The Watch - Ep. 87: 'Goliath' and 'Westworld' Theories With Jason Concepcion

Episode Date: October 17, 2016

The Ringer's Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald discuss the risky vision behind 'Westworld' (8:00) and finding fun in Jonathan Nolan's universe (12:00). Then, Ringer staff writer Jason Concepcion joins to discuss the internet theorizing around HBO's new drama. Finally, Chris and Andy close out with thoughts on Amazon's new series 'Goliath' (39:00). Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in The Ringer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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, resuming improvisation mode. It's Andy Greenwood! Resume the loop! What's going on, man? Are you a bot? I feel like a bot today.

Chris, you know, we're going to talk about... But is this just your programming to pretend to be tired? We're going to talk about the new Amazon, fire show Goliath with your man, Billy Bob Thornton. Wait, you make it sound like it's, you know the Amazon Fire is a product. I watched it on my Amazon Fire Stick. Oh. That was some subtle branding.

Yeah. Okay. But I do want to say, you ask if I was pretending. We're also talking about West World today, and we will be joined by Jason Concepcion to talk about some West World theories. You're doing the business. I'm just getting it out of the way. I feel like someone changed our programming last night, Chris, because I'm here in California,

and I was awoken in the middle of night by a very strange sound, an assisoration on the roof tiles. Rain got you woke. It rained here. Yeah. That was weird. But on the downside, I didn't really get any sleep. But on the plus side, drought's over.

Did you ever use, it drought's not over. We're all going to die out here of thirst. That's why we do a podcast twice a week, because we're so thirsty. So Andy, last night before we, we're going to talk about Goliath later. But last night, third episode of Westworld. The stray. The stray. Largely, it was interesting.

This is very like, I remain impressed by how many different balls this show can juggle because it'll, it really does dedicate quite a bit of time to so many different characters. And I thought it was, you know, it'll be really interesting to keep watching this show knowing about, like I think my main enjoyment, this is what we're really going to talk to Jason about it, is that the, the sort of extracurricular part of the show, all the talk about it. I still don't, I don't think I'm like emotionally involved in it, but I am intellectually stimulated by it. And I also find it to just be pretty pleasant to watch. I think that's interesting. I find this to be a chore and a half to watch. I find it to be a really hard slog to get through it. I think what you're talking about, and I look forward to talking to Jason about this, is real.

I think the thirst, if you'll allow it. Yeah. To engage with a show with that extracurricular. level of mania obsession, like a lost, like a Game of Thrones, is a real thing. And it's one of the most fun things about television. And I was going to say it's interesting that there aren't more shows out there aiming to hit that sweet spot. But I think the truth is, and I think as someone who's not as intuitive as you are, I think Westworld proves how hard it is to program specifically for that,

because you can't just write a show to make Reddit threads. You have to have a TV show. Or can you? Well, I think they're working on it because, as you said, from a more positive perspective, I think the emotional engagement in the show is slim to none. One note, speaking of Game of Thrones, I think any time you can get the God Neil Marshall to direct an episode, he's the guy who directed the Battle of Blackwater. Sure.

The first truly widescreen episode of Game of Thrones. I mean, the show was good before that, but that was the episode where everyone stood up and was like, oh, my God. Anytime you can get that guy behind the camera to direct a 20-minute two-hander with Anthony Hopkins, talking about a guy named Arnold, you got to do it. If you can go back in time and have, you know, Lion and Winter era Anthony Hopkins, or was even Beckett, I can't remember. But, you know, like young Anthony Hopkins is in the building.

That was cool. There are these little moments, almost throwaway moments, like the de-aged Tony Hopps, the threading of the eyeball scene. Yes. I really liked that because that was the kind of thing. Because, again, a lot of the goodwill that I still have for the show comes from an extracurricular understanding,

not of the theories, but of the care and obsession that went into the making of it, right? So this is a show that has given some thought to how they made eyeballs on the robots. That's pretty cool and pretty interesting. How to communicate that with a large cast advancing a number of different plots at once is an open question. You bring up Game of Thrones, and I think it's a good comparison, because one of the things that Game of Thrones did, especially in the beginning the first few seasons, was it would, set up an archetypal character, whether it was like Rob or Ned, and then it would knock that archetype down.

It would say all this history that you have, this learning that you have about how story should work tells you that this person should be the king or that this person should get the girl or whatever. Prince Charming is going to get stabbed in the heart. Exactly. So I think that Westworld's doing somewhat of the same thing with the Western genre. It's just being a lot more meta about how it goes about it. And I think part of that is because you have this idea of storylines,

within the show, quote unquote, within the park, you know, so that you have people who are literally writers, whether they're writing code or writing narratives for these characters, who are working on giving characters motivation. And one of the things that's kind of, you know, there's a suspension of disbelief that happens when you watch a Western where you just sort of accept, well, this person is seeking revenge against this person or this person is carrying a grudge about something. and that was my favorite part of last night's episode was Anthony Hopkins giving James Marsden this backstory that was really interesting

you know like if you just were like here's this is in a Cormac McCarthy novel I'd be like oh this is pretty cool but it's instead it was like it's all puppet master work and that in a sense is what television is anyway and I kind of so what I mean when I say I'm really enjoying intellectually what I think I'm seeing is more

I don't think of Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy is doing traditional showrunner work or traditional television writer work, even though that's obviously what they're doing too, as much as they are like the game makers. And we are playing a game too while watching this. So there's the game that Jimmy Simpson plays because he's just arrived.

