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Evelyn and Waymond are still holding each other, lit by the colors of infinite worlds, laughing like two people who can't believe they found each other. Then the lights fade, the music quiets, her fist unclenches — and a long, stretched-out, echoing voice comes through from somewhere else: ooooooh. It's Jobu, finishing the word "cute," in a brand new outfit covered in neon, teddy bear sleeves, and a single strand of hair curled on her forehead spelling out her name. She pulls Evelyn into the temple, points at the bagel, says come on. Evelyn walks out of frame — and reappears in the atrium, back beside her husband. Jobu nods. She says: I get it. And then, very deliberately: eventually, that all just goes away.We spend most of this one on Jobu's rejection, and why it's one of the rawest moments a villain gets. She didn't just lose the argument; she opened herself up in the rock universe and got turned down, and Evelyn choosing happiness is proof that the thing Jobu built her whole philosophy around might not be true. We talk about how rarely a major female villain gets to be devastated in a specifically feminine register rather than being made monstrous by masculinizing her, and compare that to Nurse Ratched, Annie Wilkes, and Cameron Diaz in Vanilla Sky. Plus: three of our barbershop quartet are now Jobu's guards (armed with pencils, scissors, and a keyboard), why they're dressed for the New Year's party, Jobu imposing a fake deadline on an infinite bagel, and a long, unplanned detour into bodkins.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

We made it to the line. Foxy Waymond finishes it — in another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you — laughs a small rueful laugh, and walks out of the alley and out of the movie for good. And then the film does something you don't expect: instead of cutting to Cinderella Evelyn's reaction, it cuts to our Evelyn, in the atrium, receiving that speech while looking at a completely different Waymond sweeping up broken glass in a laundromat. She crosses the room and hugs him. He drops the dustpan.We spend a good chunk of this one on translation. A listener sent us a Tumblr post years ago arguing the English subtitle is a slight mistranslation, and that the Mandarin is closer to "if we had another life, I would still choose to do taxes and open a laundromat with you" — a rich man explicitly saying he'd trade all of it. We dig into both versions, and then Kynan points out the chronology runs backwards from what everyone assumes: the English was in the script first, and the subtitles came from the script rather than from the performance.Plus: the smiley face stamped into the dustpan, why the sound of it hitting the floor isn't the sound a dustpan makes, the googly eye Waymond snuck onto a lantern two hours earlier that the movie deliberately didn't show us at the time, and Evelyn laughing so hard the tears come out sideways. This is the end of Act Two.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

Evelyn says "It's too late, Waymond." And then, after a long pause, reaches out and takes his hand. That single touch opens everything: the two of them as newlyweds with their hands stacked on the couch, Waymond turning from the TV to ask if she saw that (she didn't, she was looking at him), tearing the newspaper off the windows of a brand new laundromat, twirling in their apartment, finding the remote under the couch and being genuinely delighted about it. He taps a service bell in a shave-and-a-haircut rhythm and asks what song it is. Then green light creeps across her face and we're in the Hong Kong alley, where Foxy Waymond turns around and says: in another life.And that's where the minute ends. We had to cut the most famous line in the movie in half, which we assume was done to us on purpose.We work through what "it's too late" means when she immediately contradicts it, and land on this: it's too late to be Jobu and too late to be Waymond, and what's coming next is Evelyn mode. We talk about how these aren't flashbacks — she's actually present in these moments, which is exactly the thing Jobu swore she'd never manage again. And Kynan spent most of his research week on that service bell: shave and a haircut goes back to 1800s minstrel songs, becomes the rhythmic skeleton of Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love" and Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away," and was used by American POWs in Vietnam as a knock-code because the locals didn't recognize it.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

Atrium Waymond finally finds the words — the only thing I do know is that we have to be kind — and then turns and aims it directly at his wife: please be kind, especially when we don't know what's going on. In the Hong Kong alley, Foxy Waymond tells Evelyn he knows she sees herself as a fighter. So does he. This is how he fights. The music swells. Evelyn is waking up. And then Jobu's voice cuts through with one word — bagel — and the whole thing stops dead. Alpha Gong Gong orders the attack. Jobu steps forward, completely earnest, and tells her mother she could still turn around and avoid all of this.Lester makes the case that this is The Last Temptation of Christ, and Kynan — who covered both the Kazantzakis novel and the Scorsese film on the other show — agrees completely. The temptation on the cross wasn't power or bread or kingdoms. It was a normal life: come down, get married, have children, grow old, don't be the son of man. That's the one that actually lands for a regular person, and it's exactly what Jobu is offering here. You don't have to be the hero. You can just walk away.We also dig into why the be-kind speech doesn't exist in the 2017 draft, what changed between 2016 and 2020 to put it there, and how differently it hits now. Plus: why Foxy Waymond calling kindness a strategy reframes the whole thing, and how that connects to the genuinely radical pacifism of Jesus, Gandhi, and King, which was never about overcoming anyone.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

