MCUniverse: Echo - Full Season Review

[00:00:00] Welcome to the MCUniverse, where the Lorehounds, your guides to the multiverse and beyond. I'm David. I'm Jean. And I'm Alicia. And we're your guides to Echo's ass-kicking ancestry. Your plays on words are so great, Alicia. Today, we're breaking down the new Marvel show,

[00:00:40] Echo, which dropped all five episodes on Disney Plus this week. We'd also love to hear your thoughts about Echo and everything else Marvel. Email your feedback to mcu at the lorehounds.com or head over to our website at the lorehounds.com

[00:00:55] and use the contact form or record us a voicemail. For ad-free versions of this and all of our podcasts, check us out at patreon.com slash the lorehounds. I'll share more about the Patreon as

[00:01:06] well as notes about our upcoming programming schedule at the end of the podcast. Also, we'd be forever grateful if you could help us get more ears tuned into the Lorehounds MCUniverse. All you need to do is drop us a five-star rating and review wherever you're listening. Apple

[00:01:24] Podcasts is especially helpful, even if it's just a few quick words. We read all the reviews and they mean a lot to us. And before we get started, just a quick spoiler warning. We'll

[00:01:36] of course be spoiling all of the Marvel Spotlight Series Echo, but spoilers from the rest of the MCU and the Marvel Comics are also on the table. Hey ho, Marvel fans. Alicia, Jean, good to see you guys.

[00:01:48] I am podcasting from the basement of my in-laws again this weekend. We decided to pack up the cat and all our stuff. We had an unexpected school closure on Friday and then we have, of course,

[00:02:00] the holiday on Monday here in the United States. So if I sound a little bit different, that's why doing the old set up on some weird plastic boxes and some game board pieces and tables all balanced

[00:02:15] and crazy. Anyway, how are you guys? Jean, how are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. Battling a little cold, but everything is okay. I think everybody's battling a little bit of something. It is the season. In weeks. Yeah. And Alicia's on the mend too, right? Thank goodness.

[00:02:34] Yep. On the mend, watching movies again, whether or not that's good for my ears. And you went to go see a Big Boom movie. You saw the Godzilla. Yeah, I went to see Godzilla, which I heartily recommend. And I was like, I talked about before,

[00:02:51] I was like, I just can't keep up with all the different IPs and Godzilla is just going to be one that's out for me. But after hearing all the good stuff about this, I had to give it a shot.

[00:03:00] And yes, this is for me easily the best Godzilla movie I've seen. Now I know, I understand I also need to see Shin Godzilla and then compare those two. But what I've seen, by far the best.

[00:03:11] Yeah. I mean, it's a great entry back into the world from Toho, the Toho Corporation that owns the main Godzilla rights and has had it. So yeah, maybe we'll see some fun stuff.

[00:03:24] Yeah, I don't want to get into it all, into the monster of it all. But I think that this movie is a solid offering. And if they keep producing some stuff, it'll be a fun thing to jump into from time to time.

[00:03:35] Yes. Yeah, I would love to see a sequel to this, but I'm not going to see Godzilla versus Kong. I don't think. Yeah, yeah. I'm not into that as much. Anyway, well, we're not here to talk about monster

[00:03:45] ghost stuff. We're here to talk about Echo Go ass kick. I don't know. I was trying to find the word. Yeah, so we've got a lot to talk about. We're going to do this as a single

[00:04:00] podcast because we dropped all five. But I have to say, well, I don't want to get too far into it yet because we want to touch on some Marvel news really quick. But it was a pretty easy watch given

[00:04:09] the five episodes. So but we're going to bundle it all into one episode just to make it easy. Binge shows are never fun to try to cover episodically. It's a lot of work for not

[00:04:21] a lot of podcast return. That said, anything new in the on our Marvel radars that we should be aware of? I see you've got a note here. Well, I mean, I think the biggest news people are buzzing about this week ties right into what

[00:04:37] we're talking about, which is that the Defenders verse series, the Marvel Netflix series have been added to the official Marvel timeline on Disney plus. So short of a direct statement from Feige, this is the most official announcement we've gotten that these series are pretty much canon.

[00:04:54] And that of course leads right into Fisk in this series. That's I don't know, I'm kind of just still processing the news. John, what do you what's your feelings on it? Because I'm trying to resolve my own feelings. You've always seen it,

[00:05:07] Ken. Yeah, that's exactly right. I'm glad that they said it. They've always existed in the same world to me. Because they pulled some stuff from the original from 2012 Avengers and Secret Wars

[00:05:27] from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. into those Marvel Netflix shows. So I'm just happy that we could potentially get to see Luke Cage, Jessica Jones again. I really want to see them interact with

[00:05:45] other Marvel characters in the way that they do in the comic books. And I think it's going to be a pretty good thing, a really good thing if they do because those stories, some of my favorite Marvel stories that they've told on screen. So I'm really excited and

[00:06:04] hopefully that they do remain canon. And it's not just somebody saying some thing that they'll walk back in a few months. But yeah, yeah, it's really exciting. It's an exciting time. I'm kind of excited too, I think, because I appreciate the

[00:06:28] efficiency is not the right word, the conservation of all of the hard work that was done already and the enjoyment that we all had for those different shows. And to just bend them would have felt like,

[00:06:45] yeah, okay, but that would have been a little bit disappointing and kind of like, oh shucks, you're just throwing away something we all really enjoyed. Where now this embracing of it, it just feels like, yeah, thank you. It's an acknowledgement that there was hard work that

[00:07:03] went into those. There were interesting stories that were told in those and that those production validates. And the casting was spot on. What's that? Yeah. The casting was spot on. And I think that's one of the reasons why they're like, okay,

[00:07:16] because we really do want to keep these actors if we can. Yeah. I hope you're right. I hope that's the case. I hope that they keep Mike Colter for Luke Cage. He was great. Yeah. Yeah. And I hope we get Iron Fist Colleen Wing Iron Fist.

[00:07:35] I didn't even go near Iron Fist by that time. It was like, oh yeah. I'm not sure what they were doing. Okay. Well, that's cool news. That's fun. And as you said, it ties directly in.

[00:07:45] So I guess let's start talking about our spoiler-free hot takes for Echo. We'll get into a more deeper breakdown after we take a break, but first let's sort of go around Robin.

[00:07:56] I will say that I enjoyed this season of television. I felt it was a real easy watch. I didn't feel like... We had a compressed amount of time between the time we were recording and

[00:08:11] the time we had to watch it, and I'm watching a bunch of other stuff, and we're about to cover True Detective. And so I'm going deep on that. And we've got a couple of other shows we're picking

[00:08:18] up. And I was like, oh God, I'm going to be really stressed this week or whatever. And actually it was just a really easy watch. And I didn't have a lot of effort in terms of

[00:08:30] consuming the content. And by the time I got to five, I finished four. And then I was like, oh, I got to watch this other episode, but maybe I should just finish five. I was like,

[00:08:40] yeah, I'm going to finish five because I'm on a roll here. So let's go. So I felt like the energy and the pacing of the show as a season overall wasn't bad. That said, I really hope that this is the last of this bullshit from the studio about

[00:08:55] messing with the scripts and the edits and churning it through whatever machine. Because I think while I ultimately enjoyed the season, there was a lot of misses and there's a lot of structural problems with it. But I was really entertained and I really enjoyed the way that

[00:09:16] they centered the story with different characters and different types of storytelling. I was really amazed at how well we moved from English to Choctaw to ASL and flowed back and forth between these three different distinct languages. It just felt so seamless to me and felt really enjoyable.

[00:09:39] And so all of that is great. And I feel like there's a huge potential for this character, but then I got really disappointed in how they handled certain aspects of it. Never so much

[00:09:50] that I wanted to throw the, run away from the show. And I guess when we talk about it relative to the Netflix series is, I kind of put it in that same boat. I feel like I would put it in

[00:10:06] along with those. It's not an Avengers marquee movie where we're ending a major arc or something like that. But if I were going to watch this right along with a daredevil or something like that,

[00:10:17] I feel the quality and the storytelling was right in there. So it was very satisfying in that regard. Episode four was the absolute highlight for me. I really enjoyed the heck out of that. And I was

[00:10:28] super excited. I even went on our Discord and I was like, oh yeah, this is cooking. It's good. But then, you could feel the Marvel studio machine doing its thing. And I just hope

[00:10:39] that this is the last of that. I don't know. I'm a little worried for Agatha because Agatha has gone through so many changes as well. I mean, but I think the changes, it's always going to be a

[00:10:50] part of, it's always been part of the Marvel formula and it's always going to be part of a Marvel formula, I think. But the question is, I don't know if it's going to be part of

[00:10:59] the Marvel formula, I think. But the question is like, why and how are they making these changes? Like for example, Daredevil, we know that they just went back and they're like, rewrite that whole thing. But that means that it went from apparently Foggy and Karen being dead

[00:11:17] to apparently Foggy and Karen are going to now be in the series. So for me, yay for that rewrite. Right. So I guess, yeah. And I agree that here there are some things were not done for the right

[00:11:30] reasons. Yeah. There were times where I really felt like, okay, the show is doing what the show wanted to do and say, and then there were other times like, is this the machine where I can see

[00:11:39] the scenes here or the lack of budget or I don't know what's going on. And again, it didn't take me out. It didn't spoil my entertainment of watching this, but I could just feel the awkwardness of it.

[00:11:54] And that was disappointing at the same time. I can see the potential for this character and the storyline. And I'm really excited for letting the writers and the showrunners and the actors

[00:12:06] cook, right? Like let these people tell stories and get away from the big machine stuff about it. So I'm really looking forward to the future. My last note is the trailers got me really hyped

[00:12:18] for a super dark and gritty story. And in the end, my expectations about that weren't met. I think they could have gone harder and I would have been, they had a lot of room for me to go to

[00:12:32] really push it into a much darker, grittier place. But Disney, how does Disney balance that? But at the end of it, yeah, overall, very entertained, very happy with episode four was

[00:12:47] sort of the best for me overall. And really looking forward to where they go next. Joan, what about you? Oh wait, can I ask you David real quick? So you obviously, you know, you got the echo recap

[00:13:01] in our last What If episode, we talked about it. But as the person coming with the freshest perspective, I'm just wondering how you think this worked as the Marvel spotlight. So this Marvel spotlight brand is supposed to be something you're able to watch without knowing anything else about

[00:13:17] the characters in the world. Do you think that it was successful in that way for you? I guess I'm not a perfect subject to test that theory on because I did see Hawkeye, because I watched Daredevil. But it's been a long time and obviously I don't hold these

[00:13:37] characters in my head in the same way as a non-comic book reader. So coming into it and doing that whole episode one flashback speed up thing, up until the point where she

[00:13:53] was riding her motorbike and sort of stopped to deal with her stuff, I don't want to, again, we're spoilers free, about halfway through that episode maybe it was. I felt that it did a good

[00:14:07] job for laying out the context. I got her backstory. I got these conflicts. We got, I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that yeah, there's a couple of characters that make an

[00:14:18] appearance in the beginning of it. So I thought it worked and I was fine with it. I was actually entertained by a good chunk of the flashbacky stuff at the beginning. So yeah, I think it kind

[00:14:33] of worked for me. I don't have any memory of reacting strongly against it. Does that answer the question, I guess? Sure. I didn't go out into the street, light my hair on fire and started

[00:14:46] running around screaming at what they did. I think it was effective. I think it was great. I don't know that I love the spotlight logo. It seems a little Lucas artsy for me or I don't know,

[00:14:58] something different, but whatever. That's just a font choice. That doesn't mean anything about the content. So Jean, what about you? I enjoyed the series. I liked it. Yeah, I get the things that you're pointing out, the marvel-y stuff about it, the studio stuff about it. But again,

[00:15:22] it didn't take me out of the story as a whole. I think they did a great job with Echo, with Maya. The performance was spot on for me. Everything that they were trying to convey

[00:15:40] was conveyed to me. Her story, her personal story, her journey was felt by me. There are things to say about Vincent that I will say. The things that I will say about him are not at all bad. The guy is the embodiment of... If

[00:16:08] someone embodies a character, he embodies the character. I'm not even a comic book reader and I'm picking up on that. He embodies this character. There are ways that, yes, the show

[00:16:26] could have been better, but what they did in the show was show you a slice of the MCU that we hardly ever get to see. A really personalized slice of the MCU, a really personal story

[00:16:47] that has nothing to do with anything else that's going on in the broader sense of the Marvel universe. It's not about incursions. It's not about- Watchers, stones. Witches and... It's not about any of that. It's just a very personal story,

[00:17:04] which was what the Netflix shows were about. They were personal stories about these heroes. That's a good point. I hadn't thought of it that way before. I really love that about this because this is Marvel's spotlight, and it's a spotlight on

[00:17:23] these characters. I think they did a great job of shining the light on these characters. I don't have the reaction that I had watching the first episode, and there's one particular scene, I think it's in the fourth episode. There's one particular scene that just made me scream,

[00:17:44] like, holy shit, I can't believe this happened. I'm just like, if you can get that from me, if you can get that reaction from me, like holy shit reactions, then you're doing something right.

