‘Furious’ Penultimate Episode and ‘Lanterns’ E2. Plus, ‘Lioness’ S3E4 With Van Lathan.

I need support to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to the watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at TheRinger.com, joining me in the studio. He would argue Christ was the first political assassination. It's Vandy Grimoz. What's up? What's up? What's up everybody, Monday for the watch and we are going to be talking about lanterns. We're going to be talking about Furious, but we're also going to be talking about me and Vandy's beloved lioness. They call this podcast between third chairs, between third chairs and us, in a really intense battle for third chair, the big pick. So what we're going to do is I recorded with Andy a little bit last week so we could talk about the Sunday shows, but Vandy is awesome to see you. Yes. And we're going to be back a little bit later in this podcast to discuss lioness right after this. Andy, we're here to talk about the seventh episode, the penultimate episode of Furious. I want to get your thoughts on the second episode of lanterns, although I imagine I'll talk about it a little bit with Vann. Why don't we start at the ending of Furious? So obviously spoilers for this penultimate episode, the aired last night. We've got the finale coming in a week, and triumph is a weird thing to describe to this series, like feeling triumphant at the end of it, and obviously like with another episode to go, I think there are a lot more shoes to drop and probably a lot more tragedies to befall. One, if not more of our characters, but as Catherine approaches Jayston's house as we've found out the Epstein, Chilean, Chilean relationship between Jay and his daughter. And Rihanna's, we found love begins to play again. I was, I, it's a testament to the show that I was like, fuck, yeah, let's go like that's not an emotion that I expect to experience while watching the series about what this is about, but I think that there's something very powerful about about the recurrent theme of that song, and also like this arc for this character, even if it does wind up being tragic. When we talked last week about why this show is spectacular, we were talking about tropes, and I think we were talking about them in the sense of, well, you know, rip from the headlines, murder mystery shows have to hit these certain beats. And I think it almost could take on the power of defensiveness to trying to explain why some things about the show might feel familiar and why that's actually a good thing in this case. I think it's important. Then when you're talking about an episode of Spectacular is this one, which continues in my mind to elevate the show into the very top echelon of the series of the year. It's not just detective tropes that this is playing with. It is playing with, first of all, comedy, it remains incredibly funny and remains capable of dropping jokes like, like choice, you know, just face, but also like there's one liners or as incredulity moment to moment inside of what should be an otherwise incredibly tense episode. But playing with the same kind of like adrenaline manipulation that some of our favorite action movies do. And this was based on an 80s movie, but the sense that like, oh, wait, they're gonna team up now. Wait, they're going to tear down the patriarchy just the two of them, rip apart a system, use people as Nora teaches her to do in a way that might get the kind of victory that only happens in TV shows and movies. It's incredibly canny. And when she says, when Nora says that to Alice, it's what we do. We use people. I couldn't help but think that Liz Maryweather and her writers are a little bit thinking about what they do in a writer's room. That's a really good point. They're manipulating us. And they're using our empathy and our interest and our dopamine to get us to feel certain ways about characters and scenarios that might otherwise appall or surprise us. Yeah. And I love it. Use me. There's a level of sophistication to this show that I just think is really, really, really worth pointing out. I'm sure people could point to dozens of other shows and be like, well, they do this in this, but I'm just saying like, there are visual motifs. There are lines and sort of images that the dialogue evokes that don't necessarily correspond to characters knowing that the other is talking about that, but is they're bringing up these ideas throughout the episode or throughout the season. I was struck by, you know, when Emma, the Hope Davis character, and now we know why Hope Davis took this role, I was going to text you the same thing because often in prestige television these days, you'll be like, okay, like, that seems like a, like a kind of tiny part for such an accomplished actor. But I guess everybody, everybody in New York's got to work, everybody wants to work. And then you, you find out why, when her character and the totality of her character's, you know, complicity in her father's perversion and violence is, is made clear that she is a fact procuring these girls for him at this point. She goes out into her garden when her father is doing whatever he's doing with a very young woman. And she starts like putting her hands in the soil of her garden and like squeezing the dirt and hands and hands as a kind of first responder or sensor to trauma and to the brain not being able to totally process what's going on has been something that Emma has done, something Catherine has done, I can't, you know, these aren't even my hands, which is in the shower with Alice and Alice's trauma response to what Marshall did to her often manifests itself in her shaking hands, you know, when she's trying to get her, her anxiety and her control, it's a little thing, you know what I mean, it's nine out of ten shows don't bother with a detail like that because yes, maybe one character can exhibit that. Like, you don't need to do it. It's just something that I was like, I can't wait to hear Liz Maryweather talk about this. I can't wait to hear about like what it was and how the different actions of the hands between the characters kind of like connect to the character themselves. And the needle drop in that moment is, I don't know if that's Loretta Linder, it's someone similar, but it's a version of In the Pines, the traditional song that Nirvana is saying and unplugged that is deeply unsettling. And I'm running out of superlatives to talk about the way that everything is in concert with the show way. It's not just I'm like loving the scene, loving this performance, loving this episode, everything is serving the same type of storytelling. Ariel Marks, we shouted out the first week as the composer of the music and the music has continually signaled to us to be disarmed, to be surprised. There are moments when the score seems to settle into something more appropriate to like a tense moment or a family moment. And then it kind of mutates in a jazzy or surprising way and twists itself. This episode, and I believe next week's finale, you're directed by Corey Finley, who directed a movie called Thurobreds. And as far as I can tell, like I don't know if this is someone that Liz knows or has worked with before. But to step in to the penultimate episode. I think if I remember correctly, Thurobreds has a very. There's very weather sensibility when it comes to like mixing comedy and to these things. So aesthetically a good hire, and clearly Sympathico, and said the right things. But still, when you bring in episodic directors for hire for something as crucial as the final block, you don't know what you're going to get. This episode begins with an absolutely elite framing of ambulances and cop cars swarming at the shelter through the streets of Manhattan. I was like, God