There's the game that Ed Harris wants to play because he's a veteran and he thinks that there's a next level and obviously he has his own motivations. There are the games played by the hosts who are basically told what their objectives are but are starting to question slash remember past Objectives and then there's the watcher. There's the audience who are watching this watching the show and Much like I mean you got your start writing about loss like as soon as the episode ends people are

Googling Orion to see what the significance of that constellation might be on these characters. They're They're looking up what? What that maze could mean what the man in the middle of the maze could be. They are like wondering whether this is so so I'm going to tell you something right now. Oh this this this this this can go right to Jason if you want or if you want to shoot back. Actually, why don't you... I want to clap back for a second. I feel like you'll clap back here. So you clap back. First of all, I should say that I got my start writing about Lost in crazed emails to people. Right. Right. Right. I did not. You're the original Redditor. I wish I'd got a chance to write about Lost other than the one time for Grandland.

One other bit of business I did want to say since we keep doing it and we got some questions about this. Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan's brother, prefers to be called Jonah Nolan. This is public record. This is important stuff. We are not belittling him. Did you not write about Lost? I only wrote about Lost once. Yeah, I didn't start writing about TV till Friday Night Lights for Vulture. Oh, I thought you ended Lost for Vulture. I mean, I wish I'd ended.

No, Emily Nussbaum wrote about a recap Lost and was anti-Lost at the end, but she was the TV critic for New York Magazine. How did I miss that? Because I talked to you about Lost a lot, and you were like... Mid-a-auts were so weird. You're like, these thoughts are appearing in my... It was like the written voicemail that Elsie, or whatever name is left. My apologies for...

I think that what you're saying is extremely accurate and extremely clever. My concern is it might be too clever by half. Because if my concern about the show, my big picture concern about the show is that I don't really care about programmed robots and whether they feel or not and how they feel about being made to feel, the correct counter is that's what television is. You're exactly right. So this weekend, and by the way, I know Ringer, Editor-in-Chief Sean Fantasy's favorite thing that we do in this podcast is refer to past tweets. So I'm just going to bracket it by that because there's nothing cooler than podcasting about a tweet you made. I tried to do the thing that Twitter is, which is reduce a larger thought into something pithy and 140 characters, which is to say, someone asked me if I really liked Atlanta more than Westworld. And of course you can like both.

That's 100% okay. I give you permission. But I like Atlanta more if I was going head to head. And I said the reason being the question why do or can what if robots were human is less interesting to me than what if humans were human. And I think that the emotional anarchy and creativity and engagement of Atlanta is superior because these are people going about their lives and the surprisingly quirky unquote unprogrammed way of people. Now that show is written. It's also made up. So playing with that idea of creation and performance and narrative and, and,

have the fact that all of this is phony. And we always and it's something that we never really talk about when we do arts criticism or we should do more maybe which is it's a performance it's written. And this idea of quote unquote truth being a deciding factor whether it's good or not

always has to have an asterisk. Yeah I mean we were just having a conversation among ringer staffers and Claire McNair brought up the idea of like why I hate the idea that Jeffrey Wright needed to have this dead sun as a motivating factor. You mean his son Charlie, who recently died?

By the way, totally normal way for human beings to introduce a character. So my name's Chris Ryan. I'm 38 years old and I'm from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and this is what I believe. Yeah. This show is not happening on planet Earth and Jeffrey Wright is 100% a robot. And that son, it was never there. Wow. Yeah.

Is that on the boards? Is that on the boards? I think it's being talked about. Yeah. But I, first of all, the way that Anthony Hopkins says, that to him sounds like a Manchurian. candidate style like this is a command. Second of all, when he goes to call Gina Torres, and he's like, I have a hard time getting a line out here,

that makes it sound like they basically have to line up satellite so that he can call back to another planet. Third of all, he talks about how he wakes up in the morning, and he basically describes the way Dolores wakes up where she wakes up and she doesn't know, she forgets everything for a minute. When his wife or former wife says, I don't believe it's real, that is what the show is. Yeah, that's... Right.

This is kind of an amazing machine that Nolan and Joy have built here because its construction actively rebuts criticism in a creative way. So what I'm saying is, so I watched that scene, the Hopkins and Jeffrey Wright scene, and I watched it as a credulous viewer. And I was like, this whole scene from a written perspective is bullshit to me because it is absolutely talented. telling not showing, this is a long, long speech about something we didn't know about. It seems pulled completely out of whole cloth to manipulate the audience, Arnold or whatever, you know, and Hopkins delivering it. And very few actors could deliver that speech and have me believe it. I believed it.

