The Watch - ‘The Mandalorian’ Penultimate Episode, Lots and Lots of Marvel News, and Remembering John le Carré

Episode Date: December 15, 2020

Chris and Andy break down the penultimate episode of ‘The Mandalorian’ and try to parse where the show is going with the finale and beyond (1:03). Then, they catch up with all of the ‘Star Wars��� and Marvel news that was released as part of Disney’s investor day (24:10) and remember one of their favorite authors, John le Carré, who passed away on Sunday (43:09). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I need sports to have to clear the run. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at the ringer.com and joining me on the other line. Working IT security for the first order. It's Andy Greenwald. Hey, too soon.

Too soon. You know, there was a Mandalorian-led hack of our nation's critical infrastructure this weekend. I can't wait for the APT-29 storyline to pop up in Mando season three. it's Andy and Chris, it's Monday. What were you going to ask? APT-29, is that voiced by Tycho Wattiti or Pee-Wallorbridge? On today's show, we're talking about the penultimate episode of season two of The Mandalorian. We're going to talk about the slate of Marvel movies and shows that were announced on Thursday

that we didn't get to on our emergency pod. And we'll also be discussing the sad passing of one of our favorite writers, John LeCarray. It's all coming up on the watch right after this. Did you know about one in three? three people with plaques psoriasis may also develop psoriotic arthritis, which causes joint pain, stiffness, and swelling. Does this sound like you? Listen to what it sounds like to be a million miles away. Trimphaya, guselcomab taken by injection is a prescription medicine for adults with moderate to severe plaques psoriasis, who may benefit from taking injections or pills or phototherapy

and for adults with active psoriotic arthritis. Serious allergic reactions and increased risk of infections and liver problems may occur. Before a treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you 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 Trimphaya. Tap this ad to learn more about Trimphia, including important safety information. This episode is brought to you by Brooks. Running connects 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 interest 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. What's up, man? How are you? I'm great. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. I just got my vaccine, so I'm feeling really positive. Oh yeah, you were first, man. Well, you are. You are an essential worker. California has designated all screenwriters and podcasters as essential. And they thanked us for our service. So I'm feeling good. Some exciting stuff coming up on the watch.

We just wanted to give you guys a heads up. So we're doing today's episode is Mandalorian, Marvel, and John LaCarray. I know we said that Mallory would be joining us today on the pod. Mallory Rubin will be joining us today. But she's going to actually join us next week after the finale of the Mandalorian. We actually sent Kaya to the wrong scrap metal prison planet. to retrieve Mallory, which, by the way, thank you, Kaya,

for your service. And Mallory will be freed. Who is the person that we sprung, though? That's the real question. I think we're all going to find out soon and not. And so we're doing, we'll do Mandalorian next Monday and we'll recap the Marvel

and Star Wars stuff with Mao and see what she has to say about all of that. Then the following Thursday, we have an exciting show with special guests we can't announce just yet. But, you know, some good stuff. So this coming Thursday, we have our year-end pod,

best of the year TV pod with Sam S-Mail. And of course, Kaya joined us a little bit more on mic than usual for that one. So that's a tradition unlike any other. And we love doing those with Sam. And it was a great pod. We recorded it last week. So we're really excited for you guys to hear that. Should we jump into Mandalorian?

Did you have any state of the world? State of your cooking? State of your life you wanted to get to? I'm on a great run. Thank you for asking. As you know, I made a fantastic chicken and turnip stew in my Japanese Nabe pot. But nobody needs to hear about that. You know, we need to give the people what they actually want.

I made a Thomas Keller butternut squash this weekend. And, you know, it's a weird time to be making Thomas Keller recipes just because a lot of California's political elite still enjoy dining at his restaurants despite... Chris, you're making it at home, so welcome to the resistance. That's right. That's right. I'm basically the culinary version of that dude who's like, thread, one of 76. The cavalry is coming.

Moscow Mitch's day is here. No, that was my big accomplishment, though. And when I say my big accomplishment, I mean, my wife's, we did. I think my big thing with Thomas Keller is like, I am more of a rustic hearty eater, you know, torn bread pieces, that kind of thing. Yeah. And his recipe required. Kossina Povera, the cuisine of the poor.

I get it. That's right. That's right. And he, his recipe required a lot of siving, a lot of like, puraying, a lot of like really getting like the essence of the butternut squash flavor. And I like, it's winter in Los Angeles, man. Like, hit me with the pulp. He's kind of a fancy Dan. Yeah.

Yeah. You really, you went for it. I think of, I think of you as more of a rustic eater. You know what I mean? Like, one of the real casualties, I think, of the pandemic was that your dream of opening a family-style Ethiopian restaurant. in a small airless room in Los Angeles was really sadly. Nobody has ever thought to combine Irish and Ethiopian cuisine

and I was right there. I was right on the precipice. The day they told you about how this virus is transmitted and you were like, so the plate being the bread isn't going to work? Like you were crushed. Yeah. You were crushed.

Yeah, I can tell you don't want to have this conversation because you haven't had lunch yet. So why don't we get into the Mandalorian? It is the penultimate episode coming off of a run of two episodes, I think we thought, and many people thought, were a new high watermark for the series. This episode was directed and written by Rich Famagia, who obviously directed an episode last season, the Bill Burr episode from last season, and directed dope and as a really talented

filmmaker. I think I enjoyed this one a little bit more than you, but I also felt like it seemed like a necessary bridge to get from all of the reveals and all the sort of major plot developments. I also will note, first episode, I think, without the little guy, right? Yes, that it is. And you felt it. I mean... You did. You did. I would say that in totality, I am not interested in trading Baby Yoda for Bill Burr at this time. I think that's fair. Much like Raphael Stone is not interested in trading James Hardin. I am not interested in trading Baby Yoda for Bill Burr. Yes. And I would rather... Is Ben Simmons Yoda in this? Because I would rather...

I'm okay with the status quo. Look, I mean, Mandalorian is entering the pizza zone where it's fine. You know what I mean? Like, it was still very good and enjoyable, and I still appreciated all the things that we appreciate every week out of it.

It did make me think. Did you see there was an article that kind of went mini-viral the other day where it was just like, study, children are happier when you buy them toys and presents. And someone on Twitter was like, did a child write this?

Right. My feeling about this episode of the Mandalorian was, did Judd Apatow make this? Mainly because other than his immediate family, I don't know anyone who enjoys this much Bill Burr hang time as Judapitow. And I mean this truly... You haven't spent enough time on YouTube then because... That's fair.

