The Watch - Double Detective: 'True Detective: Night Country' Episode 3 and 'Monsieur Spade' Episode 3

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

Chris and Andy break down the latest episode of 'True Detective: Night Country.' They talk about how the lack of easter-egging in this episode worked in it's advantage (1:00) and the dynamic between Danvers and Navarro (24:07). Then they talk about the latest episode of 'Monsieur Spade' and the show's very dense plotline (35:55). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Producer: Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or if you need a vaccine. Imagine being a million miles away. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Trimfaya. Tap this ad to learn more about Trimfaya, including important safety information. This episode is brought to you by Brooks, Running Connectus, us to a rush of energy that flows through our world. The cheers of friends that unlock a new gear within us, the intersection of interests that inspires a run crew, the support that gets you over the finish line. Connection is why we move forward and what inspires us to keep going.

Let's run there. Learn more at brooksrunning.com. I need supports to have to clear the run. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. and I am an editor at the ringer.com. And joining me in the studio fresh back from his ice hole fishing hut,

it's Andy Greenwood! I like the slow fade. I like that he had a heater in there. We're talking about true detective. And you're going to talk about Mr. Spade, too, right? We're going to do double detective today? I can tell you you're really holding out for that spade, the Spade section. I love that show.

I love that show, too. But I love the ice, and I love communicating with dead people. So you don't feel like Dachel Hammett is a dead person that's God Frank is communing with? That's true. Okay. Yeah. Let's do. That's do true detective.

Okay. You know what I'm going to do for you? Help me. I'm going to recap episode three. I appreciate that. Folks, you just watch this. But let's just just shout it out. Right.

So in a flashback, we learned a little bit more about Annie before she was murdered. She not only busied herself protesting the mining going on in Ennis and having secret affairs with emotionally unstable scientists. But she also has sort of changed the usage of. of Ennis's only hot tub. Yeah, and she was a birthing, like, consultant. Or, you know, like, a doula, like, yes. She worked in a birthing center in Ennis.

Back in the present day after this is when, so we get a little picture of like Annie and Navarro's relationship before her demise, but then we switched back to the present day. And Hank has called in some oathkeepers to help him search for Clark. Do you think Hank had the group chat avail? I think he's on, he's probably on television. If I had to guess. He's called in some oathkeepers to help him. I don't know if they're oathkeepers.

They just have their own guns. That's their vibe. With the search for Clark, The Missing Scientist, and Andy's secret boyfriend, Navarro has been brought on officially now to work on the case, and we find out that their schism between Danvers and Navarro not only relates back to Annie, the Annie case, but also back to a case concerning

an abusive husband who killed his wife. Danvers says that the husband committed suicide, but in a flashback, it looks like there's way more to that story. Let's just pause that and say one of the best executed scenes of this series so far.

It's so cool to have like an unreliable narrator depiction there, and I think that this is going to go to something that I want to talk about when it comes to theorizing about this show, which is, is it fun? What's it feel like to watch a show

where you don't believe the characters? Not necessarily don't believe that they're real or not, but that they're... Although that's relevant. But that they're telling the truth all the time, these true detectives. Navarro and Dan

lay out all the evidence from Clark's room at Solal, the research station. They kind of get all that stuff together in boxes. And they find a candid photo of Annie and Clark, the missing scientist, hanging out a while ago. And they find a little bit of blue hair dive on it, which leads them to think, perhaps there's a connection between Annie and her hairstylist, which is like that the hairstylist may have known more about Clark and Annie. Can we save some time in this podcast where I can ask you what would be the most incriminating thing that would be turned up in the evidence boxes of your bedroom? Like of eight boxes taken out? Zin pouches? Yeah.

That's right. Okay, so as they're putting together all this evidence, I just, I spy that the evidence itself starts to make the shape of the spiral pictogram, which has become like such a true detective icon. I just want to let you know that. Yes. So after Navarro makes this connection, they go talk to the hairstylist. She shows the hairstylist, Andy's tattoo, and the tattoo that also Clark had, and the hairstylist is yelling. Andy did talk about this image. She said that she dreamed it for a long time, and that when she got the tattoo, the dreams finally stopped.

Stop the dreams. That's cool. Is that what happened to you with sound waves? Yeah, I guess so. That's true. I didn't really, I mean, like, you know, my tattoos don't have any kind of, like, cultish relationship. They're just cool designs. I just didn't know.

Maybe that happens to everyone with tattoos. You get it saying mom, so you stop thinking about your mom. It's dark. This same hairstylist mentions that she used to date a slal guy named Oliver, who does not seem to be popping up on any Sosh. He's not, doesn't have a gram, doesn't have a truth social. And she also claims that she called the police and told Hank about Clark and Andy, after Andy died, just to be like, hey, like, just so you know, she had like a secret.

Well, she doesn't say Hank, but everybody knows. Everybody seems to assume it's Hank. And they're right. Navarro starts chasing down the Oliver lead, pressing her jump off. about his whereabouts, and he gives her a little bit of inflow. Hence the ice fishing, but they do a little quid pro quotes. Yeah, he's like, I want to know a little bit about you. That was sweet.

