Episode 20: Mailbag

Corrections:

  • [0:41] Dan still might do the Homestuck episode. Be afraid.
  • [2:25] Apologies if we said “Whatanauts” instead of “Whatnauts".
  • [2:49] Listen to their episode with Mischa!
  • [3:58] Yeah, you. Stop it.
  • [6:21] It’s important to rep Time Cube here, the Dr. Bronner label of pop science nonsense.
  • [6:32] That said, it was perfecting groundwork laid by Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
  • [8:55] Like Encino Man!
  • [14:52] Like 12 Monkeys (1995), but he’s seen 12 Monkeys (2015).
  • [17:30] It’s coming back October 25. We’ve already announced this.
  • [18:35] Admittedly, some of you said something.
  • [18:46] Or here!

Episode 19: Doctor Who

[00:29] Mischa was actually hurt in a completely unrelated incident. They’re not in any immediate life-threatening danger… Probably.

[01:03] Apologies to Abbott & Costello.

[01:43] If that isn’t evidence of time travelers meddling around with the Kennedy assassination, I don’t know what is.

[02:24] Time And Relative Dimensions In Space, but much like a lot of other Doctor Who canon, there have been inconsistencies throughout the years.

[02:36] Specifically, a blue Police Public Call Box, which used to be a thing in England. Now most of those have been removed, and the image of a blue phone box is more associated with the Doctor Who franchise than its original purpose.

[02:53] timelapsepod@gmail.com. Also, we’re probably gonna keep doing bits either way.

[03:14] TV Tropes, as usual, has their act together on this one.

[03:21] The character’s name is The Doctor. Come on, Daniel.

[03:39] The crew was being worked to death and not being paid enough money, and when Christopher Eccleston, the actor who played the Ninth Doctor (and launched the revival), went to bat for them, the BBC execs turned him away. Allegedly.

[03:51] The modern ones, at least.

[05:22] 1974-1981. 7 years.

[06:15] Mischa actually meant the 1991 film Defending Your Life, starring Albert Brooks & Meryl Streep.

[07:23] Additionally Attack the Block, alongside Star Wars all-star John Boyega.

[08:14] arsparadoxica.com/timeswimmers

[09:12] Terminator Geniseese.

[09:32] In multi-Doctor stories, there’s usually some plot reason that makes it so only the most recent Doctor is able to retain memories of the adventure. It’s pretty dumb. We really should have talked about it more.

[09:47] Doctor 8 3/4

[10:02] David Bradley (best known as Filch in the Harry Potter films) played William Hartnell, the actor who portrayed the First Doctor, in a 90-minute special about the making of the series called "An Adventure in Space and Time" (2013)

[10:14] Richard Hurndall.

[10:25] “The Name of the Doctor,” series 7 episode 13.

[10:30] Seriously.

[11:05] Series 4 episode 8.

[11:46] It’s just two time travelers.

[12:36] She’s a Guardian of the Galaxy now, so she must have really liked the work, I guess.

[13:13] One might even call it “wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey,” if one were so inclined. We’re not, though.

[13:41] Series 6 episode 8.

[13:51] #resist

[14:27] Also Sherlock, which a lot of people seem to really like for some reason.

[14:45] Series 1 episode 9.

[14:51] Also “Victory of the Daleks,” series 5 episode 3, as well as a bunch of classic series examples.

[15:00] Series 3 episode 10.

[16:09] That’s me!

[16:18] “The Unicorn and the Wasp,” series 4 episode 7. Also starring Star Wars all-star Felicity Jones.

[16:21] Beads.

[16:39] “The Shakespeare Code,” series 3 episode 2.

[16:42] “Vincent and the Doctor,” series 5 episode 10.

[16:59] “A Christmas Carol,” 2010 Christmas Special.

[18:45] “The Girl Who Waited,” series 6 episode 10.

[19:20] arsparadoxica.com

[20:13] It’s ok, this version of the episode was a lot better.

[20:53] Tomorrow as in, the day after we recorded this episode. It’s already done. Tune in on Sept. 10th!

Episode 18: Bioshock (with Julian Mundy)

[1:23] Since the last time Mischa said that they have finished all the Shovel Knight campaigns and completed every main quest in Breath of the Wild, so...

[1:27] That's a bit of an oversimplification—your protagonist, Jack, is a lab-grown adult/Manchurian Candidate assassin from Rapture sent BACK to Rapture to assassinate its founder/leader, Andrew Ryan.

[1:53] That means I can't WAIT for the Rapture level in Kingdom Hearts III

[2:14] stay tuned

[3:57] Rule 63: for every fictional character, there exists an opposite-gender counterpart. (Know Your Meme)

[5:11] An urban legend states that Lucas changed the name to save one extra letter on movie marquees. It's almost certainly the case that he instead thought Revenge was inappropriate for the tone of the film, but it's still fun to think about!

[5:22] Though Courtnee Draper did a fantastic job portraying Elizabeth, sometimes her character was distressingly oversexualized for a character who is very much not that to the protagonist.

[6:40] Bring us the girl, would you kindly?

[8:03] Residents of Rapture had access to cheap, readily-available genetic manipulation, which eventually became addictive and deleterious to their users, especially after society collapses.

[8:05] It's actually two years after the collapse, which occurred on New Year's Day 1958.

[11:55] "That's exactly how it works." —Sally Grissom

[12:14] The final stretch of the game starts heavily balancing action setpieces over environmental exploration.

[12:32] The timely reference here is the recently-released Tacoma, the second game by Gone Home developer Fullbright Games, made out of team members of the Bioshock 2 (not to be confused with Bioshock Infinite) DLC Minerva's Den.

[12:50] This is what the whole problem is about.

[13:30] Narratively, at least.

[16:03] “There is violence on many sides"

[16:33] The greater good.

[18:30] And rotary on half.

Episode 17: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

[1:49] The Death and Return of Superman

[2:20] Specifically, the passage on time travel grammar being the biggest problem with time travel.

[6:13] There’s a scene later with Bart where she attempts to shoot herself multiple times to prove a point and each time the gun jams or misfires or fails.

[8:15] This is actually one of Dirk’s really really good guesses.

[9:55] His name is Bentley!

[10:50] arsparadoxica.com

[12:08] “This is what the whole problem was about”

[14:30] Dan has not.

[15:18] That would be The Prestige.

[15:57] How to Write About Characters Who Are Smarter Than You

[16:01] arsparadoxica.com

[18:25] Dirk, in fact, broke into his house and then knocked over a candle in escaping.

Episode 16: Erased (with Julian Mundy)

Corrections:

  • [1:30] https://youtu.be/9yvJszJuxyY
  • [1:42] Saved you the Google: https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/30817/what-are-the-differences-between-the-manga-and-the-anime-adaptation-of-erased-an
  • [2:03] Called Rewind in the live-action movie.
  • [2:34] Tragedéjà vu
  • [3:22] It’s a fourth-dimensional manifold!
  • [4:37] Satoru actually saves a young boy, but forgive Dan–essentially all the other characters Satoru saves are women.
  • [5:27] We’ll be talking Dirk Gently!
  • [5:55] AKA Santa Clausing
  • [8:34] Kinda?
  • [8:45] Clearly.
  • [11:45] Looks kind of like Tippi, the Wii Remote cursor from Super Paper Mario
  • [14:11] He was actually trying to keep an eye out for a fourth student who became socially isolated due to the events of the story.
  • [15:15] Yashiro became a proxy role model for Satoru’s absent father.
  • [15:27] 4/5
  • [17:44] arsparadoxica.com
  • [18:37] I mean, he loses an evening. Six hours, at least.
  • [19:01] He has friends this time around!
  • [20:10] Joey Cambs
  • [20:36] Timelapdogs
  • [22:05] It’s dialectical!
  • [22:17] Julian will be back… in the future.

