Upstream - S2E12: To Trap A Spy
Episode Date: November 8, 2022MI6's James Bond: Eliminated Jason Bourne: Eliminated Jack Ryan: Eliminated U.N.C.L.E.'s Napoleon Solo: .... Active Dear friends, it's time to embark upon a new venture. Join us, as we head all the wa...y back to 1964 and crack into a whole new series as we hunt down The Man from U.N.C.L.E.... It's time to Kill Napoleon Solo! ------ THE WINTER OF CONTENT The UCU has a fighting fund that you can contribute to here: https://www.ucu.org.uk/fightingfund If you do feel you have money to spare, please consider supporting your local food banks with money or time! donate to the Trussell Trust here: https://www.trusselltrust.org/make-a-donation/ or the Independent food aid network here: https://www.foodaidnetwork.org.uk/donate There are several ongoing strike funds that could do with some donations, and several can be found here: https://www.cwu.org/ Additionally, please consider joining a renter's union like ACORN, as rising mortgage rates will surely result in rising rent, here: https://www.acorntheunion.org.uk/join ------ Consider supporting us on our reasonably-priced patreon! https://www.patreon.com/killjamesbond ------ *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here: https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by Alice Caldwell-Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com and https://twitter.com/killjamesbond
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If this were a trap, you would certainly be able to kill me before you went down.
No question about it.
Welcome to... Good morning everyone
Welcome to late night Kill James Bond
Listen, good sleep hygiene is important
Right
But not for me
I am Alice Caldwell-Kelly
Joined as always by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devin
Hello, I am slipping out of my bedroom in a silk robe.
I am sitting down with a pot of tea.
There are birds outside the window.
It's a sleepy Bond.
It's a sleepy Kill James Bond.
I'm sitting here.
I'm going honk.
Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.
There's a feather above my mouth
that's just sort of like being blown up and then floating back down. me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me Oh, well done! Fuck off! And the worst part is, the worst part is this sort of late night energy is coming
to you at, uh, 1400 hours British time, 2pm, and yet, due to the fact that we're all very
functional, every single fuckin' host of your favourite podcast has been incapacitated by a lack of sleep but we
watched 1964s to trap a spy the first of god knows how many movies that they made by cutting together
bits of old footage from the tv show the man From Uncle? Yeah, so listeners, The Man From Uncle, if you weren't aware
of it, is a
very, very famous
60s spy TV show,
kind of in the vein of a little bit like The Saint.
It was just like an icon.
And they took some of the episodes of it
and then they filmed extra footage and recut them
and they turned them into sort of 90-minute films
of which there's sort of six or seven
and then we'll do the whole series,
and then we'll do the modern man from uncle film
with Henry Cavill.
And what I've seen is,
my brother and I were really into these when I was a kid,
and what I really love about this series
is that as it goes on,
they just get progressively stupider and stupider.
So this is the most serious.
This is the most serious one?
Oh, crap.
Yeah, yeah, this is like, they're playing straight, and then the rest of This is the most serious one Yeah yeah this is like
Playing straight and then the rest of it is just like
Fucking ridiculous
Well because Ian Fleming was involved
With the man from Uncle for a while
Like the Broccoli's sued
And made him take his name off of it
Before that it was like Ian Fleming's
I don't know Ian Fleming's Uncle
And it shows because this is basically just like a Bond rip off
Oh yeah Yeah 100% fleming's i don't know ian fleming's uncle and it shows because this is basically just like a bond ripoff oh yeah yeah a hundred percent uh and like as as abby says later on it gets more sort of like
betray it gets into like spy fight and stuff but here we're just doing like if every episode if
every film in the bond series was moonraker fuck yeah they all get moonraker there's there's like
we've split the audience here right because some of them will just be putting their head in their hands
and others will just be like,
yes, this is my podcast.
It was made for me.
So, yeah.
Enjoy that as it happens.
But we have to start with The Trap of Spy,
which begins with 009 getting killed
in the grandest version of Bond films.
The clown agent.
Fool. Yeah. with 009 getting killed in the grandest version of Bond films the clown agent fool yeah
what's fucked up
is that this 009
looks insanely
like Mark Ruffalo
yeah I thought
it was Mark Ruffalo
too actually
yeah
like there's a shot
of him like
he opens the car door
he's like
crashed his car
he's like gut shot
he looks at the thing
and I'm like
that's fucking
Mark Ruffalo
this is
like already I'm like perfect this is the and I'm like, that's fucking Mark Ruffalo. Like, already, I'm like, perfect.
This is the vibe.
I'm back in the room.
I love it when I start a film, and it opens by excitedly proclaiming that it's in colour.
I'm like, beautiful.
Fantastic.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's...
We get a scene of him being chased from his car by goons, and through the woods, they're
like pushing foliage out of the way.
And this is so poorly edited.
Occasionally the timing isn't right, so a guy moves in fast motion.
It's so poorly acted.
It's so poorly fucking...
It's beautiful.
They hadn't invented acting back then.
They hadn't invented editing. then they hadn't invented editing
we are pre-everything
it's like real old school Connery
Bond shit it's really fun
it's nice to I'm saying return with a V
we're going back
and so the
brief that this act 009 has been
given is okay you're gonna stumble
to this house and you're gonna like
drag yourself through the agony
of your searing
gunshot wound to the
guts, you're gonna drag yourself through the
house, up to the bedroom looking for a woman
named Angela, and
what you actually get in terms of the acting
is, Guy is coming
home from a heavy night
he just kind of like, covered
in sweat, occasionally forgets
that his legs were. This is you at like, 9am this morning,
Alice. Yes! That was me now! Like, if you
asked me to get up and walk across the room, you would get the same sort of like, uh, the
same movement out of me. I would like, stumble from like, table to table.
Knocking things off the shelf, that kind of stuff.
That's right, that's right.
So at first he thinks that no one is home, so he burns some of the labels out of his
clothes in the fireplace, and then he gets on the phone to his boss in New York, and
says, they're gonna try to assassinate the president of fictional country.
Yes.
Like Western Atumba,
I think he doesn't,
he doesn't say that.
It says the president of Western Atumba is going to visit a chemical plant,
uh,
next week and they are planning to assassinate.
And then he gets cut off.
Somebody cuts the phone line.
It's good.
It's like,
it's good.
It's dramatic.
It's exciting.
And then at this point, uh, a woman who I know is evil walks in and I know she's good yes it's like it's good it's dramatic it's exciting and then at this point
uh a woman who i know is evil walks in and i know she's evil because she's italian i know
she's evil because that's fiona volpe from yes yeah it is yeah i was like that she's a
she is a vodka like here she is speaking of and she's playing i was like let's go yeah she is
just playing volpe again you might remember her listeners from the last time
she was like, James Bond, who only
has to have sex with a woman, she starts hearing
a heavenly choir, like, it's her, she's back.
Yeah, delivering word lines,
but yeah, no, returning
champion,
Fiona Volpe.
And so she
comforts him, I guess, and is like,
oh, I didn't know the phone's out.
That's crazy.
Can you go and stand by this big window, please?
She's wearing this, like, incredible nightie, by the way,
which is apparently what, like, in the 60s was passed for sexy.
So, like, nowadays, this woman would be here in, like, lingerie.
But they can't do that because it's the 60s and they haven't invented sex yet.
So she's here in this
kind of like bloomers
and like a sheer nightie
it's not sexy but you can tell they're trying
to be, this is the thing that your
grandad thought was like the sexiest shit
he'd ever seen, it's not sexy
it's like sexy coded
a woman in like a sort of
pink ankle length
quilted house coat that's made mostly out of asbestos,
if you showed that to your grandfather, he would get so horny he would die.
Yeah.
It happened.
So...
Yeah, RIP.
How they went out, terrible.
Terrible.
That's what he would've wanted.
How that jambed.
Like, saw this movie, and was like, so horny, like, he cannot think.
Had a heart attack which wasn't survivable back then as it is now.
But anyway, Angela says, oh, you should look out the window for some reason.
She wouldn't be cool if you went over to the big window and looked out of it, and
he's like, yes dear.
This is a hitman assassination.
Put your hand on this metal plate! It's so... It's so... over to the big window and looked out of it, and he's like, yes, dear. This is a hitman assassination.
It's so weird.
It's very contextual, like, standing in this spot.
And then what she does is she turns her photography studio lights on him,
because she's a photographer,
and he gets got through, like, some gunshots through the window.
They just, like, rake his body with gunshots.
It's sort of a godfather
way and then the really funny thing is that
after he's dead they just shoot like one more
burst just into the room generally
just to like just to add insult
to injury and it's quite good it's a good reveal
because then the two guys who shot him
come upstairs and they open the door
and they are apparently on the same team as Angela
and they said did he manage to contact anybody
and she said yes he managed to get through to New York and we're like oh
these are the bad guys like
she's doing the evil voice now
and then we get a sequence which I
really love because
listeners this film kind of assumes
that you know about the man from Uncle TV
series and who the characters are but if you
don't this is like a really cool
introduction to like
that's true
we get a don't, this is like a really cool introduction to like, the UNCIR.
That's true. We get a sort of nice old archival shot of New York City, of Manhattan,
and New York looked like shit in the 60s. Like, people talk about urban decay or whatever
in the 70s, but no, in the 60s, what we see is like, the UN building, and across the street
from it is like a factory of three giant smokestacks going.
And it's just like, oh man, it used to be fucking atrocious.
Maybe it still is, I don't know.
Also if you know what those giant smokestacks are, do write in.
But so, what we see is a little like, tailoring shop in the basement of a brownstone.
The Floryers, I think it's called.
And there's a guy in there, pressing some jackets.
Guy walks in, this guy looks suspicious, he looks goon-coded, and takes off his jacket,
lights a cigarette, goes to light the other guy's cigarette, the guy working there, and
fully smokes him out, because the lighter is like a, sort of like, knockout gas, Roger
Moore LSD noise ass dispenser.
Actually there's a couple of times where I can use this, because they re-use this bit.
They like, use this on two different people in this, and, you know, some good screenshots
here I think, perhaps.
Yeah, so they knock out the tailor, and then the guy, he opens the door.
And then, no no, he doesn't open the door, what he does is he equips his special
bell silencer!
That's right.
It's like something he's brought with him for this purpose.
That's fucking right.
Oh yeah! To like like muffle the little
bell above the door yeah yeah he puts something in it so that the bell doesn't ring when when
he opens the door and lets in like a bunch more uh this is like three three more goons being a
spy is like just putting on a suit and kind of doing elaborate bits with the boys it's so good
yeah yeah yeah they just go in they're all wearing business suits they
fucking like they break into the uh the secret secret room quarters which is underneath the
tailor in the tailors yes and there's a receptionist but they also do a little knockout gas thing too
which is very sweet we i love i love i love the design, as soon as you get into the spy base, the receptionist
is like, watching this from like, a red bakelite monitor, everything is like, concrete, because
like, fucking brushed steel hasn't been in, yeah, it's perfect.
This is like, perfect spy location vibes.
This is like, um, Casino Royale in the 60s as well.
This was just what it looked like to be a spy.
And this receptionist, genuinely, like, they bust in the door, knock her unconscious
with the knockout gas, and the guy just fully, like, picks her up and like, dumps her somewhere
out of the way.
Which, great first date idea for me.
However, it immediately sets the tone for what this movie is gonna be, right? Or at least,
we think it does, which is, we're not in the fucking killing people business here,
we're in the knockout gas business. This is the sort of like, baseline level of violence.
The worst thing that happens to you is you sleep it off in a corner much like me after recording this episode you get sort of honk pilled and you know you stand on the
honk exactly and then you're fine but then they they steal some security badges that the uncle um
by the way by the way this is the headquarters that we surmise of the uncle who are the united
network coalition for law enforcement not united nations because that term is protected headquarters, we surmise, of the UNCLE, who are the United Network Coalition
for Law Enforcement. Not United Nations,
because that term is protected.
But the United Network Coalition for Law Enforcement.
They're like, ah, fucking
international MI6. We'll learn more about them later.
Two of
these guys steal
the security
badges as brought to you by
Doritos. I love the security badge design, man.
They're so good.
They're like big plastic triangles that you clip on
that have a number on. It's so cool.
They're like poker chips. It's fantastic.
I've been thinking of them as security Doritos
the whole time.
They clip those on
and they go in undercover
and no one really... There's no dialogue here.
It's all kind of silent you hear like
the clicking and the clacking of their shoes on the concrete floor it's it's very very dramatic
i like it absolutely uh so they make their way in only to get to another checkpoint where they set
off the alarm the very annoying alarm the alarm which will continue for the rest of this scene
it's sort of like
golden eye 64 sort of levels of alarm
the door
like shuts on them
one guy gets through, the other guy literally
gets caught in the door
not like killed or anything
not like crushed, just stuck
and is like ah shit
that's the level we're pitched at here.
He gives up. He surrenders.
He gives up so easily. The security guard
knocks the gun out of his hand,
walks over, goes to get
the gun that he's knocked out of his hand,
points the gun at him, and he's like, oh,
okay then. He's kind of like
holding his arm where it's been stuck in the door
and you're like, oh. Poor fella.
It's just gone waylaid and he're like oh poor fella it's just gone way
late and it's like oh yeah yeah what's also really funny is that the second anyone has a gun in this
movie what they do is they hold it in one hand and they kind of like hunch over forward
they might as well have like one hand out the side like it's no no they don't they don't it's
like it's it's almost a roger it's like a cousin to a roger warfinger very much to keep me in the
vibe in the film they don't stick a hand out but they do kind of they do a little uncle hunch
semi-crouch the the funniest thing is for 1964 this is tactically correct they took like that
that's how the army taught you to spy like to hold a pistol, to hunch all the way over and look
like a dipshit. Step one looked like a dipshit!
Yes! Truly yes! And to me that makes it so much funnier.
It's such a British army officer vibe to me, it's just like holding this gun, half
crouched, you're quite low, you're holding it with one hand and you go, your gear's there.
That's it. They hold a gun like you would hold a live snake yeah i have no conception of how i would hold a live snake
no one does until you have to hold a live snake and you decide very yeah and then you hunch over
having held live snakes that is how i held them i mean anyway the other guy gets through um and he
he uh blows away through the door we see there's a bunch of uncle agents who've been scrambled one of whom we'll meet later and then by the way the way the way he gets through that he blows his way through the door. We see there's a bunch of uncle agents who have been scrambled, one of whom we'll meet later.
And then... By the way,
the way he gets through that door is he has
he's brought with him
from home a briefcase
with an oven glove in it.
It's so good. It's fantastic.
And he uses that oven glove
to apply some
plastic or some thermite, we're not sure
which, to a door to like blow his
way in he just tosses the poor fucking oven glove fantastic then we meet we meet a man we get the
best character introduction i've ever seen in my fucking life so good oh my god so he it's really
good right the evil spy he's from wasp which we'll get into i'm sure uh he opens the door and he looks ahead of
him and he sees silhouetted against the background a man a man stood so normal and so okay
this guy shoots straight at him only to discover that he stood behind some bulletproof glass so
you get a bunch of cracks and then the lights flick on and you see just sort of a normal looking guy we see we see the act of robert vaughn yes playing the character of napoleon solo
incredible uncle agent and the vibe is like american discount sean connery. Yes. He doesn't even look like he's not.
He's not good looking.
He just looks like a normal man.
In a suit.
And what he does is very dramatically run.
Well,
run is a bit strong.
He doesn't even run at first.
This is,
this is a problem,
right?
Because so, so much of the the unintentional comedy of this movie
is purely visual, and I'm struggling to convey to you the way that when the bulletproof glass
gets shot for the third or fourth time, what Robert Vaughan does is he does a little, like,
oop, sort of excuse me motion out of the fray in the same way
do you remember that Roger Moore couldn't do a fight scene
he just didn't have that kind of
killer instinct he didn't have that aggression
that's Robert Vaughn
he just walks around the guy
he moves in the same
way that like someone
with like a tray full of drinks
trying to get past me makes me
move of like whoops sorry there and then Someone with, like, a tray full of drinks trying to get past me makes me move.
I'm like, whoop, sorry there.
And then he just...
I don't know if, like, maybe this is a limitation of the form.
Maybe they couldn't rotate the camera fast enough.
But, like, it's so fucking funny that this guy's main reveal is that he sort of just walks around the other guy and shoots him.
Like, effortlessly flanks him.
This is the most fun thing as well as that
like throughout the whole film like so sean connery listeners the this film actually made me appreciate
sean connery's performance as james bond a bit more because yeah sean connery as james bond was
charming and he like you know he smiled he was nice to people robert vaughn it's just like he's
not charming at all he's just a kind of a dick he's just a normal dude i hadn't actually
seen a man from uncle thing apart apart from the reboot until now and seeing the way that
robert vaughn plays napoleon solo made a lot of pieces fall into place for me it made the character
of archer make a lot more sense to me uh It made like because essentially he's got one thing
That thing is smug and he conveys it through his eyebrows. Yes
So he like sidesteps around the wall shoots the guy three times kills him
Meanwhile the the other agents have like just sort of brought in his three comrades, the
guys they captured.
And we see Robert Vaughn's boss, Mr. Allison, who steps out into the thing and is like,
oh, I guess they were trying to kill me then.
You could have taken this one live for interrogation, maybe.
And you know, Vaughn sort of waggles his eyebrows and goes, well, we've got these three.
Also, another Robert Vaughn thing.
This is the great thing about his acting, it's so formulaic that I can just pick out
things like this.
Whenever he has to smile, whenever the direction is to smile, what he does is he grimaces like
someone has lightly squeezed one of his balls, and then
gets it off his face as quickly
as possible and goes back to eyebrows.
That's right.
Once you notice it, you can't not notice it.
I didn't need to think about Robert Vaughn's balls.
Just like a light
squeeze, like a handshake
sort of thing.
Yeah.
And he uses his whole mouth,
so it's like, eh.
But just for a second, and then it's gone.
But yeah, so at this point we also,
we briefly meet, but aren't properly introduced to,
Elia Kuriakhin,
who will in future films be Robert Vaughn's partner,
but in this film.
So not appearing in this movie.
He's there, he's played by David McCallum,
famous flautist. But he's really good in this.'s played by David McCallum, famous flautist.
But he's really good in this.
But anyway, David McCallum, Eli Kurakin,
brings in these other three agents who've been captured,
and then he sits them down on the couch,
and then they just kind of fall over dead.
What happens is,
they don't even do that until he touches them.
They're sitting down completely still.
They all have died at this point, as soon as they've sat down.
And at this point, David McCallum...
And then Allison goes, hey, touch one of them.
And he touches them.
He's like, ah, he's fucking dead.
So David McCallum is playing Soviet uncle agent,
Ilya Kuryakin, because uncle is international.
And at this point in the series,
he's still doing the accent,
which he later gives up on.
But he's like, he's dead.
He's dead.
The drop is, I got this man, he's dead. It's so good.
The drop is, I got this one.
They are dead.
But how?
It's so good.
It's so fucking good.
It's only game.
Why you have to be mad?
We have big plan, you know.
The 60s sound design is so good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so at this point we get an M briefing Bond scene, because Napoleon's so-
Bond, what do you know about African country?
Yeah.
At this point, my note I've written down here is, boy, you can't fucking say that, cunt.
My one is, oh no.
Oh god, yeah. Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
Alison goes, Solo, what do you know about?
Newly independent, very primitive African nation.
Fucking hell, fuckers.
Yeah.
Snudging up the C score there.
Yeah.
But the way in which this movie treats,
is it West Ntumba they call it? West Ntumba, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The way this movie treats West and Toomba
is in it's
way occasionally
strangely progressive
in other ways not so good
this is one of the not so good column
something that genuinely struck me later on
is like how
well
the characters from the Toomba are like treated
these guys are just one of the more characters well, the characters from the Toomba are treated. Yeah, it could have been a lot worse.
They're real people.
The vibe is, Western Toomba has thrown off the shackles of its colonial oppressor,
And is now putting on the shackles of international...
Well, we'll get there, but for now, they don't even get that far, they're just
like, it's a new nation, on the world stage, and that's a good thing.
And we're sort of broadly optimistic about this.
Now if you say, oh, there's a new country or whatever, that's sort of like a punchline,
right?
At this point, 1964, that's like, no, this is like, George Washington shit is happening in the jungle right now.
It is the newest country.
Yeah, exactly. And we as sort of the community of nations are proud to welcome them onto the international stage.
Unfortunately, someone's gonna fucking kill the fucking fucking yeah premier prime minister m m tells bond or alison tells
so one of our guys at the start agent lancer uh the guy from the opening of the film he's been
killed yeah mark ruffalo ruffalo he's been killed 1964 mark ruffalo that's right he he had infiltrated
a chemical weapons company a chemical company which is owned uh by a guy called uh andrew vulcan
and this is a cool name cool name and Vulcan. And this is a cool name.
It's nothing but a name so far.
This is a front.
The chemical company is a front for Wasp.
Wasp are Spectre.
And there's kind of a funny thing with this,
which is that like, so in the Man From U.N.C.L.E. series,
the Spectre villains are actually called Thrush.
I noticed that.
Yeah, they're actually called, but for some
copyright shenanigans, in this film
they're called Wasp, and they're dubbed over
really badly.
So every time it's just like, we need to try and stop
Wasp.
It's even better, the most noticeable one is
when they have the head of
the Nation of the Doomba say it,
and his voice is so different to
the one that they dub him over with
it's so good
Wasp!
Perfect, just fantastic
So Solo's like
alright, fine, I'm gonna go see
I guess
my handler
slash secretary
slash slam piece So the mission is
find out who killed Lancer
and then
stop whatever Wasp is up to
trying to assassinate, we assume, the president of
West Natumba. And then
so Q and Moneypenny
are the same person in this.
Qnipenny.
Stacked 10 out of 10.
Maggie.
Yes.
And Maggie works in a little office with a sealed door and a radio in it where she just talks to Solo in the field,
which says a lot about how men sort of desire women.
But she's about to go on vacation.
Imagine desiring a woman where you could touch her, but you could only hear her voice, listeners.
Wouldn't that be, like, really weird?
One of the things that she says when she's on the radio is uh
channel D is open
and I fucking bet it is
this is another like uncle thing
it's an iconic phrase where wherever they want to talk
to uncle they just go
open channel D please
channel D is open
channel D is open
but so this movie is so old that Fire Island wasn't even gay yet, is how old
it is.
She's like, packing for a vacation, she's like, oh yeah, I'm gonna go to Fire Island.
Totally normal.
Unremarked upon.
But what Robert Vaughan does, what Solo does, is he sees her bikini top, just like, draped
over a chair, immediately grabs it, he holds
onto it for the rest of the scene, and then, he does a perfect inverse baby boom echo of
the Shinzo Abe meme, because what he says is...
This ain't going to slow down the population explosion, I'll tell you that.
I'mma keep it real with you the 36th president of the united states lyndon baines johnson this will not ameliorate the
exploding population all of his like bond one-liners are like this and they're all shit
they're all like what the fuck yeah he picks up the bra and is like, well, this is too expensive to have shrunk,
so I suppose you must have bought it like that.
And everyone's like, you did it, buddy.
Ha, 60s junk.
She gives him a communicator.
She also gives him a briefing using an incredibly loud
live projector.
Yes, I wrote this down too.
She's just like, yeah, let me just activate
the extremely loud briefing projector.
She's just showing a picture like, this is vulcan this is the factory
shout over the noise
it's so good so what she tells him is that the delegation for most of the time is like...
It's three people.
There's the president,
the guy that they're gonna try and kill,
President Ashiman.
There's his minister of defense,
and there's his minister of economics.
And that's it.
That's all you know. That's all you get. And then at this point...
He calls her an agent provocateur.
Oh, I have that line.
AGP, for short.
Quite literally. Yeah, me when I flash a bra strap to get they-them pussy.
Well, thank you, my little agent provocateur.
And then he has this line where, where she's going to turn on Fire Island
is the idea
and he explicitly compares her to a piece of meat
by saying medium rare on both sides
and it's like
uhhhh
1964
yeah
they're in like
some kind of, I think we're supposed to imagine
friendly flirtatious
office relationship.
Yeah, fucking Moneypenny shit!
Yeah, but the difference is, they are fully fucking, like that's one of the things
that the Bond franchise sort of like, diverted into as it became curiously prudish about
Moneypenny until the Lazenby era, where it's like, yeah, it's just like this unspoken,
it's like a flirtation between them that we kind of sense didn't
really go anywhere, whereas
this is like, no, they're fucking
all the time in there.
Oh, by the way, we also hear that the wasp
guys who died at the start, who just fell over
dead, it's because they swallowed poison before
they even went on the mission.
I kind of like this
idea, because Kuri Akan is like, yeah,
you know, whether they succeeded or failed,
they were dead men.
And they kind of immediately undercut it by being like, ah, well, Wasp is so evil that
they probably didn't even tell them that they were poisoned.
So we do some detective work, Solo goes through Andrew Vulcan's old yearbook, to be like,
well, he must have been heterosexual at some point, he's vocelle now, because of business.
That's right.
Like me.
But, as an American man, at some point he must have been going steady with a woman.
Such a cute expression.
He looks through sorority records, which he, you know...
He probably just has those, I think.
Yes, it's a club for girls.
It's a useful, useful drop.
And he finds a photo of Vulcan with his arm around a woman, whom he has to deduce who
this is, and let me tell you, you get a fuckin' name
alert as we introduce...
Elaine May Bender.
I also wrote Elaine Bender down.
Yeah, yeah!
Elaine May Bender Bending Rodriguez.
Robert Vaughan's voice is so good.
Yeah, 100% so good.
He always sounds like this, yeah. So Elaine Mae Bender is, uh, she's from New York, she, like, dates him in college,
and then she went off to get married, and is now an unremarkable suburban housewife
in suburban upstate New York.
What a dream.
Absolutely.
Jesus.
So he goes to visit her. There's a fantastic sort of like, almost bawdy bit, where in order to make this introduction,
he's gotten the bishop of her church to send her a pastor or her priest to like, chaperone
her, and introduce him as like, no, this guy's fine.
It is normal to let Robertbert vaughn in your house
he just does this thing with his eyebrows do not be alarmed i think it's like slightly
weirder to let robert vaughn in your house if he's like introduced by a priest
like what and the priest gets a bit of comedy too because he's like well the bishop told me
to vouch for him but you know in good conscience I can only really vouch for the bishop, and then gets pulled off stage by a big hook, sort of thing.
It's like pure vaudeville.
But anyway, then Robert Vaughan wins the Brian Cox Memorial Award in Intelligence.
He wins the Brian Cox Memorial Award in Intelligence and barb, because what he
does is he sits her down, and he's like, Wasp is a top secret kill squad.
You heard of Spectre?
It's Spectre?
yeah, however, I'm a member of Uncle, which is
another top secret kill squad
she goes, I'm a member of Uncle, and she responds
and here's Brittany
you know, I've heard of that, I think
I've read about that somewhere
just like, cool
secret agent
my favorite sort of like, totally unspoken thing...
It's the same thing you heard of the red and black!
Well, she's a 50s housewife, she's like, I'm a lot of quaaludes, and I've been reading some weird literature.
But my favorite unspoken thing here is that when he introduces it, when he shows his ID, which he then snatches away from her, he doesn't say uncle. He says the U N C L E. And then like, and you can tell he's like this
time, this time I'm going to make it stick. And she's like, oh, uncle. And immediately he folds.
And he's like, the rest of the movie, he just calls it uncle. It was like, fuck.
He wanted it to be so much more impressive. It's like, I'm with the UN, see Ellie.
And she's like, uncle?
And it's like, yeah, yes, uncle.
The United Network Committee for Law Enforcement.
And uncle needs you to get on a plane to Washington, D.C. right now
and abandon your husband and your children in order to serve your country.
Yeah, and get close to Andrew Vulcan and find out what the the deal is with this because we think they're going to assassinate
the president of this new nation this is a fucking banger of a premise for a film
it's like suburban housewife has to go and become like a glamorous spy lady and this rocks this is
so i wish the movie had been from her point of view to be honest like this will get tired however
because one of the tenets of the man from Uncle was that
in order to give you a way in, they had to have an innocent, a character who was not
a spy, but became inveigled in damn near every plotline.
It's fine for this one time, but, you know, bear with me, because it's gonna get boring.
So he puts her on a plane, uh, there is a sexy woman
on the plane, flying pink lipstick, which triggers Robert Vaughn.
Yeah, she's doing a nude lip, looks great.
And like-
And like, yeah.
And like, Bryce's drive-by harasses this woman on the way first.
And she's like, whatever happened to red lipstick? And she's like, it's the same
lips. And he's like, very nice.
What he says is-
You know, this isn't fraud against men.
Kill yourself.
How about that?
Take you to a sleep on the first date.
I'm just going to say this idea of like a fraud against men is like so
entrenched in 1964 that you could say it about pink lipstick.
How is that?
What's the fraud?
What are lips are?
Yeah,
man.
I thought those were your regular lips,
but actually, now, I've
discovered that there's fucking
lips under here! Wait till you hear about overdrawing,
my dude!
What? Now you'd kill him if you
told him about overdrawing.
I will also say, this is something I want to talk about,
the sexual politics of this movie.
Every man in this movie is constantly, like, sort of wearing, displayed on their
forehead, what they think their percentage chance to smash is at that moment. And it's
sort of- that's a key component to, like, every male actor's delivery.
Robert Vaughn is just like, 100% all the time.
He's in the high nineties all the time he's tattooed
yeah he sees the pink lipstick
it goes down to 99
she does the line about it's the same lips
it goes up to 105
fully just my man
moving through life
there's even a bit where when he's asking
Elaine about
Vulcan and they're like oh yeah
we had a little bit of a thing in college
or whatever and he immediately hits back
with why didn't you marry him
and she's like oh no he was
weird
and she kind of like essentially goes oh
you made a stupid move now
you've only been married into trash.
But yeah, it's so, like, the politics of the era
where it's like, you dated a guy in college, yeah?
Why didn't you marry him?
It's like, what?
Like, I can't even remember the names
of half the people I dated in college now, man.
He, like, builds her legend for her.
He, like, hands her various pieces of information
like, this is what your house looks like.
You're now Elaine May Van Every every a rich widow in oil wells uh here's here's what your holdings
are here's who your friends are and everything about this is this is i think this this thing
where she like she's sitting in the seat he's being very charming with quotes next to her handing her all this shit i think this is a 1960s man's idea of what a 1960s woman's sexual fantasy is and it's
all about wealth and at this point i wrote down simply america is dog nation no no no this isn't
this isn't the sexual fantasy of a woman in the 1960s, this is the sexual fantasy of me now. It's like, here is your boundless wealth.
Yeah, because the next morning she's in a hotel room and Robert Vaughan wakes her up and
he's giving her breakfast and a room full of designer gowns and fur coats and he's like,
I've gotten you into a fancy party this evening.
You'll be amused to know that I wrote down, which as she does stepping out of bed directly into
kitten heels is an abigail thorn move it's all the time yeah she does put on pink heels but she
gets into the uh she gets into the hotel room and robert vaughn is like a put on like breakfast um
and be like filled this room with designer clothes and jewelry and furs um and i have written i would
immediately fuck someone who did this for me because he's
also like andrew vulcan's having a black tie party tonight obviously you're going you're gonna try and
get close to him i've also booked you a hairstylist and makeup artist and i'm like because you look
like shit quite frankly bestie god like i i would instantly fuck a man who did this for me this is
like an iconic move please someone do this there's an interesting little line here where he's trying
to get her to eat breakfast which is french toast and she doesn't want to eat like a big breakfast
and she says i bet the real uh van every or whatever is fat american american adults overeat
i'm like it's 1964 every american woman has two eating disorders on the go at the same time,
and like, whose main calorific group is fucking quaaludes. And you get a little bit of a sense
of how that maintained itself as a system, to just be like, oh that's a normal thing to say that will
make us sympathise with this character, is be like, I bet she's fucking fat.
Also, everyone's like, you know, eating lead and covered in radiation like who gives a shit after
our fucking toast who cares lead was like on tables with salt and pepper back then
there's there's there's a bit later where solo like meets another woman and apologizes for
offering her a cigarette that has a filter on it that's the level of devil may care we're at with public health
she's like is is a filter okay uh so and she's like i'm sorry i'm gonna fuck you wearing this
condom aids hasn't been invented yet one thing we've skipped over someone is that when elaine
wakes up in in the hotel room napoleon is there already he's stood in the hotel room Napoleon is there already
he's stood in the room fully clothed
staring out of the window and he goes
telepathy is real
and he's like I've been sending you messages
to wake up for 60 seconds
and she's like
why do you have the number 3000
on your forehead
hell of an open gambit i assume this is like just more 60s like population
explosion shit it's still just people must have been talking about this in the 60s it's like
i think there's something to this mental telepathy thing and i'm like what dude
good morning to you too so so so she goes to the function, where she looks great, she's got her hair done,
she's in like a gown, she meets the hostess, who is a trans woman, I'm gonna say this-
Who's the same woman from the plane.
That's true, she's perpetrated a fraud against women.
She's got a nude lip again.
Killer.
Yep, that's right.
Uh-huh.
On the spot.
Fantastic jawline on this woman.
And she's like, would you like to come and meet the delegation
from western tumba and she's like yeah sure let's do it and it's weirdly not racist like i did i
keenly conscious here i was like racing myself oh god this is a podcast of three white people, right? But, to me, it's fully like, or shucks at kind of brand of American liberalism, of like,
hey, you guys threw off your colonial oppressors, we did that!
You know, I did that too!
Did you like some new ones?
Yeah, you guys are just Americans.
But you're like, you're just Americans geographically displaced. Yeah, you guys are just Americans. But you're like, you're just Americans, geographically displaced.
Yeah, 100%.
And we see that, like, we actually managed to have a conversation between these
different characters about neocolonialism, because the deal is, they're coming to Vulcan
because Vulcan is gonna build, like build a synthetic material, like a plastics
plant, in their country.
And no one else is going to do it.
There's a lot of
investors, but no one wants to invest.
And we get like a
okay, maybe basic, but pretty straightforward
discussion of colonialism,
which I've put in, in its entirety
as a drop, because I think it's worth
talking about
first we throw the colonizers out and then we come to them hat in hand begging them to come back
don't oversimplify old boy it's one thing to enter as masters and quite another to enter as investors
and we genuinely have this like like two different politics of post-colonialism of the kind of like
liberal uh it's fine, we'll
get them in as business partners again, versus this sort of rankling a little bit when it's
people that you've been fighting for your liberation.
And it doesn't make any jokes about this, it's just there, and it's good.
And you know, everyone kind of takes them seriously as nation builders, and Robert
Vaughan meets them later on and he's just like, yeah, I mean, uh, good luck building
a country!
Mm-hmm.
But so, at this point, Andrew Vulcan sort of like, lurches into the frame.
The big number on his forehead is going up and up and up, because he has seen Elaine
May Bender, his old college girlfriend.
Elaine May Bender!
Elaine May Bender. The oneender the one that got away we sense
Elaine May Bender
Elaine May
pegging
essentially shoves
everyone out of the way and is like
okay I need to talk to this woman
this guy is like Elaine I haven't seen you in years
how's it going oh, my husband died.
She says like two months ago.
Goes down a bit to like the high 70s.
She plays a spot perfectly
because he comes over and is like,
my God, is that Elaine?
And she like looks directly in his eyes
and goes, I'm sexually available.
And he's like, hot dog, baby.
He's like throwing his hat on the ground.
Back in business. Yeah. in business yeah not 60 seconds he says it's been many years since i've
been moved by the look of a woman and it's like you just heard her husband died two months ago
my dude like yeah but he became volsel for business uh he he takes around the balcony
that's right uh he takes her on the balcony Meanwhile, Robert Vaughn is talking to the delegation.
And sort of,
Vulcan is like looking over his shoulder at him.
He's fully winding up to do the kill him thing.
Yeah, yeah.
This is quite a nice little scene
because as Vulcan and Elaine are chatting,
we see Robert Vaughn in the background and inside.
And Vulcan's henchman,
a guy called Mr. Jist comes in
and he's like, oh, oh
Mr. Jist
but he comes in and he says, Andrew
our friend's uncle is here tonight
and it's like, oh, okay, so we get a little bit
of coded spite
you mean our friend's uncle are here tonight
you ungrammatical fuck
but he's like, oh, make sure
that our friend's uncle
is taken care of.
We get a cool little bit of spy speak.
Kill him. It's cute.
And of course,
Elaine immediately recognises
this and gestures to
Solo, who is like, okay, fine.
I'll meet you. I will
prepare my special move here.
So they talk for a bit
and
she talks about him
being Volsel. They dance
because he's taken dance lessons
but he's never had an opportunity to use them
until now. I quite like that line.
I quite like that. Because she
asks him, she's like, surely you must have learned to dance
between college and now
and he goes, well I took lessons but I've never had the inclination to use them until tonight
he says until just now which is like his like sort of his sexuality sort of like blossoms like a
flower which is then crushed immediately because napoleon solo has been charging his special move
this is something above a sigma male. This is a fucking
Theta male move.
He literally...
He sees them dancing.
He, like, takes his hand away
from her, and he's like, no, no, no.
You're doing that wrong. You need to be doing it like
this.
Shows him how to dance,
and then goes, by the way,
I'm stealing this woman from you and dances away
with her fucking fucking incredible just sigma shit unreal it's it's all carried on the eyebrows
here but they they chat and um well this ends up being quite cute because they chat and robert
vaughn says okay cool uh i don't understand that I'm in danger. Put this thing in the prime minister's drink,
the prime minister of West Ntumba.
And they're like having to like laugh
and pretend this is a normal conversation
because they're being watched.
But then Robert Vaughn kind of dances her back to Vulcan
and then goes, thanks very much and walks away.
And Elaine has this line where she says,
what a charming man, or at least I'm sure he thinks so.
And it's this quite like nice moment where she's
acknowledges the weirdness of what's just happened yeah yeah yeah for sure um i plus generally one of
my favorite things is when a character says hey laugh like i'm saying something really funny to
you right now and and like the other person laughs that i really like that that's one of my favorite
sort of spy movie things.
So she does drug the Prime Minister, this happens off-screen, because Solo has to go
and powder his nose, he has to break into a women's powder room, and communicate with
Channel D to talk to this horny woman back at headquarters.
On the way out, another woman, who he been flirting with earlier looks at him like, um,
why are you in women's spaces?
And he sort of, once again, theta males his way out of it by being like, listen, I'll
be in Manhattan on Thursday, you can fuck me then, do you have to break down the door
in here?
And it's like jesus christ i i have some thoughts about the sort of like the
sexuality and the sexualization of this movie they're not weirdly they're not all negative
but like most of them are yeah i mean at least the lady on the plane that he talked to the lipstick
but the lipstick lady like she deliberately like makes eye contact with him and deliberately like
drops her lipstick on the floor so that he picks it up. So at least she instigated that a little bit.
We see throughout this film
that Robert Vaughn is being pursued
by women. He's not always chasing
them around like Sean Connery was. Not always.
So
the Prime Minister is
incapacitated. He has to be carried up to
his room. He's knocked out. He won't be able
to go and visit the plant, which is where they think
the assassination is going to take place uh so they think he's safe he gets in his car to
drive back to his hotel on the way he has a bizarre conversation with maggie yeah he calls up maggie
again who is like uh good that the thing's working by the way way, you up? What are you wearing? She fully
initiates
this as a flirtatious
as a sexual conversation. She tries to sext
him over a 60s radio connection.
Yes. She's like,
what are you wearing?
It's like grey flannel suit, same as every
other cunt.
How dare you? His is tan. Sort of like
a brown. You up? One to cyber, over!
I love when a guy comes to my door and is like, telegram, and then you're like, do you want to
fuck? And I'm like, I've been bored, I don't even know you. It's like, I'm driving my big sort of
60s Cadillac, like, down a nice, quiet country road. I'm turning the steering wheel for miles
and it's not moving.
Bet you wish you were here
instead of locked up in an office.
He has this fucking
bizarre line before he hangs up
where he just goes,
Drink your milk?
Yes!
What the fuck?
He's like, she's like,
got milk and cookies there, which he somehow knows.
Women be drinking milk?
Because of telepathy.
And she's like, will you sext me, essentially, and he goes, drink your milk.
Uh, good girl.
We're not getting off the bit where he's genuinely telepathic, we're not gonna do that.
I was thinking about it!
I was thinking more about this sort of like a Discord Daddy-Kitten relationship
between these two.
Yeah.
It's atrocious.
Yeah, it's very odd.
Discord Daddy is a disgusting phrase and I hate you for putting it in my mind.
Not now, kitten.
Daddy has to, like, detect the presence of another woman.
Which he does, because he's, like, the pussy detector goes off. Yeah, that's it.
It's like, the number on my forehead is still very high, but there's no one around.
Yeah, why is it going up? And he turns around with a gun, and it's like, there's
an Italian skank in the backseat of my car. There's a broad in my fucking wagon.
What's happening here?
He pulls over, he does the line about, like, oh, I'm sorry, I only have filtered
cigarettes, which is fucking great. Because I'm gay!
You might as well pee in a fucking dick in your mouth!
You're giving me a filtered Marlboro? Die. Get out of my sight.
He gets her out of the car, and he's like, well, what if you have a gun concealed on
you?
And she's like, I'm wearing a fucking- look at this dress, do I look like I have shit
concealed on me, the tuck is like halfway up my fucking asshole on this thing.
And he's like, well, I dunno, it could be done.
And at this point he sticks his gun in her tits. And the sort of, the, the like, interactive fiction thing of, use gun on tits that he's
doing here, really feels like every spy movie we've done has like, collapsed into one singularity.
Yeah.
It's just like, yeah, that's what it is, that's what it is, fuckin' cut it, print
it, send it, make it the episode episode art him sticking his gun on a woman's
tits but then he searches her with the gun barrel and it's sort of more it's it's not shown right we
see her face but the sort of thing is he puts the gun barrel like up to her pussy yeah like inspect
it for weapon she's like uh pussy off She's either into this or pretending to be.
Use gun on pussy.
That's right.
Um, so, at this point she's like, 009's still alive.
He wants to meet you.
He sent me here.
It's not a trap, and if it is a trap, you're so smart and handsome, you could definitely get out of the trap if it is a trap you're so smart and handsome you could definitely
get out of the trap if it was a trap
and this works
of course it works
because he's telepathic he's like
well I'd know if it was a trap
you get the drop that we had
at the start where she's like oh you'd just kill me
straight away and he's like yep
I've written here she's a great actress because
as you know he opens the door for her and she gets in the car and then he walks around to get
the other side and just through a look we get her going like i'm evil she's so good on her face is
just like genuinely genuinely the best actor yeah yeah it's fantastic. And so, he drives them to the same house that we saw 009 get killed in.
And we get some more flirtation on the way, she's like, oh, I live alone, from time to
time, you know.
Me too, baby.
Yeah, I never have any men back here.
And he's like, oh, so I shouldn't, like, intuit anything from this, I shouldn't misbehave, and he's like, oh, so I shouldn't, like,
intuit anything from this, I shouldn't, like, misbehave, and she's like, oh, I didn't say that.
And I like this, it is cute, and it makes me think about this, because this sort of normalization of
flirting, of sexuality, is, as we know, a tremendously oppressive thing in real life,
right? However, when it's done in this fit like this this framework
of fiction where it's like oh everyone's everyone's horny everyone's into it nobody's like
got a headache that day or is gay or just fucking doesn't fancy you or whatever whenever it's no
stakes like this you get a little glimpse of how i bet it was possible it wasn't worth it but i bet it was
possible if you were in the mood with the right person for it to be fun for it just to be totally
normal for a man to go up to a woman and be like hey nice tits how's it going kind of thing um
it's you know it's it's nice in a way which seems so weird it's like that right this whole scene is
the two of them just sort of like, moving through the house, doing bits.
And I, like, earnestly find it extremely charming.
He's genuinely doing like, Bob Hope bits, because he knows it's a trap, because
of the telepathy.
He grabs like a sword off the wall, and he's like, oh yeah, my grandma used to swing a sword around looking
for like, prowlers and stuff.
And he's fully just, they're just doing bits with each other, he's like, darting through
doors unexpectedly and like, getting her to go through things.
Finds the house empty.
And he's like, okay, I still know this is a trap, but I'm gonna let my guard down enough
to have sex with this.
Yeah, meanwhile his like, forehead meter has just has just gone up to about 200% at this point.
Yeah, and then we get this, frankly, incredible exchange.
A line which has been painted with a laser designator.
This line has been dropped from an aircraft.
Willem Dafoe and the lads are sighting you up and blowing up children in the next yard over.
And the lads are like, sighting you up and blowing up children in the next yard over. At 30,000 feet, it has spiralled down to directly obliterate me, because he's kissing
her, he like, undoes her dress, and the discussion they have is...
What would you like me to change into?
Oh, uh, anything.
But a boy.
Happens to the best of us, anything. But a boy.
Happens to the best of us, Napoleon.
You should try it.
It's not bad.
You might like it.
I mean, she opened up the whole scene by being like,
well, if I was a trap, you'd notice before you went down.
Grinder, yeah.
But, like, this is, it's hilarious for Alice reasons,
but also it's a very, like, instant and very specific denial from Robert Boyd.
Robert, should I be changing to you? Not a boy.
I'm not gay.
I'm not gay. I didn't say that.
I would hate for you to be a nubile young boy.
I'd hate that.
Why do you have a second smaller
percentage on your forehead that just says
thinking about femboys and why has it been
9999 the whole
movie yeah it's it's just like an extremely specific denial of the love of all these
to be about definitely not a guy beautiful woman and yeah just go i'm not thinking about men And you're like, huh?
Like, we are WhatsApp?
They have sex, she's like, do you think I'd look good with a moustache?
He discovers...
He's like, I really enjoyed making Abigail the other night at the Tia Blanche show!
And he finds the burnt label in the fireplace, and he's like, oh, shit, fuckin'
009 was here, and he's not gonna come and meet us, I'm being led up the garden path.
Luckily I already knew this.
So she's got, you know, there's an old Russian proverb, the fox it's the, uh, the fox knows many tricks,
but the hedgehog knows one good one.
She knows one assassination method, which is, would you like to stand in my, like, window
here?
Yeah.
And he doesn't want to do it, and she's just kind of stuck.
He really clearly doesn't want to do it.
She, like, points down at the fucking like
fake little bridge over the brook in the garden or some shit and it's like look there he is and
there's just a guy stood like perfectly statuesque silhouetted and i'm like is that him and she's
like there's a guy with a gun hiding in that guy's silhouette which is so gay silhouette technique
which i used for the opening of the film yeah Yeah, the second guy stood perfectly behind you, so he's blocked.
Two identically shaped dudes.
Is it gay to stand perfectly behind your dude, concealing your silhouette from the enemy?
Um, so she throws on the lights and then tries to push him into the field of fire, but he just like sidesteps her and she falls into the past of every bullet.
He uses the technique of walking slowly around her again.
Yeah, once again he just does the whoop.
He goes around a pillow and you're like, oh fuck, just one move.
And it works!
It works, she gets absolutely lit up and I wrote owned.
Yeah, she gets owned.
He looks a little bit shocked and a little bit sad because Solo is like debonair and urbane,
he's not like in the business of killing women callously, even when they're trying to kill him.
But then the two goons try to come in and we get a chase scene. He like gets out over the roof,
they chase him through the gardens.
We get a bit of a shootout. He gets away in his car, and then one of the goons goes to the other,
hey, get the car, and he goes, no, don't worry about it, I've tampered with the car.
In a plot for my sort of unproduced screenplay called Speed, I've hooked the speedometer
to some kind of bomb or something, and the second it hits 50 miles an hour, that shit
is just armed.
I call it, The Car That Couldn't Slow Down.
And then he delivers this weird, weird, weird line where he says,
Our uncle's going to go sleepy by forever.
Much like the podcast.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Very unusual.
But then Sir Robert Vaughan does in fact get to 50 miles an hour
and they knock out, they deploy his little...
I thought it was a bomb out I thought it was a bomb
I was like
wait
literally sleepy bite
because the gas
the knockout gas
the weed gas comes up through the dashboard
how could you know that would kill him
50 miles an hour
isn't fast
well I mean it's sort of 60's cars he's being impaled by the steering wheel 50 miles an hour isn't fast he could just coast
well I mean it's sort of
60s cars he's being impaled by the steering wheel
but he happens to be like
he happens to be on a bridge
if he hadn't been on a bridge he'd like
fuck knows what would have happened but he goes into the water
um
at this point we go back to Elaine
who is looking at herself in the mirror
in her sort of like expensive dress
and is like like, terrified.
She's like, I don't know who I am anymore.
Yeah, she's hearing the fucking Green Goblin suit
through the door being like, go on.
Be rich.
Is away from her husband
for one night, I don't know who I am anymore.
After all, why
shouldn't I become a sort of
rich and wealthy widow?
And Solo stumbles in
sort of
half-drowned, and immediately
passes out on the carpet.
There's a degree to which I find it very fun
that they set up a
trap for Napoleon Solo, and it
just honestly goes off
and works.
He just barely survives and is like,
fuck, they nearly got me!
He loses his gun and his communicator.
As he says to her, when she's feeling a bit insecure about it later, I don't know
why, you're doing better than I am.
Which I liked.
But so, she nurses him back to health, he does this whole scene with a wet towel on
his forehead, and she's like, yeah, I don't want to do this anymore, Andy seems like a
good guy, and, you know, I'm not really loving being a sort of like spy cop, and being used as like a sexual trap
here, and he...
Well, if it was a trap, you'd know when you went down.
That's right.
And in the most sort of 1950s America is dog country response, he literally goes, and this
is damn near verbatim,
Well, if me being hurt doesn't matter to you check this shit out
they hurt my car
god damn it
it's like
so genuine
yeah
they damaged my fucking car
woman and then he stands her up
in front of the mirror and he's like I'll tell you what your problem
is your problem is you're afraid
of serving cunt same speech that Abby gave me when we started this mirror and he's like i'll tell you what your problem is your problem is you're afraid of serving cunt same speech that abby gave me when we started this podcast and she's like
he's like listen you you're you're mediocre right you're a mediocre housewife and you're
gonna have to go back to that as is your role in our society and you so you're afraid because
you're afraid you won't be able to do it because because you look good now." And she's like, yeah, this convinces me.
I'm back on the team.
I don't know why Abi called you a mediocre housewife.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm really sorry about that.
It was cruel.
Textually, I'm sure it made more sense.
I'm sure you're an excellent housewife, I
promise.
Yeah. But so, she essentially is convinced to get taken by Vulcan to his plant, his factory,
on a date. His location.
To be like, I'm so interested in plastics, or whatever, please take me to the
plastics store. He's like, I'm gonna make them really
small and then put them in everything.
We get some great goon outfits yeah yeah yeah we do uh we get we get a whole bunch of great
sets in in the factory there are some fantastic ones i will be calling this place the pipes
factory from now on because that's what it is they have a room which is like big shit bubbling
yeah they've got the boiling piss room i was very excited to see the boiling
the boiling piss room the boiling piss has a gantry and people walk over it like
five times in the same shot, and I'm like, oh, they're gonna dump someone in the piss.
And they never do!
Someone's going in the piss, and they just-
No one ever goes in the piss!
I'm so fucking mad, because they have three scenes where they, like, people are walking
over this gantry over the boiling piss, and
there's like, no handbars on like... there is on the gantry, but when you get past that,
there's just a big... no fucking hand railings, no one goes in the piss.
What the fuck.
What am I doing here?
Wasting my fucking time.
So Vulcan's like, yo girl, let me show you the loading docks.
And she's like, going along with this.
Solo has called in some help, and we see that the security see a parachutist coming down
on the lawn, which immediately sets off every alarm Vulcan's like, you know, guards, kill
him.
Solo, the real Solo, just effortlessly sneaks into the piss room. Because as we see, the parachutist is like a dummy parachutist.
And we get a great, almost straight Leslie Nielsen thriller line, where Vulcan talks
to his scientist, Mr. Piss, Mr. Jizz, or whatever, and is like, it's a diversion.
Why?
To get us away from thi- so he just like, explains what a diversion
is. It's very nearly like, it's a big building full of doctors.
A diversion? What is that? Well, it's to distract us so we can do something else.
But that's not important right now. It's to go to the boiling piss room, and- audience,
I cannot stress enough how much this looks like boiling piss. It's just a big, yellow vat
of liquid.
It's where they keep the piss!
And at this point, I'm not entirely certain
what Vulcan's industry is.
Because there's a reactor, there's the boiling
piss, he's talking about plastics.
Yeah, it's business.
It's a business factory.
We see the funniest
piece of spycraft in this whole movie,
which is... So Solo gets out of the room, he gets to the door, the door's locked,
there's a goon outside the door. So he knocks on the door, the goon opens it, he like,
hustles past him and goes, oh by the way, welcome, why don't you indoors, and like, tries to get past him.
Yeah, this is really funny. He's like, in a tuxedo at this point, he's like, yeah,
welcome, what's your name, and the goon goes, okay, hey!
This lasts
long enough for the
second door stuck
incident of this movie.
Where he just slams the goon
in the door and runs.
Door stuck!
You're a certified dick sucker.
Yeah, he makes his way out
and escapes into the pipe maze
yeah we get a pretty
good I think chasing him through
the pipes
he meets a mongo
extremely briefly
I wrote down in caps
last minute mongo
a guy
a big guy with a pipe
just takes a swing at him.
The guy brought a pipe to work in the pipes factory, and he tries to take his head off
the pipe.
That's showing initiative.
Oh yeah.
And he just dodges it and moves on.
That guy's in one shot.
Day one of the pipe factory, I brought my own pipe from home.
All of us are like...
There's also a great shot, a two shot combination, right, where one of the guards fires a gun
at him and we get a zoom in on that guard's face and his hand holding the gun, which makes
him look super cool, and then, in the next shot, Solo picks up a small trash can, and
like, places it slightly to the left of its previous position, and that same guard
runs full force into it and eats absolute shit. It's great.
It's fantastic. So Solo retrieves Elaine, and then
they run out to the car, and then we get the twist, because the president of West Natuba
is there with a gun, and he's like, like ah you almost foiled my plan um and it's
not him who's going to be assassinated it's his two buddies yeah because he's been working for
wasp um i've been working for wasp the entire time you're like sphinx um
so at this point uh both both elaine and Solo get captured, they put them in some pretty
dramatic looking D-shaped handcuffs, and because of-
No, no, hang on, we get a phenomenal line, which I'm gonna try to get first try, but
I don't entirely remember which one it is.
Come over here, Mr. Solo, you're about to be chained to a pipe.
That's, yeah, I also had that. Come over here, Mr. Solo, you're about to be chained to a pipe. That's, yeah, I also have that.
Come over here, Mr. Solo.
You're about to be chained to a pipe.
Come over here, Mr. Solo.
TFW, you're about to be chained to a pipe.
Keep it early, my dude.
You're about to be chained to a pipe.
And that is what happens when they say they chained Solo to a pipe.
Chained to the pipe.
Nice.
So he's going to be fucking sous-vided to death.
They're going to googa him with this steam fire.
Next to the born guy's guns.
Yeah, they're going to cover him in spices
and they're going to sauna him to death.
They literally say this to him
and he turns to this woman
that he's just pulled out of her life
He turns to her and is like
Yeah sorry about that
And she literally is just like
Ah them's the breaks
Yeah she says you tried your best
The best part is they're both
They're both like dangling from their wrists
Because they've been chained to this pipe
Which looks like excruciatingly painful
And she goes don't blame yourself
And he goes oh
i don't perfect it's just so good it's like ideal it's this random it's like the the like
the sex chance the sex chance number is like low but not impossible at this point um so so the
vulcan and the prime minister of western tumba reveal that when they assassinate the other two
western tumban dudes uh wasp are gonna like over the country, basically, and they're gonna have a whole country that can
have an army and economic power at their disposal.
Diplomatic immunity, Mr Bond.
Also, we see that because of the sexual betrayal or whatever, Vulcan tries to hit Elaine slightly
before this, and Solo punches him instead.
Because you don't hit a woman, that's bad.
Which, again, curiously progressive.
Another curiously progressive thing, Solo is like, it's sort of, you see where O.S.S.
Sandicette is coming from.
He is earnestly hurt that the Prime Minister is betraying his new country.
And he's like, but we were going to be buddies.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
At the UN. He's going to have a table next be buddies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the UN.
He's gonna have a table next to you,
gonna eat lunch with you at the UN cafeteria.
That's right.
So they chain them to the pipe,
they leave him, to get sous-vided.
And Solo immediately,
like, using a
shit-ton of upper body strength we've never seen
him display at any other point, hooks his
legs up onto the pipe, and then tries to like, kick a joint into the part.
He is wearing patent leather loafers at this point, and he's just kicking this fucking
thing making no impact whatsoever, as the room gets steamier and steamier, and the woman
behind him dangling from her wrists gets sweatier and sweatier and I wrote down, is this bondage scene exploitative?
And the answer is yes.
That's right.
But he does ultimately
succeed in kicking the thing down.
The fantastic
thing about this, by the way, is that after
all of this shit, being
sous-vided for hours, her eyeshadow is
still perfect.
She gets upset actually because they do
dangle down and Elaine
having just been through this traumatic experience
we do get to have actually a nice moment where we see
how she feels about this because
she says my family never got to see
me looking so beautiful last night
I'm like you know
my outfit's ruined and my makeup's ruined
and I have to go back and just be a sort of basic
housewife again and
it's actually kind of strange that we have this
but it's quite nice
it's a little sort of like first wave
feminist grievance because she says
like all of the like everyone
takes me for granted I you know I
cook and I clean and I feel
invisible and this one time I felt
beautiful and no one even no one saw
me except you it's maybe a
nice artifact of the fact that that this was originally an hour long and has been extended
and i don't i can't tell what's what's been added and what's what was original but it we do get like
more sort of character beats than you might expect in like an equivalent james bond film actually
um because obviously the stuff that you add in is stuff that's cheap to film and that means dialogue and character moments yeah yeah absolutely um but so he then diffuses this in a
sort of like almost sort of killing joke moment where he finds her like missing earring and they
both sort of like break down laughing um because women are silly um so at this point he's like
right i've got a plan you're not gonna like what the plan is
And she's like, what's the plan?
He goes, come over here Mr. Solo, you're about to be
Chained to a pipe
This is intercut with all of
The little men guys like walking
Into the fucking boiling piss room
And I was there like, okay, we're reaching
The fucking denouement, baby, someone's going to
That piss, we're gonna get a doctor
Yeah
And I'm like, okay, right Okay, we're reaching the fucking 30-year mark, baby. Someone's going to nap his. We're going to get a doctor in a moment.
And I'm like, okay, right.
He chains her back to the fucking pipe again.
Yeah, he's like, you're back on the pipe, though.
And she's, like, dangling from the pipe, like, ah.
And I'm like, is this bondage scene exploitative in the movie?
He's like, well, maybe.
And two guys come in.
One of them's wearing the big sort of, like, hazmat asbestos suit.
And then we get the first
appearance of something which is going to recur so much in this series that my brother and i used
to call the uncle chop which is yes which is if you listeners if you ever need to knock someone out
stone cold instantly but without killing them what you do is you go behind them and you give them a
perfect light karate chop
right between the shoulder blades that's right take some fucking out absolutely out hours a
total unconscious immediately just like if someone ever does that to you you have an obligation to
society to the world to drama to be perfectly asleep for the next day yeah my brothers and i
just we still do that to each other we still just uncle chop each other for no reason.
It's uncle chopping a friend so they get a lovely night's sleep.
At this point, also, there will be an incredible moment
later in the film series where, like,
he tries to uncle chop a mongo and it doesn't work.
We'll get there, we'll get there!
The man with the iron shoulder blades.
Not working is remarkable.
Fantastic.
So he uncle chops the guy in the hazmat suit,
which like covers his face.
I'm like, oh, we're doing Dr. No.
He's going to put on the thing.
He's going to like walk around until the guy's like,
who's that?
No, doesn't fucking do that.
I'm not changing out of these loafers, you know?
Yeah.
These fucking sweaty ass steamed suit that he's just wearing
He's like, nah, I'm keeping this
I know it smelled crazy in there
In the piss room, there is a dial that says
danger on it that's going up
Why would that be a dial
and not a gauge?
I wrote down, the piss is reaching danger threshold
What are the units
of piss danger?
And he's like, to the two guys
The two guys he's trying to get killed, he's like,
please stand here, touch this metal plate.
Um, meanwhile, the Prime Minister is ushered to the side, and as the pressure builds, Solo
enters the room, and at the very last second he's like, hey, we need to get out of here,
because the piss is gonna explode.
Pulls the two of them out of the room, just in time for the piss to perfectly obliterate
everything else in that room.
The explosion that happens behind that door
looks genuinely frightening.
It looks like they overcooked it.
A gout of flame shoots through the fucking door
that Vorda's trying to hold closed.
You're like, Jesus Christ,
what fucking stunt guy worked on that
yeah yeah did people really die in this like yeah and and you know everyone who isn't um
fucking elaine the two guys that he's rescued or solo is burned to a crisp in this explosion
it's it's a weird sort of ending.
Wait a fucking minute.
The two guys get to mourn their Prime Minister as a hero and a martyr, who died
trying to do something good for his country, which was what he was planning to do to them,
in some nice irony. And then we get to the part of the movie that I really want to talk about,
because it actually really upset me, which is, he puts Elaine back on the plane, they
fly back to New York, and he's like, well, it's time for you to go back to being normal.
But as a reward for serving your country, I got you a night out at you know a fancy party yeah it says the the un are having
like a like a dinner next week i've got you and your family tickets to it i've arranged a gown
i've arranged a hair and makeup artist thank you for serving your country so you can go and you'll
look the bomb and your family will be there and you get to have an glamorous evening again. Which I thought was a nice gift.
Again, it would instantly fuck someone who did this.
And she says, no, thank you.
And what she says is, because we have to,
this being 1964, of course,
we have to reify motherhood and femininity
and all this other stuff.
What kind of a world would it be
if women could just go around doing things on their own?
And so what she says and seemingly means is...
Now, I had my big moment last night when I was...
Well, maybe something I always dreamed I might be.
But it was a dream, a memory.
It has no right to be anything else.
It has no right to be anything else.
Bullshit!
It's so fucking on the nose, and it's like, how many dreams of how many women
were suffocated in this manner?
It's so grim, and we see her, like, out the window going back to her family, and you're
just like, no, I fucking get where- yeah, she might have been in the fucking CIA, but
I see where Bessie Friedan came from, you know? Fuck, she probably
got this idea from the CIA, considering the way Uncle do this. Also, I did write in a joke here
that's like, well, I had a beautiful dream from what I was last night, chained to a pipe.
Well, I mean, we are all very sleepy on this podcast, but at this point she goes,
and the air hostess comes and gives the line
aren't you getting off Mr. Solo?
And then the number on his forehead
rises to 1000% and that's
the end of the film.
One sex please.
Well actually she's like is there anything I can
do for you? And he goes
we've got an hour in this empty plane
before we go back to New York and he's like
and we have a freeze frame ending.
We have him being like...
I like to imagine that the frame after that is like...
It's just slapping him.
No, no, it's him being like, I'm not gay.
I'm not thinking about boys.
Is there anything I can get you?
Not a man.
No, not a soft, supple femboy.
Sits in total silence,
ramrods straight into the next hour.
He opens up his laptop,
which hadn't been invented yet,
and there's the boy mode map on it,
and he's like,
yes, actually, you could drop me off in Utica.
Also, something I need to bring up, because I just caught it in the,
I was looking for trivia, and I looked at the cast list,
and found out the big guy, the Mongo, that's Richard Kiel.
That's fucking true.
I thought it looked like him, but I gaslit myself out of it.
I was like, it can't be.
It surely can't be.
That's how he lost his teeth! He survived the explosion!
In the pipes factory! Really?
Oh my god, Richard Kiel!
I love to see it, fantastic. So anyway, he's
not gay, is the thing about Cylon. No, he's not gay. He is telepathic.
And Elaine goes back to her humdrum existence. Oh my god, he the thing about Cylon. No, he's not gay. He is telepathic.
And Elaine goes back to her humdrum existence.
Oh my god, he's like looking good in that.
Yeah, it's handsome Richard Gale.
I'm very impressed.
Oh, sorry.
It's strange to see him without huge fucked up teeth.
What does this movie say about masculinity?
And why is it women are always sexually available to you?
They actually love it when you...
It's primarily that. mean i'm i'm
i'm comparing this to the connery ones but it's nice that he doesn't punch a woman
if anything he punches a man for trying to punch a woman which is better uh telepathy is real i
mean if you look here's here's my thing right if you look at the contemporaries
of this film this is 1964
so it came out the same year as Goldfinger
a movie in which
Sean Connery correctively rapes
a lesbian
and this one is just like
I mean it's fucking nothing like it
like to consider it
in the time
I'm earnestly like a little
bit impressed yeah i mean he does compare women to pieces of meat and he does like so
but like this could be a lot worse within its context this is strangely progressive and that's
an incredibly depressing thing oh yeah to realize to be like oh yeah this is progressive in that
it's like well women women can have nice lives
as a dream, and then they gotta go
back. You have to go back to your regular
shit. It's probably why Ian Fleming
dropped out of it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Progressive shit out of my sight.
I can't stress enough how much that upset me.
Just to be like, yeah, you can have your nice thing,
but you still have to have dinner on the table. It's unacceptable.
But we do have a way of quantifying this formally,
scientifically.
It's called the UNCLE scheme.
And it stands for...
Oh, sorry, before we do that,
there's one other thing I want to mention
which I meant to check back on.
And it's the most insane fucking bit of dialogue ever.
It's right back at the start
when the WASP agents break into
Uncle Headquarters and the second alarm
goes off. In the following
scene, we learn the reason
for this, which is that apparently
the receptionist
has a special chemical on her fingers
so when she
hands you the security
badge and then you go through the
scanner, the alarm doesn't go off. But if you take the badge and then you go through the scanner the alarm doesn't go off but if you
take the badge and she
doesn't touch it then the alarm goes off
and I'm like what
it's like a fantastic security
measure to add to the fucking doriso chips
unbelievable
I didn't want to let this film go
without just highlighting that piece of
absolutely insane fucking nonsense
sci-fi because that's where
we're going to go further listeners
fantastic I can't wait
I couldn't think of a funny acronym for uncle here
so I'm just going back to scum the scum system
so for smum cultural insensitivity
unprovoked violence and misogyny
well we'll say uncle and then we'll dub it over with scum
yeah
scum system Yeah, yeah.
Scum.
We have a science-based rating system on this podcast. It's called the
Scum Spectrum.
The man from Scum.
It cuts away from his face so you can't
tell, but in doing so makes it much more
obvious.
Alice is like firing up a slide projector
now so we're just going...
That's right. I'm so excited Alice is like, firing up a slide projector now, so we're just going,
That's right.
I'm so excited to have started a new series with you two.
Yeah, me too!
Me too.
Me too.
Kill Napoleon solo begins now.
So, knowing the answer...
Smarm.
7, 10, 25...
This man is a walking
golem of smarm
it's all in the eyebrows
it's all fucking up there
it's good to be back with like a 60s
motherfucker
I feel like
I feel like I want to go like 5 or 6
I don't think it's like full
because I think he could get worse
I want to give him space to get worse
yeah I want to go
for a 5 here
he does manage to be sort
of earnest in a smug way
cultural insensitivity
I think lower than
I expected
it's genuinely
it is like a sort of optimistic liberal
thing that's like you you know, one nation
brotherhood.
On the other hand, it does, the first lesson of the movie is that Italian women are untrustworthy
skanks, which we don't appreciate.
We do also have somebody referring-
I personally respect all Italian women.
We do have, like, an African Asian being referred to as primitive.
Yep.
That's true.
That is very true. But for the time, three yeah yeah yeah because i think like that discussion of um
the actual intricacies of like colonialism and like investment and stuff i was like wow that
would be like even sort of remarkable now if that was in the film yeah yeah it's not nothing
yeah totally but it's it's not anything like how bad it could have been.
So three...
It passes some sort of post-colonial version of the Beck Delta, where a black
character talks to another black character about a country that's predominantly black
people in a way that doesn't really speak to white people, which I quite like.
Yeah, so I'm happy with a three.
Now, unprovoked violence...
Not a lot, they go out of their way to not kill people, actually.
Even wasps don't do that.
Solo shoots a couple of guys dead.
In the TV series, this was like, sleep darts or whatever, but we get a shot cut of a guy
like, floating face down in some water.
But I think those are the only bodies on this movie.
Usually not piss.
Yeah.
We don't even...
I'm so mad about the piss.
It's such a cock tease with the piss thing, it's ridiculous.
It's fucked up.
I was like, chanting at the end, like, my notes just earnestly, like, the last five
notes I have are just like, boiling piss room, no handrails The piss is reaching danger threshold
Put someone in the piss to exclamation marks
And then fuck's sake
When the piss room exploded with no piss
What do you think?
It could be a one
Even
I'm struggling to think of any moments
When he did the little run around jog at the start
That guy had a gun
God you better believe that's gonna be the promo
yeah it's only it's only the bad guys i guess i guess the closest thing to unprovoked violence
is the uncle chop like they were good also that's true uncle chop knocks you out it doesn't kill
you well exactly exactly so i think it's a 1. I am marking down number of Uncle Chops per movie, though.
I'm putting a single tie here.
Nice.
So, misogyny.
Seven.
Yes.
At a minimum, at a minimum, I'm afraid.
The bit where he fucking stands her up in front of the mirror and is like,
simply afraid to look nice is fucking...
Something else.
Something fucking bad.
It's genuinely atrocious.
This movie is reprehensible.
And, you know, we get one...
Well, no, we get...
Okay.
We get two women who get agency over their own shit.
Like, who get to be secret agents.
And they're both primarily like in terms of like
sexuality in terms of using their sexuality one of them gets hoist by her own petard and the other
one is like locked in a fucking bird cage ready for for napoleon to come back to new york and
fuck her it's um like in a meat locker almost yeah it Yeah. It's not good! The way that she has to go back at the end.
The way that she has to go.
It's really fucking sad, you know?
It's like if you made a movie, and I'm sure there are movies like this, but it's like
if you made a movie about, like, a trans person, where the moral was, just repress it!
It's really fucking grim!
It's not good.
I think seven at a minimum, I could push it to eight, to be honest, because that repress it, it's really fucking grim.
I think 7 at a minimum I could push it
to 8, because that is real bad.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, 8.
Okay, okay.
In that case, that gives us a total score
of
I'm so
tired. 17.
Here's the thing thing we're all sleeping
17 which is
pretty good
it's the same as Doctor No
which is quite nice
it's the same as Moonraker
as Living Daylights
so
same as Patriot Games
so yeah it's like a pretty
good pretty solid middle of the road
score for a brand new
series I'm so excited for this I'm so glad
you guys let me bring this
I'm so glad that it's done well
because yeah my brother and I
are just such big fans of this
yeah yeah yeah
all in the 60s as well we never get to the 70s
these all came out in the 60s
at some point we will have to have my brother on the podcast.
Yeah, love to.
I'm so happy to be back in the bad decade
where we have some things to say about how things were bad.
But right now, of course, we're all very tired.
Our uncle's going to go sleepy-bye forever.
So if I can just sort of arrange this, if we can like, stand in sort of like a circle,
and on three, if we all perfectly uncle chop each other in the middle of the shoulder blades.
So one, two, three.
Oh.
Oh, god.
Sorry. Just woke up um
how you doing good morning everyone that was to catch a spy tune in in two weeks time on the free feed for the next episode of Kill Napoleon Solo which is
The Spy With My Face 1965. Of course if that's too long for you to wait do not even start to worry
because in one week's time also on the feed, thanks to the winter of content,
it's The Lives of Others,
which is an Alice pick, if you can tell already.
Now, of course, it's not necessary to give us any money
to get the entire lot of content
that we're going to be producing over this winter,
but some people still do,
and it would
be frankly rude of me not to thank by name our £15 and above patrons, and those are
Christine Fox, Amanda Comet, Fawkes Winchester, Gustavo Lira, Jack Holmes, Paint McCalla,
Thomas Oberhardt, Nick Boris, Jarek, Nate Amore, Harriet deGog, Corios, the Commissar formerly known as Jen, Library Hitman,
Beef Crime, Benno Rice, Jonathan Gerdes, Callan, Bernie, Max Gamenhart, Jack Drummond, Kit Devine,
Kentucky Fried Commie, Jay Martindale, Hellblood Hands, Lisa Mage, Jonathan Siegel, Tarp O,
Big Titty Goth Girl, Mothman, George Rohack, Trip, Harrison Fuller,
Charlie Outta the Closet, Alex, a trans robot, Zoe Shepherd, Turf Seat Shit and Die Alone,
Elizabeth Cox, Danny Potter, The Femboy a Spy.
And that's so appropriate and you couldn't have possibly known how appropriate that is to the episode that we've just recorded.
And Finn Ross.
Gil James Bond is Alice, Abigail, and Devin.
Our producer is the wonderful Naipa Thay.
Our podcast art is by Maddy Lubchansky.
And our website is by Tom Allen.
See ya.