But it turns out that Navarro's mother was murdered. We do find out a little bit about some of the darkness fueling her. Her mother ran away and never came back. And Navarro says her mother was killed and her killer was never found. So you file that away because we are getting a growing list of missing women who might be, quote, unquote, awake. And also the idea that Navarro's sister may be following the same path. as her mother. Outside of this fishing hut, Navarro slips and falls and has a vision, it seems of like her past military service. But there she is visited by a child who whispers listen or a voice

that whispers listen. And then the child says something. Now, I did not watch this with subtitles on, so I don't know exactly what the child says. Does the child say get my mommy? Does it say protect my mommy? Who is this child? Is it young Navarro? Is it Danvers's daughter, I don't know. Is it the baby that was born at the beginning? Is it the baby that was born at the beginning? The child says, has pajamas that say Dreamer on them and is holding a stuffed

fuller bear. Do you think this child would also like it if a random woman made her mac and cheese in the middle of the day? I would love it if a random one would baby mac and cheese. I'm just letting everyone know. I want to talk about that moment a lot. We get some backstory on the environmental state of Ennis, not good.

The drinking water, the mine, etc. We see the water too. Then Danvers goes to a pseudo postmortem conducted by a veterinarian, which I don't think is super a fish, but I appreciate her go-getter attitude. We're all just animals, really. And this veteran, the veterinarian, concludes, without digging too deep into the corpusicle,

that the Salal guys did not die from the cold. Yeah. They died of fright. They died before they froze, and everything is consistent with some sort of cardiac event. And he mentions how he's seen Caribou die of fear. We saw in the first scene of the whole series, a bunch of caribou jumping off a cliff.

Which was interesting. I guess were they afraid? Because that's different. And was the guy who was hunting those caribu? Is that Oliver? That's a question I have as well. Okay, I'll get to that. Did Evan Zavarov tracked down this Oliver guy who is not a great host? And he threatens to kill them. He does seem saddened by the death of the Solal guys, but also a bit, it's not like grief. It's more like he's disturbed that this is like maybe finally happened or something like that.

We learned that this guy Lund, one of the scientists, who, let out the great scream in the first episode, I believe, when they were kind of, or the second episode, beginning of the second episode, when they're kind of first digging these guys out, I'd forgotten about him. Did you? I'd forgotten that he was still kicking. I'm never, well, he's not kicking, he has no legs. It turns out he's alive, he's in the hospital, he wakes up, he's essentially the grail night for Monty Python. He has no legs, he's blind. He's not the grill night, he's the guy that gets thrown on the cart of people from the plague and Holy Grail. He's like, I feel better.

Danvers goes to deal When they go back to the hospital Danvers is called away from this hospital room where Lund is. Convenient. She has to go deal with a sort of Jan 6 situation going on in the waiting room and Navarro is left with Lund.

Lund goes full... We find out Lund's still got some demon dog in him. Yeah. Oh, so wait, like if you do the X-ray meme, it's Kujo? It's Pizzou from the Exorcist. And Lund wakes up.

Someone's going to make that for us. He tells Evangeline, her mother says hello, and that she's waiting for her. And then he points, and then he fucking dies. And that's the end of True Detective Night Country episode three. That's rude. Wait. Not you. Oh. It's rude of him.

To leave it hanging like that? I mean, a lot of him got left hanging. Let's be honest. Okay. So that is episode three of True Detective Night Country. Yes. Typically in the conversations that we've had so far about this show, Andy, we've kind of divided them into true detective conversation and night country conversation.

I will say on my first pass through this episode, I am not sure I picked up just myself, true detective dude that I am, on a ton of TrueD stuff that we need to talk about. I can't remember whether or not when Danvers and Navarro go visit the abusive husband, who does not seem to have committed suicide when they've arrived. He's whistling. I don't know whether that melody comes in.

I can't remember. Did you shazam it? I didn't shazam it. And I also just kind of, I didn't pick up on anything out of the ordinary that we needed to address. And that will come up later in our conversation about true detective. So let's talk about the night country part. Well, actually, before we do, I want to say, again, we have not seen ahead. We're not watching ahead.

Right. So I don't know if this is, if this is going to continue to be a relevant observation. But I thought for the overall health of this series, Night Country, as something distinct, I thought it was very smart to back away from the east. Easter egg store. From the tottles and the, yeah. Yeah, because I think that you're asking for trouble in a different way if you devote the main thrust of your story to kind of, to putting punctuation on those questions. Yeah. You can sprinkle them in. You can make some nice connections. And if those connections are, this is all part of the same universe and there's darkness on the edge of all towns,

great. I appreciated that, even if there's more to come. Okay. Do you find yourself, who I do not remember you often saying, like, what I love is a supernatural ghost story to collide with my detective fiction. You clearly don't remember our episodes on The Outsider, the HBO series, that was the perfect collision of Stephen King and Richard Price and that I still think about. Okay. So, do you find the same charms out here in the snow? I, TBD, I will say that. I think that there is a delicate recipe of serving both sides, you know, and there's a danger of kind of falling into the mushy middle between them where you are neither satisfying as a detected procedural nor as like a full like balls out supernatural horror show. This episode was a bridge episode between,

I think, the setup of the mystery and what the show is going to be in terms of its investigation resolution. So I'm very much on the fence. There were moments that worked for me and we keep referring to the moment of the flashback that we can't trust. that was not overtly supernatural, but it was unnerving. And I think that was beautifully staged and done, and I really enjoyed it. There's the scene you're talking about at the end with Lund, which, to me, was almost a little too on the nose. This is what happens in horror movies.