And up to that point where he said, you are still taking the news of the death of your son, comma, Charlie, comma, hard. People don't talk like that. But what you're suggesting here, and I like, is that. that these were all, this is an intentional staginess. Right. That all of it is what Hopkins does, that Hopkins was speaking to him the way that he speaks to the robots

or he speaks in these clear declarative sentences that control people. Yeah, where he's like going to analytical mode. So I think that's a great counter. It doesn't make me enjoy watching the show more, but it makes me like the idea of it more. And one of the things I wanted to say to sort of a larger parenthetical caveat around my criticism is I like the ambition of the show. I feel like it is definitely a,

a losing gambit to tear down everything because I don't like the way it's being delivered or I'm not enjoying it. First of all, because as you're saying, I don't see the whole picture yet, and we don't. And there's definitely curiosity still in me. That still exists. But, you know, if you try to pull back from the Sunday night watching experience and try to think of this as part of the larger continuum of television, I want them on that wall taking these swings because even if this doesn't work,

they got to play with this budget and with these actors and with these ideas, and then maybe it'll work next time. So they're playing with, they have a little more runway to go, like to say three, four more episodes, and maybe even to the whole first season. And there is going to be, just because, I mean, like, this is how storytelling works, there will be a reveal either at the end of this season or whenever that illuminates whether or not we live in a world where, like, robots are enslaved outside of Westworld. And that's why people are comfortable doing this. And we've, like, back to that or something like there's going to be some sort of reveal about what is happening outside the wall like the boundaries of yeah this company and when we get that that will either

change everything we saw the first season or make it all feel a little bit less consequential than we thought it might be i still think i still think they needed to make it more pleasurable and i think that often you know for people who are visionaries i don't even mean that to be a loaded word that means genius. I mean people who have a larger vision that they're trying to enact, of course you lose sight of the trees for the forest. And, you know, if you're doing something this big and this ambitious, the trick is always going to be making you care about the minutia, the day-to-day, as opposed to the bigger

ideas. I think so far, to judge the show solely on that standard, it's failed. Right. It is ponderous and slow and so, so serious. that it makes the minute to minute tough. And it leads you sometimes to ask interesting, bigger questions, which we're going to get into with Jason, and also some kind of more pedantic ones that I think would take you out of the realm of fiction.

Like the woman who goes on the bounty raids with Teddy, who seems like a good hand. She seems like a quality hang. She seems like a good sport. Yeah. she will probably have full stop PTSD due to what happens to her and Teddy in the woods with Emmett's dudes who are on some sort of like post-Colonel Kurt's death cult. Oh, Wyatt? Yeah, when they're out on the searching the backstory.

Like the level of what people are being asked to endure psychologically in the name of- I think those guys are actually guests. Fun. Well, so this is, we don't know this. Yeah. But so that makes an interesting narrative question, but then it allows, you know, it's very, easy to get lost in the weeds of like, wait, what did this person pay for? Right.

Well, that's actually perfect. So let's call Jason because Jason has a lot of thoughts on that. Okay. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Uniclo. Uniclo offers the latest women's men's and kids clothing and accessories. And you can check out some of the clothing on Uniclo.com and talk about items you like. Uniclo's approach to clothing is simple with a not-so-simple purpose. It's to make your life better.

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And we are also brought to you today by Sonos. You guys know Sonos? Maybe you're listening to us on a Sonos right now. That's the smart speaker system that streams all your favorite music to any room or every room and you can control your music. And by the way, all your music, Apple music, Spotify, your own personal collection, podcasts, radio. I like to listen to radio. You can control all of it from one app seamlessly and easily in one room or any room. I got to tell you, here's a little personal testament to this.

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and we can control it all through one easy Sonos app. It's a lot of fun. I'm really enjoying it. You should check out Sonos. It is the best way to discover music. Okay, so now we're joined by Jason Concepcion. Jason, you're known as the maister when we talk about Ginos. Game of Thrones.

Are you the tapminder? Are you the saloon keeper now? Like, what is your Westworld title? The Smythe? I guess I'm like the field guide. I'm like the scout. Yeah, you're the scout. That's good.

What color hat do you wear in this extended metaphor? You know what? I don't know what I'd wear. I think I probably wear like some kind of like Native American headbands. I don't want to like hue too closely to these. like yeah you also don't want to just be we don't have to wear a black or white hat man there are shades of gray in west world also i'm wearing chaps that's true that's it though we'll just take it from there jason we need you we need you to bring back the one thing that

is missing from the hb o television show west world which is fun this show the thing that chris and i were just talking about um basically was it does feel like a lot of the highlights of the west world experience the tv show not actually entering into this porn park is happening offline, so to speak. It's happening not during the watching the show, but in the deep dives and the research and the theories outside of the show. I mean, it feels like one of the, it feels like they've weaponized theorizing in a way. I can't tell if that's just the way, quote unquote, we watch television now, or if that's something that they really just tried to put in there. But it feels like right off of that, you know, like, who's a robot, who's not a robot,

Are they on Mars? Are they on a space station? Are they underground? You know, who is Ford? Is Ford Geppetto? Did they have to hire the here-to-fore unknown third Hemsworth brother to play the security guy? I thought that was, for the first two episodes, I thought that was Mike from Homeland. Oh, first of all, I would have loved to see Mike from Homeland get in work.

But no, it's just another Hemsworth brother, I think. Do you think it would be actually the biggest surprise of this would be if Shannon Woodward's character is a robot? She's my favorite character on the show because she actually does seem to have some personality or point of view. I think in this episode, didn't she say like, oh, that's why I use sarcasm as a shield, which is, again, totally normal human thing to say when you're just having a conversation with a workmate. But I feel like the show needs more of her. And so that would be a particularly cruel reveal if that was the case. So Jason, we were just talking a little bit about whether or not how much this show can really get away with before it has to start showing some of its cards. Because right now, it's got a lot of momentum going.

