Kill James Bond! - S4E13.5: Conclave [UNLOCKED]

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

Talking about popes is extremely in vogue right now for some reason, so we chose this as the ideal time to talk about Conclave (2024). And we figured it would be in the public interest to put this one out on the free feed. So please, enjoy nearly two full hours of Popechat, gratis.  Check out the rest of our bonus episodes on our reasonably-priced Patreon! ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. As you well know I've been working with a few gazan families to raise money for their daily living costs in the genocide. Thanks to your incredible generosity, we've been able to raise the money to register Ahmed and his family for evacuation from Gaza. I truly, truly cannot thank you enough. I hope the wait is short and I'm able to tell you that he's safe in Egypt very soon.  Here are three more campaigns from trusted sources. Each of these are for a family that need your help. If you're able to help them out at all, it would mean the world. https://chuffed.org/project/121901-help-mahers-family-with-medical-costs https://chuffed.org/project/128691-help-my-family-evacuate-gaza-war-zone https://chuffed.org/project/130802-help-rashas-family-in-gaza-evacuate-and-live ----- WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com 

Brothers, save Kil James Bond, the only podcast personally approved by the Lord Jesus Christ. I, Cardinal Abigail Thorne, my young ones, as always, my friends Cardinal November Kelly and Cardinal Devin. This is a difficult time. Many words can feel what's happening. Not only the death of Pope Francis, but also because of the Alpaca Geronimo, and this is death. In this week, we will make our dear Pope Francis

our special cure for all words. Conclave. Sorry, sorry, I'm just tearing up a bit. You know, a lot of people really admired that alpaca and I just... He really reformed the church in a big way. Absolutely. He nearly did.

Yeah. And then got him. Then kissed Amr. The coward took him out. In many ways, the death of Geronimo the alpaca more of a kind of a John Paul the first situation in that he was killed before he could implement the reforms that would have changed the course of the church. Hello and welcome, Kill James Bond, bonus episode, Conclave, religious season. POPES DEAD. Yeah, sort of.

Pope is dead, yes. We are ex-Pope right now, we're in an interregnum for Vatican City. Tempus Sedevacante, I believe it's referred to as. Yes, yeah. And, I mean, the thing is we were going to do this, sort of, on about this timeline anyway, and having just done a Catholicism bonus episode of Well There's Your Problem right before the Pope died, I am slightly terrified of the lathe, and so our next... I'm proud to announce we'll be going directly into presidential assassination season, with In the Line of

Fire, JFK, White House Down... RILEY We're gonna talk about Death Race 2000. ALICE I think crucially an aspect of the lathe here is that I have to not want it. It doesn't work if I want it to happen. So I have to really work on cultivating in my heart a deep inner love for Donald Trump and that I would be horrified were he to be assassinated. Probably very bad for the podcast though, wouldn't it? Well, you know, maybe.

I dunno. There'd be a lot more lively debates per episode, I think. I dunno. I don't know, there'll be a lot more lively debates per episode, I don't know. ALICE Yeah, so we've finally gotten around to Conclave with dramatically insensitive timing. WILL Yes. ALICE I hope we can get something out of it anyway. And so, I mean, I saw this movie in the cinema, and I was very, very lucky because I didn't get it spoiled for me before I saw it and had a pretty huge effect on me emotionally.

And then I've, I've noticed that every time I try to explain this to anyone, they do not get it. So I hope you're excited for an hour and change of the ravings of a mad woman being like accompanied by the concern of her two friends. This is my Saint Maud bit. Well, I, I had never seen it before and also managed to avoid spoilers, this was the first time I'd seen it. I did manage to Crispin' Potato Snacks The Twist, which kind of ruined it for me, but for me this was just like a good popcorn movie. I just kind of enjoyed it.

It was like Dan Brown but like three or four levels above, you know? Yeah, it's interesting that you say that. I think there's kind of two movies in Conclave. There's the one that's kind of, because it's based off of a book by, oh god, Richard Harris, the same guy who did Fatherland, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, perfectly competent thriller writer, like, better than most, I would say. And so, one half of the movie is just this kind of like, thriller that kicks along, got a lot of intrigue, better

than Dan Brown for sure, and then the other half is the bit that I think the director Edward Berger brought to it, which is kind of the more religiously contemplative bit, y'know? And you kind of get them both in the same thing. I think they go together well. I had cards on the table, I really liked this. Just to finish this out, I watched this in the cinema as somehow having avoided spoilers the first time and I had a strong emotional reaction to it. And the second time around, still good, still good. I didn't cry this time.

That was a bit where I was like, man, I'm close. I am closer. This was my third watch, I think. So, we start with... Hold on a second, my note here goes straight to the back of the headshot. Do we start with a phone call? SONIA No, no. We start with a priest walking.

RILEY No, I think we start with Mr. Conclave himself walking to work. SONIA Yeah, yeah, yeah. ALICE Yes, yeah, yeah. So we get the back of the headshot that's in all the trailers, because Berger uses it a bunch, of Ralph Fein's Cardinal walking to the Vatican, which is an interesting thing, right? Because you would expect a Cardinal to live in the Vatican, or to get driven there, and

walking there implies two things, maybe. Like, firstly, maybe a kind of humility, but second, a guy who is taking as long as he can to get where he's going. Yeah, like he's walking by the side of the road instead of getting like a taxi right there or something. It's... he's taking his time. Yeah, he doesn't want to do this. And we learn pretty immediately that the Pope is dead. Yes. Fictional Pope. Pope fiction, that the Pope is dead. Fictional Pope, Pope Fiction I is dead.

I think it's interesting, this is a movie with a distinct viewpoint on the church and church politics, and it's one that I think is even more clearly now a Franciscan Pope we're talking about here, because he doesn't live in the papal apartments, he lives in a slightly moovified, slightly cuntier version of the, like, guest house, the hotel that all the cardinals stay at for a conclave. It's called the Domus Santa Marta. ALICE It doesn't live in a big palace, which I was surprised at. When they go into the pope's bedroom I was just like, is this guy the pope? I thought the pope would have, like, cuntier digs than this.

I thought it had like a Trump Tower or something. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because the thing is the Pope does have cuntier digs than this, but one of the things that Francis did as Pope was not move into them, and stay in the functionally hotel room in which he was staying when he was elected. Took a vow of poverty, didn't he? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And so they have to dress it up a bit because there's

no kind of thriller to a building that looks like a slightly nicer travelodge. It's all kind of like black and red marble and stuff. But the Pope is dead, and the very senior cardinals are gathering very quickly as well, because Ralph Lyons is the last one there, he's been beaten there by some of the other prominent cardinals. ALICE Who include Stanley Tucci! ALICE Stanley Tucci, we love the Tucci. RILEY Love to see this guy hates acting! Love that he's a very successful actor, who's gone on record as being like, I hate how my

acting career keeps getting in the way of the other shit I wanna do. He just wants to cook. He just loves cooking Italian food and talking about Italian food. So it sells like a whole range of branded cookware as well, which looks really nice to be fair. Yeah, a real book about cooking, yeah. Survived mouth cancer, and is a cook? Great.

Mm. That's gonna be the arc that I make, is I'm gonna give up podcasting and start selling cookware. God, yes. ALICE John Lithgow is here. We love John Lithgow. RILEY Do we? ALICE I like John Lithgow. I like to see him in the video. RILEY Are you prepared to go on record saying, what the fuck are you doing John Lithgow playing Dumbledore in the new Harry Potter series?

Are you insane, brother? You're at the end of your life, you think this should be the role that you want to be remembered by the next generation. Fine. You've come with your own calculation, but like, Jesus Christ man, I wouldn't have made that calculation myself. And that's as much as I'm willing to say on the record. I have signed a non-disclosure agreement which includes a non-disclosure clause for Warner Brothers, so I have no comment on that. So Guy We Love to See.

They need to start making me sign those. Guy We See, John Lithgow. Guy We Are Legally Prohibited from saying that we do not like to see. I am legally prohibited from saying that I don't love to see John Lithgow. Prepare to be an anger translator on this topic. Thank you, Devin. Anyway, John Lithgow also appearing in this movie. There you, Devin. Anyway, John Lithgow also appearing in this movie. There you are, pal.

And we also have another guy, Cardinal Adyemi. Yeah, he's here, right? Indeed. Cardinal Adyemi. Lucian Musmati. As we are gonna learn, this is a lot like a kind of, like a play, right? We are introduced to our principal characters very, very early. We will later learn that these are the, like, most

of the plausible Papa-bile, the guys who could be the next Pope. These are the most popable bachelors. Yes. And so they do their kind of like, official grieving, praying over the Pope's body. And you see that Cardinal Ray Fiennes is by far the most personally affected by this. Amongst them. S. There's a really nice touch I like, which is that they pray in Latin, and it's not translated, you don't get subtitles for it, so you don't really need to know the content of it, but the one bit that everyone knows is the bit where they say, ah, man, which is like the end.

So we get from that. No one said out loud, Pope's fucking dead. But you know, there's a guy there who's unconscious and then they say, ah, man, it's like, oh shit, he's dead. Okay, cool. Just nice little touch. It's a good film in like, it doesn't really have a lot of moments where they explain what the fuck is going on, but it does just kind of let you pick it up, which I quite like.

Yeah, it loves to do a thing where like, most of the scene will be someone saying, I'm about to do this, and then he walks into the room where he's gonna do it, and they just cut to the next scene. But like, he's done it, obviously. Which I really like, it's nice to do. One of the cardinals stands next to the pope and presses square, and loots his ring of power?

His fisherman's ring, yes. And they destroy that, so that no one else can turn invisible? Because it's like his seal for documents, right, so part of what happens when a pope dies is that they break his seal, because I guess in the Middle Ages it was a serious security concern that you could have like a fake pope forging documents. Reasonable. Does each pope have a different seal?

I believe so, yeah. That's why if they take it off the ring, they put a different seal onto the ring. I'm not sure if it's a different seal, or the same seal, I guess it makes sense for it to be, but either way, part of a pope dying is they break the ring, which is what John Lithgow, Cardinal Trombley, does. And then, so Cardinal Ralph Fiennes, Cardinal Lawrence, has a little kind of private moment with Cardinal Bellini, Stanley Tucci, where Bellini is like, can I take this? ROY Watching this on rewatch is crazy.

ALICE Bellini's just like, yeah, I'm leaving here with something, you know? ROY I am going out of here with a keepsake. And he's looking at a chessboard and being like, can I, do you think I could take this? ALICE It's weird. There's this kind of jousting that happens between them, and it's sort of clear that both Lawrence and Bellini were like, close to the Pope, and Bellini is kind of needling him a bit by being like, oh, I was playing chess with him a lot, you know? And of course he always won, but, uh, do you think I could take this chess set?

Yeah. There's a, we also established that like his death was quite sudden. Yes. Or appeared to be. And then Stanley Tucci's like, oh well, you know, he didn't want anyone to know, but like I knew, of course, cause I was, I was in there, you know. Yeah. Me and the Pope, we were like, that's, that's me on top.