damn, this is an action show too. It's doing all of it. You know, it feels like kind of. I can't tell if it's a sign of like how excellent I think this is to focus on the blocking. But when both Alice and Marshall brought to the hospital in the opening moments, and then Danny and Marshall's mother, who's played with outrageous ferocity, and also specificity, this is not a character we know or have seen by the veteran stage actress, Constan Schulman, like that collision is explosive. And it's framed, you know, they blocked it so that both it's like people, each boxer has their corner man, who's in a hospital bed right now. And they're shooting the show, I think, with anamorphic lenses. It's widescreen. It's taking advantage of like a probably modern standard that most people are going to have these very wide televisions, and then you can play a lot with the framework TV used to be a much more like kind of vertically framed and like aspect ratio. Speaking of taking advantage of New York theater royalty, Constan Schulman married to Reed Bernie, great stage actor who's pops up in the show's time to time, and they are the parents of Gus Bernie, who was one of the stars of something very bad is going to happen. I did not know that. How about that? I like to make the connections for you. You know, that little moment you mentioned at the beginning of this episode, I think is something that a lot of TV shows can learn from. I, you know, sometimes find myself being taken out of shows when I feel like it's obvious like, oh, like there's supposed to be a riot going on as Homeland or walks off out of this courthouse, but like there's 50 people there. Or, you know, maybe they've spent too much money trying to recreate like what a traffic, you know, a car chase is going to look like. You know, if you were making a future film of that this episode, you could have like so many different locations within New York City, but all they do to commit communicate the chaos that is started from this shooting, from Catherine shooting Marshall, is the sirens going by. And in New York City, that is a real feeling of like, you'll be like walking down the street or you'll be about to cross the street and all of a sudden five cop cars and an ambulance fly by and you're like, oh shit, I wonder where that is, you know? - And then you go get your $10 latte. - Right, exactly, or in our day, a $2 run gold. - Tea. Who could say whether we've degraded and fallen with this society? - Let's talk a little bit more about the eastern side of this. One of the things that the show is done, and it took me a while to maybe get my footing with it is it has been very plain about the mystery. Like it's very, it's very, oh, the cards are turned up. - To a point, we still don't know who killed her friend. - No, I know. But like I meant, we always knew who Catherine was and we always knew more or less who did it to her. - Yes. - And it's been a matter of not who done it, but will the people who had it done to them get their revenge. And this was a twist, you know? I mean, obviously like we said with the hope Davis character, you see her casting and you're like, she's gonna do three scenes. And you know, this is why you hire her is because they're seen in his safe room, basically where he is still holding on to child pornography, even after she has tried to read the entire house of it as the cops are on their way. And the unbeknownst them, Catherine is on her way. It's just extraordinary. And I mean, I don't think I've ever seen anything like that, like that specific confrontation. - Well, also, again, it's a level of confidence to know the totality of the story you're telling and how you want it to land to, like you said, you cast hope Davis because you know the part has more room to run. You cast Peter McRobie who plays J. Easton. - He's been in everything. He's been in-- - Broke back mountain and-- - Daredevil. - He's a working talented actor. But he's also perfect in the sense that if you cast James Cromwell or something, the audience is gonna be like, I know him and I know he can be nefarious. So I know he's coming back. The show played a really interesting beta switch with audience expectations where we are told that this guy is hiding things. But because we're focused elsewhere, the level of malevolence isn't fully present because we haven't spent time with him. So you have to trust that you can make the investment to pay off later. And the scene between the two of them, and I believe this is the first episode where we've seen the two of them share the screen with no one else. - Yeah, in the past, the only other scene that-- - Like if Scott had been there or Alice was interrogating them or Danny was interrogating them, interrogating them. So you get a scene with two actors who have never been alone on screen before and he tells her that the code to his child porn safe is his daughter's birthday. - So birthday, yeah. - And the entirety of the series lands on you in the audience like a fucking emotional anvil. That is not easy to accomplish with our normal avatars and it's doing something that feels almost obvious in the sense that all of the women in this show carry water, carry trauma, carry sin for the monsters in their proximity. But to do it with a degree of artfulness and subtlety so that it can sneak up on us and then wallop us the way that scene did was masterful. I thought it was incredible. - Another scene I wanted to highlight from this episode was Alice's confrontation with Catherine and the bathroom of the hotel room, motel room. Also the phone ringing the other room, awesome. - Yes. - That's been done before. I don't care. I loved it. - That's to me was like, that's Emmy Rossin's like, Emmy, I like real right there. Was like that, like her just being like, what if I let you go? You know what I mean? Where would you go? Would you go to his house? That was a shortener. I thought, and like she has now like fully become, like I think she has synthesized all the lessons of like humanity from Danny and manipulation from Nora and seeing how the game has played and does something that like, you know, she's like, I'm already persona non grata in the PD and in the FBI, I'm gonna fuck my family. - And I'm gonna get this case solved, you know? - And also, and it's personal. Again, I don't mind that. That we talked about what is going on with Danny and the video file and all of that. It works for what the show is communicating to us. You know, I think it is a sign of a failed fiction if it pushes the audience out enough to start nitpicking and questioning why things are connected. It's like, when Tolstoy wrote a novel, he wasn't like, well, Levin and Anna will never meet and have nothing to do with each other. I'm just gonna tell you two stories it was because that's more accurate to my experience in 19th century Russia. - And then Levin, like two stories that don't really interact. - That was, it sounds better when it's written in Cyrillic. I also, by the way, shout out to, obviously, we're wearing the same clothes as last Thursday but shout out to that podcast. Alice this episode also fully becomes me watching the Sterling Point pilot and she's like, get these fucking pairs out of here. So she's a good TV critic as well. - Yeah. - I thought, we, this episode introduced the concept of Nora Oki in which Nora goes and sings a meatloaf song where the Hawaiian shirt and Quincy Tyler Bernstein continues just like an absolute tear. This is like catnip for, I would imagine for both of us. But in that bar when drunk Nora explains, really explains what it is that we do. It is, this is their FBI agents, but it is pure CIA. We love and talk constantly about spy shows and spy books and thrillers in which inevitably emits