Does he still have a nose? It's a great point. That's a great point. You can't be on the nose if you don't have one. So Issa's done it again. So right now we're in the middle. Yeah. And I think that on the detecting side, I also felt like this episode was a slightly

a step back for me. Again, I'm not really going to do the like thumbs up, thumbs down week to week. We're taking in the whole thing. But inevitably, even in detective shows that we really, really like and end up liking throughout, there's going to be episodes where characters drive seemingly randomly all around a conveniently small... Why don't you get this off your chest now? What is the square footage here of Ennis? Because there's a lot of stuff where they're like, this guy has quit society. He's out on the ice.

And they're like, great, so 15 minutes in the Land Rover? But I think that might be the case. It might be. And I think that the darkness is creating a little bit of an illusion of distance or maybe of like being, they're lost in a snow globe somewhere else. You know, like, but you said this to me. And I think that this is real city mouse of you. Okay.

All right. I think that honestly, like, when you get out into the country like I have and you really see places, you start to realize that like when somebody's like, yeah, like, I got to go to the store. it means like a 20 to 30 minute drive. That's true. And for me, from my perspective, safe in my hole in the wall in the city as a mouse in the mouse in my pocket, my experience of this is following winemakers on Instagram, like our buddy Michael Cruz,

who makes beautiful wines. I really recommend them. And now watching what he posts on Instagram, like he has like an old Subaru and to find the different vineyards, yeah, he drives like hundreds of miles a day. So you're right. So my experience is not relevant here. And I appreciate you checking my urban. privilege.

Yes. I was just saying that, like, to me, that has not, I haven't bumped up against that. I don't think that they're driving for like seven hours through the tundra to get to all of them. To be clear, I'm not bumping on anything other than I would like a little more clarification as to what is truly the edge of things. Because the fact that Ennis, which to our city mouse eyes, feels like the edge of something, like on the edge of a cliff of any kind of known civilization, that there's something beyond that. And is there something beyond that?

that's interesting. So I kind of wanted to know how far you would have to go to be that far out and does anyone go further. So that's a small question. The bigger point that I wanted to make was just that inevitably in a detective show, there's an episode where characters drive around to the beat of their own internal plot logic. Yes. Where there's a lot of going here and then there and then back here and asking this person. This show has had several moments of phone call, you have to come see this for yourself where it's like realistically like somebody

you could be like, I'm going to send you a picture of this thing that I just saw. But that's also the challenge of making a detective show in a cell phone era. And so I don't begrudge that. Everybody's doing their best and it's working for me. It's just that an episode that is about driving between, basically, it's almost, if you're picturing it, like drawing something with an etch of sketch, but you don't know what the picture is yet. So it's going to have a different feeling than the first two episodes, which hit harder with the establishing shots, if you will, of this larger story. So I personally enjoy the idea that, much like you're like there's darkness at the edge of, of all these towns, that a place that where reality is so inverted anyway, where you're, like,

you're kind of, you're never experiencing sunshine, that there are these sort of almost like borderlands right outside of what would be called civilization anyway, that like if you're, like, going to live out on the ice, it's not that much further from being near a coffee shop and a bar and a police station. I like the idea that in these borderlands, there was a, also like a porous border between living and the dead. Yeah. And especially when you start to interpolate maybe some of the mythology, the native people from that area,

and you start to think about like the communion between people and the land and like spirituality that comes out of that, I think it's pretty interesting. I think that there are a lot of balls up in the air right now. So for me, and I think that I'm unfairly biased because of like, First of all, true detective season one, but just the idea that there is like a case, a larger conspiracy,

and a series of detectives studying that case, which I think for the first and third season worked really well. Obviously, the second is much different. But in the first season, you basically have two detectives who see the world completely differently. One is a practical, pragmatic. That's hard.

That's played by Woody Harrelson. The other is Rust, who is seeing this psychosphere and it can smell, you know, spiritual, degradation and has all these philosophies about like the state of humanity. And between the two of them, they kind of like follow these leads and follow their senses to the, to this great grand Carcosa conspiracy. Here, I think that they are now like, it's three episodes

in and now we have finally like kind of truly united Danvers and Navarro, although there's still a lot of like question marks about what drove them to be adversaries rather than than, than co-workers or friends. And I don't know that there's necessarily that big of a difference in their perspectives on how these things work. I think Danvers is obviously more cynical about the idea.

She thinks that detective work and that the thing that just happened is almost Occam's Razor. It's like it's, it is, these guys probably went out on the ice because something scared them or something, you know, prompted them to run out

and then they froze to death and that's it. It's not that some spirit or some possession is taking these guys hold because they're digging into the earth and now we have unleashed a bacteria or something. Which is, like, kind of sounds like it might be the truth in this case.

I think that you've really hit on something that's essential to talking about and understanding the show, which is. This is not concerned trolling. This is just pointing something out. The decision to make the primary protagonists of the show have a history. So it is a reuniting,

not a uniting, is incredibly treacherous, just purely from a story-constitutional. point of view because you want the story to be moving forward. Now, it's, and the nature of true detective to be telling stories in different timelines. So it does, I understand why the decision is made. Also, writers like degrees of, they like a high degree of difficult. You want to show that you can do it.