We get the thesis of the movie here, which is that they're looking at a chessboard, and Cardinal Tucci says, he's like, who won? He's like, oh, he did, he was always eight moves ahead. That's kind of the film. NICOLA That's the movie! That is the movie! ALICE He does say that although he had died suddenly of this heart attack, there had been warnings, and the way that that line is phrased, and the kind of ominous, tightening cello strings at the mention line is phrased in the kind of like ominous tightening cello strings at the mention of the Curia, the sort of like bureaucracy at the top of the church full of Cardinals, it sort of hints towards again the Geronimo the Alpaca Pope,

John Paul I, who arguably was just assassinated, right? Yeah. We get this really, really good scene where Cardinal Ray finds is talking to the guy who found the body and is asking him a bunch of questions like what time was this and where were you? And like this guy's upset. Um, but you know, that he's reassuring him. And then in comes John Lithgow and he's like, yeah, I've already written a report that actually has a full timeline of the final day and his cause of death. It's already done. It's already taken care of. Here it is.

I have my rat fucky little binder here. Here's all his medical records too. And it's like, oh, you've already. You were prepped, eh? He's not even cold. The thing we get from this is that Cardinal Tromble was the Pope's last meeting. And Adeyemi and Tromble are talking about whether or not

to release the kind of the detailed itinerary, which shows how hard he was working, that he was having meetings late into the night. And Adéemi has this line, because Trombley says- Yeah, they'll think we've been working him too hard. Yeah, placing a huge burden on a sick man. If you remember the last days of John Paul II's papacy, when he was suffering a lot with Parkinson's, taking a long time to die, and doing that very publicly, that's something that had a huge impact on church politics.

But Adéemi gets a little dig in here too, because he's like, well the papacy is a huge burden for an, especially for an older man, in playing, I am younger than you, I would be better at being Pope. Me, me, I should be Pope. Yeah, they're already fucking circling. Everything all of them say has the undertone, I should be Pope, by the way. Yeah, super objective, Pope. Really good. There's also a lot of talk-

Yeah, all of them have a new objective popped up on their fucking minimap, become Pope. Why is this marked with like a tiara on my minimap, yeah. They all see the revive thing over the Pope and they're just not clicking it. They're also talking a lot about how this is gonna look. There's a lot of like, oh, the papers will say this, or like, that people will think we're working him too hard. There's a lot of concern about how the outside world is going to perceive this. Yes.

It's very interesting given that like that we don't really see the outside world as a whole for most of this movie. Absolutely. But it's like a major public relations event that requires coordination. But so we see the paramedics come in and lift the pope's body onto a trolley, and we get the first intrusion of... there's two big themes that I really want to pull out of the movie here, and one of them is this intrusion of modernity, right? Where you have this very austere room and all of these cardinals wearing vestments, and then you just have, like, two EMTs in high vis, and there's this modern trolley that, like, rattles and squeaks. And it's, it's, like, undignified,

right? It's this, sort of, like, the outside world comes in and is, like, imperfect in a different and kind of grating way, you know? Yeah. There's very few, like, out-and- out jokes, but this is a very funny movie, and like, a lot of it is from things like that, like when we see the Pope getting like, rattlingly wheeled past all of them on the way out of the ball, they're waiting to like, seal up his room and put the papal seal on it and everything. It's really funny. I love the way this sequence of like, the Pope being taken away is shot, because for the first sort of 30 minutes of the movie this

is shot like a murder mystery. And I went in completely cold, it's like, oh my god, somebody fucking killed the Pope! And the cellos are like, da da da da! And they're like, get those cellos out of here, it's not appropriate. And so it's all shot and scored as if it's a Dan Brown thing, which I really got me excited. ALICE There's one specific shot that I want to pull out from this as well, is that as they're wheeling him out of the paper apartment, we see the sort of crowd of clergy in the corridor outside, and they all make the sign of the cross. But the way this shot is framed, it's framed around two nuns. And these are the first women that we see in this film,

and they are like, center in the shot. And I'm now getting introduced to the second theme of the movie that I want to talk about, which is femininity, because the church is a woman, right? This is something that's been sort of like, advanced by people within the church, against the church, the Catholic Church is feminine, right? It's something that Pope Francis said, it's something that Pope Benedict said. LARISSA The Bride of Christ! ALICE Exactly, yes. And it's something that, like, for instance, Anglican Protestants who

worried about people converting to Catholicism sort of like on their deathbed described the church as the Scarlet Woman, right? There is something feminine about all of this, something that like, even Francis said in, I think maybe one of the funniest moments of his papacy when he was like, there's too much faggotry around here, apologize, and then a week later said it again. GARETH I get it, man. No comment. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but,

but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but trying to, like, sort of magnify the church, we're talking about it in positive feminine qualities that we imagine, if we're trying to derive it we talk about it in terms of negative feminine qualities, and both of those are informative to actual

women. It's a way of trying to impose on women, well the church is like a woman in that it is loyal and sensitive and motherly and so on and so on and so on, so that's what you as a woman have to be. And we'll get to all of that, but I just want to say- SINCLAIR Yes, the institution is about controlling women. ALICE Well, yeah, in part, right? But it's like, it's also... it's an institution that is... it kind of takes in and models that femininity for itself in order to do that. And that's one of the things that I think the movie is interested in. So they move the pope on this horrible squeaky trolley into the ambulance, and the first shot before the big title is,

I really like this as well, because it just lets you sit with death in a way that a lot of movies don't. Where it just holds on the kind of face under the slightly translucent body bag, and the trolley is rattling and bouncing against the side of the ambulance as you hear the kind of presumably convoy leave the Vatican. And it just sticks with that. It's really really good. It's almost like heartbeat-like in there. I also like that they don't have any character- there's no character in this who's the Felix

lighter who's there to be like, I'm not a Catholic, what's going on? And then someone goes, well, Red Finders is about to do this. They just show them sealing the Pope's apartment. And I'm like, oh, okay, so they seal the apartment. How do you know? Because they put a big wax seal on the door and nobody can go in. Yeah, because I watched them do it. Fine.

I watched the movie, that's how I know. They showed me, they didn't have to tell me. Someone, I don't even remember who it is specifically, I think it's probably Cardinal Tucci, has to say to Cardinal Lawrence, who is the Dean of the College of Cardinals, you need to build a fucking conclave for me, mate. You want to help me build a conclave, mate? You haven't been talking to the Protestants, have you, mate? You'll be talking to the Protestants have you man? You haven't been talking to the courier have you man? Um yeah.

And so after the big conclave title, we cut to three weeks later when they're setting up for the conclave. Yeah. Mmhmm. So you gotta pick an epope. Yeah. I mean this gives me a pretty good timeline, because I guess this is, I haven't actually paid attention to a conclave in my life before, I know there have been several

during my life, but I haven't paid attention. This helps me think about the timeline a little bit. Yeah, it's two to three weeks. It takes a bit. You gotta get everyone in, it's such a fucking procedure. And the Catholics, they're everywhere too, they're gonna come in from all over the world. They're all over the gaff. Annoyingly, we're due to have the next conclave more or less exactly on my birthday.

So, all I want for my birthday is a woke Filipino pope. Woke pope. Woke pope. Yes. Yeah. Cardinal Tagle. Please, God. Pizza Ball is not in the running, guys.

I know it's a funny name. But so we see that Lawrence is having to organize all of this, and he is maximally stressed out. It is chaos. ZOE He became important at work at some point five years ago. And he is so far off of it at this point. ALICE Yeah, he's having to like, do all the protocol stuff, he's having to learn how to pronounce everybody's names, he's having to organize the security, who are like, covering up all the windows in case people use a laser microphone to eavesdrop

on the conclave. NICCO Yeah, because they do this in the Sistine Chapel. That's where the conclave happens. Which is cool as hell, if you've ever been there, it's beautiful. ALICE And so, we also see he's a little bit sardonic, this is something that immediately primes you to like Lawrence, is he has an assistant, Ray. I love Ray, Ray is one of my favourite characters in the movie.

Yeah, now Ray's ideal. Who kind of looks at all of this and is like, this seems like a pretty good vision of hell. And Lawrence has jokes, because he's like, don't be blasphemous, hell's when the Cardinals get here tomorrow. So can you tell me a little bit about sequestration? Because the name obviously tells us a lot, but the cardinals cut themselves off from the outside world? ALICE Yes. So papal elections used to be insanely easy to fix, and so during the Middle Ages this procedure of a conclave was adopted, which is, the entire college of cardinals

just seal themselves up away from the outside world so nobody can get in and bribe them, or threaten them, and they make the decision completely in private. And conclaves used to last for, like, potentially years. LORRAINE Really? ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. Theoretically, like, until they changed it so that it's... I think now it's like, they do maximum 33 rounds of voting and then it goes to a runoff, but it used to be that they could last for like- RILEY Just keep going until there's a fucking majority.

ALICE Yeah. Literally last for like three or four years, famously because one of the things about this is that nobody used to want to be Pope. To the point that like, Celestine V ran away from it. RILEY That's why they all fucking gather around you at the end, and are like, are you gonna be pope? Do you promise that you're gonna be pope? And I'm like, fine, fine I will. ALICE But so the idea is...

GOOSE Sorry, what's a runoff? ALICE I'm not sure exactly how it works, but presumably the same way as any election, is like, you start eliminating the lowest number of votes guy until you get... GOOSE Just be like, let's fucking get on with this. Yeah, yeah. Because you have to have a two-thirds majority of the College of Cardinals, which is, in this case, all the Cardinal electors. So every Cardinal who's like under the age of 80 has to go to Rome, get locked in the Sistine Chapel, and vote in rounds until they pick a guy with

a two thirds majority. We're having a lock-in! Yes! Yeah, exactly. Honestly, it sounds like a real party. It does sound great. It's like the worst time ever. No one go- no communication out, no communication in, nobody in the room but Cardinals.

They're sucking and fucking in there. I doubt that very much. Except of course, Dean Ralph Fiennes, who has his boy Ray all the time. This is the movie that's like, don't bring me this information, we're sequestered, my brother Cardinal in Christ, you requested the information. You requested the information, and also you have paused expectantly after you said don't tell me to let me say it. ALICE Yeah. So we see the nuns come in on a minibus, which I really like.

The nuny bus. One of the nuns is Isabella Rossellini. Shoutouts, we love Isabella Rossellini. ELLY Yeah, we do. ALICE And again, we're thinking about femininity here, we're thinking about women, as I so often am, and we don't get a lot of dialogue from women, but we do get a lot of shots that might seem, if you're reading it just on the thriller basis, you get a lot of shots that

are just interstitial seeming. Of like, the nuns arranging the bedrooms for the cardinals, or doing the cooking, or whatever. And I think one of the things that the film suggests, and it takes a while to do this, is that these things aren't interstitial, that is the operation of the institution, that is the church, right? And all of the other stuff is these guys jerking each other off, you know? NICCOLE- Yeah, I think one of the nuns later on says, although we sisters are supposed to be invisible, we do in like, or like God did give us eyes and ears. And this is the point where the movie

is like, we're showing you that the nuns are in fact visible. It's like, pay attention to these fucking nuns. But at this point, all the, all the Cardinals start arriving and they, I love that they have like, they've got their sort of ancient clothes and their modern suitcases. They're like on their phones. There's this great shot where a bunch of them are walking into the Vatican and like we see the modern skyscape of Rome with all the cranes and stuff looming over the Vatican. It's really good. Like somebody's just like smoking cigarettes and shit. And there's so many cigarettes. Yeah.

