Getting Bricked with Dave Schilling ("Daughter of Ferrix" Part 1)

0:00 This podcast is brought to you by our partisans, Shelby Von Trapp and Bobby Chudhury. If you want to find out how to join up with Saw's Rebels, or if you want access to our bonus episodes, head over to patreon .com slash andorkspod. Welcome to Andor, the podcast where every week we analyze and scrutinize the Star Wars series Andor seven minutes at a time. I'm Alex Wolonetz. And I'm Rustin Hunter -Deuce. And we have friends everywhere.

0:39 And today we are joined by our friend, writer and filmmaker, Dave Schilling. Hey, Dave. Thanks for coming. Hello. Thank you for having me. This is a pleasure to revisit such an amazing special TV show. It's our pleasure. Thank you so much for being here. We're always happy to find new friends to talk about Andor with. Can you tell us a bit about your history with Star Wars and how did you come to find this show? It's a great question. I started watching Star Wars in 1995, 6? Maybe 1994. um when they would show the original trilogy on usa network on like the holidays like thanksgiving there'd be a marathon of all three movies and i was a star trek guy i still am more of a star trek person but star wars was kind

1:35 of still ubiquitous because it was it was so big for my parents generation And I would watch the movies and enjoy them and all that. And I remember it didn't really cement itself in my imagination until the special editions. So I'm the unique, weird person who remembers 1997 very fondly as that 20th anniversary and the special editions and all the toys and whatnot and Shadows of the Empire coming out and then, of course, getting the prequels. And I am... One of the rare, maybe not so rare anymore, Phantom Menace apologists. Oh, I love Phantom Menace. I think that movie's actually really good. And to me, it's the last time Star Wars was in any way interesting before Andor. In what way? What makes the Phantom

2:30 Menace so interesting to you? Well, it's the first and only prequel that... didn't have anyone else's input. George Lucas just made the movie he wanted to make. Nobody... that was working on the movie, Rick McCallum, anybody else, really had anything to say to convince George to not include a scene where somebody steps in poop or gets their tongue electrocuted or have a protagonist who's six years old or whatever, right? There's nobody, no audience, no fan, no executive who could really control or contain. his bizarre ideas and so it's pure George Lucas it's the last time when you really had a lot of real locations when you get to Attack of the Clones you have a lot of green screen work you have a lot of

3:30 sets that are elongated through special effects but they really went to Italy To make this movie. They really like went to Tunisia or wherever. I think it was Tunisia still for Phantom Menace to recreate Tatooine. There's still all this stuff and lots of physical props and physical vehicles. And it's got two of the best action scenes in the entire franchise. You've got the pod race and you've got the duel of the fates.

4:03 And so. I enjoyed rewatching it just for that kind of tactile, true, real feel and the auteur feel of it, too. I think Andor... is an auteur's show. And it is something that is so tactile. And there's so many physical locations. And there's so much to look at. And I just appreciate that reality aspect to it. Because Star Wars is already a fantastical and ridiculous concept. To take it outside of the realm of the physical and have it be, you know, like the Mandalorian on the volume stage or something. You're now dealing with another remove from reality. I need those physical bits of it. I think that's why Force Awakens worked better than a couple of the other sequels, though I love Last Jedi. I need that

5:03 reality. Also, another thing I love about Andor and why I think the original trilogy works so well. English actors. Or British actors. British faces, to be clear. Yeah, ugly British people. British teeth. Yes. Especially. They need to be in Star Wars. It's just not the same. That's why I love the original Batman more than Batman Returns. Because you've got those ugly British actors in the grime and the cold of London versus the sparkling Burbank sets of Batman Returns.

5:38 And I'm alone in that. that um so that's that's my star wars history i i collected all the toys in 99 um i tried to get into the the um extended universe novels and stuff but it never really clicked for me in a full way it never became star trek to me where it's like oh star trek first contact is out i have to go to the theater opening weekend though i remember very well um seeing Revenge of the Sith and waiting in line for a long time in my hometown to go there. But I waited for Phantom Menace, I think two weeks after the release before I even tried to go because it was so insane. Just you didn't have the time to sit in front of the movie theater for 12 hours to get in. I was 14. I think I'd rather be doing

6:27 anything else than like waiting in line for a movie. And everyone said it sucked. so I wasn't like I gotta go see this bad movie you know immediately I waited a couple weeks and I remember walking through the theater to go to my showing of Phantom Menace and I heard this rumbling and these people screaming and cheering as I was walking by and I'm like what's that and I looked at the the marquee above the screening room door and it was the Matrix and I was like I want to see that What's that? Show me that. But I saw Phantom Menace instead and was very disappointed. At the time. Now I'm sort of like, as I said, an apologist. But at the time, I was like, this is it? Really? It's long. It's so long. The tactility

7:21 of the Phantom Menace is... truly like it's saving grace and i'm a big apologist for that movie as well i would rather watch exactly what you're talking about i'd rather watch phantom menace than revenge of the sith any day that feels like a video game the third act of that movie is abysmal to me like the whole mustafar lightsaber duel is just terrible i think the first maybe 15 minutes are kind of fun the the you know the space battle and stuff just really going straight into this sensory overload of that first act of Revenge of the Sith. But from there, it's just like, you can't start a movie that high and then come down that low. And then people are just standing around talking. It's like, I think George Lucas

8:07 wanted to make an adaptation of Paradise Lost, but never actually read the book. Just like, he looked at the pictures and he's like, I think I want to do that. And that's how you get Mustafar. Do you think he read much besides like The Hero's Journey by Joseph Campbell? I don't know if he's like a literary guy. I mean, he's got a book.

8:23 He's got a museum coming out about narrative art. So we'll find out. I know. I'm excited to go to that restaurant. That's about it. Get the Skywalker burger for sure. I think that Phantom Menace like was the last Star Wars of the Lucas era like to be shot on film. Yeah. And. By shooting in real locations and putting CGI on top of it, it helped it feel real and stay on the right side of the uncanny valley. I was watching like the ILM docs about the history of like making the prequels and like they didn't know how to use green screen yet. Right. Yeah. So they didn't know to like how to rotoscope things like they had to figure all that shit out while they were making it. And so it seemed like. Following the

9:12 reception to Phantom Menace, Lucas just leaned even more heavily into, I'm going to use computers to just make all of these movies because it's too much of a headache to work with locations and work with actors. Let me just make this as streamlined for me as possible to the detriment of the movies. I think that's the reason Attack of the Clones is such a fallow middle period for people because that was the one where they really tried that. you know, has its ups and downs. And I'll give Revenge of the Sith a little bit more credit than you will. But I think they were still, you know, butting up against that even then. Well, I think, you know, you bring up the documentaries and stuff about the making

9:54 of it and the behind the scenes of it all. And the documentary, it's like a feature length documentary. This is when DVD was such a big deal. You could throw a like two hour documentary onto a DVD and people would be thrilled. The documentary is called The Beginning on the Phantom Menace DVD. You see how hard it was. And when they're in the desert and things like... I remember there's a moment where there's a sandstorm. And just like wind is blowing everything away. And George Lucas is just like, oh, God. This wind is going to destroy my pods, my pod racers. And I think you're right that... He probably, as someone that we know, doesn't really love directing.

10:41 He likes making films, but he doesn't love directing. He probably said, let's not do this anymore. People hated this anyway. So I know I have to do two more. I know they're going to make a lot of money. But I would like to sit in my chair and drink coffee and watch the monitor and not talk to the actors and learn more about this new technology. And so let's just do it on the stage. And that irrevocably changed Star Wars forever, for the worse, in my opinion. It stopped being anything that was connected to humanity.

11:21 And that's... Part of the lasting legacy of George Lucas is that Star Wars is not a series about people. It is about big things happening. It's about set pieces. And what I love about Andor, to bring it back to the topic that we're here to discuss, it's finally, at long last, an opportunity for Star Wars to be about people again. And that's what I love about the show. I mean, you said before that you were sort of more of a Star Trek than a Star Wars person. And do you think that sort of the that Star Trek to me was more about the people and Star Wars is more about the big.

11:59 No, no, no. Star Trek is more about the ideas than Star Wars. I think Star Wars is about myth, right? I remember writing something when Last Jedi came out, and I really liked the movie, but what I was concerned about with Star Wars as a whole was this is so broad in terms of what it's about. It's about big sort of ideas of...

12:24 aging and maturity and what do you do when you're young and you want to be an adult and what do you do when you're old and you're going to die and the regrets you have. Last Jedi is all about regrets. Would you kill baby Hitler? Yeah, exactly. Okay, so this guy is going to be way worse than my dad. I should probably just cut him down.

12:46 But what if I don't? And so these are big things that unfortunately anyone can project themselves onto. You could be a Republican, a Democrat, super progressive, super conservative, or, you know, borderline reactionary, you know, fascist, and say, I relate to the hero, because there's no politics in Star Wars. Star Trek, on the other hand, is all about politics. It is very explicitly about a hyper -progressive, hyper -liberal future where everyone gets along, where there's no money, where we just go into space for the purposes of bettering ourselves and learning more and protecting those that can't protect themselves.

13:37 Star Wars is about, well, what if? The bad guys were so bad that you need Jesus, essentially, or some sort of deity to rise up and save everyone. But from what? The Empire has no political ambition, per se. They have no ideology. And so I feel like Star Wars has been, up until Andor... so politically neutral and so generic in terms of its worldview that anyone can look at Star Wars and say, I'm the hero. I've got some bad news about Andor. People also do that with Andor.

14:19 Which is terrifying because it's like, how explicit could Tony Gilroy be? How clear could he be? But because you can't say, this is Donald Trump, this is Steve Bannon, this is whomever. you still have that opportunity for people to not get the point. And people still don't get the point about Star Trek either. I mean, Ted Cruz is like, I love Star Trek. Captain Kirk is cool. It's like, yeah, but he would not vote for you. He would not agree with anything that you believe in because he's egalitarian and he's progressive and he's intellectual. And he's not just a guy who has sex with green women. He read every book. He knows how a starship works and he cares about everyone, no matter what color they are, what

15:08 race they are, what species they are. So anytime you deal with allegory like that. you run the risk of people not getting it. But Star Wars, because it's so much bigger than Star Trek, because it's so much more influential, and because it's so much more vague and broad, I think it's worse for that. And or at least tried to make the point a little bit clearer. But because, again... And or doesn't say this is what the empire believes.

15:40 These are their opinions. We're all so didactic and literal in our society now that unless you say the empire doesn't believe that women should be able to have abortions or the empire killed every queer person, like then you don't, you can't really make sense in our modern context. It's still the empire is bad. But why are they bad? What do they do that's truly bad? And the things that the Empire does in Andor are things that are analogous to things that happen now.