And as we've been saying multiple times in this podcast, the flashback to their previous interactions was one of the highlights of the episode. But you always have to remember in these two-hander detective stories, the lethal weapon corollary. You want the two different heats to be brought together in front of you and everything and the sparks to fly forward. You want to see that. It's a collision between two different types. And many of our favorite stories, I mean all stories, but particularly these types of crime investigation stories, they do that.

It's easy money. You literally create sparks. And then the fire burns through the rest of the movie or the TV show. There is a kind of softness to this because we, have the Danvers dynamic with Pete, Peter, and then we have the interesting wrinkle of Navarro calling him freshman or rookie or whatever. This is my favorite Callie Reese episode so far. I think that this was one where she got to actually do a bunch of different stuff to be vulnerable but also to be funny but also to be a little bit chippy. Like I thought this was she also got to do like police work, police work. We got to see both in the flashback but also in her going through the evidence where it was like, I don't know, it was just nice to see her in the action. like this. I agree, and I thought she was very

strong in this episode, and I think Jody Foster is always strong. But the core thing that you're saying, which is you're uniting these two people, and this was something that was true in all the previous true detectives. You're right, the two was different, but the Colin Farrell, Vince Vaughn, and Rachel McAdams were all doing big, big choices

in very different characters who were brought together under various circumstances. It's Taylor Kitcher, Risha, right there. I knew there was someone else I was forgetting to. Sorry, Regan's Texas forever. The Danvers Navarro friction is muted. And neither of them is particularly extreme. Now, again, that could result in some beautiful, nuanced storytelling. But that is a, I just think you've articulated something important. I don't necessarily want to compare this show to the first season

of True Detective. I think it was conceived as something different. I think it's telling a different kind of story. I think it's borrowing certain elements, much to Nick Pizzolado's dismay. Shagrin. Uh, about, about the series. But I think this often happens with these limited season detective shows where you can feel the bones of a much larger story. You know what I mean? Like, so if I had to guess, and I also have not read it, I've not read ahead, you know, um, obviously Issa Lopez is laying the grass. work for some connection between environmental collapse and the disappearance of these women

and also possibly the supernatural element of around some of these crimes, some of these murders, and also just like the overall vibe that's happening out there. I think that's really interesting. But as a viewer, like when I'm like, where did Fiona Shaw go? Like, where did Christopher Eccleson go? Like, what's going on with Hank? Like, we get like these limited. I didn't know that Hank was like also like,

is Hank just allowed to bring a bunch of hunters on to a police investigation and doesn't really have to follow Danvers's orders or she obviously doesn't feel like she can reprimand him maybe because he has sway over these guys? Like, I don't know. But there's so many different things that are kind of up in the air right now and it often happens in the third or fourth episode of a six or seven episode season of mystery is that you're like, where am I supposed to look?

What am I supposed to care about? I think my addition to that is, and this might not be true of everyone watching, the corpusicle is what I'm interested in right now. Yeah. I mean, they always say that about you. The Annie feels secondary. Now, obviously, the defining characteristic of Navarro as a human and a cop is that she disagrees with me very, very much. Right. And that's important. That's important for the show, not just for a fictional character. But I think it's, as a creative enterprise, here, it's important for Issa Lopez to be keeping our collective eye on the main mystery that she presented to us as the main mystery. Yes. Why did these guys, which

is, it was so beautifully outlined in the previous episode when Danvers and Peter are in the sort of stands at the hockey rink and she's just like ask the question, ask the question, ask the question. Yeah. Yeah. And I want more of that. I mean, this is, I don't know, are we

in the portion of the podcast where we can say what we want? And like, the idea that there were what these guys were doing there, what they were disrupting or disturbing. Also, you know, one of the threads throughout this episode is that when we're first told about Solal Station, we're told that they are completely

to themselves at all times. Now there are at least two examples of... It seems like a dating hub. Exactly. Like, I know Danvers extends Tinder to Fairbanks. She should extend it to the Solal Station. She would have found a very willing audience there. Probably a lot in common. Everyone like sandwiches.

Yeah. Yeah, there was a lot of like, it's a all-towny romance happening. And so there's those tracks between the town and the station are well-worn. And so I guess that's kind of where the anti-investigation gets folded into. But yeah, I don't know, other than just to agree with you, that there's a lot of stuff being put into the stew pot at the moment. I'm also somewhat distracted by my own awareness of true D mythology, you know. And I think that the throwing tunnel out there in the second episode, clearly like returning over and over and over to the spiral has,

it's got my head spinning a little bit. And I think that it'll be really interesting. I think once the show round second after the fourth episode to see like, what's important here? Like what are we going towards? What are the questions that we need answered? It's entirely possible that this could be like the first season of True Detective, which was like a kind of multi-tiered mystery.

There was a murder of a woman, but then there was also the larger conspiracy that may not involve the church and the government and everything else. That's the nature of this series. And if anything, that's the mantle that Issa has picked up on. And I think she's being true

to the spirit of the show. That's different than some other detective shows. If we think about other successful ones on HBO, if you think about Mayor of Easttown, there is stuff in the past, there's concurrent stuff. There was a secondary crime story that was going on, but it was essentially forward-moving

of one character in her world and how it was affected by a thing. This is an ever-expanding concentric circle of worlds overlapping, moving at different timelines with different crimes. It's very busy. I mean, that is something that she did borrow from Pizzolotta, which just purely from an objective standpoint, I am slightly surprised by, because I did think that the opportunity,

and I still may be proved wrong, we've seen three episodes, But the opportunity to reset a successful franchise with a different creator, I thought would also come with kind of a refinement or simplification of it. Because whether you liked season three or didn't like it, and I was kind of in the middle of it, it was very heavy, very busy. Yes. And so when the central logline conceit of the series was just like, I mean, it's right there in the title. It's like this is like a pulp. We're going back to a pulp type of storytelling about detective solving a crime, but it's really going to be about them solving the crime of them.