Yeah. They're more smoking outside like school kids is fun. So because they can't, you got smoke in the Sistine Chapel. So you've's so many cigarettes, yeah. ALICE Yeah, they're all smoking outside, like school kids is fun. RILEY Because you can't smoke in the Sistine Chapel, so you've gotta smoke them up now where you got them. ALICE Well, exactly, because you could be in there for days. RILEY Be in there for fucking hell, though, yeah. ALICE There's also, I have a criticism of this scene,

right, because I think it's beautiful, it's beautifully shot, it's beautifully scored. There's an aspect of it I don't like, which is that it uses the, like, Eastern Catholic Church patriarchs, who are also cardinals, who are also voting, but who dress differently because they have their own traditions, as a bit of kind of like, visual punchline? There's a couple of quick shots of just like, head and shoulders facing the camera of different cardinals, which I like, but it uses, uh, the Eastern ones as kind of like an offbeat that I don't quite like.

SONIA I was gonna ask, how much leeway do they get to customize their drip? Cause some of these cardinals, they're all dressed like themes? They've got their own thing, but in particular the crucifix around their neck, some of them are like very bling bling and some of them are very plain. ALICE Yeah, that's a good point actually, because they're all very different, the crucifixes. ALICE So it's called a pectoral cross, pectorum meaning the breast.

STORM Helps you steer in the water? ALICE Yeah, it's like, that's very individual. Other than that, it is a uniform, but there's different bits of it that you can choose to wear or not wear, there's different hats and stuff. In particular, we see later, almost just a tiny bit later, one character wearing, like, a red Cardinal's cape as an overcoat. M-hm. N- I did write sick cape, like, lord of the sith arrives. It seems that cape is on the cards which is crazy that not more people are going for that. Yeah yeah yeah.

All of us would go for the cape straight away. I think any kind of uniformed institution you can identify the guy who has read the uniform regulations and is like has worked out scientifically the cuntiest he's allowed to be as a flex. STAP 1. I've worked out you forgot to gender these. STAP 2. I am arrive wearing a dress and it's not against the rules. ALICE But so, Lawrence meets with Bellini again, Stanley Tucci, and we see- STAP 1. I did this at school one time. I had to like, argue in favor of getting to paint my nails, because I was like, look, it says that people are allowed to do it, it doesn't say men aren't, it says people are.

Anyway, sorry. ALICE So, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but,

but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but rocks up, he's like, the papers think I've already won it! I mean, I don't want it though, obviously, like, I would hate to be Pope, guys. Yeah. Just wanna cook Italian food. I mean, he does say correctly, no sane man would want the papacy. And I think we're kind of meant to think that this, like, what if I don't want it, what if I know I'm not good enough to be Pope, is both performance and also potentially sincere. You have this kind of layer of doubt to it, which I like. At this point we need to meet the Lord of the Sith.

Yes. This guy. He's been forced his little bit, it's Tedesco. It's the conservative Cardinal from Italy. ALICE Why that's the Patriarch of Milan, I think it is, Cardinal Goffredo Tedesco. He's the one with the cape. SONIA Yeah, so we were literally saying he's like a fascist, but he is like, dripped out.

WILL Yes, no, he's dripped as fuck. He's got a cape, he's got a vape. ALICE We know that Lawrence and Bellini, who are liberals, and Lawrence is in favor of Bellini becoming the next Pope, we know that they do not like him, right? And particularly he's been, as you say, forward-scissored as Tedesco's this arch-conservative. It's also interesting as well, because the first thing we see of him, almost, is him being a dick to his assistant assistant who's carrying his bags. He offers to take his briefcase and he physically slaps his hand away. And it's like, on the one hand, as a movie, that's an unsubtly drawn character.

Yeah, cinematic shorthand there. Yeah. But we live in a world full of those, right? It's very easy to say, like, oh, you should draw, like, a more kind of complex character who's like, you know, maybe does evil things but is personally nice, but a lot of them fucking aren't personally nice. A lot of them are cunts. ZOE Yeah, look at fucking JD Vance, or fucking, like, half the American cabinet, like, yeah. Most of them, like, all of them! Fucking all of them.

ALICE But so, but so, he has this very gregarious manner. He's very kind of jubilant and you sense that he's pretty confident about it. He's also absolutely naked in his own ambition. There's none of this performance of like, Oh, I don't know if I have the spirit today. He's like, no, I'm gonna be Pope. I'm gonna come out of this as Pope. I walked in here saying my Pope name over and over in my head. It's happening, brother. No more pronouns, you know, none of that shit. Yeah, A, we're getting rid of pronouns, B, Latin Mass is coming back, C, I don't know.

So we then cut to the room where the new Pope gets robed, right, in the new white papal vestments, and there's a detail about this. This is a room in the Sistine Chapel. This is called the Room of Tears, supposedly because like, and this is like well-attested, Francis did it too, being elected Pope, one of the most stressful things that can happen to you. It's gotta suck. Yeah. It's apparently just absolutely routine to just break down completely upon being elected Pope.

Why is that? Why do people not want to be Pope? It's a huge responsibility for one thing. It's probably quite stressful. Yeah, it's a lot of stress, and also, I think if you... One of the reasons why I liked Francis and admired Francis was that in a lot of ways he was temporarily a failure, that a lot of the stuff that he wanted to do with the church was absolutely stymied, right?

And that's something that we kind of see of the fictional Pope in Conclave as well. Bellini sort of later mentions, you know, Tedesco fought him every day of his papacy and there were these, you know, like constant slurs and leaks and conspiracies. And I think for anyone, whether that's, you know, a kind of a liberal or a conservative, you're putting yourself in this position where yes, you have a lot of power, but you're also extremely vulnerable. And it's sort of like, it's even more than Lawrence's, I accidentally became important at work and it's ruining my life. RILEY But, but, if you're Pope, don't you believe

in God? ALICE Well, yes, I would hope so. RILEY You gotta, you gotta, I think. ALICE Mmhm. RILEY But if you're the Pope, then you've got the creator of the universe on your side, haven't you? So how can you possibly... What do you have to be afraid of?

ALICE I mean, that's a big name to suddenly have behind you, you know? I got pretty stressed out recording the first episode, because you were here, motherfucker. Like, what are you talking about? Oh, I'm God's guy on Earth now, fuck. That, I get it. But God's on your side! If you look at it, sort of materially, that doesn't mean that everything's gonna go your way in the short term, you know? It's not... I think that's compatible with believing in God to also then be like, I'm not necessarily gonna be as successful as I want to be on Earth, right?

ALICE Mmhm. Oh, okay. ALICE But so, they're in this room, the Room of Tears, right? And it's interesting as well because we really get some of Lawrence's grief here. Because he says, here's this line where he says, I thought he would outlive all of us, which I really like, it's a very familial kind of grief as well. Where it's like, you don't think that someone you love, and it absolutely suggests that Lawrence and the Pope loved each other, is gonna die at all. And Lawrence says that he wanted to quit, and the Pope made him stay on and made him run the conclave from conclave.

Part of the reason he's so sad is that we didn't part well, and we fought, because I wanted to resign. And Sanny Teach is like, yeah, he told me about your crisis of faith. Yeah, which we don't know more about at this point, but the Pope is essentially going like, I'm playing the fucking eight dimensional chess here. Like, child motherfucker, you need to run the conclave. I need you to build a conclave for me. Get in the fucking square. Get in the square.

And also, um, Sanni Tucci says, well, you know, he had doubts too, you know. And Ray Farnes is like, the Pope fucking had doubts about God? And Sanni Tucci's like, no, no, not about God, no. He had doubts too, you know. And Ray Farnes was like, the Pope fucking had doubts about God?! And so he was like, no no, not about God, no. He had doubts about the church. And it's like, oh damn. For real? ALICE It's also interesting as well because Lawrence kind of, thinking about this sort of chessboard box that he's been put into, says that the

Pope told him that some were chosen to be shepherds and some to manage the farm, and apparently I am a manager. Which is kind of a brutal thing, you know, it's not what he wants to be doing, right? Like, it's not how he pictures himself. So at this point we start to get some intrigue dropping on our various paper candidates. The thriller pops in. Yeah, the thriller starts. So, Janus, who's the guy we saw earlier on who was the last guy to see the purple live, oh sorry, the guy who discovered the body, Janus, who's the guy we saw earlier on, who was the last guy to see the purple live, oh, sorry, the guy who discovered the body, he finds Ray Fiennes, and he's drunk, and he tries to confess. And he says, I promised Cardinal John Lithgow not to tell anyone this. But in his final

meeting with the Pope, the Pope sacked him for gross misconduct. And we don't know what that means. And Janus doesn't know what it means either. But he's like, Tremblay was actually fucking sacked him for gross misconduct. And we don't know what that means, and like, Yanis doesn't know what it means either, but he's like, Tremblay was actually fucking sacked just before the Pope died and isn't meant to fucking be here. ALICE Yeah. Which is something that came up in the, uh, like, immediately forthcoming conclave. There is a cardinal who has been excluded from it by Francis before his death for embezzlement, right? LORRAINE Oh, damn! Fascinating!

ALICE Who was, like, fired for gross misconduct, and then also, like, explicitly barred from the next conclave. So this would fully, like, kick the dude out of the conclave entirely. LORRAINE Yeah, yeah, yeah. ALICE Also, it's interesting as well, because Lawrence, if you compare this to something like Silence, because he's so busy managing, his initial line is that he's too busy to hear his confession, it's like an imposition, he's about to sequester the fucking thing, you know?

Yeah. Gonna go into lockdown. Yeah, the guy drops to his knees and like, Lawrence is just like, trying to pick him back up again, he's like, not now, not now, man, I'm fucking running a conclave here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then we get, we get intrigue round two because new guy just dropped. We gained a pope. Sorry, we lost a pope. We lost a pope, but we've gained an extra cardinal.

Yeah, there's a guy who's not on the list, he's coming in trainers with the secret cardinal, Vincent Benitez, who's, who's cardinal from Kabul in Afghanistan. And everyone's just like, I didn't know we had guys out there! ALICE If you remember the thing about pectoral crosses, right, there's this procedure for naming a cardinal in pectorae, in the breast, in secret. Which is real, and popes do use it, sometimes it's kind of an open secret who the cardinal is, sometimes it isn't. The fictional device here is that you stay a cardinal after

the pope dies. That isn't true, if you are a cardinal in secret and the pope who makes you a cardinal dies, you stop being a cardinal. Oh really? Oh, fascinating. It's a fictional mechanism, it's fine. So yeah, he's this secret cardinal, completely unannounced to anyone, and they just have to kind of take it on faith, right, that he's, you know, even allowed to be there, and he hasn't like forged this letter from the Pope. Mm.

