[Josh40 meets Josh23 in the teslaflection with Julia. Josh23 needs help killing The Beast. Timeline23 lost access to magic--except for The Beast. Josh23 needs their help; Josh and Julia are Timeline23’s only hope.] CLARA: Hi everyone. Welcome to Episode 311 of Physical Kids Weekly, “Twenty-Three.” I’m Clara. DANI: And I’m Dani CLARA: Our guests today are both writers from the show, and they both worked on this episode together. The first is Henry Alonso Myers, who we talked to in Season 1. Welcome back, Henry! HENRY: Hi, thanks. Glad to be here. CLARA: Glad to have you! Listeners, you met our second guest earlier this season -- he wrote the emotional Queliot episode “A Life in the Day,” and he’s also the voice of the Fillorian rabbits -- it’s Mike Moore! Hi, Mike! MIKE: Hello, hello, hello! CLARA: So welcome back to both of you, we’re really thrilled to have you here today. Before we dive into the episode, this season I’ve been giving quick recaps at the beginning for our listeners. This time: Josh and Julia go to the twenty-third timeline to rid it of The Beast and take the key that’s sustaining his magic. Once there, they discover that everything isn’t as it seems -- The Beast seems to be a shadeless version of Q23, resurrected by Alice23 after she talked to Q!Prime in the teslaflection, and The Beast attack left more survivors than Dean Fogg thought. Together, Josh, Julia, and the survivors of timeline 23 take on Quentin and retrieve the key. Then Penny and Marina23 (this is going to get confusing quickly) return with Josh and Julia prime to the 40th timeline. Whew, as Josh would say, time travel headache. So, let’s start with our usual question: DANI, what did you think of this episode? DANI: I love this episode, but I love anything that fucks with time travel. I think it’s fun. Alternate timelines. I also think that I would have reacted to myself in a timeline the same way as Josh. [LAUGHTER] CLARA: That’s a pretty good reaction. I wanna start by asking you, writers, broadly, what you hoped fans would take away from this episode. Henry, why don’t you start us off? HENRY: Well as a big genre fan as you may guess, I wanted to do an alternate universe episode for a long time and things like ‘Doppelgangland’ [Buffy episode] and other episodes, like Star Trek was the first. It’s always sort of a fan favorite. It’s always a balancing act to do and we had been trying to figure out how to do a ‘bottle’ at some point this season. A bottle show is one that uses only our main cast and primarily only our main set and I thought an alternate universe episode would be a great excuse to use all of our sets, see them in a different light, and would be a way to twist up the key quest. We had this idea in the [writers’] room that one of the keys existed in an alternate timeline and that timeline had The Beast in it so I think that’s where it started. I came in with that, like most things I had this broad push to do it and then all these great ideas came from other people, like MIKE. So I think that’s really where it started. Like, we had to do a bottle show, let’s be incredibly inventive about it. It’s always a goal on our show to take our characters and show them in a different light or give them a different form. We had Josh who was gone for a big chunk of the early season, so our goal was like, let’s make him do twice the work. [LAUGHTER] CLARA: I just have to say, listening to that clip and not seeing it, it’s a totally different experience. It’s much harder to follow when you have Josh talking to Josh and no visual cues. HENRY: I can hear that they put a slightly different tinge on Josh23. I could hear the differences in them. We also did the Quentin episode earlier, the Quentin doubling, and we did stunt doubling. That was sort of instructive because it showed us the ways we needed… like if we were going to do an episode where there was a double throughout the entire episode and we were gonna shoot it in seven days rather than our usual eight, we needed to treat it a certain way. The big thing that me and Mike came up with was that we were gonna have him look pretty similar, but one of them’s got a cool jacket [MIKE CHUCKLES]. We kept it simple because Trevor had to switch between roles pretty quickly and you don’t want to have to do a major makeup change or major costuming change in between those roles. So that was instructive and I’m trying to think of what else. MIKE, is there anything else that I’m not hitting that you remember? MIKE: I think what excited me most about was what came out of those limitations and it kinda hits what you were talking about, DANI, with how would you interact with your alternate self from a different timeline? And Josh sees this guy and at first sees him as a superhero almost. Like he was brave enough to get lasix, holy fuck. I can imagine myself as George Clooney all I want, but that’s always going to be ridiculous and never remotely close to reality, but if I saw a version of myself from a different timeline that I thought was cooler, smarter, was braver, whathaveyou, then that would really elicit some soul searching from myself and without the production limitations, like Henry said, we’re filming Josh twice so we have a quick hair change and a jacket and that’s all we have time for, I think it allowed Trevor (and he’s really successful in this) to explore what if you saw a 5% different version of yourself. How would you react to that? And exploring that I thought was the most fun, creative part of that episode. HENRY: The other challenge we had had, Sera’s biggest concern, about doing alternate universe episodes in our show was that [you need] to have a couple of things you keep bringing back into the room. We have to see everybody and if possible, we have to hit all of our sets. And the other thing that was important is how. Like when you see an alternate universe character, it can’t just be a funhouse mirror, it has to have some emotional relevance that we’re gonna take away and bring back into future [episodes]. So the two characters who are [unable to make out this section] carrying on into the next… I shouldn’t say two, I guess it’s actually four, but we needed to find storylines that were relevant to Julia and to Josh that would change them. So that was the other big thing we worked hard to come up with. And the Josh one, which was one of my favorites because it’s the thing The Magicians does well, which is that it seems like a joke, it seems funny and silly, and then it has some darkness and relevance and emotional truth to it. DANI: Yeah. HENRY: Also we wanted to bring back Penny in a way that people didn’t expect. DANI: Yeah, definitely didn’t expect that. HENRY: And didn’t affect the Penny[40] storyline in future episodes. DANI: Yeah, I definitely wasn’t expecting Julia and Penny. That was something that was never on my mind. [LAUGHTER] CLARA: You remember I texted you when the promo came out, because I think you thought it was Josh first, right? DANI: Yeah I thought it was Josh at first. CLARA: I was like, that’s too tall, that’s gotta be Penny. [LAUGHTER] DANI: So when you thought about returning to the 23rd timeline, what did you want to