What do you think of Hank? What do you think is going on with that character? Did you pick up on, I haven't rewatched, but did you see the sort of surly snarl of Hank in this episode in the pilot? No, I thought he was a dipshit in the first episode. I thought his, like, he was supposed to be like the small town cop. Right. Who's like, let's just keep the piece. There's a lot that goes on underneath the hood.

We don't need to look under there. And I thought he was like, I'm just trying to get my mail order bride out here. Like, I'm trying not to make waves. And this time, since the, so the Annie file in the second episode where Peter steals the file and he gets slapped for it. He steals it in the first, slap in the second. By the way, are you going to revise your comments about that slap? Because it's really left a mark. And now he's telling people he fell on the ice.

Yes. Even though he is an expert skater. A gentle slap. I wouldn't say it was a gentle slap. I just think that, you know. All right. Kaya knows what I'm talking about. I'm not endorsing

what is it, corporal punishment? Look, I'm just saying that when you do adopt a ward, you may need to revisit some of these opinions. If I adopt a ward, that that kid's going to be like 6-3190. I'm not slapping anybody. Because he's going to be recruited by some of the, like a mid-major. Okay, got it.

Anyway, my point was just that, like, yes, you're right. He has taken an increasingly nefarious turn. And I think I'm a little bit, like, I'm very curious about the Danvers Hank relationship. Every time I watch this with my wife, she's like, did they use to date? And I think that's really their energy, which seems to be, she seems incredibly demeaning of him,

but in a way that almost seems like they had a personal relationship that went wrong somehow. I'm very curious about that part. She also is written, the character's written as just like a... Danvers. Like in Danvers. It's like an apex predator of sex in that town. Like that she is just...

She seems to have had relationships with many people. She gets after it. Yeah. I respect it. I respect it as well. Fantasy football. Bonin. What else is there to do up there?

It's the 20s and whipping up some mac and cheese. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? I was just struck by... This is a scene where they're at the hairstylist's house, and the hairstylist's daughter is a little bit disturbed by these two cops in her home. And Danvers distracts her by being like, why don't we go make some mac and cheese and talk about unicorns? My thing is...

Now, one of the most successful things of the show is it continues to... super disorient me as to what time it is. Because I was like, oh, we just night fish at night. I mean, ice fish at night, but no, it's probably morning. I don't know. So when they go over to the house, it's unclear what time it is. And thus, I'm a little bit at sea in terms of like where the child is with her meal schedule that day. Right.

I would just say that as a parent, if someone else came to my house and offered to just feed my child like a rich meal out of the order of my scheduled day, I would not be chill with it. Now, if it was obviously dinner time, my impression was that it was like her last appointment was there. She was going to be making dinner next, but that it took to, like, basically their interrogation took so long. The kid was starting to become hungry and tired and Danvers saved the day. That's possible. Look, Danvers did save the day and showed a streak we didn't know she had in her and the long form the moth-like storytelling about a unicorn just purely inspired as if she's in an improv troupe from an image on a shirt. Bravo.

That's expert. That's God tier parenting. I can't do that. And I purport to be a writer. I couldn't do that. It was really more of the like, let me feed you with someone else's food. And it could be 8 a.m. or it could be 11 at night.

I got the impression it was past dinner time. I also noted, and I wondered if this was the show's remarkable commitment to authenticity, that the mac and cheese that she's making is the like the velvita style, which is the tube of like, like not quite liquid, but like gelatinous cheese. It is not the more traditional powdered. But that doesn't mean, maybe that's because they can't, are they going to get milk all the time? Like, what's going on?

If you have to shop more, more shelf-stable stuff. They seem, I mean, like, the guys in Solal had all manner of chips. You know what I mean? I feel like they're... So do I. I mean, like, the prices are high. You know, like, I think that that's a Sleepy Joe problem, but that's also an Ennis Alaska problem about getting goods up there.

And so it's Elisa Murkowski problem, is what you're saying. I mean, it depends on who. I mean, she's an independent now. She could probably reach across the aisle. When I talk about the show's commitment to specific detail, I do have to mea culpa briefly, because I imagine people listening to this also listen to last week. Last week, I was like the production design and the detail in these rooms and these, you know, in these spaces with the canned food.

