]: But like everything roll into singing, hey Jude, roll into Shane, the broken protagonist who's this like grizzled sort of gunslinger they call him,
[SPEAKER_00]: He's like humming, hey Jude, and stuff like there's weird references to our world, especially the 20th century, because the dark tower world, mid world, has portals to other universes and other worlds.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's constant bleed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like the one of the mythical figure, like the first
[SPEAKER_00]: the most prominent of these so-called gunslingers is a guy named Arthur Eld and he's basically the king Arthur story except he's a god-a-revolver instead of a sword right and so there's this idea that like okay yeah Stephen King is copying off of Lord of the Rings but the Lord of the Rings
[SPEAKER_00]: probably is referred to in right that there's there's Harry Potter references in the that like villainous monstrous characters that look like footage players in one of the dark tower books because it's very much like
[SPEAKER_00]: our stories infect in ways that basically it gets so meta in a way I can't spoil that in the sixth book starting the sixth book it gets so meta that some people are turned off by it majorly and whereas I'm like oh my god I'm all in I can't believe he did this congratulations Steven you did it um and a lot of this like just to talk life story he almost died
[SPEAKER_00]: So anybody who's ever been to to main there's these I have and I've gone for runs on these streets and there's these long roads in the middle of the woods between communities and a car will drive by and you're like oh my god, how did I not just get hit by that car and sure enough Steven King was hit while he was on a walk and almost died.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is in the early 2000s and almost almost died.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I think he might have been in a coma for a brief period.
[SPEAKER_00]: He then woke up basically and said I have to finish the dark tower.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he wrote three books within the span of a few years after really the dark tower novels were like five and ten years apart prior to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at that moment, he also decided to make the most meta decisions possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: So these ideas that like, oh, it's references to the Lord of the Rings, those are not criticisms that is, so that is a deliberate baked-in thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when you're not a bug, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So feature not a bug.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, that doesn't mean it's not, it might not be for everybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes people might find it too much, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, the dark tower is this at the center of mid-world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the Dark Tower is essentially the lynchpin of existence.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the connecting tissue of all of creation.
[SPEAKER_00]: You could possibly in the same way that we wonder if it is dairy.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dark Tower might be gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gone is gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: G-A-N-G-N is essentially the creator
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the unnamed kind of not directly acting on us.
[SPEAKER_00]: God, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Arrow or the light in the wheel of time, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So we always got to bring up the wheel of time at least once, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The creator.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the way, the wheel of time talks about the creator with the capital C. It's the same way Native Americans talk about God is the creator with capital C. Interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the beams.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where it gets to be like confusing, like, is this metaphorical or physical held up by beams?
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you imagine the world, sort of also the universe, but one of the universes has a tower at the center.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this tower exists sort of on other planes of existence, too.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, the dark tower is represented in our world, in New York City by a single rose in a building, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And it doesn't matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not dark tower, but it is the representation of that same force on earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you imagine that being the center of the world, and then these spokes going out and they're called the beams and those beams hold up.
[SPEAKER_00]: the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: They hold up creation, like Atlas holding the earth or being on the back of a turtle.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the weird thing here's what where it gets really weird is because it's not weird so far.
[SPEAKER_00]: These might be just spiritual threads, but they might also be actually physical because in the backstory of the dark tower, which you don't ever learn much about it, it's just these sort of ancient
[SPEAKER_00]: And we, it's possible it's our world in the future or something like that like a super high tech cyborg organism kind of super computers AI civilization that falls.
[SPEAKER_00]: But before they fall, they realize that the beams are weakening.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they reinforce the beams with actual mechanical structure also.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, this is like, you don't learn this until late in the series, but none of this matters really to the series.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we have these beams that are supporting not just mid-world, but kind of the connective tissue between the multiverse on the sort of strength of these, like, raffed or sort of two by fours in a building.
[SPEAKER_00]: How have I gone too far, Alicia?
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you with me?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, no, no, keep going.
[SPEAKER_01]: Keep going.
[SPEAKER_00]: Should I keep going?
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, everybody listeners, if you need a pause, take a breather, come back.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, till we take 10-minute breaks with my, my long classes.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, okay, we have each of these beams on the end, and this is where this relates to what Danny was saying, has a guardian at its end, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: And these are animal sort of totemic beams, and the question is open,
[SPEAKER_00]: like what exactly are the is the form of these beings?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there is a turtle that is sort of a turtle in some way, but also kind of a demigod or a god.