do differently this time around? Mike, you start. MIKE: Well we wanted to look at just the idea of one little thing going wrong for our characters, how does that affect Brakebills as a whole, the world as a whole? And it turns out it’s pretty fucking important for our characters not to screw up because things kinda went to shit. DANI: They screwed up a lot of times. MIKE: I think it was really fun, especially when we got into the script, because this was the first time I got to co-write with somebody else, like in the same room. The only other time I’d done it before was just emailing drafts back and forth, so to be able to brainstorm with HENRY and talk about what, how is Fogg different? Why is he sadder or happier or crazier or what have you. The amount of backstory we just riffed on, talking about was… that was such an instructive writing lesson for me. HENRY: I have a way that I like to do collaborations over many years, which is, MIKE and I each did half. I did the front half and MIKE did the back half. And then we mashed them together and we just sat in a room and rewrote the whole thing from beginning to end, like next to each other. If I didn’t have a good take on a scene, I’d be like, Mike you do it. Vice versa. We worked really hard on every part of it. This is something I learned from doing a lot of comedy. We would find ways to push every joke and every emotional moment together. We were hard on each other in a good way. It was also more fun, I thought. MIKE: I thought so too! [LAUGHTER] CLARA: Sort of punching each other up. MIKE: Yeah, yeah. HENRY: Yup. CLARA: So I do wanna ask, this is a, as we discussed a little bit already, pretty Josh-centric episode, and it follows on the heels of Josh getting some pretty devastating news about his former girlfriend, Victoria. So one of the things I wanted to ask you is how you balance Josh’s “class clown” tendencies with the more dramatic elements of his storyline? What do you think his reaction to that moment in that episode and this one tells us about him as a person? Henry, why don’t you start this one. HENRY: Josh as a character, we introduced him in episode 12, which I wrote in season one. The thing we learned about him early on is that he makes jokes to make himself comfortable so one of the fun things to do with him is that you get to write a lot of jokes, but those jokes have to be centered in his desire to avoid or deal with uncomfortable news. The scene in this episode in particular that really sticks with me is after he’s seen himself die, he’s reckoning with what The Quickening might be, and he’s drinked the carrot wine with Penny23. Trevor is a magnificent actor so we rarely take a lot of takes, but this is one where we took two, to keep pushing to find a deeper version of it, and I think he came to a beautiful performance. But the goal wasn’t just to have it be funnier, but to have it be centered in this horrifying realization. We have a guy whose good at delivering one liners, but how does he deal with the fact he might become a monster and murder everyone that he loves? MIKE: Yeah! Like he uses jokes as a defense mechanism a lot to avoid and it’s interesting and engaging to see an actor, especially as good as Trevor, [deal with] what if your character’s defenses aren’t enough and you just have to deal with what comes to you. As someone who uses humor a lot to deflect myself, I found the final product to be very true, and I think (I’ll quickly plug this) we wouldn’t have thought of attempting this kind of episode if we didn’t trust our actors across the board with this kinda stuff, big challenge. And just knowing them and seeing them for three seasons, we knew they could all handle it. So shoutout to those fellows and ladies. HENRY: Yeah, 100%. I mean, part of it was also to give them [ a challenge], like you don’t want them to get bored, so give them something fun or crazy to do. We got to give Jason a chance to be evil, we got to give Olivia… like we gave Olivia a three and a half page expositional scene, sitting in a boat with like [CLARA: Rabbits!] seven other characters, which is a terrible thing to have to do to an actor. She just nailed it. It was one of those scenes where I was talking to Meera who directed it, Meera Meno, who did a wonderful job. Our biggest fear was that we needed to give her something to make it emotional and that’s hard because it’s an exposition scene. It was one of the things we were so worried about and Olivia just came in and [HENRY MAKES AN EXPLOSION SOUND]. Every moment was infused with weird sadness and it made the whole scene work. CLARA: One of my favorite parts of this episode is just her, completely deadpan delivery of the ‘Captain Hopps’ line. DANI: Yeah! HENRY: My favorite line of the episode. Mike wrote that line. [LAUGHTER] HENRY: We had this great line. We had to find the right place to put it and that is my favorite line. CLARA: It’s so great. MIKE: She nailed it. She nailed it. HENRY: Christina Strain made a little gift for me this season, which is a little figurine of Captain Hopps, who has like an eyepatch and a peg leg. He’s a rabbit with a peg leg. I’ll tweet a picture of it. CLARA: I really hope you do! HENRY: But 100% props to Mike for that. It’s a gift that keeps giving. We had this idea like, what if we did The Swift, the rabbit from the book, Fillory and Further. CLARA: Oh yeah. HENRY: It was something MIKE and I kept throwing back and forth. It kept giving us [ideas]. David Reed suggested they were [distortion] MIKE: Yeah HENRY: It was one of those jokes that kept building and building. [LAUGHTER] DANI: Awesome. So this episode has a lot of meta elements (act out, the line about the shippers, the Star Wars thing), and a lot of them are delivered by Josh. To what extent is he a stand-in for the fans, and how is he different in that role then say, for example, Hyman? Mike, let’s start with you. MIKE: Actually, I think Henry should actually kick this one off, if that’s okay. Because your [HENRY’s] meta love, is, I think, unparalleled. HENRY: I mean, the whole idea about doing the alternate universe episode is a giant meta commentary on every other aspect of it and how do you show the crazy versions of each character? I mean, I think Dave Reed’s pitch for the Penny episode, like Penny is watching a television show called The Magicians and he hates it. [LAUGHTER] And I’m stealing his good line, and that was basically the pitch, and we needed someone to bounce against, which was Hyman. I mean, Josh from the very start, has always been someone who is incredibly versed in pop culture. Like when we first meet him he says, come with me if you want to live, I always wanted to say that. Stuff like that. That’s right out of the books, Lev has always… the fun of this show is the kids that would go to magic school are the kids that would read Harry Potter or the kids that would read The Lord of the Rings. He’s just an interesting character that’s easy to write for. I have an easy time writing for him, I think MIKE does as well. Like we did at the beginning of season two, our characters speak in this language of pop culture. [Josh] just has an incredible versatility for