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On this episode of X-Ray Vision, Jason Concepcion and Rosie Knight lend each other their ears! In the Previously On (1:29) Jason and Rosie acknowledge the recent distressing and upsetting news about actor Jonathan Majors and his arrest. In the Airlock (3:31), they dive deep (deeep) into the season 2 premiere of Yellowjackets, recapping and discussing Shauna’s chaos energy, Misty’s rightfulness, and where the season might unfold from here with some Tinfoil Hat™ theories. Next, in The Hive Mind (58:11) Jason and Rosie are joined by Scream V & VI co-writer Guy Busick to discuss writing the iconic horror franchise as a fan, the tricks to writing a great horror film, and more. Then in Nerd Out (1:28:16) a listener pitches Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot series.

 

Note: Imprecise timestamps are an unfortunate side effect of a new ads system. Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve this issue.

 

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Nerd Out Submission Instructions!

Send a short pitch and 2-3 minute voice memo recording to xray@crooked.com that answers the following questions: 1) How did you get into/discover your ‘Nerd Out?’ (2) Why should we get into it too? (3) What’s coming soon in this world that we can look forward to or where can we find it? If you’re sending a theory, feel free to send only a summary of your theory (no audio needed) for Jason and Rosie to react to on air.

 

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The Listener’s Guide to all things X-Ray Vision!

The Ice Storm (1997) – directed by Ang Lee; featured performances by Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood.

 

Old (2021) — directed by M. Night Shyamalan; adapted from the Swiss graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters.

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

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Jason Concepcion Warning. This podcast contains spoilers for the season two premiere of Yellowjackets. Season one of Yellowjackets and the entire Scream franchise, including the latest edition in the Scream franchise Scream VI. So be warned, Sidney.

 

Jason Concepcion Hello, my name is Jason Concepcion.

 

Rosie Knight And I’m Rosie Knight.

 

Jason Concepcion And welcome to X-ray Vision, the Crooked Media podcast, where we dive deep to your favorite shows, movies, comics and pop culture.

 

Rosie Knight In this episode on Previously On, we’re going to briefly talk about the news that came out about Jonathan Majors from over the weekend. In the Airlock, we will be onto Yellowjackets Season two, the premiere where we will recap that very fun episode and maybe talk a little bit about some of the horror that we’ve loved so far this year in the Hive Mind, We’re going to have an interview with Scream VI co-writer Guy Busick, which I cannot wait for. And in the Nerd Out, we’ve got a passionate plea from Lucas on the Monk and Robot series by Becky Chambers.

 

Jason Concepcion We know there have been issues with the timestamps. We’re working on that. But you can still check the show notes for those time stamps because they are there for you to reference. Coming up, the Previously On. Okay. First up on the Previously On, some truly troubling news about Jonathan Majors came out over the weekend over the end of last week per People magazine which actually has the police report quote, On Monday, people obtained documents from the Manhattan district attorney’s office that show majors, 33, was charged with three counts of assault in the third degree, aggravated harassment in the second degree, three counts of attempted assault in the third degree, and harassment in the second degree after he was arrested for an alleged domestic dispute on Saturday. Some of the fallout for this includes the Army pulling majors from its ad campaign. The Army currently embroiled in issues regarding its own problems with with assault, a cross-gender assault in its ranks. Violence. So some kind of very bad association with that. We don’t know much more than what is contained in the police report. And we’re waiting for information to emerge, but truly not good news. A statement from a Major’s lawyer says the following that Jonathan Majors was, quote, the victim of an altercation with a woman he knows and that the woman had recanted the accusation that video, evidence and witness supported his account. The statement continues. Mr. Majors is entirely innocent and did not assault her whatsoever. And there is an earlier statement, I think, that this one in which the same rep said something to the effect of Mr. Majors looks forward to clearing his name completely or something to that effect, obviously. This is not good. Not a lot of information to go on. And we’re waiting for more information before we say more about it, but obviously troubling. Up next, Yellowjackets and. We’re stepping out of The Airlock for the season two premiere of Yellowjackets on the beleaguered Showtime network.

 

Rosie Knight Beleaguered. If you tried to watch it this weekend, you may agree with that statement.

 

Jason Concepcion Well, let’s talk about that for a brief second before we get into the recap originally. The show was supposed to come out at a certain date, but then it turned out not to be the date. What happened there?