What I mean is, and I mean this... There are a lot of videos where it's like a picture of Bill Burr when he still had hair being like the thing about Bruins fans an hour and a half long, and it's got like three million views. I picked the wrong media company to make this comment for then. But I think I really like Bill Burr. I enjoy his comedy.

I enjoy his surprising dramatic turns. I thought he was good in the Staten Island movie on Breaking Bad. And from what I've heard, he's actually a really nice guy. So I am not the anti-Bill Burr. I'm not in that camp. But it's a lot of heavy lifting

in a show like this to be that guy for 40 minutes. And it just, it's not my favorite dynamic, partly because, and this might bring me all the way back into the What's Wrong with Bruins fans camp, the show, Mandalorian, you know that phrase like you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose? I don't know that phrase, but that's a really good one.

Great phrase. One of my favorite, I have a little book of phrases. That one's underlined. The Mandalorian campaigns and governs in prose. It is never going to be mistaken for a show with like, you know, just savage wit or turns of phrase, you know what I mean? It is not Mank, both either the movie nor the man. And so when you have a guy whose main contribution is like cracking wise,

it's going to fall a little flat. And that's kind of how I felt about the episode last time. That said, like the action set pieces, the getting the gang together. Family you did a really good job. The director bullshit award goes to William Freakin Sorcer, which I saw cited multiple times for this episode. Because of trucks. I thought, like, they kind of set it up a little bit in the beginning.

Like, I just sort of, the premise of this planet that they had arrived at seemed to be to me like it was kind of going to be like a Vietnam kind of situation. Or I wasn't really sure where it was going, but just like the actual topography of the world that they were setting it in or the L.E. screens were setting it in. Also, Chris, they were like, there are native people here. To them, you know, who is in control matters little. Yeah. And I was like, wow, wow, okay, Terry Malick, I see what we're doing. And then they just literally drive the 26-wheeler past them.

Yes. Again, like you live by the lightsaber, you die by the lightsaber. Like the first part of this episode, I'm marveling over the economy, right, where they show up on some planet we've never seen before. Again, just a soundstage of Manhattan Beach. And they're like, there's droids and there's scrap metal and there's a decaying tie fighter. And then they're off to the races. There's very little. And I respect the hell out of this.

Like, there's a version of this show or of storytelling in general where just going to get Bill Burr takes two episodes. Yeah. We were out of there before the credits. The downside of setting that precedent is that then when two otherwise anonymous truck driving stormtroopers single-handedly defeat a swarm of like, I mean, they put, there were bodies. There were so many pirates. Yeah. They killed so many of them and rescued the day. and then they enter one of the stormtroopers, Bill Burr,

not even wearing a helmet at this point. I know. Breaking protocol left and right. And they walk in and everyone's like, hazah, hazah! Like they're in the grate. And then they walk through the crowd and then no one pays any more attention to them. Yeah, and you're leading up to the main point

that I wanted to discuss here. Good episode. I think your point about is a Mandalorian episode that is so much about Bill Burr really what we want. I'm fine with it. Here's the issue that I have. The Empire are,

coming off a couple of L's. You know, they lost one death star and a new hope. They lose another death star in return

of the Jedi. Both of those death stars, they have... You lose one, it's an accident. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Both of those, I think they had a lot of, um, a little bit of arrogance. You know, about like, there was like,

you know, with the first one, I mean, who could have guessed that, that an X-wing would make that, that run

and drop a one and a thousand torpedo shot right into the little trash hole. It was the Kauai Leonard of shots. Exactly. It was the three-bouncer. So, fool me once, whatever. They lose another death star.

God knows how much of the GDP went into that one. Kind of a vanity project for the emberra. To be fair, when you can print money, infrastructure, like just printing the money and building it is the goal. You're saying Palpatine was part of MMT. He was just make money printer go burr. Kind of. That's how we're going to pull the entire galaxy out of this hole.

So Palpatine, obviously, at this point, we think, you know, in this timeline, he's not, he's gone. And little do we know JJ would resurrect the dude. But just because he's gone, I don't think that they should let everything fall by the wayside. Details still matter in this world, you know? So it really pained me to see Baker Mayfield and Mandalorian get into this fortress. And they're like, okay, so where is this sacred terminal that you need to hack into so that, we can then keep it moving. And it turns out it's next to the hot bar

at a sizzler. Unattended. There is a computer terminal and it's just like, yeah, this faceless bounty hunter vigilante samurai just needs to remove his helmet and give a little bit of that Pedro Pascal magic to the computer,

which is just sitting there in a mess hall and they'll just be like, here's where Moff Gideon's hanging out. Can I give you the counter? That scene touched my heart. I was very fond of it because it reminded me of a special time, a very brief time in my life and in the life of the great city of New York that you and I both used to call home, where the only terminal, if you will, to be in touch with the outside world on the island of Manhattan was the Apple store on Prince Street.

Yeah. Where you would build your whole afternoon around getting out of the subway and orienting yourself near the Apple store in Soho in order to check your email alongside just a rag-tag collection of expatriate Italian DJs. Yes. And that was before we could, you know,

and the guy speaking to a pigeon carcass that he had in his back pocket. Yes, because there was no email on our flip phones. And so we communicated kind of, and again, I don't really remember the language of like the touching the numbers. I was really good at it

to spell out letters. But in my mind, when I think back on my Motorola, it kind of looks like the screen inside the truck, where it was just like flashing warning signs, and that warning sign, you know, meant go to 11th Street bar at 10 p.m. So that kind of collective spirit was present in that moment. And I appreciated it. It does seem like they probably should work on their security protocols,

because if Mof Gideon is the most important actor in this post-empirus era. He's floating around in a spaceship with a dark saber. a organ donor, like a mid-chlorian organ donor, you should maybe mask his his whereabouts a little bit, a little bit. Well, it just shouldn't be available to everyone. You know what I mean? And that's just, that's just, that's just a smart management structure. You know what I mean?

Like, right now, Chris, do you have access to Daniel X. Whereabout? Like, do you know exactly where he is? No, I mean, do we learn nothing from Gawker-stalker? I mean, just like, turn off location status. That is actually, that is a contemporary of my time at the Apple store, so I appreciate the reference. The other thing is, I want to welcome Pedro Pascaul to the show. This is his second time being on set for the Mandalorian, I believe.