it. These lines just come out of him. MIKE: I think this season we also kinda been a little more about it. Like the first episode this season, how long is the quest going to take? A good season. [LAUGHTER] But this episode, cuz Josh and Julia are a little bit like spectators throughout the episode, we had a little more leash with that and so we took it quite far. HENRY: They’re in this adventure where they know they’re gonna run into all these people and they just don’t know what form they’re gonna take, like what movie they’re going to find themselves in as well. Does that answer your question? I’m sorta dragging it. CLARA: Yeah! I think it does. My husband when we were watching this together, so this is actually a question he came up with, and his interruption of it was that Hyman is a very particular type of fan. Like a basic fanboy, and he said, I think Josh is podcasters. [LAUGHTER] I don’t think that’s actually true, but I thought it was kinda funny. HENRY: Josh has a love for everything and I think Hyman is a little more critical. MIKE: Yeah, Yeah. HENRY: He’s talking to Penny and he’s like, you guys are okay, but you and Kady are totally not best. CLARA: So this is a little glib, but while we’re at it, Henry, does Josh know he’s on a TV show? [HENRY LAUGHS] HENRY: No. [LAUGHTER] HENRY: And I actually think we try… the ‘act out’ line, I think that was a little challenge of MIKE with writing. We actually had a version where we tried to say ‘act out’ at the end of every single act out, but also when we were rewriting it, I think it felt like we would say it once and then obviously the alternates had to say it. So Josh Prime was critical of what his other self would do. CLARA: And I think another interesting thing about that is, of course, it doesn’t cut to commercial at that point. Or at least I’m making that assumption based on where the fade to black is. HENRY: The first one does. The second one doesn’t. CLARA: So Josh23 is actually wrong about it being an act out. [LAUGHTER] HENRY: That was a pitch we came up with in the room and it felt like, if we can fit an act out, where can we put an act out? MIKE: I’ve always felt that there’s a logic to it. Like maybe I’m overthinking it, but Josh is this guy who consumes much TV, movies, books, all that, so it kinda shapes how he sees his daily life. So when there’s a huge, major reveal that happens in front of his eyes, this is his brain that has been trained to cut to commercial at that point. So it feels fair to cut to commercial. HENRY: I mean that’s the language he speaks MIKE and CLARA: Yeah. HENRY: At some point later, Marina says, eyeroll. I think the language that they speak is the language of pop culture. I just think that [Josh] has a fluency in it CLARA: Yeah. DANI: One of my favorite things that Josh did in the books, and it also goes in line with how meta of a character he is, is when he takes the button and visits all the different worlds is when he goes, dude the Teletubbies are real. [LAUGHTER] I feel like that’s something else Josh in the show, if the button still existed, would do. HENRY: There’s some more Josh pop culture stuff coming in the next episode that I won’t spoil. I’ll let you enjoy. DANI: Awesome. Okay so I wanted to ask, when you’re dealing with multiple timelines, you need a way of showing that characters in one timeline are different from characters in another. How much do you try to differentiate them in writing, and how much do you try to let the actors create those distinctions on their own? Let’s start with MIKE this time. MIKE: Well I think as far as the writing, I think a lot of that came out of those conversations that HENRY and I had about the backstories of these alternate universe characters. Also a lot of those conversations happened in the full [writers’] room too. But through talking about what led these timeline23 characters to where they are now, I feel like that gave us an internal sense to how they are different. We also talked with each of the actors about that and they came up with some great ideas and some great nuances that an actor brain would find that a writer brain might overlook. It was just a very open collaborative discussion, it really allowed everybody to find the little insights, the little nuggets, that really made the alternate timeline characters special. HENRY: We knew every single difference. We knew where it came from. We had the incident. We knew what made them different, in some cases the dead. We made sure we had all those answers so we could hand them to Meera, the director, so when the actors came to her, she was able to answer them very clearly and cleanly. And if there was a discussion to be had, then we got involved in that. I think it all started with Olivia as Alice23, which I’d written that character in an episode in season two MIKE: 2x10 I think. HENRY: It’s funny because we hadn’t pushed it to see how a tiny little thing could make someone completely different and then we tried to apply that formula to everyone. I think Olivia had a version of her already that she had done and then everyone else had to explore. I mean it was fun. It was fun for everyone. The Eliot and Margo ghosts were maybe my favorites ones to write. [LAUGHTER] CLARA: Oh yeah. They were fantastic. HENRY: They were the ones were we were like, okay, we’re going to be able to hit all of our characters. Because we had specified in episode 2x10 that everyone had died and the one person who we flipped the switch on was Penny. We were saying in this universe Penny actually never really became friends with those people and disappeared so when Fogg tells them that everyone died in that universe, he’s not referring to Penny because Penny wasn’t really part of the group. DANI: Yeah, I actually love the line where Eliot is like, she called me a lush, which is like a nicer form of alcoholic. [LAUGHTER] MIKE: Props to Henry for that one. DANI: Oh yeah? MIKE: Yeah. HENRY: The other thing I liked in that scene is that there’s a second Eliot after Margo blows up and this came out of a props meeting, he pulls a little piece of her ear with an earring off. I don’t know if you can see it very clearly, but that’s what it was. It was an earring with a little piece of ear on it. CLARA: You could tell it was supposed to be a body part, but I couldn’t tell what it was. That makes sense. It’s like a little tassel earring. HENRY: Blown up Margo I feel is my favorite effect that we’ve done on the show. It turned out so much better than I expected. DANI: I love whenever they do the ghost things on the show. That episode from season one is still one of my favorite episodes still, that episode with the ghost children. HENRY: We’re really good at establishing rules and we were trying real hard to apply all those rules to this particular instance. It actually helped us a lot. DANI: Yeah CLARA: So one thing I noticed in this episode is that Josh!Prime tends to interrupt Josh23 whenever they’re talking. So he fills in the blanks [HENRY LAUGHS] You’re laughing! Good, I found something. So he’s filling in the blanks in what Josh23 is trying to say with context from his own experiences. And that made me really think