 

Rosie Knight My understanding is that the show was released on streaming on the Showtime app as they advertised on the 24th, but the premiere date as promoted multiple times was Sunday the 26th, which is when it is airing on the Showtime network. Going up against Succession on HBO.

 

Jason Concepcion On old school cable.

 

Rosie Knight Old school cable.

 

Jason Concepcion On broadcast.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah, it was unclear at best, but ah, I will shout out to the Discord once again because so many people went in there and were like, Guys, I just want to let you know you can watch it right now. And luckily the Internet knew and now everyone can watch it. And we have confirmed that that will be the release schedule going forward. You will always be able to watch it on the Showtime app, on streaming on the Friday and on Sunday. You can watch it on old school cable and we will be talking about it on our Wednesday episodes.

 

Jason Concepcion Oh, folks. And it’s a lot to talk about.

 

Rosie Knight Whew. Okay, so it’s me, Rosie. You can hear my voice. Not Jason’s voice. Shocking twist. Just like this episode is full of. This episode of Yellowjackets has an unbelievable name that you will surely laugh or cry about once you see the final scene of the episode. It is called Friends, Romans, Countrymen, written by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, the two of the show runners and directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer. Welcome back to the wilderness, baby. The girls are trying to survive a harsh winter and it is not going well.

 

Jason Concepcion It’s not going well at all.

 

Rosie Knight It’s not going well. Travis and Nat have taken on the role as a full time hunter gatherers, which we kind of saw teased in the last season. But while that seems sensible, they are also entrenched in Lottie’s strange wilderness rituals.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah. You know, Lottie, who you may remember nearly led a cannibalistic murder and sexual assault. Very came very, very close to happening. Well, the sexual assault thing, I think you could argue did actually happen. The murder did not, luckily.

 

Rosie Knight She almost. The murder only was stopped by Nat. To stop Shauna from splitting Travis’s throat open with a knife.

 

Jason Concepcion And Lottie is continuing down that path of now, remember, she has gone off her medication. She’s neurodivergent in some fashion, bipolar or I forget, which one was.

 

Rosie Knight It is unclear. I believe.

 

Jason Concepcion Unclear.

 

Rosie Knight I believe Internet sleuths saw that her medication was currently used, but it was regularly used for people who have schizophrenia.

 

Jason Concepcion Okay.

 

Rosie Knight I will also note that the mysterious nature of the show, we also know that Lottie has had visions that have come true and there is a chance that potentially. She is medicated for reasons unknown. And we kind of we kind of see that her parents have a distant relationship with their daughter and her mental health. But basically, I’m going to tell you, she’s not doing very well because when Travis when Travis and not go out, she makes them drink a tea. That has her blood in it.

 

Jason Concepcion Right. Not to mention the fact that if you you know, if you’re schizophrenic and you go off your meds, you definitely shouldn’t medicate with mushrooms, which is a thing that happened and could be have very adverse effects.

 

Rosie Knight Also dropping off, dropping off any meds is like a recipe for disaster.

 

Jason Concepcion And not good. I will say to your point about. Her medication and her parents, I am eager to raise the possibility that there is some kind of deeper conspiracy going on. But I’ll get to I’ll raise that. I will get to that.

 

Rosie Knight So it’s the really interesting thing here is Travis kind of embraces that he drinks the blood tea, he goes for it, and you’re starting to see where we stand two months later now. Nat is not about this shit. She says it’s not like this wicken bullshit is doing us good. But as Lori points out, they keep coming back from the woods alive. So drink that blood tea and head out on the way. She’s like, Is it working? And then, you know, we’re going to get a kind of this is foreshadowing a we were right moment here we see Lottie draw the strange symbol that we now know is the symbol of her modern day cult. But before that very interesting moment here, we skip to a year we haven’t seen before, 1998.

 

Jason Concepcion The girls come home.

 

Rosie Knight Yep, it’s a press frenzy, like absolute madness at the airport. They are not thinking about these children’s mental health in any way, shape or form. They are absolutely raising her. And no surprises. Lawyers dealing with it less than anyone. She is silent. She won’t talk. Her parents say she barely eats and we immediately see them take her to the doctor. They request that they want her to be fixed and soon she’s getting electroshock therapy.