[SPEAKER_00]: But also we learn that the great old ones, the great old ones are the people who built all the machines back thousands of thousands of years ago in the back store in the dark tower who reinforced the beams with mechanical and they had like god-like control of technology.
[SPEAKER_00]: but also like so like when you meet a demon in the dark tower it could be a monster but it could also be a machine that's gone crazy right and you never kind of know you have to read a passage twice to realize well that thing had an antenna on it that wasn't just a a ghost or whatever that was a a robot that's gone insane that they just shot
[SPEAKER_01]: So, um, remind me because, okay, so this is very early in the Dark Tower series where they meet this bear shardic and, you know, shardic is, is not good shape and they end up taking shardic out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Minor spoiler for the beginning of this series.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, what's shardic remind me, was shardic actually a mechanical, that that version that they didn't into the bear?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, here's the deal.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have at the end of
[SPEAKER_00]: each of these beams.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are six beams, but 12 possible destination points.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the end of each beam is a portal to another world, by the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: We know that the portal on at where Shardic the Bear is leads to New York City in our world.
[SPEAKER_00]: or at least a version of Earth, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So we don't know what's at the other portals, but each of these has a guardian at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we think that these are these metaphysical avatar kind of godlike animal forces, but here's the weird thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: As the old great old ones, the sort of super tech advanced civilization thousands of years ago, recognize the vulnerability of the dark tower and the beams.
[SPEAKER_00]: They thought they were weakening.
[SPEAKER_00]: They reinforced them biomechanically and that includes
[SPEAKER_00]: turning some of the, I think it must have been that some of the guardian creatures were weakening also.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they built a giant mechanical bear.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the the guardian of the bear in the timeline of the dark tower when they encounter it.
[SPEAKER_00]: was not like a god bear anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe inhabited a robotic bear, but it's basically a robot.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's been so many thousands of years that its program has got all messed up and it is mad and it attacks them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just this giant mechanical but possibly biomechanical bear.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so its unclear is this the original bear with cybernetic enhancements kind of.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't know and they don't roll in is interesting
[SPEAKER_01]: book floor is the main gunslinger.
[SPEAKER_00]: The gunslinger, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: He's the main character, but he has what's called a cotette, which is he has a loser's club of other buddies and they are way more compelling characters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: There it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, sure, that's true, that's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of them is a cute, like, dog-like creature, which you maybe haven't met yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I have.
[SPEAKER_01]: That happens.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think in, like, book three or four, anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: But book four is a massive backstory of Roland as a young man.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is the first time Roland has any, like, to me, like, you start to actually, like, feel for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because,
[SPEAKER_00]: earlier it's like they fight this bear and he kind of is almost uninterested by the implications of this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why was this thing a machine?
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas the other people he's with are like what is going on here, Roland takes so much of this just forgiven.
[SPEAKER_00]: But anyways, where am I going with this?
[SPEAKER_00]: So there are guardians.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are 12 guardians, not 13 but 12.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we go clockwise, these are at the ends of the earth in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: We go elephant, rat, bat, eagle, dog, turtle, wolf, fish, hair, lion, horse, and bear.
[SPEAKER_00]: And every beam has its opposite.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the bear and the turtle exist on the same beam.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the way they actually kind of use it to tell direction in mid-world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like if you're moving towards or away from the tower, you would say, for example,
[SPEAKER_00]: I am on the path, or I am on the beam of the bear on the path of the turtle.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what that would mean, as I recall, is that you're on your heading towards the dark tower, pointed at the turtle.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're on the bear.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Walking away from the bear, because the bear and the turtle are kind of on the same beam, but they call it the beam of the turtle if you're on that side.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they say you're on the path of the bear or the path of the turtle.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the bear, the bear and the
[SPEAKER_00]: we don't learn about the eagle.
[SPEAKER_00]: The lion is called aslan, like these all are literary references, literally aslan from Narnia, like they're all references.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, a shardic is from some novel about a bear, I don't remember what it is, but Steven Maturen is a character in the Patrick O'Brien, like the master in command or novels.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, I haven't read those, I haven't seen that show.