about the perspective that we’re getting in this episode, that we’ve to some extent been getting throughout this season. Like Josh and Julia, we’re pretty embedded in the prime timeline point of view. Should we be taking their interpretation of timeline 23 with a grain of salt? And how big should that grain of salt be? Henry, since you laughed, why don’t you start us off. HENRY: Now what do you mean by their interruption of timeline23? Like how timeline23 became to be or…? CLARA: I guess part of my question is that if we take this episode completely at face value and all the characters we’re seeing in timeline23 at face value then I think that we have to assume their motivations are kinda similar to the ones we already know and I’m wondering how much of that is true. How much is that true? HENRY: I think that is very true. I mean the Josh interrupting Josh thing: my wife is an identical twin and she and her sister always interrupt each other or constantly send texts at the same time. Like they’re thinking the same thought. I just imagine if you saw someone who was you who had most of the same formative experiences as you, except for at a certain point, you’d share a lot of the same thoughts. You’d know what the other person was gonna say and you’d be shocked when it was different. Like say if you behaved yourself. Like, these are the same character just at some point they branched off. That was really the goal– know when they branched off, know why they branched off, and have a very good explanation as to why they branched off. And ideally we tried to figure out a way that came from the teslaflection. Because we gave Alice23 hope, hope that she could maybe bring Quentin back, she did a thing that caused all this other shit to happen. DANI: She kinda did the opposite of what Quentin did to her back. HENRY: Yeah. MIKE: She’s like sad and desperate and I feel terrible. The only person she didn’t alter was Margo and Eliot who died in the initial thing. DANI: That made me sad, seeing everybody I love die. I was like, this is too much. HENRY: MIKE, is there anything I’m missing there? I’m trying to think of anything else. MIKE: No, I think that hits it all pretty well. I mean, there is a bit of a journey when we first land in timeline23 where the point of view is very weird, like there butchered plastic curtains everywhere. We called them murder curtains. [To HENRY] Did you coin that? HENRY: To props, yeah I did because they looked like a meat locker. Special props to both our camera and lighting department and our set design – Margot Ready. They were just really game to play. And there were so many things that didn’t even make it into the show. Like graffiti written in blood at one point. There was so much stuff. They really did a magnificent job. François, who was the DP of this episode, had this entirely different lighting scheme for timeline23. I mean everyone really did a beautiful job. I think it was fun for them. MIKE: Yeah so we landed that and we had this Josh and Julia (at least the audience POV) is pretty judgemental of this world. Like Dean Fogg is fucking insane and Marina and Josh are cutthroat. But then we come to realize that’s because of us. Through Julia saying, oh when I reached out through the teslaflection with Quentin, I was kinda the spark that lit the fire that burnt this world down. Sorry about that… So through Julia, we do get to see a bit of a transformation as to how we approach timeline23. HENRY: We had the episode where we killed Marina so one of the goals here was we wanted to bring back a version of Marina and play Julia’s guilt about that. Like her own feeling of culpability about creating both this universe, like she created this universe accidentally, but she also did some terrible things to Marina in the past through her own… I don’t know how to describe it. Some of it’s… I don’t want to say it’s her responsibility because it’s not totally her fault. MIKE: I mean Julia’s always had extremely difficult problems with no great solutions and she’s done what she can, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t hurt people along the way. This episode specifically, I think, was a lot about her confronting that. That even if she’s acting out of the best efforts and interests, she’s still hurt people and so she wants to do whatever she can to write that, either cosmically or through an alternate version of that person. CLARA: There was one other way I wanted to try to spin this and see about it. So part of why the interrupting caught me was because Josh!Prime never really hears an answer to any of the questions he asks. He asks these big questions like what’s the Quickening and stuff and he kinda assumes he knows what Josh23 is gonna say already and so he doesn’t actually get the full answer so I think that’s where I’m wondering should we be taking how similar he thinks they are with a grain of salt and I don’t know. HENRY: [Josh23] doesn’t tell him either so. CLARA: No, he doesn’t. HENRY: You’re going to find out eventually what The Quickening is, but maybe not this season. CLARA: Oh okay. DANI: Oh no. [LAUGHTER] DANI: I just know that Marina and Julia shippers are going to be very happy with this episode. CLARA: Oh my god, you’ll never hear the end of it. [LAUGHTER] DANI: Especially with the context, like the obvious context that Marina throws out there. They’re gonna have a field day. [LAUGHTER] HENRY: I mean, Marina just hits on her really hard. DANI: Oh yeah. I’m not opposed cuz this is a different Marina. If it was the same Marina I wouldn’t be behind it. HENRY: Well she doesn’t have the same history. DANI: Yeah, exactly, which also (that I don’t think we put in our script) I wanted to bring up the fact that Kady’s not in this episode. CLARA: Yeah, that’s a good point. HENRY: I would have loved to have Kady in this episode, but honestly it was a function purely of [that] some of our actors we only have available for 10 out of 13 or 7 out of 13 episodes, and we just didn’t have her and we were trying to stick to our budget. I love Kady. I would have loved to have her in this episode and I very much would have loved to create an alternate universe version of her, but we were trying very hard to stick to a budget. So apologies to Jade for that. I would have loved to film that. MIKE: And all other Kady fans out there. DANI: I don’t know if you guys will ever bring up that timeline again other than the characters coming over, but what do you think Kady would be doing in that timeline? If you can answer it. HENRY: She’s dead. I mean you know who Kady Orloff-Dias is based on in the books, right? DANI and CLARA: Yeah. HENRY: And the goal was to, in that timeline, she was killed by The Beast. DANI: Ah, okay. HENRY: Because she was killed by The Beast right away, Penny didn’t have anyone to go too, and that’s part of the reason he became who he was. CLARA: Okay HENRY: So that was really what we talked about. Her death was the ultimate changing point for Penny. And in the books, Kady Orloff is… CLARA: Amanda Orloff, right. HENRY: There’s a slight change to her in our show. Because we couldn’t use her and it’s an alternate universe, how is that going to