the action and the global intrigue in chaos. One character says some super sick shit to the other one. Like, you know, we are, I wrote down. We use people, that's what we do. We are inhuman in defensive humanity. We become evil to fight evil. - You reminded me a lot of the Edward Norton speech and born legacy. - Yes. Yes. And again, that is the sign to me of a well-constructed fictional vehicle because there's room for Nora to be painful, believable but also sang in the middle of the penultimate episode and just drop intellectual heat rocks like that too. It can do all of those things. And very few, very few multi-season shows can pull this off, let alone eight episodes that, you know, we were not checking for and dropping on Hulu. It's awesome. - Yeah, I mean, I was thinking, I was trying to think about like how this one kind of came together. I don't think I've ever seen Black Widow. Have you, the film that it's based on? I wonder if this was just something that was sitting in some IP library that got developed that way. I did want to ask you about one more specific moment from this episode because I thought, the care with which it was handled, but also the candor with which it was handled, they had to have both. And that's the sort of reveal after the end of last episode that there is this, that there is a child pornography video with young Alice on it and that Alice has been made aware of this by Danny when she kind of reaches across to be like, take me to, let's get the fuck out of it. Let's blow this town. - She's very vulnerable in that. - Like I think I love you, you know, blah blah blah. And he's like, I gotta tell you something. And he tells her about the videos. And he tells her, you know, and her reaction to it and the way that Rossum hardens, but doesn't like, it's just a very specific, like detailed, studied, rooted in the character reaction. And this is a person who I think even when they are open or even when they are vulnerable, I think it's in some ways a mask that they are wearing. - I mean, I want to talk to both all of the creators about it if we get the chance, but just to continue with that theme of what you choose to make up in a fictional story and what you choose to research and be right about. And I think that moment in the previous episode in 106 when Catherine was like the thing about the shower, you weren't lying about that. - Yep. - I think that the beauty of the way this show is constructed is that there are things they are, quote unquote, lying about. I mean, there are, there, you know, joy. You know, the way that Ed George smiles and walks through the office, a lot of the, you know. - He's concerned for people's wellness. - Yeah, but also just like some fictional filigrees that make it a fun show, like some comedy moments. - Yes, all the stuff with Danny and Alden, you know. - So, yes. - So it's lying about that. - Or it's lying about maybe the coincidence of all of these cases stacking on top of each other in a perfect way to, you know, in rapture and to trap everyone. But it's not lying about how, to my view as an audience member, I cannot speak to the veracity of people's lived experience, but like the way that Emmy chose to respond and deliver that performance as Alice, who being exposed in that way by the person she has just become vulnerable to, struck me as not lying. And I think that's a delicate balancing act. And also just, you know, we don't know where the last cards will fall and there might be more coming. But when we watched the, when we talked about the first three episodes, I think we were actively wondering how the show was playing with or not playing with familiar tropes and familiar expectations. And you were like, you know, I think you just casually throughout the idea that Danny at Scoot McNary's character would either, you know, meet a terrible end or prove to be not the good guy that he seems to be. I felt like he had some live forever, Evan Peters. And she's still might, but if the only card left to turn of between these two characters is that they love each other, but the ugliness of history, the world expectation and perception will forever keep them apart. It's almost more tragic. Yes. And a much harder bar to clear. Yeah. I mean, in that same case, you know, plenty of things, the stories that we love culminate with somehow every character arriving on the scene at the same time. Yeah. I mean, that is literally how LA confidential ends, you know, the way that they're doing it, I can't wait to see how they play that out. I legitimately have no guesses as to what's going to happen, how they want what their final statement about the nature of justice and revenge is going to be what a conclusion for this Alice character looks like. I don't know. They may very well be making another season of this. I have no idea, but they are doing another trope where it's like the criminal various factions of cops and the, the even bigger criminals are all waiting in a big spooky house. You know, and we're going to have a showdown of guns drawn, but also like we want to build a case and we want to get to the systemic issues here. It's it's pretty awesome that they're that they're driving right into that. I just think there's a really ahead of it and we'll see how it resolves, but I just think there's a really important lesson here for writing in general, which is like you could get together and you could try to galaxy brain a different box for everyone to go into at the end, a different shaped story or you could accept that there's one really, really good shape and then try to surprise people with what they do once they're inside of it. And then this is the whole thing with the like detective novels that we've been reading for most of our lives is like there's really just the one story, you know, and even within that story, there's like kind of marks that you have to hit, and because that's what people buy these massive market pick per backs for, it's how you execute those things and what you want to say in those familiar settings that that really matters. I wanted to give you a couple of minutes if you wanted to just sound off on on lanterns episode two. I just wanted to ask you to begin with, I didn't prep you for this, so I don't think you necessarily have to have an answer, but I couldn't come up with one. I think there are very, very few series in which the second episodes are just incredible, like far superior to the pilot. Second episodes historically are incredibly difficult, incredibly difficult because you've had, it's like second albums, you've had a lifetime to do the first and then you've got a couple of weeks to pull together the second and more often than not. Second episodes are just retread to the first again, having cleared your throat and maybe with a bigger sense of who's recurring and who's a guest star and where you're going with it. I'm not saying that was what happened behind the scenes with lanterns, but what I loved about this episode, and I respectfully liked and was intrigued by the first episode. I loved the second episode, and the reason I loved it is because it relaxed into being what it's going to be in a way that felt really, really good and very, very exciting because this was an episode that had time for like, again, I understand now there's going to be eight episodes of this because they split hell and they split John and they had different storylines and they had different challenges and they had different reactions to those challenges, helped me understand them better as characters and helped me understand how we're going to get six more hours of story out of this. But it was also an episode that had time for the incredibly mundane and incredibly ambitious, meaning you texted me, you're like, oh shit, Kelly McDonald put the reading glasses on. So I am who I am. Amazing scenes though. It was also like that, both because I also was a 19-year-old that's a train spot in the theater and also because this is a woman who has a job who lives in a place and is choosing to engage with things in a certain way. But the other thing was at the end of the episode, when it's already had one of my favorite scenes of the year, which is the Paul Ben Victor, do you know what a man hunter is seeing, which we should talk about. Kyle Jordan puts on his special green suit, flies into space, goes to a space prison, and fucking red skin, moustache, old synestros there. And guess what? He's just a dude too. Well, but he's also like the real problem is your boy down in Nebraska. If you went to TV writing school, I feel like this episode, the last five minutes of this episode should be shown in a lecture format delivered by Damon and Chris Mundy and Tom King about like how to best use the week to week deployment structure of an HBO show. But again, like there's a flip side to that though, too, but it me. You're right. They did everything you're supposed to do with the second episode, which is to start to separate or untangle and let fly different plotlines. I thought separating how and John was so important. Up until now, we've only seen John with his parent, his dad in a flashback. And then the rest of it has been a enjoyable, but somewhat repetitive conversation with how of all right, Junior, you're not ready for all that yet, you know, and one dalliance bazillion the truck keeps saying they slept together. I didn't clock much sleeping to separate them. I thought like pumped air into the entire series because then you get how is a different guy interacting with different people in different circumstances. The ranch scene is incredible. The hospital scene with Kelly McDonald's awesome. The town hall scene is awesome. And then the payoff is John comes back and they're outside the motel and how it's drinking beers. And when John starts asking about man hunters, you just get that great moment of how taking his arm brace off. So I just thought this is where this writing staff kind of is like, this is why we're Hall of Famers is because those scenes of John at house house or at this town hall, like could be kind of boring. Like they, or they could be kind of, you know, like, all right, just like, I know what's going on. Like we're just trying to wait for this guy to get back. He's going to get the lantern. He's going to come back to Nebraska. You've really wind up enjoying the journey this way. And not for nothing. That was a really fun, cool car chase scene where they had two guys fall out of the back of a van and race each other through the middle of highway traffic. I will say the show is very bullish on the human body. Well, although we find out not everyone's human, but their ability to hit pavement jumping out of cars. We're now two for two. Well, I don't know what's going on with either of those people. Well, the aliens know, but I do know that John, I don't know what's up with him either. I know they both have the sickest jackets in the universe and they never take him off and they never seem to scuff them in any way. But I, that scene where a bunch of bald aliens tie him up in a office and then, you know, veteran character actor Paul Ben Victor delivers a speech about how there is a creature that is the worst thing that has ever existed in the universe doing mini Holocaust and every planet it comes to and it's living in Nebraska was so first of all, it's just beautifully staged, beautifully delivered, but it did the thing that the genre shows really struggle with, which was I was all the way in feeling stakes, feeling spooked, feeling disturbed by it. And in that, it was tying into, I think, one of the other important antecedents of the show, which is X files, which is this idea that there are so many conspiracies laid on top of conspiracies and so many people here who know more than you do and they aren't talking to each other. And there's layers to this. So such as such an expert way of handling IP where they're like, yeah, here's all this DC stuff. And you can totally be like, I've been waiting to hear somebody say, man, after a television show over my whole life, or you can just be like, cool, so we get an ag at the Christie show where they're going to have to find, they 48 hours to find a killer Scooby Doo, this guy. And on top of that, like, all of the mechanical stuff that Hal does with the dead bodies to be like, huh, this metal detector didn't go off when I walked through with a, it's great. Piece of my car. So now I'm going to feel like what is it detecting then? It's doing something that is incredible. Each side of what it's, each side of the divide that it's straddling is hard to do. And they are believable, engaging, emotionally real superhero stuff. And I'm outside of the matrix and I'm desperate to know what's going on inside of it kind of conspiracy thrillers. It reminds me a little bit of, this is a really, really deep reference that I don't think many people will remember it all. But 20 plus years ago, the writer Jeff Jensen who wrote about loss for EW and then worked with Damon later on Watchman, he wrote four issues of a comic from Marvel that they called X Factor in between X Factor being just an X-Men book. And it was basically about government investigators investigating mutant crimes. And it was, I remember it being decent and admirable and they didn't really stick with it. I thought of it for the first time in 20 years. I'm sure Damon saw that. Watching this episode. Because it's like, what does it, it's, you know, the James Gunn thing that he introduced for the DCU as like gods and monsters, right? And it's just like, when you watch Superman movie, there is a delight in living in a world where these technical or things and dogs can fly. There's this flip side of it, which is- Is that what the hell flew over? Is that the forces of solitude part of the- I didn't even notice. Like the big ice crack in the ice there. I guess so. I was looking up to the stars, like how? But the flip side of it is you do show like the boys or you're like, this is debased and appalling and we have to be on the side of humanity here, you know? This show is doing something where it's like, yeah, okay. So you plug in the- the ring with a lantern and there's a guy in a space prison. Okay, but at the end of the day, we're all just dudes here trying to figure out. - I also just love the fact that they're taking, like I'm sure this is canonically accurate for the lantern stuff, but one thing that sort of played my adolescent brain in the last run, I think of Marvel specifically, is a kind of vagueness of power. - Totally, it's just-- - I just shoot shit like a purple swirl. - Yeah, exactly. And I'm sure they all have like, they're logic to them, but like when watching on big screen, just like so like you just have power beams that you know, like you just have like an aura or whatever, like, and I love the fact that he has to recharge the ring. - Yeah, who among us? (laughing) - I'm walking through a city with it. - He can like hit the trunk and get like a little juice from it, but like, he has to, he has to, he has to, he's trying-- - And he needs to say his little poem too. - Yeah. - His little, his little credo. - Cool, he liked lanterns. - I really liked lanterns. I was trying to think of, just to say to your point, like WandaVision, I show like WandaVision, even, you know, ultimately I don't know if I loved it, but like what I admired most about it, especially the early episodes, was it took seriously the idea of having more time to think about something and give it some