Stanley Teechie even says that, well, you know, maybe the Pope had fucking dementia when he made this guy, we don't know who the fuck this guy is, he's Mexican, he's been all over the world in fucking war zones, and he's... since when have we had a fucking outpost in Afghanistan, but no, he's been there. RILEY This is the first of a number of times when the, like, the Pope-able bachelors are like, well, the Pope knew everything with regards to me, but like, with these other guys he was kind of an old man, so like, kind of doddering. It's like this sort of hyperposition the Pope gets put in. ALICE It's interesting as well, because, like, as a piece of character development for a character who is, like, largely unseen and has no lines

because he's dead the whole time, little hints of, like, the Pope's kind of biography and the strain he was under, you know, that Bellini can ask, you know, was he entirely competent, and Lawrence is, like, troubled by this. RILEY Lawrence is like, I don't, I can't say for sure that he wasn ask, you know, was he entirely competent? And Lawrence is like troubled by this. I can't say for sure that he wasn't. And Ray finds us like, look, he's legal, he's got his papers, he's got his Cardinal recognition certificate. That's a Cardinal.

Yeah, I've seen his ID, says Cardinal, yeah, there we go, he's in. That's the Cardinal, baby, check out the feathers. You know, sometimes Cardinals are like wrongly identified as not Cardinals, that's the Cardinal, baby. Check out the feathers. Yeah, so you know, sometimes, sometimes Cardinals are like, wrongly identified as not Cardinals, but then the challenger has a proper look and we all have a laugh about it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you should be, yeah, you'll be allowed to be like, hold on, I'm not a Cardinal. But like, again, this is another example of a scene where they're like, we're gonna admit him to the College of Cardinals, and they walk into the room with him, and he's like

asleep and it just cuts away, because it's like they've admitted him. Yeah. You know what happens in the rest of this scene. Man is exhausted having... He's also in a tiny little cell as well. Yeah. This little interrogation type cell with a big two-way mirror and everything. We get a nice moment here that tells us something about Ralph Fiennes,

because everyone's about to sit down to dinner in the big sort of Popeable bachelor cafeteria. Yes. And Ralph Fiennes because everyone's about to sit down to dinner in the big sort of Popoble bachelor cafeteria. And Ralph Fiennes stands up and says, Hey, everybody, new Cardinal just dropped. This is Cardinal Benitez. He was introduced perfectly legit procedure in pectorre. Here he is. Welcome everybody. And then he says, there's a nice gesture. He's like, Cardinal Benitez, would you like to bless our meal before we all sit down? Which is like a really nice moment of like, hey, we're going to make sure you're included. Yeah. Maybe a little subtle test as well. Yeah.

To see in other words, or is he going to be like, oh, fuck, fucking. Good gravy, let's eat, you know? Yeah. So he does the standard blessing of like, thanks for the food, big man. And everybody, everybody likes.

Goes to sit down, yeah. Yeah, everyone's chairs, scrapes, they're about to sit down. And he does something that we've seen in a bunch of religion movies at this point, which is shaming someone with a longer grace than expected, and making them get back up. He switches to Spanish for this as well, which is his first language, and he, like, prays for the poor, and the hungry, and the sick, and he also thanks the nuns.

He's the first one to acknowledge them at all. Yeah. We've seen extensive shots of them preparing this food, and it's really intricate, the procedure. I like that the food doesn't look very good as well. No, it's just a lot of it, I guess. It's hard to cater. Yeah, yeah.

We see Sister Agnes, Isabella Rossellini has a little bit of a smile at the corner of her mouth when she gets like thanked for the first time. And over the course of dinner, Tedesco flags Rafe Feinstown and it's like, the fuck is all this woke shit? Who's this new guy? Yeah, 100%. Yeah, so this is interesting, Tedesco's conservatism, right, because one of the things he points out is the sort of cafeteria has self-segregated by language and by geography.

Mm. The Italians sit with the Italians, the Spaniards sit with the Spanish, like nobody's mixing. And Lawrence thinks that Benitez is like a sort of... He calls him a testament to the universality of the church, right? Like we're talking here of the thing that makes it Catholic with a small c, something that makes it universal, right? And for Tedesco, it's like, no, no, no, the church is losing its universality. It's losing its Catholicness because it's being sort of like split apart. He quotes like, you know, things fall apart,

the center cannot hold. Will That Gaia? It's widening. Baroness Falkener? She can't hear the falcon. Will The falcon? Buddy, that falcon has not been able to hear for decades at this point. Luke And of course he gets his trad grievance in, which is like when we were boys we said the Tridentine Mass, which was in Latin, everybody here would have been speaking Latin, it would have been the same, right? And if you have, like, a top-down papacy that imposes things from Rome, things can be the same. And it can hold together with tradition this thing. And this is, I think, not an unfair summary of a Catholic conservative worldview, which is

one that logically follows that he then becomes incredibly racist. RILEY Immediately he just goes like, and also by the way, that guy's Nigerian. And just sort of leaves it there for a couple of seconds. It's like, yeah, but he's homophobic, man, like he's on your side, he's just black. ZACH Well he goes, if we continue down this road, what's next? And kind of like gestures his head at Cardinal Adyemi. And it's like, what's next? A fucking black pope. Thank God that a lot of Catholic conservatives are also racist.

But yeah, because, because Adyemi is also a conservative, right? Like all of these are composite figures. They're all fictional devices. But there are a lot of African Cardinals who have been named as Papa Billy, who like have similar kind of social values and social teaching that is particularly homophobic. Right? That's our fault, by the way, in the long run. That's our fault. Yes, it is. I think Adayemi says later on, oh no, Sunny Teejee says later on that Adayemi believes that homosexuals should go to prison in this life and hell in the next, and like, if he was white we'd be saying he's as bad as Tedesco.

ALICE Yeah, this is kind of the Robert Sarah position, basically. And, but so, Tedesco, I mean, he is obviously extremely racist, and we see that Lawrence is disgusted by this. He doesn't even like, really even like really name Madayemi, he just kind of like, gestures at him dismissively. And he says that he warns Lawrence, like, that the Abyss calls out, you know? Which does sound good in Italian, or Latin, whatever he's saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the thing is, we're bringing back this idea of, this is a consequential election

for the church because it could either just become completely irrelevant, or it could tear itself into pieces. And either of those is a very real possibility, you know? Certainly. So later on some of Stanley Tucci's supporters chat're like, we gotta fuckin' stop Tedesco. We gotta spread the word that Stanley Tucci's woke. RILEY First meeting of the Bellini squad in the fucking abandoned cinema or whatever.

ALICE Yeah, and if you had the kind of Catholic conservatism advanced by Tedesco, this is your kind of Catholic liberalism, right? RILEY It is Lib shit. And I don't mean Lib shit to mean woke, I mean lib. Like, he's just not Tedesco. That's his whole stall. He doesn't have like really that many individual ideas. He's just, I am opposite they Tedesco. He says at one point too, he's just like, I think women should be allowed to play a bigger role in the church. And one of his supporters goes, let's not mention women.

That's a fascinating bit that I want to draw out. Because, like, he doesn't even mention that, like, the big change, the, like, big kind of, like, brass ring that a lot of Catholic liberals would like, is female ordination, right? Letting women become priests. Right? Something which is so anathema to trans, that it would be one of the things that would fully just, like, tear the church apart, right? And so, already Bellini is, like, compromising with himself, because what he offers is basically the same thing that Francis tried to, and basically failed to, which is- NARES Increased role. ALICE Yeah, more role in the Curia, right? Like,

you let women religious, you let nuns, like, organize more things, but there's still no question of women priests, right? And it's interesting as well because at this point they're in this auditorium and some nuns come in and as they're talking about women they just go completely silent and talk. Yeah, just wait for them to leave. It's really good. It's good. It lays out really easily, right there, all of the problems with Bellini as a candidate, which is that he just simply doesn't have his own ideas. He's not strong enough. Yeah. And as they do this campaign, as they organize this campaign that Bellini professes not to want, the one Cardinal who kind of like is organizing this functionally, his

campaign manager divides it up like, okay, Villanueva, you go speak to the South Americans, you go speak to the Africans. And it's like, okay, so Tedesco had a point about the geographical separation then. Yeah, he did. Meanwhile, Ray finds, he goes to see John Lithgow and is just like, hey, were you sacked by the Pope? Yo, I heard some rumors, pal. John Lithgow, Nixonian in this, he's brilliant, right? Because- It's so good, I love this one. Because he lies his arse off.

What? No! Nonstop. Because he lies his ass off. What? Nooo. Non-stop. Just lies, lies, lies. And the second he gets caught, because Lawrence puts this to him, and he's like, Archbishop Wozniak, Janusz, the guy who came crying to me, says that you were fired. He's like, what?

No, that's absurd. I'm gonna walk over here to the loudest coffee machine in the world. Turn my back to you. Put a little coffee in the machine. And that's just going to give me the time to like think of something. Would you like a little coffee from the loudest coffee machine in the world? Yeah. Just like, uh, uh, uh, turns around and goes, now he was a drunkard, first of all. Second, the Pope was old. And third, nothing happened. And it's like, you're not even eternally consistent. You're just lying.

This coffee machine, which is so noisy and so out of color scheme with the rest of the room is another intrusion of modernity that allows him to like take refuge in it for his little fucking scheme, right? To be like, I'm, it's fine, it's fine. I'm just going to go do the very uncardinal like thing and inherently visually comic thing of a guy in like scarlet vestments making himself a tiny cappuccino, right? And he also says, well, you know, there's a guy named Morales who was at the final meeting I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,

uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, also a bub because he's like, it was a private conversation and very precious to those of us who knew the Holy Father well and were close to him and had a lot of conversations with him and whom he wasn't mad at.

It was like Pope to Pope, you know, Pope to future Pope. Sort of like a Pope thing. Yeah. You wouldn't get it. Yeah. So the secret Pope, the secret Pope handshake that you don't know. I knew I know. ALICE So Lawrence goes to bed, and at this point, this is the first time we see him out of clerical garb, and he is just a man in a hotel with a lot of work to do, getting distracted by a lot of human noise, like doors opening and closing. ZACH He's gotta write his fucking homily. ALICE Yeah.

ZACH Which I guess is the opening statement for the conclave. ALICE Called open for the podcast, yeah. ALICE The, um, the toiletries come pre-packed in a little plastic bag that he can't get open, and he has this very human little, like, unclerical moment of frustration where he ends up just like tearing it apart and getting mad at it. You can't bring your own toiletries? Apparently not.

You've just gotta use the, like, you know, after the rain brand, like, Aaron Cosmetics, you know? What if you're a cardinal with a skincare routine? Oh well this is why they don't let us in. Weirdly it's all who gives a crap, and they're just like, I don't want to use this. Not interested. Yeah. It all comes out of the, like, one dispenser on the wall.

Like, the tram lodge. Ugh. Ugh. It's not sufficient! Don't even joke about it! Combination shampoo, conditioner, body wash, shaving foam, all purpose cogs fluids. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all purpose seasoning, you know. Dry oil. Yeah, but so, the very next shot is largely taken up by a big cross that is crucially and again we're looking at like

colors that are mostly like red and gold. This is completely black. Like absolutely like sheer blackness void of this massive cross which is in the back of the you know the chapel where he's gonna do the homily. And it's just really, really striking imposition again, of something that's completely different from all the modern impositions. All right, I just had to double check I was right there to make that joke, but it is the same etymology as crucifix. Nice.