I think it's, you know, criticisms aside, is largely popular because it's a puzzle to figure out in a lot of ways. But the problem with puzzles is eventually you finish them or, you know, you realize, oh, it's a waterfall and I can just fill in the rest of this stuff here. So the longer we go with all these questions, the harder it's going to be for them to come up with an answer that seems as significant as all the scholarship that goes into it. But in the meantime, it does seem like a lot of the choices that they're making are actually thought through. Like the, what do they call the Arroyo that the little girl tells the man in black where the maze starts. I read a whole Reddit theory this morning about what that means in relationship to Orion and ancient Mays. literal like stuff so jesus i mean like where are you at with some of these theories to be honest the theorizing is a lot less interesting to me than kind of like trying to figure out the gameness

like how how much of the video gameness is meant is intentional and is not intentional way i i the thing that i can't uh i'm really enjoying the show like if you tell me hey robots in a theme park and people kill them and there's a lot of like sex and weird shit that goes on. I'm all for it. But at the same time, it feels as if this was a script that could have been written like in 1970 and you could have just like put it in a bottle and then wrote it now. I don't understand how people don't get it and be like, oh, I just went to Westworld and here's an anonymous account.

I just started this anonymous account. I just spent $3 million at Westworld AMA. Like, you know, like, why doesn't that stuff happen? Like, why is Jimmy Simpson like, oh, man, this is weird? Like, so what do we do now? You know, like, I barely leave the house without watching 20 YouTube videos about stuff. And I feel like this is kind of, there's a lot of really cool philosophy and thought. and, you know, like, the ideas about consciousness and forget about the fact that it's, like,

marginally more interesting than, like, take on the danger room becoming sentience in, like, astonishing X-Men in 2001. Like, there's a big, deep point from you right there. There's no grounding, like, in a, I need it to be grounded in some kind of actual life to understand, like, what is my perspective here? Like, is Jimmy Simpson the weirdo? Like, is he strange for not wanting to kill robots? I completely agree with you.

But I do think that the risk here is that there are certain threads that if we pull them, the whole thing comes apart. And I wonder if that's one of them purely because for a show like this to exist, you need the kind of naive white hat character to be discovering it, to be the audience surrogate into what's possible. And, like, that's just, they just need that. But there are these other questions, too, that I just keep. getting hung up on. Like, if Dolores' mission every day is to wake up, go to town, meet Teddy, go back, get raped, basically, that's her day. That's the loop that we actually, like, that's the thing that happens at the end of the third episode is that it's unclear what actually

happens in that. I don't mean like it's unclear what happens to her. I mean, there's obviously like a corruption of that program. Right. But my question is, just in terms of the experience, are people arriving for a set amount of time and then new people come in? Or, so, or are you there for three days. And every day that you're there, Dolores has that same day. And if you go along with her the first day, does that mean no one else can do it the second day? Does that mean you could spend every day there rescuing Dolores? Or does the programs keep looping until someone engages with them? See, I kind of thought that the loops were more like on a, like, in my imagination, when I'm watching it, I imagine that there are basically people come for X amount of days. I know it

says like it's 40k a day but let's just say like people come for a week and you come in and then everything you do there has like a knock down effect a cascading effect on the narratives right right but that dolores is on a loop but not necessarily a daily loop i think they do we get a little confused because it shows her waking up but that if say jimmy simpson had decided to ride out to her farm you know if jimmy simpson rescues her then it's not going to actually she's going to wake up the next day in her bed and be like, I forgot everything that happened. It goes along Jimmy Simpson's loop. But I don't even know.

And that's just my... And then what is... But then do people have secondary loops? Because then if Teddy doesn't pick up the condensed can of... The can of condensed milk, what does he do? Right. You know, it's... Well, because the man in black did it once, though, right?

Right. So, but again, these are the questions that I feel like the show is inviting us to go granular and go deep. But it kind of doesn't sustain... It doesn't want us to go this deep because then we get caught in feedback loops and we're not actually appreciating what it's choosing to show us. And to a certain degree, we can also spend our disbelief, right? Because Jeffrey Wright keeps pulling her out to have these heart-to-hearts.

So then what's happening with her loop when she's not there? And then when does he put her back? And who notices and who doesn't notice her abs? Like, what is that? There's no point. That's not enjoying the TV show at that point. So let's go, let's run through some of these other thoughts. Well, Jeffrey Wright being a robot is a big one.

I think Jason and I both agree that he is, right? I agree. He's 100% a robot. It just feels like Ford's, the way Ford said, you know, and I know that the death of your son has been weighing heavily. Like that felt very much like the way he talks about the robots, motivated. And it was also like a command prompt almost. And then apparently, like, I haven't noticed this, but I've read about people saying that, like, if you watch scenes where Jeffrey Wright is in offices or walking through labs or whatever, people treat him differently than they do. Others, like, basically, like, people are aware of who he is.

also how about the fact that so he's sleeping with the woman right the woman from the woman from borgon whose job i don't quite get um she's the sort of representative of the quote unquote shareholders right but she is essentially but if it to go along with what you guys are saying your theory she's basically using him for sex the same way people in west world use robots and when he says i had bad dreams she's like i don't give a fuck about your dreams yeah exactly that's the way people talk to the robots yeah yeah okay okay all right i'm in on this one i like it so then there's the isolation of of the people who seem to work there and how they all seem kind of basically trapped there and are like, when are you rotating, having a hard time calling out?

It's obviously underground, but Jason, do you think it's happening on Earth? I've changed my mind about this like 15 times. As of last night, I believe that it's some sort of planet and or space station. Okay. To be clear, you said planet. Bernard calls it a planet. Bernard refers to it as a planet at one point. He says all life on this planet evolved because of a mistake.