emotional grounding and investigate it and have an opinion about it and a point of view, specifically this woman, her power is what she can do with them and what they've done to her and also to the world around her. And then you would see, because you would see her in an Avengers movie, and it's like, "Oh no, Ultron, Wanda, quick." And she's like, "Red Beams," or something, because it's not what it's about, it's about the fight and it's about whatever else is coming. Lantern seems to understand the assignment that if you have time to think about it, use the time and think about it and have an opinion about it, not just like cool, he can counterfeit money and also fly in space. - Right. - Right. Although both of those things are pretty cool. - Do you let yourself get carried away into being like, okay, so who have met so far as alien, possibly an alien? - No, I just stopped on the threshold of that so cool that someone is bad. - That's healthy. - And there, thank you. I'm trying to change. - Thanks so much for joining me on the watch. - Yeah, the show you in Vandu to talk about. - Me and Vandu Greenwald. - I think I like that more than he will like that. - I think I'll enjoy it. - You think? - Yeah, I'm gonna try it out on him. - I'm just coming on, you know what? You're welcome. I hope you have me back sometime. - See you two days, no problem. Can't wait. - All right, brother, what's up? Thanks for joining me. - No problem, man. - You're the only person I can really talk to about this. - Linus? - Yeah, I think so. I mean, Andy tried twice and I think we got a little bit derailed. - Okay. - I wish you was here today, though, because there's the first thing I want to talk to you about with this show, which is aired for episodes of its third season, is something that I think you would be adept at discussing, which is like the structure of this season. I think that this in some ways is the most successful season of Linus because it's the season that is involved the most characters most directly. If there is a flaw to the idea, it's that they are running an agent who's doing most of the stuff in some far-flung place in typical past seasons of Linus. Now everybody is kind of in play, right? And the way that they're dramatizing that is with this two timeline structure of this season, which is honestly fucking bonkers the way they're running this. On a basic level, how is your tracking of this season going in terms of like, this is happening now, quote unquote, versus this is happening six months prior. - So I'm not having any problem with it at all. - Me neither. - Because I think, but we're close watchers. - But I think the tone of the two different timelines is so distinct. One is obviously Joe in this perilous situation where she's being tortured. And that's her name, Joe, right? - Joe. - Yeah, where she's being, you looked at de-liad-ness. - De-liad-ness, yeah. - Where she's being tortured and she's away from her family and everyone's trying to get to her. And there's a tense, tense sort of almost powder a cake of a situation that exists of a tone that exists during that time, right? Because her being captured by the Russians means everything can fall apart. And they lay that out in this episode. - In this episode for sure. In the other timeline, she is free and at the focal point of trying to understand how deep the rabbit hole goes. So when they switch back and forth and they don't really tell you, they go boom, boom, boom. Like at the end of this episode, Nicole Kimmins' character goes back to talk to the husband, which is a shout out to that guy. - Do you have any help? - Yeah, 'cause a shout out to him because he is playing the most sensitive vulnerable, yeah. And he's doing a good job of it. But he looks like he should be one of the Delta Force guys, right, when you look at him. And they don't, the only time I was like, huh, where are we? Is they don't tell you which timeline they're in there? - You can only tell because in the six months prior timeline, the past timeline, they're living at like a military base. But the house that they live at at the military base is not altogether different than how they look like in the suburbs. I think it's like, you know, to Andy talks a lot about, Taylor doesn't get any notes. And that Taylor in his way is like what happens when nobody is like, that's not clear. Hey, this is a little complicated. Why don't you just tell this in a linear fashion? I'll be really curious to see once the season concludes whether or not this dual timeline thing makes sense because you could just as easily at the sixth episode or at the end of the fifth episode be like, we've concluded this first timeline. And now it's always all done. It has been kidnapped, you know, like at the end of it. And then the second half of the season is getting her back. My understanding or at least my guess about this is that something is gonna happen obviously in this earlier timeline and this past timeline where they're working with this Ukrainian double agent to assess what honey trap, honey pot traps or whatever they've got going on with senators and professors and all these things. That's gonna blow up in their face and that's why she gets taken later. But, you know, I mean, in the meantime, the only thing that's hard to track is like, well, at what point wouldn't it just this have gotten out? Kind of like, so I don't know. But I have a bunch of questions about this season for you. - So the interesting thing to me is how these two timelines relate to one another. Like at first I was thinking, did she allow herself to get captured? - Yes. - All it is like a ruse so that she could get to the inside and learn something about, that seems to not be the case now. 'Cause she seems pretty upset about being here. - She seems pretty upset about being here. She's getting Chinese water torture. And then the political blowback that could come from this is so severe, like this geopolitical destabilization is so severe. It doesn't seem like they would play with that. - Yeah, it would be an involved run in Israel and Hezbollah and all this stuff according to the geopolitical world of light. It's although I suppose plausible enough, right? - So the thing that I love about this season more than past seasons is I was actually getting sick of the, all right, we're gonna take you, we're gonna make you a lioness and you have to turn your back on everything you love, can you do it? I was like, I didn't wanna go back to that well again, right? And so making this, orienting this around Joe and like how important she is, it kind of deepens your understanding of the character. How much trade craft she has in her head, how important she is just the high stakes nature of what it is that they do, mission to mission and how her family, even though we always knew that they were on the outside, they had this relationship with her, almost like the relationship that I would imagine a wife has with an NBA player. Well, you know what happens on the road, but it's better off that you just don't ask 'cause we need Nike contracts. And what happens when the girl on Instagram goes, guess what? In Portland after the game, now that's broken. Now you gotta have the real family talk. And that's what's happening with her. What's happening with her right now is that the girl from Instagram came to the front door and now the thing that the family always knew, the fact that she was living this really dangerous sort of soldier's life, they have to contend with it in the front of their minds. And that is also interesting. They do so or Joe does so in the six months prior plotline. Even though they are living on a military base, she gives her surgeon husband like a Glock. - Yeah, so you go learn how to shoot. - And