affect everyone else? What would the losing of her change? We didn’t go into the specifics of that, but I would love to do an episode where we see another version of Jade Tailor. CLARA: There’s two things that I thought were [interesting]. I’m really interested to see how Penny coming back is going to impact the relationship between Julia and Kady because obviously there is a lot of complication there. But one of the other things I found really interesting is we’re sort of seeing through this episode that Penny’s propensity for seeing the women he dates on a pedestal and as all encompassing. Like that’s a thing about him, about him and Kady, that’s about their relationship. MIKE: Yeah, I think Penny is the kind of guy, like you said, who puts his significant other on a pedestal. He’s a reserved, quiet guy. He doesn’t open himself up to many people so when he finds that one person that he wants to open himself up to, they get all of Penny. It’s all in. And thats how he approaches friendly relationships, romantic relationships. So when there wasn’t a Kady for Penny’s interests to go towards, and he found Julia, he says that Julia was his soulmate. He’s not really hedging much there. CLARA: No pun intended. MIKE: Yeah! [LAUGHTER] He’s just a guy and there are so many like this who pick who they’ll really connect with and it’s like a bandwidth thing. You have that much of yourself and if you’re gonna open yourself up, it’s gotta go to this one person. HENRY: We were trying to imagine… like Kady died but Julia was also there when it happened. And one of the other things is, what if Penny connected with Julia at the moment. We were just trying to imagine ways to totally change who Penny was and how he saw people. And then Penny23 comes into our universe and completely upends that entire relationship with both of those characters. That’s what we were interested in exploring. How can we really alter those relationship structures on our show? And you’re totally right about Penny. He has an idealized version of her and Julia tries very hard to be like, I’m not her. DANI and CLARA: Yeah HENRY: And he has a very blunt response. His Han Solo response. DANI: I feel like it also has to be really word for her because the Penny she knows hates her. MIKE: Right. DANI: So that’s gotta be really weird. Like, whoa, Penny’s talking to me because he wants too. HENRY: I think that’s a fun challenge for our actors to completely upend what they thought of it. And they end up doing a very beautiful scene, I thought. This episode is also planting story seeds that we’re going to pay off down the line, and I’m not gonna say anymore beyond that. [LAUGHTER] DANI: So kinda relating to that and getting back on our script, CLARA and I were talking yesterday about how we got so wrapped up in the quest this season that we kind of forgot about the fact that the idea that the keys would help them get magic back was something Quentin came up with -- his interpretation of the Tale of the Seven Keys. And Quentin is often wrong. Is that something we should worry about? MIKE, you first. MIKE: So should we worry about if the keys won’t get us magic back? DANI: I mean it kinda hints– MIKE: Yes, you should be worried about everything all the time. CLARA: You should just be a ball of anxiety. [LAUGHTER] DANI: I know MIKE: Rolling from one crisis to the next. DANI: We got a little too fluffy this season. We’re just skeptical at this point. MIKE: I mean, it is a magical book that reveals itself one chapter at a time. Without going into down a dead end alley, but sometimes alles take turns that you might not expect or see on a map. DANI: I’m already expecting a devastating cliffhanger at the end of the season. I mean, I’m expecting it. MIKE: Cool cool. So you’ve watched the show then, I see [LAUGHTER] HENRY: No comment. [LAUGHTER] CLARA: Okay, so before we wrap this episode, I want to share a little more from the conversation DANI and I had yesterday about this episode and how it’s made us question a lot about what we thought we knew. HENRY and MIKE, you can join in if you want, but as ground rules, you’re totally allowed to abstain and listen. So let us know if you want to cut in. Okay, so. In the books, much like in the show, the quest starts out as a fun adventure. Quentin is in his element, and he’s excited for the chance to finally be the hero of his story. But things don’t turn out quite how he expects them to, and Quentin learns that being a hero isn’t everything he thought it was. And there’s actually a line in this episode when Julia’s talking about going off-book that really reminded me of where in Quentin’s point of view about how in books everything is sort of laid out for you and there’s always somebody to point you to the volcano to throw the ring in and that’s not the way it is in real life. So there’s already some of that in this episode. So, as the quest comes to a close in the books, Quentin confronts Ember (who in the books is still alive at this point). The hero should be rewarded for his heroism. But Ember puts him in his place: “No, Quentin,” he says, “The hero pays the price.” There’s this current of entitlement and Quentin making these assumptions turn out to not be so true about how heroism works and how questing works. In the show, Quentin certainly does seem very single-minded about the quest, convinced that it will not only bring magic back, but perhaps even make him happy (which Quentin is perpetually thinking there’s one thing that’ll make him happy). But one thing we talked about was that Julia could be deluding herself, too. She’s been for the last few episodes talking about how she thinks the power OLU gave her is growing because she’s doing good. But it’s not 100% clear that’s true. When she leveled up with Skye, it was after the collar kicked in, but before Julia could reverse its effects. And while she leveled up again after helping the fairies break their bonds, that scene also involved a lot of violence and brutality. We’ve been referring to it as the Red Dinner Party. [LAUGHTER] So it’s possible that Julia’s power grows not from doing good, but simply from using it or even - in line with the notion that magic comes from pain -- from being around the pain of other people and absorbing all of that. Dani, what do you think about all that and what do you want to add from our conversation? DANI: I mean, we’ve been speculating for quite a few episodes now, that this quest has been sent on by Hades himself and they don’t know this. Because a lot of people have been referring to ‘because of HIM’ and a lot of ‘HIM’. Okay so like, maybe it’s Hades, and we’ve been saying that everything is going just a little too good for Julia right now and it just doesn’t quite make sense. [HENRY LAUGHS] I don’t want it to be true. I want Julia to be happy. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, we don’t trust you guys. It just makes more sense that I feel like something bad is going to happen at the end of the season and we’ve been speculating this. And we’re kinda a little bit more confirmed. We had a little bit more confirmation with Quentin23 today: “You let in a monster worse than me.” HENRY: So true. That was another thing from this episode that we were trying to pay off, to worry about in the future. I like your theorizing. Your ideas are really interesting. I’m not gonna spoil the season for you. [LAUGHTER] CLARA: I’m enjoying watching you guys. HENRY: MIKE, do you have any input? MIKE: Nah, I think the next few episodes should speak for themselves. CLARA:Well I’m enjoying watching your poker faces. There’s a couple other little things– MIKE: Oh god we have terrible poker faces. CLARA: You say that, but you both seem to smile all the time so the fact that you’re smiling doesn’t tell me anything at all. [LAUGHTER] HENRY: I am impressed with how much you guys engage the material and really think about it. I find it really cool. CLARA: Well good. HENRY: You guys are thinking really deeply about it. DANI: We both read these books way too many times. [LAUGHTER] CLARA: So many times. So we’ll impress you a little bit more. So the other thing we talked about was this “Quickening” Josh23 mentioned, that our Josh is so worried about. We had to look up a bunch of references and a bunch of the potential tropes and there’s so many related to a quickening out there. The one I found most interesting, thinking about the books, was the highlander one, where you kill an immortal and absorb their power. [HENRY LAUGHS] Cuz I still don’t know what happened to Ember’s god powers in season 2. But Dani, what’d you think? DANI: I’m going on what you said to me. I think it’s a red herring of some sort. CLARA: It’s not werewolf-y? DANI: It’s either a red herring or a Chekhov’s gun. It’ll show up again eventually with enough time for us to forget about it. Except we’re bad at forgetting things. Because we’re still like, the Candy Witch is gonna show up with Quentin’s blood. We haven’t forgotten. HENRY: She might! MIKE: She’s still out there. CLARA: Did we talk about that last episode? HENRY: You’ll eventually learn what The Quickening is. That’s all I’m gonna say. CLARA: But maybe not this season, right? HENRY: I’m not gonna promise anything, but you will eventually learn. And it’s going to be HORRIFYING. [LAUGHTER] MIKE: Yaaaay DANI: We’re also missing the god killing bullet, which is literally Chekhov’s gun, which will show up next week. CLARA: There’s some great ‘no comment’ faces going on. HENRY: Why should I ruin your enjoyment of the end of the season? CLARA: You shouldn’t! You absolutely shouldn’t. DANI: Absolutely don’t worry about it. We’re always thinking. HENRY: I want to hear your thoughts on the fashion of this episode. DANI: We’ll get there. HENRY: Because I have a special question for you guys, if you can name the episode Margo’s wearing the jacket CLARA: Oh, so I noticed that jacket and wasn’t 100% sure. I thought it might have been the episode where all the mentors came to Brakebills, but I wasn’t positive. HENRY: It’s not that episode, but it is that season. CLARA: That’s gonna drive me nuts. I’m gonna have to go back and watch it. I love that jacket. HENRY: I will tell you if you want. CLARA: Yeah, go ahead! HENRY: It’s episode 1x10. The Margolem episode. It’s one of the different jackets that she’s wearing. CLARA: Yes. DANI: Ohhh. HENRY: It’s easy because there’s two, two Margo’s in that scene. But she’s wearing that jacket. I like that it’s white because you can really see the blood on it. CLARA: Well we’ll turn to fashion now since we’re in that. But I do want to sum up by just saying I personally do not think we should assume to know anything about the motivations of the characters of timeline23 and my current theory is that the prime timeline magicians are probably off the mark a bit about what’s going to happen when they find the seventh key. Okay! Fashion! HENRY: They found the seventh key. CLARA: Okay, whatever. Like the last one that they need. They need them all. When they complete their collection. [LAUGHTER] When they fill up their Pokedex or whatever. Okay, fashion time. A couple things: I think Alice23’s Fillorian grab was just fantastic. She was wearing the perfect kind of tragic peasant dress for the perfect tragic version of Alice. HENRY: Yup DANI: Yeah CLARA: One thing I was curious about was Josh23’s jacket because he said he found it. It looked a little familiar to me before he said that but I couldn’t tell if I was fooling myself and it kinda made me wonder, did it belong to somebody else before? MIKE: I don’t think we used that before. I think Magali made it special for this one. CLARA: Oh okay. MIKE: We were just thinking if a ton of magicians got killed, one of them had to have a really good fashion sense, so. DANI: True. It was Todd’s. I’m KIDDING! [LAUGHTER] CLARA: Todd doesn’t have the greatest fashion, I just gotta say. [LAUGHTER] HENRY: Could have definitely been Todd’s. DANI: Especially since they were in the Physical Cottage. MIKE: Exactly. CLARA: I do kinda wonder about Todd23. Maybe someday we’ll get to learn about Todd23. [LAUGHTER] DANI: He probably also died. CLARA: Aww. HENRY: I don’t think– MIKE: He has a way of staying alive. DANI: Yeah, he’s a cockroach they can’t get rid of. MIKE: Yeah! Or a twinkie. HENRY: I think he’s alive. We were just not able to get him. That’s my theory, that he was alive. DANI: Well I’m definitely okay with that because I want Todd always alive. CLARA: DANI and I have a request whenever the next musical episode is. We NEED Todd to sing I Just Can’t Wait to be King. It just needs to happen. So you know, pass it along or whatever. [LAUGHTER] HENRY: John has strong opinions about musicals. CLARA: We’ll work on it. So one of the other things I was really interested in was the difference between Fogg23 and Fogg!Prime’s style. Because I noticed they both have pocket squares, but other than that, their fashion is incredibly different. Fogg23 seems to be wearing a hunting jacket over flannel, and Fogg!Prime, even with everything that has happened, even that period where he was actually blind, still dressed to kill. Is that something either of you discussed with Magali or that Rick discussed with Magali? How Is it representative of his different personality or different experiences? DANI: He just went full Walking Dead on us. HENRY: Yeah we had a lot of discussion and prep. I would argue he is dressed to kill – just a different kind of kill. We wanted him in survival gear as things had really gone wrong in his timeline. It didn’t seem like he’d be wearing a suit while he’s holded up in a bunker. It seemed like he was a little more of a scary guy, locking himself up behind several locks in the doorway in order to keep from getting murdered. I think his fashion sense would have fallen by the wayside. I think he was still a little prim and things were still tucked in. CLARA: And he still did have the pocket square. MIKE: Yeah and I think the thing I liked about it the most was that he, despite the world crumbling around him, he has these tiny hankers that he just will hold for his life. The pocket square is one, tucking in his shirt. If he can keep those little bits in control then he can keep however tenuously in control. CLARA: I like that a lot. HENRY: You need something to mop up the blooood. MIKE: Yeah. And there’s a lot