Two Waymonds. Two speeches. At the same time. In the Alpha Verse, a stabbed Waymond stands between Evelyn and a dozen armed jumpers — one of whom is holding an office desk phone as a weapon — asking if they can just stop fighting, and admitting that he doesn't know what's going on but somehow feels like it's all his fault. In a green Hong Kong alley, Foxy Waymond tells Evelyn that choosing to see the good side of things isn't naive. It's strategic. It's necessary. It's how he's learned to survive through everything.Here's the realization that reframes this whole stretch of the film: Ke Huy Quan has two famous speeches in this movie, and almost nobody thinks of them as separate. People quote both constantly — laundry and taxes, and be kind especially when you don't know what's going on — but they're braided together so tightly that they feel like one continuous thought from one person. They're not. They're two characters in two universes making two different arguments. We spend the episode pulling them apart and then arguing about whether they're secretly the same speech in different dialects.We also sit with "somehow this feels like it's all my fault," which is factually wrong — this is the Waymond who says Raccoon Waymond and Raccoon Joy, he has no idea what's happening — but lands on Evelyn at exactly the right moment. She's been telling herself that her whole life. She's also been saying it out loud to him for twenty years. Hearing it in his voice is what finally breaks it.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

Deirdre pauses at the door on her way out, shares a look with Evelyn, and staggers off looking like someone dropped a bomb on her. Waymond, still kneeling in front of his handcuffed wife, tells her he doesn't know how he did it — he just talked to Deirdre — and he is openly, unmistakably crying while trying to look like he isn't. Then he stands up, picks up a broom, and sweeps the broken glass while quietly singing a Chinese New Year song. Meanwhile, in a green-lit Hong Kong alley, Foxy Waymond says Evelyn's father used to call him too sweet for his own good, and maybe he was right. And in the Alpha Verse, Waymond stands in front of the wife who stabbed him, arms out against a dozen jumpers, saying please.We stop the episode to sit with what Ke Huy Quan is doing here — real tears, in a performance where the character is trying not to cry, in a conversation that's clearly scarier to him than facing down the police. We talk about the specific kind of masculine melodrama that wrecks audiences, and about the twenty years Hollywood took from all of us by not casting this man. And then Lester looked up what Waymond is humming while he sweeps: "Gongxi Gongxi," written in 1945 to mark the end of the war, tied to an older myth about a beast that came each winter to eat villagers — so at dawn, neighbors ran out, saw each other alive, and shouted congratulations. Not on winning. On surviving. Waymond is standing in the wreckage of his marriage singing a song that means we made it through the dark together.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

Jobu is outside the laundromat window with a cigarette, grinning, telling Evelyn to come back to the bagel — and then to ignore it. But Evelyn can't stop watching Waymond whisper something into Deirdre's ear. We're too far away to hear it. We just watch Jamie Lee Curtis take it in with her whole body: straightening up, clutching the eviction papers, breathing out, and then telling the cop to let Evelyn go before slumping hard against the washers like the fight has left her. Waymond walks over with his hands going into his pockets — somehow both aw-shucks-it's-just-me and John Wayne after saving the town — and crouches down in front of his handcuffed wife to tell her everything is going to be okay. Evelyn says that's impossible. Jobu, nearly talking over her, says it's just a statistical inevitability. Nothing special.Daniel Kwan originally wanted ADHD to be a running theme in this film, and this is the minute where Evelyn's distractibility saves her life. We spend most of the episode on Deirdre — this is the second time she's let this family off the hook, which makes it a pattern rather than a Grinch moment, and we build out a theory of who she was before her divorce and why she became who we met at the start. We also get into the two different faces Jobu is wearing in the same minute, why "statistical inevitability" echoes a line from a deleted Thetaverse scene, and the trope that doesn't have a name but should: making excuses to do the right thing.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