Sure. It's really, I don't know, it's accurate, but it's very compelling. You wish to recant that? No. I just want people to know that I did watch last week's episode on a screener site on my laptop. So I did not really catch the AI-generated metal band poster. This has been a big topic of debate that the miner who's living in, I thought to be a mining dormitory, like a workers dormitory,

but possibly a halfway house has also been kicked around online, that he had several posters on his wall. And I made fun of them at the time. I was like from the law and order school of like every time you have a disturbed teen, they have like a helmet poster. Helmut was a band for 99.9% of our listeners that was a very aggressive kind of like

Matthew Metal Bay. Page Hamilton, was that the guy's name? Page Hamilton. He went to Harvard, I think. And he was like, he would to Harvard, but he riffs. Yeah, it's like, if only, hashtag goals, brother. Yeah, go on. Anyway, this guy who is telling Navarro about his brother selling Clark a trailer

has posters up on his wall that say essentially like metal tour and it's like it does seem AI generated Issa Lopez apparently responded to someone talking about this she's too online and was like yes it was

AI generated and it's like basically like this is what they can do out there I honestly oh so she was implying that the guy had no access to like proper so made it like made his own or maybe like I don't I don't know Right. So, like, normally a minor would buy like the Shepard Ferry, like, tour poster of his favorite band, but like he can't, like, he can't do that. He doesn't have access to Red Bubble or whatever. So that's right. So he, he AI generated his own poster. Because I thought the complaint was they obviously like drew that in in post. And they didn't do better than that. And I didn't even notice because I watched it on a small screen.

It didn't really, like, I noticed the metal part of it, but it didn't take me out of the show. I guess is my point. I think that what... Look, I don't know if Ease is listening. I don't know if Casey, even Casey Blois at HBO is listening. But if they are listening, all I ask is, since it's all... You can do it all in post anyway,

and you can always just take it down and post it back up to the Macs servers. Nobody's going to notice. Someone should gin up a Shepard Ferry-style poster of Paige Hamilton from Helmet with the words obey and put it back in that scene. For us.

Just for the two of us. Just to prove that there's a little... life in the thing left. I wanted to conclude our conversation about this episode by talking about the last scene. Yes.

So this is an episode and this whole series has told us that as the guy says in like I believe the second episode, the guy who's the chip delivery guy the delivery guy

who's been to Salaal it's Enis, you see people. Right? Rose sees Travis. Travis may or may not be Rust's dad. I believe that has been

confirmed by Ysill Lopez on Twitter. You know, we've kind of had these visions of animals doing weird things. Now Navarro is having dreams about her military service, which a mysterious child is appearing and talking to her. So if that's happening and the Lund thing at the end was very specifically done with only Navarro in the room, do you interpret that as something that Lovarro? is experiencing or something that she is having it like it's a vision it's a great question

because that guy that guy was close to death when they arrive you know like it's about as bad it's about as banged up as you can be he's also not he is on iR and i'm saying this as a so yeah no shots of torrid all are getting him back on the field he's in the blue tent yeah an independent neurologist has ruled him he's in protocols it's like debo coming out without his pads on yeah and as a you know, just from a podcasting perspective, he's not, like, super articulate, I would say. No. You know, he's not mic-ready. No.

I guess I would just respond to your question with a question of my own, which is, does it matter? The show is intentionally not differentiating between people's personal visions and their effect on the larger world. That is, in some ways, the text of this show. So, I mean, we're talking about a murder mystery in which the bodies were pointed out by a ghost. Yeah. if a ghost continues to be the literal ghost in the machine pointing out every clue, that's consistent. I don't know where I am with it in terms of my investment.

Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on whether or not this guy miraculously revived himself and then said something very specific to Navarro's experience that she clearly doesn't share with very many people because she's so resistant to talking about her mother with her boyfriend or with her lover. or he is like a figment of her imagination that's kind of calling into account

like women who are on the other side who want you to look for them. So it's just interesting. I'm going to keep my eye on that. That's not actually like something I need a magnifying glass. I'm sure it's going to be a major topic. It feels like more of like a magifying glass

where you're like, there are special men in this world who can tell you and women want to come, want you to come look for them. It's like an ad on my pillow. Right? It's just like, hey, some ladies. So I'm in December and flight of Ostock. Keep searching, brother.

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based support, millions of business owners already trust Spectrum business. So visit Spectrum.com slash business to learn more. Restrictions apply. Services not available in all areas. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Mr. Spade. Yeah, I think largely I wanted to talk about it because this is a, as you know, it's a very dense show. It's not. Mr. Spade, obviously, I just had a third episode and it's on AMC. And it's in the shadow, at least both in this podcast and maybe in terms of the Sunday night conversation of True Detective. First, I just want to say, if you're watching True Detective, please give Monsieur Spade an uncertain regard, right, as we would say? Like, it's, I love it. I agree, but let me tell you this. In the same way that I said

a lot of balls in the air on the third episode of True Detective, a lot of things happening. I would say that the same case is the case for Mr. Spade. Definitely. We have now introduced several different timelines, several different, you know, 60% of what people are talking about, but we have not been filled in on the last 40 to 35% kind of bit. And the added element of what happens in the third episode so we can get into that now, which is this child who's kind of been in the background,

like it's the child belonging to the Algerian nun in fake nun, in the convent of the nuns who have all been murdered. This child's on the run. This child gets found by the guy who works in the nightclub, brought home, and then the jump in logic here is that they start to believe that he could be some kind of Messiah. Potentially.

Well, the church seems to think of that too. There seems to be like this hyper amount of activity around this child for some reason. They even got Dean Winters out of insurance commercials. I mean, a Tom Fontana veteran. Yes. So we now have like the church searching for this child. The monk seems to be indemnified from legal prosecution because the church is taking him back to the Vatican to question him. there is the Algerian expats in Bezul's who are shepherding him or protecting him

but also seem to be suspicious and also seem to be like ready to believe that he could be the Mahdi there's still all this stuff with Jean-Pierre and what happened in Algeria and what he wants to do and go back we get a flashback of Philippe but we still haven't seen Philippe in a while like in the present tense Teresa there's British Secret Service involved. There's so much shit going on in three hours of TV. You're totally right, and it's really interesting.

One of the reasons I wanted to try to pair them up, at least for this week, was that they are in the same spot in their story. They're both six-episode series. And so, well, I'm slightly criticizing True Detective for it's like driving around and trying to draw connections for us that we might not even see yet. That's happening here, too. Oh, yeah.

They're like, why don't you get in the car and come to this interview with us? What's unique about Monsieur Spade is that Monsieur Spade's model at least as much as I can intuit what Scott Frank and Tom Fontana want to be doing here is that they are actually using the archetype of Sam Spade as a, if you'll allow it,

true detective to kind of center and balance out two extremes of storytelling in two different eras. What I mean is all of this shit with like the ghost monk

and the maybe Messiah that all feels very contemporary. Everything is a conspiracy. Everything is potentially supernatural. Everything is swirling all at once. I mean, that's the hallmark of Night Country. That's what we do with these modern mysteries. The Daffy painter and his prim mother being revealed to be,

oh, jolly good secret service agents for MI6 is preposterous. And played almost for laughs. So the balancing act between those two things tonally is really precarious and wild. And I'm curious where it goes. I don't know if you had the similar thing, but like the whole business with this painter and the way he behaves and his mother and the way she behaves is absurd. Absurd in the same show potentially as this other stuff.

Maybe less absurd if this was a 1940s serial. I mean, but I think he's trying to do both. It works within the realm of actually the Maltese falcon. Yes. Those kinds of like rogue gallery, rogue guy characters who show up and kind of, you know, Peter Lorry, you would just look at it on face value and just be like, this guy seems like questionable. And, you know, in the movie itself, you're kind of like he's one of 10 or 15

of these kinds of malcontents. I think that the other thing that I was just sort of bumping up against is, and I'm not pumping up against it in terms of my enjoyment of the series, because honestly, for 48 minutes of this episode, I was in pure heaven. This scene between Jonathan Zakai, shout out to the Bureau, and Sam Spade or Clive Owen in the first scene of this episode, is the hardest shit I've ever seen, like when he's just like, here's 500,000 francs, get the first.

fuck out of town like buy a boat go to Norway like I hear they have like an asshole short I know it was great I love it so much um but I just I'm I'm actually like I like to think I'm a pretty smart mystery watcher and I am like operating at 104% capacity of keeping all this stuff straight yes I wonder Scott Frank would be like that's not the point you shouldn't be doing that I will come around on episode five and fix it for you but for me, I'm distracted by my own ability to be like, okay, and so like, why did Philippe, who was he blackmailing?

He was blackmailing Jacques, but also the other people. Here's what I, I don't know what Scott would say. I hope we'll talk to him before the end of the season. But my assumption is... Scott would tell me there's an asshole shortage in Norway. Yes. Or in Sweden, so get back to Spotify, HQ. I think he would probably say that it is not the viewer's job

to separate wheat from the chaff. The viewer's job is to watch the scythe. And the scythe is Clive Owen. Watch him. Watch what he does, watch how he reacts and be with him. The rest of it is just the maelstrom that he's navigating. And I did think, for as much as we love Clive Owen and we talk to him and we're delighted by him, I think his control of this character and his performance and the charisma that he's bringing to it elevated in this episode.

And maybe it elevated because I'm clinging to him for dear life because the rest of it swirling around is a lot. I also thought that they got, they were very fortunate they found Kara Bossum who plays Teresa. She's so good. She's really good. And like, oh, she's like, and I mislaid my knife. Where did you? Oh, I lost my knife. Where did you lose it?

Inside the monk. Yeah. Killer. But like, to fight you. I mean, imagine the casting call. It's like, we need someone who is plausibly a teenager who speaks perfect American English and also perfect French and also is good and is going to hold her own in these mysterious scenes with five oh.

And she's great. She is great. Can I just mention that I found out that Chiara Masraani's parents? It's a Chiara. When you speak Italian, as I do. Yes, go on. Do you know who her mom is? I know who her dad is.

Who's her mom? Catherine DeNov. That's sick. That's so cool. So Marcella Maastriani. And Catherine DeNov. Had a baby. And it's her.

That's great. This is great podcasting. She once said, I only saw my parents together on screen. She never saw them together in real life. Is that the first thing that you see on the internet when you Google her? I don't have to answer that. This is an audio podcast. As far as people know.

No, I know. If we were a real podcast, you would have just thrown that factoid out, and I wouldn't have killed it for you. No, if this was a real podcast, I would have stepped down, Googled it, and delivered it. But we show the warts and all. Do you think that my neurotic reading of this episode and my own sort of anxiety about keeping everything straight means I have been too true detective pilled? Yeah. It does. Well, I wouldn't have phrased it that way.

But you're chill. You're just like, it'll all get it come out in the wash. Yeah, I'm treating this as a mystery novel. Yeah. It's vibes. A few characters I like in a setting that I like, and then let's go. I bought a ticket. Let's go on the ride.