of it. There’s tons. Leprechauns have more blood than humans. It shouldn’t be possible but it is. [LAUGHTER] HENRY: It is. Happy St. Patrick’s Day. CLARA: Did you have a discussion about how much blood leprechauns should have? Part of the backstory for this episode. [LAUGHTER] MIKE: We could have talked more about it, that’s for sure. HENRY: So much more about it. Fogg does unspeakable things and that was just a little glance. MIKE: Just a little bit. Just a little bit. DANI: I mean it also kind of brought up the fact that it’s not just very easy to make dust from other magical creatures as well. Also I just love the fact that the show made a very lovely, bloody version of fairy dust. [LAUGHTER] We’re so used to Peter Pan fairy dust. MIKE: It’s all the same. They just didn’t go into it. But Peter Pan was a coke addict for sure. [LAUGHTER] HENRY: Have you played Bioshock ever? CLARA: My husband did. I tried to play a little and got scared. DANI: Yeah. HENRY: There’s a moral choice you make in the game by doing either the good thing or the bad thing, and this is the route where he took the bad thing. [LAUGHTER] CLARA: So we talked a little bit about Margo’s outfit, and I just really love that we got to see something she’d worn before. I just love to see those little touches and it’s such a notable one. That really does anchor you in this world. And I wasn’t sure, but I was curious if what Eliot was wearing was also something he’d worn before. I really like that tie. MIKE: Yeah, I feel like they may. The costume department made an effort to either use the clothes from season one, or if they didn’t have those available, to recreate them as closely as humanly possible. Because we were trying to say that at the timeline split not at the beginning of time, but just a couple years ago, so they would have had the same clothes, the same tastes, the same styles. CLARA: So this is not fashion, but this is one more question that I was talking to someone else who gets the episodes early, one of the Reddit mods, and they were saying, when does Fogg turn back the clock in these previous timelines? Like when does he give up on a particular timeline and move on? I guess here magic sort of runs out and who knows how it affects magical timepieces, but it was something I had running through my head this episode. I’m curious to know if you’ve thought about that. HENRY: We thought a lot about that. This is the point that happened in every one and I had a really good answer to this and I’ve been wracking my brain for a few weeks. We discussed a lot the specifics of when and why he would do it and would the timeline continue without it. MIKE: There were several diagrams involved. HENRY: I’m not kidding, we had so many conversations about this, and I’m just drawing a blank right now. MIKE: It was like three days of conversation at least of just the technical rules of time travel and all that HENRY: There’s also the decisions you make about time travel. Like what type of time travel are you engaging in. Does time travel affect the future? Does it not affect the future? Are things always the same? Are they always altered? There was a lot of discussion about this and I’m completely drawing a blank about it. I’m sorry. CLARA: It’s okay because you kind of wrote yourself an out with Julia’s line, what even are the rules for the key. [LAUGHTER] You’re excused from remembering. MIKE: We took a little page from Looper when Bruce Willas and Joseph Gordan Levitt are talking and he asks the rules of time travel and says, just don’t talk about it. Just enjoy it. HENRY: There’s people’s expectations of it and part of it was leaning on the genre expectation of alternate universes and what you can get from that. And on our show, it’s slightly different, because we’re not doing an alternate universe, we have these time loops and a set amount of them. Each one of them is slightly different so we try to lean on our mythological version of that. CLARA: Yeah. The other thing that I thought of, with the headache line, was a two part episode of Star Trek Voyager called… I’m not gonna remember the name of it, where they go back to our present day, Santa Monica, and Jane Way is sitting in front of an ‘old computer’ and trying to hack into it and talking about time travel and she goes, the past is the future and it all gives me one big headache. MIKE: Yeah. HENRY: For sure. CLARA: Alright, so we should move onto MVP and I guess I will start this one. I’m going to give it to Olivia for this. I think what sealed it for me was her delivery of that “Captain Hops” line -- it was so amazing in an episode where there are so many funny lines delivered in funny ways, to have her bring that emotional weight to this kind of ridiculous joke did it for me. And a close second for me would have to be Magali Guidasci, the costume designer, because there were so many great touches from wardrobe for timeline 23. DANI, what about you? DANI: I actually have to give it to Trevor because he pulled double duty and he was solid the entire time. I just know that he’s shaping up to be a lot of people’s favorite characters. I’ve heard a lot of people on like Twitter who just love Trevor and Josh. It makes me very happy because he is definitely one of my favorite characters in the book and I’m very happy he stuck around. HENRY: Me too. CLARA: So HENRY, who do you want to call out for this episode? Who would be an MVP for you? HENRY: Well that’s tough. I agree with you about Olivia. I agree with you about Trevor 100%. I wanna call out Rick especially, Rick Worthy for his version of Fogg, who is incredibly funny. I also want to call out Stella because she’s playing the straightman for a lot of these scenes and doing a really beautiful job of it. I have a hard time just picking one. I would say Olivia’s delivery of that one line might be my favorite line of the episode. MIKE wrote it and it’s just one of those ones where you’re like, we need to nail it in. I’m gonna give it to Meera, our director for this one MIKE: Aww you took mine! HENRY: Oh I did? MIKE: It’s fine I have like three lined up. CLARA: Alright Mike, who do you want to add to the list? MIKE: Definitely a huge shoutout to Meera. Our show can be complicated for directors to come in, this episode especially was complicated, and I thought she just nailed it. But the two I want to call out are Margot Ready, our production designer, just turning all these standing sets to this completely different world. Even just going and standing on the sets in person, not just picking and choosing what we want to see through the camera lens, I felt like I was in a different studio, and I just thought, yeah she did a great job. And also Jason in his portrayal of The Beast. We’ve talked in the [writers’] room a lot about how QUentin has these darker tendencies that we haven’t seen yet and I thought he just did an absolutely beautiful job of exploring those in this timeline in a non-judgemental way, in a very compassionate and understanding way that Quentin Coldwater could have become The Beast. I thought he did a really fantastic job. HENRY: Yeah, and he was having a good hair day that day too. MIKE: Exactly! DANI: Jason also looks incredible in a suit. There’s that. HENRY: And with a finger. MIKE: With a sixth finger. CLARA: Yeah, I can’t believe we skipped over that ebacuse Dani and I did talk about how it was really great to see that explored. To see that Martin and Quentin are two sides of the same coin, and all you have to do is take Quentin’s moral center out of him and he becomes Martin Chatwin. HENRY: On that note, that was an idea that came out of the room and I want to give a shout out to the writers room on this episode. They really really worked double time to break the hell out of this episode because it was one of those episodes where you have to think about every little element and they did it beautifully. I can take credit for writing the episode with Mike, but I can’t take credit for Jason as The Beast because that came out of the room, and it was really a fantastic idea. DANI: Yeah. I also really loved the kind of Romeo and Juliet-like scene after Quentin stabs himself and lies next to Alice. It really got me. MIKE: That’s a huge Meera shout out. Meera, Jason, and Olivia really put in work rehearsing and staging that scene. All that stuff was their ideas and very deliberate and I agree with you, I think they nailed it. HENRY: A beautiful, great job as they all come up. MIKE: Oh that shot was so good. CLARA: Okay so we’re at episode ratings. Dani, I’m actually gonna let you go first this time. DANI: This is a hard episode to rate. I probably have to give it a solid 8 out of 10. It just felt so different to me. Plus, I mean we’ve been having a hard time this season giving ratings because it’s just so so good. CLARA: It’s true. The quality this season has been out of the park phenomenal. DANI: Yeah, I really enjoyed this episode. It was really, of course, sort of outside the box, this whole season has been. I really like it and I think it adds a good layer, and I can’t wait to see [what] Marina and Penny popping back into the room will do for us. CLARA: So I’ll give mine. I’ve been a little nervous about this. I have to admit, the first time I watched this episode I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. And I think it was because I was catching these differences in tone that were about the timeline and some of the things we discussed, but I didn’t really know where they were coming from. And when Dani and I were talking, and I started to think about why it felt weird to me, and I started to think about all those other aspects of it more and realized that I missed a couple of things the first time around. When I watched it again, I loved it. So in the end, I came to the same rating. I have 8 out of 10 written here. And it was interesting for me [to see] what the difference was between the first and second watchings, because that is pretty rare for me. Usually when I go into these episodes, if I love it, I love it forever. If I hate it, I hate it forever. If I feel meh about it, I feel meh about it forever. But this is one of those ones where I’ve watched it three times and everytime it’s gotten better to me and felt richer, and that I really liked. So yeah, 8 out of 10 for me. DANI: You also changed your mind on the haunted house episode from season one. CLARA: That’s true! I actually hated the haunted house episode the first time I saw it and then I ended up loving it as one of my favorite episodes of season one. Not naturally a horror person, which I think was part of that. So Henry and Mike, I won’t ask you to rate an episode you wrote, but I would love to take this opportunity to ask what each of you got out of working with the other person.Mike, I’m going to start with you. What did you learn from working with Henry? MIKE: I was in a great position, it was as much a learning and growing experience as a writer as it was a script to write. Just working side by side with Henry, and seeing his writing process, and being able to collaborate in a more hands-on way, it was kinda the same as cross training sports. If you do the same thing every single time, you only know how to do something that way, so working with Henry and seeing how he approached problems, how he would approach even the functional aspect of how to write it, has helped me a lot. And after the season was over, I wrote a feature on my own, and I found that experience with Henry really helped how I wrote that feature. So I think he helped me grow as a writer tremendously. HENRY: I didn’t know that. MIKE: Oh yeah! CLARA: MIKE, what’s your feature? Is it in production? MIKE: Oh no, no. It’s in an email inbox somewhere, or outbox, waiting to go to my agent. That’s all. [MIKE CHUCKLES] CLARA: I hope we get to see it at some point. HENRY, same question for you. What did you learn from working with Mike? HENRY: Working with Mike was a delight. I had fun every moment when we were working together. Mike has one of the best attitudes out of anyone I’ve ever worked with and brings that every day and I have to remember if I ever feel crappy or shitty about life, not to bring that into the room, and to bring that sense of optimism and fun, because I feel that really came through. It was really fun. I just had fun every day. It was a really good experience. CLARA: Good! Well we really enjoyed this episode and I’m excited to see more. It’s been cool to see all the partnerships between all the writers. Like Mike, who got to do their first solo episode, or things like that this season. And directors too. HENRY: I think it’s Mike’s second. CLARA: Oh right, this is your second. MIKE: Yeah. El CLARA: Right, El had her first one this season, right. And it’s really nice seeing all the different voices that are coming out of the writers’ room and how they have shaped the show. It’s really lovely. Okay, that’s all I have in our script. Is there anything else either of you wanted to say before we wrap up? MIKE: I’m just glad. I’m happy there’s so many cool, interesting questions and theories. That the show is eliciting that much investment and response is really heartwarming. So thank you for watching. HENRY: I couldn’t agree more. I like the deep terror and enthusiasm you guys bring into it. I appreciate it. CLARA: Well, we really enjoy it. I think if we could get paid full time to think about the show, we’d be really happy. [LAUGHTER] DANI: Hell yeah. CLARA: But no such luck so far. Alright, Mike, Henry, thanks so much for joining us today. It was really fun to chat with both of you again and talk to you together about an episode that you wrote as a pair. I’m so excited to do it again. I’m so glad it was renewed for season four. MIKE: Woohoo! CLARA: I feel like it’s just a thrill every time. HENRY: Full writers’ room tomorrow. CLARA: Oh wow. Earlier every year. HENRY: It will enable us to take more advantage of the Fillorian Summer. CLARA: Well thank you so much for being here and listeners, thank you for sticking with us for season three. Remember to subscribe and rate us on iTunes. The more positive ratings we get, the higher we show up in search results, which means more fans can find us. And as always, follow us on Twitter or Facebook @physicalkidspod. Bye! DANI: Bye. HENRY: Bye guys. Thank you. MIKE: Bye, thanks!