Jobu rises out of the rock universe and back into the Bagel Temple, and finally says the thing the whole movie has been building toward: she didn't build the bagel to destroy everything. She built it to destroy herself — to see if going in meant she could finally escape and actually die. She holds out her hand, Evelyn takes it, and Jobu says at least this way she doesn't have to do it alone. Then static cuts in, and Evelyn wakes up handcuffed in the laundromat while Deirdre tells Waymond that everyone she knows is going through a hard time.This is the minute where the Trojan horse opens. Underneath the hot dog hands and the raccoon voiced by Randy Newman, this has been a mother-daughter drama about a daughter contemplating suicide the entire time. We spend most of the episode there, and with Camus — Kynan reads from The Myth of Sisyphus, which opens by declaring suicide the only truly serious philosophical question, and uses Galileo as its central example: a man who chose to keep living over an argument about whether the Earth orbits the sun. It takes Camus 180 pages to conclude that suicide is the wrong answer, which is exactly why so many people stop halfway and take away the opposite. Same warning applies here: don't stop at this minute.We also track the creation metaphor carrying over from the rock scene, why the shot of their two hands forms a yin-yang without ever saying so, and what got cut from the scripted version of this conversation — including a line about Evelyn forgetting her silly husband's name.If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call or text in the US.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

Two rocks on a clifftop, still no voices, still just text. Joy says every new discovery is a reminder — and Evelyn finishes it: we're all small and stupid. Then Joy wonders what discovery is coming next to make us feel like even smaller pieces of shit, and Evelyn responds with a single word: language. In a theater where you could hear a pin drop, that gets the first laugh in what feels like ten minutes. Then Joy stares at her, and Evelyn clarifies: I'm joking, that was a joke. They laugh in text — ha ha ha, white and black, filling a wide shot of a dead planet — and in the silence afterward, you can hear the desert wind. Joy says f**k. She's been trapped like this for so long. And she admits what she actually wanted: someone who would see something she didn't. Someone who'd convince her there was another way.Lester takes a swing this episode and argues Jobu might be the perfect villain, and we trace that through Nurse Ratched, Syndrome, Miss Havisham, Darth Vader, and the xenomorph in Alien — landing on the specific archetype Jobu belongs to: the broken hero who ran the journey first, failed, and needs the new hero to prove the game isn't rigged. What makes it devastating here is that Evelyn failed too. We also break down how this scene is engineered: why "language" is a popcorn joke and "I'm joking" is the better one, why rendering laughter as text makes it an idea rather than a sound, and how sound itself slowly evolves back into the scene — wind, then chimes, then one clumsy piano note — like life restarting.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

Two rocks. One clifftop. No music, no voices, no movement — just white and black text appearing over them in a universe where life never formed. Joy tells Evelyn that most universes are like this, actually. Evelyn says it's nice. Then Joy starts talking about how we spent most of our history certain the Earth was the center of everything, torturing and killing people who said otherwise, until we found out we orbit one sun out of trillions.After the montage of sixty-nine universes nearly broke us last week, this minute is the movie building in its own intermission — and we are deeply grateful for it. We get into how the Daniels genuinely feared audiences would be bored here, shot backup time-lapse footage of the sun moving behind the rocks as insurance, then cut it for being too energetic. We talk about the missing punctuation in the text and why it makes the whole thing feel like texting rather than dialogue. Kynan reads from William Steig's Sylvester and the Magic Pebble — a children's book Daniel Kwan has confirmed as a direct reference, about a donkey who turns himself into a pink rock and then slowly stops trying to be anything else — which is a genuinely upsetting thing to encounter in a picture book. And we sit with Evelyn's apology, which arrives shockingly early, and what she might really be apologizing for.Also: Michelle Yeoh is the reason there are no voices in this scene. It was her idea. Rocks speaking English would violate the rules of the universe.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

Thirty-eight seconds. Sixty-nine universes. Everything everywhere all at once.This is the montage. Evelyn screams and it ripples outward through the bubble map like a red nebula infecting every universe at once. We see her as a cat news anchor, an anime figure on a city crosswalk with her hair in the wind, a nun with a skull, a baby, a drag queen, a prisoner with a "Brew Crew" tattoo under her eye, a bunch of grapes, a tree, a Tinder profile that removes the like button halfway through, and a drone strike that may or may not have her face superimposed over the explosion. The Twin Peaks red room appears for one frame with a subtitle that says "Meanwhile." — period, not ellipsis. Jobu winks directly at us for eleven frames. Then the montage ends quietly: Evelyn drops to the floor at the party, becomes a rock, and the laundromat fades away to a desolate clifftop. Two rocks. Silence.We go through all sixty-nine universes frame by frame on this, our hundredth episode, covering the hundredth minute of the film. We talk about what the script actually said (one paragraph, basically nothing), how much of this montage must have been built in the edit, and what it means that Jobu winks at us specifically — not at Evelyn, at us. We break down why the montage ends not with a bang but a whimper, what the cop's expression tells us about how Evelyn's universe treats geological transformation, and why two rocks sitting in silence on a clifftop is the most confident directorial choice in the movie. Kynan tracks the color swap: the rock we assumed was grey is, once Jobu's rock appears beside it, definitively blue. Evelyn and Jobu have finally switched.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