Okay. But the modern way of watching television and of parsing detective shows is not that. I'm not on the boards trying to solve this. I just like... Well, the boards are in French. But I know, but I'm actually so interested in it that I want to know. You know what I mean? Like, I want to know the town that Jean-Pierre went to.

that was like a little bit more rough and tumble than his small town to go sell her necklace. Yes. Like I want to know what's up with that. And I want to know why like, is that more like post-war France that's a little bit down in the dumps, you know? I'll say this. And I think based on godless and on certainly on the queen's gambit, Scott Frank is first, or at least in the first cohort of people who are successfully able to translate some of the momentum and plot delivery of,

of movies with the week to week or episode to episode pace of television. He just seems to have it in his bones based on those two shows. Queen's Gambit was such a pleasure as a whole, but also it was pleasurable. I know it was bingeable, but it was pleasurable in its distinct chapters.

So I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt here, but there is an element, but it's an open question whether this is the sort of thing that needs to be perceived as a whole. Yeah. But it's not being delivered that way.

I don't know. I mean, he can write his own ticket he can do what he wants in his whole careers and movies and queen's gambit and godless were both binged yeah so this in some ways this is his first week to week and that's it sometimes can be a different animal and sometimes can feel different depending how you're processing it i have one comment one question to end this my comment is that that housekeeper better be alive oh hell yeah yeah helena i love her she's a lot of fun also i think her grandson might get a little annoyed if she dies and second of all my question is,

do you care at all about Teresa's mother's antiquing the Maltese falcon piece? Do I care? Is if it's going to be relevant again? I don't know. Do you care? Are you like, Leo, pointing at the screen?

Are you like, I need to know, did Bridget really find them the real Maltese falcon? And that's why Teresa has this fortune. Is the Maltese falcon around somewhere? Like, do you care at all? Do you care about that shit at all? You're going to Rust Cole's dad

this show? I'm not. I'm just trying to generate convoy with you. I am going to rewatch the Maltese Falcon, the movie I haven't seen since I was 15, I think. Can I tell you something? Yeah. That's a good movie. That's the word on the street. I love it. I loved it, but I've not seen it since I was in high school. Have you ever seen Maltese Falcon Kaya? No.

You would enjoy it. I wonder if you would enjoy it. Let's do a Maltese Falcon Pod. We should do a Maltese Falcon Pod. Okay. Okay. I'll watch. All right. Great. That's Kai and I'll do that when you're away. You're more than welcome to do it. I keep those numbers up always always finger on the pulse

we're going to do a Harold Lloyd pod the next week I think I'll be back for that what's going to be silent on your end yeah it's fun it's fun you know

it's I think it's an interesting thing to bring up in the context I was joking when I was like Russ's dad but whether you bring up things to feel you know for like as a wink and a nod to the people who know

or you are creating a piece of art that is dependent on the larger Sam Spade universe, that's a tough one. Yes. I don't know. My sense is that it will only matter to people to whom they want it to matter. So if her fortune comes from the Maltese falcon, how great? I don't think you need to say it.

I think the story that he's telling her at the pool that is in the sort of memory that Sam is having of when Gabrielle and him used to sit by the pool and he used to look cool as shit and smoke, that story that he's telling her is actually an. anecdote from the Maltese falcon. It's got mentioned in the New Yorker piece. But I just thought I've mentioned that to you. I love that. Is your...

Do you feel like... I have all these facts. I don't know what to do with him. Like, he really... His main takeaway from his eight years of marriage was, it's better to swim naked. Right? Like, that was his main... Like, she left him a vineyard, but he also left him with like a remarkable amount

of body confidence that I think it should be celebrated. Personally, honestly, if Jean-Pierre was like, I want my vineyard, I'd be like, let's let's work something out. Oh, I thought you'd be like, if Jean-Pierre said, I want, my vineyard, you would drop your bathrobe again, just to be like, you can have this? Oh, I'd be like, can I keep the pool? Can I keep the house? You can have the vineyard you can make, let's go,

I don't know, 60, 40 on the vineyard? This is our, we're way more vineyard references in this podcast than I expected. I don't know a lot, but I do follow a lot of winemakers on Instagram, and it seems real hard. So I would be, that's why I'd be pushing that on to JP. I'd be like, do you want to go into business together, but you make the wine? Yeah. I'll drink it and I'll live here. And you can take some of the profits, but like...

That's also a great scene is the omelette scene. It's a great scene. When he's just like, I could just wait it out for you to die, but I want, like, I want clarity about whether or not this was like all in my head or it's true or not. We should not, I'm glad you brought that up as a way to end up. Like, we just shouldn't look back on the fact that Scott Frank is one of our best screenwriters and he's just riffing on Hammett and he's having so much fun. We were produced by Kaya McMullen, the truest detective.

And Andy will be back on Thursday with... Will I? Who knows type episode? We don't know. We're talking. We don't know. I'll be out on the road, the rewatchables tour Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. So. God bless, Road Dog.

Can I just also say, because I've gotten some feedback to people like knowing in advance, certainly people who listen to the end of the podcast, which Kai assures me as everyone, this week Stick the Landing is about a comedy show called The Office. Oh, people want to know in advance rather than get sprung on them? Yeah, because this way they'll hear this Sunday night. Oh, and they can go watch it. they can watch all 200 episodes leading up to the finale. Is that what you did?

That's what Mallory would do. So. Okay. Thanks everybody for listening. We'll see you next week.