[00:18:02] You're doing something right. There are shows that I watch and I enjoy, I never go, holy shit. I had that reaction to Fargo episode nine the other week. Anyway, but that's a different show. No, but that feeling-

[00:18:16] I had pointing out when you get excited by something and you have a physical... Yeah, yeah. And you verbalize- Yeah. You have a moment and it's just like, man, then you look, I paused the show and I was just like,

[00:18:31] what the fuck? It's just like, wow, okay, they did this thing. This thing I felt really was like, holy shit. And then I went back to the show. Well, excited to get into the spoilers so we can tell you what it was.

[00:18:46] I had to take it in. I had to take it in and then I paused, took it in and then I restarted the show. You know what I mean? So if you're doing that for me at any point in a story, then you're doing something right. Nice.

[00:19:01] And for me, they did something right. Right on. Alicia? Yeah, I really enjoyed the show, but I start to just get worn down by the whole story going on where people are complaining about Marvel fatigue and stuff. I'm like,

[00:19:21] I have Marvel fatigue fatigue. Just shut up and enjoy the show. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Because it just... So that did like, was a damper on me, that and the whole binge model. I'm not

[00:19:33] a fan of the binge model at all for a lot of reasons. But yeah, and just people commenting on Twitter horrible things about... Well, I won't even get into it. Yeah. People being horrible in the ways you expect with a disabled female character.

[00:19:48] We got you, Alicia. We're here. We're here together to... Don't let it bring you down. I know. But if I block all that out, then I found this to be like a good solid show. Like I'd give it an

[00:20:01] eight out of 10. So I mean, that's not a 10 out of 10. And the problems for me come back to... It's not on the creatives, but I agree with you. It's on the execs. I think that they really threw the show under the bus when they did this release schedule.

[00:20:20] There were budget cuts. There was supposed to be six episodes and then they told them like... Total of five. Halfway through writing, oh, it's going to be five episodes. There's definitely some production issues where you could feel the budget constraints. Yeah.

[00:20:33] And they... Yeah. Maya was going to... They were going to set her up for Daredevil at the end, have her back in New York and they cut that part out. So her future in the MCU remains uncertain,

[00:20:44] which I'm very unhappy with because it feels like they keep cutting back on the most important stuff to me personally, because they want to keep the fanboys who just want Iron Man back or whatever. Dunedin is... And you can have both.

[00:20:58] Ahsoka is doing this. There was one other show I was thinking about this, or Mandalorian. Tell us what the plans are so we can be hyped. If I walked out of Dune knowing that Dune 2 was already greenlit, my hype for the first movie would have been bigger.

[00:21:15] Would have been, yeah. But if I walk in uncertain or you don't have the news for me as I walk out, you're just dampening my enthusiasm overall and my hype overall.

[00:21:26] Well, I mean, I understand a lot of things are up in the air right now as they sort of figure out their new way. But I just hate that. I think they're just listening too much to

[00:21:35] the wrong type of fanboys and give them the characters that they want. You know, give us that Hulk movie. I will be there in the front row for that. Not in the front row,

[00:21:44] I'll be in the middle of the theater where the sound is the best. But yeah, but I want to see more of this character in particular. Like David, when you and I started talking however long ago,

[00:21:58] this was one of the first things that I brought up that I was looking forward to in MCU. Right. So I've been looking forward to this for a long time. And I think,

[00:22:07] you know, I'm quite happy with the results. I felt they did a good job balancing her backstory and why she is the way she is with the criminal network politics and her family life today.

[00:22:19] I really liked that recap episode, personally. I think there was a lot of great camera work. Yes. Fisk was so very Fisk in all like the best worst ways, you know? But I was glad that this was

[00:22:35] ultimately this was a show about Echo and her family. And I like that. Yes. I could have used a little bit more fighting, but, you know, the choreography that we had was good. Yeah. Something you said, Alicia, just really struck me. You said

[00:22:52] the show is not a 10 out of 10. It's an 8 out of 10. Why is the barometer being set that everything must be a 10 out of 10? No, exactly. Exactly. I agree. I agree. That's the inherent problem. Glad we got this. Yeah. What does it have to be a success? Yeah.

[00:23:09] That is the inherent problem. Everything comes through the lens as if this is not a 10 out of 10. It's terrible. It's a failure. Right. No. No. And it's a very small vocal- It's like if you give a four star review on something, then you diss them somehow. Right.

[00:23:26] Or, you know, on a- Well, actually I do- Or something. For instance, the movie theater that I go to, after I go, they send me surveys afterwards, like, how was your visit? And if I rate it was an 8 out of 10, they're like, why so low? Right. Exactly. That's-

[00:23:40] An 8 out of 10 is not low. I always select, yeah, that's an option for the response. Like, that's not a low score. Right. It's not a low score. But we've been conditioned by this very small, vocal,

[00:23:53] racist, misogynist, sexist, homophobic minority to think that if a show is not a 10 out of 10, according to whatever scale they're using, according to whatever measurements they're using, whatever criteria they're using, that the show is a failure. Now this has become a thing

[00:24:15] throughout the critique of the MCU and superhero genre in general. Yeah. And that is a problem. The Marvels. That is a problem. The Marvels is a fine movie, and it's going to do very well. Not 10 out of 10. It's going to make a lot of money.

[00:24:28] No, it's not a 10 out of 10. It's not a 10 out of 10. It's not a failure. But you'll enjoy the movie if you watch it. It would have been a 9 out of 10 if they had put that musical stuff back in there.

[00:24:35] So until we address this rather large elephant in the room as a community, then we'll continue to feel the fatigue of the Marvel fatigue that you're expressing, Alicia. Interesting. And that is the problem. Yeah.

[00:24:52] You know, I don't need... Everything is not going to be a 10 out of 10, but that's okay. Because you know what? In this last, what, seven months, I've got a zero out of 10. On my list. Right? I got a zero out of 10.

[00:25:10] Talk me out of giving that show a zero. Can somebody talk me out of giving it a zero? What is that? Is that that one show? That one show that we don't talk about. That one show that we don't talk about. We always talk about.

[00:25:21] Well, how are we supposed to talk about it if we... If we talk you out of it? Because you can't talk me out of it. That's the problem. That's the point. I'm giving that... You know, that is... Clearly. And that one clearly went through the studio meat grinder.

[00:25:37] Yes. It went through the grinder and it was terrible for it. But the show was terrible. And it showed. So there is truth that some shows are bad, some shows are good. And some shows are really, really bad. And some shows are just outstanding.

[00:25:59] Everything doesn't have to be outstanding. Everything is not going to be outstanding. It's not a binary, you know, it's a pass fail thing. Although if it were binary pass fail, the show passes. The show passes. Yeah. It passes. But okay.

[00:26:11] Speaking of our own ratings, this was the first TVMA property officially in the MCU. Do we think it earned that? What do we think the violence is on the Pukila scale? And for those who might not be aware, we've got a couple of different frameworks

[00:26:29] that we like to use within the Lorehounds community. We have the Shippy test. We have the, is it Sanderson? I always forget. Sanderson, yeah. The Sanderson scale between adaptation versus inspiration. And then we also now have the Pukila test, which is named after our dear friend and favorite

[00:26:50] Tolkien scholar, Marilyn R. Pukila. And it rates the violence on a relative scale based on the rings of power being, is it more violent or less violent? And would Marilyn watch it? If it goes over the scale, then it's something that she wouldn't watch because the violence

[00:27:08] is too much and too intense. I think it gets a plus one on the Pukila scale for me, starting at a zero point. I think it's just over the line. There's a few early on fight scenes, and there was certainly one gruesome death

[00:27:22] that I think they gave an extra, they put some extra shots on it to really push it at us. Yeah. And then otherwise- And that's what they keep advertising in the trailer too. Yeah. But otherwise by and large, except for the flashback stuff and that one other scene,

[00:27:39] I think it was pretty mild. Like I said, it could have gone harder and darker for me. Yeah. I thought it was going to be more violent. I knew it wasn't going to be. Yeah. Okay. I knew it wasn't going to be like Punisher dark.

[00:27:56] I knew it wasn't going to be like Daredevil dark because it's on Disney+. Right. Yeah. If that show would have lived on another platform, I could have seen it. That's on Hulu too. Yeah, but it's not-

[00:28:10] I mean, I watch American Horror Story on Disney+, so it's hard for me to say- But American Horror Story is not a Disney plus thing though. No, it's not made by them. Right, that's what I'm saying. I think that's the difference.

[00:28:22] So we can watch all the Netflix shows on Disney+, but they're not made. I think there's a difference. So I expected some violence. I didn't expect it to be, like I said, Punisher violence. Right. So on the peculiar scale, I would say it's over the scale. Yeah.

[00:28:46] But it's not over the scale where it's like, oh my God, this is awesome. Right. Well, that's what I'm saying. If we start this scale at a zero, because this is a new... We're still exploring what this scale really means.

[00:28:59] If we start at the neutral position of zero, that's why I give it a plus one. Yeah. The violence is predictable in this. It's not like in the third episode of the second season of Wheel of Time, something violent happens very suddenly.

[00:29:15] Then I would be like, you need to know that's about to happen, or we'll have that image in your head for life. Right, right, right. And this is like... The fight scenes at the beginning, there's some stuff where, if you don't like violence...

[00:29:29] I think it's the sound mixing that's more... True. The sound mixing does a lot of the heavy lifting for that, the squishy sound of blood smattering. Yes. Cool. And I liked... They did the camera work.

[00:29:45] The question is, how well does this fit into the Daredevil Netflix Marvel pantheon? And I agree, it's not as dark and violent and much shorter, obviously, but you could see really, especially in the fight scenes, the choreography, the camera work they did there, that it shared a pedigree.

[00:30:03] They even had some of the same coordinators. There was one... I want to talk about it, but we can't because we got to take a break. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about it. Let's go. There was just some fight choreography.

[00:30:14] Yeah, let's get into it. Do we have a fight choreography? Let's do some spoiler stuff. Yeah, let's get into it. All right, well, let's take our break. And then when we come back, this is your spoiler warning that we're going to come in and talk about spoilers.

[00:30:26] So we'll be right back. And we are back. Okay, spoiler stuff. Here we go. This is it. If you're a Patreon person and you had the ads cut out, this is where we're going to get into it.

[00:30:51] There was one little part in the fight scene with Daredevil where she's in the cage. And she does this thing where she pauses and re-aims her kick because he moves. I was like, oh, that was so cool. I really liked that.

[00:31:06] This is a fighter who is thinking tactically in the moment. It's not pure choreograph, flowing, whatever. There's like, she's like, oh, boom. Right? You moved your head. Now I'm going to move my foot to make sure I connect.

[00:31:20] And I was just like, I haven't seen that in a lot of choreographed fight scenes before. It really made me happy. I think it's a callback to the comic character who watches other people and mimics their, whatever they're doing. I like that. I like that take.

[00:31:38] So she's able to watch someone else, whether it's their fighting style, even playing the piano, for instance. And she's able to just, okay, I see what you're doing and I can do the same thing. So for me, that's the call.

[00:31:51] I got a call back to the comic character, watching this person fight, understanding what they're going to do, and then counteracting what they're doing, which was really cool. Very cool. Okay. Now that we got that out of the way, because I'm super excited.

[00:32:05] I have to ask, John, now that we're on the spoiler side of things, what's the moment in episode four that made you stop and pause and go back? I don't know, but what's the moment? The moment I'm talking about is when... That made you scream. Fisk. Yeah.

[00:32:24] When he opened, when he said, this is, he got that box. Oh, the hammer. He was talking, you know, about his father. I take him out and he got the box and I said, holy shit, this is my, he got the hammer in the box. I know.

[00:32:42] Does he have the hammer in the box? No way. He's just carrying that around. And I'm just like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Get to the box. Open the box. And it's the hammer! I had to pause. I had to pause.

[00:32:57] This guy has the hammer in the box. He's deranged. He is. He's out of his mind. He is completely out of his mind. I was, I said, no, the guy is walking around with the hammer in the box. The hammer that he killed his father with.

[00:33:17] For him, it's a symbol of his freedom from his father, but it's not. It's actually the thing that's holding him in place. It's your derangement. Yes. It's reinforcing your derangement. You killed your dad. No matter how horrible that dad he was, you killed him. Right. Yeah.