he's like, we both took oaths. I took the Hippocratic oath and she was like, your oath is basically useless or nobody else has that oath in the world. And I was like, this is just like, I think the thing that's funny to me about that. - That thing is hilarious. Hold on for a second. Don't try to, like, we love, we both love big team, man. That's a funny thing. - It's like, that is multiple scenes of the funny, because the thing that's been happening recently on the show is that someone will just do, like, a prolonged podcast model. - Like, yes, I know. - And nobody is like, what? - What the fuck are you talking about? - Yeah, like, when Joe's getting tortured and this dude is like, we dropped COVID on you so that you would realize you had no freedom and how you want a fascist dictator. And that's what that was the whole plan. And Joe's just like, yeah. Those and but they Joe has one as well. Yes. So those are getting once your country. Yeah. Those are getting much more pronounced. Do you remember the Truman show? Yeah. Of course. Do you remember the Truman show when Truman's wife does that commercial? Yeah. And he goes, what the hell are you talking about? Yeah. Like, who are you talking to? Like at this point, he knows that he's in the television show. They let like the Russian ambassador or diplomat that Byron goes and meets with an restaurant at one point in this past episode where he's just like, just runs down the five talking points of Russia about the Ukrainian conflict, where he's just like, that belongs to us. That used to be our bread. Yeah. Let's get the whole nine. And just like, they're just corrupt like grifters over there. And Byron's just like, you know, I just keep waiting for somebody to go. Yo, man. What the fuck? What are you doing? Like what? Like what are you? Like what are you? Like it would be great if we could be on this show as like data entry dudes and like somebody would be talking like Kyle would be like, and that's why I did an extra judicial killing day. And we're like, what? What do you do? What? What? I forgot to tell you, you got to pay up for it. Did you see him kill the Russian diplomat in front of everybody and I did a fucking air bleeding? It's like it's like when she was giving him the whole, the world's always been like this. Like I wanted him to be like, I wanted him to just straight go, bitch, are you out of your mind? What do you do? Like what are you talking about? Like, I don't give a fuck about. I'm a doctor. I don't want to kill. That's actually the thing is nobody on any of these shows is ever like, what the fuck are you talking about? Yeah. Or even I respectfully, I disagree with some of the things. Right. And then the thing about it for me is over the course of the season. It almost feels like, and it's the interesting thing with Linus, the interesting with Linus is I'm of the LA lefties, like the true LA lefties and they are loving this show. Like they are loving the 92% I'm talking about a lot of black ladies that I know that are going out. I'm talking about Kamala Harris, Jasmine Crocket, my sisters in the 92% they love and Jasmine liked Linus. I don't think that they do, but I think that a lot of the women that I know love them are loving this show. Okay. Number one, it has a strong black female lead who is in control, who's blessing ass. Yeah. And number two, it doesn't feel like the world is too big for her. It doesn't feel like anything is too big for her. She always seems like she's in control. But it's interesting to me that the show is so heavy handed with its obvious and we've talked about this before ad nauseam, its obvious political programming, but it doesn't take away from any of the narrative of the show. You almost feel like this is the way those people would have to think. I think that, you know, it's funny because I was thinking the other day, you read a lot about like what happens after Trump to the right and what happened and it's like, I saw somebody be like, this shit all dies with him, like there's nobody is like particularly uniquely charismatic as him and he's like this figurehead of this movement and the second he goes away, it goes away. And I was like, I don't agree with that necessarily. But what I really don't agree with is that like this sort of like, I know better because I saw something on the internet once like mentality will knock away. And you could kind of feel like the bones of that, sometimes in this show of like people just being like, yeah, this is what COVID was. That's what Hezbollah does. And I'm like, where'd you read that? Yeah. Maybe some of the things that they say may even have like a gradient of truth or interest. But like I'm like, what are you, where are you sourcing this for a special question? Is there a part of us deep down, like take James Bond, for example, like James Bond gets told in the movie, your license to kill is revoked. And that's like a big deal. Yeah. We're like, Oh shit, James Bond just can't kill anybody who he wants in the source of it. He's got to get that back. He's got to get his license to kill back. And who is James Bond? If he just can't kill somebody, we need to kill him, right? Because it near a part of us, no matter what we think, that believes that certain people like have to be like James Bond and certain people have to be like Joe, so they have to be like. So kind of articulates that I think so that in the world of like espionage fiction and movies and TV shows, there's like a trope of, and I think it's true for a certain era of spycraft or whatever where there were like London rules and Moscow rules and Berlin rules. And they were different. Like, you didn't, didn't do certain things in certain cities because the governments of those cities or the governments of those countries would allow it. These were the things like if you go to Moscow, it's going to be like this. If you go to Berlin, it might be like that. But in London, we don't do that. It's all like following each other, but there's no hardcore violence that is beset, but falls upon people. And I think what this show is trying to do is that that whole like a lot of other things that order those rules have been done away with by guys like Kyle, who are operating with a green light from people like Caitlin to get what they need no matter what. And that, you know, like Kyle like that scene is pretty electrifying as like a thriller scene, but his justification of it while he hilariously like just downs a bag of almonds is, you know, the entire premise of what I'm talking about, that the idea of like the old rules are not applying to this. And also though he, in that scene, I think that's a scene that illustrates what's so good about this season of the show. In that scene, he just knows more than they do. Because this show does something that I don't know that I've seen another show be able to do, which is separate the spheres of expertise between different levers of like the government, right? So the Delta guys are there. And when you are like taking a guy in Ukraine, nobody beats the Delta guys, right? But then the spy guys know the rules of the spy stuff. And so then the soldiers who are essentially her hammer those got like green beret marines, all of us. They're in the dark, they're yeah. And then she's in the dark when the upper level government people are negotiating like here's what we are and are not willing to like give up right like with like, and then the secretary of state is actually at his wits in when he says we got to the president more and more than free. We got to tell us free minutes in the show. Yeah, pops up every now and again. Yeah, they may have blocked shot him out, but like mortar freemants in this show, yeah. So he's like got to the president. I disagree. The guy who's the director, the deputy director of the CIA, yeah, he, I don't see how you keep up with all of these names. I give you credit. I know. I know Caitlin. I don't know Morgan Freeman's name. I know Kyle Caitlin Joe. I know, I know I know who's that I watched the show for and Bobby, right? So everyone has different jobs and those jobs run a follow of each other, but they're, they're playing together in this like, oh, Josie's the other Linus, oh, yeah, like that, okay. They play together in this like brutal symphony to where everyone wears kind of each other's mistakes and has to also make up for it. Okay. That scene from the last episode where the two Delta guys go to the lady's house and she's in the Ukraine and they're trying to extract it just so the show is getting it all. Sorry, sorry, sorry. If I could compare the show, I realized this yesterday because it's such a, it's so easy to watch the show. Like when I do it, I'm just like, I can't believe it's over already. And the. I was bothering you on vacation. Last time I felt that way where I'm like, I can feel my blood quick in as I'm watching a TV show. I think I haven't felt that from a TV show since 24. Oh, yeah. Where you're like, I wish there was another episode right now. I can't wait till next week, et cetera. But even in Linus, when it's like stupid scenes of people talking with each other, just the crazy shit they say, I'm like, I'm actually dialed in on this because I want to hear what not bar thing Michael Kelly is going to say to a Russian diplomat or to whoever, you know, what's Caitlin going to say to Neil when she's like, fucking man up, your wife's been redacted. You know, like. It's. The 24 comparison is interesting because 24 comes out in, I guess, the after glow or the remnants of 9/11. They're more Ontario and so you're wondering what would guys like that guys that would save or do if you could listen to podcasts. If you could listen to podcasts right now, how are who are those guys, right? And then this show comes along. It's Kyle. Yeah. He gives you that. And in this situation, there's so much happening. So when you hear Iran, Hezbollah, Israel, Russia, the United States, at first we were talking about Mexico and Mexico's connections to China and all that and stuff, you believe this. You believe that once again, this is how these people would have to be. The funny thing about it is that there's so many things where it's clear that whether it's because Taylor Sheridan wants to say something that he believes about the world or whether there's just. There needs to be versimilitude so you mentioned Hezbollah and you mentioned this and you mentioned that. But they never mentioned Trump. Like, there is a hole in the middle of this that is like, who was this written? Like when it was written? Biden was president like initially. And it's not that I expect them to acknowledge Trump by name because that would date the show and more significant ways than mentioning the Middle East or mentioning Mexico or mentioning China. But it is, it is interesting that that is like skipped over. So it's interesting and I think it's intentional. Of course. Because I think that Trump's brand of politics in a way, even the most conservatives is still really singular. And it's, it's transactional. It's transactional. It's toxic in a way that doesn't lend itself to we are preserving freedom. This is for the greater good of the way of life of America. Trumpism isn't really that. So if you inject that into this, it becomes about the will of Donald Trump and not about the kind of bird's eye view that the show wants you to operate with. Yeah. So this is really an appeal for old school conservatism. The Neal cons of like 1987. And in 1997, the people that said, you know, we just got to go in and do bad shit sometimes. This is like almost from their world. Like even in this show, they almost harken back in this episode. They harken back to the cold war. And when that woman's like, I don't remember the cold war in Caitlin's like me neither. It's just what I imagine it was like. I would imagine it was like, like I was in school when I was going, I imagine it would be like that. But it almost feels like they want that. Yeah. That's how they feel about it. Because it was like that was one, that was a time when it was two ideologies that were very clearly like opposed to one another that were on like, it was just like, you believe in this and we believe in that. And then like, we're going to do all this stuff globally to like have this chess game about it. In any case, I wanted to ask you about a couple of different characters on the show specifically. The lionesses. They they've been it's I can't remember a show that's done this before where they'll have somebody be basically the focal point of a season of TV and then become part of the support and caste. Right. And so Josie, which is last season's lioness and Cruz, who is the first season's lioness, are now just like a in love. Yeah. I'm happy for them and be part of the crew that rolls around. Even though Josie is just essentially the helicopter pilot marine girl. Yeah. And they go to a nightclub as part of an undercover operation. Did you think Joe was like, what are they doing? Or was she like, no, great acting you guys are doing great? Like is there a relationship secret? I don't think it's secret. I think that the show, I mean, who would understand a lioness better than another lioness? I think that we see them in their intimate moments. They're sizzling intimate moments. It's fantastic. And I think when Joe looks at the, when Joe looks at the rest of her team, sometimes she looks at them as kids. Yeah. Yeah. And she's like, oh, let them do their thing. Do you think that was an accurate representation of nightclub life? I don't know. I thought that when that scene first started, I thought that they were in Moscow. I looked like John Wick was about the bus on the beach. I'm like, where is that at? Well, the funny thing about this season is of all the things that are confusing about it. The addition of longitude and latitude. As if I need the longitude latitude of Baltimore. I'm familiar broadly with where Baltimore is. And it's like even when you throw up the longitude and latitude over Ukrainian battlefield, I'm like, I'm not going to help me. I'm not going to Google maps and entering that. Like I believe you. Well, that's just that's just like for the we're fucking soldiers, bro. This is the way we talk. But even in that, you know, the lioness is and like Joe's crew and the things that they do. Sometimes it almost feels like it's dragging the show down at this point. The show has such an energy that moves forward based upon. It's just not the same show it was from season one to season two. I think that's good. That's what TV used to do. Of course, where all of the tension was in. Will they be found out? Will this op work? Now, all of these things are so much broader than that. Yeah. I was like, it's worth it. The lioness program was like once you finish your mission, you're retired. They have to like, you have to disappear because it's so dangerous. Well, the first thing we see is Joe like blowing up. Yeah, you know, so like I didn't know. But now they just they're collecting lionesses. It's an incredible series. It's an incredible show. It's problematic. It's also like one of the most entertaining things that's been on the last couple of years. Just to say, do you know that like, I don't know and you want me not to say it's problematic. I'm just saying the show does feel like a release in a way for me. It feels like a vacation for me, having to be either hyper critical or it or it for preservation right now, being politically aware. I would not I'm not