 

Jason Concepcion Okay, so in this scene, when, you know, we’re watching the news reports of them coming back to civilization after their rescue somewhere in the woods, we hear the reporter say that they were the plane crashed 800 miles off of the flight, the flight path like that was. It was in a place where no one was even looking. Leading me to ask. What is good? What is going on here? There’s another plane there. There’s like that part of the woods. There’s something weird going on there. And what? What would lead the plane to be over there in the first place?

 

Rosie Knight So you’re asking the important questions? One, I will say as a as a devout hater of Lottie’s parents from the first season and the second season, I will say I think there’s a very sad, logical reason, which I don’t think is going to be the answer, but I’ll cover it first. Lottie’s dad hired that plane. Lottie’s dad hated having a kid with mental health. I think there’s a very good chance that that was a way for him to get rid of this kid that he saw as a burden. But I think the reason you’re asking important questions is because the reality is, as we see in this episode, we’re really getting into lost territory here. We talk about it. We talk about the MUDA triangle, people getting potentially lost, planes ending up in this strange space. Something is drawing people here. Yeah. And I don’t think Lottie was wrong to say that the forest is trying to keep them there.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah, I think you’re right.

 

Rosie Knight And, well, in the modern day we see Lottie at her wellness retreat. A.K.A a cult. Yes, it’s a call. And in an interview that I brought up IG and the creators is kind of talked about how they were inspired by real wellness leaders and kind of people who had used their platforms to end up creating cults around them. It’s called Camp Green Pine. Now I just have to say something. It looks like the wilderness where they were lost, right? I think she truly looks like she’s just gone back to where they crashed.

 

Jason Concepcion I’m saying I think when Lottie came back, part of the reason why she wasn’t talking is because she fucking loved it out there. She was in her element. She was having a great time. And then all of a sudden she’s back in this place she doesn’t want to be. And it’s, I think, quite fitting that it appears that she has created a life that allows her to return to that energy.

 

Rosie Knight I completely.

 

Jason Concepcion Agree. You know what? The the pink and Amal’s and purple jackets are pretty nice. Pretty nice. Always beware when when these wellness people start wearing the same shit.

 

Rosie Knight Yes. When it starts that you have a uniform. Yeah. It’s going to go badly. It’s going to go bad. And she’s giving like a speech that I think really speaks to your point, which is she’s talking about like primal selves and and how we all we, we can only help ourselves. No one else can help us. And then she says something really interesting that, again, I think leads into our lost theory when she basically says it doesn’t matter because it isn’t real. And everyone just starts screaming. It isn’t real. It isn’t real. And you’re like, Not good. That no good sounds bad. And after that, very good night, this credit sequence, which if you want to, you can go through a half speed and find many clips that will occur later in the season, just like they did in season one. I did an analysis at IGN about it. We come to a shocking revelation, which is that Shauna is being interviewed by the police about Adam’s murder and that asking very quick questions because guess what? It’s not the police. It’s Misty.

 

Jason Concepcion It’s Misty with a voice transform.

 

Rosie Knight Dream style voice transform. And again.

 

Jason Concepcion You have to say here, okay, so Misty, one of my favorite characters in recent TV history, one of the most for my money, one of the most original characters that I’ve ever seen on television. She is chaos. She is amoral. She is you know, if you had to put her in a slot, you’d say she’s a villain.

 

Rosie Knight She’s a murderer. We’ve seen her kill people.

 

Jason Concepcion She’s a murderer. She is probably the reason they were not rescued from the woods a lot earlier because she destroyed the transmitter. She made them all trip on mushrooms. On and on and on and on. But. She’s also right about everything.

 

Rosie Knight Yes. I’m so glad you brought this up, because one. Samantha Henry, Christina Ricci. Unbelievable. I have to say, both all of the casting in the show is, like, unreal how much they manage to get two different actors to portray the same character and make it believable. But I tell you, I’m so glad you brought us up, because this episode especially proves they would be fucked without Misty.

 

Jason Concepcion They were fucked.

 

Rosie Knight Okay. :Look. Did she break the black box transmitter? Yes, I have. I will. I will admit that. But, they probably wouldn’t have survived even the two weeks it took for them to rescue them if they. If she hadn’t. Without her, she was the one who knew the weird survivalist shit. She knew how to cauterize the wound. She is indispensable in the narrative world that they have created. And I love that that continues now because they had to call her to dispose of Adam’s body. Now she’s training. She’s training Shauna on how to stop. Not not tell the police everything because Shauna’s useless and chaotic.