[00:33:34] With a hammer. And you keep it. For all these years, you apparently have it in a box that you take with you on trips. Yo! Then he thinks he wants to have that. Like that's gonna help him. Yeah, he'll join me in my psychosis.

[00:33:56] He'll join me in my dysfunction. Kill your father. Take the hammer and be free. He killed your actual father. Yeah. Take the hammer and be free. Great Star Wars comp right there, right? Between strike him down and join me. Right. Strike me down and join the empire.

[00:34:13] Take the hammer and be free. What? What? That's why episode four was my favorite. Go ahead. Sorry, Alicia. No, I was just saying, I love her responses. She's just like, nah, dude. Like I am not as messed up as you. I just realized that.

[00:34:29] She's like, this is the hammer? This is the hammer? I'm like, yeah, that's the hammer. That's the hammer. I was like, oh man. Woo! This boy, that boy had some issues. Yeah. I'm so glad to have him back.

[00:34:46] Do you want to step back really quick, Alicia, and cover some of the meat potatoes here? So the series was created by Marion Dare, which is her, that's her like pen name. Her real name is Heather Williams, but it's interesting that her pen name is rooted.

[00:35:05] She took that name from her paternal family names. So you can see this is also a theme that goes throughout the series as well. Echoing across the generations. She also grew up in a family funeral director. So does a lot of thinking about death. So that's interesting. Wow.

[00:35:21] But she's previously best known for writing on Better Call Saul. Nice. I love that show. Yeah. And the other head writer is Amy Rardin, who's got a lot of TV writing production experience on direction. It was led by Sydney Freeland.

[00:35:36] She's Navajo and especially known for telling Native American stories. The episode three director was Katrina McKenzie, who's an Aboriginal Australian. So she's got lots of TV experience, including apparently being the first Aboriginal woman to direct a US series.

[00:35:51] But we still, you know, she's from somewhere else, but she's got that same perspective of wanting to tell Native stories that are often glossed over. I feel like we're getting a nice breeze blowing in with a lot of stories from different communities.

[00:36:11] We're in the middle of watching, well, sorry, not in the middle, but just started watching True Detective Night Country. John and I got access to screeners. There's a lot of stuff that just brings Native Alaskan culture forward.

[00:36:25] I know Alaska, I'm not sure of all the appropriate tribal names. So I don't know whether to just call it Inuit or what have you, because there's more than one group there. But to bring those stories forward and to bring in Callie Reese, who is a boxer and

[00:36:43] an actor and an activist in her own right, to Kohore the episode in What If? I mean, I know Killers of the Flower Moon is a Scorsese thing, but it's talking about something that's very relevant to this. So I feel like there's... Yeah, Prey. Prey. Prey.

[00:36:57] Another shout out. Yeah. It's just great to see that there is kind of a... And then of course we're getting stuff like Michelle Yao, we have a Yao Ressence is what one of our Discord users, Adrienne, called it.

[00:37:12] And she, you know, we've got everything everywhere and The Brother's Son, which I'm watching right now. It's a lot of fun and American Boy and Chinese. So I feel like we're making a lot of great inroads into telling stories that encompass the reality of our world.

[00:37:31] Yeah, it's more interesting than telling the same Anglo-Saxon stories over and over. And it's great that these... Although we still do that too. Sure, sure. Of course, we're not diminishing. It's an abundance.

[00:37:42] And it's just great to hear that I didn't realize that all of the primary creative team here are all coming with their own perspectives on this. Agreed. Okay, so just a couple lines to recap the series as a whole. We're set five months after the events of Hawkeye.

[00:38:00] So Jean expertly recapped those last episode of this podcast. And Maya Lopez is being pursued by Wilson Fisk's organization, leading to her return to her hometown in Oklahoma, where she must come to terms with her past, reconnect with her Native American roots and embrace her family and community.

[00:38:21] So I just wanted to, just as an act of positivity, I was wondering what is everyone's favorite moment from the series? It doesn't involve a hammer. David, what do you think? I had two. One is a bigger arc thing, related thing in the way the episode was structured.

[00:38:44] But for an individual moment, I think it was Maya getting that visual implant contact thing where she could see the ASL being gestured out as somebody was speaking. And what I liked about that, it was rather than saying, oh, we're going to fix you

[00:39:06] by giving you the ability to hear. No, we're going to, I'm actually giving you the ability for me, for my words to go directly into a language structure that you're able to take on board right away.

[00:39:21] And so I thought that that was a really clever and interesting thing. And I thought that technologically, in the way they made it look, it looked great. It seemed to work great. And so I really enjoyed the fact that they didn't fix Maya, but instead leaned into who

[00:39:36] she is and then enabled something where you didn't have to murder a translator. Yeah. That was rough. I also liked that moment, but I liked it because it showed early on, and I was glad that she directly called it out later.

[00:39:55] But I was like, in the first episode, I was like, I can't believe that Fisk has been like inserting himself as a parental figure in this child's life for the past 15 or so years. And he doesn't bother to learn sign language.

[00:40:08] And then he ends up just cheating with technology instead of bothering to learn it. Whereas you see everyone in her family in Oklahoma, they all, of course, her mother was also deaf, so they know it for that reason too. But everyone there is making the effort.

[00:40:24] You can see often characters are searching for words because they're not always fluent in it, but they're all making the effort to talk to her in her own language rather than saying, I'm too busy to learn that. Here's a technology cheat. Right.

[00:40:41] I hadn't thought about that as a further extension of Fisk's character, but it plays perfectly into that. That makes sense. It does. It's good logic. Yeah. And my other favorite thing is everything with biscuits. What about you, John?

[00:40:53] So my second, well, I had two, sorry, I had that visual thing, but then the other thing was just the mirroring of the Fisk conversation and the Chula conversation that Maya has.

[00:41:07] And she's talking to these two important figures of part of her life and that are pulling her in these different directions. And I just appreciated the way that the show slowed down and had the conversations and

[00:41:24] had the emotional play and did the hammer and talked about her mother's death and what her grandmother did and didn't do. And when Maya says, you didn't choose me, you chose yourself. I was like, boom, that was just such a great line.

[00:41:44] And so the way that they set that episode up with that tension between these two strong figures in Maya's life, I really liked that construction. And I thought that this was the show at its best in storytelling by really putting Maya

[00:42:01] into that conundrum of who am I going to choose and which way I have this anger and this pain from both sides and who am I within this? It felt like the human heart in conflict with itself, which if you're a long time listener,

[00:42:19] you know, that's my thing. If you're doing that with a story and you're telling that kind of story, you've got my attention and you've got me engaged. I really thought that that made the series for me was that construction of those two conversations. What about you, Jean?

[00:42:38] Um, the opening scene with the creation myth, Shafa and them climbing out of the, as the roof is falling down on them and climbing out of that tunnel and being on a savanna or grass plains and the clay, the red clay falling off their skin.

[00:43:00] I thought that was just really, really visually just really nice to watch. Yeah. And I'm a sucker for mythology stuff. So this is the lore hounds podcast. So, all right. So, you know, getting that, uh, thrown into a superhero story because my superhero story

[00:43:22] started with mythology for me. Right. And it's just, um, it was really cool to see something that we haven't seen before or talked about before, or before you sent that, um, you sent a link about creation myths last time. About the Mohawk. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:43:41] About the Mohawk, which I hadn't, hadn't read before. Um, that was really compelling for me. I, it kind of set the tone for, for me to watch the rest of the series because it took me in

[00:43:55] a, in a, it put me in a, in a, in the mind frame either, even though I knew that this series is going to focus on, you know, called Native American culture that I haven't focused on before. Right.

[00:44:07] Um, it's, it, it set it up for me emotionally to be prepared to, to have these conversations in my head as I'm watching the series play out, um, what it means to be displaced, what

[00:44:23] it means to, you know, be connected to your ancestors in a way that matters really. Right. And that really was something that was, was great for me. So that opening scene, that opening montage of the creation myth of the Choctaw people

[00:44:44] that, that's probably my favorite outside of the hammer. That was my favorite, um, scene in the show. Did you get strong Kohori vibes from that? I thought they were going to like lean into the Kohori story for a second there. I thought there was some test around it.

[00:44:59] Well, there's a, we're gonna, we're gonna talk more about the creation myth when we talk about, uh, the, the ancestors who gave Echo her powers. Um, but there are certain overlaps, especially we'll see. Okay. So just a little general Choctaw background. Sure. Um, the Choctaw were originally Southeastern.

[00:45:16] So the Mohawk were North Eastern. Uh, so Southeastern, both woodland tribes, you're going to see a lot of similarities. There's also, yeah, a lot of similarities across Native American, um, creation myths like the Choctaw in their creation story. They were the first, their language is the original.

[00:45:35] And then there was a sort of tower of Babel situation that they say created all the other tribes. But yeah, so they were originally based around Mississippi. They are what, uh, the, the Europeans dubbed the five so-called civilized tribes, which are the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks and Seminoles.

[00:45:55] And they called them this because they were the ones who they like align themselves with the European. They started to wear more European dress, started to intermarry more with Europeans. But even though, um, despite that they still moved them when, you know, Andrew Jackson

[00:46:12] decided that all the tribes should be moved. So this movement is called the trail of tears. And that's usually the one people learn most about in school. There were other ones like from the Potawatomi we're part of, from the Great Lakes region

[00:46:24] that was called the trail of death. This is the actual trail of tears. Um, and so a lot of them, most of them ended up in Oklahoma, which is where they dumped all the tribes, uh, before, yeah, they, because the land was barren.

[00:46:40] So they dumped all the tribes there. And then during the Great Depression, this is when the tribe started to find oil, but we'll talk about killers of the flower moon a different day. Right. Um, but this, so Oklahoma, the name of the state is actually a Choctaw word.

[00:46:54] It means, Okla means people and Hema means red. So that's where the name of the state comes from. Um, it was really cool to see all that. And it is true that because all the tribes are dumped there, like a lot of like powwows

[00:47:08] tend to look the same. So this looked a lot like a Potawatomi powwow to me, only it looked a little bit sparse. I have to say should have been a lot more people there, a lot more going on, but this

[00:47:18] is obviously where the budget was coming up short. Right. Um, so one thing that I just, I have to address this because I keep seeing it coming up. Uh, and this is the whole thing you, you hear about female superheroes and female characters,

[00:47:35] not so much often about male characters, which is people saying that, um, that Echo is too angry, you know, Ah, kick rocks. Yeah. Like, well, first of all, she's a quadruple minority. So she's female, she's native American growing up off the reservation.

[00:47:53] She's an amputee and she's deaf and each identity is more isolating than the last. So that would be enough to be angry, I think as it is. But then she also witnessed the death of both of her parents and Fisk, of course, is there

[00:48:06] the whole time whispering in her ear, manipulating this anger, playing on it. So like, I think if you're cool with Bruce Banner being angry, I see even more reason why Echo would be angry. And like, we've got to just let, accept that women can be angry too.

[00:48:20] A whole character just based off of anger and we have a problem with Echo. Come on, give me a break. Give me a break. And they told a different, they gave a different ending to this.

[00:48:34] She didn't take up the hammer in the moment, nor at the end, she chose a different way, just like they did in the marvels. You know, they chose it a different thing. We don't need to have violence and trauma and re-perpetuating that cycle. She did something different.

[00:48:53] You know, she's, she's, of course, she's angry and she's dealing with it. And she has every reason to be angry. Absolutely. You know, she has every reason in the world to be angry.

[00:49:04] You know, the person that she, she has looked at as her only family took her family away. And then manipulated her and gas lit her. Into being something that, you know, she, her own family would never recognize. How could she not be angry?

[00:49:23] So she's angry at herself and she's angry at Fisk. She's angry at her grandmother for not coming to get her. She's angry at her uncle for leaving. Yeah. He left her. Yeah. He left her. They just kind of abandoned her. Yeah. How could she not be angry?

[00:49:42] No, I have. Come on. Yeah. So I feel like maybe I'm a little extra defensive of this character because like all this stuff about the talking about, like, I also, I feel like her sometimes when I, you know, I visit

[00:49:56] from the East coast and I go back to the reservation and I end up getting like projected upon me from arguments, from arguments from generations before me, you know, things that

[00:50:08] happened when I was a small child or before I was even born and up getting put at, you know, that story ends up getting put on me. So I really feel like that alone without all of these extra things, like I just see no

[00:50:22] reason for her not to be angry basically. Right. Come on. As a, as a parent, when our daughter was younger and especially a bit more in the stroller and things like that, that's one of the nightmares that would plague me was God, what if something

[00:50:38] happened and my child was suddenly left alone in the moment of tragedy and disaster? And I can't, I can't imagine what it would be like to be in that vehicle and look over and realize this horror, this horror that just happened. Right.

[00:51:04] And then to have your family lie to you about it because he didn't tell her the truth when she was in the hospital to, to have a part of your anatomy, you know, for your taken off to save your life, but still that's still a big blow.

[00:51:21] And then to be ripped away from your grandmother and your cousin who are the support that you're going to need as you're moving forward with dealing with these things. Damn, that just, it hit really, really hard.

[00:51:36] And I just felt that the storytelling was so compelling in that whole backstory of telling us who Maya started out of as that just gutted me. It really, really touched me as a parent. I was just like, oh my God, this is horrible. Yeah.

[00:51:54] I also think that the storytelling, you know, the showing, putting us in Maya's perspective is really well done with the camera work and with the sound editing as well. Like, I especially love that moment with the motorcycle where she, you know, puts the band

[00:52:09] around it and sends it like through the window out of the cab car. And we just, we hear it from her perspective, meaning we don't hear anything. We don't hear it. We see it happening. And I also love the camera work.

[00:52:20] There was a lot of great cinematography, great framing of shots and also how they would frame sign language. Like there's one shot where they're, I can't remember who's talking, but they show him signing through the open slots in a bookshelf.

[00:52:35] Um, just really novel ways of, yeah, of showing that, but making sure the people, deaf people who are watching the show, they want to see the sign language. And of course they can read the subtitles, but you know, show that sign language.

[00:52:49] It's, it's such a way of expressing character. It's such an expressive language. Can we segue onto the, the sign language part of it really quick? Now, I don't know if you have it later in that alone or not.

[00:53:00] I was really impressed by all of the other actors who obviously did the professional work to figure, you know, to learn what they needed to learn to be able to, I don't know what their personal histories are with ASL and signing.

[00:53:17] I think they all learned for this basically mostly. They, it was the professionalism that they did because it didn't feel like Graham Green's character or, um, Chula's character. I don't know the actor's name that they, um, it felt natural.

[00:53:35] Like they had been doing, it didn't feel forced or awkward. I, as a former cigarette smoker, I can tell when young, when there are actors who have never smoked before, when they're holding a cigarette, I'm like, ah, or in photography, because that's part of my real life.

[00:53:50] I can tell when people are holding the camera in ways that, okay, no, you, you, you don't, you know, this seems awkward. And the way that the naturalness which they were communicating, uh, was really great.

[00:54:03] And I don't know what it's called when you kind of whisper the words that you're speaking as you're talking. I don't know if that has a name or whether or not they vocalize, but yeah, that was one

[00:54:12] of the things that they were saying was that, uh, people who are less good at less proficient in sign language tend to, because you're trying to link every gesture with the word and they say the words at the same time.

[00:54:23] Whereas if you see people who are really fluent in sign language, they're often not really vocalizing. Yeah. And, and they portrayed that they didn't cut that out or edit it out. They actually included that as part of, um, the storytelling.

[00:54:35] And I just was really, I used to work in a setting where, um, in Seattle where there's a big, uh, ASL program, uh, like one of a, a big center for it. So there was a lot of, the deaf community was all around us all the time.

[00:54:49] And it was, it was really, um, profound to see it again, to see this on screen and to, in the way that they, uh, used it as part of the narrative fabric of the storytelling. They didn't shy away from it. They didn't lean into it.

[00:55:05] They just, it was, it felt really well balanced. And I loved that all of the actors, especially, uh, storied actors like Graham Green, who's been around forever. Right. It was so natural in his expressions and the way that it was really, I just really appreciate

[00:55:23] what they did with it. You know what else I appreciated was the, uh, I love the theme song, the burning by the yeah, yeah, yes. I did not skip it a single time, even though I binged.

[00:55:35] So yeah, we got one of the things that people were looking forward to most was the Daredevil cameo and the rumors were, it was great. The fight was great, but I initially, and about this point, I knew that it was going

[00:55:50] to basically be just that fight, but initially he was supposed to be in it more. There's even rumors that he was going to be looking for Jessica. Um, I just really, that's one of the things where I feel shortchanged by them cutting

[00:56:03] back the, like, I would love to have seen, I want to see them, you know, Echo first appeared in Daredevil, uh, a 1999 issue. That's where their character first came from. I wanted to see more of these two together because it's so interesting to see, you know,

[00:56:17] she's deaf, he's blind. How did they communicate? But yet they even have a love story in the comics. Like I just, I please let us have more Daredevil and Echo. Like I don't, don't listen to the bigots and, you know, just shelve this character because right.

[00:56:33] Was that Charlie Cox? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It wasn't quite sure because it's been a while since it was good. Same guy. Yeah. And that struck me too. In that moment, I'm like, Oh, wait a minute.

[00:56:43] This is a deaf character and a blind character, you know, having a moment on screen together. Like you said, don't show the character. Yeah. I just really want people to watch the show and determine for yourself how you feel about

[00:57:03] the show, you know, wherever you come down on it, just watch the show and determine for yourself how you feel about the show. Yeah. Don't take the idea that we are fatigued when things are done well. Well. There's no fatigue. And it's literally only five episodes.

[00:57:26] Like how much fatigue do you have? And the thing is, like I think on our Discord SubZero, I think he mentioned something that I feel as well is that, you know, I wish the episodes were a little bit longer, a little bit more teased out. Right? Yeah.

[00:57:42] The end felt really compressed. Right. The final episode felt really compressed. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Why did they have one cut? Yeah. Right. And if you're saying that you wish the episodes were longer, then there's two things. One, you want to see more of it.

[00:57:58] And two, you want to see more of it because there was obviously some storytelling that needed to be completed. Yeah. That needed to be fleshed out a little bit more that they weren't able to do. Yeah. Yeah. But the casting was perfect. Yeah.

[00:58:17] Alaco Cox, like don't recast Echo. Huh? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, no, no, no, no. Sorry. Just a joke riffing on recast. Oh, yeah. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. You say recast. Time out. Time out. No, no, no, no. Nobody wants to and they shouldn't.

[00:58:36] And they shouldn't, but I want them to bring her back. And also the young Maya was played by a cousin of hers. Oh, she was great. Oh man. That's why. Yeah, they look a lot alike, but she's not deaf.

[00:58:47] So she learned ASL for the role and she had to like fake having a prosthetic limb and stuff. She was awesome. She was great. She did a great job. So good. They did a great job.

[00:58:55] For not having been a professional or somebody who's pursuing acting, they did a... I don't know what her pursuits are for acting, but... Well, yeah, maybe now she wants to, but... Hopefully she should. But she was awesome.

[00:59:08] And I just have to point out that both, that means both versions of Echo are actually the actresses who play them are from the Menominee tribe. Not Choctaw, but whatever. Okay. Doesn't matter. I also just really loved how they incorporated...

[00:59:23] Echo in the comics does not have a prosthetic leg, but Alaqua Cox does. So they really incorporated it into her character, build it into her fight style and the way she interacts with the world and the story.

[00:59:35] And I just thought that that made the character so much richer and made her fight style so much more distinctive and cool. And when Scully was rebuilding and doing the MacGyver-y kind of like, okay, I'm going to

[00:59:49] cook up some weird-ass prosthetic that uses a mountain bike shock thing and stuff. They had some fun with it there. And I could feel what was coming is, oh, it's going to take me a little while to make you a good new one.

[01:00:09] That all played into her identity and her stepping into this new persona that she's taking on where she's choosing something for herself as opposed to having it... Choosing one or the other, like going back to being the little girl or going back to being

[01:00:33] Fisk's ward or what have you. She's actually stepping forward into something that is of her choice. Right. Yeah, and I thought it was interesting too that the tracksuit mafia of which she was the

[01:00:48] head is not the group that came after her, which I like to think is because they respect her too much. So it was actually the Black Knife Cartel that came after her instead.

[01:00:58] So I just like to think that that's a legacy of showing they're not coming after their queen. So they showed the tattoo on the neck. So that's the Black Knife? Yeah. Okay. And the guy who's the main baddie, was he a tracksuit guy or... No, no, no.

[01:01:19] He was never a tracksuit guy. Right. No. He was always Black Knife. Okay. And is that like a different operation within Fisk's realm of operations? He's got different... Yes, it is from the comics. The kingpin. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You know, he's the kingpin. Yes. Okay. The guy.

[01:01:36] He's got a bunch of different groups. So he's got different organizations underneath him. Everywhere you look. Okay. Everywhere his hands are and everything. Got it. And yeah, and again, Vincent D'Onofrio is just, ah, just born for this part. Do not recast kingpin. No, nobody wants to.

[01:01:54] But I just... The gaslighting, as you put it earlier, that he did when he's like, we both had fathers die. Like, dude, you killed both of them. No! You killed both of them. Yes, like, are you kidding me? Oh, this guy, man. This guy is just like...

[01:02:10] He's terrible. I heard criticism that D'Onofrio was playing it a little bit monodimensional or kind of a flat. I disagree. I disagree totally with that. I'd like to. Yeah. Get out of here. Whoever says that, no.

[01:02:26] But do you think he has something supernatural going on with his durability and healing? Don't you think? Like he gets shot in the eye and then it's only that bad and all this stuff that he went through

[01:02:37] in Hawkeye and he just, he seems supernaturally durable is the way I'm feeling. I always took it that in the Daredevil Netflix shows that there was something a little extra with him. And then in this, I actually turned on, I didn't always understand what was going on

[01:03:00] with the subtitling. I felt like that when I had the subtitles off, I was getting inconsistent viewing of the subtitles, you know, in certain times when they would either ASL or in Choctaw, sometimes they wouldn't be there.

[01:03:14] And I don't know if that was just a tech issue or something. So I just turned on, I just forced on the subtitles. I always watch the subtitles. Yeah. To make sure I was getting everything.

[01:03:24] And the audio description for when a couple of times when Kingpin took off his eye patch, you know, or remove the bandages, they noted gears and wheels clicking and turning or something to that effect indicating to me that there was something mechanical, nanomechanical,

[01:03:49] whatever going on with his eye. Like he's got some sort of bionics or something. So I didn't know if that's something new for the show or if that's something that is, they're pulling up from the comics? No, he's not superpowered in the comic. Okay.

[01:04:06] He is, think of him like a sumo wrestler, right? Okay. This huge person who you think is not muscle, but actually is all muscle. That's basically what he is. So he's not superpowered, but he is probably stronger than you and I, David combined. Right.

[01:04:31] He definitely stronger than I am. Right. He's really, he's a accomplished hand to hand fighter as well as being a really strong human being. So those are basically, and he's just evil. He's just a terrible person who will do whatever it takes to win a fight.

[01:04:55] So really strong, a very accomplished hand to hand fighter who will do whatever it takes to win a fight. That's who he's been in this. So it seems like they put something then in his eye that is going to maybe play into future roles where he's going. Probably.

[01:05:13] Probably. Probably. And then for him as well, it's not armor like Iron Man, but it's like his suit is always made up of some sort of protective armor, like a bulletproof, like Kevlar. Right. From head to toe.

[01:05:34] So he takes shots, but the shots that he takes you think would put him down, but his suit is basically bulletproof, it's armor. So he's a prepared individual for combat. Yeah. I'm wondering what they're going to, I mean, because they're obviously setting him up to

[01:05:52] be, everyone keeps calling him the Thanos of the street level Marvelverse. Well. And I'm here for it. I'm glad to see it. Well, the setup that they gave us at the end, that's calling right back to the comics and

[01:06:13] that's going to be a great arc if they actually pull that off. I think that's going to be some really good stuff coming out of there. Yeah. We can talk about it now if you want it, but. Yeah. Mayor Fisk, let's put it out there. Yeah.

[01:06:31] They totally on the plane, right? Yeah. They made that, they telegraphed that really strongly. Mayor Fisk. Yeah. All I'm saying is we know he's going to be fighting with Daredevil with this probably, hopefully with more people from the Defendersverse, at least some Jessica in there,

[01:06:48] but it's got to be with Echo. Come on. You can't just like introduce her and then I'm so scared they're just going to. Well, she's so central to Fisk's psychology. Yeah, exactly. And his motivation and understanding who he is. Right. He's not who he is without Echo.

[01:07:06] And so to not have her, that would be, that would be, yeah. I don't know what all the plans are for there, but that would be just a fun story world is, yeah, to do this whole Mayor Fisk, Daredevil, just rebuild that.

[01:07:22] That would be really a cool place to be. And you can bring in a lot of different characters because as mayor, he's able to do things that can impact the superhero community at large in New York City. Exactly.

[01:07:37] Not just the Daredevils and the Jessica Joneses and Luke Cages of the superhero universe, but actually all the superheroes. Yeah. But that would be, yeah, that'll be something that Iron Man only dreamed of. Signed the Sokovia Accords. All right, let's go.

[01:08:02] So one thing that I think that this is a factor of the show being chopped up and shortened is I wasn't always completely clear on the exact relationship between people and why people were

[01:08:14] mad at like why people, I was so glad to see Zayn McLaren back as William Lopez, Maya's dad. But I wasn't completely sure why they were mad at him because it seemed like his uncle was also involved in organized crime, but maybe not directly with Fisk.

[01:08:30] Or maybe he was mad about being pulled into Fisk's circuit. His uncle being Chaska Spencer, who played Henry Black Crowe Lopez. What do you guys understand from that? I enjoyed Spencer seeing him and what he brought to that role.

[01:08:50] And I was really confused when she showed up at the skate shop and then they went up onto the water tower. I felt that episode two was the weakest episode in some ways. And I understand we had to move the story forward.

[01:09:05] It was the one that I was like, oh, I was getting a little bit nervous because it felt a little bit, I don't know. And then four brought me, three and then four started to get me excited more.

[01:09:16] The way that I, after finishing the series, kind of thought about it all over again was that Fisk has got a criminal enterprise all over the country. And her family, obviously, her family has been involved with him for a long time at certain levels.

[01:09:36] And maybe he had operations set up there a long time ago that were feeding into his system. And then her dad or her family, part of her family, well him obviously, right?

[01:09:50] Because he married into the family, was involved or got wrapped up and then his brother got wrapped up. And so their legacy is that they are Fisk lieutenants or underlings in some way. So that's the way I kind of re-filtered it back into my head.

[01:10:08] But during the show, I was really confused. I just went with it and then it sort of all made sense after the end. I felt that Trula was, her grandmother was upset, was mad at him because he wasn't what she wanted for her daughter. Yeah. Right. Right.

[01:10:26] He was a criminal. Which that makes sense. Right. He was a criminal. And it doesn't seem like her maternal side of the family was about any of that life. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I think she was mad from the onset, like, how could my daughter marry this guy?

[01:10:43] She says as much in the hospital when she's- How could she have a life with this guy who's not what I want for her? Right. And then she dies and he takes her away. Right. And takes- Because of that life. The grandchild away.

[01:11:02] Somebody cut the brakes because of his- Right. Criminal activities. Because of his criminal activities. So I got that she was angry from the jump because she did not want her daughter to be with him. But I didn't get why his brother was so angry with him though.

[01:11:21] That's, you know what? I kind of felt like the brother- Why did he leave New York and come back to Oklahoma? His brother? No, I think his brother just was in Oklahoma all the time. No. No. Because they talked about him being in New York.

[01:11:35] No, he was in New York. Maya says you left her. Yeah, he left her. You were alone. He left her in New York. After maybe he just ran... Yeah. Why would he bring her with him? Yeah.

[01:11:44] That's the point when he said he got scared and he didn't know what to do. But he's still working for Fisk in Oklahoma. Right. Or is he working for a proxy of Fisk? Like that, what's it called? The black knife cartel. Because he's part of...

[01:12:02] After she blows up the warehouse, when he's talking to a couple of the yard managers, they're all like, oh yeah, we did our paperwork right. Okay, well, all the other nodes on the network, we just got to keep our heads down and not attract attention to ourselves.

[01:12:18] No, he's in. He's in. He's in. He's in. 100%. And I think he's mad at his brother for one, leaving him. Right? His brother died. So you left me. Right. And you left me to deal with all this shit by myself, because there's nobody else around

[01:12:39] who I can deal with it with. And you put me into this situation where I'm beholden to this guy. So he's obviously dealing with the grief of losing his brother and not having these conversations with him. Right. You know what I mean?

[01:12:58] And being away from his extended community. Absolutely. And just being in New York on his own. Right, you took me away from the land. You took me away from my people, my ties and left me. You didn't leave me voluntarily, but you still left me.

[01:13:14] Which is what I love about this whole storytelling setup is everybody's mad at each other for very real feelings that we have. Yeah, very real. When we hold onto them and bury them or not confront them and deal with them, then this is what occurs.

[01:13:30] So her having those conversations with her uncle and her grandmother about choices they made. The kids get punished for their parents' sins, yeah. So good. And as you said, Jean, this is the kind of storytelling that this level of the superhero

[01:13:45] MCU thing is that yes, we can get personal. And we're not talking about cosmic powers and dealing with our powers, but we're dealing with very relatable human story. I do have questions though also about the family structure.

[01:13:59] Okay, so Cody Lightning, sorry, Graham Green as Scully, he's Echo's grandfather, right? No. No? He's just like someone who had something with Chula. Right, they were together. But so we don't know what happened to Echo's grandfather then. No. But okay. And so Tanto Cardinal plays Chula.

[01:14:22] That's what I read from the story, that they're not family. Because in the hospital, he said something to the effect like, you can't get rid of a family, but he wasn't talking about himself. He wasn't referring to himself. He was telling Chula that. You know what I mean?

[01:14:43] Okay. Like he said himself in that moment when she's looking at Maya, he set himself apart from the family in that brief moment. So he's not blood, no. Okay. Okay. And then, but Cody Lightning is Biscuits and Devery Jacobs is Bonnie, our brother and sister. Oh, sorry. Yeah.

[01:15:06] Yeah, I just want to go back to Tanto Cardinal really quickly. I haven't seen her in anything before. No? And I know, and I'm looking at her filmography right now, and she's been in a few things, but I was really taken by her as an actor.

[01:15:23] She was really bringing a lot to that role that for me, it was unexpected. I didn't see her coming. I just thought, oh, here's the one-dimensional grandmother who's there at the traumatic beginning.

[01:15:37] But when they brought her back around and her being the one who is the conduit for Echo's becoming and that conversation and the reality that they got into that conversation with and what Tanto Cardinal was able to bring to that role was, again, the show was hitting

[01:16:00] and with certain aspects and characters was hitting on really great notes that I just wish we could have had more of. More of, right. Compressed five chopped up, which we've gone around that circle too many times. Yeah. Okay.

[01:16:18] So I was asking Cody Lightning is Biscuits and Devery Jacobs as Bonnie. They were a brother, sister. Am I getting that correctly? Yes. But they were the grandkids of Chula, but we don't know about their parents. Their parents just not mentioned. Or talked about them. No. Okay.

[01:16:37] By the way, Devery Jacobs is the person who voiced Kihori in What If. Oh, wow. So- I didn't even pick that up. People want her to play a live action Kihori in the MCU that she would be doing double duty,

[01:16:50] but it would not be the first time an actor has done that. So it's not impossible. Why not? Just make her look different enough. Okay. So this segues nicely into the Ancestor Powers, which is the twist that they did for this character for the TV show.

[01:17:04] And I personally, I am pro this change. I like, I think one of the reasons, yeah, we don't want another task master because that already exists in MCU. And another reason is, I've noticed this being a trend in media that's portraying the authentic deaf experiences.

[01:17:23] They're starting to portray more realistically. Lip reading is not the way it's been shown on TV, written by non-deaf writers, like where people just think that deaf people can just lip read. Even the most skilled people are saying, they say they only get like 70%.

[01:17:41] So I think this is another reason why they wanted to move away from this unrealistic expectation for deaf people. But I think it's really, yeah, I love the way that they tied it to the generation.

[01:17:53] So five episodes, each one is one of the names of the ancestors who lends echo their powers, starting with Jean, you brought up the creation myth with Chafa, who was played by Julia Jones.

[01:18:08] And so the Choctaw creation story is, indeed, the people are made from clay, which is a common theme. I mentioned it briefly with the Kohori episodes in What If? And it's also part of Potawatomi myth. It's a very common theme across Native American myth.

[01:18:23] People are made from clay and cast in fire. And that's where humans come from. And yeah, in the creation story, though, it was at first only men who were trying to reach the sky.

[01:18:36] So they were trying to build these bigger and bigger mounds, which reminds me also of the Kohori story that we saw where they're trying to reach that sky portal. And then they crumbled. And that's when that whole Tower of Babel situation came about.

[01:18:50] And in this version, so Chafa is a character invented for the show, but Chafa is the number one in the Choctaw language. And it is supposed to be the first Choctaw female. But here they have her, you know, that she's saving them from this crumbling, this falling

[01:19:04] of the Tower of Babel, which was followed by a flood story, which is also really prevalent across Native American myth, especially on the East Coast. And yeah, it's really interesting to trace flood myths across the entire world. Yeah.

[01:19:24] Yeah, I think there's been, I'm pretty sure that there's a lot of academic literature on that and looking into this different storytelling. Maybe Marilyn can chime in on some flood related mythology. Yeah, I have a very healthy section of mythology on my bookshelves.

[01:19:43] And it's, yeah, mythology and folklore is one of my greatest passions. And I have a book that dedicates like half the book to the flood myth and how it's across- The flood. Oh, cool. How it's across all cultures.

[01:19:56] But yeah, so one important piece of Choctaw history though, is they say that after the flood, they ended up in what's now Mississippi. And this is where there's the mother mound there, or it used to be there. There's only small bits of it left now.

[01:20:09] Or the Naniwaya, as they say in their own language. And this is, I mean, this is where they say either people emerged or they from the underworld, but also, or in the other version, they brought the bones of their ancestors and buried them in this mound in Mississippi.

[01:20:28] Interesting. And yeah, we see Chaufan, her people drinking from the magical pool. So, we see water as a portal again. That's a theme that comes back again and again in Native American myth. And yeah, and then we get, yeah, it's a nice tour through Choctaw histories because the

[01:20:46] next ancestor we get is Lo'ak, played by Morningstar Angeline. And Lo'ak is a Choctaw tribeswoman in 1200 who competed in the Ixtembole tribal match. So, Ixtembole is the Choctaw word for a stickball, which you probably think looks a lot like lacrosse.

[01:21:05] Now, the version we call lacrosse is actually based on the Mohawk, Cohortis tribe. It was noticed in Montreal and the French, they were like, the stick, lacrosse. But this was something they would do it almost like to settle disputes, almost like a trial by combat.

[01:21:25] So, in the game we see being played in the series, they're playing to see which group gets exiled. Yeah, yeah. I noticed that the stakes were really high when it's like, wait a minute, we're going to get exiled?

[01:21:37] Wait a minute, this isn't just a friendly game of athleticism. This is real stakes here going on. Yeah. That's another thing across cultures, settling disputes, not at war. Right. Yeah. There are better ways people. A lot of cultures throughout history that would, instead of fighting, would settle the

[01:22:02] disputes amongst themselves in this form of trial. Instead of trial by combat, but just who's going to be the victor and whatever we decide we're going to compete in, which is really cool to see because like you said, there are other ways to settle disputes.

[01:22:25] And we don't often learn about those. Yeah, we don't often learn about them. Right. We're taught war is inevitable, but- Right. The alternate, by having alternate it's more efficient, it's less, because war is taxing

[01:22:41] on resources, not only on the human scale, but also on the material scale and the economic scale, regardless of whether you're mechanized or not. But it does boost economies too. Yeah. But I think more so on the human scales when we talk about ancient peoples and their ability

[01:23:00] to live, you need bodies. Yes. Wars take away, right? People die and you don't have enough people left over to plant, to hunt, to do all the things that you need to do to sustain a community.

[01:23:20] So you have to have other means of settling disputes besides killing one another, which is not novel, but it is novel storytelling. Yeah. That's a good point. It's not represented enough on screen. Right. Yeah, because we just go straight to war, combat, fighting. Right.

[01:23:39] I love to see it, don't get me wrong, but it's nice to see. Yeah. And then, so we also got, speaking of taking laws into your own hands, Tuklo, the next ancestor played by Danny McCallum was the first female light horseman.

[01:23:57] So the light horsemen were a real group in the comics too, but also they were a real group of militia who, the five civilized tribes in Oklahoma, they created this group to protect themselves from thieves because the white men weren't going to give them their police.

[01:24:16] So they sort of self-regulated with this group, which, and that's a nice way to show that Echo got sharp shooting skills. Right. I got really interested in this aspect because I heard the term light horse and light horse

[01:24:31] comes from cavalry and along as we were talking about war, and what a light horse unit is, which is faster, less armored, lighter armed, used for scouting or reconnaissance or messaging, getting around probing.

[01:24:49] But also then, yeah, when it got into with this unit, which was a big unit and actually had a bunch of different sub elements to it all the way through to what with National Park Service and the early Rangers and how they were mounted on horse.

[01:25:08] So I had no idea that there was a Native American light horse police force. So I read, I went onto the Wikipedia and read about that. And it was really interesting. I was like, oh, okay, let's go here. Cause I was like, wait, what is this?

[01:25:21] What is this light horse police thing? And interestingly enough on the Wikipedia disambig- oh, I can't say it now. The page that tells you there's a whole bunch of words on it. There's a whole bunch of different terms based on, you know, different pages based on it.

[01:25:37] The five civilized tribe light horse was not listed on that. No. And so I actually posted, I said, you know, on the talk thing, I said, hey, you know, why isn't this listed here? I don't know if anything's resolved on that.

[01:25:52] But if you do search for a light horse and that whole article comes up, there's a whole robust article about it. So yeah, that was really interesting. Same thing with like Bass Reeves and Black Marshalls or Buffalo Soldiers or early Park

[01:26:10] Rangers or Tuskegee Airmen and other African-American units or Native American code talkers. Like there's a whole world of history that this show, when a show like this unearths a little nugget like that, it's like, oh yeah, okay, cool. Down the rabbit hole you go. Exactly.

[01:26:31] Finding really delicious and wonderful tidbits. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then the last ancestor was her own mother, Taloa played by Katerina Svirvogel, who's a healer and also deaf like Maya. And I wish they'd explain this part more.

[01:26:49] Apparently it's through her, Maya got this ability to like reach into Fisk's memories when we saw her having Fisk relive that patricide moment. But we see also, yeah, because I get healing memories maybe.

[01:27:04] Whatever you need a healer to do, whatever you need to be healed, that's what she does. I wonder if Fisk has healed at all though. Oh, hell no. He's disoriented for sure. Yeah, he's disoriented. He's not healed. He doesn't know what to do.

[01:27:20] But I think in the moment where we see him, his eyes kind of light up when he's listening to the news talking about they need a strong, what was the word that they used?

[01:27:33] They need somebody who's not afraid to rough it up in the political sense of it. And he just like leans forward and is like, that could be me. He is not reformed and he's not healed. No, he is not. But yeah, I find it.

[01:27:55] So they had the whole, they showed an interesting side with Maya where they show even when she was in her happy place with her mom alive and everything, she hit a woodpecker with a stone just to see if she could hit it with a stone.

[01:28:10] And then it's like, oh, I didn't mean to actually hurt it. But the woodpecker is important in Choctaw lore as a messenger or omen. So this is why we see that whenever there's a generations, we see the woodpecker keep

[01:28:23] showing up and it's called the Biskunik, which is apparently also the title of the newspaper within the Choctaw nation. Interesting. Just trying to find, I couldn't find which exact species of woodpecker that is. It's definitely not a pileated because a pileated has a much bigger crown.

[01:28:42] Oh, they do actually. If you look up Biskunik, it'll tell you exactly which it is. I'm not an ornithologist. I don't really know that much about birds, but I do. I did. I have seen it is a specific type. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

[01:28:57] And they did on the CGI, they did do a pretty reasonable job. It didn't take me out. It was, it still had a little bit uncanny valley. But one thing I did appreciate is at one point, I think in the final, some of the final shots

[01:29:11] where the woodpecker is flying up and away, or maybe it was in that flashback. I can't remember. They actually mimicked the flight correctly because the woodpeckers will flap a little bit and get an arc, and then they'll glide down a little bit and then get an arc again

[01:29:25] and then down again. And I appreciated that the animators actually studied woodpecker physiology and flight patterns. So good job guys. That's what we're here for. They better. That's right. We're in the lore house. We dig into this stuff. That's what we're here for.

[01:29:40] It was also cool that they showed, so they had this spiral glowing things on the palms the rumors were that they were going to have face tattoos and they decided against that for whatever reason, but the growing spiral in the palms, if you notice it goes counterclockwise,

[01:29:54] which powwows tend to, when you saw Maya do that at the end, when they start to walk around the powwow circle, this is like a typical thing happens at every powwow. And that walk goes counterclockwise on the Choctaw website.

[01:30:11] They say that the reason for going counterclockwise is because the creator, you see so much of what the creator has created goes in a clockwise motion. So the Choctaw say they go counterclockwise to show that they are imperfect and human and humble. Oh, interesting.

[01:30:29] What did you guys think about Chula and Bonnie getting the powers at the end? You weren't a fan? No. Okay. I wasn't a fan. I wasn't a fan. I'm not a fan of sharing powers. I'm not a sharing powers kind of person. This is a family.

[01:30:51] It's a family. It's nothing against the characters. I'm just not a fan of the power sharing. I'm not sure what to make it in terms of the overall story and where the story- It makes sense though, in the overall story. Certainly for the grandmother. Yeah.

[01:31:07] Then I just kind of was like, okay, well the ancestors are... The ancestors could reach down and pluck anyone they wanted is kind of the way I figured. And given that- Well, it seems like it's all women in their line. Okay. I don't think it's anyone.

[01:31:22] I think it's her specifically. Her line. And you think she somehow activated their powers? That's her mutant power. You think she can activate the other women in her? That's her mutant ability. She was able to push her power out to encompass them. Interesting. That's her mutant ability.

[01:31:40] Let's go. All right. I'm running with that. I thought it made sense for the other women in our family to have powers. And I thought that for me, it made sense that Chula would be able to use them. She's clearly a woman who...

[01:31:53] She knows a bit about this. She was the one who told Echo, I think this is what's happening to you. But Bonnie, I think Bonnie should not have been able to immediately kick ass. She might've gotten the powers, but then be like,

[01:32:05] oh, what do I do with this? Because she's not a brawler. But I don't think it's her. It's the power. Like she's not... Working through you. It's not... Right. Whatever she's doing, she's doing it unconsciously. Yeah. It's the power of that person that is working through her.

[01:32:27] So it's like a puppet on a puppeteer string. So it's not that she has to get used to it, is that she's being manipulated into doing these things. So that's how I read it. I didn't read it like, oh... But she seemed to enjoy the manipulation.

[01:32:45] She's like, oh, look at that. Oh, absolutely. She's kicking ass. Kick ass, definitely. I'm not mad at it. She kicked ass. Well, I think that's where the story suffered a little bit here. You could really feel the compression of that final fight scene

[01:33:00] in the shortened final episode where we didn't get a fuller examination or they didn't precede... They didn't give us some clues, breadcrumbs along the way to sort of prepare us for when that happened. It just sort of happened. Right. And we're like, huh, okay. Yeah.

[01:33:21] But can we please get Echo's family and can we get Ms. Marvel's family to hang out? I just want to see the banter. That would be interesting. That would be some fun. Cool. The stories they would tell each other. Yeah. All right.

[01:33:39] So that's pretty much what we got for the outline for the show. Thank you, Alicia, again, for structuring and organizing us and all that information. Yeah. I'm really hopeful for the season overall, for future seasons. So let's take a quick break. Yes, more Echo, please.

[01:33:56] When we get back, let's talk a little bit about what's up next for Marvel. And then we've got a couple of emails. So we've got a little bit of feedback. So stay tuned. And we are back. Okay.

[01:34:22] So let's talk a little bit about what's up next for Marvel. And then we've got two emails, one from Jordan and one from Maryland. You've got a big list of stuff here, Alicia. What do we need to know about Marvel's scheduling? It's not the schedule of previous years.

[01:34:46] We definitely are feeling the strike and the reorientation at Disney for production and expectations for production. Yeah. So we have some dates when things are supposed to come out, but let's see. As always. So Daredevil is currently in, you know, they're starting back over, refilming phase.

[01:35:10] So that's probably, we might see Fisk again next there. And that's now expected in 2025 and hopefully get to find out there what he means by the other surviving heads of families. But also Spider-Man 4, which I'm assuming is going to come out after that.

[01:35:28] We know that Daredevil is going to appear in that. Maybe Mare Fisk will appear in that too. It seems like they might be bringing in some other characters like Ant-Man. So that might be a big crossover film. Hopefully Echo's going to show up on one of these stories.

[01:35:43] I would love to see at one point in the comic, she takes on the Phoenix Force. So I would love to see that story, just a new take on the Phoenix Force. It's not, you know, the same Jean Grey story over and over.

[01:35:53] And then, yeah, this year though, we have Deadpool 3 coming out supposedly July 26th. Agatha Darkhold Diaries or whatever we're calling it now, Agatha all along in fall of 2024. Maybe there's this Witches Road special presentation.

[01:36:11] I don't know if that's being folded in or if they're still having that be like a separate thing. You know, the show tracker that we have is our Patreon benefit where we sort of map out all the shows in a given year.

[01:36:22] I just have it as Agatha question mark, question mark, question mark. They change it so many times and then I don't want to be wrong. It's going to be just Agatha. Yeah, exactly. Fine. That would be fine.

[01:36:35] And then yeah, also in 2024 some animated stuff is supposed to come out like X-Men 97, you're in a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, which is the new animated series that was originally going to be called Spider-Man Freshman and Sophomore year. And the freshly announced Eyes of Wakanda series.

[01:36:52] And then the rest is like basically Sony's pulling the rest of the weight for this year. We've got Madam Web in February, Craven the Hunter in August, Venom 3 in November and eventually probably next year the Spider-Man Beyond the Spider-Verse. Jean, what's your hype level for the Sony stuff?

[01:37:15] I really want to see Madam Web. Um, I really want to see Craven. Um, I want to see Venom. Okay. And you know, Spider-Verse goes without saying. Yeah, without saying. Yeah, we don't even say anything about that. But I want to see Madam Web.

[01:37:38] I want to see how they do this character because she's a super important character in the Spider-Man universe. Um, what they do with her, how it's changed or how it remains the same. Um, the, the villain, I don't know if they're doing the inheritor.

[01:37:56] There's a lot of questions that I have, um, that, you know, if we get to talk about it, then, you know, it, it, it all makes sense. But there are a lot of really good Spider-Man stories that spin out of Spider,

[01:38:11] that could spin out of a Madam Web movie. So let's see what they do with it. Yeah. I think, do you guys want to, are we going to cover that for sure? Like do a, uh, I'm going to watch it. Yeah, I'm going to be watching it.

[01:38:22] Yeah, I would definitely watch it. I would love to talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's do, let's maybe do a single pod on that where we could do a little recap, take a break and then do a spoiler review in one episode. Okay. Sounds good.

[01:38:40] I don't know. You're going to still have to work on me on Craven. I mean, I want to see it because like, you know, I'm in for a penny and for a pound. I'm going to watch all of these.

[01:38:50] But for me, that one's the, I'm more excited about Venom 3 than, cause Venom 2 wasn't a great movie, but it was fun. The Venom movies are fun. They are. I haven't seen any of them yet. Venom. They are, they're fun.

[01:39:03] And I'm waiting, they keep teasing the Venom Spider-Man crossover and I'm waiting for that. I think that's why I'm kind of like out on Venom because, you know, the character, the symbiote character is so much part of Spider-Man lore and history that not to have

[01:39:26] that be really incorporated into a proper Spider-Man movie is what's keeping me from being super excited about the Venom movie. Yeah. Like I understand what they're doing, but because Venom is its own character right now in the Marvel comic books.

[01:39:46] You know, the Spider-Man crossovers are just that, they're crossovers. But starting off in a cinematic universe, I would much rather have been a Spider-Man centric story than a Venom story, if that makes sense. Mm-hmm. Yeah. What do you, do you want to see Venom Fisk? No. No? No.

[01:40:12] Why not? No. Just no. Yeah, no. Just no. No. I'm kidding. Too funny. Yeah. Okay. What's our future looking like? Yeah, so then in 2025, we have currently slated Captain America supposed to come out in February, Fantastic Four in May, Thunderbolts in July, Blade in November.

[01:40:38] We'll see if any of this happens. And then the only other ones- You better bring Blade. You gotta stop this around. The only other ones given dates are the two Avengers movies, the Kang Dynasty or whatever it's going to be called now. Whatever it is now, right.

[01:40:50] And Seagore Wars in 27. And then we have all these other ones on the docket where it just could be dropped. By surprise, anytime. We never know. We've got obviously another Spider-Man trilogy coming. We've got Shang-Chi 2. We've got Armor Wars, Ironheart.

[01:41:08] I'm actually really excited for Ironheart, especially because there's going to be some of the Mephisto side of things. Allegedly. I won't. I mean, it could be now and then change tomorrow. We're keeping fingers crossed here. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:41:25] And then, yeah, Wonder Man, Marvel Zombies we keep talking about and Vision Quest. I'm also really excited for it because I'm hoping that that will be West Coast Avengers foundational moments along with Wonder Man. Yeah. With Wonder Man, definitely. Yeah. So lots of things coming.

[01:41:40] We don't know when or in what form. So- So this year we're going to take a little breather and yeah, well, we can maybe catch up to our- That's what Iger said, right? Yeah. Less is more. Yeah. Yeah, please. Yeah.

[01:41:56] I would rather have quality than quantity for sure. Right. Right. For sure. And we have Sony and we have, I'm really looking forward to the Spider-Art. We've got to do a Spider-Verse recap.

[01:42:07] So hope we'll have some time to be able to catch up with that and actually break down the film in greater detail because I know we all really enjoyed it and there was just so much visually going on on screen that it was hard to- Yeah.

[01:42:20] From seeing it in a theater versus being able to- Pause. Pause a frame and look at stuff. Yeah. And they keep changing also. So they keep morphing and putting new Easter eggs and replacing shots in different versions so that they're slightly different. Yeah.

[01:42:36] You can find comparison videos online. It's crazy. Very good. Yeah, the YouTubers must be going crazy for that. Awesome. Okay. Well, let's jump into a couple of quick feedback emails. First up is Jordan M.

[01:42:47] And just to say, for the MCU shows, because of the way that we work it, anytime that we get any feedback or voicemails, we will always roll them forward into the next podcast. So don't ever hesitate to send us in some feedback or if you've got questions, comments,

[01:43:04] what have you. I'm surprised we didn't hear from Abby or Dark and the Ninjas on Echo. So I was hoping to hear from them, but I know they had thoughts. Yeah. I know Abby had feelings.

[01:43:15] Well, I mean, Abby's not as into this character as she is in the Loki. Yeah. Because she's a Hiddlestoner. Got it. All right. So Jordan wrote in and says, Howdy, y'all. Love your content as always and wishing everyone the happiest of New Years.

[01:43:33] If you permit me a small soapbox moment, something in your last coverage struck a small chord. Jordan, here's your soapbox. Absolutely. And I want to encourage everyone to feel free to write in when stuff like this comes up. Don't hold back on it. He says,

[01:43:50] David, huge fan, but I feel you came very close to white watching Indigenous people's history with just a quote unquote quick Google search re forced Indigenous migrations. I consider you one of the most well-researched podcasters around.

[01:44:03] Gosh, that makes me blush because I don't know that I'm that well researched. And I mean, this is a very amenable caution that when the stakes are so dire, i.e. the history of forced relocation and cultural genocide,

[01:44:15] maybe pause and do a bit more of a Google search. Sorry, I didn't mean that to sound sassy. Jean also jumped in and didn't make matters much better. And there was an odd pseudo defense of the Spanish too. All the commentary just blended together wrongly.

[01:44:31] And I was very grateful that Alicia was there. Good job, Alicia. Again, I mean, this truly is a candid and well-intentioned advice only, but felt the need to share considering arguably the best impact of an episode like Ahori is creating said discussions. Cheers to you all.

[01:44:50] Thanks so much for the amazing content. You truly do great work, clearly very hard work, and it's much appreciated. Un gros merci. Happy New Year all. Jordan. So first I want to say thank you, Jordan, for just taking the time to write in.

[01:45:04] I wrote Jordan an email as well just to share a couple of my thoughts. And I remember when we were podcasting about this, one of the things that I was trying to get my hands around a little bit or to touch on a little

[01:45:19] bit was the complexity of history and the nuance of things when we have historical representations and in storytelling, it's not always the best vehicle to explain nuance. And so I wanted to kind of put an asterisk on that.

[01:45:39] And then I kind of kept getting out a little bit thinner and thinner. And I was like, I was feeling myself panicking a little bit and going, oh, okay, I'm saying weird things here and this isn't going very well. So let me try to rope it back.

[01:45:51] So my point was that history is full of circumstance and nuance and complexities and different historical drivers. I don't have the information around the Spanish and what they were doing and what early Native American tribes are doing and how those things interrelated.

[01:46:14] And so I was a little bit thin on the information when trying to express that there is complexity in history and we don't always have the information. I would actually speaking from the Native American perspective,

[01:46:31] I said that we're seeing this from Cohorti's perspective and we don't need the nuance. And I stand by that, but I would love to see because we talked about why that change was made because of this appearance of this special lake.

[01:46:48] This is why the Spanish would show up. But I would like to see more nuanced storytelling because when I learn about Native history, it's way more complex than we see. It's not just the Natives against the colonists, it's different,

[01:47:04] because the tribes are fighting each other as always and they're making alliances with different groups of colonists. So like Cohorti's tribe would have been aligned with the Dutch, but would see the French and would see the tribe that I was raised as part of to be enemies.

[01:47:22] And I would love to see some more of that complexity represented on screen. And maybe not in a 20 minute episode or 30 minutes. Right. And complexity between human groups, no matter where and in what time of history,

[01:47:33] there's always a lot more going on there in terms of how humanity has treated itself and how we identify tribally or nationally, regardless of physical differences in how we appear. There is no, yeah, there's a lot of complexity in human conflict. Yeah. So.

[01:47:56] And I think one thing that I really appreciate about the episode that maybe didn't come across and that was about that first part about them, the fact that the Mohawk were originally Eastern seaboard and not really, and they were moved to the Great Lakes,

[01:48:10] is that the episode when I was reading the background about it, one thing they found really important is that they wanted to make it pre-colonial. So, these are the, this is, we first encounter the Mohawk in their most indigenous state as they were before things were changed.

[01:48:28] But it is also, it's tough. Like I have this same thing with Potawatomi history is that history was oral before the Europeans came. And so, so much of the history is influenced by Europeans being the first ones to write it down. Mm, that's a really good point.

[01:48:46] And that does add another layer of complication where, you know, you've got anthropological evidence, but then you can also see, like I see in the Potawatomi language that there, you can tell that there are French influences on the language that obviously weren't there before that,

[01:49:01] but we don't know what the language is like before that. Right. Joan, any thoughts? Yeah, just, I think I chose not to talk about those things. You know, my, my, my gripe with the, with the episode was strictly because they use Spanish.

[01:49:21] Persons when they shouldn't have, because it was not true to the contact with Europe for that tribe. Right. But I chose not to speak about those, those things that are obvious, because I don't think the show was talking about that at this point. Right.

[01:49:41] For me, I didn't feel that I had to, how can I say it? The history that we talk about when we're talking about Native American culture, when we're talking about African culture in the diaspora, in this part of the world, right? It's fraught and really, really. Yes.

[01:50:10] It's complex. Yeah. And complex. That's the word I'm looking for. Yeah. I don't think this episode of What If was for me the place to bring that out of, to talk about those, those things, because the episode itself was talking about not European. Right.

[01:50:33] Influences on Native American culture, right? This show to me was very much centered around Native American culture. Right. This particular tribe's culture. Right. Separate from. And this inciting incident. Right. And how they reacted to it. Right. Not how they reacted to, you know, invasion. Invasion.

[01:50:58] Not how they reacted to being relocated to different parts of the country, of the hemisphere. Not. Right. How they were enslaved. Not how they were made to be othered. Not how they were made to be non-human. Right? Right. We can talk about that.

[01:51:17] The genocide and the war and the taking away of the children and wiping the existence of their culture. Right. And I don't shy away from talking about those things when they come up. No, that's my great-grandfather's story. Exactly what you just said.

[01:51:28] You know, don't shy away from those things. But I don't think this story was telling that story. Right. I think this story was telling this is how this group of Native Americans, this tribe, faced this first contact. Right. Which is a different first contact because of the lake.

[01:51:50] Exactly. Exactly. So for me, I didn't feel this was the place to have that discussion for this episode. Right. That's all I'll say. Yeah. Cool. But it's a good point to make because we should have those conversations. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:52:08] We should have those conversations and we should be telling those stories. Why? And we should be having, we should have these reactions to wanting to hear those stories. So the email, the comment is on point because I want people to say,

[01:52:24] hey, why aren't you talking about these things? Right. Yeah. So yeah. And to give each other the space and the grace sometimes if we're inartful or if we're unaware of something and we stray into an area.

[01:52:38] And that's what I really appreciate about Jordan's email is that they said to me, hey, this was a little funky. Just wanted to flag that for you. And it's like, yeah, that's true. I was.

[01:52:52] And I was feeling personally like, oh, I'm starting to talk about stuff that I don't know that I should be talking about because I don't have the information to have an informed opinion. And that got a little, I got a little muddled up in there.

[01:53:04] And so I appreciate the grace then to say, okay, hey, let's have a little bit more of a discussion and a little bit more understanding. We check ourselves all the time. Yeah. Right. Amongst ourselves, right?

[01:53:17] David and I have had conversations where we, off the pod in real life that we check ourselves, you know what I'm saying? And that's part of the beauty of doing this pod is that we get other people to actually listen to what we're saying and they hear something.

[01:53:37] And it's like, wait a minute, I gotta do a quick G check on these guys real quick. That's right. Just make sure that they understand what's coming across. Yeah. Right. So for when we do talk about the things that Jordan is bringing up, we talk about them

[01:53:58] in their proper context with the gravity that it needs to be discussed in. And to take the time to articulate in an email what can be very easily lost in nuance and conversation. I appreciated the way Jordan made sure that their email was flagging something, but not

[01:54:19] challenging or being rude or in a way that was non-nuance. There was a really nice use of language to communicate something to somebody that we haven't met in person to look at each other in the eye. Yeah. And we should be able to talk about these things. Exactly.

[01:54:35] And that's what we have always wanted within the Lorehounds community is to have a robust and vibrant discourse and to be able to- Even when we might disagree. 100%. Yeah, especially. Especially when we disagree. Yeah. So, un gros merci à toi aussi. Merci, Jordan. All right, next up is Marilyn.

[01:54:57] Yeah. Marilyn says, nice episode all on the what ifs before listening. I really didn't have much interest at all, but now I might actually go take in a couple of the episodes. So, welcome you folks. That's what we try to do with this podcast, right? Is to deconstruct.

[01:55:10] Another thing that we're trying to do is make it so you have context and tools so that you can dip in and out as you want. Marilyn continues, I have two bits of lore for you regarding Hell's color. Is it Hella? Is that what she means here?

[01:55:25] No, well, Hell is the... We spell it with two L's in English, but in Norse mythology, it's spelled with one L. Oh, okay. Interesting. And that's where Hella was banished in the MCU and in actual Norse myth. There you go.

[01:55:39] Regarding Hell's color, in the original mythology, she is the daughter of Loki and was half white and half black. Interesting that they're switching it from all one to the other. Any thoughts or observations on this? This is outside of my-

[01:55:54] Yeah, well, because in the show, she started with... She's dressed in all black in the MCU. And then at the end of that episode, she was like the light bringer and all white. Yes. Okay. And Hell is her actual Norse name.

[01:56:09] Hella is her name and Hell is the place. Yeah. No, no, no, she's Hell. Oh, okay. Yeah. She encompasses what Hell is. Right. So she's actually Hell. Nice. Good. Okay. She continues, and a fun fact, I heard you say something about King James and having an

[01:56:27] aversion to the alternate humans in that episode. Yeah, that's from the source material in the Neil Gaiman comics in the 1602. All right. And calling them witches. Historically, James VI and I had an absolute phobia about witches and was supposedly responsible for making the committee

[01:56:47] to translate the word poisoner in the King James Bible they were working on to witch, resulting in the infamous passage, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. This along with the dreadful text from 1485, the Malius Maleficiarum, or the hammer of the witches,

[01:57:10] was responsible for an awful lot of the persecution of witches, most of whom were innocent men and women in the 17th century Europe. That book outsold even the Bible at that time. Really? So, and this goes interesting, an interesting another call over to which you were talking

[01:57:29] about, Alicia, when we take oral history from another community and then run it through a written language, be it French, English, whatever, when we take ancient history and then say, oh, hey, this is the word of God.

[01:57:44] By the way, we did a big edit on this and we had a big old committee and we, you know, this is our divinely inspired reinterpretation of it. It's going to shift, right? And we're going to get word translations like this and that's going to echo down history,

[01:58:01] right? So, oh, so it went from poisoner to witch and then suddenly, oh, that's a whole thing there, which we're kind of talking about in our Earthsea coverage. So, Marilyn, John and I have been talking about the Earthsea books by Ursula K. Le Guin.

[01:58:18] And one of the things that her later books get into is women's magic versus men's magic and sorcery versus village healing magic and what and where and why for us. And there's a whole bunch of interesting information there in how that kind of,

[01:58:36] quote unquote, magic or knowledge or traditional, you know, this relegated into this world of healing and herbalism, why it just becomes a woman's things and why we just naturally assume that it's women when again, history is a little bit more complex and nuanced in that regard.

[01:58:56] So, yeah, if you're interested in either of those topics, check out our Earthsea coverage and obviously we continue to talk about these other interesting things. So, Marilyn finishes up, having now heard the background of Echo, I can see why it's so violent.

[01:59:10] Maybe I'll just listen to your pod instead. Well, here's the pod, Marilyn. Thanks for writing in. Any thoughts or additions to any of all of that? No, I think, Marilyn, you should try reading the 1602 series from Neil Gaiman.