Foxy Waymond pushes Evelyn away, and the all-is-lost montage begins. Raccaccoonie is taken away in an animal control cage, hands fixed to the bars, as Chad screams and strains against the coworkers holding him back. Deirdre hands Evelyn the eviction papers. Evelyn picks up the googly-eyed bat, says "I've always hated this place," and smashes the laundromat window. Opera Evelyn screams with her whole body until she has to crouch to finish it. Hot dog Deirdre cries alone in her apartment. And Jobu's voice threads through all of it: just a lifetime of fractured moments, contradictions, and confusion. Only a few specks of time where anything actually makes any sense.We follow Raccaccoonie to the animal control truck — and then have a long, not-particularly-comforting conversation about what actually happens to raccoons after that. We dig into Harry Shum Jr.'s work in the Chad farewell scene, which crosses the line from parody into genuine melodrama by about two smudges of sincerity, and why that line is so thin and so effective. We break down why Evelyn smashing the window with a googly-eyed bat has all the visual ingredients of a liberation scene — and is scored and shot as a final descent. Kynan distinguishes the all-is-lost moment from the dark night of the soul, and why this film is rare enough to need both. And at 1:38:38, there is a figure in the background who casually raises a newspaper before the glass breaks — not to protect herself, but because she already knew.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

Evelyn pulls Waymond close at the party while Deirdre's forty-eight hour eviction notice fades in and out of the background. Across universes at the same time: she rips the hat off Chad at the teppanyaki table to reveal Raccacoonie, slams Foxy Waymond against the alley wall and kisses him, throws a handful of elbow macaroni in his face, stabs Atrium Waymond with a shard of broken glass and pulls it out slowly with cold fascination, pushes the divorce papers into Party Waymond's chest, and in the hot dog universe, Deirdre hops away out the door on one foot with her carry-on trailing from the other. Foxy Waymond breaks the kiss and pushes Evelyn away.We go frame by frame through this sequence: the rotating strobe that makes a motionless Michelle Yeoh look like she's cycling through different people, the red light taking over as the decisions get worse, the exact moment Evelyn crosses over from vacant to something colder and more alive. We break down why the stabbing itself isn't shown—we only get the aftermath, Evelyn holding up the glass and registering what she's done with the detached curiosity of someone running an experiment—and we bring in Bruce Block's film theory on triangles: circles are calm, rectangles are stable, and triangles are shards. This is the first major triangle in a film of circles and bagels. Ke Huy Quan's face in that moment isn't asking why. It's asking how.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

Foxy Waymond gently pushes Evelyn's hands back down and says, if you don't mean it, please don't give me any false hope. Evelyn's laughter bleeds in from across the universe before we even cut. At Gong Gong's party, she grabs the karaoke mic, shouts Happy New Year, signs the divorce papers in front of everyone, tells Waymond no more running, and then Deirdre walks in with two cops to announce the seizure of their personal and business assets. Evelyn smiles with her fingers tented like Mr. Burns.We go shot by shot through the party: Waymond pulling off the lion-or-dragon head looking stricken, the full spectrum of guest reactions from D.Y. Sao's bafflement to Craig Ng still having a fantastic time to Waymond Lee bracing for impact. We dig into why Deirdre crashing this party in person after hours actually makes emotional sense if you read her as someone who extended real trust to the Wongs and got shut up, nothing matters on the phone. We catch Joy watching from outside the window at 1:36:45, parallel to the cops coming in, in a shot easy to miss on first watch. And we spend genuine time on the lion dance versus dragon dance question, which has no clean answer, and why that might be exactly right for the Wongs.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

Foxy Waymond asks what if you had come with me all those years ago — and then we're at the New Year's party in full swing. Evelyn comes back to life in the Alpha Verse, stares at her hands, and the music rises with what sounds exactly like a hero's reawakening. Then she picks up the phone, tells Deirdre to shut up, tells her nothing matters, and her eyes fill with black. We end in the green-lit alleyway outside the Hong Kong theater, with Evelyn advancing on Waymond saying they'd have woken up every day in a tiny apartment.We spend time on Rick, played by the late Biff Wiff, who passed away in February 2025 after a late-career run that included this film, I Think You Should Leave, and Jury Duty. He's standing at the party in his red suspenders, insinuating himself just close enough to Evelyn to be technically arguable, and we trace everything the movie has done with him since the beginning. We also dig into Debbie the Dog Mom showing up without the dog and actually talking animatedly with Evelyn like they're friends, Jobu's expression when "nothing matters" lands — not triumph, something much more like nausea — and the shot of Evelyn's eyes going black, which is easy to miss and hard to come back from. The false hope of this minute is the whole point.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute