House of R - Our 10 Favorite Musical Moments of the Century (So Far)

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Sing along with Mal and Jo as they go through their favorite musical moments of the century. They talk about everything from ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ to ‘The Leftovers’ and ‘Lost’! Musical Moments Playlist (00:00) Intro (05:55) Our favorite musical moments (27:02) Jo’s no. 10 (34:18) Mal’s no. 10 (40:43) Jo’s no. 9 (46:10) Mal’s no. 9 (56:45) Jo’s no. 8 (01:03:11) Mal’s no. 8 (01:10:24) Mal’s no. 7 (01:19:00) Jo’s no. 6 (01:26:38) Mal’s no. 6 (01:35:09) Jo’s no. 5 (01:40:50) Mal's no. 5 (01:49:08) Jo’s no. 4 (01:55:46) Mal’s no. 4 (02:04:07) Jo’s no. 3 (02:11:42) Mal’s no. 3 (02:19:05) Mal’s no. 2 and Jo’s no. 7 (02:26:29) Jo’s no. 1 (02:35:03) Mal’s no. 1 and Jo’s no. 2 (02:49:52) Honorable mentions Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Mallory Rubin Producer: Carlos Chiriboga Social: Jomi Adeniran Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopowell and John Richter Prepare for one last adventure at Target. Visit https://target.com/StrangerThings Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Greetings and welcome to House of Our. A Ringerverse podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network. I'm Mallory Rubin. Joining me today now that she's finished dance walking down the street with an evil Peter Parker. It's Joanna Robinson. Hello, Joe. Mallory, this is the podcast I've been waiting my entire life for.

Tell people what we're doing today. We are doing our 10 favorite musical moments of the century so far. So the genre-specific film and television. This is our third installment of the sort of best of the century so far series. This is so how Samar, I can't even, I'm so excited for this. Just the absolute pinnacle of sharing our passions with each other. There will be laughter. There will be tears.

There will be some ill-advised singing from both of us. Correct. Perhaps even some dancing. This is a video podcast, so who knows? All right. We're going to explain all of the eligibility rules and criteria. more specifically, and then get into our lists right after this. This episode of House of ours is presented by Target.

Have you heard? Stranger Things is back at Target, and it's time to gear up for the upside down. Head back to the 80s with awesome exclusives like the unreal Demogorgon popcorn bucket, the fog over Hawkins candle that reveals secret messages, and the Demogorgon bundle box that's full of cool surprises. New items are dropping all season long. So prepare for one last adventure at Target. All right, Joanna.

Before we explain all of the particulars of how we will be structuring this best of today, some quick programming reminders. There's a lot going on, as always. Over on the ringer verse, the Midnight Boys, boop, pooh, pew. Potting at the end of this week about Predator Badlands. It seems like everybody loves that movie. It's across the board popular. Seems like exciting. Great stuff.

I haven't seen it. Can't wait to see it. Can't wait to listen to the pod. Here on the House of R. Next week, at the top of the week, we will be concluding our Stranger Things rewatch. We'll be doing Stranger Things Season 4, Part 2, which for our purposes means episodes 7, 8, and 9. And then in the back half of next week, we're doing some movie stuff. Yeah.

I'm about some films. More details to come. I mean, can I tease something? Sure, you can. We haven't seen the movies yet. So, you know, subject to change, but go for it. One of them probably stars. Mm-hmm.

Yep. A newly minted ringer podcaster is what I would say. There you go. I love that. Great things. Yeah. Perfect. Oh, man.

Joanna, how can everybody follow along? Oh, my God. I'm so glad you asked. Listen. The bad babies have really been showing up recently. The Stranger Things emails have been on point. And even though we only announced that we were doing this podcast two days ago, we got so many responses from the bad babies of, like, their suggestions for musical moments.

So hobbits and dragons at gmail.com is where you can always reach us with anything if you have thoughts about, musical moments, you know, a Christopher Nolan film we haven't talked about yet. Your Stranger Things theories, like whatever the case may be, hobbits and dragons at gmail.com. Follow us on the social media platform of your choice. Anyone that you choose, I support you in all your endeavors. Subscribe to the podcast. That's a good idea. Should have started there, but I didn't. I recommend it. Yeah.

Figure out where the podcasts are and subscribe to it. I'm really excited about this era of House of R. It's been really, really fun. And I feel like the bad baby is really showing up. For this podcast specifically, I might recommend watching it. Oh. Because not only do we have some clips today, unusual clips today, which we will talk about. But if we do wind up singing, I feel like you're going to want to see that.

So we're on YouTube. We're on Spotify. We're on Samsung. You can watch us. So, you know, why not? Everywhere. I definitely had. I mean, I have this feeling pretty routinely podcasting with you, but I had this very, very

acutely and intensely last night, like a real, just can't believe I get to talk about all these things I love so much with the person I absolutely adore. I know. I spent the last two days just sort of like drowning in the topic because, again, we We did not plan this very far in advance. We both had absolute meltdowns and panic attacks about it. But I was like, but what a joyous thing to lose my marbles over. I know.

This thing I love so much. There's pleasure in the pain and that's something. On the spoiler warning front before we get into a little bit more about what an act of torture this was yet again and all of the eligibility particulars. What do you want to say on the spoiler front? I mean, I think it's the same one we've been using for the best of the century so far, series. We've already done speeches.

We've already done villains. Check those out if you haven't yet. We're going to do a few more after this, so keep the suggestions coming. Spoiler warning is basically if it came out in the last 25 years, we might talk about it today. There's a couple things that I'm going to add that I've kind of want to talk around a little bit. But the problem I would say with like a musical moment is that it is often like a hugely impactful, emotional. Yeah. Often like a climax of a story or something like that. And so it's just like we will do our best to for things that are not like big, big and everyone's seen them.

Do you know? Like, if Thrones comes up today, we're going to assume you guys don't care about Game of Thrones spoilers. But we will be talking about what the property is before we start talking about it. So if you feel particularly skittish around that,

you can skip ahead to the next item. There you go. Should we get into it? Should we get to the rules? Let's do it. This episode is brought to you by Sweet Green. The day doesn't ask for permission. Lunch window?

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Here's the process. We are counting now once again from 10 to 1. And once again, our lists are surprises. I don't know what's on your list. You don't know what's on my list. If we have picked the same musical moment, we will discuss it at the higher of two spots. If we have discussed,

if we have something from the same property, but not the same exact moment, we can do them separately. Do them separately. Yeah. And then we will probably save our smuggles for the second property location. Something I was going to suggest is if, like,

let's say we pick different Thrones moments. When we get to that like top thrones moment, then we won't be like, but also these other throne moments. And that's, we will once again have honorable mentions today. We're going to have a lot of honorable mentions today. We're going to have our honorable mentions. We're going to have your honorable mentions. If you just go to honorable mentions and you're like,

what about all these other things that didn't make your top 10 and aren't listed here? They're probably in the top 10 as smuggles. Because if they are in a given franchise, we might mention them more contextually there. The time frame. obvious, but just to say it, January 1st, 2000 through this very moment in time. Now, to be clear, the song that is featured in the given musical moment can be older. A song could be from the 50s, the 60s, whenever. But the rendering, the moment that it was in a film or a show in this particular scene and moment that we're talking about,

has to be from 2000 to 2025. Yes? Yep. What properties are we covering, Joanna? Okay, this is a TV and film list, as we mentioned. Eventually we'll probably do something related to books, but... I think honestly we're just scared because it's just like how it would possibly do it. It's so hard.

We talked about like reading our favorite passages. It's just like how do you... This would be even harder than this was for us possibly. So anyway. That's when we get to the end of December and we're like, we have all these ideas. Let's just keep it going into 2006. And then like next July we do that or something. Best of the Quarter Century Plus One coming to you next year.

But so we're not doing these stage musicals. And to be clear, these do not have to be stage musicals, obviously. Right. Like, for the most part, actually, I did not pick things from actual musicals. But film and TV versions of stage musicals are eligible. So if, say, for instance, we want to talk about Wicked that came out last year, we could on this list. Yes. But only half of it.

So, you know, there's that. Let's hit the next bullet point in great detail here. Let's really emphasize this one. This is one that slips by our listeners every single time. And what is the premise of the podcast, Mallory Rubin? It's House of Our we cover genre storytelling. That includes sci-fi, fantasy, horror, anything with like a supernatural element to it, is what we would say. We will not be talking about, we got a lot of suggestions for like, your gray's and

Or Scrubs came up, a lot of medical shows do music. Scrubs came up a ton and people's suggestions and stuff like that. Scrubs has like some fantasy sequences. And so maybe if we really wanted to push for it, we could do something like Scrubs. But we're not going to be talking about once an incredible musical that we love. A complete unknown, a movie that we enjoyed together. Or this is an example you put in here and it's just absolutely brilliant. Landry and Crucifitorious rocking out on Friday Night Lights.

That is not eligible today. Sadly. So I know in the comments you guys are going to say, but I can't believe you missed and it's going to be something from a non-house of our property. I can't stop you, but we just, we have to say it. And now we have. We have. We also want to emphasize that the exercise today is to list our favorites.

These are our favorite things. So it's not necessarily like a comprehensive list. It's not designed to reflect consensus over what was the best or the most impactful or animated the zeitgeist. Maybe all of those things will apply to certain picks, but maybe not. There are the moments that mean something to us and that we chose for reasons that we will explain as we go through the list. I will say that like, you know, so I went on blue sky and Twitter and sort of put out a call for people to come. Because you and I were both afraid that there was something obvious we were going to miss. And we were just like deathly afraid of that, right?

Yeah. I will say, though the bad baby showed up incredibly on both of those platforms and in the email inbox, it actually didn't change my list at all. But it was really to know that like there wasn't anything that I didn't already have on my list that like, you know, with one exception, which we'll talk about when we get it. It's on your list. But that being said, I would get like a large volume of responses of a different musical moment. from a property.

From a property. And I was like almost pulled. I was like, should I do the one that everyone says it should be? And I was like, no. I'm going to do the one that I actually think is. Yeah. So I, I, this is interesting because we both love music. We'll talk about that more in a minute.

This is like one of your passions, right? Musicals, musical moments. So from the second, the second we decided to do this, you were, I think it's fair. to say euphoric and at a transcendent state of jubilation and also like, should we do 50 instead of 10? How is this going to be possible? I did ask you to expand the list. You did say to be like a midnight text. Uncharacteristically. I was like, can we do more? And uncharacteristically, Mallory said, no, we have to stop somewhere. I wanted to say yes. And I felt such a sense of rare certainty that if we allowed ourselves to go beyond 10 in this case that we would just be like doing a hundred by

whatever the final pot is, which maybe would be fun. Maybe we should. I will say, though, in a way that surprised me, I had the hardest time with this of the three we've done so far. Like, once I actually got to, I, same as always, like, immediately wrote down like 15 things, and I'm like, these are going to be contenders. And then you start, okay, I'm panicking, what am I missing? And on the panic front, the thing that I'm, I was most worried about was actually, I mean, I'm always worried about. Are we going to miss something obvious and be embarrassed? Obviously, that's just like a crippling aspect. The natural state of a podcasting. Yeah, exactly. What I was really worried about. And frankly, even after cementing a list that I feel

great about, am still worried about, is not that I have forgotten something that other people are going to be like, how could you forget X? It's that I have forgotten something that I love, like that I have said on pods many times before, this is one of my favorite things of the world. Now, granted, I'm I'd say I have the tendency to be like, this is one of my five favorite things and say that about 500 things. So what are you going to do? Right, but I'm worried that I have forgotten. Yeah. I've forgotten something that I'm like, this is just deeply important to me.

Mallory famously loves this moment. You know what? And if that happens, I don't know what to say about it other than there are a lot of things that have come out in the last 25 years that we love. Joanna, let's talk about the other. This is a big one. The diagetic sound aspect of this, how we are considering what musical moments can actually be included today. So dietic sound, this means sound that exists in the scene, inside of the fictional

universe. The characters can hear it. They are creating it. It is not just audible to us at home. So if a character is singing or dancing or even just listening to music, playing music, but they can hear it. They have put it on the record or whatever the case may be. They're thinking about something. They're swaying to it. They are engaging with it. it is eligible for selection today. And so that does mean, because we initially were like, needle drops may be a completely separate thing. And broadly, they are pop songs, like songs from records can be included today if the characters. Yeah.

Listening to it on a Walkman, turning on the radio, whatever the case may be. That counts if they can hear it. Yes. I tried to limit those picks, though. But I have a couple. I'm not going to lie. Okay. I try to limit the ones where people are just going to be like,

is that just a needle drop, though? But I do have a couple. I have one. That is a slight fudge. But it is no more a fudge than the one that I know you and I have in common. And I'll explain why. There's only one that I know we have in common. Interesting.

Because like a diagetic moment can also then like play over a montage. That's sort of the gray area. You know what I mean? did at some point in the sequence, a character in the scene engaged with the music, then it's eligible today. Right. Okay. Yeah, because we got a lot of nominations for, like, The Light of a Seven, a piece of Game of

with a home score that we love. That would not count. You know, or a lot of needle drops, but those don't count. So an example that is not eligible for today just because it's not a genre pick, it's not a house of our property, but we'll use to explain, like, if anyone's like, what the fuck are you guys talking about right now? Kendall. Rocking out.

dancing in a supremely intense moment in his life in the season one succession finale, dancing to Whitney Houston. That counts. Yeah, that's a needle drop. But they're at a wedding and they hear the song and they're engaging with it. So like that would count by that rule. But like, now that's not being that rule, like making sure I have something that is not a needle drop was a really fun exercise in like the concept of sound design. Yeah.

Because there's like ways in which I want to talk about a specific example that's not on my list, but I can't guarantee. It's on your list, so I'll leave it off. But there's ways in which something starts out, you know, and the sound design has made it very clear that it's just playing in the room. And then it will open up and sound more like a needle drop. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's fine.

But that's just like fun to think about the way in which sound design informs how we're receiving this piece of music, you know? Well, let's go from there right into the last thing that we wanted to talk about before we get into sharing our list with each other and all of you. you, which is what makes a musical moment magical, meaningful? What makes it impactful and resonant in the first place? What makes it something that you're thinking about potentially 25, 24, 23 years later? Maybe it's six months later. You know, who knows?

We'll see what the recency bias is on our list. How much of it is about overall, whether it's score, You know, what aspect of the sound design can do to you? We've talked about this a lot in many stories that we've covered. We talk about it a lot with Star Wars, right? When the force theme kicks in, it ports you to a place. When the lightsaber activates, it ports you to a place. Sound is such an important part of how we relate to and form connections to the fictional universes that we love to inhabit.

So how much of it is the music itself? How much of it is about the characters and where they are and their stories and their journeys? Where we are in the show or the film at that given point? how much is about the surprise of it, like when a musical moment wallops you because you had no reason to expect that you were about to receive it? I'm curious for your thoughts on all of this and just in general, if any themes, without tipping the picks, like if any themes emerged for you when you were settling on what made your final top 10, like what through lines or patterns were there? There's a thing that happens to me that I can't describe when a musical moment like really hits. Not every moment on this list, but there's just like some specific examples. Like even my number 10, I remember this feeling of like, it's like I'm soaring.

Like there's just like a lightness in my chest and I just feel like I've been transported to another level of absorption of a story. And it's, you know, not every musical moment can achieve that. But there's, and it was funny, I'll talk about this more when I get to my number 10. But there was like a part of when I dug into how it was made, I was like, oh, that's why that happened to me with that moment. But like something that my personal musical theater, Yoda, Steven Sondheim, likes to say a lot or like to say a lot when he was live, was if you could take the song out and it doesn't leave a hole, then the song's not necessary, right? And so like, you know, this idea of just sort of like, is it absolutely essential to this moment?

And some of it is like underscoring an important emotional moment in the story. But some of it is all just like woven into the fabric of the plot. So if you could take it out and it's the same, then, you know, why do it? So I don't have anything on here that doesn't feel absolutely crucial and essential to what is happening in the story in that moment. Same, I think. Also in terms of like performance that I don't think it matters if it's done perfect. I think it matters that the emotion is authentic. And so there's one entry that I could not leave off the list and I care about it a lot,

but it does use a little bit of auto tune. But in general, if I can hear autotune on something, it drives me absolutely batch it because the purpose of a musical performance, I would rather have someone sing it poorly but give me all that emotion than like have something that's just sort of like flattened and perfected in a way that just like drains it of its resonance. So, you know, that's something I was thinking about a lot. There's a couple great examples of that of people who are not singing very well, but just like absolutely kills me. And again, actually not all and maybe not even most of my picks are singing, but like that's something I was thinking about a lot.

And then music as it exists, you know, there's another adage of musical theater of like if you can't say it, sing it, if you can't sing it, dance it. Like this is like the sort of like escalation of like confessional opening up. of emotion. The emotions are too big to simply say them, so I must sing them sort of thing. So emotionality, the way in which music connects us, the way which music can allow us to exist inside of that moment after we've watched it. So there's a needle drop that means, or a musical moment that means a lot to us inside of a story. I love it when they play this song on a record. And then later you could just listen to that song. I've got a song on my list that became my number one Spotify

most played song that year. Same. Yeah. It happens to me all the time. You know, because I just wanted to live inside of that experience. And so that's just like an incredible thing that music could do. And then just sort of like plot-wise,

how we gather around as like consumers of story and is part of the human experience. It connects us. It can connect us. Ancestrally can connect us to our community. It's just like such an important. human thing that we do, that I'm so overjoyed that we get to celebrate together. I love all of that. I, yeah, I mean, you know, thinking of just like in general the way people

connect to music, which obviously is so individual and so, like, intimate and personal and the songs or artists that people gravitate towards, sometimes it's because the poetry of the lyrics really reaches you. Like, sometimes it's because of the way it sounds. Sometimes it's because you met a friend who loved them too, and that became a part of a meaningful experience in your life. Like, there are any number of reasons. But the same thing that makes me, like, love a song. Like, I will, when I discover, this was particularly true for like, and this is real, you know, real, like, hits Bong 1 stuff from teenage Mal. But, like, you know, you're like, oh, you listen to, like, a Dylan song for the first time.

I just listened to it, like, a hundred times in a row. It would be all I did, right? Just like when I saw ordinary people. for the first time, all I did. I rewatch it every day, right? That's just my relationship to this stuff. So it's also my relationship to these moments and stories that I love. And I think it's kind of a like exponential impact then because the music is giving you

that inside of a story, a show, a film with a character who you feel that way about already where you're just like, I have an attachment that is so deep and it has been heightened in a way that is like supremely meaningful to us when that happens. I mean, everything that you said about, you know, expression. And I love when characters are put in a moment that is so... Now, how many people break out in song and dance in real life? I don't know. I guess that varies person to person.

But what people do turn to music, either to listen and think or to try to express something that maybe you cannot put into words and to see characters do a thing that feels like such a part of the everyday experience of, like, why people form a connection to a given song or artist, I really love. And I think just like, like you said, what music can invoke is so powerful and meaningful. And like, I really, a definite theme of Milas, not like all 10 of them for not all 10 of them, but a through line I would say is like the idea of these moments is incursions, like in a good way, right? I have, I was not expecting so and so to sing or so and so to dance or so and so to put that song on. the record and then they did and it just like floored me. And so many of these moments are things

that I return to and I love returning to them and that's why they're on the list. But also I have like vivid memories of what it felt like to see them for the first time. The way that I felt like pushed into my couch or the chair in the movie theater or whatever the case may be. Yeah. Pushed into or like and then also just like pulled closer to the story. Yeah. And I love thinking about it in terms of specifically what we cover because, you know, something, I remember so distinctly when we were covering House of the Dragon and you were talking about the Vagar sequence, claiming the Dragon sequence, and tying it back to something you and Jason talked about a lot on binge in terms of like what the fantastical can do to communicate, you know, something in the fantastical can do that straight fiction cannot do in terms of like really driving into how big emotions can feel. We talked about this when we talked about Buffy. Like, what if the like pains of adolescence were literal monsters? You know what you mean?

And so it's sort of like that idea of like bigness enormity that these fantastical sci-fi horror elements bring to a story. That's what sort of like a musical moment can do. Not necessarily putting on a record, but, you know, bursting in a song, dancing, or then what that record sort of brings out in you. Like, I just think it's, it's, it, we're not a podcast that covers musicals despite the fact that I love talking about musical moments, but it, it is really hand in hand with the kind of storytelling that we often resonate with. Yes, I, I, this absolutely. I think the throughline of my list, unsurprisingly, is just emotion, emotional response.

Either in me or the characters are both. Correct. I had, I, like, I'm really excited. I'm always excited for the honorable mentions. Like, I'm really excited for the honorable mentions today. Like, there were a lot of things that I found. quite painful to leave off the list. But that was horrifying.

I would say almost always that, and not to say there aren't things in the honorable mentions that I have elicit a strong emotional response to me, but like there are definitely things in the honorable mentions list where I'm like, that animated the zeitgeist.

That was like conceptually so riveting. Right. You know, but that became a meme in a way that feels so of a piece with the internet era. Like, those are all really cool and meaningful things to me. And they're definitely in my top like 15,

top 20, But when it came time to decide between A or B, I was like, did this one make me sob? You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was usually the tiebreaker. So I have mostly. A lot of tears come in today. But I have a couple that I'm just sort of like this is just like an incredibly cool moment.

I'm glad. I'm glad. Should we get to it? Any other big picture opening thoughts about list conception or structure or anything else? It was horrible. It was horrible to pick only 10. Really horrible. But also, how long?

lucky we are, like reading through all the bad baby responses and stuff like that, like how lucky we are to have celebrated these last 25 years of film and television together, you know? I know. All right. I'm so excited. Me too. Let's get to it. Let's get to our top 10. What is your number 10? This is the only entry I have on the list that I don't have a clip for because, oh, and we should say, yes, should we say, legally we cannot play any of this. music for you all. If you were hoping to turn in and tune in and hear a bunch of clips from shows about the music, we can't do that. But we tried to pick like premise setting clips to give you a sense. But legally, we cannot play these songs. So that's just where we are today. So in this sequence, I know you don't have this. So I'm not going to play the usual go fish with you. In this sequence, there was nothing around it. That would help. So I don't have a

clip today. Okay. Because this is from the Mike Flanagan Netflix series Midnight Mass. I do not have this. I know you don't. And it is from episode three. And it is the Neil Diamond song, Holly Holy. And I'm going to explain why it's here. This is one of the first things I wrote down.

Okay. This was the one that wound up being my number one Spotify Most Play song. I had probably heard it but never engaged with it before I saw it here in this show. The premise of this song playing is, and this is why I'm allowed to use it as a non-needle drop, is Ed and Annie, played by Henry Thomas and Kristen Lehman, put this record on the record player, and they start the sequence by dancing to it, and they end the sequence by dancing to it, and the record ends. And so that is the bookend of a four and a half minute song that plays in its entirety inside of episode three of Midnight Mass. And it is, I'm not even a huge Neil Diamond fan. This is such a good song. And I will say, I don't want to spoil everything that happens in Midnight Mass necessarily, but it is definitely a genre story.

And the premise of where we find ourselves in episode three is that a new priest has come to. this tiny island community. He has performed a miracle on a teenage girl who was wheelchair bound. Now she can walk. And we watch over the course of this four and a half minutes, several characters interact and connect to the tune of the music. And also his congregation swell. And so we see a couple different instances of him, played by the great Hamish Link later,

walking down the aisle of the church. And the camera's on this like crucifix that's being. held aloft behind him and it's sort of swaying to the music. And I was just like, not sure why this hit me as hard as it did. And then I was investigating into like, Mike Flanagan, why did you pick the song? Why is it here? Etcetera. Holly Holy was written into the script years before we filmed it. I grew up with Neil Diamond, blah, blah, blah. I'd listen to it over and over again, blah, blah. In the case of Holly Holy, in the screenplay, each line of the song is written into each little scenelet of the

the montage to make sure it timed out properly. And on the set, we'd play just whatever line from the song was needed for the shot so the actors could synchronize with it. Because the Holly Holy montage is made up of so many locations and characters, because we do check in with everybody. It was shot in pieces over the entire course of production. It made it very funny for the crew after we'd chew a scene. I'd say, okay, now we're grabbing our next piece of Holly, Holy montage.

And we play the five seconds of the song that we were covering that day. out of order spread out over many months. It seemed entirely nonsensical, but everything had a timeout just right. A lot of times we don't know what song will end up using in the finished product. That's a choice to make an editorial. But in the case of Midnight Mass, a lot of the songs were so specifically written into the script that it was like choreographing a dance. And that's what it feels like, I didn't know that. Yeah.

That's what it feels like watching the sequence. It's not sometimes these are done, as he says, mass will work by whoever's editing the stuff together and make it all feel like it belongs to the music. But this was specifically, it's like watching beautiful choreography. And it's not, people aren't dancing in these moments, but they're like sneaking out of their window at night or they're, you know, encountering each other on the street. Or in one case, like a villainous character is carrying a bottle of rat poison to the closet. You know, like there's just something. But to the beat of the song in a way that I didn't realize was so intentionally done. This is an incredible miniseries, Midnight Mass.

I just, it's super rewatch. It's very scary. Super rewatchable. This is like such a potent sequence. I'm so impressed by what he put together here. I cannot believe he let the entirety of a four and a half minute song play out inside. It's like an audacious thing to do. The last thing I'll say is that, because I know you don't have anything for the Flanagan

verse in here, a lot of the bad babies recommend. Well, from Midnight Mass, they also sing this hymn, Nearer My God to the at the end of the, that was one that some people recommended. But also, in the haunting of Hill House, there's, in the Bent Neck Lady episode, there is a sequence set to the song, Heavenly Day, which I told you already. I watched the YouTube clip of last night and was sobbing. Then I had to watch the whole episode, The Bent Nette Lady, and, like, sobbed through it. And then I had to watch the finale so that I could feel a little bit better.

about where the characters are inside of a show that has an episode called The Bent Neck Lady. So, like, I, that is an incredible use of music. It's, it's sort of like a ghostly induced hallucination. So she's dancing through the haunted house and she thinks she's dancing with someone she's loved and lost. And then it cuts out and you just see her dancing by herself. And the music cuts out. And it's just like, I've seen that. Yeah.

I've seen that on the internet. Yeah. It's so upset. It's devastating. It's so good. So anyway, Mike Flanagan, I love you and would never inflict a Mike Flanagan show on you because I know it's too scary. But I wanted to honor Hollyholy. When I played it for myself, I had my headphones in.

And I just like played it five times in a row. Like just as I was like, I just love it. Great pick. Sounds incredible. Number 10. It's my most cheaty sort of needle dropy smuggle. into. I think it sounds well within the bounds of what is permissible today. Thank you. And what a great way to highlight rhythm and harmony in a creative form. Right, right. That that's something that, you know,

I have an entry later where I actually asked the creator about it and he was like, oh, actually we played a different song on set when we filmed this and then we decided it was wrong and we put this other one in. So that can that can also work. But like the fact that that that's the fact that that this was so intentionally designed is very transportive to me. Love it. Great way to start. My number 10, I don't think you have. But do you have anything from Pixar?

I don't. Okay. Carlos, can you play my clip? Miguel, you apologize to your Mama Coco. Mama Coco. Well, apologize. Mama Coco. Your Papa.

He wanted you to have this. I'm already crying. I don't know how I'm going to get through the pod today. Honestly. I don't know how I'm going to get through the pod today. So my number 10 is Miguel singing. Remember me to Mama Coco in the 2017 instant classic Coco. This is a story about a boy who loves music in a family where music has been banned across the generations.

and Miguel ends up making a trip to the land of the dead and a lot of incredible things happen and if you haven't seen this movie, you should, but I'm going to talk about some of them now anyway. Miguel meets Hector. And Hector is desperate to visit his daughter before she forgets him. And the movie spends a lot of time,

the story spends a lot of time on this idea of like what it means to be remembered or forgotten. And this idea that if no, Nobody is around anymore who remembers you or who has a reason to remember you. That the memories that people carry of you, that is what keeps you alive either as an idea or something more tangible on some plane, whatever that plane might be. The eventual reveal, spoiler, that Ernesto is a cheat and a thief and a fraud. and that Hector is really the creator of these cherished songs and also Miguel's ancestor and

Coco's father is like such a wallop. And Miguel returns to the land of the living. And as we just saw a tiny piece of sings Remember Me to Coco, the song from her father for her. and then it just brings her to life. Like the way that it animates her and revives her lucidity and like restores her spark. And then of course the way that it completely heals this family

through like truth and clarity but also this shared tie of song, Hector's memory is kept alive and the family is reunited around this new clarity and this new truth. And then music becomes not a thing that they are ashamed of or hide from, but the centerpiece of their shared experience and their newfound joy. And like, it's an incredibly beautiful song. I mean, this song won the Oscar. Like, this is just a great song. And one of the things I love about it so much and really appreciate it about it is how, like,

it's deployed, I think, four times across the film. It's deployed multiple times. across the film and we understand something different about it each of those times because we have new context, new understanding, but it's only at the very end that we really are able to appreciate what this was always meant to be. And this is one, again, this will be a theme today, but this is one we're like, I saw this movie when it came out at the movie theater and I sat there and I sobbed. With like a bunch of strangers around me, I just wept freely and like, like, racking sobs in this moment. the movie. And, you know, the lyrics are so beautiful and there's a simplicity and a sweetness to them, but it kind of like enhances the potency of them. Remember me, though I have to say goodbye.

Don't let it make you cry for even if I'm far away. I hold you in my heart. I sing a secret song to you each night we are apart. Remember me. And another thing I have a really vivid memory of is like talking to people, friends, colleagues in real time, like when this movie came out about how, emotional this made them. And for all sorts of people, but like a lot of people with kids, you know, who basically like I kind of like almost couldn't handle this song and thinking about this song. It made me so deeply emotional. And it's one of these things where I'm like, I watch this sequence that I listen to it and I have such a just me right now in my life, where I'm in my life, I have such a deep connection to it and it moves me so sincerely. And then

I'm also like, do I want kids when I hear this? That's a pretty amazing thing, right? So I knew that this was something I wanted to have on my list. I wasn't sure where exactly, but it made the cut at number 10. Perfect pick. Perfect, perfect, perfect pick. And I love exactly what you're highlighting when we first hear it is this like cheesy ballad. You know what I mean?

And honestly, that's how they performed it at the Oscars. I'm like, I was like kind of surprised that they went with that. I would have just had a guy with a guitar play it at the Oscar. But yeah, this moment is just absolutely killer. It's the sort of to me, to me, I think Coco is my favorite Pixar. And to me, it is the epitome of that Pixar, well, Bing Bong and Coco sort of like tied as like sort of the epitome of Pixar emotionality. So, yeah. Opening 10 minutes of up.

I'll throw that in as well. Oh, absolutely. Of course. Oh, man. This episode is brought to you by Target. Listen up, Explorer, Stranger Things has returned to Target, and the upside down is calling. Don't miss your chance to grab some epic exclusives like an AirPods case shaped like a mixtape cassette, the totally tasty Doritos Stranger Pizza and Cool Ranch chips, and the Demogorgian Crunch cereal.

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Okay, well, I meant to note this. My number 10 is from 2021. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. I, no one made me do this.

I limited myself to one superhero pick. Okay. Yeah. Do you have anything from any X-Men property? I don't. There are so many incredible superhero picks. Yeah. This is unusually mine.

This is from 2014's X-Men Days of Future Past. Carlos, we play, play this clip. I'm amazing. I love that this is here. It's a great one. Again, this is the one I was talking about where I was like, this is just fun. It's not emotional. This is, if you, if you, there was no context for you in the clip necessarily.

And again, we could not play the song, but what we played was the aftermath of the sequence in Expendays of Future Past when our heroes are cornered. Charles can't do anything. Eric can't do anything. Logan can't do anything. But they've met this kid played by Evan Peters. Hell yeah. It's Quicksilver himself and he puts his headphones on and time in a bottle by Jim Crocey plays, which was used again to great effect by Marvel as a needle drop. And everything slows down and he cheekily zooms around this kitchen where all of these like people are about to have their guns drawn on. on our heroes and just tweaks things, nudges bullets, moves people's arms, and does all this stuff as time slows down for him.

It is such an incredible, I know that there are way bigger superhero musical moments and more obvious ones, but I thought of this one and then I couldn't talk myself out of it. Yeah. I have another reason to do that. It's Evan Peters based, but it's, It's this was like the great

schism inside of superhero properties where we had two Quicksilvers, right? We had Aaron Taylor Johnson and age of Ultron and we've got Evan Peters here. And so there's two approaches to how do you show a speedster, right? Do you just show them sort of like zooming around? And like I like Aaron Taylor Johnson's Quicksilver better than most people. But like this is such a creative way to show us the superhero, the power set of this character. And they do it, they repeat it again, of course. They do another musical montage for for Quicksilver and another movie. So like, but Evan Peters is just like having so much fun.

Yeah. It's such a joyous moment. The musical is, the music is essential. He's listening to it. It is like what he does to get into this mode. And the lyrics are cheeky, of course, time and a bottle, like all this sort of stuff like that. So I just, I really loved this. The Evan Peters-based reason is I'm going to smuggle in here his work on the American Horror Story franchise because there's a number of American Horror Story episodes in American Horror Story double feature and American Horror Story Freak Show

where Evan Peters sings and he has a great singing voice. He does Islands on the Stream with Francis Conroy and Double Feature. He did a great come-as-you-are in Freak Show. So I just want to honor Evan Peters as this great musical performer of genre television and this superhero moment, which I just like, which is so tied to X-Men superheroism. You know what I mean? It's just so tied to this concept of like what is your ability and it is this like represented in this musical moment. So that's why it's here. This is a dynamite pick.

Thank you. This is an absolutely great one. It's, you know. we obviously now, like, after the evolution of Ralph Boner, actually really enjoyed it talking about Ralph Boner. Yeah. Become a cherished fave of ours as a thing we get to spend time with. But, you know, before we got to the original, oh, my God, we've been Ralph Boner of it

all during Wanda Vision, those days on the internet, when Evan Peters knocked on that door and we're like, oh, my God, it's happening. Quicksilver is here, he's here. Like, the clip, the moment that you picked here, I would say was the thing that people were sharing with each other, like the most in the world? It's like, we get to do this again, holy shit. And then we didn't.

But. Right. And I think it's important that this is inside, I mean, people like Days of Future Past, but inside of an X-Men franchise that just sort of like got worse and worse and worse. But Quicksilver was like always welcome. And it was sort of like putting Andrew Garfield in a better Spider-Man movie. Can we port this character and this performance that we really like into a better era of superhero storytelling? So, yeah.

Great pick. That's my pick from 2014. This is a blast so far. That was a lot of those. Okay. My number nine. At the beginning of the pod, I was like, I feel like we definitely have a couple of the same things. I think I feel sure about two others.

I think we might also have this on both of our lists. Do you have anything from the leftovers? I do. Okay. I assume it's the same thing as mine, so, but I don't know how to find out for sure. Does yours involve karaoke? No, but I'm like, could not be more excited that you put, this is what I was talking about when I was like, everyone expects me to do this and I did something else. I am great.

Thrill. Oh, Chris is great. That you have done this. This, I did consider this possibility, too, that you would. It's like you've done me a service. So thank you for doing it. Okay, so then in that case Wow, this is wonderful.

In that case, Carlos, play my clip for number nine, please. Who's next? Anybody? You're right. Don't do it, stupid. How about you? Officer, you want to turn?

Okay. Instant tears again. I know, I'm a mess. I'm like trying to so hard to say composed, but it's very difficult. My number nine is Kevin, singing Homeward Bound in the season two leftovers finale. I live here now from 2015. This is an incredible episode in one of the best seasons of television ever made in a tremendous show that we both adore.

I'm not surprised that you have a pick coming from it. It was like really important to me to have a leftovers pick at some point in this series, probably multiple points in the series. That makes me happy. We haven't talked that much about the leftovers, you and I. No, we haven't. Yeah, this was also one, this happened with a number of these where, like, you revisit a scene and texting Adam.

Like, we got to do a whole rewatch of Thing X now. You know, it happened with, like, so many things prepping for this. I watched three episodes of the leftovers in prepping for this. Time to do a leftovers rewatch now. It's basically impossible to not want to do that after watching this. Do you want to set the stage? So Kevin has been shot. He wakes in this plane, this land of the undeadies back in this hotel, goes down to the lobby.

A woman is performing an angel of mine, or angel of the morning. Excuse me, angel of mine would have also been iconic. Also very good. That would have been great. Angel of the morning after Kevin has refused to sing and then our guy bill camp is there. And he's telling Kevin that he must sing in order to return, in order to go back to. the living, to his life. And Kevin is very resistant and then, you know, very dubious, and then goes and spins the wheel.

And it assigns him homeward bound, Simon Agarfunkel, which is one of my favorite songs, one of the themes on my list. And the creators, you know, to talk about this when it happens, it's like, sometimes if it's on the nose, not only is that not a problem, it's actually helpful. That will be coming into play with another one of my picks in a major way. The shots of cigarettes and magazines. Cigarettes and magazines paired with actual shots of cigarettes and magazines is, yeah, really something. Why do you want to go back? Because I have a family, because I love them, and I need to see, yes, you love your family. It's not your time.

Still got so much to live for. Oh, come on. Be original, mate. Why should you go back and the rest of us be stuck? Because I deserve to. It's builds and builds. They're talking about this idea of singing. It's stupid, right? Kevin Garvey says in this scene, it's stupid, which like has to be said before what happens next. And then Bill Camp says, ah, the trial, it's beneath you. It's not elegant enough. Too easy. You pushed a little girl into a well. You don't want to sing? This is just like an incredible TV moment. And then just a girl. Bill Camp we should say is like playing God.

Yes. Perhaps. Justin Thoreau. This is a great Bill Camp performance. Oh, my God. I just like made for accent corner with Joanna Robb. Oh, yeah. Justin Thoreau, who there, you know, there's a lot of great interviews around this season of television in this episode, this sequence. There's a Ben Travers oral history for Indy Wire that's really fun and worth reading.

And the way that Justin Thoreau's clip quotes are deployed in that, which is just like 20 versions of, I really did not want to do this. It made me deeply uncomfortable and I hated it. And you can feel that and it unlocks everything in the scene. And the way that Kevin, as he goes up there and performs this song, performs Homer Bound, the shift that we watch on his face from this extreme dug-in, active vocal resistance and skepticism and doubt into real time, like, reflection and despair and longing and the, like, his nose is dripping and the tears and, like, the son is running into his mouth as he's saying. It's just, it's just unbelievable.

I think, like, a couple of the specific moments, the way that he starts to break, like, the first crack, actually the cigarettes and magazines verse when we're, we're, okay, it's happening. Like, my actual life is slashing before my eyes. But when he gets to every stranger's face I see reminds me that I long to be home or bad. And then he says, when he says, I wish I was, like the way that his voice starts to crack and he starts to just crumble. And then this is such a beautifully shot scene because it has this like, you know, the feeling. Yeah.

The lighting and the framing. So we have this stretch where we're viewing him really like close, tight framing and the blue light is bathing him. the moment, just looking at his face when he sings, I need someone to comfort me. I think he's like in the running for one of the best moments in television history. In that Indie Wire oral history, Mimi Leader who directed this episode has a lot of really, there's a ton of great stuff from our guy Lindeloff.

Let me spoil something for you. That's not going to be a spoiler for you or anyone listening to any of our podcast ever. This is not my only Damon Lindelhoff picked today, folks. Correct. I said, good, I don't want you to be a singer in response to Justin Throving. Like, I can't sing.

I don't want you to sound good. I just want you to sing. I want you to want to go home. I want you to want to go home. Like, that is the truth and the essence that has to be captured there. And I mean, I'm a sucker for any kind of, like, Kings Cross Way Station sequence, as you know,

I really love this stuff. but this is such a purposeful and artful and uncomfortable and raw version of it, as is so often the case with Lindelof's stories. And I think it's just like not only a beautiful scene and a beautiful moment for Kevin in an incredibly brilliant season of television, but it's also, I think, a symbol of like how TV shows can reinvent themselves and what they can achieve when they're given the time and the space to grow and change. And so it is very meaningful to me for that reason, too.

And yeah, I'm definitely going to have to do an entire series rewatch now. Homeward Bound. The way it ends with home where my love lies waiting silently for me. And we get Carrie Coon's face, Nora's face. Makes actually all the other flashes worth it to me because they're all so on the nose. And then we get to that. I'm like, okay, but this is so good. This, yes, I have something from the left over.

as we will talk about it later. We'll talk about Lindelof. Again there, but like this idea of love as the as the port, as the bridge, as the connective tissue to get you through a

supernatural moment. He's so corny and you have to be so good at what you do to make something so nakedly emotional, absolutely land. And Lindelof does it every time. I know. It's a true gift. No one else does it like him. Plenty of people do great stuff, but no one does this like Damon Lindelof, I think. And if it hits, it hits in a way that

like we just talk about forever. And so yeah, this Kevin Garvey moment, this Justin Thore moment, I love how bad he is at singing. This is what I was, this is what I was referencing when I meant, And there's another pick that I think you have, I think, that falls under that category. But like, it doesn't matter. It is better that he can't sing. And if they had like auto tune him or, oh, my overdubbed him with someone else's voice, like that's just not. Then it's on a trial. No.

I love that. I love what, yeah, I love when Bill Camp says, you know, it's not elegant enough, right? Kevin wants like something big and grandiose and he has to go up and say. sing karaoke to get home. Spin the wheel. And it's another thing that that Lindeloff or particularly the leftovers does so well is that combination of

like pop culture and sort of the poetic and the supernatural right? This is like a pop song. A folk song, but a pop song, you know, when you and I both, I love Simon and Garfunkel. Like, you know, a song that we love, a song that I've heard a million times

before I watched the leftovers. But then it is like redefined and transformed by this moment as well. And this is an association and then is inextricable from your experience with the song forever after this. They talk about this in the Travers, Indy, oral history too, but they wanted to use like a prayer.

They wanted to use Madonna. And it's funny to think about that alternate history, which, but I do love that it's on the wheel. I do love that it's on the wheel. It's just great. Oh, my God. What is your number eight? Do you have anything

from the television series and or? I don't. Yes, in my honorable mentions, three things in my honorable mentions, actually. Not in my top ten. I'm really, really happy this is here. This is, I love that we're showing up for each other. Oh, this is great. Carlos, will you please play my clip? All right. This is the Gorman, the Gorman National Anthem from Season 2, Episode 8 of Andor came out this year, 2025. that episode titled Who Are You? What we just showed was right before this character, we've spent a little tiny at a time with,

but don't really have a strong emotional connection to. Inside of this crowd of people chanting, we are with the gore, the whole world is watching, takes his hat off and then starts singing the Gorman National Anthem. This is written by Tony Gilroy and Nicholas Bertel in the fictional language that they created for the show, obviously heavily based on the French language, the French resistance.

And then we see a number of other characters that we know a bit better, sort of start to rally around him. And then the entire crowd is singing this national anthem as forces that they have no possibility of surviving are amassing just behind the barricades on their way to absolutely decimate them. And so we see that too during the sequence.

We see a number of our characters we've spent a lot of time with are also circling this this massive historical event that's about to happen. This horrific, violent moment. And inside of this moment, inside of this resistance from these people, is this song, this national anthem, that there are several other great options. Mon Manta dancing at the wedding, obviously, Marva's funeral, the Ferris marching band. Those are the three. Incredible stuff from Indoor. But something that Tony Gilroy talked about a lot in creating

Andor that we just relished was the sort of specific details that make up a culture. How do you define a place and a people? We talked about this so much. We talked about ferrics. We talked about, you know, the bells, stone and sky, the gloves on the wall, that band of sort of like the various unions sort of coming together and marching towards marvis funeral that's a specific place. And so in creating the gore and in creating this planet and, you know, the specificity of the cloth and specificity of the language and the specificity of the architecture. And then inside of like what makes a society and what makes a people a national anthem.

a celebration of their planet that is about to be destroyed, physically destroyed. The people are about to die. The planet is about to be fracked by the empire. And here is this last sort of, you know, funereal monument, you know, owed to the home that they love. And it is devastating. and it is beautiful.

And you can't do it without. The chant is good. The song is better. And the song, it quiets them. They were chanted together, but then they become like a choir together. And it just, we were stunned watching this. You and I, I know that we were.

So, yeah. I'm thrilled and frankly really relieved that this is here. This was one of the really, really hard ones to leave off my list. Just an absolutely. beautiful and gut-wrenching moment. I love hearing you talk about it. You know, we talk a lot,

I'm covering Andoran in general of Star Wars, but, you know, certainly most of all with Andor, about how one of the many, one of the many ways that we see and understand the horrors and atrocities of the empire inflicts is that they don't care at all about any of the things that make a place,

a place or people, people are a culture, a culture. Yeah. But then that hideous, truth that when they do, it's only so they can use it or steal it or come on, like, right, or warp it. So what is inside the core of this planet?

We need it for our weapons. The only truth that they care to understand, the only aspect of recognition is so that they can take, right? And so for the counterforce of that to be this union. of song and an embrace at the end, like you said at the recognition that it's the end, right? And it's still worth it. It's important. It's necessary to say this is who we are and this is what you're destroying is such an incredibly, incredibly powerful and impactful thing to watch. And like, obviously this was one of the great gifts of Andor in general given, you know, we've said many times we'd love more Andor. It was perfect. But we, you know, do we, are we greedy? Do we want more? Sure. Are we glad we got to

perfect thing, yes, we don't have a ton of time with the characters, period, and certainly not with the characters we met. Gorman, and the fact that we care this deeply, that if we were with them for a second, we would have cared this deeply, because that is the point that you shouldn't need to know somebody for your entire life or nine movies or five seasons of television to recognize what has been taken from them. It's just so brilliantly conceiving. and portrayed there. So just a fantastic pick. I'm thrilled.

It's here. Thank you. You're killing it. You're killing it. Thank you for Kevin Garvey. My next pick is something that we talked about, actually incredibly recently, mere weeks ago. Do you have anything from the television program, Stranger Things? I don't, actually.

Okay. And the reason I don't is because, A, I was pretty sure you'd have it, and B, we, like, days ago just talked about it so much. You know what I mean? Yes. But it should be here. So I'm really glad you have it. I had three really strong contenders. Yeah.

For my Stranger Things pick. Yeah. We can talk about the two that I did not select as well, because it's really hard to pick between the three of them. You probably know which one I picked. I said when we talked about it in real time that it was like one of my favorite Stranger Things musical moments. But Carlos.

Can we see the clip? You can make it up to me now. What? I want to hear it. Not right now. Yes, now, Dusty Bun. Susie Poo, this is urgent. Yes, yes, you're saving the world.

I heard you the first time, but Ged is also saving Earthsea, and he's about to confront the shadows, so this is Susie signing off. Wait, wait, wait, okay, okay, okay. My queen, Susie, and my favorite character, Dustin, how could I not? We will in our little smuggles here talk about Eddie and about Max and running up that hill.

The clash. Yeah, I mean, there are just so many Stranger Things contenders. This is Dustin and Susie singing Neverending Story to Save the World in the season three finale, the Battle of Starcourt from 2019. We just talked about this for a really long time. If you haven't been listening to our Stranger Things rewatch pods, you can hear more about this in the season three revisited pod. I will keep this quick. just first of all an incredible deployment

of 80s nostalgia and we both fucking love the never-ending story so when this happened I was just like on the moon I can't believe

this is like real life this is just frankly a privilege the filmmaking choice here this is something we've chatted about recently I always love

hearing you talk about this when a show or a film or a story has the confidence to take a beat for a minute when extremely intense pressing things are happening. Yeah.

This is an example of that. The fate of Starcourt, of Hawkins, of the right side up, all on the line, but we will fucking break for a full musical number. And not only will we do that, we're going split screen. We are going full on with the theatricality. I love the way in the sequence Dustin's mortification, mortification that he realizes, because everybody's listening. And he's like, I am going to have to sing, and everyone can hear me on the walk.

He's Erica's right here and that everyone else can hear me. Just evaporates instantly as the love of this thing takes hold. And he gets to share a duet with his very real girlfriend. Yes, everybody gets to find out here. Reach the stars. That's just so good. It's really good. The other character's reactions, as we talked about in our season three pot, absolutely priceless.

All of them are priceless. Erica's like almost jump scare and then Joyce pressing herself against the wall because they're So on the clock, definitely the two best, but they're all great. One of the things we've been doing a lot in our Stranger Things Paws, we're talking a lot about coming of age stories. We're talking a lot about comfort and safe space for young people who are nerds, right? Who are uncool. And like, this is just such a celebration of being a nerd and having other people in your life

who, like, love the same thing that you love and you get to share them with and how transporting that really is when you're at any point in your life. ultimately. Susie has to recite Plank's Constant. After singing, never-ending story, you get to do it with the boyfriend or girlfriend, in this case, for each of them, that you met at science camp where you built a cerebro so that you could communicate with each other across state lines. This is just the peak nerd shit, honestly. And then Dustin's like little chuckle at the end after they finish singing is just so good. It's like, yeah, we got to save the world, but I can wait a minute because we have to sing and share the things that we love with each other.

And that actually ultimately is how they are able to win and save the world just because they share the things that they love with each other. So it's just great. It was hard to not pick running up that hill. And it was honestly really hard to not pick Eddie Guitar God. Master of Pusset. But I just have such a, I really have like a deep attachment to the never-ending story moment. I just absolutely love it.

So it had to be my pick. I think it's a great pick. I'm really glad it's represented here. And I'm really glad Stranger Things is represented here. It should be because of the specific way in which they've used music every season to sort of connect characters. And, you know, I thought about running up the hill. I thought about this. I thought about Mass or Puppets.

I thought about the clash as like sort of Will's totem to sort of keep him safe in the upside down. Yeah. But this is such a good example of, and I have an example of this later, but like when. TV creators know that they have a really good singer in their cast. Yeah. And finding some organic reason to let that person sing. And sometimes it's not organic at all. They really bend in shape the plot in order to make it happen.

But Gayton Montarazzo has, like, a beautiful voice, Gabrielle Epizola, who plays Susie. You know, there are these clips going around right now or full videos that Netflix is putting out of the cast of Stringer Things watching. older season, Stranger Things. I sent you a screenshot. But Gaten talking about this moment, talking about doing it with Gabriela and how they're both Broadway kids. And so, like, you know,

and I've talked about this before, the fact that Caleb and Lachlan and Sadie Sink and Gate Monorazzo are all, like, musical Broadway kids. And they really captured that energy and brought it to the nerdiness of the Stranger Things kids. But, yeah, like, find an excuse to, like, Gaten sang. And then Caleb and Sadie to, like, make fun of them,

but sing it later. is like is really good stuff. Yeah. It's so good. And it's not organic, but it works anyway. I'm like, yeah, I accept that Susie is making, is insisting on this because he hasn't called in a week. Yeah. Granted, he was trapped in a secret Russian layer between the mall.

But you know what? She's insisting on what feels right in their relationship. And yes, this is their shared truth. Love it. That was my number eight. What's your number seven? Do you have anything from the television series? Avatar the Last Airbedder. I do. Higher up.

Great. Quite high. What's your number seven? Well, it deserves to be there. What's your number seven? Okay, so now we have more overlap than I thought then, because that, I did think that was, now I think we have. This is one of the ones I was sure you would have. Now I feel we have three picks coming up still that are the same. But maybe not. We'll find out.

Number, okay, so number seven for me, do you have anything from the, you don't? Because you said you limited yourself to one superhero. You don't have anything from the MCU. I don't. Okay. Carlos, let's play. I think this was the like fastball down the middle. This is not going to surprise a single person consuming this podcast, but I had to do it.

Please play my number seven. Well, after I put the stones back, I thought maybe I'll try some of that life. Tony was. telling me to get how that work out for you it is beautiful okay this is cap and peggy finally sharing their dance dancing to it's been a long long time at the end of a little movie you might have heard of Avengers end game 2019 uh I had a lot of Marvel contenders a lot there were so many maybe that's why I pivoted to Fox because I was like I was just couldn't pick a Marvel moment. And I was like, I'll do this instead.

But anyway, sorry. There are a lot of, we'll do some smuggles and honorable mentions here. There was like one other Marvel PIP that was actually, like, made me want to die to leave it off. And it's one, we'll hit in a minute. But I've probably talked about more than like any other. It's a couple one over there. I kind of can't believe this isn't on my list.

But in addition to how much I love this and how important it is for a character for characters we cherish Peggy. But like one of our. most important characters in the last decade and a half of our lives is Steve Chris Evans and Steve Rogers. There's all of that, but it's more than that. Like, this is, with respect to the actual final film of the Infinity Saga, Spider-Man, Far From Home, which is like Dakota to the Infinity Saga,

this is the end, this moment. Like, this concludes a decade-long shared experience that was like this central uniting force in so many of our lives. And like, I just couldn't leave it off the list. It just carries so much weight, I think, for that reason and what it represents for these characters for the cap franchise, which is, you know, when we adore inside of the MCU and for the MCU overall. Like, we're not, we've done this on other pods, our Steve Rogers Hall of Fame, et cetera. I'm not going to go through every single beat that paves the weight of this moment. But like just a couple. I mean, we obviously have the first Avenger, you know, set up. You must have danced. Figured I wait for what,

the right partner. Steve's sacrifice at the end. And, you know, I still don't know how to dance. I'll show you just be there. Winter Soldier, the song, they will eventually dance to playing on the record player. That moment that I just adore so much between Sam and Steve, what makes you happy? I don't know. That is like the truth that Steve Rogers inhabits for so long after he comes out of the ice. Like, I don't know.

In Ultron, what is the torment that Wanda inflicts on Steve? The idea of the dance with Peggy, are you ready for our dance? And so, like, all of this is enriched by, of course, the Tony and Cap parallel path and then this inversion at the end of the way that their conflict and their headbutting ended up being a gift they gave to each other that Tony is making the sacrifice play and the cap is like making the selfish choice. No, I don't think I will. Like, this is for me. I am going to do this. I get to keep, I have given so much and I get to keep something for myself. It's like just incredible.

And it's like I love this idea of like music as a promise and a time capsule and the way that this connects the films and our experience with the characters across all these years. And like also music is a companion. Like when you hear those keys, it just takes you into this space with these people. So yeah, I really, I mean, I love a lot of the Marvel moments. Like I, as you know, I love American Pie with it in Black Widow. I thought about that one. simply because of it's such a part of our shared like origin story of podcasting, I was talking you about that. Yeah. Like it was painful to leave that one off. The one that I was like, I cannot,

I simply cannot believe this is not on my list is father and son from the audience too. Like Peter and Baby Groot listening to father and son. That's my, I actually have another Spotify Rapp example coming up. But like, you can just pretty much always tell what movies or films I've been watching or rewatching based on my Spotify rap. That is a thing that we share. And like, it's like, oh, is. devil town on here? Like I was just revisiting Friday nights,

etc. Right. But father and son, like when I was doing binge Marvel, father and son just had to run at top my consumption

for a really long time. I love that moment. That's a really, like father and son, it has a similar composition to Hollyholy and that it like sort of it builds.

And then you just want to listen to it again to experience that, that build and how it gets bigger and bigger and it sound. Yeah. And like the composition

of that song, like the way that he is inhabiting the father and the son rolls and singing both parts differently. So the music itself is asking you to think about the passage of time and about perspective and then you have Peter and Yandu and, you know, it wasn't your daddy. Like, it's just great and I fucking love it. But I just, yeah, it just had to be, it had to be Stephen Peggy dancing for me. Should we hit some, do you have anything else from Marvel on your list? Those were like the main ones that I was like, these, those were my kind of top three, but obviously there are a million. So yeah, you want to throw it because the bad baby

sends a lot of Marbles. Yeah, I'm going to throw some more out. Yeah, let's just do our Marvel stuff here. Alex suggested the musical notes fight from Dr. Strange. Great one. Sarah and Eric wanted to shout out Agatha All Along from Wanda Vision and Ballad of the Witch's Road from Agatha All Along. Guardians, you already mentioned, but come and get your love. Mr. Blues guy in there because I love that sequence of the way it's shot.

And the dog days are over from Guardians 3, the sort of all the characters dancing. together. At Wollivan suggested the Meganley-Stalian twerking from Sheehulk. Great one. This actually, this is the one that I almost put on in it also prompted me to watch three episodes of a television show. Legion. Yeah. I actually almost put on.

The suggestion we got from a lot of people was the use of Bolero in this sort of dream sequence. I'm not sure that's dietic, actually. That's okay. It's really good. Dan Stevens singing Rainbow Connection. playing the banjo. Dan Stevens is a great singer, but that's another case where it's like performing, you know, he's stuck in this liminal space. He's trying to signal something to Sydney. And he's distraught, but sort of like, like, locked into pretending that he's not. And he's just,

and Dan Stevens learned how to play the banjo in a week to do it. And it just like sings the rainbow connection. And I really almost put it on my list. It's really, really good. And there's like dance battles and rap battles inside of Legion. It's just like really great stuff. Sunflower from Into the Spider-Verth. I thought that was a really, really good suggestion for one of our listeners. Yeah. At B. Cool Bear suggested Sam playing Trouble Man by Marvin Gay for Steve at the end of Winter Soldier. Great one.

At Skriffy suggested the Star Spangled Man with a plan from First Avengers. Various Iron Man, iron needle drops, you know, like Jarvis drop my needle. Like, you know what I mean? Like it's part of it. Rogers the Musical? No one really went to bad for Rogers the Musical. X-197, Rogan Magneto dancing to Aza's Base, a moment that you and I like... I can barely, like, talk about that when we thought about it.

That was fucking electric. That was incredible. With Gambit watching them. Okay. I'm going to call that one an official smuggle of mine. I want to claim that as an honorable mention for us personally. That's a great one. Oh, God.

All right. Do you have any other superhero things on the list at all? Anything from... No, I don't. Okay. I just want to shout out one other things. At Halkat tweets nominated from The Batman. Yes.

Maybe not best, but it's notable in the Batman when it seems like something in the way was a needle drop only for it then to be turned off by Bruce, who has presumably been listening to it on repeat for hours. That was really fun. Great one. Fantastic. Okay, Joanna. What is your number six? Do you have anything from the television series?

Station 11. I'm so, I don't, I'm so happy that you have this. But I'm not sure. I mean, there are a couple good options. There are a couple good options. I did not go with the one that everyone wanted me to go with. This is the one that I picked Carlos Lee Play this Club. Breathe is false so quaintly that they may seem

taints of liberty, the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind, a savageness in unreclaimed blood of general assault. We'll all see one today. She loved this song. That's as much music as I got into any clip. Thank you, Carlos, for including it. I was like, can we get away with it? So this is from the series finale.

This is Midnight Train to Georgia. I will talk about why it's here. Obviously, the one that people really wanted to have in here was from episode seven. Excursions were Frank Raps a Tribe called Quest, and it's incredible. It's great. There's also Kirsten Singh, the first Noel, which I thought about. But, okay, so Station 11, Midnight Train to Georgia. From the finale Unbroken Circle, the clip you just heard is a lead-up to Deborah Cod.

singing midnight train to Georgia as sort of a memorial for Lori Petty's character Sarah who has just passed away. And it is the backdrop to Jevin

and Kirsten are two main characters of this show who have been separated since Kirsten was a child, spoilers or station a lemon. Separated since Kirsten was a child and they rediscover each other and they share a wordless hug.

And it is one of the most emotionally rewarding moments. Patrick Somerville, who is the showrunner for Station 11, worked on the leftovers, worked under Damon Lindelof. Like, this is a very Lindelofian moment. Midnight Trade to Georgia,

I was arguing with a friend of mine about putting this on here because she's like, how essentially is that song to this moment? I was like, actually it is because what happens plot-wise is what you heard was a character reciting some of Polonius's speech from Hamlet. And the notion of performance and art as this shared experience,

this essential experience of humanity, survival is insufficient. The quote that Malia and I love to cite all the time, performance is so important. There is a moment earlier in this episode. where there's like a near miss between Chevin and Kierston inside of this show. And you're like, oh my God, are they not going to see each other here at the end of all things? And this is based on a great book, but many, many liberties were taken. And so we don't know because this is their relationship is very different in the show than it is in the book.

They don't have a relationship. So Kirsten has just been talking to one of the like child soldiers who like snatches the copy of the comic from her and runs away. And Kirsten starts chasing her and then she stops. And she's like, no, I will not choose violence. I will stop. I will sort of smile and think about, okay, this is this is not the path I'm going to take. This book is now going to mean something to someone else. I am passing that along.

What she does and says is she turns back to and she gravitates towards listening. to the music. And because she makes that choice, and because she gravitates towards listening to the music, she sees Jeevan, who instead of going home, has stayed to listen to the music. Because they're both listening to the great Deborah Cox, saying that I train to Georgia, they see each other. Because they both chose to sort of marinate in this artistic space, they found each other. And something that Somerville said in an interview with Variety about it was just sort of like, Jeevan is sort of revealed to the audience in a way that before Kirsten realizes he's there.

But Somerville says, it's a great shot because in terms of slead of hand, there's no better look at my hand over here than Deborah Cox singing Midnight Train to Georgia, right? And this is like Dan Romer, who is the music supervisor. on this show and composer of the score, something like that. There's a lot of great live music from the show that happens. But this idea,

this full circle moment of Kirsten, meeting because of the theater, because Jeevan went to the theater and Kirsten was in the show, and that's how they met, and he walked her home. And meeting again because of this artistic, theatrical moment is really important to me.

The... Leave it on a minute I train to Georgia and this idea of, of like leave and jeven, like, together in this moment. But there's this recap that I read that Amanda Whitting wrote at the time for Vulture about this moment where she says, it occurred to me the lyrics are littered with concepts that a post-pan, meaning someone in the show who was born after the pandemic, couldn't understand trains, state lines, Los Angeles.

But the themes love and aspiration and homecoming are beginning to make sense again. And then she sort of enumerates how that hits, like, the various different characters. Then she goes on to say, perhaps this is another high watermark in the remaking of civilization. People have survived long enough to shed versions of themselves, just like in Wendy's songs. Bottom one way to get back to the life that he once knew. The past isn't so squarely in the past. It is simply before and after. I just think it's gorgeous.

Beautiful stuff. This show absolutely. I'm captivated and wrecked the both of us and this moment is just like I can watch this moment in isolation a million times

and it will make me cry. The performance that we get inside of this wordless moment from these two people the ferocity of the hug is just very important to me. So that is my pick

from Station 11. that is a beautiful one. I felt very sure you would have something from Station 11. I'm glad it's that. The excursion sequence is wonderful. Great. Wonderful. This is an incredible.

But it goes back to that. And that has a lot of emotionality too in terms of what the character Frank is going to and stuff like that. But it goes back to sort of what you were saying. If you were choosing between the two, I'm picking the one that makes me some. sob every time. Just an incredible pick. I really wanted to put station 11 on. I gave myself permission not to

to because I felt so sure you would. I wonder if that will be true in reverse. For my number six, let's stick with HBO dramas from recent years. Do you have anything from the last of us? I do not. Perfect. We're in lockstep at number six here then.

Carlos? Hello. No, no, no, no, no, no, thank you. Sorry. Not this song. Not this home. Well, I'm not a professional. Well, neither am I.

Okay. To be clear, Mallory and I did barely any colluding on this list, but this is one where I was like, are you hitting the last of us? And she said yes, so I left it off my list. Yes. And I did not tell you which moment. Right. There are a few contenders, and we'll do some smuggles as well after we talk about this moment. This is, of course, from 2003's Season 1, Episode 3, the instantly.

indelible and iconic long, long time. And I am selecting Bill playing and singing Linda Ronstad's long, long time for Frank. As we talked about a lot when we covered this together when the season was airing. And even like before then, when we were just like on a group chat with like us and Chris. Yeah. I, this song has been a part of my life for as long as I can. remember. This was just a song that my mom played all the time when my sister and I were kids. Like, she would just play it all the time around the house and the car. She would sing it to us.

And so it is a song that I just have like a really deep attachment to and a love for. And so I think I would have had a reaction to it kind of no matter what. But then you put it inside this miracle of adaptation where season one of the last of us is an incredible season of television and there are a lot of episodes in it and sequences and things that we love. But episode three is like a radical act of adaptation. And it's something that we have found really intellectually and creatively rewarding to consume and parse and think about and we have carried it with us this moment. A lot of the things that Bill and Frank say to each other and what they mean to each other

and what it means to be able to forge a relationship like that in a context like that, that or at all, you know, paying attention to things it's how we show love. That's something that we both quote very routinely on our pods and just in our lives. So Bill and Frank, one of the things that I loved the first time I saw this episode, and again, this is not how it goes with these characters in the game at all. This is so different. One of the things that I love the first time that I saw this episode and just like have never stopped loving and I think we'll only love and appreciate more over time is just like,

what it captures about people's capacity to surprise each other, you know, which is just like a really important aspect of forging a connection and finding a way to like take a step that maybe you didn't know that you could take. And this is such a beautiful moment and musical moment and just story about connection and about like new love and new hope in the dark, like just a raft, like a life raft in the abyss. And this is also about somebody seeing you clearly for the first time in your life. And also like you bill in this situation allowing yourself to be seen for the first time. And, you know, that like, who are you thinking about?

Which girl are you singing about? There's no girl, right? And that kiss that they share and how nervous. Bill is because this is not an experience that he had. And so this horrible thing has happened in the world. And it is awful. And a lot of the show and the game exists in that space of how awful it is and the terrible things that people do to each other. But this is a moment about how good things can sometimes spring up amid the horror. And it's just beautiful. And so to, The look on Frank's face when Bill starts playing the piano and singing,

because I've done everything I know to try to make you mine, like we're having that experience at home watching it, and it would be perfect already. But then we go to the end of the episode. And Bill and Frank are gone, and we have watched in mere moments them live a life together that they would not have gotten to live together otherwise. And to fall in love.

And Ellie and George, Joel arrive. And when they pull away in the truck and Ellie finds the tape and they put it in and the way that we shift from like, all right, no, stop yet to like, oh yeah, that, oh yeah from Joel, it hits me so hard every time because like for him it is this capsule to the before. Yeah. And the way that the sunshine plays on their faces and Ellie, like, she's making fun of him, but she can't help but smile when she looks at how happy this music has.

has made him. And then they'll like, fuck. And on a rewatch, this is just, I mean, if you had played the game and you know it was coming, but now for everyone on a rewatch, like, the harbinger of the lyrics, the pair with them driving away and then into the credits, wait for the day you'll go away knowing that you warned me of the price I'd have to pay is just like really incredible. Yeah. So I really wanted to pick Joel playing and singing future days to Ellie in season two episode six, which I think is a gorgeous scene. I really wanted to pick Ellie playing and singing take on me to Dina from season two episode four, which we both adored. It was difficult not to pick those two. I felt like we could talk about them and celebrate them here as well on the smuggles.

But the Bill and Frank moment, that's exquisite. It's exquisite. It is. And it got, you know, I did think you might pick future days. Future days. Yeah. But I'm glad. I'm going to glad you did it. I'm glad you picked this, even though that's an astounding thing. But, like, that's another example. Pedro's singing that song is another example of sort of what we're talking about with Justin Thoreau in terms of, like, it's performance, not quality of voice. And so Nick Offerman has a much stronger voice, but it's still, like, sort of an imperfect performance, but it's so nakedly emotional. The vulnerability of it. And that idea that these are two men who are meeting each other in their middle age. And so they don't have a lot of time together,

but they do have time together and what it means to share a life with someone and a life shared and like strawberries consumed together and music shared together and paintings done together and meals shared together, you know, like these, the sort of like the appetites of life, the joys, the delights of life that like feels so absent elsewhere inside of this mushroom zombie infested world? Like what are what are the survival is this efficient? What are what are the sort of like joys of civilization of being a human that we can find and

share with each other? And like for some characters it's like a you know a dumb joke book and you know and for some characters it's this and it's just one of the most incredible episodes of television we've been given in the last 25 years and I'm so glad that you're honoring it this moment. It's the best. You can now watch House of R on Spotify and the Ringer's first ever television channel, available exclusively on Samsung TV Plus,

the subscription-free streaming destination bringing you the best of TV. Rewatch some of our best deep dives and debates on the new all-day ringer channel. You can also settle in and catch up on your other ringer favorites, including The Ringerverse, the rewatchables, or the big picture. To watch. Open the Samsung TV Plus app on your Samsung TV or Galaxy mobile device, navigate to the ringer channel, and boom, you're in. We've reached the top five.

So many incredible picks already that I'm like, what does the top five have in store? Oh, my God. What is your number five, Joe? Number five, I know you don't have this because this is another way in which we colluded. This is from 2022 The Rings of Power, Carlos Lee plays clip.

Come on now, Grove, not going to migrate to us. Might help us move faster if you sang as your mom's walking song. Hey, go on, Pops. Give us a war with it. The best. The absolute best. Okay, so you and I behind the scenes did a little like Tolkien negotiation, right? You were astonished.

I didn't pick this. I was. Yeah. This is like my number one runner-up of all of my run. But I was just like, I really, for us, for House of Var. Had to be here. I won and one-in-one day on the list. Tolkien elsewhere will be celebrated and we'll get to that.

But this is where we are celebrating the rings of power. And Megan Richards singing Wandering Day, which is, you know, was I think the top of your Spotify raft that year, was a, you know, come on pop, give us a war, but like, just like just a potent experience for you and I covering the show together. You've talked so eloquently about what the lyrics of the song mean to leave all I've known for the unknown ahead, like all, you know. And in terms of that idea that you were just talking about with The Last of Us and this idea of radical adaptation, you know, Jady and Patrick have taken a lot of shit for the Rings of Power. And we could talk about the ways in which the Rings of Power

has not been perfect in our view. But there are moments where you're like, nobody understands. Yeah. And can do Tolkien the way that these two guys are doing it. And this is one of those examples where it's like Tolkien's use of music, Tolkien's use of music as a way in which to expand or cement the lore of his world. It's often historical or geographical or whatever it is. And so this is a map. It's a map song. It's a traveling song. It's part of their culture. It is going to lighten their load as they travel. Megan has a beautiful voice. And so like as she, And it's not autotune. And so the way that she, like, sings, or I mean, if it is, barely detectable,

the way that she sings this is so uplifting. And it's just like, I just felt so served in terms of, like, here's some people who get what matters most about Tolkien. And that idea of, like, levitating. Oh, my God, we're getting music inside of this. we had a couple of bad babies write in about the Tom Bombadale song in season two

which I also sort of like levitated over and loved but this is just like you know this is the Rings of Power is one of those shows that has been so enhanced by my time covering it with you and by hearing from the bad babies and what it has inspired in me

in terms of digging deeper in my Tolkien scholarship and all the sort of stuff like that So, like, do I, is it more important to me than the Lord of the Rings movies or the books? No, but is it more important to like my experience through the lens of House of R in the last 25 years? Like, yeah, kind of. Until you and I cover the movies together. Like, this is something that has been so important to us. So I just love this song.

It had to be here. I love sharing the song with you. Adventures in Songs Must Be Share. so here we are. And apple tattoos, you know? And apple tattoos. It all traces back to this. Yeah, I'm thrilled that you have this.

I was worried I had a little too much recency bias on my list and that on the coin flip, because all of the Lord of the Rings contenders had that, this makes me feel a depth of something that is like indescribable almost. So they all had that. I went with the trilogy. We'll talk about that shortly, actually. But Wandering Day is for, for every. reason you said and all of the, just it's been like a thrill and a privilege to talk about it with you

now over over over the years. You know, we talked about it when we covered it. We talked about it on our favorite moments of the year pod at the end of the year. Like we keep finding reasons and ways to think about how it makes us feel. You know, we had the just unbelievable, like, pleasure of doing a music of Middle Earth episode together. I know. Yeah, did I see the Lord of the Rings musical? I mean, that's not eligible for this. I think we But it probably would have picked now and for always. We would have ranked it very high, in fact. Yeah, I'd do.

No question. If we had picked that. Something I wanted to say about that is when I found out you were not doing this and you were doing something for the movies, so then I knocked my movie pick on the list, it did hurt my early in the 25 years sort of proportion a bit, but that's okay. I still have some others. But I was trying to get, like, in making the list, I was, you know, recency by something you were concerned about, but also just like the spread, like not

neglecting the middle also and, you know, really trying to be representative of the 25 years. Can't have a survivor season 50 cast situation, you know? Right. Not from the middle. I get that. I didn't ultimately care that much about the spread of the years, but I, yeah, it was on my mind a little bit. It's just absolutely elated the wandering days here. Frankly, would have, I think, invalidated the podcast if it had not been.

Maybe the only thing I actually feel that way about, other than one other thing that I think we will both have very high. My number five, I do not believe you have. It is, it is eligible. I will explain why it is the one that I think is most likely for people to say. Is that eligible? But it is, and I will explain why. You don't have anything from Black Mirror, correct? I don't.

But I was expecting you would have this. Yeah, I mean, this was a lot. I talk about this a lot. Carlos. I guess I'm ready. For what? for the rest of it. Okay.

Mackenzie Davis back. A lot of time. A lot of Mackenzie Davis today. When I figured out that you would probably have this on your list, I was like double McKenzie Davis. What a treat. What a treat. This is, of course, from Black Mirror, this is the end of San Juanapero,

season three, episode four. Not only my favorite Black Mirror episode, but one of my two. three, certainly five favorite episodes of television ever. I absolutely love San Juanapiro, and this is, heaven is a place on earth, Belinda Carlisle, kicking in at the end, the end of the episode, and then cut in with the credits and these little glimpses of where our characters wound up. If you're watching the clip, you saw it. If you're listening, hopefully you heard it.

Yorkie, when Yorkie gets into the Mi, I. Yorkie pushes a cassette into the cassette player and then the song starts. So Yorkie is listening to this. I'll give it to you. I did rewatch this to check because one of our listeners put it in and I was like, I'll, I'll happily give it to it. The song could just start, but they go out of their way to show us Yorkie pushing a cassette into the cassette player. And so dietic, there we are.

This is like one of my two or three favorite deployments of an actual like pop song. song in TV or film ever. I think it is iconic genuinely. This is another example to me of like it could not possibly be more on the nose in terms of like the lyrics and everything, but that just heightens it for me. It's just perfection. You know, this episode, San Juan O'Paro, already would have been like one of my favorite hours of TV ever, but the way that it ends, like really cemented it and the use of the song really cements it and its status for me. This is a story about a lot of different things. It's a story about identity.

It's a story about acceptance and belonging. It's a story about people who embrace who you are and celebrate who you are. And it is a story about choosing each other, right? And choosing anything, including potentially a forever, with somebody who can help you live the kind of life that you deserve to live. And it's really beautiful in a show that is – and I think one thing that sometimes I think people – because it's a very – hopeful episode of Black Mirror, which is really rare. And Black Mirror can be really dark and really grim, like exceedingly bleak. Yeah. I something that I think everybody can receive every episode of television the way they want. That's cool. I'm not here to talk anybody into anything. But one thing

that I think is not a good faith argument is like black and black mirror like, Sanctuary and like, it's like, that's too easy. And I think this episode is like deeply rooted in pain and trauma and like there's a lot of really heavy intense shit in here. Like Yorkie's family's response to her coming out is what leads to the car crash that paralyzes her. San Juan Apparo gives her a chance, like a chance to be who she truly is for the first time and to share that with people with other people. And she meets Kelly there and they fall in love.

And Kelly has her own history and her own pain and her own. and her own very difficult choices, like her husband, her daughter, her daughter died before San Junipera was a possibility, right? And so, like, the choice that Kelly has to make is, do I choose forever if the people I spent my life with aren't there with me? Like, what would it mean to do that? What would it mean to live a life again? And is that, like, a grace that you can grant yourself? And, you know, there are so many deeply moving and emotional moments in this episode and so much is packed in here. Like, Kelly, in the real, like, world, in the actual timeline of where they are in their current lives,

marrying Yorkie so that Yorkie can, like, be uploaded to the cloud, can become a little blinking Tucker probe because her family wouldn't do it, wouldn't give her that. Right? Which is so horrible. And when we hear what Kelly says, like all things considered, I guess I'm ready for what, for the rest of it, it's like on the one hand that is so specific to I'm going to choose to be with this person. I'm going to go find Yorkie. When Yorkie puts in Belinda Carlisle and drives forward, like I will be there by that beach house waiting. But it's also like for the rest of it, it's another version of like I trade all. I've not. for the unknown head. It could be anything, right? It's like you're giving yourself the chance to be happy and to discover something new. And I think that's amazing. And the lyrics are, you know, this is like all-time song. This is just a great one thing. This is another classic, like always on the Spotify wrapped, you know. But it's, it's just perfect. They say in heaven, love comes first. We'll make heaven a place on earth, the driving off. It's just the setting. It's beautiful. And like, I love. when we see them in the car, Kelly joins Yorkie and they kiss, and that's paired with,

like, in this world, we're just beginning to understand the miracle of living. It's just gorgeous. Like, it's great. And then we go, and the little Tucker lights are blinking and dancing. And it's like, especially now, you know, in real life where we are and the insidious creep of technological advancements. And obviously that's like, that's a huge part of Black Mirror and the text of Black Mirror, like, what is the digital dystopia going to look like and what will it do to us and what will it do to how we think about what it even means to be human and forge a connection with someone. And I don't think this episode diminishes that or seeks to say that that's not true. But I think that it's important to say that there could be a glimmer of something brighter amid all of that.

And I just really like to adore this episode. I get chills every time that cassette tape goes into the deck and the song kicks in. I just like love it. It's so good. So this was the first thing I wrote down. This was always going to be on my list. I love that. I love the things we share, and then I love the things that are like distinctly you, you know what I mean?

And I just associate this episode forever with you. And I think it's no coincidence that you have, I don't think it was intentionally done, but I think it's no coincidence that you have these back-to-back queer expressions of love. Because, again, inside of like let music do what words cannot. Like, you know, for these characters who exist in a space where they are afraid of being their authentic selves. And so the vulnerability of opening yourself up to connection to someone is like so scary. It's always scary. But like the stakes are higher inside of these scenarios.

So it's so scary. And so like, you know, let the music express this for me to a certain degree. That's not exactly what's happening in Black Mirror. But, like, I just, I, I think that's one of the beautiful things that music can do, which feeds into, actually, my next pick. But tell me. Number four. Number four. I know you don't have this.

You haven't seen it yet. All right. Did you not allow yourself to put this at number one because of me? No. Well, I don't think I would have put it number one, but I might have put it number two. But I just, I can't talk about it in full and it doesn't bother me that I, that it's here. It's fine. Carlos, will you please play my clip?

Last night, you know, did anybody burst into song? Merciful Zeus? We thought it was just us. It was bizarre. We were talking, and then it was like... Like you were in a musical. We did a whole duet about dinner last night. I couldn't see in the synchronized dancing from the rooms of the church.

We were arguing, and then everything rhymed, and there were harmonies and a dance with cobras. It was very disturbing. What did you sing about? I don't remember. but it seemed perfectly normal. But disturbing and not the natural order of things. And do you think it'll happen again? Let me tell you something, Giles.

Still looks great. Spoiler, it will happen again, Zander. Season 6, episode 7, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, once more worth feeling. I'm cheating and just doing the entire musical episode. I cannot go into detail because even inside of that clip, which was like one of the least spoilery things I could put, there are two characters that Mallory has even met. Yeah, I'm like, who are those people?

Yeah, who are those people? So this is why I cannot talk very specifically about what happens to the episode, but I can talk generally. First about, you know, the audacity of this episode, the influence of this episode. So 2002, Buffy Vampire Slayer puts out a musical episode. Musical episodes weren't a thing. They became a thing after this. People just chased this and, you know, there's just like a number of great examples. but like Supernatural did a musical episode.

The magicians, which we got a lot of people wanting the magicians on the list, and they would do things that were inspired by Buffy all the time. The Aeroverse, Star Trek's Change New World, doing subspace Rhapsody, which was like directly trying to do Once More With Feeling. So the premise of Once More With Feeling is a demon has come to town,

and as a result, people are uncontrollably bursting into songs. So there is like this really fun, premise for the episode. Oftentimes, musical episodes, Star Trek didn't do this, but oftentimes musical episodes are treated as sort of like these little anomalies, this little like bubble of a sort of gimmicky episode that is not what we did with Once More the Feeling. The idea is you burst into song and you basically start confessing things that you've been hiding from other people and you start revelations happen, confessions happen that impact every single character in a very monumental way.

And so I love that about this, that there is like, you know, love confessions or revelations about things or whatever the case may be. And then the characters will say how uncomfortable they are that they revealed these things to each other. And so, again, that's a thing of, like, music heightening your ability to express something. You can finally tell people something you've been hiding from them because you're doing in song. There's dance. There's, you know, there's just like a number of things. It's, I sent you a clip of Giles singing from like a different episode. Because it was like the most

spoiler-free way. But Anthony Stewart Head, Amber Benson, James Marsters all have like incredible voices. So like showcasing their incredible voice. Emma Cofield is a great voice too. Showcasing their great voices is really fun. Some people are not. as good at singing Alice in Hanigan, but like we don't need to give her a song and we'll sort of like joke about the fact that she's not that great at singing. This is the one case where I would say there's a little more auto tune than I would like to aid one Miss Sarah Michelle Geller, but she sounds good enough and it's only slightly, but you can hear it. But do you know who doesn't need it? Anthony's your head. James Marstores. And I will just say if I had

to pick one moment, I would pick Spike. singing rest in peace, which is one of the greatest moments of my entire life. I can't wait to share it with you. But yeah, I just, I don't want to talk about it that much more in detail because I want to preserve the experience for you. But I think that its influence is undeniable in terms of what people felt free to do in a musical way on shows thereafter. and that is all I have to say about that. I feel bad for inhibiting you. But one of the things that we've talked about this actually in our season two pods, but we had previously discussed it as well.

This is an episode I have a degree of, obviously I don't have any of the contacts and there would have been encoding failures on any specific thing because it wouldn't have. But I do, like, I'm like, oh yeah, this is like one of, the biggest and most iconic episodes of Buffy and its influences felt and these people cited and X, Y, Z. So I have a sense of it, just because of like the force that it clearly is and the impact that it had happened. I can't, I can't, I can't wait to get there. What was Charles eating? Was that an English muffin? Was that a scone? I don't know. I don't know. I can't wait to watch, see that on a bigger screen in HD. I'm thrilled. I will say, you don't have anything for the

the magicians on your list. Do you? No, just honorable mentions, but I know we got, we got a lot. We had a lot of nominations for this. Under pressure, most of all, or? Yeah, under pressure most of all, but I would, I almost picked take on me, which, uh, yeah, it happens at the, towards the end. We have lost a character. It is so emotional. Very intense. Um, uh, yeah, the magicians. We, but the magicians is a show that, like, wears its Buffy love on its sleeve. And like, so many of the choices they made were just sort of like, because Buffy did it. I'll probably have to rewatch it after finishing Buffy.

There are direct Buffy references inside of it. Because, of course, so much of my experience with the magicians the first time around is like, oh, what if Hogwarts weren't fun? And, you know, what if magic were really hard and also for older kids? Or like, you know, obviously Narnia. But to have that other lens to see it through will be fascinating. So all right. My number four, this is where I have my Lord of the Rings pick.

And it is a Pippin' Pick, but perhaps not the person. Pipp and Pick that everybody is waiting for. So we will, of course, talk about that as well as one of our shared smuggles and honorable mentions. But Carlos, I think the real heads, the real bad babies aren't going to be surprised by my pick here. I've talked about this. Over our Lord of the Rings Pots. Carlos, can we see this clip? Pippie! It's like, I guess that's the most we can do. That's all you can get away. Okay, well, let me set the scene. So this is from, of course, 2003. The Return of the King. Extended a dish.

That doesn't matter. It's in every version. I did have to specify when I sent Carlis the time code extended edition, obviously. We're in Return of the King. Okay. We're in the third film of the trilogy. So we have survived Helm Steep. This is after Helmsteen.

This is after Isengarde. We are back at Enters. After they've eaten that chicken that was in the like body. Logged water. Everyone is imbibing. Consuming in many forms. Everyone's getting sloshed. Legos and Kimmel are playing their drinking game.

It gets started to affect me. Everybody is celebrating. That's what this is. This is a moment of celebration. Celebrating, surviving the battle, beating the odds, making it through, fending off the dark for just another day. And that's like very poppable throughout this whole sequence. They are together, right?

They are sharing a moment of good cheer. And I love this for so many reasons. The Green Dragon song that Pippin and Mary sing. But a specific moment inside of it is what really elevates it to just pantheon status for me. We see, you know, inside of this party, we see our beloved Pipp and Mary dancing. They're on a table. They're dancing and they're singing and they're kicking their hairy hobbit feet and they're swinging their pints and everyone is assembled, right? Everyone has gathered and everyone is watching them and everybody is smiling and everybody is laughing.

And I don't know why like I have, I honestly don't quite know why always I have such a fondness and like affection for this particular moment, which is like very brief and like not quite as palpably like emotional intense as edge of night, which will be our shared smuggle, which we'll talk about it in a minute. But I think like just that setting and that gathering, it feels to me like it's one of the most beautiful and organic encapsulations and presentations of the idea of fellowship that the entire series has to offer. Like the hobbits, what are they doing here? they're connecting to and sharing their culture, right, with the people of Rohan.

Like, that's what they're doing. You can drink your fancy yales. You can drink them by the flag in. But the only brew for the brave and true comes from the green dragon. Like the idea of the hobbits as the brave and true is just so perfect. And the way that everybody who is watching soaks this up and it embraces it and loves it. And, like, they're getting to glimpse something. Like, for us, this feels like as viewers or as readers, right?

It's such a, it's like a return to normalcy. It's a portal for a moment of a simpler time. Like, we're thinking of, you know, the rain may fall and the wind may blow when we've seen Mary and Pippin singing and dancing and drinking in fellowship. Like, before everything changed, right? Yeah. And then Pippin stops singing. And he turns and he locks eyes for just a second with Gandalf, who has been, smiling as Pippin has been singing, and their faces both just fall. Like, their smiles just

melt. And it is so brief and it's so fleeting. But there is just like a lifetime of fear and doubt and shame and like that sense of being unsure or worried and we're like full of a took, right? We haven't seen it yet. It's coming in mere minutes in the film, but the seeing stone. We will go further into this film into everything that happens at Minas Tirith, which we'll talk about more. Of course they're all thinking of Frodo, what it means to be so small in the face of something that's so big. Or thinking of Galadriel, saying to Pippin, like, do not fear young Peregrant, Tuck, you will find your courage. And so I just find it to be this, like, it's so quick. But I just find it to be this really, like, incredible blend.

it's like so jubilant and hopeful and pure. Yeah. Like how would you spend your time with the other people who made it through this thing with you? And then it is also so haunting just for a second inside of it. And it's just, it's really always like gripped me in a way that is significant. Is your interpretation at that moment that Gandalf can like tell what Pippin is about

to do with the Seingstone? That was sort of always my interpretation. Like he's always worried. Always worried about Bippin. He's like, I see something in you that is going to do this thing. Pip. Yeah. And I love what you said about how it connects back to the light, happy hobbits that they were before.

Right. And then there are ways in which you can't go home again. They will never just that. The Chires been saved, but not for me. Edge Knight? You want to talk about Edge Knight for a minute? Are people going to be like, how did you guys not have Edge of Night on the list? Yes. But honestly... Can you sing Master Hobbit? Well, yes, at least well enough for my own people, but we have no songs for great halls.

My... and evil times. Yeah. Changed forever our relationship with Cherry Tomatoes. Forever. My friend Matt has always said that each of the other of us will sing it at each other's funeral, whoever dies first, the other one will sing it at their funeral, Edge of Night. But you have to sing it like Billy Boyd sings it, which is way too poppy for Laura the Rings.

He's like, The Edge of Night. You're like, okay. All right, American Idol. That actually, I don't think I would have picked Edge of Night, though I might have crumbled to pure pressure and picked it. But for me, really, it's Vigo Morton Sen is Aragorn singing the lay of Barron and Luthian in fellowship, which is very brief,

but really beautiful or actually Misty Mountains. The Misty Mountains colds from The Hobbit. This is just gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. That I think is actually like aesthetically. It's the most beautiful Lord of the Rings music moment. Yeah.

I think about that all the time. Me too. I love that sequence. That's one of the runners up as well. And then look, let's just fucking say it. Rock and Bull is nice and cool. It's a juicy sweet. Currently wished to catch a fish, a juicy, sweet column.

You know, in the forbidden pool, it has to be here. It has to be here. Talk about iconic. There are a lot of Lord of the Rings contenders. I mean, like you said, the music is just an essential part of the Middle Earth experience. So no bad pick, really, from Rings. We're at the top three. Oh, my gosh.

I feel like we might have the same number three and number one. I know we don't have the same two because my two was your seven or if I'm remembering correctly. But maybe we don't. Maybe we don't have a thing that I thought for sure we had as a shared item. This is a shock to me. But I don't know. I don't know. Let's find out.

What's your number three? Do you have anything from the 2025 film centers? As an honorable mention, oh, I'm hyped that you have this on your list. Fantastic. Okay, so we don't. Oh, no, wait. Maybe that's your number two. Okay.

No, I'll close up. We don't, I don't think we have it, and I'll explain why. Oh, interesting. Okay. Carlos, will you play this clip, please? I'm gonna send me more. I'm a sharecropper from sunflower plantation. They called me preacher boy, counter my daddy being the pastor.

I wrote this song for him. This is one of the most astonishing cinematic experiences of my lifetime. Yeah. And I was, I was, I was, I was a little worried about recent. bias. I was like, is it just because you saw sinners multiple times in the theaters this year? No, it's that good. No, it's just that good. So this is the moment in sinners. If you've not seen it, what are you doing? But this is the moment in sinners when Sammy sings, I lie to you, written by Oakland's own Raphael Sadeek and Ludwig Warringson, performed by Miles. I've heard his name

pronounced several different ways, but I'm going to go with Caton, which is the way that Ryan Cougler says it. Miles, and by the way, beautiful singing voice, not a guitar player. So he practiced, they learned this

complicated blues song on the guitar, five hours a day, practiced so much that his fingers seized up at one point. And as he's singing this song,

I lied to you, about his love of the blues and about lying to his father who would prefer he not love the blues. We're inside the juke joint, everyone's dancing, and then all of a sudden, there is this, to your point, incursion of

different musical genres, African music, funk guitars, DJs, Sisu, Chinese performers. We're following, we're roaming around the juke joint. Everyone's dancing, and all of a sudden you hear these other instruments, these other instruments come in, and then you see in this surreal sort of celebration of the blue, and its connection to the past and its connection to the future. The execution of this was technically it was written into the script.

So, like, Ryan Coogler's like, and then Sammy's going to sing a song and then all these figures from the past and from the future are going to come out and be part of the experience. And Ludgorensen's like, fuck! How do I, like, how do I deliver on that?

And so he called in Raphael Sadiq to help him. And apparently Raphael Sadiq had, like, been working on this song his entire life, I lied to you. And so it comes to this. It's a banger song. But in terms of just thinking about the logistics of this, they did an IMAX camera. So if you watch this an IMAX, it just opens up into this IMAX moment. Those are massive cameras that they had to move through the closely packed juke joint and carefully choreograph. when

when does the Jimmy Hendricks S guitar come in so when do we see that person inside of this and like so Ludwig Gordson

was DJing on the set live in order to like get this is when the drums come in and this is when the Chinese influence comes in and like

something I love and this is when the twerking so happens and something I've loved about this experience is like your jaw

just like drops and then drops further. And you're getting these like auditory cues of what's to come or you see like something visually. And then you're worried you miss something. So you get really excited to see sinners again. So you can watch that whole thing again. And Ryan Coogler has talked so beautifully about the way in which making Fruitvale Station and then Creed and then Black Panther were all about exploring these different parts of his own, you know, Oakland being something he's connected to Africa being something he feels connected to. And then he talked about his father and creed and how that's all connected. Then he's like, then there's this like Mississippi Delta

Blues part of my family. He went on this like scouting trip with Ludwig Gorson and his father to sort of like drill down into like what the blues means. And something that Coogler brings up again and again when he talks about the blues as this like root structure that reaches back and then branches out into the future is this idea of the crossroads that comes up again, thematically again and again in blues music. And so this idea of this like permeating a boundary,

this like laminal space of reality that happens inside of this musical moment. And then the roof catches on fire and the whole thing burns as this sort of acknowledgement of the undeniable power of art and expression and music and freedom and community that these people who are not welcome in many places

have found with each other inside of the juke joint here. And so the supernatural that happens inside of this moment. I mean, this is a movie with vampires in it, but the supernatural of like these ghostly apparitions and then the fire, which is not actually a fire because the juke join is fine by the end of the song. And then the PS de Resistence is like, This is the siren call that draws Remick to the jukechoint.

He is irresistibly drawn to the power, Sammy's power, his connection to music. And then music, of course, will be important. Like, the other performances inside of the juke joint, Wild Mountain Time, Rocky Road to Dublin, like all the set that happens with vampires outside. The moment earlier in the film when Delroy Lindo's character is, talking about, like, his experience with music and, and you get this auditory encouragement while he's talking about it. Sinners is a masterpiece, no matter what, if this weren't in the movie, it would be a

masterpiece. But this elevates it to just sort of, like, I just can't describe how I felt watching this. And every time I feel that watching this. So, frankly, I could have put it higher. But this is where I have. I lied to you from sinners. So, yeah. Perfect.

Perfect pick. Also, technologically, so the IMAX camera, but then there's also the Dolby Atmos sound they used. And so talking about sound design, as the camera, as we move through the juke joint, we're hearing the song differently as if we are in the room listening to Sammy perform, which is just viscerally incredible. So immersive, truly.

Incredible pick. Thank you. Filled. This is great. Academy voters, I know you'll listen to our podcast. Remember this come Oscars because I am like, the sinners is like my dune too this year where I'm like, if you fucking forget about sinners or you you deny its power because it's a genre film, I will never forgive you. So, yeah. My number three is from a television series called Lost.

I don't have anything from Lost because I knew you would. Okay. So this was when I was like, I was going back and forth. I'm like, I know Joe is going to, I talk about this all the time. I was like, I knew you would know I had it and maybe. I also, similar to my like, arbitrary restriction about superheroes, I, told myself I was only allowed one Damon Lindeloff thing. I had this one first, and then I just couldn't leave the leftovers off.

So I was like, fuck it. I celebrated. We're going double Damon. My number three is from Lost. Carlos, give us the clip. Okay. This is like a genuine, genuine favorite of mine. Absolutely.

This from 2005, the season two premiere, season two episode one, man of science, man of faith. Just a fucking all-timer. Just an astounding moment in television history, honestly. Yes, truly. And that's a big part of why I felt like I knew I would have it on, but I moved it around the list a few times. I'm like, it's got to be top three for that reason, ultimately, and some others.

This is Desmond, playing make your own kind of music, Mama Cass, Cass Elliott, on the record player, as we realize that we have gone into the hatch. So this is just like it's a banger of a lost episode. It's a great one. We open on an eye. A different eye. Who is this?

Computer beeps, as you just saw and heard. A man jumps out of his bunk. He enters the numbers. Presses execute. The beeping stops. He walks over and his boxers and his t-shirt to a record player and he puts on make-your-old kind of music. And he listens to it as he goes about his routine.

He does the dishes. He rides his exercise bike. He does pull-ups. He does crunches in a way that I can never manage. Makes a smoothie. Takes a shower. Injects himself with a vaccine and then boom. An explosion pulls the needle off the record.

The man suits up. He arms himself. And he looks through a series. of mirrors up at our titular man of science and man of faith. There they are. John and Jack. And we realize what is happening. We realize we were in the hatch.

We have discovered the hatch in season one. We had looked down into it. We looked up at Lack and Jack looking down. But now we're here. We're in it. And there is a fucking person here. And there is a whole world down here. And so it's like an all-time musical moment to me.

a lot of reasons. Like, this is one of my favorite shows ever. It's one of our favorite shows ever. We talk about it all the time. You guys know we love Lost. The song is a banger. This is a classic. Like, on my Spotify wrapped all the time. I just fucking love this song. And my experience with loss is a huge part of why this song is something that I cherish so much and spent so much time revisiting. And obviously, like, the lyrics are so rich and so significant. Like from the first bar, nobody can tell you there's only one song worth singing. You know, we're going to build toward you're going to be nowhere, the loneliest kind of lonely. It may be rough going, just do your thing the hardest thing to do.

And so there's like what it means that Desmond chooses to put this on, picks up that record and puts it on and listens to these words, right, and thinks about these things. In his isolation, there's also, though, how it fits the show and the themes and interests of the show more broadly and how this story that orients so mesmerizingly and fascinatingly around the choices that define so many lives and these people who feel so often so isolated and so alone. And then we and they discover the connections, right, that wound up leading them to this experience and to this place. And it just changed like the fabric of my TV viewing world.

It did. And like, it opens up the world of lost and the universe of loss, but in the way that it does that, it does the same thing for our imaginations. Like, so spectacularly, the idea of the layers of truth and possibility and reveals and entwinement that can wait for you in a story and a mythology and a character set that is crafted with this much intention and care, it's like the fact that this. is the start of the season. I just think it can't be like understated as a choice. And we don't know this guy at all. It's just incredible. I mean, it's our guy Desmond, but we don't know that yet. So, uh, I knew you would have this. I'm so relieved you have it. It had to be here. It would not have been my lost pick. Yeah. There are a lot of contenders from lost. A lot. My lost pick would be Shambola, three dog night from Trisha

Chinaka is dead. Just in the same way that I like, I knew you would pick this. I think people who have heard me talk about loss would know that I would pick Shambola because in that episode, Trisha Tanaka is dead, which I talk about a lot as this example of like possibility inside of a longer season or whatever. It basically centers around four characters, Charlie Hurley, Sawyer, and Jin fixing a VW van and they get it running. And the moment they get it running, the eight track in the car starts, kicks in and Shambola plays. And Jin and Sawyer, who has, helped push the van to get it started. You know, Jin's like, Harley, and they, like, run, and they get in the van, they drive around.

They've been drinking these, like, extremely flat, I'm sure, Dharma beers. And it's just like this, to your point about the Green Dragon moment, it's just this moment of joy inside of a world that is so dangerous and so scary. So, yeah, that would have been my lost pick. But there are a lot of great options for lost. A little Petulia Clark downtown is. a fun option, you know. So, yeah, Hurley listening to his disc man until it runs out of batteries, you know, like there's just...

Why are you all everybody heads out there? You all everybody, people want to talk about Drive shaft for sure. So, yeah. Oh, one of our listeners wrote in, Leah, I think it was, wrote in and was like, she wrote good vibrations, ha, ha, ha, kill me. So, you know, that's a very potent moment, too. So, yeah. Oh, man.

Lost, great show. Watch it if you haven't. Number two. My number two is your number one. And my number two is your number seven or something like that. So seven was where you had Avatar The Lost Airbender. This is my number two. Let's do that.

I had no doubt we would have it on both for our list. Carlos, let's see the clip. Happy birthday, my son. If only I could have helped you. Just from like the first The first chord. No. Yeah.

You just want to cry. Stop. Stop. This is from 2006. This is Avatar The Last Airbender. The Tales with Bossing Say. Joe, you want to tell us what this means to you?

Sure. So Uncle Iro, a shared favorite of ours. So Tales of Bossing Say is a really great episode. It has a bunch of little short stories inside of it. And we have, you know, Uncle Iro is a character who has, like, you know, we know has seen a lot as experience a lot, but it has constantly been this

booing source of like, and when we first meet him, it's like this silly old man who loves to eat and drink tea and stuff like that. And it has constantly been this sort of force for sort of like light and positivity.

And he, you know, he spends the day in Bossing's day like being supportive of other people. And then he takes this moment to go up to this hill and honor his son who has died.

And he sings Lees from the Vine. And Mako, the actor who voiced Uncle Iro in the first couple of seasons, passed away shortly after recording this in 2006. But Michael, Dante Di Martino and Jeremy Zuckerman

wrote this song. It's very simple, very short. But it's gorgeous. And it is, again, one of those vocal performances that is not technically perfect, but he's just infused with, he's just weeping as he sings this beautiful song about a soldier boy. And the soldier boy is his son who went to war and didn't come back. And so it's just devastating, devastating.

True story. When I opened Netflix and went to the Avatar Lost Airbender catalog to find this and revisit it. This was exactly what I think because it was the last thing that I had just like I had to, every now and then I just have to see it. It was definitely featured in our top avatar moments. It did. We did. Yes.

We talked about this together when we were revisiting the animated series ahead of the live action series. And yeah, I just, I find this like profoundly, deeply sad and moving. And I, yeah, like that episode is wonderful. All of the vignettes are great. The Iro, the Uncle Iro vignette. Like, for what you said is, you know, we go from watching him, like, shift the moon flower that likes the shade, right? And then he's singing this song. He's singing leaves from the vine to this crying little kid to try to cheer him up.

So we get this, like, really joyful, kind of peppy, bouncy, bouncy rendition. Like the Remember Me sort of. Yeah. Yes. And then, you know, he guides the soccer benders, you know, the side of these kids. It's like, and then he's accosted. And what does he do with this? This would be thief who is trying to rob him.

He, like, counsels him, you know, about his stance. And he says, while it's always best to believe in oneself, a little help for mothers can be a great blessing. And so, like, we talked about this when we talked about this moment on that prior pod. But, and you just mentioned this, like, I'm always so struck by that part of this sequence before we even watch Ira walk up the hill and kneel in front of the tree to remember his son. Like the fact that this is undoubtedly the hardest day of Iro's life every year, right? His son's birthday. Maybe one of the two hardest days, the day that his son died and then the day that they would have been celebrating his son's life.

Yeah. And he spends it helping other people. Like it's just hard to think of too many other ways to show us what somebody's heart holds. And so the buildup is so rich, even though it is, we're talking about minutes. Right. A vignette inside of a half-hour episode, like a 20-something minute episode of television. Yeah. And then, like, we watch him walk up. I'm always so struck by the setting because you have, you know, he's, he's preparing, right?

He's setting the rocks and he puts down the cloth and the offerings and his son's portrait and lights the incense. But just the tree and the hill and then the way that the sequence is dapp. bold and full of the setting sun, you know, with the tree in the sun and the sun, like, and what he is doing there remembering his son that he lost, it's like this idea of cycles, right, and rebirth and like the natural order of things and just the subtlety of the presentation of that. When he says, happy birthday, my son, if only I could have helped you, like, we're in this moment with Iro and Iro's loss, but we're thinking about Zoot.

Zuko's not here, but it is a moment that so deeply enhances our understanding of a relationship that means so much to us. Yeah, yeah. Because he doesn't, the whole that Lutens death left, and they're in Bossing sex, this is where his son died. And like, how can this not inform, as we understand Iro better through witnessing this grief? How can this not better and more fully inform why beyond just the nature of a family bond? That doesn't matter for a lot of other characters in the show, why he is so desperate to, like, reach Zuko

and to help set him on a better course than the one he's on at that point in the story. So that really, like, heightens and enhances it for me as well because I own Zuccarus, like, my two favorites. I fucking love them. So important. And the singing, when we, because we got that version with the little boy in the street,

and then we hear the despair and the way we see his tears, and then we hear, like, he's weeping, he's sobbing, he's mourning, so actively, he's like choking out these words. When he says little soldier boy and the sob kind of chokes the words, it's just devastating. Brave soldier boy comes marching home because he can't come marching home. And like it is really just I love this as a, you know, it's touching and it's crushing. Just this idea of like the portrait of grief that other people carry and like you don't always have access to.

Right. And how lonely and private grief is for people. Yeah. And, like, how worth remembering that is. We don't know what other people carry with them. Yeah. So I really love how this world makes me think of that. Yeah.

Like, the whole thing about Iro is that, like, peeling back the layers of, you know, we find out more and more about his strength and his abilities and all sorts of like that. But, like, the buffoon, the fall staff or whatever, becoming this, like, yeah, deeply tragic and this insight into him. And that it is expressed in song is such a. Yeah, privilege, I guess. We're at our number ones. So your number two is my number one. I don't know what your number one is.

I'm so excited to find out what order you want to do this in. Let's do my two and your one last. I think it's right that we end on that. So tell me what your number one is. Carlos, will you please play this clip? So here we are in the middle of nowhere, bumping into each other. I'm only here for the night and I figured, you know, I didn't ask you to dance tonight. Never forgive myself.

Oh, my God. Of course. Absolutely perfect. Perfect pick. I could not do a single clip from the actual scene that I'm talking about because there's music under all of it. So the moment is a shared dance between Nora and Kevin. at in the season three episode 8, the book of Nora, the series finale, two dreams to remember by Otis Redding,

which is playing at a wedding. And Kevin asks her to dance and they dance. He asks her here to the dance and she says, no. I don't want to spoil all of the leftovers, I guess. But I will just say that Kevin and Nora have been separated in the show since like basically the beginning of the season. So it's one of those like, Lindelhoff did this all the time on Lost.

It's like what we were talking about, Station 11, this like reuniting of two characters. For reasons I will not get into right now, Kevin is like pretending they don't know each other very well, but in fact they were a family. She is the face he was thinking of when he was singing, Homer Bound. They have been separated in the time of the show for years and years and years.

And some of the best old age makeup I've ever seen in my entire life, like quite subtle, but showing the passage of time. And for Carrie Coon, especially is Nora, they, there's just like, I mean, Carrie Coon is beautiful no matter what, but there's really like no vanity to Nora at this time in her life. Her hair is grown out and kind of scraggly and gray. She works in the Australian sun, and so her skin is all skin, her skin damage. She does show up to this wedding, even though she told him she wasn't going to go in like trousers and a jacket and a button down and no, not a scrap of makeup on her face. or like a sweater and a nose, scrap of makeup on her face.

My icon and my queen and my role model. He asked her to dance. She dances with him. The looks that they share, and Justin Thoreau in this whole, both of them, but like Justin Thoreau's face when he comes to the door in that scene in the clip that we just came from where he's just like, his lower lip is trembling, like almost through all of it. And then they share this dance. The look that they give each other of like such.

yearning, you can see the passage of time on their face, the time that they have been separated from each other, the yearning, the morning, the like what we have lost. And then, and this is the beauty of dance inside of something is they start dancing cheek to cheek. So then we get to see their faces, the faces that they can't even show each other. They're showing each other a lot of emotion. But then they go face to, like cheek to cheek. So the camera shows us her face and her absolute collapse and just sort of, and then his face and his absolute collapse, she like snuggles into him, like into like, breathe into his neck, the scent of this person who was one so close to her. And then she shifts so that her like cheek is pressed up against his chest and they just like hold each other tighter. And it is so beautiful.

And then there is this like devastating. This is not the reunion because there's a devastating break after this where she asks him why he's there. He perpetuates this lie, this story that he's giving her of like, I was on vacation, blah, blah. She says, I can't do this because it's not true. And she leaves. And then there's more to come after that. But this moment is so beautifully. It's a nighttime wedding.

The light is gorgeous and golden meat leader again is back. as director to sort of give us this vision, I did text our pal Damon Lindelof to ask him about this scene and this is what he said. He said, Otis Redding was always the voice of Kevin's inner pain.

I wanted the music over the opening titles to be nobody's fault but mine Otis Redding. And it worked perfectly, but it would have cost a gazillion dollars and Richter wanted to score it. We used Otis Redding in the pilot, I think when Kevin and Amy and Jill are eating dinner, we use Otis for the Murphys, too, to connect them to Kevin.

But Dreams, remember, was always the one I was saving for the finale. All I knew was that it would bring Kevin and Nora back together, but he didn't have any context yet. And then he says, I'm pretty sure that dances something else when maybe shot it. Dreams finally found his place in the edit, as did all the Billy Holiday. And then he texted me a leader to ask her what they played on set. And he says, it was, I will always love you, the original Dolly Part and not Whitney.

Oh, wow. was a little two-two, but it had the right cadence. So that would have been not this. Wow. This is such, I just cannot describe. Yeah, it's beautiful. Storytelling, emotional storytelling at its apex, performance from Carrie Coon and Justin Thoreau at their apex,

a beautiful song, a beautiful setting, romance and yearning, but pain and sorry. also there and distrust and all these other things. And it's just, it does something to me. It had to be my number one, even though, like, what, the one we're going to talk about after is, like, also so important to me. But I couldn't put this any lower than number one. And something I want to mention, a sort of, like, miracle of peak TV, is that the Leftover's finale, Book of Nora, aired on June 2017. In August 2017

In an episode of Twin Peaks the Return Which is a genre show The Characters of Ed and Norma To an Otis Redding song I've been loving you too long Ed proposes they kiss And she says Norma says Of course I will marry you

That is a payoff of a love story That's from 25 years previous In Twin Peaks It is just an incredibly poignant romantic moment. They've talked about filming that scene that David Lynch was playing the Otis Redding song loudly on the set and weeping like a baby as he was filming this.

Again, very romantic, just the mirror of it, like these characters who have waited so long to be together. And the idea that like I always, I often watch the Dreams to Remember dance sequence on YouTube if I want to cry. And then I always chase it with I've been loving you too long this sequence when Twin Peaks the return. I feel so I asked Damon about this. I was like, because he's obsessed with David Lynch and Twin Peaks.

And I was like, what did it mean to you that just like a few months later? Yeah. Like coincidentally, right, that one of your mentors used a notice reading song to score a very similar sort of moment. And he was like, you know, in his Damon fashion, like, oh, nothing except I was sure that she would say yes. when Ed proposed to her or whatever. And then we were just talking about the ways in which he was like, the joy of being a fan is that you can become overly invested in things and like ascribe meaning to them, you know,

and he's just, he's a Twin Peaks fan. So I don't know, it's all wrapped into a moment of television that we were really lucky to experience. The leftovers feels like a miracle that it ever even happened, let alone ran for three seasons. To your point, it's a show I hated in its first season, and then became my, I think this might be my favorite television moment ever.

Wow. So that is why Kevin and Nora dancing to Otis Redding is my number one musical moment of the last 25 years. Oh, Joe, that was beautiful. What a great pick. Thank you. Well, let's stick with Friends of the Pod. Let's talk about Brian Cogman for a minute here

because your number two is my number one. It is Podrick singing Jenny's song, Jenny of Oldstones, in Season 8, Episode 2, A Night of the Seven Kingdoms from 2019. Carlos, play the clip. Better get some rest. No, let's stay a bit longer.

Or out of wine. How about a song? One of you must. No one. This is the night before. This is the night before, the moments before, the final moments before,

the long night, the Battle of Winterfell. And inside these just, you know, utter, Maras of season eight this entire episode and many moments inside of it a gift just a gift

and a jewel a beautiful jewel this is a love letter it is a thank you and I think we both consider it the proper goodbye to the characters

who we had spent so long with and grown to love so fiercely when we see Tyrian and Jamie and Brian and Padrick and Davy

and Torman sitting by the hearth here. And this is followed by the nighting and Alzheimer for both of us. And Davos, Tertarian asked for a song. And Davos and Brianna and Tormond all passed in their unique fashions. And then Padrake Pate. You'll pray for a quick time.

Pray for a quick time. Patrick Payne, Daniel Portman, begins to sing. And we hear Jenny's song. We'll get a Florence and the machine version of it at the end over the credits, but we're talking about the Patrick version here. It's like, it is in some ways very, Pippen, edge of night, and return to the king, you know, but like here, the fact that the real differentiator is like that it's shared by friends here, no Denethor, no figure like Denethor here in this circle.

And the look on Tyrion's face when Pod begins to sing, because he doesn't announce that he's going to, he just starts. And his former squire, there's never lived more loyal squire. His former squire, being, and Brands Squire, being the voice in the dark when no one wants to go to sleep. when the world can end at like any moment, and they all know it, and it's all they can think about, and the only thing that they all know to be true other than this horror waits is that they don't want to be alone in the face of it. And they and we are like mourning

what we've already lost, and also what we fear we might but haven't yet, and that is such a taught, intense space to inhabit. And you're also fighting. Like you're fighting so that, you can live and save and protect and that you're doing it so that people keep surprising you the way that Patrick surprises them right here. And the lyrics, this is like a great, it's a great moment for book nerds who are like, holy shit, it's Jenny's song. You know, the first line of the

song, High in the Hills of the Kings who are gone, Jenny would dance with her ghost. We know that line from the books. And then the rest of it is this new thing for us. And we have all of these, there are all these moments from the books where, which maybe we'll talk about more in a minute. But you don't need any of that at all, ultimately. The ones who'd been gone for so very long, she couldn't remember their names. Or, and she never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave.

That repeats time and time and time again. Like, it is, that's all of them before the fight and before the long night, but it's us too. Because we're at the break of the end of Game of Thrones and what that shared experience was. And the montage of the pairs with the song, the pre-battle glimpses, that overhead shot of Gilly and Sam and Little Sam.

I think the one that always breaks both of us the most is the look that passes between Theon and Sansa, which just shatters us. Ariang, Gendry in bed, Masande and Greyworm kissing, Jora, riding into formation. Like, if you come to the scene and you bring to it like the ghost of high heart asking Tom of Seven Streep's dreams to sing and it's like, you know, you want the same one again? Like, oh, my Jenny song, is there any other? And Aria has heard it and we have witnessed that. Or, you know, Rob has said, like, there's a... a song, Jenny of Oldstones, the flowers in her hair. And Catlin says, we're all just songs in the end.

If we're lucky. Like, if you bring any of that, if you bring who Jenny actually was as a figure in the universe and Duncan Targaryen and Jenny and what it means to choose love over your claim and your inheritance, or Jenny's friendship with the woods which who shares a prince that was promised prophecy in the Targaryen line and the role that that plays in the story and what it means that we go from this scene in the episode into John and Danny talking about who John is. Like, all of that is, I think, for book fans, kind of like a euphoric, transcendent experience. But the emotional truth of this is there, whether you have read a page of the text or not,

because this is about the history with the show and the history with these people. And they're the most important character, no matter how Thrones ended, like these are the most important characters in the last decade plus of my life. And so this was always going to be the number one for me because it is a gorgeous rendition and it is stirring and it is soulful. but it honors our time with them and with each other. And so I will just always cherish it. And frankly, the fact that back out of season 8 is such a letdown actually just makes

this moment even more precious to me as a time where we- Because you never want to leave this moment inside of the show. We never wanted to leave. It's just absolutely perfect. It's gorgeous. I did ask Brian about this and I will read what he wrote to me. But, like, I, thank you for sharing that. That was so beautifully put as always.

Whenever you talk about Game of Thrones, it's transcendent. I was arguing with Diana inside of our house about this because she's like, how can it not be Reins of Castamere? And we were upstairs, and she, like, gestured to this sort of gallery wall we have where there is a Raines of Castamere, the latest her sends their regards poster. And she's like, what's on the wall? And I was like, what's on the wall downstairs? It's a massive oil painting that a listener made for me of this fireside moment.

As you know, I have one too. commissioned one. And it's like the way in which David Nutter shot it, which is why when I said I was like, I said it looked like an oil painting to me and then a listener made this oil painting. Like, it's, it's just this golden circle of light inside of a darker room. And there is warmth there and there is her fellowship. Okay. So this is what Brian said about this.

Brian Cockman, who wrote this episode. He said, we always tried to find organic places to include the various songs reference in George's book. I think that song appears in the Storm of Swords. I honestly can't remember when I came to the idea to have him sing a song at that moment, whether it was in the outline stage or when I was writing the episode. but I knew Daniel had a lovely singing voice, and it seemed like a natural place for it, a sort of melancholic epilogue to that little one act that was the fireside chat in that episode. Plus at that point, and I haven't watched that episode since it aired, so maybe I'm wrong.

Pod hadn't really said much in this scene. He's the type to only speak to his betters when spoken to, so I thought it would be a fun surprise. Also pays off a running gag that Pot is always full of surprises. Anyway, I probably scan the wiki to see which. I probably scan the wiki to see which songs we hadn't used looking for a ballad and this would have come up. George sometimes has all the lyrics to a song in there, but in this case it's just the opening phrase. But it seemed perfect because they were all

facing certain death the next morning and reflecting on all they've been through. My personal favorite bit is the shot during the montage as he sings of Sansa and Theon silently sharing a meal together in the Winterfell courtyard. So I think it's a lovely bit. David Nutter directed it beautifully. And then he

says, that episode was my love letter to the cast. So I was happy Daniel slash pod had that moment. And then this is just like a fun fact. He said, now, I had done this before in season three. I took a fragment of a song. It's always somewhere under the sea and that this half-grade's gesture sings in the book

and repurposed it as a sort of nursery rhyme for Carrie Ingraham to sing a Shereen and wrote a bunch of new lyrics. I still get ASCAP residuals to this day for that. But that season eight episode was such a fucking nightmare to write. It was possibly the worst first draft I ever turned in and I was mentally exhausted that for the first two drafts I wrote,

additional lyrics TBD when Pod started singing and tended to come up with the rest later. But then the third draft comes back with the lyrics written by the guys, probably Dan White. And he told me at the time that it was Dan Weiss, probably Dan Weiss. But I'm not sure. Then it became a charting single by fucking Florence in the machine. Think of the ASCAP residuals, the bastards, but their lyrics are splendid. So great stuff from Cogman about that. But yeah, this idea that we had like one line of the song and then they write this like beautiful,

in terms of the way in which a song can keep us in a moment, such a strong memory I have. And I wasn't sitting with you at the time, but you might have been in the room. At Con of Thrones, there was this sort of talent show thing that they did for one of the evenings. And this great Game of Thrones blogger, writer, Petra, got up and sang Jenny of Oldstone's acapella.

And it was gorgeous. It was haunting and beautiful and like didn't need any embellishment to it similarly to like the way that pod sings it. And I was just like blown away but just like so appreciative to just be able to marinate in that moment again, you know, through this beautiful song being sung by someone who loves the show as much as we do. I want to add that like, you know, we're so lucky to have that moment because we love. of Jamie and Brian and, you know, who doesn't love Tyrion and Davos is there. It's such a nice group of people that are there. And so many different storylines sort of smashed together in this scene. You know, it's just sort of like, did we think we would ever get all these people,

same people around the fire together? I would add one note, which is, I think this would hit even harder if, if not for the fact that every single one of those people will survive the Battle of Winterfell. They're all fine, but Theon isn't. So, you know. Jora. But Jora's not in that, in that, like, if someone in that circle, that was, like, their last night, I think that would, like, devastate me even more.

But is it possible to devastate me anymore? Anyway, this is an incredible. This is just... It's the best. It's just so good. We both knew immediately that we were going to do this moment. It wasn't even a question for us. You know, with love and respect to the bear and the Maiden Fair and reigns of Castamere,

which is obviously, like, very important. Rains of Castamere for Diana and everyone else who's like, guys, what the fuck? Obviously, it's here as a smuggle, you know? I mean, I think when the doors close and the strings

begin, that is one of those, I mean, it does achieve that thing we were talking about at the beginning of the pod when you can hear just a beat of sound and it takes you exactly to a moment and a feeling. Obviously, Rains of Castamirteer does. that. When Thrones was great, it was just the absolute best. I want to say I was sort of,

I was, you know, poking around this song to sort of see what George had to say about it. And in 2000, someone asked him, this sort of goes to what you were saying earlier about long, long time and adaptation. Someone asked him if we would ever get more lyrics to Jenny of Oldstone. And he says, the chances are not good. I did write a few verses, but they were cut. I wanted that particular song to be very haunting and evocative, and I don't think I quite achieved that in 2000, he said that. So Thrones gets a lot of shit for the things that did wrong and rightly so. Yeah.

But many times over, it gave us things that George, for all of his genius, has not been able to. And so the fact that we now have a complete Jenny Wold's Zone song, and it's beautiful, is important. The fact that, like, we have a tune to the reigns of Castamere. or the bear in the maiden fair or whatever. Like anytime I read them, I can hear that version of it. Thank you, I think, Rumi and Javadi for all of that. So I think that, you know, the things that the show did very, very well endlessly, and this is such a good example of it.

And to go back to that Catlin quote of, we're all just songs in the end if we are lucky, like this idea of like history is constantly being written. They're on the eve of the Battle of Winterfell will become the stuff of ballads. for years and years. I mean, there are dragons in the sky. There's a fire sorceress. There's like all the shit going on. Like, the Night King, Ice Zombies are here.

You know, like, imagine the songs that will be written about that moment. But something that George does, that Tolkien does, is like we're constantly living in history through the ballads that are used inside of these spaces. I love that point. And, like, one of the moments. we get right before we transitioned into this sequence. I mean, obviously, we've already mentioned the nighting and the idea that any night can make a night and the connection across character sets. This episode is called a Night of the Seven Kingdoms.

We're about to get a show call a Night of the Seven Kingdoms. So excited. The novellas, everything. But also, like, one of the moments we get right before this Jenny of Olstown sequence is Sam giving Jora the sword. And, like, you know, the thing that Jora, who, of course, has rejected. previously taking Long Claw back from John. And what Jora says when he accepts Heart Spain from Sam, like, I'll wield it in his memory, right?

And the idea of memory. And like the genuine dance with her ghost is like the ghost, ghost of the past is why we have this story, you know? The decisions that Ragar and Leanna and everybody before them made. So like it is, it's just a, it's a beautiful way to tie these characters inside of this television series and this moment of the story. But I love, that's a perfect note, I think, to wrap this up on the way that it connects to everything beyond that, too, because that's what it means for a world to be a world.

Like, it's a song of ice and fire, you know? The world of ice and fire. Honorable mentions, we've hit a ton of them already, obviously, because we smuggled in a bunch. What haven't we hit that? I think we should certainly mention Dr. Who here. Yes. 12 and Clara. Oh.

Is it a sad song? Nothing's sad until it's over than everything is from a whole band. That one wrecked me at the time. That was hard to keep off. That was tough. And when he says, he says, you said memories become stories when you may forget them. Maybe some of them become songs. Like, ugh.

I thought you might have the Rasputin dance. I was sure you'd have the ex machina dance, Oscar Isaac dancing an ex machina. So I thought it, I don't think I was. was being super coy or subtle at the top of the pot. And I was like, there were some things that were really hard to leave off. And some of them were memes. So the three things that I was like, I mean, I've already said, I think about like seven different things. This was the one that was hardest to leave off. So take all of it with a fucking grain of salt as usual. But actually in my top 10 at various points, I had three things that ultimately ended up here in the honorable

mentions, which feel a little, even though they're all distinct a little of a piece to me, Nathan's spontaneous dance from X. Machinaw. Milchick's music. music dance experience from Severance. And then the wigwam, do you want to taste it? Peacemaker Season 1, opening credits dance, which were all like,

what is happening here? Moments that were, that feel to me, like there are these bursts of something astonishing, but also outside of the show or film that they exist, and they just feel like internet moments. So you're like, I just remember people like trading these gifts

and, you know, this became a meme, etc. So they feel kind of, have connected to me. And I did want to include one or at some point all of them, but I just simply couldn't at the end of the day. My hardest leave off, I haven't mentioned yet. It really pained me.

Season 1 episode 1 of interview with the vampire, Louis de Ponteelac and his brother, Paul, do a dance at their sister's wedding. And it's like, you know, Louis's last day is a human. And it's this like thing he shares with his brother who's just about to leave this.

And it's the moment that, and I think about it all the time, to your point about being surprised, when they start dancing, I was watching this with Diana. Diana were watching it. And my voice went into an octave. It rarely does. And I was like, is this musical? Anyway, so I love that moment. Jacob Anderson is great in that experience. And then one of our listeners is like, can we just include the trailer for season three of it or The Vampire? and I was like very tempted to. Like all of everything that Listad is about to do in the interview of the vampire season three would have been on this list. So that was my number one. My number two hardest to leave off was from other than all the smuggles that we talked about. Yes. In the film Stranger Than Fiction, a movie that I love that I think counts as House of Art. Sure, yeah, definitely.

That Will Ferrell sings Whole Wide World by Reckless Eric on the guitars. very long, long time, like, very much like a moment where he's just sort of like, he's, he's with Maggie Gillian. He's like, I can, I can't, you know, I can't. And then she goes in the other room to do dishes. And then he just starts playing this beautiful, a song that I already loved in a beautiful rendition of it. And then she comes back into the room sort of drawn in by him singing and then they

start making out and they have sex. But like, that. And then from Westworld. I thought you would have this. I'm always trying to get, well, what would you pick from Westworld? I just, I thought you would have something from Westworld. Yeah, yeah. The player piano and Westworld.

But there's so many, there's something's impossible. I know. The player piano and West World was so important, but there's just this really cool thing they did. In season one, there's this whole heist at the saloon set to a player piano version of Paint It Black. And then in season two, an Akana no Mai and Shogun World, they do the exact same heist again, except like, Hirouki Sonata is here now, you know, in, you know, in, in the Hector role, and then they play Painted Black again, but it's like the Japanese version of the play of piano version of. And so when you hear it start, you're like, oh, my God,

they're going to do the season one saloon heist here again. And it's just like, it's so fucking good, really good. I'm just Ken from Barbie was also very hard to leave off. It's also here for me has to be. Well, Defying Gravity from Wicked, Instant Classic. Great stuff. Um, golden years from a knight's tale. I love that moment in a night's tale when they start dancing to Bowie.

It's very good. That's a great one. Okay. I think this is eligible because we have talked about Mission Impossible on the pot before. Okay. The opera fight. Yeah. All right.

Yeah. I give it to you. Yeah. That feels like a good honorable mention to have here, I think. Great one. Bastar all along the Watchtower, obviously. Oh, I was actually very surprised you didn't have that. Yeah.

It's, I feel like I would have had to do a little too much equivocating and hemming and hawing about, like, people's not being a needle draw. Yeah, it's just, but honorable mention feels like a, I'll have, I think, Battlestar might be the thing that ends up making the most, like, top tens for me over the course of this exercise that we're doing. So I felt, I felt at peace with the here, but obviously that is a central aspect of the show. Edgar Wright Tofer. Scott Pillardom versus the world, I would do Clash at Demonhead doing. metric doing Black Sheep. Great one. Or the ensuing guitar fight.

As you know, I really loved the Scott Pilgrim animated. Yeah. I really loved, I don't remember you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a fucking great one. And then my other Edgar Wright would be in Sean of the Dead, the like, Don't Stop Me Now, zombie fight. That was on my long list.

The boys? The hospital. Oh, my God. Frenchian. Give it a guy. To I've got rhythm. Great one. I meant to tuck that under my sort of like Buffy musicals episode sort of thing.

Yellow Jackets? I didn't have it on my long list, but we did have a listener suggest it for sure. Any of Misty's musical moments, for sure. We got a lot of nominations for Umbrella Academy. I would say there's a lot of great options. I think we're alone now. It was like the first time they did it and it's really good. I think all of their musical moments are really good,

but there's a footloose dance battle that happens in, like, season three or four, that's, I would pick that of all the things. Magnolia, I think, counts because frogs fall from the sky. So I would say, wise up when everyone starts singing in Magnolia. I love us. I loved the use of five years' time in Superman this year. I had too many 2025 entrants. But that's another one where the sound design is really fun, like, that James

Gunn said he would not use any needle drops in this and he got away with it because he's like, oh, these people are just listening to the song. And then as Lois is put into the forcefield bubble, it becomes the sound opens up and it becomes a needle drop sound. And then when the force field goes down, it goes back to that sort of tinier. It's actually playing here. I've listened to that song a lot since Superman came out. That has a chance to be my this year's Spotify Rapp. You can look at the Rapt and tell what I watched this year. That's a great song. I love that song. And like, that was such a great gem from like the early odds indie scene.

And then we got a shout on our guide doof warrior from Mad Max for Ayr Road. Right? It's a must. Yeah. It's a must. Couldn't end the pot otherwise. Anything else? I mean, we got so many suggestions from people. What happened? We hit that I feel like we should hit.

Oh, there was a moment that I went and looked up and I thought it was really good. It's Mr. Hughes on Twitter suggested in a quiet place. John Crosisian, Emily Blunt's characters, share earbuds and dance to Neil Young's Harvest Moon. It's a really beautiful moment because, like, point of a quiet place is you stay, you have to stay silent. Yeah.

So she's got the earbuds in, and they're kind of dancing, and then she puts the other one in his ear, and then we can hear. We can't hear it, and then we hear the music come in, and it's really, really beautiful. That sounds great.

Not a film I've seen, as you know. Nope. However, as I believe I've told you, I did watch a lot of it, a person sitting in front of me in an airplane. That's right. That's right. I'm going to expose myself to some of this this way. This feels doable. That's a good way to do it.

The last thing I will say from this year that we didn't include that people might say what the fuck is K-pop Demon Hunter's Golden or take your pick. Great, great stuff. But for me personally, my... I'm a soda pop head. It's not... No, I mean, I really like it, but I haven't like obsessively watched it the way that maybe... some parents of small children have. So, yeah. Adam got me a derpy t-shirt.

Nice. I guess it was my birthday recently. Yeah, that would have been what it was. I was like, I've watched this movie once, but I didn't really like it. Yeah. I didn't really like it. This was the thrill of the lifetime. There are so many things we didn't get to talk about, and I'm sorry.

But we did our best. And this is amazing. Thank you to Carlos for fielding, like, nearly 12. 20 clips from us last night and or this morning. And thanks to you, Mallory, for, I didn't twist your arm. You, you like, and one of our, a couple of our bad babies suggested this as a topic. So thank you to the bad babies for writing in about it. You guys are the best. And an absolute blast. Thank you for. This is such a fun project. Sharing your heart with us. It's just lovely. Genuinely lovely. Watch the leftovers. Watch station 11.

I just want to go rewatch all of them right now. Yeah. Watch Mid-I-Mass. I don't know if I can handle it. I'm too scared. No, not you. Adam loves that, but I, he'll watch it in a different room. When are you going to start Both the Vampire Slayer season three? I think. So this weekend.

Stranger Things. I'll be finishing the Stranger Things re-watch prep many hours for that, even though it's three episodes. And we've got some movies to watch for next week. But I think next weekend. I think next weekend. exciting. It's been painful, especially because, you know, we have an Apple TV. So, like, you know, it flashes, like, the things where you're like in progress. It's just like taunting me. Every day. I'm like, I'm desperate. Well, sometimes perhaps next year, we will get to the musical episode and we can talk about it in full. And I cannot wait for you.

Perhaps next year. Well, I don't know how long this is rewatched project is going to take. No. No. We have a Giva Throne show coming. Like, that. There's a lot coming. Two. We will absolutely. I am often very reticent to commit to timelines publicly. There's zero doubt barring something that is out of our ability to control in any capacity. There's zero doubt we will finish the Buffy rewatch in the year, 2006.

Zero. Okay. I'm just saying. Zero. It's a lot of episodes. It's true. But I can't wait to watch them. All right.

Thank you to Carlos. Thank you to John, Arjuna Jomi. the whole team as always. And thank you to you, Joe, my darling. Thank you to you, my musical partner. I love to harmonize with you. I know. You're the best.

See you in mere days. To conclude our stranger things for you watch, I can't wait. Eddie, Eddie and his guitar await us. Bye.