[01:59:29] I think that you would find it, that one is really hewing close to history, but with the characters that we know playing a role within these historical things and I think that you would like it.

[01:59:43] Well, John and Marilyn just did The Hogfather, which is out of the Discworld series. And so, that podcast is out. I'll flag another podcast that's slightly holiday related to Anthony over on his Electric Bukaloo podcast, which is where he does all the Game of Thrones stuff.

[01:59:59] He does a lot of medieval history as well and being a theologian, and that's what he part does in his profession. He put out a podcast right around Christmas time talking about the mythology around the creation around Christmas. And it was really interesting and insightful.

[02:00:20] I had no idea that the mythology that I have about how Christmas was formulated was not on mark. It was my mythology. My knowledge on that is off. So, go back and check out Anthony's little... It's a short podcast. It's about five, six minutes, I think at most.

[02:00:36] And he talks about, he sort of deconstructs where Christmas came from. So, fun stuff. So, lots of good content in the lore hounds world. So, let's wrap up today's podcast. Just one more thing I want to say before we get off. Yeah, yeah.

[02:00:51] I just want to say that bringing these stories to screen has always been something that I've wanted to see. Right? Nice, yeah. And I'm appreciative that Alicia's here for that because I said earlier, I hadn't really read a lot of creation myths from Native American folklore, right?

[02:01:21] Religion and ancestry and things of that nature because of the very fact that I don't know when I was in school, whether it was grade school, high school, college, and in my adult life, what's truly Native American and where the European interpretation starts. Right. Right.

[02:01:44] And it's difficult to sort through that information even when you come from inside the tribe. Yeah. So, I'm really appreciative that Alicia's here to give some insight on those things because it becomes difficult to really say as someone who is not versed in that world,

[02:02:08] whatever world that you may be from, to comment on those sorts of things. So, yeah, I just really, this is a really cool community that we have at the North Hound. And at the beginning of 2024, I just want to say thank you to everyone who's involved

[02:02:31] because even on the Discord, folks are teaching me things almost every day. And I'm really grateful for that. So, yeah, hats off. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Thanks, Joan, for those words. Appreciate it. Appreciate that we have a space to have these conversations. Yeah. So, okay.

[02:03:00] Well, let's shift gears and wrap it up. A quick note about the Patreon. If you're in and listening to us, you can listen on the public feeds and we have ad supports for those. But we do have a Patreon.

[02:03:17] And if you're interested in supporting this community, the funds that we generate out of that go into paying for our costs. We make sure that all of the co-hosts also have a stake and participate in that. So, we make sure that things are shared.

[02:03:34] And so, we really appreciate everyone who does make the choice to subscribe and support us. And I also just want to open the door too is like if you want to subscribe for a little

[02:03:44] while and then you got to bounce for a little while, whether you come back or not, it's all good. Like don't ever feel... I know sometimes if I am subscribed from a Patreon, I'm a little worried like, oh, what do they think?

[02:03:53] No, we understand people's financials and circumstances are different. So, if you want to bounce in and bounce out, no problem. If it works easier for you to get an annual membership, there's a discount on that. That's cool. You can always convert your membership at any time.

[02:04:09] So, just feel at ease because we've gotten a couple of messages from folks saying, oh, thank you. I've been meaning to or I'm sorry I haven't. Never feel sorry that you haven't. I mean, just by listening is big enough support.

[02:04:19] But if you do make that decision, we really do appreciate it. And it means a lot. I just want to flag a couple of things. We're coming up on True Detective. And one of the things that I'm doing for True Detective as a Patreon benefit is I'm doing

[02:04:34] a sort of an online journal. If you saw season one, Rust Cole had this big journal that he walked around with documenting all this stuff. I'm kind of making a faux version of that online based off of our show tracker.

[02:04:49] So, I'm going to be putting screenshots and clues and some character guides. So, for anyone who has a subscriber and you're going to dig into that show a little bit more, check that out as an exclusive benefit.

[02:05:02] That goes along with our show tracker, which is that big thing I was talking about before we're tracking shows across platforms and across the year. We've got a couple of different ways you can see that as a list or as sort of a Gantt chart

[02:05:14] calendar thing that plays out. So, I have a lot of fun keeping that stuff up to date. So, that is all there as bonus benefits. We've mentioned the Discord several times. Discord's open to everyone. There are a couple of Patreon only channels.

[02:05:30] So, if you're a subscriber, there's a couple of places where we have for folks to especially talk about our second breakfast podcast for that as one of our benefits. But we've got channels set up for all the different shows and projects that we are covering.

[02:05:47] It's a great place to meet and converse like Jean was saying. People having really interesting and substantive conversations about these stories and about life. And I just want to say too, we just sort of fired up a mod team. We call them the Doonadain.

[02:06:04] And Adrian, Aaron K., and Brian8063 with some help from Josh the Black have all jumped up. So, thank you guys for helping out. Our community is only as good as our mod team. And so, I'm just really grateful to have their support because the Discord's gotten a little

[02:06:20] big enough now that John and I can't keep our hands and our eyes open for everything there. But those folks are there. So, if you have any questions about how things work, if you're not a Discord user, there's

[02:06:31] a ton of people, not only the mod team, but everyone. Like, hey, how do I do this? People are going to jump in and make sure that you're supported and understand.

[02:06:41] Because I know Discord can be a little bit, especially if you're new to it, can be a little bit confusing at times. So, let's talk about a little bit programming schedules. Alicia, how are things with Warshift Dust and the Silo Book Club? What you got cooking?

[02:06:55] Yeah, back to editing audio now. So, yeah, wrapping up Beacon 23 and forging forward with the Silo series. Next up is Dune, which is going to be followed by the three-body problem, which I think John was also interested in taking part in. I'm rereading the book. Yeah. Okay, great.

[02:07:16] Me too. Me too, actually. Well, I'm about to reread the book. My rereading list is like longer than my reading list. But I also, I wanted to shout out, this is not Lorehounds related, but I am part of the

[02:07:33] committee doing the Academy of Death Racers film festival right now, which is a- Yeah, I was wondering if you were going to talk about that. Yeah. It's an online. Yeah, so Death Racers are what people call themselves who watch every Oscar nominated movie.

[02:07:47] But then you can also get crazier than that, where you're watching just basically all of the nominated movies within a year, which I find an incredible experience because, for instance, it's the only time of year I really catch up on documentaries and I learn so much

[02:08:02] and all these international films I would have never have come to my attention otherwise. Very cool. What does that include, like Emmys and DGA and like- Well, so it depends how crazy you get. Okay, all right. Standard Death Racers, just Oscar nominees, but- Okay.

[02:08:18] Which Oscar nominations are coming out next week, but we've already got the short lists. And so the film festival that's going on right now through the 21st, which is the day nominations come out, it's short films, it's online, so it's available from anywhere in the world.

[02:08:35] And there are 10 Oscar shortlisted shorts in there, so including some of the harder to find ones, but I know one of them is leaving on the 16th, so jump on that if you're interested.

[02:08:48] It's aodr.net slash festival, just costs $6 to get a ticket and you get access to about 70 short films from around the world. Awesome. Cool. More content that we have to put on our watch read consume list. Hilarious. All right, Properly Howard Movie Review, they're on a little break.

[02:09:12] Anthony has got a bunch of stuff going on and I know that he'll be back, but they're just on a little pause both on the Bukalu and Properly Howard Movie Review. That said, they have, Steve and Anthony released a whole recap of season one of Severance in

[02:09:31] anticipation of season two coming soon. We don't know, we're waiting. There was some activity on the Apple TV Instagram that was teasing it, so we thought, oh, maybe February. It came out in February last year, so we're fingers crossed that it's going to come up soon.

[02:09:50] But we set up a whole new feed just for Severance so that the four of us, Anthony, Steve, John, and I can do week to week podcast coverage of season two the moment it hits the streets.

[02:10:04] Go subscribe to that feed if you're doing a season one rewatch or if you just want to listen to some more podcast content with Steve and Anthony having a good time, go check that out.

[02:10:14] For us on the Lorehounds, on our main feed, we are running True Detective episode by episode. We have access to screeners, so we're watching a little bit of head. We're never jumping ahead on the podcasts, so we'll only ever podcast about what we've

[02:10:30] seen, but we're able to record those about a week in advance. So we're still taking feedback, truedetective at thelorehounds.com, and we figured out a way that we can just tack on the audio for feedback at the end.

[02:10:42] We can record a quick feedback and then tack them on before they get published. So check us out there. We have our What If? season two, and obviously this podcast. John and I are going to do a Fargo season five wrap up once the final episode has aired.

[02:10:59] I don't know if either of you are watching Fargo season five, but it's on fire. It's on my watch list to watch the whole show, but yeah, we'll see when I get to it. Oh man, it's so good. It's so good. This is like the Fargo-ist Fargo of-

[02:11:13] Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But it is the Fargo-ist Fargo that ever Fargoed I think. Okay. Okay. Yeah, it's amazing. Holly is swinging for the fences. John and Brandon are scheduled to do a Final Fantasy VII remake podcast for Lorehounds Play. That'll probably be out in February.

[02:11:32] For the Star Wars Film Festival, we are up to Rogue One. We're going to have a live watch. I believe that's on the 20th, next Saturday on the Discord. That's a Patreon-only member benefit. Then we'll release a podcast about that about a week later.

[02:11:48] Earthsea, we're going to push that into February. We're reading Dragonfly, a short story called Dragonfly. And then the next book, which is called The Other Win. And that short story and that book tie in together with the continuing story. So Marilyn, John, and I will be doing that.

[02:12:05] We're going to record and release that in February. Silmarillion story, the next up chapter in the Silmarillion is Of Min. That should be a really interesting podcast. Looking forward to that. And then that'll be in February. And then in January, we still have Second Breakfast,

[02:12:21] which is our Patreon-exclusive podcast where John and I talk about life. And we get a lot of feedback from our community. And we have our movie of the month this year. It looks like on the poll, the Patreons voted for Logan's Run. Good for them.

[02:12:33] An amazing science fiction film from 1976, starring Michael York. A really very cool science fiction movie. Check it out if you get a chance, but we'll be talking about that. What we're tracking, we've got a lot coming out this year that has not yet been given any actual dates.

[02:12:52] We've got Severance, House of the Dragon, Rings of Power, The Boys, The Alkalite, which is a Star Wars show. All of those will be day one coverage when we get dates. We're keeping our eye on Masters of the Air.

[02:13:06] I think we're going to do maybe a two-pod coverage of that because I've watched already the first two episodes. It's not really a week-to-week kind of show that we can do, but I think we can do episode one and two.

[02:13:17] And then maybe at the end, we'll sort of wrap it up. We're tracking Shogun. The trailers look really good. It looks really interesting. We'll see Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Looks amazing. That looks like a lot of fun. Hopefully, we'll probably get to give you... The Last Airbender.

[02:13:32] The Last Airbender. Yeah, we got that. Constellation. We've got a bunch of stuff. So if you're a Patreon member, go check out the show tracker. Otherwise, keep a listen for the programming notes and we'll keep you up-to-date on what we've got going on. That is a lot.

[02:13:48] Okay, last big shout out to our Patreon Loremasters. These are our top tier supporters. Samartian, Mark H, Michael G, Michelle E, David W, Brian P, Nick W, SC, Peter OH, Patina W, Adam S, Nancy M, Dove 71, Brian 8063, Frederick H, Sarah L, Garrah C, Eric F,

[02:14:10] Matthew M, Sarah M, DJ Miwa, Andra B, Kuang Yu, Deadeye, Jedi, Bob, Nathan T, Alex V, Aaron T, Subzero, Aaron K, DailyV21, and last but never least, Adrian, who is also one of our mods. And so is Aaron K. Thank you all so much. With Brian 8063.

[02:14:33] All of our new Discord mod team are all Loremasters. So my goodness. We're gonna have to send you some merch when we get around to getting some merch someday. Anyway, I feel like I've been going on here for a little bit. So let's wrap this up.

[02:14:45] John, Alicia, great to see you guys as always. What's next for our next Marvel podcast? I guess, Madam Web. Yeah, Madam Web. And we still haven't heard from you guys what you got cooking, but hopefully that'll be – we keep teasing it.

[02:15:04] It's a lot of work to do a podcast. It takes something to lift a podcast off the ground. So anyway, thank you again both so very much. I appreciate it. We'll see you on the next pod. Thank you. Ciao.

[02:15:14] The Lore Hounds Podcast is produced and published by The Lore Hounds. You can send questions and feedback and voicemails at thelorehounds.com contact. Get early and ad-free access to all Lore Hounds podcasts at patreon.com slash thelorehounds.

[02:15:30] Any opinions stated are ours personally and do not reflect the opinion of or belong to any employers or other entities.