Honestly, honestly, honestly, what's the over under days on set? Not in a VO, like an ADR booth, but what is the over under days on set for Pedro? I don't think he knew where his trailer was. Don't you remember last year, in the last season, the stunt guy gave that interview where he was like, I am the Mandalorian? Yeah. Whatever happened to that guy? Did we just like brush that aside? That guy's harder to find than Moff Gideon right now. I'll tell you that much. That guy was not welcome at Disney Investor Day last week. Don't show your face in Manhattan Beach, bro. I mean, luckily, Mandelorians never show their faces. But, you know, and again, like, it's a beautiful face. It's a, you know, it's a prize-winning face.

Right. I think other people have pointed out, like, the mustache is a bold choice. Like, either just don't shave. But if you're never showing your face for days, weeks, months on end, and it's it's got to be stuffy in there. Sculpting the mustache, as you learned from your experience this summer, like, that takes work. It's still happening. I mean, you guys can't see us right now, but I continue to push ahead with the Great American Mustache Project of 2020.

The problem is, for Chris, is that he actually got. What am I going to do if a little known side effect of the Pfizer shot is you can't grow a mustache? Well, then I feel like maybe you've had it for a while. I feel like maybe you were one of the, I feel like you were in the Moderna trials then. Because I think that you have the Thomas Keller of mustaches. Like it's been refined. It's been run through a sieve. He's been run through a sieve on like a number of levels.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, like the show, the show just hums so confidently and it's just so baseline entertaining that when you get to the point, because you know after season one that there's going to be a moment in season two when he takes the helmet off, right? Sure. And it's just like the moment he takes the helmet off is to watch Bill. is to check his email and have Bill Byrd deliver a monologue about the righteousness of the common soldier.

Not how I would have drawn it up. Maybe not the moment I would have chosen, but it's the moment we got, and I wasn't mad about it. I also, just quick follow up, what was their exit plan that didn't involve killing everyone and jumping out the window? Because this worked out great. I mean, it seems like if they could have gotten through their drinks with the commanding officer guy, they could have just like walked out and people would have just been like, oh, it's those guys

who successfully brought the rhidonium to us. I think I can't decide if their lack of... Employee the month over here. Maybe, and I'm trying to like make this work in my mind, maybe they weren't overly excited about those dudes because all those dudes just get killed every time they do one of these runs so no one knows them.

Like maybe that's the worst job in the post-emper empire empire period. To the shows, credit. The speechifying, I think, was less the Mandalorian trying to justify its best drama series nomination and have something to say about, you know, the nature of humanity and leadership and whatever colonialism. And kind of more about what the Mandalorian's larger project actually is being, is as we've learned this season, which is just cleaning up the mess. Yeah. Because this idea that was introduced that this is just a cycle that the that the new republic is a mess the umpire's a mess and

they're going to keep trading the ball back and forth that helps because you know among the many things yada yada yadaed by the the last trilogy was just like we're just going to run it back and yeah it's all the same this was the first episode to be honest that it actually you know you know made me feel a little bit differently about the sequel movies and about you know i i don't i i'm not somebody who gets shaken to their core by Star Wars movies necessarily. Like I don't... No, Mallory's coming on next week. No, but, you know, remember when the Ryan Johnson movie came out and everybody was like,

this is fucking bullshit. Luke would never do this. You know, like, it was like they were, they really felt like Ryan Johnson had misunderstood and desecrated the memory of this character. It's kind of interesting to watch the Mandalorian take kind of like these cool little pot shots at the, the, the, public, you know, at what used to be the rebellion, and just kind of be like, eh, these guys not great at governing the outer rim, you know what I mean? Like, there's

some, there's some issues out here. That's really, I agree. That's not just interesting. Without making it in the foreground and without it being like the fucking republic is just as bad, man. It's not just interesting. And I agree that it is interesting. It's also essential story cement for this expanded television universe they want to get. And it's of a piece. with this idea that the Jedi aren't the stars of the story, there's like four magical wizards that only people who are in the Death Star know about. You know what I mean? It's decentering the main characters that we knew from the narrative to make it a larger story about, dare I say, star systems at war. At war. Yeah, right. Conflict. And that's helpful because, and we, you know,

we kind of went through it when we did the Emergency Star Wars podcast last week, but that's where we're headed. And the show, it's really, it's very interesting because even though we're, you know, we're kind of nitpicking around the margins of this episode that we generally enjoyed, like the show continues to do the little things right in service of the longer game that has just been revealed. So do you have anything on a wish list for the finale, the finale, which airs Friday? No, I have to be fully honest with you.

My experience, start to finish with Mandalorian, has been, okay, sure. Like, I didn't enter it with expectations, and I've been just so pleasantly surprised at how much I've really gotten into enjoying it. I don't. I mean, I like the way they tell the story, and I'm excited to see where it goes next. And, I mean, look, I had that, I had Boba Fett's ship. It was a cool toy to play with. And now you're seeing it fly around and rotate and do all that stuff. Great.

Great. It's cool. I like it. I mean, that's the extent of my criticism heading into the finale. It's got a little gyroscope thing going. I'm mostly curious to see whether or not they, they tie a bow on it and reunite Baby Oates with his crew because I think that'll be a nice little test for people's appetite

for darkness on this show, which is, this is as dark as it's gotten to have the most beloved character, possibly in popular culture, get snatched up by the empire. But I think that this show is playing the long game. I think, I believe season three is underway already. that's usually when they shoot is the December before. Has Pedro Pescal been,

has he been alerted? Did they send him an email yet with his schedule for later this year? Actually, I think he is directing an episode of Narcos. So I think he's busy. What a cushy gig. What a cushy gig.

But yeah, like I'm curious to see what loose ends they leave and how many of the clearly like establishing Boketan and Asoka and what's there going to be this sort of Rangers of the Republic show.

What is it called? Rangers of the New Republic. Rangers of the New Republic, which may or may not be Caradune and Carl Weathers and Bill Burr. And Bill Burr and all these, yeah, all these sort of supporting characters that they've brought on,

Timothy Oliphant, whether or not they are a part of like, whatever the final boss level of the second season is, or whether it kind of gets left open a little bit more. So I don't really have any predictions per se, but I do, I kind of would like to see the Mandalorian continue to raise the stakes.

The one thing that this episode did make clear to me was the way that the narrative and fandom around even this show can overwhelm it in ways that are helpful to it, as opposed to the way they can overwhelm the movie. And what I mean specifically is that last email that our man Mando sends directly to the location of Mofgidia, he's like, he's like, it reminded me of like, you know, Vimeos of like emo kids

reciting the lyrics to like from Autumn to Ashes' albums. He's like, never in my life have I cared for anything as much as what you have in your possession. I promise you, I will hunt you down. And I'm like, great. Because the world feels that way about Baby Yoda. Mando's tougher to read. So all of a sudden, when everyone's like,

your son is missing and he was like, I will move heaven and earth. He literally, he gives the Daniel de Lewis last to the Mohican speech, and it was a little out of character. It was a little jarring for me. And maybe the show doesn't need to spend that deep character building, or maybe it's impossible to do it because it's a stuntman in a tin can. But whatever spackled, they think they thought they were doing

by showing us flashbacks of a kid we don't know hiding in a bunker, and then this tough warrior falling in love with a small green puppet, But that hasn't really been done in the text. It's been done around the show. So no one watching that is just like, everyone agrees that we should get Baby Yoda back. That is, no one's on the fence about it. But I don't think it came from a character place.

I thought it was actually not very consistent with this character because he got to ruin the element of surprise. By the way, great point. If he had the location, maybe go there. Wow. He could have talked over Mofftonian's dying carcass and said, I fucking told you, I was coming for you. Chris, are you a ranger of the New Republic?

Why don't we talk a little bit about the Marvel slate that got announced on Thursday? Because when we recorded our emergency pod, we were knowingly just doing the Star Wars stuff. And, you know, that shit went to like 8 p.m. I don't know if people think we're, I mean, I appreciate it. People were like, why did you quit midway? And I was like, you know, we keep bankers hours on this podcast. You know what I mean? I could see it in your eyes that there was just like a glassy, faraway look.

I think that there's also now, in retrospect, I would say for me, the Star Wars announcements of all these shows coming to Disney Plus and the mentioning of Patty Jenkins and Tycho Waititi developing their movies. And Patty Jenkins did that whole clip where she's like talking about her relationship to the idea of fighter pilots and her father. Yeah, and like she's always dreamed of making a fighter pilot movie and she's going to get to make one with a, with a rogue squadron.

Very cool. But that felt like a pretty seismic announcement because to some extent I think it was because they did a really nice job of keeping a lot of that stuff under wraps even though we knew

that Konobi was happening even though I think we could guess the Osoka was going to happen. The totality of the announcement felt like a real seismic thing. The Marvel announcements, while no less significant and just sheer quantity,

I think felt a little bit more like housekeeping. Like a bunch of stuff that was supposed to come out in 2020 anyway. And a bunch of stuff that had been sort of announced or teased already. And a couple of things, you know, we got to finally see. But for the most part, I think that was a confirmation of something we always knew was going to happen, which was that Marvel was going to introduce Disney Plus as this secondary playground for them to play on. Whereas the announcement from Star Wars made it feel almost like, We have learned our lesson from the Mandalorian.

This is what people want. This is what we're good at making. We're going to give you 10 times more of that. Marvel is still kind of like, there's the movies, there's the shows, there's a lot of stuff going on. And they're a little bit more behind the eight ball because of the pandemic year and not, a movie theater is not being open. They've got four movies coming out next year, which is about as many as you can possibly release probably from one of these titles. I can go through a quick list of the slate of stuff, but, I wanted to know if you had any general reactions to the Marvel announcements.

Yeah, I mean, I think you say behind the eight ball, I mean, I still think they're in the driver's seat. You know, they, what was so incredible about this whole announcement and rollout was, and this is not my idea or idea that came from our podcast. I saw this as a headline at least one place. This is Disney Blues. Like, this is what it was supposed to be, and it was basically delayed for a year. This full flood is how they intend to win the next decade and be. beyond. And so all of this is being announced while they also announced 90 million subs, so they're fine. The Marvel thing, just to sort of piggyback on your point, Star Wars was so,

the future of Star Wars felt so fragile as much as any multi-billion dollar successful franchise can feel in that coming out of those movies, what direction was it going to take? And this felt like a very strong reassertion of control by the current regime of Lucasville about what they want it to be and how they want it to be. Marvel hasn't dipped. So in it, and the pandemic hit at a moment when they were already just finishing their victory lap and ready to do the next thing. Powering down a little bit. Yeah. So, and then that coupled with the fact that the, their relative strength in the streaming marketplace, like they don't need to pull in HBO Max. Like, they can still say we're going to put out movies in 21 and 22 because our streaming service is fine. And these movies

will make a lot of money. And so it just felt calmer, you know, because of it. I thought, the on one hand what was most interesting in telling about the marvel piece of it was the things they didn't announce right there was no sense of there ever being another avengers movie or what that would be there was no announcement of any x-men content which is you know teed up and in their court now to do how to do what to do what they want to do with it i wonder if that would be the case had they been able to get go through and release their movies this year if they were prepared to do that the most interesting one to me, and, you know, long-time podcast fan, Josh Trank, cover your ears, is that Fantastic Four is coming.

Yeah, that was the thing that I was going to say is probably the most significant announcement. And it's not just that it's coming, it, that, you know, and you knew, I mean, here's the thing about Fagie, like Kevin Fagie has, and we'll talk more about this specifically, just an uncanny ability to distill what's beloved about all these characters and communicate them to, the mass market, I think he was chomping at the bit for this one. Because Fantastic Four is the original Marvel title. Marvel became Marvel with Fantastic Four number one and think in 1961. And nobody's gotten it right. Obviously there have been repeated. I mean, there was a sequel to the Tim Story movies, but they're not particularly beloved. And then obviously the Josh Strank movie

is considered to be kind of a disaster. This is the one he wanted. Like he wants to show people. He knows how to do this one. And he handed it to John Watt, which is really interesting coming off of the Spider-Man trilogy. Right. It does seem like when Marvel settles in on someone and they're like, you're our guy or a woman, like, they do settle. And John Watts will have directed three Spider-Man movies and then moving into...

And the third one seems like three Spider-Man movies within it. So at least nine movies total. And I think we've talked about a lot recently, and Mal can go into more detail about this. All the multiverse stuff that they've been doing, I think we've seen and we saw pieces of that in a couple of the different trailers and

announcements that they made on Thursday, that obviously has been playing a huge part in where the story in totality is going. But the Fantastic Four, aside from them being a flagship group of characters, are also a gateway group of characters because I think that gets you to X-Men, right? Like, that gets you to a couple of different things. I don't, I mean, it doesn't necessarily get, like mutendom, but like, I think, I think, it opens it up. Right. It actually tends to, it, it, It goes, I think it goes more hand in hand with the kind of multiverse stuff because Reed Richards is like the scientist that explores and they travel, the family travels through all these dimensions. I think it just continues to open it up.

Whereas to the X-Men point, you know, we did that long pot about what the writer Jonathan Hickman has been doing in the X-Men comics. We talked to Jason Concepcion about it over the summer. If that's the direction they're going in, it almost needs to be its own thing. And it needs to be its complete own thing with its own announcements. Generally, I mean, that was kind of, that was fan bait and clickbait and interesting news, although not. not surprising necessarily. Generally, and then I think we should switch to the TV stuff, which had a lot more meat on the bone.

But if you run down the movie announcements that they did make, I mean, it is just like watching an MVP player just deliver. You know what I mean? They make these decisions that they announce them, and you're like, oh, yeah, obviously. Oh, of course. And they don't screw it up, at least in the early going. And that's kind of amazing.

So the film slate is as follows. It's Black Widow, Shang-She and The Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, Untitled Spider-Man, Far from Home sequel, all those for 2021. Then in 2022, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor, and that's directed by Sam Ramee, by the way, Thor Love and Thunder with Christian Bale joining. And that that's the thing, man. It's like, if you fucking tell me that Daniel Day Lewis is going to be in a Marvel movie in 2024, like, I wouldn't blink at this point.

What if I told you he had already been in a movie in 2018, but just so transatlary? formed himself. That's right. Thor Love and Thunder, 2022, Black Panther 2, 2022, and the announcement that Kugler is writing and directing, and that they will not be recasting the role of the child. This is what I mean by talking about like an MVP player. Like, they don't screw it up because they're in such a position of strength. They know, they know the power of the movie they made and of the character that that Chabrox was created. They were so close to bringing Daniel DeLuess in, but they just decided. He did audition. Yeah. But But Pedro Pascal's stuntman was like, maybe he never takes off the mask in the sequel.

They're like, that just don't screw it up. So is there precedent for following up, you know, a billion-dollar generation-defining movie with a sequel without the star? Of course not. But that movie was so well made and at such a deep bench and the talent is not just, you know, Letitia Wright and Winston Duke. It's Ryan Coogler. So there's plenty of story there. And that's the right decision. Right.

Captain Marvel 2, directed by Nia Dacosta, Ant Man. There's the other one. Yeah. They're like, what do we need for this? Who can we get for it? And then they get Nia Dacosta, who's a talented filmmaker who, you know, who I think, I was just, I don't know where I saw this. Oh, there's a cartoonist for the New York Times who, like, interviews people on the street,

and they were doing an interview series about student debt. And the person they interviewed who had the most student debt was Nia Dacosta, who was just like, I owe $100 grand in debt for, like, film school and everything. And my only hope is that I'll get a super-com. hero movie and I'll be able to pay it off. Congrats. And here she is. But she's also a great choice for this and they make it look easy.

Yeah. And The Wasp, Quantum Mania to keep with the quantum world stuff. Did it. Do another one. It's working. Payton Reed, Paul Rudd, sure. You know what I mean? It's such a, the margins for that make sense.

They spend less on that movie, but they still get the attendant attention for like being a Marvel movie. It works. Right. And then in 23, we've got Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3 with James Gun returning and Fantastic Four directed by John Watts. The TV series, some of which we already knew about. So Wanda Vision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

I still don't know what Falcon and the Winter Soldier is about other than those dudes being bummed out that Captain America was like, I'm going to be old now. Do you know what it's about? Captain America was just like, unwashed. Captain America tried to get that spot in the top of the line. You know what I'm saying? He's like, look at me. I was born in fucking 1915.

COVID can't get me, brother. Do you think, who are the Falcon and Winter Soldier of this podcast who will take the microphone slash shield in 2023 to cover these movies when we're like, now, we're going to be old now? Yeah, right, right. We're done. The thing that probably caught our eye the most, really was the most footage we got to see. Well, there was a Falcon Winter Soldier in WandaVitia trailer, but let's talk about Loki. Because this is not something that the kid had on his Christmas list where I was like, I love Tom Huddleston, but I didn't. Huddleston? No, that's, that guy played midfield.

Huddleston plays midfield for Toddom, we're used to. Tom Hiddleston, I love that guy. I think he's really entertaining. I was not like, I need more Loki. In fact, I kind of felt like that dude probably should have been like vaporized a couple times. You know, like, he keeps like totally betraying humanity

and then people are like, but he's Thor's brother. You can't touch him, you know what I mean? I mean, that sounds like America for the last four years. I feel like, I feel like we have a lot of rope, you know what I mean? for people who keep screw it up. Keep disappointing us.

Yeah. But this is the reason why I think you and I keep coming back to discussing this stuff, other than the fact that it's more or less the monoculture at this point, is that when they get it right and they basically take one of these stories in there, like, they go to somebody and they say, what genre do you want to put this in? And in Wanda Vizja, obviously, they're doing this kind of zany, psychedelic, farce sitcom thing. You know, Falcon and Winter Soldier seems to be large. an advertisement for Henley's and

no logo baseball hats. Loki, they're like, they're like, how about we make a fucking sci-fi prison break show? And Owen Wilson is apparently like the parole officer in this place. And from what I gather,

the prison that Loki is being sent to or the place that the facility is the place where they oversee all the timelines. Fuck yeah. This looks fucking ridiculous. Like, I want to apologize.

to all the like Caher's do cinema listeners who are here for my Criterion Channel takes. I completely agree that it is worrisome, offensive, egregious that while

most of the internet is squeeing including us over this orgy of branded content from one company that dominates the discourse, they are also laying off 30,000 workers who actually are the lifeblood of the company. Like that sucks. we could take maybe like don't make Falcon and Winter Soldier and just pay the people who work for your company.

Yes. Am I on some level concerned that rather than, I mean, this could go two ways. This could be just the steady drumbeat of content we were going to get anyway. Or this could suck all the attention and money out of more interesting idiosyncratic non-IP projects and be the death knell for the type of TV that we've covered. As everyone gets into an arms race, they can't win with Disney. all of that is possible. All of that is worthy of consideration. But I have to tell you from the bottom of my jaded soul,

I fucking want to watch Loki. I want to watch Loki. I like comic books. I like the Marvel movies. And I particularly like the fact. And I can't get over this. And should we ever get the chance to talk to Kevin Feig, your people who are part of the original founding of the MCU,

was there one meeting where he or other? other people were like, this is the tone. Yeah. I know everything is supposed to be serious, gritty, dark night, but like Marvel Comics have always had this kind of embracing the goofiness side. Colorful. And they let it happen and it changed movies, obviously, but it just gave them this unfuck-withable blueprint that lets us end up in this place

where you have this dastardly charming rapscallion of a character slash actor. And you build a show around his strengths. and you build a show around his strengths using the time variance authority, which is this almost from the beginning tongue-in-cheek creation from the 80s that was spearheaded by this great Marvel writer who wrote my favorite Captain America runs. He passed away tragically too young. Mark Grunwald, no relation. I think that all the people in the TVA originally were drawn to look like him

because he was such a stickler for continuity and had read every Marvel comic since the 60s. with names like Mr. Mobius and Mobius. And now you have Silver Fox Owen Wilson playing that almost tossed off living LOL of a character, sending Loki into various timelines.

Like, that's just fun. And I cannot stress this enough. Like, yes, everyone should watch small acts, but also we should have in our lives room to be like, oh, there's fresh Loki content. Fire it up and take me away. Like, I don't see the downside about this because it looks super fun. And I texted Chris.

I was like, I apologies for the heat on this take. This looks awesome and I can't wait to see it. I just, good idea. Make a Loki prison break show, good idea. Can you name the cast? Like, I sent you a screen grab of just the IUDB page. Well, it's Hiddleston and Owen Wilson and Richard E. Grant and then Google and Batha Raw and Sasha Lane. Yes, done. Yeah.

Right. Right. And I think Google and Bother Raw seems to be playing like a, you know, know, Judge. Yeah, something like that. Great. The other show that they announced are What If, which is animated and is based on a run that Marvel did where it would be like, what if Punisher did this, you know, right?

I got to tell you. So this was announced a while ago, but now it is a go moving forward, I guess. And what if was like the ballerest flex of my early comic book years? This came out around like, so I became a comic fan of like 87, 88 and got really into X-Men. And that was when there were comic books, they were pretty. so many of them that they had a comic book called X-Men Classics, where they're just reprinting old X-Men's and you were paying for them again.

And one of the best ones was what if, which was basically like, what if Gwen Stacy hadn't have died? Or what if someone else got bitten by the radioactive spider? Or what if they lost secret wars or Dark Phoenix took over the universe? And all the craziest, like, pre-fandom message board shit. It was just like, it got dark.

And people would die all the time. And it was super cool. and they're making a cartoon series about it. That's a good idea. So what if Miss Marvel, Hawkeye, which we talked about a little bit on Thursday, I think,

with Renner and Haley Steinfeld, Moon Night, sure? She Hulk, Tatiana Maslani is going to be on that. Yeah, that felt spicy for a minute. She never talked about it. She was like, nobody asked me. And then they did.

Guardians of a Galaxy holiday special, which is based on the Star Wars holiday special, which is like, I think a concentric circle of fandom below where I'm comfortable being, but I'm sure it'll be amusing. Secret Invasion, which is a Nick Fury show, Ironheart. And the one where I'm like, okay, guys, you know best is Armour Wars, which is the war machine spinoff and is about basically like, are we sure technology is good for humanity? And I'm like, well, that, that ship may have sailed. My guy. As I sit here watching Disney Plus on my Apple TV box. I don't want to praise Kevin Feigy for all this and then tell him how to do his job. But I would say two armor-centered spin-offs of the Ironman IP seems a bit much.

Obviously, we haven't seen yet how the shows are going to overlap and interact with each other, other than Mark Ruffalo's like, yeah, I'll be in She-Hulk because literally they all love hanging out in Atlanta and that's fun. So everything we used to think about things staying in lanes and crossing streams is irrelevant now in moot. But Ironheart is an really cool character created by and written by Eve E-Viewing and was part of Marvel's initiative in the last few years to not just diversify their lineup, but sort of de-age and put new heroes in the forefront. And Ms. Marvel is part of that. Ironheart is about a young African-American girl in Chicago who's a genius who is given armor, basically by Tony Stark, and then Tony Stark is in one of his I'm Dead Now, phases in comics, and she takes over.

That's cool. That could be a new Iron Man. You should do that. I don't know why we need that. Anton Cheedle being like, why are these armors fighting? Why are these armors in war? Why not do both as one? I'm just saying.

Yeah. I mean, the thing is, is that like, it could very well be that armor wars winds up being like just the Ed Norton parts of Bourne legacy. And I get it tattooed onto my neck. Great point. Yeah. Great point. Okay, let's wrap up the Marvel conversation there. And we'll take a quick break. And when we come back, Andy and I are going to pay tribute to Jama Carey, who passed away on Sunday.

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Run to Denny's 4. The new attorney. Part of Denny's slamming meal deals. And see the new Masters of the Universe movie, only in theaters June 5th. All right, Andy, we are back. And this is a sad part of the podcast, but I hope that people leave with it

with a feeling of celebration, because that's what I'd like to try and do here, to pay tribute to one of my favorite writers, a hugely, hugely important figure in my life, and I think in yours too, and that is the writer that we all knew is John La Cary, who was his real name was David Cornwell, and he died on Sunday at the age of 89.

And, you know, obviously over the last few years, Andy and I have talked a lot about his novels in relation to the adaptations that we've seen, especially little drummer girl, which came out a couple years ago that we were both huge fans of. But, you know, it's hard to wrap your arms around someone who I think is one of, I think the great, one of the really the great writers of the 20th and into the 21st century. So what we wanted to do is just talk about some of our favorite books and talk about what he meant to us.

I don't know. What do you think of when you think of Le Carre? I think of the bookshelves of my father and of my uncle particularly. My uncle is a particular guy of very specific tastes and very smart, but I remember being struck when I was a kid, way before I would read any John La Caree books myself, that while he had many books in his house, he really only read a perfect spy by John LaCarray. And I said, at one point, either I asked or someone to my family asked, like, why don't you read something else?

And he said, because they're not as good. Right. And it's hard to argue with it because I think the thing that might still be stumbling block for people who are wary. And people like this generally don't listen to this podcast, I think. But in general, people who might be wary of genre fiction or say, like, oh, I don't like spy books or whatever might not appreciate is that LaCari was one of the great novelists full stop. of the last 100 years. And his sentences are many works of art, and his intellect is peerless,

and that he put those skills in the service of something that generally might be considered only fit for spinner racks at airports, I think puts that, that reveals that to be kind of a snobby lie, but also is ultimately really deeply moving to me because this is a genius of the First Order who, unlike many writers, had his fastball until the very end and reinvented himself multiple times,

but devoted his talents to the service of investigating, explicating, and shaking his head at our world, as it is. You know, which I think as, especially over the last few years, this fiction has gotten more and more like navel-gazing and more MFA-E, the majesty and importance of his project

stands even larger in my mind and in literary halls. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the family connection because that's obviously a really, it's not obvious, but it's a very important one for me too. It was in a lot of ways, you know, a bridge between me and my dad. My dad passed away in 2011,

but he was about 10, 15 years younger than, I don't know, I'm being exact, but he was younger than John LaCarray was. And LeCarrie was born in 31, and my dad was born in the 40s. And it was a way, not only for my dad and I to connect, which was, you know, taking his advice and reading it,

but it was a way for me to understand him a little bit because I think that some of LeCarrie's characters and some of the ways he wrote about the experience of being British, as my dad was, throughout the post-war experience, were really helpful in me understanding a little bit about him, you know, a little bit about my father. So an incredibly, like, meaningful, like, piece of,

like connective tissue for me in my life, like on a personal level. I couldn't agree with that more. I mean, from my father, like, a new La Cary book was like an event. Yeah. It was, here are the reviews about it that I'm going to read. Here's the day I'm going to go buy it at the store. Here's it'll get pride of place on the coffee table in the living room. And he'll read it and he'll let us all know what he thought about it at great detail.

And the thing that he kept talking about throughout my life, understanding who La Cari was and talking my dad about books. There are two major things. I think one is that in my house growing up, there were mass market paperbacks, crime books, like Ed McBain. Yeah. Dick Francis. Yeah. Ross Thomas, my favorite. They were in the basement. But La Care wasn't. You know what I mean? And he was kind of met in the middle between the more high-minded literary stuff and some of the stuff downstairs. But also what my father, who's also, non-specifically, a little bit younger than La Cary, but a little bit older than your dad.

We love to marvel over was the reinvention. And there's a book that I'm reading now. I was going to mention a little bit later called Absolute Friends. I mean, this is a guy who came to prominence writing about the Cold War and the relationship between the West and Russia, and this is obviously something he knew from his own spy days when he was a younger man. But he never stopped.

So the world changed, and he wasn't stuck in the past. I mean, we love a writer like Alan First, and I don't mean to use him as an example to denigrate someone, but Alan First only writes books set between 1940 and 1944 in Europe. Yeah, and I think generally, like, the same thing happens in each Allen First book is like a dashing man gets involved in a big conspiracy and has a lot of sex. With women way out of his league. Yes.

And then you turn back to the author page and you see Allen First and you're like, Godspeed. LeCarré, when he wrote Absolute Friends, I mean, it is a scathing indictment of America's foreign policy post-9-11. written with like scabrous wit and insight and passion, you know, from a man who was, I mean, he was already in his 60s and basically reinvented himself because the world inspired him to keep going in a way that is very meaningful and really impressive. So, LeCarray spent some time in MI5 and MI6, although not a significant amount of time. And he got his start writing these Cold War novels in the 60s that I think peaked with, the spy who came in for the cold, which became a huge sensation,

and Richard Burton starred in the film adaptation of that. And then he went on to write a trio of, I think, arguably, you know, Tinker Taylor's Soldier Spy, straight up as a spy novel is probably the greatest espionage novel ever written. And then the trilogy of Tinker Taylor, Honorable Schoolboy and Smiley's People, is if you were going to go to another planet and you could only take three books,

you would be worse off by taking those. You could do worse. And then as the Cold War ended, and, you know, the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR felt, he basically, like, expanded his project to talk about what happens when the corruption and crime and bloodlust of this Cold War seeps out into, like, the rest of the world, be it South America, Africa, ex-Soviet Soviet states, wherever. And those are really incredible novels. generally I think a little bit more compact and a little bit more written in a thriller style,

but absolute friends, like you're saying, is a kind of return to an almost polemical style of writing. Yes. These characters who are in their twilight facing, you know, like grappling with a lot of their, like the ideals that they've lost over the years, although I would necessarily call him an idealistic writer at any point, but grappling with the sort of myths and lies that they feel like they may have been told by their country and by their service to that country. I wanted to basically just,

if you don't mind me, just read two quotes. One is one that I always, always, always think about. And a lot of my favorite novels tend to go back to this quotes from Don De Lillo in his book Libro, which is about the Kennedy assassination.

It's a novel about Oswald. And there's a quote that goes, maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable.

You use the restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. So that's this deliola quote that I always think about when I think about La Cerey, that I think about Dennis Johnson, when I think about a lot of my favorite writers. And then this is a quote that LeCarray gave to John Banville and the Guardian a few years back. Looking really in some Faustian sense, God help me, for what

the world holds at its innermost point was a way of asking, what are we? Who were we? Which is probably an extension of the question of who the hell am I? Where is virtue to be found? Where is the altar of Englishness? And I think that really was quite a severe internal journey and very interesting one in retrospect, a lost boy in search of something or other. So that, I think those two quotes, one from the man himself and one having no relationship at all to him, explains why I think you and I are so fascinated by this guy because his project was really about the participation of an individual with history was about the idea that you could merge with the greater world. And shout out to my uncle, because I think the thing about a perfect spy that is so striking

is that it feels, and you've read much more deeply and widely in his catalog than I have, I've only read a handful of books. That book feels exactly like that quote in that he's interrogating his own life, his own experience, his relationship with his father's, relationship with his country through the larger scrim of fiction and what it has meant to him and what it could mean. It's a really powerful book. But I think that you're right to set it up that way because you can look, you can, you can do the whole oeuvre, right? You could, and you're not going to be disappointed. I don't think there's really any, he doesn't write bad books. He doesn't write bad books and he never did, which is incredible. You know, as someone who's who's dealing

with the back end of Larry McMurtry's catalog. It's not true for everyone. Respect. He writes a lot of books. But you can pick out books that are just pure pleasure reads, or you can go a little bit, take a step a little bit deeper, a little bit deeper, a little bit deeper, and you begin to realize the complexity of the project that was his life and his fiction that was about that interplay between the idea of, like, the individual actor on the global stage

and what it could actually mean and what the consequences of action even are. It's really heady stuff, but at the end of it, it's also just so supremely entertaining that he was enjoying, and it does sound like from interviews that as much as he enjoyed anything,

he was enjoying this, this kind of reexamination and re-engagement with his work that was spearheaded by his son, I believe, who sort of took control of the catalog and began developing, taking a firmer hand in developing projects like The Night Manager and Little Drummer Girl.

Yeah. Yeah. There's this great, one of my favorite things about him is you read these books and you figure, like, oh, well, these must have all just been drawn from his experiences from working in intelligence himself. And, you know, he just must have these contacts in British intelligence and kind of spins him out from there. But, you know, apparently nobody in the British intelligence community really wanted to talk to him after a certain point, because obviously their secrets were being aired. And so he was a hell of a reporter. Like, there was this great anecdote I read when he was doing our kind of traitor, which is about like a kind of shady Russian oligarch slash gangster who is ensnars this British couple into a scheme that he needs them for. And he had gone to, I don't know if he had gone to Moscow or where in the Soviet or in Russia he had gone, but he was essentially doing research on this guy, Dima who would, the Dima who would show up in the novel. I don't know what the actual guy's name was in real life. But he went to like, it's like John LeCarray at this fucking nightclub with an arms

dealing Russian gangster. And he's got his translator there. And he's like, I could barely hear him over like the pulsating club music. But I eventually got got to the point where I asked him, you know, like one of the things that usually happens when you have like, you know, essentially this class of criminal is that at some point they decide they need to create a better world for their great grandkids and start to do things that are somewhat

better for society if also while doing this nefarious shit and he does this question and the guy responds at Russian and the translator turns to him and says Mr. David I'm very sorry he says fuck off and I always just love the idea of this like really bookish British guy

in like a Russian, like, in Russia, just like chopping it up with this gangster. Why don't we leave people with this? We can do two books that we recommend and two adaptations. So you want to talk a little bit more about Absolute Friends, or did you have another one you wanted to talk about? Oh, so bookwise, yeah, I mean, I'm reading Absolute Friends now. And one of the reasons I'm reading it now was because I saw it on my shelf. I'd never read it.

And I remember just like it is this massive turning point, like my father's discussion of it and estimation of the, the man and like his pivot into a different sort of perspective on the world. And I'm really interested in reading it now because when the book came out, you know, it was, as you said, it was very polemical about things that were happening in the moment. And now we've moved on in some ways. And so I'm very curious about how it plays. And like with all of his books, I'm just like, Jesus Christ, these sentences. I mean, it's just next level artistry, the way the physical, almost the physical way he writes. The other one I was going to recommend, which I feel like,

I don't know if it gets a lot of love, but I loved reading the Taylor of Panama. there was a pretty decent movie made with Jeffrey Rush and Pierce Brosnan that I did enjoy, but of all the books of his that I've read and some that I've tried to read, I just really enjoyed it as an entertainment. And I feel like for people looking for something

that maybe isn't freighted with history or importance or doesn't have a lot of sequels, like that's a really fun read and you realize just what an expert he is. Those are both great picks. And did you have adaptations you wanted to highlight? Yeah, I thought that we were going to have a little back and forth

potentially about Tinker Taylor because there are people who point to the miniseries as masterful, I never saw it. I'm sorry, World. I really loved the movie with Gary Oldman that came out a couple years ago. I thought it was just wonderful, but I can only imagine the surgery, the slaughter of like whole sections since it's such a big book and we can talk about it right now. The thing about the adaptation of Tinker Tailor is that the movie is too slight and the miniseries might be too much. The miniseries is so dense that I don't even know if it would make sense unless you were not only just a reader of the book, but actually

retained a lot of the information from the book. And that miniseries actually played a huge part in Le Carrey's writing career because he became pretty disillusioned with Smiley as a character because he felt like he couldn't see it or hear it unless it was Alec Guinness's face and Alec Guinness's voice. He had initially planned on doing a series of Smiley novels much more than, I think, the trilogy that it wound up being, but just decided to finish it off, because of the miniseries. The movie looks great. Too many bad wigs and too many truncated parts of the film, I think.

Although I do quite like it. One of my favorite movies the last few years is the trailer for the movie. Yes, the trailer for the movie is sicko. The other one that I would point out, and we don't need to get too into it because we spent a lot of time in the podcast talking about it. But Little Drummer Girl with Florence Pugh is just stunning. I still think about the production design of it. It was a total.

experiential trip to watch. And also really exciting in a kind of hopeful sense, because even though the great grandmaster himself has left, there's so much in this work. And there's so much opportunity when you give it to collaborators and artists who you might not expect, which I thought was so beautiful about Little Drummer.

And I thought Pugh really brought that part to life in a way that I feel like maybe is singular. I also wanted to shout out Little Drummer Girl. I mean, Park Chan-Wuk directed it. I mean, that's the other thing. Like, you have this incredible Korean director, you might on the surface say, what does he have to say about this particular moment in not just English history, Western Spycraft? He had a lot to say about it in a really interesting way. So I would also just shout out Night Manager, which, speaking of Tom Hiddleston,

was really the best version of, like, light LeCarray. Like, it was much more focused on, I think, locales and vibes and everybody looking beautiful. Billowy shirts. Yeah, and so it's Elizabeth DeBecke is in it and Hugh Lorry. It's very good, but it's a much easier watch, I think, than Little Drummer Girl. It's a little bit more like you can digest it. So those two for the adaptations. Another one of his books that was adapted, and I think sadly didn't get the best treatment

even though I think it had a lot going for it was a most wanted man. And that's one of the novels I wanted to recommend. Oh, I love that movie, actually. I was pretty surprised by it. Yeah, you know, that one had the tough, what accent are we doing from scene to scene issue? Philip Seymour Hoffman is great in that movie, although I just kind of wish he spoke German.

I mean, he is a head of the German, or one of the heads of the German intelligence service in the movie. And you just kind of like wish there was like a feeling like this wasn't a guy lumbering through a German accent in English. But that's a cool movie. the novel is awesome. The novel is about as tight and propulsive a thriller that you can read while still getting this huge hit of like these literary flourishes and these absolutely like virtuoso segments. There's a part of the book that I return to very often, which is essentially like

a four or five page monologue from the character that Philip Seymour Hoffman portrays in the movie. that is, it just will melt your face. And it's essentially about Hamburg, the city's reaction to 9-11 and being in some ways like a staging ground for some of the terrorists who conducted 9-11. So most wanted man would be my like thriller.

Obviously Tinker Taylor, little drummer girl, all those totemic ones are really big. But Andy and I have mentioned throughout the pod, Perfect Spy. And, you know, I could go on and on about it, but I think you should just take Philip

Roth's recommendation where he said it's the best novel in English written since the war. So it's a novel about fathers and sons and it's also a novel about spies and it's also basically a map of the human mind. Like when you read it, you do actually feel like you are experiencing human consciousness. It is a fucking towering achievement and one of the best novels I've ever read. And if you have the appetite to make it a project, you got to check this out. It is perfect spy is just one of the great novels you will ever read. I can think of no more perfect way to send off the man himself and send off our podcast. Yeah.

So we'll be back on Thursday with our best TV of the year episode with Sam S-Mail. Until then, talk to you guys soon. Great job.