[SPEAKER_01]: Shardic is the sequel to Watership Down.
[SPEAKER_00]: Seriously?
[SPEAKER_01]: I know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, and it's a better bear.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, and then you have to wonder, like do these just Stephen King being cute or are these dark tower pop culture eating itself and we're getting Harry Potter references in the actual story as characters, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Both can be true.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Stephen Maturen is a character from the Patrick O'Brien novels who is apparently like names a species of tortoise or something like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the turtle,
[SPEAKER_00]: is one of these guardians that for whatever reason is associated with the earth and protecting the earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's possible if we if we read into that that the turtle is has a portal that leads to the earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the dark tower, they're nowhere near that side of the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mentioned this before, but in a lot of Native American culture, including what they based this fictional culture in the show on, and the movies, is that turtle island is the name for North America, because you know, as humans we live on the back of
[SPEAKER_01]: a turtle and that they're making drawing that connection.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is an addition because Stephen King in his books, he would like make these vague reference to, you know, these ancient burial grounds and Native American concepts but without really having the understanding so I do think that it's a good thing they're going in and being in deepening this connection.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that is one, this addition of the TV show is drawing more connections with this turtle entity.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's also the idea that the earth rests on the back of the turtle, the turtle with a capital T, is a thing that is true also in the Stephen King universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's a confusing thing, because the turtle is really just one of 12 of these guardians, and they're not the god, but they're like kind of like gods, that exist primordially.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think we're supposed to think like, if you think of it,
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is one of our kind of war concepts in humanity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: For some reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the same way that you can think of the Myr for the Tolkien fans as like Sauron and Gandalf are actually equivalent cosmically powerful.
[SPEAKER_00]: It may be that
[SPEAKER_00]: It's postulated that it and the turtle might be of a equivalent strength.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we think of like that level.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're not God, but within a certain confines have almost unlimited power.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it seems to be both true that the turtle is...
[SPEAKER_00]: one of these 12 guardians, which maybe is biomechanical in actual midworld or maybe not, but also might be holding up the earth itself metaphysically.
[SPEAKER_00]: So does that mean that that's just a legend and no one knows that that true?
[SPEAKER_00]: Does that mean that the
[SPEAKER_00]: turtle is uniquely kind of aligned with our world, whereas the eagle might be, you know, some other form of existence that it kind of has chosen.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's, in some way, the, the turtle is not the opposite of it because the opposite of it is the opposite of the turtle is the bear, literally, across the beam depends.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I mean, I opposite.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, but the bear and the turtle are probably on the same side if the bear hadn't gone mad as a machine, but the turtle seems to be diametrically the the the other the antagonist of Pennywise, and but the turtle's agency in actions in the book are really subtle.
[SPEAKER_00]: In prayer and you'd have to remind me because I haven't read it for so long and this stuff's all cut from the the
[SPEAKER_00]: the films.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but just without spoiling too much, there are moments where the kids kind of commune with the turtle and it's just it's almost.
[SPEAKER_00]: you wonder if it's real because the turtle's kind of a bro if I remember the turtles like, hey man, hey, keep it going like you got this buddy like that kind of a you're like, what?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what this cosmic unimaginable force is saying.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe that's like through their filter of how they understand it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But is it even happening right like because the kids have not the kids no none of what I just described all this cosmology of what's really going on is nobody on earth knows any of it right But there's this
[SPEAKER_00]: moment in the second half of the novel, where there are adults, where someone talks someone might evoke the turtle to Pennywise, because the interaction that I described the like hallucinated conversation with the turtle happens as their kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Pennywise says that the turtle is dead, the turtle choked on a galaxy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so,
[SPEAKER_00]: is that true we don't know because the turtle does not come up much in the other the turtle is mentioned as a guardian but the dark tower they don't directly mess with the turtle much did the turtle die.
[SPEAKER_00]: because the part of the plot of the dark terror is like what happens as these beams weaken, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And what are they without spoiling it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like what do we do if forces are maybe deliberately trying to break the beams and what would that do to existence, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Could it be that the turtle died, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So,
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that was a huge info dump, but Danny's question, why isn't this 12 is fascinating because the way they visually represent this is very much like spokes surrounding 13 spokes kind of that's so easy for these to be beams.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it might still be that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, the zodiac has 12.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do they say beams?
[SPEAKER_00]: Definitely pillars, and like the Zodiac is 12, we clearly have a Zodiac reference going on, but there's also versions of the Zodiac on there with 13, and so, you know, is there a 13th guardian in the cosmology?
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know about that's being represented here.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not 19, 19 would have been this other weird, dark tower reference, but they can't, in a story that's dropping so much turtle,
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like they don't know about the beams, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: They know about all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're choosing to refer to this visual, like there's a moment in the dark tower where Roland explains this to the rest of the cutette and he just takes a stick and he draws a circle on the dirt and draws the lines cutting through and says, this is existence and this is the beams and he doesn't explain enough from my taste at that point in the story, but they have to learn it all later.
[SPEAKER_00]: They showed us that, right, and it's not, but it's not exactly that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was 13.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was your questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all out.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do we think in before we move on?
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, well, I think I want to bring in the last piece of feedback here too since we're talking dark tower.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, Reader Reborn says, is it more powerful and dairy?
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, the first part is just general, it lower and then the second part is about the dark tower.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it more powerful and dairy than in the movies?
[SPEAKER_01]: It seems it can do more in the show and he referenced, you know, which you brought up before about the whole car scare in the first episode, how that's a lot of.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hmm.
[SPEAKER_01]: thing to be several people in a car and stuff, like manifest as a full, yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: That just seems beyond the abilities of each.
[SPEAKER_02]: To Vartier.
[SPEAKER_01]: My theory is that it is more powerful and that each cycle of losers has weakened it just a little bit more until it gets to the point where the final losers can finally defeat it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So maybe it's an impossible power in 1908, and then yeah, I think that's an interesting theory.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll be curious to see if we see the entity getting more powerful as we go back in these seasons up this show.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're going to get more seasons, which I think is going to happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think people are liking this show.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's doing well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hopefully, yeah, we do have to kind of just comment on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We also have to, I think that how fast and in question, is it gaining or weakening and strength?
[SPEAKER_00]: In this story about the glue, we see it seems to be increasing and strength the more it feeds, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But does each loser generation chip a piece of that armor?
[SPEAKER_00]: We do have to remember that for all of Pennywise's powers that possibly are godlike, but within a confine in the same way that the turtle might have godlike powers that are limited.
[SPEAKER_00]: for whatever reason, one of its rules is that it does take on the weakness of the form.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, Pennywise is kind of just a corporeal clown, like maybe a gun to the head would kill Pennywise.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know that, maybe, but it is susceptible to some extent by the choices it makes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, maybe,
[SPEAKER_00]: The final, if we could say that the losers in the 2017 timeline kill it for once and for all, which maybe is not true.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't really know.
[SPEAKER_00]: It could be that it was weakened sufficiently by previous generations, or it could be that they just kind of manage to overcome its
[SPEAKER_00]: it's weakness in that particular form.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we do, Pennywise doesn't occur in other novels in a very prominent way, but there is, I won't spoil where and what, but there is a creature that occurs in another Stephen King work that people often wonder, this is the same as it in terms of
[SPEAKER_00]: pretty quickly.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's very powerful.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure is it.
[SPEAKER_01]: From a book.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, it would be a, look, okay, it's a, it's not, there's a creature that is very, very powerful.
[SPEAKER_00]: That occurs in the dark tower series that feeds off of fear in the same way, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And, and we don't know the limits of because this character is not
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dark Tower story is quite episodic in some ways, not monster the weak episodic, but like they're just journeying towards the tower and closer they get the weirder stuff gets.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there is a creature that is referred to and is discussed that people wonder, is this the same kind of creature as Pennywise?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because of this whole feeding off of fear element,
[SPEAKER_00]: But that creature is killable and that creature might be killable because of the form it's choosing to take when it is encountered.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to spoil much, but it, it, it, it's possible that reader reborn is really onto something about the generational damage.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's getting done, but it also just might be, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: If it took the form of something that has a weakness and someone believes in that weakness, it is risking its life in that moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the same way that the turtle rists its life when it choked on a galaxy, apparently.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, apparently.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, so read a report and tying into the dark tower, ends with, I have a titan foil hat question for tower junkies based on the podcast discussion last week.
[SPEAKER_01]: Read the loser's club analogous adults seem quote-unquote good compared to most everyone else does Pennywise create good slingers Create them by by by creating those stress Yeah, what are you making them become more heroic because they're forced to overcome Pennywise Are the kids gunslingers?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's interesting, because like a gun, a gun slinger in the King universe comes to mean a sort of a night of justice, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And you get one of the cringiest, Stephen King is a like.
[SPEAKER_00]: liberal boomer like a like classic like room it there's an entire novel about someone trying to save JFK and there's a character in the dark tower who was alive in that era because there are some characters from earth in the dark tower because it's a multi-virtual who says ah JFK he was the real gunslinger and you're like I really like okay Steven I get it um love you love you some JFK so gunslinger comes to mean kind of
[SPEAKER_00]: a night of goods, so to speak.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the gunslingers in the dark tower, the cut-tet, because in the backstory of the cut of the dark tower, the gunslingers are like a, they have a loss.
[SPEAKER_00]: They used to kind of be like in charge, so to speak, like their civilization, a long time ago kind of ran things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're kind of all gone, except for if you will have them including role in the main character.
[SPEAKER_00]: But new ones are created, and those they're created out of need.
[SPEAKER_00]: And some of them aren't even from mid-world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of them are from Earth, and things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there are people who are taken from...
[SPEAKER_00]: Really, and this isn't spoiling much, or this is early stuff, you know, there's a kid who is in distress.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a, there's a woman who loses her legs due to a horrifying accident that's actually like a racist attack and things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like these people become gunslingers and they become in the dark tower, they become literal gunslingers where they become crazy aces with guns, like to the point that they can
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's almost video gaming in the sense that like, you shoot the monster enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's going to die is a little more dark tower, a little more fantasy battle sequences, more than it is all metaphysical with kids and their love for each other can fight the darkness kind of what we get here.
[SPEAKER_00]: So.
[SPEAKER_00]: figuratively?
[SPEAKER_00]: Pennywise 100% creates gunslingers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Possibly, literally, but these kids would need to, you know, if we'll at the end of the story, find the portal and walks to mid-world, and sees a grizzled cowboy.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's about to become a gunslinger, probably.
[SPEAKER_00]: But,
[SPEAKER_00]: there's like capital g gunslinger and then lower case g if jfk is a gunslinger will then rich and lily are gunslingers but but if you need to go to midworld and actually learn how to shoot maybe not right okay okay that's fair all right we'll see we'll watch that
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, good reader or boring good show jumping back into the end of the episode quickly to wrap this up, so I do find with the, you know, in terms of Pennywise and well, I'm calling the entity Pennywise also yellowized sometimes, but Pennywise technically is the clown shape.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm being more general about it because that's a name people now.
[SPEAKER_01]: But let's say so Pennywise we see always appears as the fears of the people so it's very interesting that it's appearing as to the Native Americans.
[SPEAKER_01]: First, as a giant moose shedding its antler skin which is like yeah that's really what moose's look like moose's mace look like when it should be.
[SPEAKER_01]: when they shed their antlers skin, it's like this bloody mess like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is horrifying.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I can imagine somebody saw that, you know, it was terrified by it as a kid.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the other things that it appears as to the Native American group is white settlers and Christian.
[SPEAKER_00]: Firetucks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lookin' guy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, with with a sort of demon baby births from the monster's chest, which has a crown of thorns on it, like okay, which oh, wow, I didn't even notice that So are you guys subtle wow so it is
[SPEAKER_01]: It is interesting, you know, the way, you know, I love this story as I always say, as an analogy, and they're leading into this here where, you know, the time to leave their land, quote and quote, because the white settlers have come and they've disturbed the balance of nature.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's all real straight out of history, maybe not with the supernatural entity from space.
[SPEAKER_01]: But this is all based on real stuff like, for example, an example that we see today of the colonists not listening to the local tribes and messing things up is that the fires in California, the tribes that have lived there for thousands of years, they learned methods of controlled burning in order to prevent these fires from happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then, you know, when the Europeans came,
[SPEAKER_01]: No, we're not sitting things on fire to prevent fires, that's stupid.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now we see the fallout of that and they're actually starting to go back and they're like, wait a minute, wait a minute, there's still people alive who knew how this controlled burning thing worked because I think we need to try that now.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, it is very much reflecting reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are we going to get into a big conversation about the abundance model of progressive politics in reshaping environmental law to, like, no, we're not.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought, yeah, I thought we were going to get into that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, all right, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, just just pointing out the... Yeah, yeah, it's a good example.
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, and just want to point out also from the lower perspective.
[SPEAKER_01]: We see these three lights above these entities that they're seeing in the woods.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that seems to be how they represent what's called the dead lights.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think we're going to hold off and talking about the dead lights because based on trailers, I think we're going to have good reason to talk about the dead lights more very soon.
[SPEAKER_00]: Interesting, they're not orange.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought they were.
[SPEAKER_00]: orange in the previous depictions from the novels of my wrong or not the films in the films it's like the three white lights, but then it's white.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Never mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I'm just remembering the eyes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I'm sure the Lord, we did enough Lord diving in this we don't need to know what we're going to talk about the dead lights more, but just like those three white lights that appear Watch out for that because you're certainly going to see more of that and definitely you might remember it from the movies as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Shaw, by the way, we had given general Shaw the benefit of the doubts.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm walking that back a bit after seeing how he's treating tenial.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know that we, I mean, I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he's just something off.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's just something.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just that though, before when they're talking about, oh, we've, there's some scene who's he talking to his kernel maybe.
[SPEAKER_00]: where he's talking about Rose just like oh yeah well we're going to get next thing we're going to get it's going to be more than a season to assist.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's talking about her very transactionaly like she's this obstacle like I think we were both maybe wondering last episode like is he earnestly like how much affection does he still have for her?
[SPEAKER_00]: He's talking about her and her nephew very much like an obstacle that needs to be overcame and so
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, gross, right, to what extent he's still really does remember his youth.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's forsaking their bond at least when discussing with his colleagues at least, whether what's in his heart, I don't know, but the way that he treats Daniel, the way that he discusses the tribe in general doesn't, it's not a good sign, put it that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and then the question is, you know, Leroy is witnessing all this and Leroy's the one, the character I have the most question marks about in this episode, just because he's struggling.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can see he's he's struggling about not knowing how to handle what's going on to his wife because obviously he doesn't want bad things to happen to Hank Grogan, but he also doesn't want bad things to happen to his family.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this whole, you know, he wants to be promoted in the military, he has this unique chance to be a part of this major important project, but now it may be also might be linked to something that's threatening his kid and.
[SPEAKER_01]: Totally.
[SPEAKER_01]: So a lot of question marks about what now that Lee Roy, he looked horrified, suitably horrified by what was going on with Daniel and the whole kind of, you know, assaulting his mind thing that Shaw was having dick do.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, the question is, where does Levi go next?
[SPEAKER_01]: So, he's eager to zig or does he zag after the end?
[SPEAKER_01]: And why?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why does Shabbringly Roy in?
[SPEAKER_00]: Shabb, Levi basically asks for more information.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, what are we really doing?
[SPEAKER_00]: And the answer is, come watch us mentally assault this young guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, he doesn't just answer his question.
[SPEAKER_00]: He brings him into the fold in all the darkness that then implies.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like, that's a really interesting, calculated risk that
[SPEAKER_00]: Shaw basically thinks he trusts, I guess, Leroy enough to bring him in on the, you know, less savory aspects of what they're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe that's gonna come back to Hauntim.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe I miss understanding Shaw's angle there, but Shaw showed us
[SPEAKER_00]: his true colors in a way, but also showed Lirae.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for a guy who you need on your side because he's this super powered, fearless man, like, that's her risky play.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, they could have answered his questions without kind of showing them the maliciousness and the kind of gross tactics that they're willing to, you know, he lost his moral high ground so to speak with one of his officers under his command.
[SPEAKER_01]: And maybe he's trying to either test, Lee Roy or implicate him more in her dragon into the he feels to excellent point.
[SPEAKER_00]: Totally.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, the the end of the dick gets from Daniel at the end of this is follow the tunnels under the old well and you'll find the pillars.
[SPEAKER_01]: And next week's episode title is Nebel Street.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the old well is also known as the old well house, also known as the house on Nebel Street.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, and this is where, this is the haunted house that we see in the movies where it is sort of, it's central layer in dairy.
[SPEAKER_00]: This poor house, like they show it, it already looks like trash.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: It looks like trash in the 80s and it looks like trash in the,
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like, did anybody ever live in this house like who?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because West like, yeah, in the movies, in the moon movies, they took Mike talks about the fire that killed his parents and I thought it was supposed to be in that house.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I wondered if they were showing us in this show a flash forward of that house?
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, of what it looks like, you know, in the later storylines, just to remind us, like, hey, movie watchers, we're talking about this house because also Daniel refers to it as the old well and not the house or whatever.
[SPEAKER_01]: So maybe it really is just, it hasn't been built out yet, even, or I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: that would have to make sense because if it's already dilapidated like look I'm not a native New Englander but I can tell you living here long enough like if you lived in central Maine and you just didn't repair and nobody owned nobody took care of a roof like that house would be practically rubble by the time we get to the 1980s right someone has to own it that someone has to have repaired it lived there like if it's just this hellhouse now that's confusing
[SPEAKER_00]: uh, unsuspecting family that'll move in and refurbished the place and then it dilapidates again, and this is its own cycle, but if it is just as gross as it is in the it book, that's confusing, so or or the and even the films, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe it is just a will.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, but they clearly were showing us like, hey, remember this from the movie.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can a nod way more way less subtle than we can a nod really.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we'll see.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll see.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're calling out the name, you know, if it's called Nebel Street, the next episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: Speaking of title.
[SPEAKER_01]: What the heck on this one like they'd say that term the swirling earth what was it great swirling apparatus of our planet's function Which yeah, I expect more I expect it like we got we got the great Lord drop at the end But I expected there to be some I thought it was gonna be like will and 10-year-old talking to each other I don't know talking about like science and mythology and how they interact right and that's not quite what we got yet
[SPEAKER_00]: Not quite, not yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, put it, not yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an interesting title like that comes from the snail video, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So they haven't connected those things yet, but you know, those connections can be made.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, lots of interesting things to pop up next week.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we will be back in your earholes then.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the meantime, check out our main Laura Hound's feed for weekly coverage
[SPEAKER_01]: That's with Nicole Mark's podcasting partner and hosted by David, who is also hosting our resident historian Brian on a series responding to the new Ken Burns series of documentaries about the American Revolution.
[SPEAKER_01]: So
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll find all that in the main feed you can listen along, watch along at your own pace if any of that interests you And watch out also for a few movie episodes coming up with got Predator Badlands this weekend Frankenstein next week and then wicked the first week in December Mark, do you want to tell us what is going on this week?
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll never mind the music
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so regular old episode this week Nicole and I talking about the chain smokers don't let me down.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this might be our first EDM hit that we've done.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've done some dance music and some synthy stuff, but like this is 2010's EDM.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: We lots of fun conversation about tech bros making music and stuff like that and cognitive distortions is Nicole's Angle and I did not think we were going to talk about that when I heard a catchy groove and wrote an episode outline about it so yeah check us out episode drops on Tuesday and next week we've got
[SPEAKER_00]: What do we have now?
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh no, no special guest next week.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a holiday themed episode next week.
[SPEAKER_00]: So check us out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Holiday music, but all our own style.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanksgiving, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Thanksgiving's already too late to talk about Christmas music, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So that episode drops next week.
[SPEAKER_00]: But check us out for the chain smokers this week.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Great.
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll find the link to never mind the music in the link tree in the show notes.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll also find links to the other affiliates on the network properly Howard is between seasons radio active ramlings.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think they're going to be starting up.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, we we have fall out season two coming up very shortly.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll shift dust.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are, there's still soon stuff coming.
[SPEAKER_01]: I promise, but we are going to be starting our the Christmas Carol series for this year again, and the Star Wars Canon Timeline podcast covering the hybrid public at this point.
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[SPEAKER_01]: All right, thank you so much, Mark, for the Lord dump this week.
[SPEAKER_01]: If people have questions about it so complicated, it's so obscure.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure there are questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: Please write them in.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can send it to horroratthelorhounds.com.
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll find that link in the show notes.
[SPEAKER_01]: And look forward to talking to you more next week, Mark.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hopefully.
[SPEAKER_01]: And with John, we're going to find him in the tunnels.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you all so much and see you next week.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to It's Welcome to Dairy, a Lower Hound's podcast.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for joining us.
[SPEAKER_01]: We all float down here.