Episode 15: Looper (with Eli Barraza)

Corrections:

  • [0:38] Narrative flashbacks, chronological flashforwards. Time travel!
  • [0:47] Also The Brothers Bloom and some of the best episodes of Breaking Bad.
  • [1:58] It’s a genius plot.
  • [2:24] Why do you have to kill yourself? Wouldn’t it be just as convenient–and cheaper–to have someone else close a given Loop? Also, why do they have to shoot them? Wouldn’t it be easier to just time travel them into, like, an incinerator or something? Man, we would be some great time travel crime lords if given the chance.
  • [2:27] Joseph Willis-Levitt.
  • [3:24] This all feels like stuff that needs corrections, but this is the real plot of the movie.
  • [4:08] Why don’t they just kill Young Seth?
  • [4:26] arsparadoxica.com
  • [5:23] And the death of the sea turtle caused a tsunami in Japan, which caused the mob to kill Bruce Willis’s unnamed wife in China.
  • [6:28] “Exactly” is a bit of a stretch.
  • [6:50] The hoverbike effect looks really bad.
  • [9:32] This movie faceplants the Bechdel test.
  • [10:25] Seriously.
  • [11:22] So he’s basically Baron Ünderbheit.
  • [12:00] None of this work with each other.
  • [12:42] Be sure to listen to Eli as Peri on The Far Meridian at thefarmeridian.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Episode 14: The Legend of Zelda

Corrections:

  • [0:02] Your relative past.
  • [0:16] thefarmeridian.com
  • [0:52] Seriously, it’s on the tip of my tongue.
  • [0:54] If you are listening to this episode at night, substitute where appropriate. If the distinction between night and day is meaningless to you, well, them’s the breaks.
  • [1:05] It lost out to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.
  • [1:22] Their future being in our relative past, ironically.
  • [1:25] And Philadelphia.
  • [1:40] Despite this being recorded in the immediate weeks after Breath of the Wild’s release, it is highly likely that Dan will be still be playing by the time this airs.
  • [2:08] Hold onto your hats, kids, because that list of things is just gonna keep shrinking
  • [2:19] https://youtu.be/1jct5FOG9AE (NSFW?)
  • [2:24] In direct contrast to that statement, Mischa is currently playing Shovel Knight.
  • [2:55] A Fun Fact You’re Going to Hate starring Adam Conover and John Oliver, coming to CBS this fall.
  • [3:10] Magician, not wizard. (n.b.: that’s an actual correction not a reference to the hit SyFy show or associated books)
  • [3:41] They fight over the Triforce, a Sierpinski triangle lookin’ thing that embodies power, wisdom, and courage, and Ganondorf, Zelda, and Link usually embody those traits, but mostly it's a fancy MacGuffin.
  • [3:48] Some sort of man/bear/pig thing.
  • [3:54] Don’t forget about the Europe/Japan-only release Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland.
  • [4:08] No, but for a similar idea, check out the game Half-Minute Hero.
  • [4:02] In order: Skyward Sword, Four Swords Games/Minish Cap, Miniboss in BotW, A Link to the Past. 
  • [4:20] During this recording, Mischa wore a shirt that evoked both Magic: The Gathering and Super Mario Bros., so they know a lot about endlessly remaking something in weird new contexts.
  • [4:41] No correction.
  • [5:18] Yeah, jeez. Fell right on your face right there.
  • [5:45] As Is Prophecy.
  • [5:49] It’s the place where the Triforce is supposed to be, even though the real Triforce was inside you all along. 
  • [6:22] The Song of Storms, to be precise. https://youtu.be/gPE_Ws4mD0s
  • [6:27] The Spirit Temple.
  • [6:34] The wear on the temple actually isn’t the issue, it’s the size of the various Links. Dan had it confused with the time-hopping level “Effect and Cause” in Titanfall 2.
  • [7:52] Fun fact: Dan’s first Zelda was its companion title, Oracle of Ages, which also has time travel, but it’s mostly used as a light/dark world mechanic.
  • [8:34] The whole thing. Never did a single co-op session.
  • [9:19] Instead, the DS sequels to Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks each had their own Big Bad and Ganon never showed up because, uh, he super dies in Wind Waker.
  • [9:58] The Link that goes back to be a child continues on to Majora’s Mask.
  • [11:37] I’d play a Ezlo/King of Red Lions spinoff game.
  • [12:05] And then gets _immediately_ kidnapped.
  • [12:32] One hundred years.
  • [13:43] It’s just a massive departure that had more RPG elements and sidescrolling combat but it doesn’t feel good and it’s just super not fun
  • [14:55] Game Boy Advance.
  • [14:56] Fun fact: Minish Cap, alongside the Oracle games, were developed by Capcom. They’re the only officially third-party Zelda games not made by Phillips that anyone ever saw outside of Japan.
  • [18:56] Oracle, not Ocarina.
  • [19:50] OH SHIT
  • [20:13] Dan has seen timelines that try to include his appearance in Soulcalibur II.

Episode 13: Futurama

Corrections:

  • [1:45] Seven seasons.
  • [2:15] Four seasons before it was canceled on FOX from 1999-2003, four direct-to-DVD movies each composed of four episodes comprising an effective season 5 in 2008-2009, and then revived on Comedy Central for two more seasons and aired as four half-seasons from 2010-2013 before being cancelled again. There’ll likely be more Futurama to come. It just won’t stay dead!
  • [2:21] The year on the show is the production year plus a thousand years. For example, a Futurama episode based today would take place in 3017.
  • [2:53] He poops dark matter.
  • [3:34] Lovable Time Idiots is an alternate title for this show.
  • [3:59] Notably, the Brain Spawn, a race of floating psychic brains that makes their prey stupid by manipulating the Delta Brainwave.
  • [4:33] In the 1998 The Simpsons episode “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace”, you can see for a moment a blackboard that contains a counterexample that would disprove Fermat’s Last Theorem… if it weren’t a margin of a margin of a percent off.
  • [5:22] ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • [7:22] Also it’d be cool if Lars had told Leela like, any of that.
  • [8:22] Dan is actually referring to the paper that Silicon Valley published referring to a joke about optimal dick-stroking. It’s a weird show.
  • [8:29] Check out this explanation of the theorem here. 
  • [10:10] That is not how painting works.
  • [10:27] The appropriate reference here is Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. In the fourth book, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, Marvin states that he’s thirty-seven times older than the universe itself due to time travel shenanigans.
  • [10:45] Continuity porn: Bender has a lifelong dream of being a folk singer, but an inhibition unit keeps him from doing so–unless it’s neutralized with a magnet. 
  • [11:03] The Bender of Theseus? The Robot of Planet Express? Workshopping it.
  • [13:33] A simple country Hyperchicken lawyer.

Episode 12: Timeless (with Malcolm Barrett)

Corrections:

  • [0:42] No correction necessary. He really does sound great.
  • [1:12] He goes by Verbal the Rapper.
  • [1:23] Under the name Icarus V. That’s the letter, not the numeral.
  • [4:27] “Content Creator”
  • [5:50] [citation needed]
  • [6:00] The Marty McFly hand fade version, not the dark corners of the web version.
  • [6:47] Spoiler alert.
  • [7:38] Check out S1E7 “Stranded”–it uses time travel particularly well.
  • [8:23] Fun fact: Doctor Who premiered the day after the Kennedy assassination.
  • [9:42] Why, I NEVER!
  • [9:56] [citation needed]
  • [10:46] The “journal with instructions for everything I need to do” requires a fixed timeline, so that the future that results from following (or deviating from) the journal can be accurate while still maintaining an ontological paradox where the information contained in the journal has no one true “origin”. The archetypal example here is Robert Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps”, and as such, it’s sometimes called a bootstrap paradox. The Song of Storms in Ocarina of Time is a good example.
  • [11:40] If you are listening to this less than two weeks after this posts, you can place a bid on the actual journal prop, signed by Malcolm, and also the rest of the cast too I guess.
  • [11:50] It’s actually for William Shatner’s Hollywood Charity Horse Show.
  • [17:02] Alexandre Dumas’s father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas had an illustrious military career and was the General-in-Chief of the French Army of the Alps.
  • [17:11] Though Alexandre Dumas was best known for writing The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo etc, his son (also Alexandre Dumas) was an accomplished playwright in his own regard. What a family.
  • [17:27] S1E12 “The Murder of Jesse James”
  • [17:38] I’ve got bad news and good news. Bad news is that Timeless was canceled. Good news is that three days later it got renewed for a second season in 2018! Get pumped!!
  • [18:12] What would be worse is if you lived in a timeline where it wasn’t renewed and you and your best friend had to jump backwards in time, threaten television executives to make the show happen, and then dispose of your past selves and take their lives. That would be worse.
  • [19:12] (☞ﾟ∀ﾟ)☞

Episode 11: LOST

Corrections:

  • [0:48] Movies are sometimes not an hour and a half.
  • [1:44] Actually, Lost only had 42 mysteries.
  • [2:04] The Invasion, The Nine, V, and Life on Mars were all mystery shows launched in the show’s wake that occupied the post-Lost timeslot throughout its run. FlashForward and V in particular used Lost alums Dominic Monaghan (Charlie) and Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet).
  • [3:04] The Dharma Initiative–an organization backed by the Hanso Foundation–set up a series of stations across the Island to conduct various experiments. The Swan was one such station that monitored electromagnetic anomalies on the Island until [cut the rest, super boring, sorry. –M]
  • [5:17] Ben tells Michael he can escape the island with a bearing of 325 in the season 2 finale, or: North by Northwest. Metatextual!
  • [5:34] arsparadoxi.ca
  • [5:50] Don’t get rid of your land line until Christmas 2004. This is a reasonable ask.
  • [6:15] A constant is something (or someone) that a time traveler recognizes in the time periods that they visit to keep their brain from turning to mush.
  • [6:42] Daniel Faraday explains it like a skipping record, which, like, sure dude.
  • [7:12] arsparadoxi.ca
  • [7:42] Eloise Hawking, because they are not subtle about names. Desmond Hume’s middle name is David. Richard Alpert is Ram Dass's birth name.
  • [7:56] If you want to make Dan angry, tell him you thought that Inception was too complicated to understand.
  • [8:19] Mischa actually meant to say “great” TV show. [no I didn’t –M]
  • [9:33] Sometimes, it invaded other ad campaigns, most notably in Sprite’s inane Sublymonal ads.
  • [9:40] Dan LOST the plot!! Get it?
  • [10:25] Lost actually did some good work at negotiating an endpoint (six seasons, no movie) so they could actually answer some questions. The problem was that a lot of the answers were bad.
  • [12:15] And co-writes just about every episode.
  • [12:20] Westworld is also produced by Bryan Burk, who was one of the executive producers of Lost.
  • [12:22] He’s not.

Episode 10: Terminator & T2: Judgment Day

Corrections:

  • [6:45] Dan is, in fact, kidding.
  • [7:50] arsparadoxi.ca
  • [8:41] "Genisys Premisys"
  • [11:50] 1999-2007
  • [12:30] You can change your fate, actually. Your fate is what you make it.
  • [12:45] The Singularity makes the invention of time travel inevitable.
  • [13:00] It actually is an idea proposed by Stephen Hawking.
  • [13:20] He personified it in a paper by using the idea of time cops.
  • [13:28] Do not get Dan started on his deeply-held conviction that ghosts aren't real.
  • [13:47] Free will is overrated, actually.
  • [14:40] From August 29, 1997, to July 25, 2004.