And Jason, you said planet. and slash or space station, not planet Endor, where Ewox run free. Right. That would be dope if actually this whole thing is run by Ewoks. Yes. And this is like what happens 100 years after Jedi. There's always another level. A cowboy theme park for their own amusement to watch humans destroy each other.

First of all, I never trusted Ewox. I never, ever trusted him. they're way too merry considering the circumstances you know I think that that is absolutely within the realm of possibility I feel like an Ewok will just root in your trash An Ewok will cut you

Yeah Are you kidding? Yeah They're like They're religious fundamentalists The Ewok Yeah Crossed with like raccoons

Yeah Cross with Teddy fucking ruckspin Yeah I'm not into them at all You've just totally swayed me I never trust I never liked them I first saw the movie. And then, like, as soon as I saw it for the first time, I was basically, like, skip every time

Ewox came on. So you just didn't watch the third movie? Wow. The third movie is fine, but it peaks with the Luke Somersault off of the prison transporter. That is the coolest shit I have ever seen in my life. Wow. Did you ask, you guys didn't ever think that that was the dopest thing ever?

I mean... That was definitely the moment when you're like... like, oh, wow, Luke can do stuff now. Like when he first shows up and he, like, chokes the bars. Oh, I forgot the power. Oh, when they're on the floating skiff? Yeah, and Artu shoots the lightsaber, and he does, like, the flip. Yeah, that's dope.

Yeah, come on, man. That is cool. Yeah. And then after that, it just goes downhill. It goes downhill, like Boba Fed into the pit of Sarlack. Jason, what are some other theories that you're playing around with or that you've read about that you like? I love a theory that Jimmy Simpson is the man in black but younger.

but I do think there might be some playing around. It has to be just like what Andy was saying about we don't know how the loops worked and how what the knock-on effects of talking to a host is. But there was that moment when they first went down to cold storage and you see like the Globe and the Deelos, like the old Delos lobby. Yeah. And it does look a lot like the station that Jimmy Simpson gets, off the train at. So I don't know if he's Ed Harris. I don't think he is. I lean very heavily

towards him not being, but it does seem like that is the lobby that we saw, the decommissioned lobby that we saw in the earlier episode. Isn't it tricky though? Because, and again, we don't fully know what we're seeing, and there's a lot of wiggle room here, but if we are trying to track this episode, last night's episode, narratively, when Dolores has the sort of like, you know, basically she halts and catches fire basically as a robot and has to do the reboot. She sees the man in black. Instead of the guy who is the guy telling me because that has already happened and then she runs off. Well, she rides off on the horse to or is the man in black supposed to be some kind of like basically rogue code liberator?

So then it becomes the Matrix. Uh-huh. But isn't there a line in there where they talk about like that guy? paid for like the amount of money he spent. Yes. Let him do it everyone. He says that. I have two, I have one theory that I wanted to throw out and then I have a question for Jason about the show in general.

One is, I don't know if we've talked fully about this on the show, but one thing that I do like is that officinados of the original film, this is based on Eagle Brenner film, have informed me, right, that there is not just a Westworld. Yeah, there's Roman world. Right, there's a Roman world. Yeah. It's medieval world. Yeah.

And so the idea, one thing that I unabaptive world. One thing that I unabashedly love about the potential for the show is that we could be this, like we could be, you know, spurs deep into this Western world, and it could change on a dime. And there could be another world, and it could be a completely different set of genre tropes and a completely different setting. Yeah. I really like that. What would you do if we had a hard cut, and it was just like three Ewoks sitting in front of like a joystick?

What would I do physically? Or what would I say on the podcast? Would you just throw up the X like Des Bryant? I would probably do my first ever spit take. I don't think I've ever actually done a spit take. The other thing, so I hope that is coming. I imagine they'll play with that idea in some capacity. They've said they won't.

They said Westworld is the world. Well, they might not be honest with us. Yeah, this is the thing is that these, like, not these specific people, but the bad robot squad are the people who are like, Khan is not in this Star Trek movie. Yeah, absolutely not. an original villain. So, but Jason, the angle I wanted to ask you about is as a gamer. You enjoy the video games.

And not only do you enjoy them, you have to put up with me emailing you every three to six weeks, begging you to let me come over and play video games because I just want to know what they're like now. It might be why you haven't moved to L.A. yet because you finally have some distance between us. They're too good now. I'll tell you that. So what I wanted to know is, isn't some... Some aspect of video games still dependent on a kind of uncanny valley, not in the traditional sense, but existing between the player and the game. Because there was a moment in last night's episode where the woman who Chris and I were talking about before who I just think, she's just, she's ride or die in the game. She's the guest who shoots the rifle with Teddy and then goes upstairs for a little roll in the hay and then accompanies him on the quest.

She seems like a, she seems like a pretty avid, hardcore gamer. She seems to know what's up. And there's a moment when they are riding on this new storyline to get Wyatt. And the sheriff and Teddy are talking. It's basically exposition. They're basically unspooling the backstory. The Teddy backstory. And that's basically, maybe that's where I left off with video games, right?

You know, you choose to go on a quest, whether it's like in a Final Fantasy game or Grand Theft Auto, and the people you're with will have a chat. And a lot of people like to just X button through the chat, but it's giving you some backstory. Isn't there a necessary distance, though, where, like, you don't actually want to be fucking on the horse about to get into a gun battle? Like, do you think that the way video games have increased exponentially during our lifetime, do you think it's plausible that people really would want to go to that next level? Because what she then has to endure, to my mind, seem pretty psychologically traumatizing

and not necessarily worth the game. But maybe video games isn't the right way to look at it. Maybe it's more like adventure sports. But I want to ask purely from a video game perspective. And then I'll go to you as the adventure sports expert. To be clear. Patagonia over here. To be clear, I think Young North Face, you like haunted hayrides, which is crazy to me,

and I would never in a billion years do it. So let's put the question to the video gamer and then to the haunted hayride maven. Okay. So you first, Jason. Yeah, I think it's an interesting question. Like, it's something I've been thinking about as a person who plays a lot of first-person shooters. Like, how realistic can this get before you start to find it creepy? You know, like there's, I just reviewed here's a war for the ringer. And that game is, like, extraordinarily gory, but they pick it in a certain way that aesthetically comes off as almost cartoonish.

You know, like the Roadrunner, like, you shoot some of the shotgun and they explode into little parts, and it's not disgusting so much as it's just like, oh, whoa, that was crazy. And it's something, and it's kind of a trend you've seen in shooters, like, over the last year, like, as realism has become more. possible. You've seen games like Overwatch come out that kind of like pull back. It's like we have to pull back from this because it's almost a little too troubling. I think that there's, this is a discussion I was having with people on Twitter. Like I think that there, you don't even realize how necessary the distance is when you play games that are like super violent.

You play GTA and it's, yes, you're gunning down people in the street, but it's never, you're never confused as to if it's real. You know what I mean? Like there's never not a divide between the fact that you're playing video game. And I think that is, to me, the most interesting thought that Westworld puts out there is what in a reality where you could play video games that are absolutely seamless, what then what does that mean morally? That's interesting to me.

And the connection between that and experiential games or some sort of like real-life RPG is, so I don't think that those people in the cult are hosts. In the new backstory, the Teddy situation. Yeah, I think Wyatt might be like Teddy. He's a guide, but he's a guide who takes you to, to become a, like, you're in a death cult now. And I think that that is, if you were to say, and Jason wrote about this last week, but it's like, if you were going to pay to go do this, some people might pay for the same. scenery and some people might pay for the sort of PG-13 adventure or whatever. Or the sex. Some people might pay to have the darkest possible experience they could have with the sort of,

because I think that the woman who's with Teddy actually does sort of have a reaction like you would if you were vaguely aware that this was a game. She's like, that smells awful when that, and then like the guy gets shot. Remember? Because they're like, go touch him. And then it's like he comes back to life. and I think that her thing is almost like this is like

this roller coaster is a little too steep right now but it's not like I'm complete and the guy too who's there with them who's like this is too much like I'm out of here and then he gets out yeah or we think he does but the people who are the cult are basically they've gone up a level

and they're like my idea of fun is riding around the desert wearing masks and basically this idea that the farther way you get from civilization the more stripped away of narrative the more narratives become unmoored to traditional. Well, these things only work if you buy in. Yeah, absolutely.

Same thing with watching the show, though. But that's why it makes for good conversation, if not necessarily good watching. But like when, Christian, when you go on a haunted hayride, like the one thing that you cannot do as people dressed as zombies are overtaking your wagon or whatever you're on, you cannot be, you carry this with you, right? You cannot be the guy who stands up and goes, nope, this is made up. You can actually be the person who says, nope. You just can't tackle them. They can't touch you. There's like an awareness when you go into a lot.

I think there are some where you can sign a waiver and be like, you might get kidnapped. Jesus Christ. But on this particular thing you go on, the Hun and Harrod in LA, they can't touch you and you can't touch them. So it can be like they run up behind you and hit a bat against the wagon you're in or whatever. But you have that knowledge that you're somewhat saved. Speaking of that, the one other piece of information we should mention before we move on is. So Jimmy Simpson gets shot and gets knocked off his feet. And apparently that can happen, which seems to...

Well, it wouldn't be fun if it couldn't hurt. But it seems to contradict what we saw with the man in black who stands in the middle of... Well, he's got the cheat coats. That's right. There you go. Yeah, he's been playing the game too long, so he knows the secret passages wait, you know. He's level... Or he's level all the way up.

Or he's level up. I will say... He has mithril armor on, from my real heads. There were a lot of, like, really interesting video game nods last night, like, like Stephen Ogg, as recurring host in the game. And he played Trevor in the latest Grand Theft Auto, which is like so an actual video game character in a show about video games that's essentially based on video games. And then the whole cult side quest was eerily like Red Dead Redemption DLC undead nightmare, which made Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar games, kind of like open world cowboy game into a zombie game. So there's like, I mean, there's a lot of like interesting video game nods in this.

Okay. Well, let's, we'll keep having you on because I like talking about these theories with you. I like talking about Ewox with you, Jason. Yeah, I always have. All right. Talk to you soon, man. I like Ewox. Peace.

All right. Well, thank you to Jason Concepcion for Jordanus. That was fun. I like talking about that stuff. And we're recording on the throne set today. It feels like all times. I know. Andy, let's talk a little bit about Goliath because it's the new David E. Kelly show on Amazon,

starring Billy Bob Thornton, William Hurt. Yeah. Maria Bello. Sure. Molly Parker. Molly Parker. Olivia Thirlby? I think it's Trilby?

Is it? I think so? Nah. I'm pretty sure. Really? I've always thought so. Color, what a weird break of my streak of getting things pronounced right? That's exactly right.

What about Tanya Raymond, who played Ben's daughter on Lost? No way. Yeah, she plays a hooker, which is just what a delight. It must be to read those lines. I texted you as I was about 10, 15 minutes into this show. And I was like, is Goliath good? What did I say? No.

And then I got to the end of Goliath. And I kind of agree with you. I mean, like, basically, my attitude about Goliath in a less loving way is a lot about what I thought about the ranch, which was, this is a show that should just be on CBS that they have put on a streaming service, gotten absolutely like, about as close to A-List talent is you can kind of want to get without having an actual box office superstar in it. And then loosened up the sort of controls a little bit to allow for cursing and heavy drinking and this stuff.

But essentially, it's just like the verdict gets Grishamized. Yep. And is like a tough case for a tough lawyer up against a big corporation. I think you're exactly right to look at it through those terms. I think this is the kind of show where it's worth looking at from a industry and business perspective, almost as much as a creative perspective. This show was originally called Trial, and it was a really, really big sale. David E. Kelly, one of the kind of unfairly overlooked now because he was a maestro of broadcast TV. Yeah, absolutely.

From, I mean, Alie McBeal. from Ali McBeal to Boston Public to Boston Legal and the practice. Picket Fences? Picket Fences. That's the one I was trying to reach for. He came from the Stephen Botchko School. So he did some LA law, right? Yes.

And he was the dude who, like, Sorkin, wrote everything himself, just wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote. And was just this machine. And his shows were always very clever and verbose and emotionally interesting. Formerly inventive? Yeah, but also plot. Always plot. And so, you know, he worked really well within, like, it's a school. It's a law firm.

and then he could just come up with a billion stories within those worlds. He has struggled to find a foothold in the post-Prestige universe. I don't know whether that's by choice because he's married to Michelle Pfeiffer and probably has a great life. He also has a housemate of money. Yeah, exactly. So he doesn't need to. But there hasn't been like a hot David E. Kelly show in a minute. Sometimes those guys, because did you see about how like,

basically like Steve Bannon, the guy who's Trump's CEO of his campaign? Doing great job, by the way. And you know why he has like the money to flit around and do something? stuff like this, Seinfeld royalties. He bought a piece of Seinfeld royalties when they sold it to TBS or something. And he has like a steady check on that. So when it went to syndication, it just will pay forever. So these guys who have like old TV money, like they light their money cigars with money.

It's a very, very different thing. Yeah, their tobacco is little bits of shredded money rolled in bigger money that they light with money. Speaking of rolling things in money, Amazon. So they had this project. and basically it was sold off of a, I don't know if it was a pitch or if they had the pilot, but it was given a straight to series commitment by Amazon. It was a hot ticket and it was the idea that they would get a major star. I don't know if Billy Bob Thornton was attached and it would go straight to series.

And it was built to be this, you know, it's not a prestige vehicle as it is an eyeball vehicle. Like Amazon knows what it's doing in the sense that would they want, they have shows like Transparent, which are going to be nominated for Emmys. and break through culturally in a lot of different levels and are essentially excellent. Similarly, catastrophe and fleabag. These shows get buzz and get acclaim and bring in creators, but they need people to watch the shows too.

And those shows are not, they won't let us know, but I would imagine they're not getting broadcast procedural numbers. So this is an attempt to kind of bridge the two worlds. This is the kind of show that, you know... They also have shows like Bosch, which are like a little bit more traditional. I think Goliath's a little closer to Bosch, probably. It's a little bit closer to Bosch, but it's still a little bit glitier, brighter, both in the star wadage and in terms of the network.

What's up with band in the High Castle? When is that coming back? I think it's expensive and slow thing to make. But that's not like their most popular show, isn't it? That's the show they went all in on to be their show, but they'll never let us know what actually was their most popular show. Boss just got renewed for two more seasons. So that must be doing pretty well. I mean, like, I'm sure that those books have such a got built-in fan base. Exactly. But this is a much bigger play to get a show that people are going to be really,

really watching, like the we would watch or our parents might watch or whoever. My main experience watching the show was that it really felt like David E. Kelly was psyched to see what he could do off of a network, but he couldn't shake the training. And that's not always bad to shake the training. But let me give you two examples. The show begins with two Spanish-speaking fishermen on a boat. First of all, I'm in. I love it. These guys are speaking Spanish to each other with subtitles. But then they do the network TV thing where after three volleys of Spanish back and forth, they switch to English.

And that's the kind of universal, you're in safe hands here, grandpa, that network TVs and movies tend to do when characters are speaking other language and it drives me fucking crazy. They did not need to switch to English, but they did. And that just felt like the kind of thing

that he probably just typed that. That's probably a default macro on his final draft that it would do that. The flip side of that, the characters on this show smoke a lot of cigarettes. Everybody is constantly smoking cigarettes at inopportune times and even referencing. In modern-day California. Yes.

Where you're basically not allowed. You have to smoke a cigarette inside of a pothole. You have to go to West World to smoke a cigarette if you want to smoke a cigarette in California. My only takeaway from that is that David E. Kelly must be a cigarette smoker, and he knows that network TV shows banned the smoking of cigarettes by characters a decade ago, and he wanted to see what he could do. So I'm watching this whole thing through that prism of what they're trying to do versus what they're not doing. And I found the whole thing essentially inert because of it, because it has these great actors and it wants to deal with these more mature subjects like smoking.

Right. But it can't get out of its own way and is essentially a broadcast network show, which in and of itself isn't a crime. But it's stuck in this middle that's kind of uncomfortable. For this show, I think it's well done. And I think Billy Bob is just like a very, very charismatic, engaging actor. Yeah. I like him better when he's the embodiment of evil as he was on Fargo than... I don't know.

I'm into Friday, it's Billy. Yeah. And I'm into... And I don't mind... I mean, like, this is sort of more close to bad Santa. It's like bad Lord. I'm into primary colors, Billy, if we're going to get real into it. Wow.

You know what, this brings up mentioning the older movie. I wanted to bring this up. What is the... Is William Hurt one of the most unique characters that we've ever seen? Yes. Here's the thing. I couldn't really think of... who William Hurt is today.

Like, William Hurt is still William Hurt today, and he's, like, still getting Avengers money and, you know, but, like, the idea of, like, William Hurt being in broadcast news and being a heartthrob and being, like, a huge star. No. What about, what about body heat? Yeah. Body heat.

Is he in children of lesser God? Altered states? I can't remember. Yeah. But, yeah. Like, who is the William Hurt today? It's a really good question, because William Hurt is. Like, really weird.

William Hurt is so... So weird. But not that our titchieged. articulate, I mean, articulate, but not like, verbose. He's not glib. Because I was trying to imagine, what if William Hurt had done Will McAvoy? Right. Because those guys are just similar, like, both kind of broke around the same time.

Jeff Daniels in terms of endearment and all that stuff. But, like, Jeff Daniels has now become, like, the master of Sorkin theater guy, and it's just like a solid, solid, solid character actor. Like, you put Jeff Daniels in your movie, it goes up 2%, 5%, 10%. William Hurt, like, what's up with William Hurt? I mean, legendarily, he was real tough to work with and stopped getting a lot of work because of that. That was always what the People Magazine's Scuttlebutt was, that he was at sort of a tough hang. Really?

Very, very serious. In the same way that, like, a lot of serious actors are too serious to just have fun with on set, and that does affect people. But it is very unique. I mean, remember, he toplined the Lost in Space reboot with Matt LeBlanc. Jesus Christ. weirdest, weirdest career. And there are precedent, plenty precedent for like people who are essentially weird actors miscast, quote unquote, as leading men. But they rarely sort of tumble into this weird sideways verse like he did. Like his last performance on TV was in the AMC show

Humans. Oh yeah. And he was really good in it. He was the best thing in it as this guy who doesn't want to give up his robot caretaker because he's grown attached to him in a paternal way. So in this show, to bring it back to Goliath, I mean, he has a scarred face and he's clicking something, and he is basically turned up to what's higher than 100. Like, what is the emoji that Spinal Tap has? Because that's what he is on in the show. He's going full Val Kilmer in this one. Well, that's another example of an act. That's a perfect example, even though they're kind of peers.

Both William Hurd and Val Kilmer are good actors who look like leading men, who are tough to work with, who are secretly super weird. And then that's stopped being a secret. pretty quickly. Okay. But do you want to, let's just bring it back to Goliath, do you want to watch more of this show? Not in today's current landscape. Right.

Just too much. I appreciate it that it's only eight episodes. Yeah. But there are just these little things like, you know, we talk a lot about how we wish things would go back to like individual episode pacings or episodes or episodes. And so there's a speed to this that I didn't mind that he's basically, he's, he's, call that a retirement in like 11 minutes of script time. It takes him like 10 minutes to get back on the horse.

In this case, the horse is the woman who came to like bring him onto the case and he sleeps with there because he's an irresistible alcoholic. You just don't, you know, it's just doesn't, it's caught in this uncomfortable middle, I think, between two different kinds of shows. But I do think it probably accomplishes what they set out to do. They set out to do. And as a final note, Kelly back, Chris. I don't know if before Westworld last night you caught the ad for the big mini series.

Body of lies! Is it Body of Wife? Lie to me? Keep going. No? Big. Little big lies. Big little lies.

Obviously they need work on the title. I agree. It's like a not a memorable title. But Kelly, David E. Kelly wrote this for number one queen of the watch. Reese Witherspoon. Shaline, Reese, and Nicole is

quite a trifecta. Adam Scott. Zoe Kravitz. Laura, Dern. I paused to put your own profanity in the middle of it. But that's in the Kellyverse, man.

Where's Wendy Malik? Seems like she should be in that movie, that show. Wendy Malick should be back. When is, when's Malick back? I don't know. We'll figure that out Thursday. Hopefully we'll have a special guest on Thursday's re-up. We'll be talking about Atlanta.

Until then. Andy? Yeah. What? Great job. Great job. Wrenski! Thanks again to Falling Water.

What if someone could walk out of their dream and into yours? What if they could use your dreams against you without you ever knowing? This Thursday USA Network presents Falling Water, a new original drama where the battle for your dream is real. And it happens while you sleep because those of us who can control dreams can control the world. Brought to you by the producers of a couple of our favorites like The Walking Dead and Homeland Falling Water is a new original series. It airs Thursday at 10-9 Central only on the USA Network. And thanks again to Sonos for sponsoring us today. You guys know Sonos. That's the smart speaker system.

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