discouraging that for anyone. But it almost feels like yeah, it's like back in the day, you're watching like my dad used to love Westerns. And the politics of a Western aren't very good. Yeah. But they are what they are. And the fucking fastest gunwinds, the dude, he kills the bad guy. Then that means he gets the girl, right? It's it's it's simple in its construction, but you just like release into the world. And I don't really think about a lot of these things when I'm watching the show. I'm educated enough to know that some of the shit that's being put out there. It's kind of Taylor Sheridan's bullshit. Like he like I'm a little Taylor Sheridan, but he made himself the most badass guilty guy said yeah to to Bill. I fuck with people and I put this stuff in these shows to drive people crazy. Right. Like I think he has I think he is just like in a unique situation where his success is given him the artistic freedom to basically make what he wants. And what he wants to make is a hyper modern hunt for a October type. Certainly Tom Clancy. I'll say it more concisely, which people always want me to do. But sometimes I struggle to do. I was unaware that I could still be confronted with politics that I didn't believe in or agree with and not be offended by them. It's just been it's just been so long since that was a thing. That watching the show almost kind of reminds me of a time when someone would say something and I would be like that's bullshit, but it wouldn't ruin my whole day knowing that they were around. And so like a lot of the shit that I hear in the show, I'm like that's that's probably not the way I look at that. But it doesn't mean I go deep platform turn it off. Cancel Paramount. It's a good thriller. It's just it's weird that there's a thriller that has like about nine minutes per episode of just like they are going. They did it like four times in this one. Joe did it to the guy. Then it happens at the dinner or whatever. Then it happens again. Joe gets one off to the Russian touch and he gets one husband that like you don't know shit. And you think that I'm some just deformity and this like disgusting outgrowth of like a military industrial system, but she's like what about Jesus? What about how we killed this Pharaoh? You know, like and it's just like I guess that sometimes I just like get right. I just want to turn my brain on and be like, Dan, they killed a Pharaoh like that. The fact that she knows the complete human history of political assassination from the beginning. Does that ring more true or does that seem like some bullshit that would be in a monologue that like somebody like that would know? Because to me when I looked at that, I'm like, well, if she truly believes this, it almost wouldn't make sense. That she has like justifications in her head. Yeah. And I think that is what like the characters tell each other is that they are like an essential component of a functioning society. Yeah. Before I let you go, I just wanted to get your lanterns talk, your thoughts like two episodes of aired. Andy and I chatted a little bit about it. I thought this episode was fantastic. And I thought I was curious whether or not you you were like surprised at anything about this show or whether or not there was elements of this show that like you took any issues with or whether you're just like blindly like I'm all in on this. I legitimately two things about the show. Two characters haven't had a handle on a superhero like this since Hugh Jackman and Wolverine. Maybe Tony Stark, Iron Man, like this John Stewart and this how Jordan ring so accurate and true to me that the entire world of this show can be propelled by those two performances. Aaron Pierre or something else, bro. Like he legitimately does like small things in his embodiment of a character that just make you completely believe in the character itself. The difference he's a very subtle performer. Yeah he is. And he's a great action star and he's a great actor. But I was talking to Andy about you know if they had kept him in Nebraska and the whole show is like this slow progression of him being like whatever you say sir but kind of a little bit you know with an edge. I think that would have been fine but the fact that they sent him out on an adventure and he came back changed. and the way that he is performing those changes, I thought at that motel parking lot scene was so good, the exhaustion, he's like, I'm over you, I'm over your bits, you know what I mean? I'm over like all of this and whatever he saw that they showed him what the man hunter did. Like I just thought it was really expert writing, but it was even more so like a really wonderful, wonderful piece of acting. - I think the decision in this show to ground it then makes the story telling about relationships and expectations. And that is just how you get to know characters, man. It really doesn't matter how much CGI you have, whatever story that you have is going to be about relationships and expectations, what the characters expect to get, what they actually get, what they think they know, and then what they find out. And it's difficult to do that with superheroes sometimes 'cause you wanna see the Green Lantern make a gigantic fist and then punch them by in the face. But that's not what you want. You want to see the hero's journey of the Green Lantern and understand how that ring which comes from this extraterrestrial space protecting guild, right, how that changes a person's orientation with the rest of humanity. And that's, this show is starting there and working to everything else. The decision in this episode to have how's ring lose its charge. - Yeah. - And so, I mean that's happening in the comments before it happened in Green Lantern. - 'Cause I go get my battery. - Go get my battery. So you gotta go get the battery to come and charge my power back up. Like, that's your deal. How do you keep yours, which is what he does with the bird the entire time? How do you keep your power by going to get something to charge up my power to exalt me? And then he's still got to be useful in the town without the ring. The ring is not a source of how Jordan's power. - Yeah. - His fearlessness, his guile, his wit and intelligence is. I just think the show is like operating in that way to a degree that I really did not expect it to be able to. - Yeah. And you've got a collection of very experienced, very, very, very good writers. - Absolutely. - Who were able to make Hal and Kerry in the hospital room or Zoe and John at the diner or the Garrett Dillahunt character. Make it a camera. - Make it a camera. - Yeah. - Him on the horse and Hal at the gates there. So it's seen saying. - Scene work. - Yeah, man. - It's just scene work. It doesn't matter how fast you can fly. Scene work is gotta come first. Like, and the fact that this show is actually like penetrating into a different audience and making people care about the Green Lantern, it's doing really well right now. - Yeah. And I think also like for some people DC stuff generally, but Green Lantern specifically is something I just, I honestly don't know anything about it. Like I didn't, I don't have a priors. I don't have a Hal Jordan, John Stewart anything. I don't have a favorite Lantern. And so I'm watching this and I'm enjoying both sides of it. I'm enjoying the like stated, true detective, grounded mystery of it. But I also am finding the like extra terrestrial and then pretty entertaining. - Yeah. - So they're doing a great job with it. Thank you so much for coming by. - Prime, man. - Higher learning, ringer tailgate, midnight boys, Van Lathen. Thanks for joining me on the watch. We'll be back on Thursday. Thanks to Kai and Kai and Sarah and everybody for producing. Talk to you soon. (upbeat music)