Nice. So they're doing the Miserere, which they cut off short, actually. Which is interesting musically, there's no resolution to that. And Lawrence does his homily, which is on the theme of what you might call synodality, right? Like, the kind of diversity and unity of the church, another big kind of frant. Mm. Indeed, yeah. So we've got to have diversity, corporate responsibility, Pope lives matter. Uh, no, not ambition or factionalism, but togetherness. We only want good things, we don't want bad things.

Uh, we don't want certainty, he says. Even, he says, even Christ wasn't certain at the end. Doubt is essential for mystery and therefore faith. So he says, let's choose a pope who doubts, who sins, who repents, and who carries on going. Because certainty and like, absolutely knowing that you're right, that's the end of unity. RILEY Puttin' a hand up, this is one of the poise for that cry as when I first watched it. ALICE Yep. Yep. Yep.

RILEY Shame, I didn't mean to, it just happened. ALICE This is also, it's like, politically, what he's done, is he's been in a hotel room irritated, having had lunch with a racist, and gone, I am gonna, like, repudiate that guy, fuck you. RILEY This is why he keeps cutting to Tedesco while he's talking. ALICE He's looking at him straight in the fucking eyes! And unfortunately, that is a political statement that reads to the entire room as, I want to be Pope.

ZACH Every single person in the room, yeah, there's no response at all. Like, he finishes the whole thing and it cuts to, it just cuts to, the whole audience sat there silently. Which is really, really good. ALICE So, afterwards, in the vestries he's getting the robes taken off him, Rey is there, and Rey clearly is struck by this, he's had the same reaction that Dev and I had to this, he's like, clearly in my head-

Oh my god, you wanna be Pope? Yeah, like, may we all have a guy like Rey in our corner, you know? But so, he asks Rey, can you go and find out about this Morales shit? And there's a bit immediately afterwards where he has this kind of moment of self-disgust having asked him to do this, and he like, sort of tears the little Zucchetto, the little hat off of his head, just in like, again, frustration, you know? Yeah. Breaking the rules.

Yeah. He's breaking the damn rules. But they lock down the Sistine Chapel, off they go, they seal it down, eggs they hunt, omnes, everybody gets kicked out, the party starts. It's concrete, baby. Interesting that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is the last judgement. So if you compare that with like, Andrei Rublev's opinion of it, it's also really fucking dark in there. It is. It is, yeah. Well, not just because they've covered all the fucking windows to stop people using like, laser microphones and shit like that. Or the, like, the sort of paranoia.

Yeah. I think they filmed in the actual Sistine Chapel. I have no idea. I think they actually did. I think the Vatican actually let them film in the Sistine Chapel, which also may explain why it's dark, because if you put movie-level lights on old paint like that, you'll probably fuck it up. Which is probably why some of those scenes are dark. You fuck it up, yeah. You cannot take photos in the Sistine Chapel. That's crazy. The procedure for this, the way that you vote, is you have a little, like, election card,

you write on it, you fold it in half, you walk up to a big urn, with a pattern, the way that you vote is, you have a little, like, election card, you write on it, you fold it in half, you walk up to a big urn, with a pattern, the thing that you hold under the Eucharist on it, and you make a vow, right, in front of Jesus, this is the person who I think is, like, best suited to be Pope, and then you tip it into the urn. And then the three randomly chosen cardinals go through and count them all up. WILL Love the ho- all the procedure is so good. ALICE Yeah, one of those guys, Roberto Sutron, guy I love to see, he was in Diabolic as the

hotel manager. WILL No shit! ALICE Hey! Alright! WILL Fantastic. Italian TV actors, I don't know. Anyway. So, in our first round, it's pretty tight.

Ado Yami, Teresco, and Tucci all get similar numbers of votes for Tucci trailing just a little bit behind. John Lithgow also pretty close in the mix, not far behind. ALICE We see Lawrence votes for Bellini. WILL We do, we do. ALICE And we also see that Benitez gets one vote, which plausibly could be Bellini, to be honest. Just out of protest.

WILL Also, Ray finds five votes. possibly could be Bellini, to be honest. Just out of, like, protest. Yeah. And also, Ray finds five votes. He gets five votes because it was fucking Homily, and everyone's so upset with him. You need 72 to win. Accidentally became popular at work. So, if you're not familiar, the way that they signify the round of voting to the outside world in a conclave is there's a chimney on the top of the Sistine Chapel, they burn the voting papers, and if there's black smoke then no one's been elected, and when there's white smoke it means they have elected a pope.

But the way that they do that, for the sake of like, disambiguity, is this very modern, just like smoke canister that you have to put into a machine and like push a button. Yeah. So next day we get a bit of an hour and a sock and walk and talk between Ralph Fiennes and his buddy Ray. And Ray's like, well I've been doing some digging on- One second, sorry, there was one other detail from that that I wanted to put out, it was

further down the note, sorry. There's also like, we never see the outside world very much, and we certainly don't see the crowd in St. Peter's Square watching this, but when the black smoke goes up, you hear this intense crowd noise, and this is, I think, a really nice piece of implication that even for a conclave, this is being unusually closely watched. Yeah. Yeah, I really like that. So the next day we get a bit of an hour and a sock and walk and talk between Ray Fiennes

and his boy Ray and Ray Sisman. So I've been doing some looking into Cardinal Benitez. He's cool as hell. He's sick. He's dope. He built a hospital for female victims of sexual violence. He tried to resign on health grounds a few years ago, but the Pope wouldn't let him. I'm not really sure what those health grounds are, but we'll look into it.

Also, I went to see Morales and he confirmed what John Lithgow said, but he was also lying and shitting himself whilst he said it? Yeah. He specifically said that report was withdrawn, so I'm pretty sure there's a report somewhere we should try and find out. Yeah, that's pretty sure. Ray's so fucking good. He says this in such a, like, priestly way, but he's like, my Spanish

is quite poor, and I may have accidentally given him the impression that you had seen a document which made him shit himself instantly, and he was like, oh, that report was withdrawn, there's no basis to it. I'm gonna try to find that, let me know. The Ford report? It's been buried. So they go back in the minibus to the Casa Santa Marta, and Bellini's campaign manager is so mad, because he's like, you're fucking up pussies here. We need those votes. And also, when Lawrence looks out of the window,

there's a high wall, you can't even see the outside world at all. RILEY This is for the first Turtles thing, I think? ALICE Yeah, this is when Ray finds Benitez playing with some tortoises or terrapins, which the previous pope kept as a present. And then he chats to Benitez for a second, he's like how are you settling in, do you need anything, who did you fucking vote for? Who did you vote for and what does it mean, stop? And also stop if it was me. He also says of the turtles that they're, you know, they're beautiful animals, they also keep running out into traffic and getting run over.

Really love that. Yeah. It's really, it's a really funny movie. They're beautiful animals. They're just sort of old and doddery and keep hurting themselves accidentally. My job is to just kind of bring them back to the pond. Benitez is like, yeah, I voted for you. You seem like cool and dope. And then Ray Farns is like, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He has to pray the Divine Office, right, so he's praying at defined points every day, with defined psalm readings and everything. Oh, really? You have to do that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's crazy. Damn. Yeah, Liturgy of the Hours is sometimes called. Anyway, so he has to do that, he has to pray, he's not just praying spontaneously. And we don't know what his difficulties are, other than that it's not spiritually fruitful for him. We see him late that evening in the hotel, praying to a god who doesn't seem to answer even in Welsh, and he has this kind of hypnagogic moment, right, where he's sort of half falling asleep. A thing that Pope Francis said he used to do when praying sometimes, and he sees the dead pope, like,

lying on his bed just looking at him. Mm. Stanley Tucci rocks up and is like, listen you bitch, you gotta make me pope! You gotta make me pope! You gotta vote for me! Yes I supported the genocide in Gaza, but you gotta fucking vote for me anyway, because otherwise Tudesco's gonna be pope, and none of us want that, do we? Enough of this fucking woke transgender shit, we're not gonna let you speak at the conference, fucking vote for me anyway, because otherwise Tedesco is going to be po- but none of us want that, do we? Enough of this fucking woke transgender shit, we're not going to let you speak at the conference,

fucking vote for me. Interesting, there's like a little bit of an inversion here, because like Lawrence is like, well, I don't know, Adyaymi's got some like popularity, he could be able to do it and like immediately Tucci's just like, fucking Adyaymi? No, absolutely not. Like this is where he says he wants homosexuals in prison in this life and in hell in the next. If he was white, we'd be saying he's as reactionary as Tedesco. He goes, Adiemi is not an answer to anything. And later on that night, it gets like, we hear Adiemi yelling in the corridor. Yeah. Because something happened outside of the rooms.

Yeah, we see- There's also a funny moment here where Ralph Fiennes says, I didn't know you were so ambitious, and suddenly she's like, of course I fucking am! Every single cardinal chose that pope name years ago! And Ralph Fiennes is like, I didn't! And Lawrence insists, he's like, I didn't! Maybe you did. Yeah, you did. Yeah, he fucking did. For a fucking second I became a cardinal, I would have picked it. Yeah, of course. Of course, obviously.

I've picked mine, and I can't even become a priest. The next day they do more voting, and it's still tight, but Lawrence keeps gaining votes. He's like, stop fucking voting for me! Meanwhile, so does Benitez, quietly. He's up from, like, you know, Benitez gets one vote and then he gets like two votes, quietly on the outside. But every vote Benitez gains like, one more, just to keep him quietly in the background. Lawrence is like, please stop fucking voting for me! And out of game he's really pulling out ahead, though.

There's a great thriller bit here, where there's this, as they're voting, there's this rumble outside that sort of momentarily interrupts the vote, and it's like, you get again, these sirens and these helicopters and these intrusions of sort of like, modern noise, and it's like, the church exists in the world, and the world is a violent place, right, and there's stuff happening out there that we don't know about. Is it an earthquake? Is it Godzilla? Who knows? Pope Godzilla the first? Yeah, and of course none of the cardinals can know about this. Only Lawrence, and he deliberately is like, don't tell me.

I don't want to know. Because we're sequestered. But so they go to dinner, and there's this scene, there's this scandal. And the previous vote, Adyemi had gotten, like, a shitload of votes. Yeah, yeah, he's pulling that ahead. He's like, pulling forward, yeah. Yeah. But we don't see it, because it happens on the other side of the cafeteria, but there's

some kind of tray gets dropped and somebody shouts and this nun leaves in tears, and Adayemi storms out the opposite way, and it's like, oh, okay, what the fuck is going on here? So, Ray Fiennes goes to investigate. So I'm gonna poke around, and it's like, oh, okay, what the fuck is going on here? So, Rafe Finds goes to investigate. ALICE So I'm gonna poke around, and be retaken. RILEY And then Sister Agnes is like, nothing happened, fuck off. ALICE Yeah, behind the scenes where people are working

and where he is an imposition on Sister Agnes, who is trying to, like, comfort this other nun and protect her. RILEY She's trying to run her own, like, shadow, like, conclave of the fucking nuns in the background. It's so interesting to see the amount of labour that it takes to run this done by the nuns, but it's just completely ignored by the cardinals. ALICE He has to more or less order her out of the room.

SORROW Yeah, he does. ALICE Also I note that Sister Agnes' office, she's got plants and she's got a little caged bird in it, these are the only signs of external life bar the turtles. Like... ALICE Yes. Yes. RILEY The bird is tweeting the whole fucking time. ALICE Very Franciscan. In the sense of the saint, not the pope.

RILEY And this woman, Shinumi, is in tears, she won't say anything, she won't say what happened. Until Ray Farran says, do you want me to hear your confession? ALICE Yes. RILEY And then... ALICE This... this... this... And then it still doesn't say anything but we cut to the next scene. ALICE This is a really important bit of the movie.

However. ZACH The movie wants you to be like, this is like, oh okay, it's the boundaries of the confessional, he can't reveal this, so she's like, trusting him now. Or whatever. That's what they want you to take from that. ALICE Yeah. And so he goes to Cardinal Adyemi. Mmhmm. He immediately comes up with that, first of all, it's a conspiracy, second of all, it's lies, third of all, I don't even know what you're talking about. It's a secret government CIA kill squad, right?

Yeah, genuinely, we're gonna award the Brian Cox Award for Memorial- Award for Intelligence to Cardinal Adyemi. To all of these fuckers, Lithgow gets it as well. For the first time in ages. I mean, this is helpful as a fictional device, right, I'm thinking as he volunteers all of this, because it avoids me playing the religiously-inflected cinema sins ding that I asked Devon to make before this episode. However, then Lawrence goes, and what about the child, and I invoke the big cinema sins ding. That's a holy ding.

Because what Lawrence has done here is he has broken the seal of the confessional. You can't do that. You cannot do that. You can't use any information that someone has confessed to you for any purposes, or reveal any of it, ever. No exceptions. And it's like, this... In some ways it's not a very granularly Catholic movie, it's more about faith and about institutions, I'll get to that institutional reading, but this is straight up inaccurate in a Catholic

way, it's required for the fiction to progress, but you can't do that. I believe that Lawrence would bend the rules a little bit. We've already seen him bend them a little. I kind of do, but this is like- Again, the impactoray thing also gets its own retrospective. He does it again, though, because Arayemi's just like, well, you know, we were young, yes, me and her had a child, but we were young, and he goes, well, she was young, you weren't. Yeah, he's like, she was 19.

She was a teenager! You were in your thirties. And he's like, look man, God told me this morning that he wants me to be pope, he wants it so bad, you can't stop me being pope. And Lawrence hits him with the you will never be pope stare. He's like, I'm sorry brother, you're not gonna be pope. I'm not gonna say shit, because I can't, because of the confessional or whatever. But everyone else just saw that, and we are terrified of any other sexual scandal, so

there is no fucking chance you become Pope. Sorry, pal. And Adiemi breaks down, and Lawrence kind of shifts to compassion. Yeah. I think this is a really important- because like, Lawrence broadly agrees with Bellini that Adeyemi is a reactionary, is a homophobe, probably should not be the future of a church, but he doesn't bring any of that up, because he needs Adeyemi to accept this on his own terms.

Mm. This is really, really good. And he says you must begin again, but you're a good man. Right? It's redemptive. And this reads as kind of Lawrence's path to power here, because the next round of voting you see how Adeyemi, who is destroyed anyway, with tears in his eyes, implicitly votes for Lawrence. RILEY Yeah, it all goes to Lawrence.

He's like, fuck, fuck. ALICE No, not me! But Lawrence is still flagging way behind because now John Lithgow, leader of the pack, followed closely by Tedesco, Stanley Tucci down on 13, dropping like a stone. Fray finds catching up. Jim Leader. Yeah. Benitez quietly on six.

Yeah, one one one really small detail I noticed this time Lawrence. Previously, he'd been writing Bellini's full name. He just writes the surname this time. Just writes Bellini this time, yeah. This is also the one where we get the shots of like, our main guys alone. Yeah. Like, we just cut away all of the extras who were there for no purpose at all, and we just see like, Ady Aimee, we see Bellini just sat there on their own, Tedesco vaping away or

whatever. Just again, you could do this as a play. LIAM Yeah, it's really good. ALICE The first time we see Tedesco vape. LIAM Probably will. ALICE Comedy vape, Cardinal. The first time we see him vape is when he sees Benitez. Anyway. We have another, like, secretive campaign meeting in a stairwell, where- the liberals! Fucking liberals!

LIAM Liberals, baby. The Libs are like, oh we're getting fucked. the liberals fucking liberals liberals baby the lips like oh campaign managers like listen we've had bad popes before we've had popes who are in the ss we've had popes who covered up child abuse we've had popes who consorted with fascists we've had popes who've consorted with communists it's like these are all equally bad all bad things yeah yeah we gotta unite now behind john Lithgow. Virtually though, he does say one thing which is kind of the thesis of the movie as well, which is, we are mortal men. We serve an ideal.

We cannot be ideal. So the church is, it's crooked timber again. It's sort of like, made of people. And this is in response to Lawrence's line, is this where we are now? We're considering the least worst option? Which, hey, anyone go for any recent elections? Yeah, yeah. So converse to that, we then get Benitez, because Lawrence goes to see him again and he's like, stop fucking voting for me. Stop fucking voting for me! Please stop! And Benitez is like, no, I don't do this like horse trading stuff,

I'm voting based on principle, I think you're the best person there to be pope. So it's a vibes-based argument, I'm accepting subjective arguments only. Yeah, this is now the white boy crash out portion of the proceedings, Lawrence has lost control completely. Please stop voting for me. And Benitez is like, no, I'm not gonna do that. And then turns, like, blows out a candle and leaves the room. He's gonna vote for you twice, actually. Very very...

Really aggressive candle blowing out, so he's just like, ffff. See ya later. So the next morning, he goes to see Sister Agnes, with a kind of, sister can I go on your computer argument. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like me, age nine, waiting for my mum to finish her hospital wards, asking the sister if I can go on her computer, but he says, look, so it's pretty fucking wild coincidence that Shinumi would just turn up right where Adyemi is for the first time in thirty years, isn't

it? And Agnes is like, yeah, you know, that is crazy! And he's like, sister, could you go on google.com and search what the fuck this is? This is really good, because it doesn't ever do the cliche line of, like, we're not so different, you and I, but it is them realising that they are kind of similar. She's like, come on, do it for the old gaffer, do it for the pope, we both love the pope! It's such a fucking good Isabella Rossellini role, she's so fucking good at this, she gets like very little lines, but her presence is always so fucking good.

Because she looks at it and she thinks about it for a second and she just types her password into the computer, hits enter, gets up and walks out of the room. Yeah, her password is like, I love dead pope, right? God wants. And like, this is the thing, they both love dead pope, right? And like, this is the thing, like they both love the pope, they're both curious, right? And they're both kind of like liberal, right? Curia. Yeah. And so he goes on there and he, we don't see the information he finds, but his next stop is Trombley. And he's like, I know what you fucking

did last summer, right? Like, listen, John Lithgow, you fuck. Immediately goes to Trombley, goes, brother, I'm not going to say outright that I think you killed the Pope, but it's like broadly, there's a there's a possibility exists that you might have exacerbated some things. Also, I know that the last thing he ever said to you was you aren't allowed to be a Cardinal anymore. thing he ever said to you was you aren't allowed to be a cardinal anymore. And John Lithgow goes, seems like you want to be Pope. Yeah. Seems kind of like you want to be Pope, huh? And you're trying to destroy me. A, you were sacked. Okay, point number one with a bullet, you were sacked. B, two, second point, you brought Shinumi here specifically to stop

Adagio. John Lithgow's like, yes? That's crazy, bro. I did, but I didn't- He doesn't have a coffee maker around him, so he's powerless. Because the Pope told me to, in the last meeting that we had, he told me to bring it in. He's got one move. And it's like, remember the Pope? Lawrence sees the reverse and is like, you were lying about the Pope in his own fucking home, and the instant that we see that he can't bullshit him anymore, Trumblay switches immediately to threats. Right, yeah, straight up.

And he's like, everybody knows you wanna be pope. Right? And if you try and smear me with this, everybody's gonna see it as like an obvious tactic by a guy who is so ambitious, and I'm just gonna pretend that this never even happened. I'm gonna make myself a tiny coffee. RILEY Yeah, and as he's walking away, Lawrence just yells, the conversation did take place.

Which is really... And also, this is fucking win-win for Lawrence, cause he does not wanna be Pope, and if he's told directly to his face, revealing my, like, traitorous nature will stop you from becoming Pope too, and he's like, oh, amazing. Two birds. And here I am with a single stone. Interesting. So at this point he has to discover some more clues, so he breaks into the Pope's sealed

room, he activates cardinal vision, so that the clues are highlighted. Yeah, he's got like the Batman... Yeah. There's a really, really heartbreaking bit in this, but he's highlighted. Yeah, he's got like the Batman. Yeah. There's a really, really heartbreaking bit in this, but he's like alone, he's sitting on the Pope's bed, he finds his glasses which are like insanely like grubby, there's like an untouched like half-drunk glass of water on the bedside table, and he just like breaks into tears and it's heartbreaking, right?

It's like, it's like really deep, like, personal grief, right? And then, you know, like, outside you hear the lift bell go off, and it's like, ah, shit. This was a sneaking mission, right? And there's this beautiful, again, completely unspoken bit, because it's Sister Agnes, right? Isabella Rossellini, and she sees that the seal has been broken, and without any dialogue, this scene has to deliver that she sees this kind of huge violation, right? Deguses what's happened, and that it's Lawrence, and trusts him to do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why I'm saying it's such a fucking good Russellini role, it doesn't say a thing, but you see it so clearly. She was robbed for best supporting actress. Like, just this completely unspoken conspiracy that she's joined him in. Yeah. completely unspoken conspiracy that she's joined him in. So Lawrence finds some more clues, he finds a secret file behind the headboard of the Pope's bed. Yes. Which is the report that was withdrawn.

Yeah, and so he goes to Bellini with it, of course. And he's like, you're back in the game! Yeah! This reveals widespread simony. Shoutout simony fans, you know, been sleeping since Divine Inferno, since Divine Comedy, but now we're back up, you know? Simony is when you sell church offices or buy them. So he's been bribing cardinals for their votes. ZOE In advance, because you can't bribe them whilst you're in sequestration, but he's been fucking prepping. He's been diverting for funds to these, like, dioceses.

Yeah, John Misko's been setting this up. He knew he was sick, and then as the Pope was onto him he had this really contentious meeting. Pope dies of a heart attack, and then they go into conclave. It's also kind of the flip side of Lawrence's thing of like, because the Pope was spying on all of them, he has all of their bank statements, that's how he knows this has happened. The flip side of a Pope who doubts is a Pope who doesn't trust anyone, right? And you see the kind of problem that this causes for Lawrence,

because Bellini is like, you should leave this alone and not look into this anymore. BELLINI. BELLINI. PUSSY. Goes like, ah, this would fuck us all up, really. If you reveal the church conspiracy order. If John Lithgow doesn't win, Tedesco's gonna win, so put it back.

This never happened, fuck it. And like, the institution would be tainted, right? And this is a movie about, like, the Catholic Church is maybe like THE institution in terms of like, age and like, sort of like, posited legitimacy, and kind of like, cloistered institutional like, nature, right? And all of these men, like, have dedicated their lives to serving IT, right? And all of these men, like, have dedicated their lives to serving it, right? And that's this kind of, like, this problem of having to steer this thing that is made of really, like, extremely fallible human beings that is dedicated to God, and sort of what that

demands the compromises it requires from you. And in this case, Bellini is like, just leave it alone. And Lawrence accuses him of having been bribed himself, and we don't ever get an explicit answer. Yeah, he says, what's he promised you, Secretary of State? Fuck you, man. He doesn't respond to it. So then we get some more comedy modernism again, because we get this So then we get some more comedy modernism again, because we get this comedy of a cardinal trying to work at photocopier. Again, it's Sister Agnes, who has to be the kind of intermediary who's like, I will photocopy this report 108 times for all the cardinals. And lay them all out.

Puts it on everyone's breakfast platter. So the morning there's a big bust up in the cafeteria, John Lithgow's fucking pissed, they duke it out in front of everybody. Sister Agnes pipes up and she's like, yes! You know, Ralph Fiennes broke the seal of the Pope's apartment, but he had good reason, because Lithgow, you brought Shinumi here to embarrass Adyaymi, and you've been fucking bribing everybody since day one, fuck you old man! ALICE And this is where we get the comedy vape hit from Tedesco, but it's also like, this is the church tearing itself apart, right? And Lithgow is destroyed by this.

Yeah, Lithgow's fucked. He goes down fighting, he tries to get another little dig at Lawrence when he's like, you know, the Pope told me to do this, as those of us who saw him regularly can attest, not like you, bitch. But it doesn't work, and he's completely destroyed as a candidate. Yeah, he's fucked now. I think you will not become pope today, I'm afraid. More of his office to resign. And everybody's yelling too much, so he doesn't. Yeah, his one move. Yeah.

He speaks to Bellini, and Bellini is like, again, sort of like deeply ashamed and like contemplative. I like that it's ambiguous whether he's, well, so Stanley Tucci comes to him and apologises for his earlier ambition and so on, but it's not entirely clear whether he's sincere about this or whether he's just like, I'm really sorry, man, you're gonna vote for me for Pope though, right? You're gonna be Pope though. I guess you're the last guy who can become Pope. Yeah.

Unless someone else... If you really didn't want it, maybe I could. It's kind of like, it's simultaneously, like, he is, uh, like, sort of grieving his own, his own kind of, like, sin, but he's also like, okay, well you're gonna be the new Pope, so I'm gonna, like, cozy up to you. Yes, definitely. And, and so he talks about ambition, and at this point Lawrence does say, yeah, of course I picked a pope name.

Everybody picks a pope name. When you're a cardinal, you think, I could be pope, I picked a pope name. And the pope name he picks is John, which is interesting. The most common one, I think. The single, yeah, he would have been John XXIV. It's common, it's humble, it's also evocative of John XXIII specifically, the guy who did Vatican II, so it suggests reform. But so, in the next round of voting, we see he's like, mulling this, and Tedesco holds

up his ballot paper and looks in the eye just like, kind of daring him. And because he gets it rubbed in his face, he writes his own name. He writes his own name. He has to take the long slow walk up to the thing, and he has to do the vow again, right? Every time, in front of Jesus, this is the person who I think is best qualified to be Pope. Right? And we know he's lying.

We know he doesn't believe this. He's looking at a fresco of the last judgement, and lying in front of Jesus, and he puts the thing on the pattern, he slides the pattern, and the church fucking explodes. Boom! Yes. Immediately, the fucking, like... The window blows up! The window that we've seen them putting the protective shit on, explodes outwards.

There's dust everywhere, the dust remains on our Popeable bachelors right up until the very end, now from this point. And they have to call it, they have to all go into the abandoned cinema from the Bellini squad. And have a discussion. ALICE It's like the world is going to impose itself onto the church, even if it tries to sequester itself. Yeah. Because Reif finds, tells them the deal at this point, doesn't he? He does kind of break the rules by telling them what's happened. Which is that there have been, there's been a car bombing and then a suicide bombing in

Rome. And also in other cities across Europe, in Munich too. Yeah, Louvain and Munich, which is an interesting combination, L'Ouver are famous for Catholic universities. Munich has a Catholic cathedral in it, but it's like, we don't actually know who, like he doesn't. That's a really crucial detail. We don't know what it is, only that an explosion has happened. Yes. 52 dead, and about 100 injured. And Tedesco gets up and he's like, it's the Muslims, right? It's number one of the bullet, it's Muslims, and we need to start a religious war against

them. Yeah, he has this fascist rant. This fascist rant is interesting to me as well, because again, it's internally coherent as a piece of conservative Catholic theology, right? It differs from the JD Vance,, Otto Amoris bullshit, right? To me it's like, grotesquely racist and unchristian, right, specifically because the theme that he keeps returning to is the church is weak, right, and the church cannot afford to be weak because it exists in a violent world in which people want to destroy it and therefore it has to like make war, right?

And his line is, how long will we persist in our weakness? Right? S- He calls Muslims animals too. He's just like, we need to destroy these animals. B- Yeah, he's like, we like nurture them in our homelands, but they don't do shit to us and theirs and things like that. All the classic, like, you know, Islamophobic racism that we know and love. Yeah, yeah, of course. We've all heard it a million times. But so, at this point, Bellini has a little like... Yeah, yeah, yeah! People remember this as specific, they go like, this is Tedesco and then Benitez's speeches, but there is a middle one where Bellini, Captain fucking Lib, stands up and just goes,

you should be ashamed of what you're saying, and it doesn't fucking work even slightly. ALICE Because he's not! RILEY Yeah, because like... ALICE Many examples of like, racist going, I'm racist, liberal going, that's racist. RILEY That guy just said some racist shit, and everyone's like, yeah, and I agree.

It's like, you have to articulate a fucking vision that isn't racism. ALICE Yeah. And so, what we get then is Benitez's kind of repost to it. And it's interesting to me, because I think this is in some ways the weakest part of the film, because I think Tedesco's theology hangs together as its own thing. Benitez is meant to be not kind of Catholic liberalism, but a kind of Catholic radicalism. And that's an interesting thing to do, I don't think that it supports it theologically as it might, because the way that Benitez articulates this

is, I know war, you don't know war, war is terrible. Which, yeah, Of course, right? But it's also, he mentions, like, giving in to hate, right, is like, kind of giving up the Catholicity, the universality of the church, right? Which is fine, it's just, what that is, is that's liberalism one notch more liberal than the church mainstream right now. Yeah. He could go into more detail about the kind of liberation theology and so on, because there are radical Catholics. This kind of is my complaint again, like he actually doesn't articulate a vision. Like this is still liberalism. And he indicts the whole College of Cardinals as being like small, petty men concerned with

themselves, which yes, of course, obviously, the church isn't about tradition, it's about what we do next, which is a real movie trailer line. But it's like, to me, the church isn't about tradition, it's about what we do next, which is a real movie trailer line. But it's like, to me, the kind of, the answer to how long will the church persist in its weakness is that, like, weakness is the point of Christianity, right? Something we talked about in silence. What's the fucking logo, dude? Yeah, yes, exactly. To find out about the meek.

It's a symbol of temporal defeat. But this does lead me to one thing that I do really like. I thought I had invented it and then I saw Sarabar Mari say the exact same thing about Francis in his obituary of it and I felt really mad because I thought I had invented this. I have a thesis, right? Tedesco, as much as he might protest otherwise, is a modernist, right? This is why it's so important that he's devaping Cardinal. He's not appealing to, as much as he might think he's appealing to the Crusades or whatever, the Church has been formally committed to interfaith respect and cooperation or whatever

for like, at this point, 100 years plus. What he wants isn't to go back to the old ways, what he wants is to impose new ways that seem like them to him. And he is suggesting a modern culture war, right, rather than a crusade, because that bears no resemblance to how medieval Catholics thought. It's a different thing, it's a new thing. Where, by contrast, Benitez is a traditionalist, right? He wants the church to be more like a, you know, sort of Franciscan or Jesuitical view of something pastoral, right? And there's

this kind of temptation when talking about the church to be like, oh, it's so much more complicated than like secular politics, unless you speak fluent Vaticanese, you can't even understand all the axes these guys are operating on, right? Which isn't true. But I think a lot of people misidentified, like, Franciscan liberalism specifically as being like, well, we're going to impose modernism on the church. And it was a deeply traditionalist kind of theology that was like, no, we have to kind of try and meet people where they are, something which is articulable within our tradition. Right? And so this is kind of, that's the tension there, is like, where the tradition is and where it should be. Because of course people like Tedesco will appeal to tradition as a source of authority,

but what they really care about is power. It doesn't matter though, there's like centuries of tradition of Christianity being about like, love God being love, and hate being repudiated. Yeah, anyway, they go back at it, they go in and they have another round of voting, and... ALICE And there's this kind of brief breath of wind from the hole in the ceiling, that kind of rustles the papers, and of changes everybody's mind, it seems? There's this little... NARES The moment of silence, they hear the, like, the Swifts outside, and they're like, they think about the outside world.

ALICE This is almost exactly a description of a lot of Catholic interpretations of the Holy Spirit as well. NARES Certainly. ALICE It supports the thing. And they vote, we don't see the vote, we only see the acclamation of like, welcome new pope. Yeah, you're the pope now. Lawrence asks the new pope, hey do you wanna be pope? His fucking face!

He doesn't say shit. Please answer me, do you wanna be pope? Say it again brother. His face is just like, oh, for fuck's sake! He's like, I will... Visibly praying on it, yes. And it's Benitez, and Benitez chooses the regnal name, the papal name Innocent. Which, again, deeply traditional, that's a medieval Catholic name.

Well, again, it'd be Innocent the 14th. This is a common name. I ended up looking up Papal names after this. There's a bunch of ones that have only come up once that I think go hard, and you should try those again. But there hasn't been a 6th, just the 6th for instance, you should try that. There hasn't been a Pope Oscar. Because Oscar Romero has only made a saint very very recently. It's got to either be a saint or a previous pope.

So yeah, Oscar Romero, that's my pope name, I'd be Pope Oscar I. Which is a good name. Orlando? Pope Hilarious? Pope Hilarious is pretty good. This seems like the first and only Pope Francis though, to be fair. Yeah he was. Pope Hilarious would be me, Pope Hilarious II 100% would be the comedy pope.

So we also see, so, you know, Pope Innocent is like, taken to the Room of Tears to go and get like, robed. WILL Yeah, he won't do it. ALICE And, Ray, meanwhile- WILL Do it, he's woke! ALICE Ray is like, looks like he's had his entire world shaken. WILL Yeah, Ray is there, he had some intel that he didn't tell Lawrence before the phone.

ALICE Yeah, Ray's fired his life. WILL I didn't expect- AL... I never thought he'd... I thought you, my boss, were gonna be Pope, I was gonna be really happy about it, Benitez like no chance, right? Yeah, yeah. But... He wasn't supposed to fucking win, man! Yeah, yeah.

He wasn't supposed to fucking win! I've gotta give you some fucking news! Hey, I've got something to tell you about this guy. This health stuff? The health crisis that they went through. Time to reveal what that is. We still don't get it though, we still don't. We see Lawrence frowning, like hustling towards the room of tears.

Lawrence shoots over to the room of tears. Everybody get the fuck out! Everybody get out! Somebody does robe zone! Get out! I need to talk to the Pope. The Pope won't get robed as well, like, he won't like, get undressed in order to get like, dressed in the thing. He's actually sitting there waiting for Lawrence, he says, I was wondering when you were gonna won't get robed as well. Like he won't like get undressed in order to get like dressed

in the thing. He's actually sitting there waiting for Lawrence. He says, I was wondering when you were going to come and see me about this. And he, so they refer to it as his situation, which is very interesting. This is a transgender podcast about leftism. It is. And this is partially a movie about 9-11. Yeah. And partially a movie about being trans-Jar.

And 9-11 happens outside of the conclave. This is modernity intruding on the church again, isn't it? So Ralph Fiennes says to Mike, so you were gonna go and get this medical treatment, we didn't really find out what it is, but I've just found out what it is. You were gonna go and get this operation, weren't you? Do you want to tell me what that operation was? And Vanitas is like, it was the laparoscopic hysterectomy. Mm hmm. Really, really, really good. Just like, yeah, no, the thing is, I was born,

I grew up poor, I never had the chance to like check the fucking chromosomes. I just grew up like a boy and I was treated like a boy the whole time. Joined the seminary. Went into seminary? It's not like I was having sex? Like, you can absolutely be this kind of into sex and not know happened to a friend of mine. Yeah, if you haven't had like an extensive medical, like, check, you could be this right now listening. He was, he was already a priest. He was in his thirties, when for the first time he got a medical check and discovered his XX womb ovaries. Yeah, he had his appendix out and they found a fully functioning womb and ovaries.

Yeah. No vagina, dick, dick, dick of balls. But intersex. Intersex, yeah. And Ray Fiennes is like, ohhhh. Ray Fiennes is like, fuck. And he was like, yeah. And he says, like, I was gonna, I had a crisis of faith immediately.

I was, I came, I told the Pope everything. Obviously Lawrence is like, you fucking told the Pope about this? ALICE Yeah. And crucially, Innocent is so comforting in the way that he says all of this, right? It's kind of very patient, it's very, very like, consoling. ZACH This is genuinely a phenomenal fucking performance from Carlos Díaz. Just incredible. Also a very, I don't know if he's doing anything to his voice specifically, but like really good if he is. I did clock the voice on the second row of rewatching. Listen, I went to the Pope, I told him about this, he booked me in to

get it out, and I thought about it, and the night before it was due to go I was like, you know what, no, I've been this the whole time. God made me like this. It seems worse to me to undo his handiwork than to just persist. ALICE Yeah, which is an interesting needle to thread. It's something that I think is implicitly pro-trans, but it's not directly a trans narrative at all, it's like an intersex narrative and one that is sort of helpfully, because this is fiction, something that's completely sort of compliant with like, orthodox Catholic thought, of this idea that like, I'm not doing anything to it, you know?

Yeah. Functionally, this is a cisgender man. God made me this way, like, bodily as well. Yeah. He says, some would say, because of my chromosomes, that I'm a woman, yet I'm also, as you see me, I know what it is to exist outside of certainty. Yes. Yeah, I think back to your homily. Yeah, and so the sort of like, result of this doubt, right, is whether you want to have it or not, like, not just modernity, but also femininity, will be sort of like imposed on

you, right, And the church is not just something that's feminine, it's something that can be sort of feminine in a way that is previously unexpected. There's a thing I read from Deezer about how he played this, where he's like, he described himself as acting in a kind of motherly way. And that's something that is very familiar to Christians, because there's a relatively popular image of Christ as a mother hen. Right? So even a kind of male figure can and should have these kind of feminine qualities, and these things can co-exist in a way that is not necessarily clearly demarcated. And so, you know, he kind of... Lawrence accepts this,

he's completely astounded by it, but... NARESH And again, we don't see it happen. Instead, we just cut away and we understand that he has accepted it. ALICE We hear a big cheer from outside. ALICE He finds the turtle. This turtle of absurdity, this kind of like, wonder... Because it's not like a sheep that's too obvious a metaphor, it's this- It's this doddering ancient animal.

Strange, funny little thing. Yeah, just has somehow wandered off, and he takes it back to the pond. This is where we get the sped up gif of him walking the turtle. But the metaphor is that is the church, is that he's successfully guided it back to the right decision. He's taken this fucking turtle that would have walked straight into the middle of the road if Tedesco had been elected and just put it back in the pond. He has managed, you have to care for things, you have to care for the institution and for

the beings of the earth, you have to pick up the fucking turtle. God exists in like, the complex and the absurd, and you have to kind of take care of it as best you can. You, you, yeah. And then we hear the like, acclamation of the crowd. Love this. Love this. Don't even see the white smoke, don't see the crowd, don't see innocent going out onto

the fucking balcony and being, I'm Pope now. Like just all of that is implied because we know how the process works. The way that that's phrased liturgically before Habemus Papam, right, is like, it's like it's a happy announcement, you know, it's like it's a, it's a glad thing and that we see Lawrence meet it with happiness as well is really, really nice. There's an interesting deviation from the book here too, because I looked at the pots and opps of the book. In the book Benitez and Lawrence agree to keep this a secret. They do not form any such agreement in the movie.

Really glad that's not enough. So it is left open as to whether the Pope will disclose this. Yeah, yeah, we don't know. I mean, the whole way through, we that like, this will probably come out. Like that's what everyone is saying, that's what Ray says to Lawrence the whole time, is like, if this will like, this man is, this motherfucker's about to be like, the most photographed person on earth immediately, and like, this will probably come out. They're going to transvestigate the Pope.

Certainly it'll come out when he dies, and there's an autopsy. RILEY Yeah, 100%. Like, this will show up at some point. Which, and I really, I didn't know that they made that decision in the book, but I'm really glad that isn't in the movie. ALICE I am too. And so we end the movie with, after the conclave, now that we have a Pope, you know, the sort of like, Sere Vecante is over, Lawrence, we see him trying to pray again, and the blinds, all the big security blinds open and let the light into the room, he just goes, hm.

And again, it's like, he can like, find God again with less certainty, right? And he goes and he like, opens the window, and at this point I note that John XXIII described Vatican II as opening the windows of the church and letting the fresh air in, right? That's the kind of liberal promise of the movie, is that when the church changes it changes for the better because it lets the outside in. RIght? Yeah. He, like, the final shot is him watching three nuns leave, chatting amongst themselves. Yeah, it's like, women unheralded hold up this institution completely, but, y'know, it's all people within a kind of, y'know, structure, and it's about being on the inside of something, and I think it's something that like, that's one of the things that always gets me, it's why the, y'know, like, collective sort of

sign of the cross at the beginning gets me, it's, y'know, you feel the yearn on this one, is this kind of shared belonging, y'know? And, yeah. Orthopraxis, I guess you would call it. Yeah, I dunno. It's different now as well, because I have no idea how the next conclave is going to go. Yeah, I better go to Rome, actually, I gotta vote.

Yeah, remember to phone your representatives in the College of Cardinals, alright? We need Tagle in there, baby. If you are in line to vote, stay in line! I was Cardinaled in Pectorre. I will be Pope by the end of May. I've seen those Pectorre's as well. Thank you, thank you very much. And that's Conclave.

I mean, please, if we have closing thoughts, you know, invite some sort of link. It's good. It's very moving. It's like a good mystery, a good thriller. It made me go, oh, Catholicism. And in that regard is probably quite good PR for the Catholic Church, an institution which I remind you has declared all three of us to be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Yeah, but I feel that I am. And also, whose official position is that the three of us have usurped the power of God.

Again, I feel like I have. Yes. Yeah, it's been wrong about stuff before, whatever. RILEY They've been mean to us, but like, we should ask Keir Starmer if he thinks trans women could be ordained, that's what we should check. KM That's a real like fucking checkmate move. RILEY Like, go on son, what do you reckon? Are they blokes or what? KM Well then, can do you reckon? Are they blokes or what? Well then, can we be- can we become priests?

In terms of not being able to affect the things that you want to, I do note that Pope Francis called trans women daughters of God in his autobiography. Well at least he said daughters. Nice enough. I'm not interested in eulogising Pope Francis at the end of this, but he seemed like he was the best option in the last one, and I hope the best option in this next one gets picked as well. I have come not to praise Pope Francis, but to bury him! Already happened, I'm afraid. Too late. That speech ends with him praising the guy, though.

Yeah, it really does. That really does, though. Like, that's a lie, when he said that he's gonna bury him. So, uh, a few things to end on. All of these guys get the Brian Cox Memorial Award for Studies and Intelligence. ZACH Yeah, like, everyone. Rossellini, Fiennes, Tucci. ALICE Good Night Cross for Ray. ZACH John Lithgow is a working actor.

ALICE Yeah, Sister Agnes should get the Good Night Cross. Sister Agnes should get the Good Night Cross, Tucci. ALICE Ray Fiennes also has said some shit about trans people, so... ZACH Ray Fiennes did a good enough performance in this movie that I'm willing to pretend his name isn't Ralph for another year. Good for you, Rafe.

I think it was cool when Wattailo beheaded your ancestor, I think that was fucking sick. Keep it up. SADLY TOOCHY, I hope the acting career doesn't go well so that you can keep doing the things you want to do instead. Stanley Tucci, I hope that you stop getting cast in roles. Stop being good at it, man! Yeah, I hope you become a way worse actor and stop getting cast and just become like a cookware guy.

Stop being so fucking good at it, okay. I really enjoyed this movie, and I tell you what, this time I didn't dissociate for a week, so that's positive. I had a really good time watching and talking about the movie Conclave with my two best friends. Hey, if you're Catholic, good luck in the big game. Yeah, fuckin' Taggle, if you're listening, lock in. Yeah.

Go get him. We need you to lock in. We need you to fucking lock in. Your eminence, we need you to lock in. We need you to fucking lock in. Your eminence, we need you to lock in. Please. I mean, I guess you literally will be locking in, but I need you to lock in metaphorically as well. But you need to, like, also, yeah.

You need to go gamer mode. Yeah, that's the movie, that's Kill James Bond, that's a bonus pick. Our next mainline episode, we're gonna do a Q&A. Yay! That is right. You've got Q's, we'll A'em. Oh yeah. We'll A' some Q's for you.

I got the collected Q's ready for us to A' in just a moment when we're done. Perfect. Well thank you so much for subscribing to the Patreon, and we will see you next time. Bye everyone. Bye! Go in peace. Wale. Thank you for listening to yet another episode of Kill James Bond. Next week on the free feed, we're doing a Q&A because we've had to bank these episodes

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