16:13 And the whole prison arc is such a powerful bit of business in this show. But you can't say that it's a clear one -to -one. You can't say like, OK, I see how this relates to reality if you're not looking for it. It's a Rorschach test. Star Wars and all science fiction is a Rorschach test. You could watch Dune and you could be like, well, Paul Atreides is a great guy and he's a hero and he liberated Arrakis. Well, also, he's a dictator and he ends up genociding billions of people. That book goes out of its way to tell you he's a bad guy, and yet people still miss the point. They still miss the point. And when the third one comes out, they will miss the point again. And they will say, oh, well, he's a bad

17:05 guy, but he's a bad guy like the people that I hate in the real world. It's almost as if entertainment cannot really fully work as a political tool to convince people of your politics. It's almost as if art is separate from the political. Machinations to get people to change their minds. Well, it is certainly when it is for the purposes of making money. Yes. Right? Everything we're talking about today is in service of capitalism. And for good or worse, capitalism is what dictates what art we see. If that's paintings, if it's sculptures, if it's music, if it's literature, you can't make it unless there's a profit motive. attached to it so we'll never truly get something that is a true screed or a real gerrymand against

18:01 a certain thing. The closest I think we get with that is a Boots Riley movie. You know, I saw I Love Boosters, unlike most people in America. And that was as close as you're going to get. And you could still misinterpret that movie. Well, it's easy to misinterpret it because the sound mixing was awful. It might have been the theater you saw it in. Oh, no, it was. I've heard.

18:25 Other people complained about the sound mixing on that, so that was not me. It's no Christopher Nolan movie, but yes, I understand the complaint. I think that Lucas... You know, he wears his influences on his sleeve, right? Like he's very forthcoming about the political moment in which he was trying to capture, you know, within Star Wars. But he was also a canny businessman and knew that I need to make that palatable to people.

18:54 I need to suffuse it with enough. cutesy glupshiddos to, you know, get kids to want to buy toys of my little Viet Cong figures because they're never going to let me make a movie about, you know, the Viet Cong unless I can also turn it into a way to sell action figures. But then he's had billions of dollars to make whatever movie he's wanted and he's not. Because he's lazy. Yeah.

19:18 He's not a person who likes being on a set. He likes his ideas and he likes tinkering with equipment and he likes all of the stuff that's non -human about it. And that's what's fascinating to me about Phantom Menace is he said, I'm going to make this movie. I'm going to make a trilogy of movies about how fascism can foment in a democratic society. But it's Star Wars. And I don't understand how people talk. And I'm going to make one of them a noir, and I'm going to make half of it a Ray Harryhausen sword and sandals movie, and it'll all fit together. Yeah, the original trilogy, and I think part of that is because George didn't direct the other two, is that they were all the same genre. It wasn't like, oh, The Empire Strikes

20:14 Back is now going to be a romantic comedy. That didn't happen, right? There weren't these wild tonal shifts or different narrative structures. Okay, so it's... The same thing you saw before, but a little different because it's not, it's more, you know, it's darker or it's the bad guys are winning more or, you know, we're going to do the Death Star again, but it's a bigger Death Star and now they're little people with furry faces and Jabba the Hutt shows up. Like, it's mostly the same kind of movie. It's still an adventure, serial, sci -fi, Flash Gordon kind of thing. And I think that's why people... still to this day don't like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom because it took Indiana Jones

21:02 and they put him into a different genre of movie. They put him into a haunted house horror film and included a bunch of racist stereotypes that nobody appreciated. And it was scary, and kids are now in peril and all that stuff. You have to, with a sequel, give people the same movie, but... different in how does it how does it be different you know i that's just terrible what it said how is the movie going to be different uh dark the dark knight is i think the best example and empire strikes back and godfather 2 where it's the same genre of movie it's the same thing that you liked before but heightened in some way there's some element that is slightly more sophisticated or more exciting or something that

21:58 just like takes it from an eight to a 10. And I don't think he ever figured out how to do that with the prequel trilogy. And certainly with the sequel trilogy, they tried and they just couldn't land the plane there. I think that their, their insistence on certain deadlines, you know, threw them off. And if you're going to do that, you need to have one single person holding everything together. They wanted every dollar they could get from the sequel trilogy. Disney was like, we're going to do these on this year, at this time, and we're going to get this money, and we're going to keep it going. And that's a bad way to make sequels. Yeah, I mean, ironically, Kathleen Kennedy's idea of let's do different

22:44 directors who have their own control of the project is a good idea, but you have to stick with it. You can't just like, bounce out after you have one pickup yeah and you need to pick well too like picking josh trank gareth edwards and lord and miller i think those are you know three and colin trevor they had to fire him they like they had to fire him there was no reason why you have to get rid of the third guy right okay let's let's accept that some people really didn't like the last jedi Guess what? Rian Johnson's not coming back, so who cares? But what they did is they said, we hate this movie so much from a corporate standpoint that we're not going to work with this guy who has made a huge movie,

23:35 Jurassic World. We're not going to pick up any of the plot threads from the last film. And we're just going to give it back to J .J. because we're so terrified. And that's a terrible way to do business. Well, speaking of guys we hate, I think we should speak about guys we love. Because here on the show, we have a question we like to ask our guests, which is in honor of the late great WTF with Marc Maron. Who are your glup shittos?

24:06 Well, I mean, there's so many wonderful, bizarre characters to choose from. My first love is Salacious Crumb. from uh hell yeah return of the jedi and i'm sure other people have said that on this he's our he was our first five -timer he's hilarious like he's having so much fun and that that first part of return of the jedi is very dark and kind of it was scary to me like being in this um dank disgusting sex dungeon essentially like let's be real job of the hud's up to some jeffrey epstein stuff i mean did you watch mandalorian and grogu no Oh, man. Absolutely not. They are sucking and fucking in that movie. There's like a full Eyes Wide Shut scene happening with multiple Hutts. In the Hutt Palace. In that case, I'm

24:54 going to queue it up on Disney Plus right after this. And only watch that part. He's sort of like in the cuck chair. Salacious Crumb is. He's like the jester cuck. Yeah, he's like, I can't believe you're doing that. That's gross. Don't get any on me. But I just love the design of the puppet. I love the sort of anarchic vibe that he brings to the film. It makes everything grosser. It's sort of like... In Blue Velvet, there's the famous party scene where Kyle MacLachlan's character has been dragged to Frank Booth, Dennis Hopper's sort of weird drug den. And they have the in dreams scene where Dean Stockwell sings, or doesn't sing, but lip syncs in dreams with the light as a microphone. Brad Dourif is just

25:53 like hanging out in the background with a snake. And he's just like dancing around with a snake. And there's like an older woman and she's dancing on a couch. And that's what I think Salacious Crumb brings to that moment is people are having fun and they shouldn't be having fun in this at all. And then my other one is Babu Freak.

26:17 Hey, Bob. Congratulations. Babu Frick is getting the SNL five -timer jacket because of your nomination. Fabulous. There's not a lot that I love about Rise of Skywalker. Babu. Other than when it ends and then I can leave the theater. I remember seeing it. I saw it at the El Capitan in Hollywood. It wasn't the premiere, but it was like a big press screening and all the nerds were there.

26:49 I'm like, oh my God, really? Like every five minutes, I'm like, oh my God, you killed Chewbacca? Not really. You didn't kill Chewbacca? Who is, why is Keri Russell in this? And all of it was just so painful. And we all walked out and we're like, really? That was it? That was what they did? But we all said, we love Babu Freak. Because it's such a great, again, a great little creature.

27:20 And they designed it well. Whoever came up with that creature design deserves a raise. Because he's got the mustache and the big eyes and little arms and, like, the goggles. It felt like old school Star Wars. Whenever you see a creature like that, that feels like it would belong in the original trilogy, you know that they've hit a home run. So after you watch the Eyes Wide Shut portion of Mandalorian Grogu, fast forward to the 20 minutes of what if it was just baby Grogu and four Babu Fricks? I've seen enough clips on Instagram where I feel like I got the gist of it. What if there was four Babu Freaks?

28:03 It'd be amazing if they could do a supercut of just Babu Freaks stuff from the show, from the movies. That's all I need. I don't need to see the story. I just want to see my little guys doing their business. It was worth the price of admission, I'll say, for how much of Minch and the gang you get to see. Because it isn't technically Babu Frick. It's like others from their species. What are they called? Minch is the main guy. Oh, Azaleans. Azaleans. Okay, got it. And they all look exactly the same. It's not like every minion has a different sort of configuration of eyes and goggles. They do look different. Some have braces. Dave, who are your minions? I mean, obviously Bob, number one. Gotta be Bob. Stuart, great. The one with braces that

28:53 was in Rise of Gru. I love the deaf minion from Minions and Monsters. He was great. I could talk about Minions and Monsters for an hour. So when this is over, there's a Minions podcast coming. Can't wait to be on that one. Who's your favorite minion? My insane Minions take is that... Not only did they hear the, why did the minions not fight for Hitler of the first three? They said for minions four, what if we make the minions Jews? You know why they weren't fighting in World War II? Because they were making movies. Well, yeah, that's like, okay, there's a tribe of minions lost in the desert, following one with a staff, who somehow, unfairly known for evil, who ended up working in the entertainment industry in the

29:37 1920s. Louis B. Minion. Exactly. Yeah, I love this. I love this theory that it's really just about the Jewish experience. Just that one tribe. I mean, they start saying the Minion tribes, which is a very specific word to use. You're right. But also, like, they have to explain why there's... tons of groups of minions that are doing different things across history. Because in the first, the prequel Minions movie, it's like, oh, they're all on this island, this frozen island, and they all come to England in the 60s.

30:09 But it's actually like, no, there's other minions. They're everywhere. They're an infestation on the planet. We have to do something about all these minion tribes everywhere. If anybody at Universal is listening, I have a very good spec script about Operation Paperclip of them kidnapping all the Nazi minions. after World War II and then using them to do evil here at home. Operation Bellowclip. Yes. Well, we can move on from this now. Yeah. With that, should we get into our seven minutes of Andor? Seven minutes in heaven.

30:41 Unfortunately, no minions, but we get kind of close. We get pretty close. uh cs uh previously on andor uh we finally escaped for 19 to 5 uh ruth and riel told us out about how he made his mind a sunless place and scared the shit out of lani but now it's time to kick off episode 11 which rusty and holy shit we only have two episodes left of season one i know what the fuck it's absolutely absurd we are officially at like the one year mark of doing this show I kind of can't believe that we're going to finish season one so soon. Yeah, that we've stuck with it.

31:17 Yes, and then so we start with our Andor logo, which I feel like it's very jaunty music -wise. It's almost at its full evolution, which makes sense for what's going to happen later in the episode. Yes, back on Narkina 5, we find Melshi and Cassian are hanging out, literally hanging on the side of a rocky cliff. trying to avoid the Empire patrol ship looking for escapees.

31:39 Melshi can't feel his hands. Cassian tells them that the Empire is leaving. Melshi knows that's bullshit. Cassian repeats, they're leaving. Melshi says he can't climb back up. Finally, he asks Melshi to comfort him and tell him they're leaving. They're leaving. And so ends Melshi turning into a Woody Allen character for like 30 seconds.

32:01 I can't feel my hands. I guess it's more of a Jerry Lewis. Yeah, it's somewhere in the middle, yes. Yeah, like... What did I do to deserve this? Oh, right. We just busted out of a prison, that's what. I mean, you know, they've gone through all of the trials and tribulations of Narkeena, and yet here they are in as precarious a place as ever, just to avoid the sentries flying overhead.

32:33 Dave, do you have any thoughts about the prison arc? We're coming in right at the end. I mean, Andy Serkis in that prison arc is incredible. And the production design, the set, you really feel for these prisoners in a way that I think Star Wars, even earlier in the season, you understand that the Empire is bad. But you don't really see, and to go back to my original point earlier, you don't really see why they're bad. They don't do horrible things. Even in the original trilogy, you know, Darth Vader is obviously a villain because he's all black and he's mean to Princess Leia and everything. And you're told in the scroll they're bad. But what are they doing that's bad?

33:24 And so you see how these prisoners are treated. You see the kind of... orwellian nature of this facility and it cements what you're supposed to hate about them and you want cassian to escape so much and he escapes and then of course his escape is to the edge of a cliff you know he's hanging off of the rocks and and i just really love that you get this And this is the first moment where I really understood what the show was going to be, where now we're just going to be in the prison for a while. At first, I'm like, oh, he's just going to be bopping around and stuff. And eventually he'll get to the resistance.

34:10 But it's like, OK, here's three episodes where he's just in prison. And that was fascinating to me, and that's when I really locked into the show is, okay, we're going to do some interesting, difficult, weird things that are not going to be action -adventure stuff. So speaking of the sort of knowing that the Empire is evil aspect, I want to ask you, because you did work on Horror's New Wave, 15 Years of Blumhouse. I did. It has like a political angle of like something is bad.

34:47 It doesn't really can't come to a conclusion about it, but there is some sort of like revulsion of seeing something that is bad. And so do you sort of see like a parallel between those two things of there's a political aspect of horror of like, this thing is bad. It can't really offer a solution to it, but it. Well, I mean, I think anytime you're going to make any sort of social, cultural, political statements. The thing that you hate has to be truly repulsive. And horror does that much easier than science fiction. Horror can say, you know, we're making a movie about the awful nature of being closeted. and being forced to not be able to be yourself. And I'm, of course, speaking specifically about Nightmare

35:37 on Elm Street 2, which is famously very much like an allegory for growing up being queer and not being able to express yourself. And what does that mean? And Freddie is almost sort of like an analog for... the societal pressure to be something you're not or whatever, right? Everybody watch Teenage Sex and Death, The Camp Niaza, now streaming on your favorite platformers. It's not streaming yet. It's still in theaters. No, when this episode comes out. Oh, sorry. I didn't realize the episode was going to come out much later. I hope it's still in theaters. But yeah, that's the thing about horror is that because it's visceral and it's gross and it's scary, it creates more of an emotional reaction. Science

36:23 fiction is either a kind of like it's fun, like Star Wars, or it's so intellectual and so like focused on the ideas that it might be off putting for some people like Star Trek. But it's not the same kind of. oh my God, this means this. You know, you can watch Halloween and you can say Halloween is really a movie about the encroachment of urban crime into the suburbs, right? You could say that if you wanted to. You could say Jaws.

36:55 I remember this is very, this is a thing from film school. One of my film theory professors said, you know, Jaws is really both about fear of the vagina. And Watergate. And I'm like, what? It's both? And it can be both depending on how you read it. The fact that the government is not to be trusted, that they don't really have the people's best interest in mind, that they're really thinking about profit over safety. All of that stuff. The shark's really sexy. The shark has a beautiful vagina dentata situation and they all want to jump inside there, but they can't. And yes, there's so much to horror that maybe is easier to grasp, but it's still, I mean, it's all allegory at the end of the day and you

37:44 can't really, unless you're looking for it or you're parsing it. And my favorite conversations I've had in the last two weeks. have been about Camp Miasma because it's one of those movies that wants you to talk about it after it's over. But most horror films, most sci -fi films, they don't want that. And so we're putting meaning onto things that don't have meaning. And that's what I was saying about Star Wars before is people can see this thing that is so broad. And George Lucas made this very broad kind of commentary on Vietnam. And anyone can put themselves into Luke Skywalker. Anyone can say that the person they hate is Darth Vader. Anyone. And they just can't get the point. Yeah, and here, like, they

38:30 have taken... what is usually, you know, like the prison escape genre, maybe it has a downer ending, but when it has, when they get out, that's usually like a big uplifting moment, right? But here we are in the aftermath of that, and it doesn't really feel like they've escaped. Yeah, this is not Shawshank Redemption. This is not Shawshank Redemption. It's not like, oh my God, they made it, and now Cassian Andor is a free man. He's not. He still lives under the thumb of this fascist. Do you think there was a chance that this scene was originally at the end of the last episode and they were leaving it on a cliffhanger? I don't think so. No. Yeah, it's a cliffhanger. That's very cute. I think it's

39:15 ironic. Yeah. I think it's a commentary on what you would expect to see at the end of an episode for sure. But yeah, because they're hanging here and there's all these close -ups of their hands and their feet and they're so bloody. And they do not look like they're in a good place. They're in a way more dangerous situation than they even were diving into the ocean. The first thing you see in this episode is a bloody foot. And I think that's important to... hammering home what this show is about you get the the dramatic success of escape but then the show says actually it's not over there's more to do it's it's it's uh from one peril to the next and the entire two season run of this show into rogue one is these

40:13 characters are never truly free These characters are always being put through the meat grinder. And there's a catharsis to that for people of the modern era who feel the same way. The struggle continues. Indeed. But we leave, you know, we end this scene with the image of Cassian and Melchi hanging against the... cliff and we get to see just how high up they are and then the image dissolves into a blinding white liquid and we see that we're staring into the eyes to the eye of b2 emo well we don't know it's a liquid yet it's just sort of this weird abstracted shape which is rare for star wars There's like a fluidity to it for sure. But yeah, we don't know what it is at first. We're just so focused in on B's

41:10 eyes looking out as he's listening to the voices of people in the room talking about, you know, Marva and how heartbreaking it is that Cassian is in here. And then what are we going to do about the droid? And when he hears that, poor little B. starts shaking so violently that the cup of calf sitting on his head rumbles off and gets caught by a good old reliable Brasso. And Brasso, at this point, makes it clear to the audience that Marva has passed. If B wants a minute, you know, to say goodbye to her, they'll even clear the room so he can have alone time with her. But B doesn't want to be alone. He wants Marva. And Brasso, you know, tries to help the little guy. move on or at least get his mind

42:16 off it by telling him that jesse has a jesse and the daughters of pharix require his help in matters of grave importance and so here we are with with our beloved marva dying off screen um rp marva and or you taught me it was okay to be weird it's only a choice to have her die uh between episodes I think it's probably for the best. I mean, we're Cassian. We don't get to see it happen. It's right. We're told about it. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's really bracing.

42:51 And it makes her absence like in this episode. It puts us in Cassian's shoes. Right. That like before we even knew it, she was gone before we could come back. And then I think it will also pay off in the finale. Right? When we get to see her again. Yeah, the hologram stuff. When we get to be in her presence again. Exactly.

43:13 Like, it's better that way. The last real statement from her is that hologram speech. Mm -hmm. Yeah. I know we talk a lot, like, they've talked about B2Emo as, like, her pet dog. But there's something about this scene that almost makes me feel like it's, like, somebody with, like, Alzheimer's. Like, that's, like, I, it's almost more like her husband of, like, I want to see her. And they're, like, they can't really tell her that she's gone. He sort of can't really internalize it. There's something about it that's much more human than I think B2 has been in earlier scenes.

43:44 Yeah, I don't think that there's ever been a droid in Star Wars where you really feel like they have any sort of emotional connection. Obviously, C -3PO and R2 -D2 are characters who care about Luke and Han and Leia, but you never believe it in a sincere way. It's sort of like a heightened... sci -fi way of like oh no are they okay but it's never been like i have grief like grief has never flashed over the face of a droid it's always been played as a punchline Right? Like, C -3PO and R2, like, are as much a member of the team as anybody else in the Rebellion. But when C 3PO gets blown up, it's, you know, played as a joke that he gets carried around in a pile of scrap on Chewie's back. I think the only other

44:39 character that even gets close to that is Alex's beloved L -337 in Solo. That's a whole other story. Yeah. Yeah, who, you know, maybe doesn't show grief, but is, you know, able to share other emotions that we don't usually see droids get to have. The robot with two backs. I think the only time before this where I felt like they had feelings, like real, like human feelings.

45:11 was the scene in return of the jedi inside jabba's palace where one of the droids is being tortured yeah they put the like hot metal thing and he goes oh oh they have they have pain receptors um they're kind of like people and i think yeah there's an interesting thing about solo where it's like oh these are these are uh an oppressed minority the droids and then they don't have rights, but they also want them. They're sentient.

45:47 And you get the taste of the sort of quote -unquote racism against droids in A New Hope, where the bartender's like, no droids here. Why? Why are droids not allowed? Are they bad? Are they an underclass? Dave, you've been doing a lot of reporting about clankers, as they like to call them lately. i know you've written about like schools with ai and yeah yeah and uh what was the other one uh you had did you think about schools and you also did the uh what was it the the net then the meat kits The education ones for small kids and tracking your baby's biometrics.

46:28 Oh, yeah, yeah. You have cameras where it can tell you when your baby falls asleep and doesn't and how many flutters of their eyelids they do and all the stuff that we don't need to know. So my question is, are we the guy at the bar going, no clankers in here? Are we the people now who are going to... I mean, the reason they're at that point is because they just went through a whole war where droids were on the other side of it. So there's like a prejudice that's developed over that time. You have now added meaning to a meaningless film where George Lucas had no idea that was going to happen. I mean, the only mention of the war before was it's a clone war.

47:11 Yeah. The clone wars are over now. But the idea of the Trade Federation battle droids being evil. and everyone hating them is an interesting thing to look at in hindsight. Did people in Galaxy Far, Far Away have a resentment towards droids because of the Trade Federation? I don't know. Maybe we could say that, certainly. Nobody's picked up on that thread, but it's an interesting thing to talk about. And to Alex's question, I think yes, unfortunately. We will end up being those people hating the droids. I know I feel that way every time I see a Waymo. It's a great ride, though, let me tell you. I hate to say this, because now I'm selling out the human race.

47:59 But the human race has unfortunately proven itself to be problematic. You won't hear any argument against that here. Being in an Uber or even a regular taxi cab, it's like, you have made this so unpleasant that I would rather be in a car. operated remotely in some foreign country than be with you. And that's a terrible thing. But Uber has ruined it. Taxicabs were not great.

48:32 You watch any movie in the 20th century, people are complaining about taxicab drivers. It's an awful experience to be in, especially if you've been out. at a bar or a club or something and somebody wants to have a conversation with you and maybe you're feeling sick or whatever, you don't want to hear their music or smell whatever food they've been eating or the cigarettes they've been smoking or hear about their delusions of grandeur. One time I took an Uber and someone told me that he thought he might be Jesus. And I'm like, well, maybe a robot will come along and save me from this. What was the might be?

49:06 I had this thought that it's possible. that I could maybe potentially have some divinity in me. And I'm like, this is my stop. That's right there. Just drop me here. Just roll me out like a cannonball. Yeah, unfortunately, we have this system where the drivers of these cars are... Sometimes insane. Or too chatty. And you get into this vehicle that is going to take you where you want to go. You play your own music. It's air -conditioned. It's quiet if you want it to be quiet. It's loud if you want it to be loud.

49:51 Maybe the robots aren't so bad. I don't know. This is not a very well -cooked theory, but while you're saying this, it almost occurred to me, like, is the fact that, like, taxi rides and... Ubers are a rare situation where we as people are paying somebody else to do something and we just have to sit with that fact for a prolonged period of time like there's no mediation between like I am paying you to do this for me and I am superior to you because I gave you this thing to do this for me and that like having that contradiction of like I'm not forcing a human being to drive me to LAX this is just me and a machine there's nobody else involved there's some lack of complicity there i don't know i don't know if it's that

50:35 per se i don't know because there are so many instances where you have someone do something intimate for a service right like for a fee you know a service for a fee a haircut right a massage therapy um there is an inherent power imbalance all of those things you your housekeeper your gardener if you can afford such a wonderful uh luxury I think the difference is that in a cab, in an Uber, a Lyft, whatever it is, different from a subway car, different from any bus, you are not one of many. You are in a one -on -one environment with a stranger. It is so intimate in a way that any other form of transportation isn't. You have to figure out how to have a conversation with a stranger who also has your life in their

51:37 hands. They could make a wrong turn. They could speed through a stoplight. They could not take you home and take you into a field and shoot you in the face. They could do all these horrible things. Or they could have a bad conversation with you. It's not going to happen that way on a subway car or on a bus. Those sort of egalitarian communal environments feel safer to me than, okay, a person is picking me up in their car, their personal car. Yeah, that's the difference.

52:11 Whatever is in the car. Whatever is not in the car. Like, does the seatbelt work? Can I plug in my phone? Do they want to have a conversation with me about my career and try to network with me? This happens in L .A. and New York all the time. Do they want to ask me about my personal life? Do they have delusions of grandeur? Whatever it is, if you're a woman or another vulnerable part of our society, a trans person, whatever, are they going to do something horrible to you?

52:47 That doesn't necessarily happen on a bus or on the subway. That's the scary part to me, is it's way too intimate and way too intimate for a situation where it's just you and a stranger. I mean, a danger Mon Mothra will warn in future episodes. Yeah, exactly, right? Like, who's driving her spaceship, right? Like, somebody who might be working as a spy for the Empire. We don't know.

53:18 Yes. We don't know. But we do know. I was going to say, have you ever seen Good Morning by Yasujiro Ozu? I actually haven't seen that movie, but I love Ozu as a director. It's mostly just about, like, the people going, like, why do we just say all of these banalities of, like, how's the weather? How are you doing? And I feel like if he had to deal with Ubers, he would have, that'd be a very different movie of just, like, having, like, the banality of these things. And then, yeah. I always click quiet ride when I order an Uber, and they don't listen to that. I always say I want it to be cold. They don't listen to that. They do what they want. They talk to you if they want to talk to you. They have a heater

53:59 on when it's 90 degrees outside if they want. They don't care. It's more akin to being at Norquina 5 is what we're saying. It's kind of like that. Yeah, it feels like a little driving prison. Well. Poor B2, he's trapped here in the house as Marva gets taken outside, and she gets put on a lift that is driven by a human, I will say.

54:23 Thank God. And everybody out on the street, you know, watches in silence, except for one person, one man inside the calf shop who takes a sip of his coffee. Can I stop you for one second before you? Yeah, yeah, what's up? I love that the last scene starts with us looking right through B2's eye. And in the next shot, as the camera pans, the first thing we see is a round window of them on the streets. Yeah. Like that little virtual narrative of we saw through B2's eye and now you're seeing through this separate round eye of what's happening outside. I just thought it was a nice look. Yeah, I was going to comment on the fact that we, in this moment, don't get to be on the street. We're observing still. Yeah.

55:12 And obviously later on, we're in the thing, right? We're in this monumental moment where the forces of this culture standing up against a dictatorship are right in the path of this army and the confrontation and how that's going to play out. But at the beginning, you know, as we go into this episode, there's this distance from it. We're not quite there yet, but we know what's happening. And so much of this episode is about this. We know this is going to happen. The Empire is preparing for a confrontation that they want. And that's so fascinating about the show is that all of the confrontations are things that they want.

56:03 It's never like, oh, this is a real like this powder keg is just bound to happen. It's there are machinations. The ISB is planning all of this. And that's the scariest part of the show. It's like you as a person, hypothetically, presumably, that sides with the rebels, with the oppressed peoples of this show are like, yeah, you got to stick it to them. Fight back. But that's what they want. And that's an interesting thing because when you think about Minnesota, Minneapolis, and the confrontations with... ice in that town i think a lot of people's instinct was stick it to them you know blow up a car or like you know punch somebody in the face but that was the whole point of the thing and that's why i

56:54 keep coming back to andor is because there's a really clear roadmap for how these moments of authoritarianism like they grow it's because they want the antagonism. They crave that. And I think one of the great things about what we went through with that was the level of restraint. I mean, you go to season two of this show, and you go to Gorman, and you see, like, they want to fight back really bad. But again, that's, they want the gore to fight them. They want them to blow something up. They want the confrontation so that they have the pretext to take them off the planet. And this is a fascinating part of the show is to see that play out in a fictional context. What's interesting is we just ended

57:45 on Luthan's speech where he sort of talks about that it is his politics to immunitize those moments of conflict and how much he's had to destroy himself over doing that, knowing that by doing this, he is killing good people in order to create these situations where the conflict happens. Yeah, Luthan and the ISB are both trying to manufacture moments. They're trying to create theater. Saw, on the other hand, just wants to blow stuff up.

58:14 He doesn't really have any sort of high -level thinking, and that's why he's kind of a splinter group within the Rebellion. It's because he's just like, well, let's just get some bombs and let's get some blasters and see what we can accomplish with that. But Luthen is very, very focused on what are the optics of this? How do we be smart about this? How do I, and also Mon Mothma, how do we do this thing in the shadows versus out in the open? And I think that's a conflict and it's a tension that is expressed more in season two where Cassian ends up on Yavin 4. And they're like, just be part of this thing. Just be part of this thing. And he's like, nah, I'm good.

59:00 I don't want to be part of this thing because I'm going to do my thing in the shadows. I'm going to do this on my own terms. I don't need to be part of this big, bright, brilliant rebellion. I have another reason for doing what I'm doing. Yeah, and in this moment, you know, the opening of this scene, we were there with Bea. who has one of the most intimate relationships with Marva.

59:28 And now in this moment, we cut to the complete opposite side of the spectrum, which is this imperial spy who is just standing there keeping guard on her. And then we see Cinta finish cleaning up the tables outside the calf shop. And we see that she's a much... better spy and more capable at blending into the situation. And the guy asks her if she knows whoever's died, but Cinta plays dumb and ignores him. Although, yeah, Cinta plays dumb and ignores him, but I think in this moment she can tell exactly who he is and what his purpose is here. It's a stupid question to ask. Yeah, if you're trying to blend in the moves. Who's that? Come on. So are you just recently moving to Ferrix? Like, what the fuck? The jacket that's

1:00:27 clearly just been worn once and never folded. Which is a classic move, as we've seen, you know, in various real world situations. Like, those Timberlands that you're wearing and that Yankee hat, they seem like they were just purchased at a Marshall's. He got the Carhartt work in progress, not the Carhartt work wear. Exactly.

1:00:47 Yep, that's dead giveaway. But yeah, we get to see that things are dangerous for Cassian here on Ferex as well. But with that, we head over back to him. The Empire is bad at their jobs because for them to actually understand these local people would require people who have certain skills that are... against what the Empire would otherwise be doing. Somebody who would be good at understanding what it's like and how do you, you know, mingle in here comes from a certain place of curiosity or intelligence that the Empire usually does not want. And that plays out very clearly in Season 2 on Gorman, where you send the biggest doofus to infiltrate the Resistance, and they're like, we don't trust this guy at

1:01:33 all. Who is this little weasel? Why does he keep wanting to join our signal chats? Exactly. Yes. Let me find my spot. Okay. Out on the Sandy Inlet, we find two aliens arguing around broken crates in an unsubtitled language. Thankfully, we now know their names are Dewey Pamular, a Coretian, as first seen in Rogue One, and Freedy... No, is it also Pamular? Yeah, they're brothers. Oh, they're brothers, but they're different creatures, right? They, you know, they have different heads, but they're brothers. An alien of unknown origin.

1:02:11 I guess he's a crystal Coretian. I've seen conflicting reports whether they're the same creature or not. I think they're like brothers of the struggle, not brothers of the flesh. Brothers from different mothers? It's like twins. Or like that movie Four Brothers. There's two more of them. There's a Mark Wahlberg and an Andre 3000. There's one black brother and it's fine. It was my test to try and describe these guys, which was fun. Dewey is the taller of the two. His face looks like a deflated turtle, mushed on top of a stocky brown body with long arms, and a protruding belly under his fishnet shirt. He's wrapped himself in a sweater, some sort of floppy hat, and a contraption over one eye with a light lodge to

1:03:01 his forehead. Is that a fair way of describing Dewey? Yeah, I think so. It's not kind, but it's fair. We'll get to the fashion later. Thank you. Freedy, the slightly more humanoid of the two, has a squashed human face covered in scars. His hair is in a disheveled samurai chonmage, sheared down the middle with long hair on either side and a bun in the back. I think the contrast is if Dewey is covering his chest and revealing his body, his belly, Freedy is the opposite, all chest, no stomach. In fact, his stomach kind of looks like Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Frida's left arm is potentially intact or giant metal hand, but his right hand is gone, replaced by a sword knife thing that's very cool.

1:03:47 It is very cool. Do we want to save diving deep into them? Yeah, maybe a little bit. Yes. Yeah, I can skip those guys. Okay, okay. Yes. So we pan up to see Melshi and Cassian watching them up on a cliff. Cassian points out they didn't walk here. They didn't walk here, so they must have gotten here somewhere else, some other way.

1:04:09 So they crawl down to find a quad jumper, a little transport vehicle. Cassian's not sure if he can fly it. It's a bit of an antique, but they don't have much of a choice. And without warning, Melchie gets up and runs towards the jumper. Even if they saw it, he reasons, they wouldn't be able to stop them. He's right. The two aliens see them pace by, and the aliens simply as they watch.

1:04:31 But then a device is activated and the two are bagged in a giant web of alien goo. Dewey laughs and they struggle as the gross nets pull them away from the quad jumper. I love that there's always a vehicle. For whatever reason, these planets are just littered with abandoned spaceships. I don't know how this always happens. Like, oh, there's a ship there. Well, this is their ship.

1:04:55 Oh, it's their ship. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. This is their beat -up, you know, Ford Bronco that they drove out to the fishing hole. Yeah, okay. I see. I just always feel like there is some sort of happenstance. But you're right. That is their ship, and they're going to steal it. They put a couple of buds in the trunk. They had a couple road beers on the way over. If you've been to West Texas, these are two guys from West Texas who are just drinking Coors Light. And pirates. West Texas and then also pirates. But we'll get there in a little bit. Yeah, yeah.

1:05:31 I've got some info, some background info for that. Exciting. I do love that Melshi... wants to just run for it. Like throughout the Narkeena arc, we always see that he's not much of a planner. He's more of a doer. And meanwhile, Cassian is there like seeing all the angles. He's like, but you know, yes, there are two guys and they don't look like they're very fast. But what if there's a third guy, you know, taking a nap in the ship? He's able to see all the ways in which this can go wrong and prepare for that. And that's a microcosm of what the show is about, right?

1:06:07 We were talking about this before with Lucian and Saw and the differences between these two kind of factions within the rebellion is one does and one plans and one thinks and one prepares. And people get frustrated with that idea of like, let's stop for a second. You can't really have a resistance movement of any kind without, thought behind it. But one can also think too long. Yeah, exactly. And that's a beautiful tension of the drama, right? It's like nobody's 100 % right.

1:06:45 There needs to be a union of the two. And I think that's where you get to as you get to A New Hope. And the building of the Rebel Alliance is, yes, we have to be smart, but also at some point we've got to buy some more X -Wings and we've got to get some blasters and we've got to get some helmets and we've got to get out there and we have to stick it to them. We've got to blow up that Death Star. We sure do. FBI handlers who's listening.

1:07:14 In three years. Yeah. They'll get there. We've got to let it get built first, I guess. They couldn't just attack it. But that's something that I think this show does touch on a little bit, not fully, and you get more of that, weirdly, in The Last Jedi, of the economics of... war in this universe where you do have to buy weapons you do have to buy spaceships you do have to have someone funding it the idea of you know mon mothra mothma secretly funding the rebellion and and where do they get the the money to to build these forces and and do these operations and then in last jedi it's like oh here are all these war profiteers who are thrilled at the idea of there being another conflict because they need to sell tie fighters to people and

1:08:05 they need to sell X -Wings and they need to sell AT -ATs and that kind of thing. There's got to be some money involved in some way to build those forces. And so I imagine in those years between the end of the show and the bigger things that happen later in the films that there's, okay, we have to buy, let's see, we need how many of these? We need some of these. We need some of these. And who's going to get the money for it and where are we going to buy it from? in a clandestine way. Those practical things that go into actually waging war, Star Wars ignored for a long time because it's a fairy tale. But that's what we're interested in now, and that's what I'm interested in as an adult person, not a child. So we just

1:08:47 did an episode reviewing the rise and fall of the Galactic Empire. I don't know if you've heard about this. They basically did the rise and fall of the Third Reich, but about Star Wars. It's like an in -universe history novel. Where do they pull their sources from? Do they just make up a bunch of stuff? Most of the things in it are real references, but it's written by a guy who's trying, like, from Exegol, trying to, like, put together what's happened over the last 60 years. So it's taking historical analogs and applying it to the Star Wars universe. I mean, yeah, there's references that, like, the Wookiees had their own version of Showa. Oh, my God. The Wookiees are Jews now. Is everyone a Jew in this?

1:09:33 That's kind of my takeaway from that book. I love that. In that book, he goes into detail on everything. But my critique of it at the time was that it does not really go into the aspect of capital. And I think that is the thing that you were talking before about what capitalism can create. And that is always the third rail is we can't really get into the aspect of. This evil is being derived out of the system that requires, you know, spending money for commerce.

1:10:03 You know, it's to push people into doing things for money is the thing that is the most destructive. And we can't talk about that because that would, that's the form of presenting the, we exist under a capitalist system and this movie is being made under that. And I can't critique the thing that's making it. And that is the most fascinating thing about The Last Jedi. People malign the casino planet. I forget what it's called. It doesn't matter. But the Casino Planet second act, big chunk of the movie. People are like, why are we doing this? And who cares? And Finn and Rose are boring. And why do we have this, you know, Benicio Del Toro in the movie and all this stuff?

1:10:42 But it is fundamental to what Rian Johnson wanted to say about Star Wars. And it is the most contemporary thing that is added to those movies. Everything else is either nostalgia bait or a direct remake of a thing we've seen before. The other two movies don't add any new ideas to Star Wars. It just says, Star Wars is being remade essentially.

1:11:10 The bad guys are back. They wear very similar costumes. They have a similar logo. They're doing it all over again. Why, we don't know. Doesn't matter. Who cares? There's no ideology. They're just evil. But The Last Jedi says, well, This is being manufactured by the people who have the capital. And so now we're in this pleasure planet, this resort planet. Space Santa Monica.

1:11:36 Exactly. Or Space Vegas or Space Monaco or wherever. Space Sun Valley, where all these people congregate and make decisions. I don't know whose tweet I'm stealing, but it was a really good joke. The Canto Bight arc is just a... Story about two minorities getting arrested on trumped up legal parking charges. Yeah. It's like if a black person and an Asian person went to Mar -a -Lago and just left their car on the course. And that's one of the reasons why I love that movie is it's like Rian Johnson said, how are we going to contemporize Star Wars and what can we bring to it that's different? People got so mad. People were mad about other things. No, no, I feel like Candlebite is the thing I routinely see as the thing people

1:12:23 are maddest about. Yes, because they're not interacting with the idea. They're just mad that it doesn't relate to what's happening with the fleet, what's happening with Rey. It feels like a distraction. And also Finn is a character that was severely underwritten, that was designed to be more important, but was marginalized in that movie. And I think...

1:12:46 I'm not going to criticize Rian Johnson for not giving John Boyega more to do because that's his business and I'm not the director of that film. I'm not the writer of that film. But at the same time, you watch that movie and it's like, oh, Finn doesn't really have much to do. Finn's just kind of there. And so you're following the least interesting character. And maybe that's partially because of how his arc played out in The Force Awakens. You're not as invested in his story as you are what's happening on the ship. on the capital ship of the fleet, and you're not as invested as you would be if it was Rey.

1:13:22 You have the third lead, essentially, out of the three new leads, bumbling around a casino planet. But it's the core element of the movie, besides the end of it. The end of the movie directly ties back to the Canto Bight stuff, where you've got the little poor kid. And he realizes that he has the force and he can manipulate the broom or the mop or whatever. And that is the movie.

1:13:51 And if you don't see why Canto Bight is important, you have ignored the entire movie because you're just mad that Luke Skywalker is training a woman because he dies and he doesn't get to kill everybody with a sword. And you're mad a woman with pink hair got to tell the cool starfighter guy that he was wrong. Exactly. Like you're focused on the wrong things. And that is the problem with our society. We're all focused on the wrong things.

1:14:21 We're all focused on the identity politics when in reality the problem is class. And Last Jedi is a movie about class. Did you say the class Jedi? I got to tell Ryan Johnson about this idea. He's going to love it. He's like, I should call it that. Well, now that we have, you know, found the answer to society's problems. Maybe when we're done with Andor, we'll just talk about The Last Jedi every week. Rusty and I would be cool with that. Seven minutes of The Last Jedi.

1:14:51 I mean, it's a rich text. It's a rich text. Absolutely. It's very much worth, if you're going to do, like, the progressive leftist guide to Star Wars, you have to have Andor, you have to have... Rogue One. I don't love Rogue One, but you have to see Rogue One after. We will be covering Rogue One on the show, yeah. And then I think, yeah, go ahead. Last Jedi destroyed Hollywood. I can make a very compelling argument. It certainly destroyed a lot of people's brains. But I think, yeah. Now all of Hollywood is, how do we not piss off that fan base that Hollywood refuses to admit was like a juiced up subculture? It wasn't real. It was Russian bots. Well, it was real, but it was not. They were complaining.

1:15:39 It was real, but it was a hyper... They took it as such a fear of we can't piss off this fan base, ignoring the fact they don't really have as much capital power as they think they did, and they overreacted, and now we're in this bizarre industry place where no franchise can really push the boundary, and yet they go, why does no one want to see these big franchise movies?

1:16:00 And we're just sort of in this middle ground where they can't really figure out how to do it, except let's make Drive again, but... In space. And then also as a Marvel movie. They learned nothing. Can we talk about the Ryan Gosling jacket that they revealed for The Last Starfighter, which is the drive jacket again? I mean, fine.

1:16:22 I mean, I want the jacket. It's cool. But it's just that. I love Ryan Gosling. Who knows if it's going to be good? But I think the problem is they had two examples. Two different approaches, back to back. Okay, after Force Awakens is a huge, massive success. Gigantic. You've got this big jumping off point. In the same way that A New Hope, the first Star Wars movie, huge success.

1:16:51 Okay, what does George Lucas do? He says, I'm going to take this opportunity to tell a very bleak story. A second act where everything goes wrong for the heroes. After their huge success, everything goes wrong. We flip the table and all the pieces are scattered on the floor and we have to put it back together. If he had done the opposite of that, would we still be talking about Star Wars today? Probably not. You needed that to counterbalance the first movie and you needed to give the third movie a reason to exist.

1:17:26 So you have this big success, The Force Awakens. And it works because everyone's so excited for Old school Star Wars and new characters and the Millennium Falcon's back. Isn't that great? Okay, you've set it up. Now that you've got the chess pieces on the board, flip the table again. And that's what Rian Johnson did. He said, okay, here it is. Flip it. Surprise everyone. And then we'll pick up the pieces later. And then Disney said, oh, everyone's mad. Everyone's mad. Not everyone's mad. The movie still made a ton of money. And people forget, did the Empire Strikes Back make as much money as the first Star Wars?

1:18:09 No, it didn't. It made less by a lot. Why would anyone see the second one who did not see the first? Right. And some people who saw the first said, I don't even see it 500 times. I'll see it twice. It's okay. There's two of them now. And this one's kind of a bummer. People don't go back over and over again for a bummer. But did they show up for the third one because they want to know how it ends? Of course. So then, instead of seeing the opportunity that Lucas saw after doing this kind of edgy second film, Disney said, people are mad. We didn't make enough.

1:18:49 So let's put the pieces back on the table. Let's bring some old pieces. And let's pretend like the second one never happened. Yeah, they brought out the universal remote and hit the rewind button. It's like unplugging your PlayStation because you didn't like how the game turned out. And that's why Mandalorian and Grogu made $2 billion.

1:19:09 It... No, it did not. It lost money. You've ruined the whole thing because people, no matter how many people were mad... I guarantee you, if the internet existed when The Empire Strikes Back came out, people would have been like, Luke Skywalker's dad is Darth Vader? That is stupid. You've ruined this. How dare you? You've destroyed Star Wars.

1:19:36 You cut Luke's hand off? What is he, some kind of wuss? There would have been so much consternation over that movie for not giving you the same thing again. But they did that with... The Rise of Skywalker. And they said, hey, you know what? We don't like all this negative attention. We want everyone to love the movie. Guess what?

1:19:56 No one could say that everyone loved The Force Awakens. It wasn't a universal success because no movie is. And so Star Wars died at that point. When they had the opportunity to finish that trilogy and play the final notes of that symphony, they said, no, we're going to play... Rock and Roll Part 2 by Gary Glitter instead. Well, you know who else died? Poor Marva Andor. I will say, if people want to talk more about this, the Fall of Skywalker podcast goes into a really good way of what happened. Yes, the Going Rogue series about the rise of Skywalker. Highly recommend.

1:20:34 It's a great listen. You'll hear all this. extremely well. Much better than we can. I think I did a great job. Oh, you did an amazing job. Absolutely. If you want another five hours of it. I'm just mad still. I'll never not be mad about this. We're going to take it to our graves. No, I think part of the... Rusty made me want to do this podcast because he knows that I will just talk about The Last Jedi at any given moment as, like, the fall of society. So... Yeah. Something broke.

1:21:04 That and Ghostbusters. Something snapped. No, I would say if... If the Rise of Skywalker came out, got delayed by COVID, I truly think society would have been destroyed. If people had to wait for that for like two years because of COVID and then they released that, there would have been riots in the streets. They might have been able to write like a 50th draft, though. They would have fixed it. Yeah, I think JJ would have dropped out. They would have hired, you know, I don't know. Christopher Nolan. Just kidding.

1:21:38 He wouldn't do this. It would have been a different movie, and that would have been better. There's no guarantee of that. Yes. There's no guarantee of anything. It would have been different. If the version they made got delayed for two years because of COVID, people would have gone insane. To be fair, a movie that did get delayed because of COVID, No Time to Die, did not end up being significantly better because of that. I like that movie, but... It's still not great. Well, it did the opposite. They're all dead. See you later, folks. Bye. We killed your hero. Yes.

1:22:15 Speaking of dead heroes. Yeah. Speaking of dead heroes, we then move to a shot of Dedra looking like a stern full motion video game cut scene on a hollow screen. I'm going to the only place not ruined by capitalism. face face yeah get get dead ramiro in uh what is that series called red alert yes uh yeah But she is being informed of Marva's passing last night, and the prefect informs her that they are watching the situation carefully, although the people of Ferex are requesting a send -off for this very prominent citizen.

1:23:00 He says they're going to request a permit to close Rick's Road, but obviously we're not going to allow that. They're just doing it because they want to build a list of grievances. Dedra then surprises the crew by telling them that, no, we want a funeral. You're going to give them a permit, keep it small, limit the time, limit the numbers. We want to put them in a box, stand back, and watch. They have only two days to set this all up as according to Farrick's custom.

1:23:32 And what's that exactly? The dead are bricked. They mix your ashes with mortar and local stone dust, put your name on it, and fire it up. You become a block of ferric's brick, and then they find you a wall. And so I feel like in this extremely short scene, we have a lot that we can talk about. Also, just how quickly slang changes that within four years, getting bricked now makes me laugh.

1:24:00 Murph is getting bricked up. Oh, it's an erection. Yeah. I forgot that. That's what that means. Yeah. They had no idea. It's like if someone was like, oh, there's 67 people that are trapped on this spaceship. Six, seven. I want to say, I'm sure this has been said a thousand times on this show, and it will be said a thousand times again as you get into season two. Denise Goff is incredible in this role. as Deidre it's so easy to fuck up that role yeah she could have just been an ice queen she could have been overly neurotic she could have been too aggressive not aggressive enough there there's a moment in An episode in season two where she's telling – what's his face? Her boyfriend. Cyril. Cyril, yes. Thank

1:24:55 you. Cyril Karnes. The ultimate sitcom guy just who happens to be in Star Wars with the ultimate Jewish mom in space. And she's like, you got to leave. You got to leave, Gorman. Things are happening. Pack your bags. And he's like complaining and humming and hawing about – He's got a mission and all this stuff, and he feels like he's out of the loop, and she just gives him a big kiss.

1:25:23 She just grabs his head, and she kisses him with no sexual passion, but with, like, I gotta get you to shut up, and I'm just gonna kiss you. And you don't know if she really loves him or not, and I think you never really know at the end of the show if she really cares about this person or not, but she plays every aspect of this incredibly complicated person. super well and in that same episode that's when she finds out that like they're gonna go to gorman and they're going to forcibly relocate everybody and they're gonna wipe the planet clean because they need the stuff to make the death star and she looks horrified and you're like oh no she's a i thought she was a true believer but now she's

1:26:04 starting to see the the true scope of this thing that she's involved in and she has a humanity that is surprising but makes sense because you've seen her be vulnerable throughout the entire show she's a true believer and she's ambitious and she's deceptive and devious at times but she's still a person and that's what i was saying before is like star wars has historically been archetypes and one -dimensional characters and andor says what a star wars had people in it and she is the She's not the lead, obviously.

1:26:43 She's not the most important person on the show. But the show doesn't work if she doesn't work as that character. Yeah, in Star Wars, if you are a hyper -capable operator, you have to either... be Tarkin and look like a Hammer movie villain, or you're Grand Admiral Thrawn and you're this, like, ridiculous caricature of, like, a tactician.

1:27:10 But here, like, in this scene, we're getting to see Dedra in her element and able to play the 4D chess that nobody else is able to do. And even though at this point she's tortured Bix, you know, she's doing all this horrible stuff, we see her... make this plan and you're like damn you gotta hand it to her that is a great strategy she's a she's a survivor and i think in on both sides of the coin on this show the characters that rise to the top are the ones who are not necessarily the best people but they're the best at surviving And you see in those meeting, those ISB meetings, she's the one that can survive the grilling. She can survive the scrutiny and the pressure cooker of everyone's vying for position.

1:28:07 Everyone wants to be the golden boy, so to speak. And she just has a way of doing it. And of course, it ends up falling apart for her later on in season two. You're following her rise as she's just able to be savvy enough to avoid the obvious landmines that a lot of characters on that show can't. And Cassian's the same way, right? Cassian is the one on the other side who sees the pitfalls and can kind of jump over them, like Mario or something. Dave, you write a lot about fashion.

1:28:45 I think we'd be remiss to not talk about Deirdre's fashion for a little bit, especially season two. She gets wild out there. Oh, when she's in her casual outfits. They're like hanging out on Coruscant and stuff. Do you think Dedra monograms everything she owns? Like I do? For different reasons. I think she does it for different reasons. She wants to make sure no one takes her clothing.

1:29:06 That's hers. It's not bugs. Yes. I think she's obviously very fastidious. The way that they do her hair. in in in all of the scenes where she's in her uniform it's one of the most fierce and tight and uncomfortable looking buns i've ever seen on a television show like her hair is just cinched up and when she lets it down it's kind of it's kind of scary it's almost like when captain janeway takes her hair down on voyager you're like what's going on here um yeah and and her her casual wear is i mean star wars has never been i would say fashionable i don't think any of the clothes on star wars have been clothes that people would want to wear maybe han solo's jacket but if you wore that in public you look

1:29:59 like a jackass it's not it's not the same as, you know, other, other sci -fi fantasy, like even like Blade Runner. I feel like you could wear the coat, Deckard's coat from Blade Runner and be pretty cool. Or you could dress up, you know, like a character from the Matrix and go to, you know, a nightclub in Berlin or something.

1:30:19 But I just don't, Star Wars, just like people are wearing like Flash Gordon costumes and it's just not, it doesn't work. It works better on this show. Things seem more wearable. I think Cyril, some of Cyril's little uniforms and suits that he wears. His little alterations. Yeah, there's like, oh, it's a suit, but it's got like a strange collar or something. Like it's kind of, it's recognizable to human clothes. I wouldn't say that's been the case historically in Star Wars. In the Art of Andor book, they talk about how they had a lot of debates about whether or not Dedra would even wear casual clothes or if she just wears her uniform at home all the time.

1:31:05 We're making dinner and your mom's coming. I'm going to wear my imperial uniform. I mean, why not? It would impress Cyril's mom at least. Oh, she's got a good job. I feel like you have a good answer to this question. One of our sub questions is, Uncle Harlow, the unseen uncle who helps Cyril get his job. Yeah. Who would you want to be Edie Karn's brother in that situation?

1:31:32 Richard Kind. A man for our hearts. There's only one answer. It's Richard Kind. That's our number one choice. Cyril, what are you doing? You know the Empire is looking for people. Can I have a bite of that? Do you mind? Cyril, baby! I'm gonna go take a nap on the couch. I'll see you guys in an hour. I would love a sitcom with Cyril, his mom, and Richard Kind. Just a Star Wars sitcom on Coruscant. Harlow's home. Yeah, he's like the Kramer. He just shows up and he causes chaos.

1:32:11 Speaking of airing of grievances, so... uh before we move on from this scene i do really want us to to talk about the the concept of as alex put it getting bricked up i do think it's it the the silly joke aside it is a really beautiful concept and i think that um it really speaks to like the heart of this show which tony has described as like exploring the ways in which fascism destroys community And I think in this concept of becoming bricked, you become a literal part of the community at that point forever.

1:32:55 And I think in that way, allowing Marva to be our entry into that is really fitting for her character. The community is built from people and the people is built from community. It goes both ways. Yeah, and this is an example of Star Wars being more like Star Trek in that historically Star Wars has said, oh, this is a planet of Muppets.

1:33:21 This is the Wookiee planet. This is the planet of fish people. But they don't have a culture. They don't have anything that defines them, that makes them special. But every week on Star Trek, the Enterprise shows up at a planet. that has its own society, that has its own language, that has its own religion, that has its own political system. And those are the elements that make an episode. Star Wars is like, oh, this is the underwater planet. Everybody lives underwater.

1:33:52 Who cares? It's one city for the entire planet. Exactly. It's like, oh, this is everything. Star Trek kind of does that too, where it's like, oh, this is, you know, we're going to beam down to this city and this is everything. But also there's still some thought into like, How do they interact with each other? The only time we really get that in Star Wars is my favorite Star Wars movie, The Phantom Menace, where you have two societies operating both independently and symbiotically. And they have their own culture, they have their own way of doing things, and they don't... interact very often but they have to work together in order to stop the trade federation but usually it's just like you know this planet's

1:34:35 blue this one's brown this one's green whatever well in the art of andor book they talk a lot about how it was actually a really controversial decision for them to build Ferrix out of brick. The conversations were among the design team that brick is not something that we see in Star Wars. And this is something that the Andor haters like shout. tout as being like this show is just all like brown and bricks and that's not my star wars and i think that in this scene we see how tony is able to justify that right okay you're saying that bricks are not you know what towns are usually built out of why is that then Why would this town be made out of brick? And let's invest it with this deeper meaning in order to

1:35:24 then justify the nerds who, you know, are going to get mad at us for saying that this hasn't happened before. I mean, that's just good writing to see the contradiction. Exactly. And let's lean into that contradiction and explore it, not just go, oh, that's a plot hole. Let's explore that plot hole. Or shirk away from it and not use the brick, right? Like other people would hear that and say, well, I guess I can't use brick then. What you need to do as a creator is... say, I want to use brick. Let's figure out a way to make that happen. But that's such an asinine complaint. Oh, absolutely. I've never seen a brick before in Star Wars. And it's a massive galaxy. Yeah. And that's, I think, the problem that a lot of Star Wars fans have perpetrated

1:36:06 on the franchise is it's got to be the planets I've seen before or planets that are kind of similar to ones I've seen before. Tatooine. is a desert planet with a bunch of space hobos. So why not, in The Force Awakens, we have another desert planet with another set of space hobos, and people will not complain because it's basically Tatooine again. And that's so stupid. It's supposed to be a massive galaxy where there's all kinds of different people. You see the Senate in The Phantom Menace, and it's this massive... where it just seems like it keeps going and going and going, and there's all these people and all these different planets and different aliens and different languages, but you're saying that none of them

1:36:55 use bricks? None of them. E .T. doesn't know what a brick is. We literally saw an underwater civilization in The Phantom Menace. It wasn't made out of brick. It was made out of bubbles. Why the fuck wouldn't it be bricks? They're underwater! But you have to have variety. Otherwise, you run out of stories. And you see that happening with Star Wars now. It's like we're running out of stories because there's this narrow idea that has been perpetrated by the fact that Disney and Lucasfilm were terrified by the negative response to The Last Jedi. What's the disease of the reactionary mind? This is what I like, and I don't want it to be any farther than that.

1:37:39 Yep. This is the limit of my imagination. And once you put limits on the imagination, you have put limits on the stories you can tell. And so now, as Star Wars becomes less and less relevant, my son is eight years old. That is, pretty sure, the target audience for Star Wars. I would disagree, which is the problem. Well, it's supposed to be. The target demographic right now is millennials without kids who put all their money into buying figurines. But it's supposed to be, right? When George Lucas created Star Wars, he made a movie serial for children. And he did that again with the prequel trilogy. He said, I'm making Phantom Menace. There's going to be a kid protagonist.

1:38:25 The kids are going to relate to this character. And then I'm going to eventually make him evil. And he's going to kill a bunch of people. But they have to like him first. And they have to relate to him. And they have to see themselves through his eyes for it to matter. And now, to your point, it's just for grownups who have nothing better to do with their time. But it's not that.

1:38:47 It's at its core. And my son, when I ask him, do you want to sit down and watch the Star Wars movies with me? He's like, no, I would rather not. I have no interest in this whatsoever. My friends don't like it. We don't talk about it on the playground at school. I don't need this in my life. I don't care. And that is because they have limited their imagination. And so whatever a kid today might like is not relevant to them because it's not, to your point, for them. Now it's for someone like me who has disposable income and wants to pretend like he's still eight years old. And we get to do that every week here on Andorx. That's the exact opposite of what Andor is, though. Andor is like, what if Star Wars

1:39:35 was for the target audience, but spoke up to their intelligence and not down to their intelligence? If you're going to make a Star Wars for people in their late 30s and early 40s, speak up to them. Don't speak down to them and treat them like adults and say, OK, we get that you still like this. Here's the thing. That is for adults.

1:39:59 Speaking for adults. Let's go back to the giant. Aliens on Narkina. Hell yeah. Good old Dewey. Dewey and Freedy. Back on Narkina. Back inside the goo. Cassian watches as Dewey exclaims. Micey me. Freedy in half Narkinese clarifies. Prison hiya. Escapers. Toolzy tool in fact. I can't. it's rules it's so good uh i have been looking forward to covering this scene for a very long time because you know you're talking about how andor does not talk down to us and there's a lot of people who say andor is embarrassed to be a star wars thing and yet here we are our our hero has escaped from a a fascistic technologically advanced prison and now has been captured by these backwoods redneck alien fishermen who talk

1:41:06 like Jar Jar Binks. Pirate Yoda. Yeah. Pirate Yoda. Yeah, exactly. A thousand offer. A thousand each the offer be. One for each of us, 3D. Like in a rhyme. It's so funny. It's all iambic pentameter if you noticed. It's like Shakespeare. I don't know that, actually. I'm just kidding. It rhymes. You know, it's like poetry. It rhymes. Dewey points out that it's better fishing on land, especially as these humans have, quote, killed our water, hey -ya. Inside the net, Cassian doesn't know what he's talking about. Dewey quickly clarifies and explains, not much squiggling now, not much left. Cassian tells them they have met no harm, just some light larceny, but they haven't killed anything. Not true. They haven't killed the squigglies.

1:41:59 That's true, yes. Cassian is a very good liar when he has to be. Dewey tells him it was that scob in prison that ruined their water. All that water. Hey, yeah, Freedy. Freedy is in agreement. No biggie dinner tonight like pastimes, Freedy, Dewey asks. Cassian tries to explain we were trapped here. It's not our fault. Dewey's goggles make some hydraulic noises and it spins around.

1:42:26 Always blame the Empire, huh? I know this is canceled, but it is just like Mad -Eye Moody from Harry Potter. I see it. I wouldn't know. I don't like that at all. That show. Or a movie. No, it doesn't exist. What is it? Yeah. Cassian tries to explain. Oh, yes. Freedy says something to Dewey. Cassian asks for a translation. Freedy sheathes his sword as Dewey tells him. He's saying, alive or dead, the offer goes. Freedy asks, toosie tool. So I've got some behind -the -scenes info to share about these Narcanese, which is that according to Tony, this sequence had the most meetings of deliberation as any scene in the entire first season of the show, where basically they were trying to figure out, can we actually

1:43:25 do a scene? that is this overtly comedic in Andor because the show had been so serious up to this point. And he cites it as the most successful creature that he wrote in season one, too. He clearly did not feel... Like the the glup shittos, for lack of a better word, were his domain. But he wrote this whole alien language for them and really seemed to enjoy doing it. And he says people were like, if you can do that, why aren't you doing any more of it? But it was a lot of work, he said. So as as rigorous a writer as Tony Gilroy is, I think even he he saw the aliens and said, I don't want to deal with that. I don't think it was funny. I don't watch this scene and say, oh, this is hilarious. I'm laughing.

1:44:19 Like, there's obvious peril, right? We've just been through this three -episode arc where our hero is in, you know, Guantanamo Bay, essentially, or some sort of, you know, black site prison. And I'm not like, oh, boy, isn't it funny that he's in the goo web and he's not able to get out? all that stuff. I'm like, oh, you know, I hope that he gets out because I've invested in him emotionally. And I think that's one of the things that separates these sort of wacky alien monster, not monsters, but alien, you know, creatures from Jar Jar Binks, from some of the other, you know, great glupshiddos of Star Wars history is they're placed into A dramatic situation, a perilous situation. When you watch the cantina

1:45:17 scene from A New Hope, are you laughing at them? Are you laughing at the racist bartender? Are you chuckling at the band and the weird noses and all the silliness of that? No, not necessarily, because you've been told this is a scary place. And it's alien in every sense of the word. And this is supposed to be, it's like deliverance, right? Like, I'm not supposed to be here. I don't speak their language. They don't understand me and they just see me as, you know, a big bag of meat. I'm an intruder on their society. So I didn't think of it as like a comedic moment.

1:46:00 I thought of it as a moment where Cassian is in a really tough spot because he can't, he's really good at negotiating. with people to get what he wants. The prison was another situation where he couldn't negotiate, right? He's under this very oppressive system and the guards don't care about, you know, what he has to say. He can't use his, his wits to escape. And in this situation, he also can't use his wits to escape.

1:46:31 And there are moments at the beginning of season two. similarly where he's kind of stuck in a place where he can't get out and he can't use his cleverness because it's another alien situation. I didn't think of it as funny. They're funny looking and the way they talk is kind of weird. Maybe funny is not the correct word, but the way that Tony talks about it, he calls this his Sergio Leone meets the Coen brothers scene. And I think that what it's doing is that these are...

1:47:02 Very colorful characters, right? They're unlike anybody we've ever seen before on the show. But even in this moment, you know, as kind of big a character as they are, they're still relating to the show and speaking in the language of the show, talking about the way in which, you know, the prison has killed their fish and they're better off, you know, fishing on land for the...

1:47:28 the escapees of the prison than fishing for the food that they, you know, have subsided on for. Yeah, it's not a dramatic departure. Yeah. Other than the fact that these are aliens. And we haven't seen that. As you said, you know, we didn't get the classic, you know, Star Wars. Here's a bunch of interesting creature designs and they all speak a funny language and they're everywhere.

1:47:52 This was a very distinct departure aesthetically. But as you said, this is part of the show. Like, how did these incursions of the Empire affect the native population? Yeah, I think... Funny is not the right word, but there's like a joy in seeing creatures that look like this engaged with seriously. The fact that Cassian sees them as much as a threat as anybody else when we know that they look like this just has some sort of...

1:48:19 I don't know what level of irony that is. Not a dramatic irony, but the fact that they look like this to us is funny. I think there's something inherently... There's a contradiction there that just humor comes out of. I think that's... It's deliverance. Deliverance could be funny if you don't think about the fact that they're going to be assaulted. I mean, people have made a lot of inappropriate jokes about... So deliverance.

1:48:43 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. But it's the same sort of idea of this alien culture. And they're so different from us that they you could laugh at it. But I also think it's a counter to what we've seen of just like you're saying of episodes of just people in the same uniform and go like, oh, right. This planet is also filled with people who are a different race. We're just seeing one small window of it is a nice reminder of what Star Wars could be with of like everywhere you go, the universe gets wider and wider and there's more things the more you. the more you explore.

1:49:12 Yeah. And if I can draw a line from this scene to Return of the Jedi, I don't know if you looked up who plays Mr. Dewey. It is English actor, animator, and puppeteer Mike Quinn, who's best known for playing Nynum in episode six. Oh, wow. I thought it was pronounced Nynum. I think it's 9 -num. Is it 9? I've always said 9 -num, so.

1:49:42 It's a yum -yum. Yum -yum. He also performed Sice Noodles, so he is. Oh! Yes. That was my third Glubsha, though. We can give you a third. I think you've earned a third. Yeah, you can have a third. Okay, fair enough. Everything about the Max Rebo band is a joy to me, and Jedi Rocks is actually cool. So you guys are wrong. We didn't say anything bad about it. Yeah, we... No, I'm saying to the audience. Yeah, yeah, the audience, you're wrong. Right now, furiously smashing their cell phone that they're listening to this on and being like, Jedi Rocks is stupid. What is he talking about? No, you misunderstand our audience.

1:50:24 Evolved Star Wars fans who appreciate the special editions. Just appreciate some classic jizz. I want to know who decided it was going to be called that. George. No. It had to be. No, no, no. It had to be like an extended universe. I assume it's like a bricked up situation. I assume that the slang came later. They didn't know.

1:50:51 If I change one letter in the word jazz, it'll be fine. Jizz. Okay. Wrong again. Guess what? Time moves on. They tried reckoning for a second, but they gave up. Yeah, it didn't work. It's going to be jizz forever, and we're just going to have to accept the jizz in our life. That's the end of our episode. It's going to be jizz forever. A bucket full of jizz. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. A bucket full of jizz. Speaking of jizz, they're giant nets that they've been caught in. Kind of look like jizz. Yes. Cassian tries to explain, we were trapped here. We did this already. Freedy says something to Dewey.

1:51:36 He's saying, alive or dead, the offer goes. Sorry. Cassian desperately exclaims, let's talk, let's talk. But will they talk? Is this the end of our intrepid hero? You'll have to listen to next week to find out. Will they talk to Cassian? Because we're done. Yes. Dave, you survived. We talked to Cassian, they will. We started with a cliffhanger and we end with a cliffhanger.

1:52:01 It's a great seven minutes. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for being here, Dave. Is there any final thoughts or anything about the show that we didn't get to touch on in these seven minutes? I mean, I will say that it is remarkable that this show It's still being discussed. When it is the least popular Star Wars show from minutes watched that there has ever been on Disney+.

1:52:34 I think even more people watched the Acolyte than this. If it's not the worst, it's close to the worst. It cost more than most of them. And it is better than all of them combined. And we're trying we're trying our best here to keep it in the conversation. I think it will never leave the conversation. I think there are shows that transcend their moment. If it's The Sopranos, Twin Peaks, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Hill Street Blues, Law and Order that just like define a generation. They define a certain style of television show. I don't think. There is a better show from this era, period. Can you name one? A streaming show. Not that it was more successful, because obviously Andor was not a huge, massive hit.

1:53:36 But what was better since COVID? Is there a better streaming show? I don't think so. I think this is it. I'm waiting for you to tell me there's nothing else. There's nothing else. Nothing. It's what we were promised that streaming could be. It could be we're going to spend all this money to do all these incredible things and go in these incredible directions. And we won't care if people watch it or not because as long as they're paying $9 .99, which is not the cost anymore, it's like $20 a month or something.

1:54:09 As long as they pay for it, we don't care. And now it's become the opposite. They not only need to watch it immediately, they have to watch it in the first 24 hours it's out or else it's a failure. Exactly. This is the one. When 2030 comes along and we're asking ourselves what were the best TV shows of the 2020s, if this isn't number one, then something will have come out in the next four years that was better than this.

1:54:34 And I mean, like, part of the reason to do this show, right, is we're going to be doing this for, like, another... Two years, Alex. Think about that. And in what other ways is this show going to reflect, you know, whatever horrors await us in the next two years, you know? I'm trying to think of it as, like, boy, we can look back and say, glad that's over. But you're like, no, there's going to be so much more. Wait till you get to the Gorman stuff. Well, I mean, you know, you mentioned, you know, you referenced, like, Minnesota and, like, the protests there.

1:55:06 And, like, here in this seven minutes, we got to talk about death. you know saying that we need to provoke a reaction we need to provoke a situation in which we get to observe and gather information and in here in this scene you know with with our fisherman friends They're talking about ecological collapse. They're talking about the death of all their animals. It's like a data center. Like, oh, we put a data center in your town and all the crops died. Literally, yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's just so much there. And it's a testament to Tony Gilroy spending so much time learning about this stuff. And he said, like, all I did was I read a bunch of books about the rise of fascism in the world and all of the

1:55:48 times that this has happened and just put it in a TV show. And it's just... It's free real estate. All that history is free real estate when it comes to writing. It's just there to be taken. You've got to read it. Well, there's unfortunately, I would say, a lot of TV writers who are not interested in that. No, what if we made a show about two assistants who get involved with Hollywood who want to... Yes, what if I look deeper into my navel? And then I'm sure I'll find some gold in there amongst the dust.

1:56:19 Anyway, this was a pleasure. I really enjoyed going back. It's been a while since I watched this show, and this is making me want to start from the beginning and rewatch it a second time. Well, looking ahead to season two, we would love to have you back. Is there anything you'd like to call your shot for? Oh, I have to do the scene where they have the dinner party. I have to.

1:56:45 I have to. My dinner with Needy. Yeah. Other than like every scene with her is so good. And as much as I love that first one where it's like, oh, my God, they really went with this person and they're doing this and he lives in this. But that like the tension of the three of them in that room and all of it and the way that the three of those characters bounce off of each other. It was like it was like watching my wedding day all over again. My only issue with Edie is that I guess Tony Gilroy is that. Edie's house, all of their couches are not covered in plastic.

1:57:20 That is my only complaint. Well, I mean, Star Wars rules might be different. I don't know. It might be an invisible plastic. It could be, yeah. It could be some sort of like a shield, like an electrical field over it. It's made out of plastic. It comes laminated. What if the whole plane was made out of the black plastic? Anyway, yes, I would love to talk about just that scene because it's some of the funniest and most true writing I think I've seen. We're going to spend an hour talking about Cyril hiding on the bed.

1:57:59 That alone. Again, I've been in that situation multiple times. So I must, I must, I must. Dave, thank you so much. This was. Thank you. A pleasure. Do you have anything you'd like to plug and where can people find you? Yeah, you can find me on X if you have to, if you simply must, at Dave underscore Schilling. I don't use it unless I'm retweeting something incendiary or funny. And then I'll do some promotion on there also if I have to. I'm at DW Schilling on Instagram.

1:58:35 If you are interested in my short film that is doing the festival rounds now, you can follow it at Can't Float. It is a thinly veiled... Romana Clef about me trying to learn how to swim as an adult in a children's swimming class. And hilarity ensues. And you can also... Buy my book, Horror's New Wave, 15 Years of Blumhouse. If you are a horror fan and you are a fan of those particular movies from Blumhouse, it's available anywhere from Simon & Schuster. You can go to Amazon, go to your local bookshop, which is better.

1:59:12 There's an audiobook with human beings who read it, shockingly. It's great. As opposed to AI. Any way you want to read it, it's available and I hope you buy it. When you have back, I want to talk more about Five Nights at Freddy's because that's such a bizarre... You can't bring up Five Nights at Freddy's two hours into the show. No, I'm saying next time. I'm saying next time. We'll talk about it next time. I am not going to talk about that movie. There we go. He refuses. I don't want to. If you want to know what I thought about the movie, read the book. Don't make me talk about it publicly. It's just so funny how immediately Chuck E. Cheese, what if Chuck E.

1:59:49 Cheese became so completely understandable to Gen Z that they had to make a horror film out of it? But also we're talking about, you know, making films for fans. And that is a film that is, you know, so lore accurate that every 13 year -old boy you know loves it and can tell you all about it, as I have heard many a time.

2:00:12 What I will say, agnostic of my opinions, is in the book, you know, I talked to Scott Cawthon, who created Five Nights at Freddy's. He rejected many versions of that film and ended up co -writing the first one and writing the second one by himself. And they really went the extra mile to make sure that it lined up with the things the kids...

2:00:39 wanted to see from the video game and that they satisfied him and and all of that stuff and there are pros and cons to that and you see that with star wars sometimes it's better to uh adhere to the dogma and sometimes it's better to say what if it was a little different and you know it's a choice that people make when they have quote -unquote intellectual property to deal with well if you want to hear all about that be sure to get the book uh because there's a lot to dig into there. Yeah, don't ask me about this again. I have nothing else to say. It's a great movie. You should rent it. Well, I could say Wayne Knight would also make a good Uncle Harlow. Oh. He's a little too big for me. I would...

2:01:22 What about Matthew Lillard? That's too Koyasha. I love... Yeah, you need a Jew for that. Charles Grodin would have been a great actor if he was still alive. Oh, man. We know he loves Miss Piggy, who, you know, if we're talking Muppets, like Edie. Albert Brooks is also great. Albert Brooks is retired from acting, but otherwise would be incredible. And a great actor himself. Anyway, thank you guys. This was a pleasure and a half, and I love this show, and I'm glad that I could offer some... meager insights into what it's about. Yeah, this was more than plenty. Thank you so much for joining us and thank you all for listening. Please be sure to rate and review the show on your podcast platform. It really

2:02:20 helps spread the word. All you gotta do is go on there and say podcast good and give it five stars. That's literally it. And don't forget, Live long and prosper. Am I right? Yes. We'll bring you back on the Star Trek seven minutes at a time show for that one. You would never end that. No, it would be horrible. There's like a thousand hours of Star Trek. kill yourself you can check out our patreon at patreon .com slash and orcs pod where for just five credits a month you'll get our full and orcs detours including last week's episode talking all about the rise and fall of the galactic empire you can follow and orcs on social media at and orcs pod send in your questions about the show to and orcs pod at gmail .com and we will see you

2:03:18 next week for part two of season one, episode 11, Daughter of Ferex. Later, dorks. Bye, dorks. Bye, dorks.