 

Jason Concepcion She’s going to need that training.

 

Rosie Knight She’s so bad.

 

Jason Concepcion Shauna is going to need that training. And it goes on and on. Natalie would have relapsed into addiction if not.

 

Rosie Knight We will get to that, too, because Natalie would also have just disappeared off the face of the earth and no one would have cared. And if you’re questioning whether Misty is only doing this because she loves, you know, murder and terrible things. No. She even made Shauna. Yeah, she made Shauna a giant cookie that said, let me speak to my lawyer. She was like, she is a true friend. And in the world of Yellowjacket, she is indispensable, even as like, a crazy serial killer. You are lucky to have her on side.

 

Jason Concepcion Absolutely.

 

Rosie Knight And they do not respect that. Shauna is kind of like boy in her off and she wants to go back home and she’s like, We’re fine. Nothing’s going to happen. Taissa is struggling because how we found her bloodshot shrine.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah.

 

Rosie Knight At the end of last season, which we’ll talk about more because I think they’re playing a very interesting game with the way. We perceive whether Tai really knows what’s going on. But that comes to a head outside of her son’s school where she tries to drop off a new dog, Steve. And love Steve. He’s so cute. Was I was a big fan of this. Steve is actually also the best name, the name of the best character in the movie.

 

Jason Concepcion I hope Steve makes it for the entire season.

 

Rosie Knight Me too. I love Steve and I’m sure this is going to come into play. But her wife basically says, like, if you don’t drop out of office and get some help, like I’m going to the press.

 

Jason Concepcion And by the way.

 

Rosie Knight That’s her biggest fear.

 

Jason Concepcion As she should, as she should.

 

Rosie Knight Blood shrine. Blood shrine.

 

Jason Concepcion And I’d be. Could you imagine if you saw yourself a potentially like psychotic ex who decapitated your pet and created a weird, like a blood religious shrine in your basement all of a sudden that you’re divorcing, you suddenly try to pick up your child?

 

Rosie Knight Most I think the most unsettling thing about that is not the fact that she made it, though. That is obviously horrific. But also you’d have to deal with the existential horror of the fact that it seemed to have worked because Taissa was going to lose the election season and then she did that and now she’s a senator. Nat is nowhere to be seen in the modern day. Of course, we know she got kidnaped by Lottie’s cult, and Shauna is just like unbelievably chill about the fact she killed a man and is now calling out very badly. In a very cool moment, Misty basically like seeks out the truth on a true crime boards to see if any citizen detectives are going to uncover what happened in Adam’s death. And it does look like a faceless, yet recognizable voice of Elijah Wood may be coming closer to the truth than Misty would like. So we’re going to get that ice storm reunion sooner, rather than later.

 

Jason Concepcion And I will say, as a person who spends a lot of time on the unsolved mysteries, read it. The the the voicing of this like the post itself and smiling felt very do very much what you would actually find on one of these boards.

 

Rosie Knight The telegrams, I was like, yeah, this is and I loved how in-sync they are. There’s this kind of that it’s written as a telegram, something stop. Did it stop? And Misty’s like, Oh my God, this is getting tired. And at the same time he writes, This is getting tired. Like, I’m tired of that. They’re in sync already. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw Misty finally find a romantic.

 

Jason Concepcion I was going to say I absolutely I feel the same way that it feels like that’s.

 

Rosie Knight She’s going to have to, like, team up with him to pretend that they’re solving the murder. But really, she’s going to be stopping him. I mean, it sounds delightful. Sadly, things are not delightful in 1996 where the rations are running low, which seems like it’s going to play into the further cannibal story arc that we will inevitably be getting to. If you remember the first episode of the first season where we saw the girls eating some kind of meat in these strange cult costumes. Now good news. Turns out Jackie did survive her night in the forest because Shauna is playing MASH with her and that kind of talking about how she’s going to be married to Jeff. And it seems great. Oh, no, that’s not the case. Dun, dun, dun. Jackie is dead.

 

Jason Concepcion She’s talking to a flat out frozen blue gray corpse that is like horrific to look at.

 

Rosie Knight And for some reason, I would say trauma, grief and immense amounts of guilt. Shauna now, as Mari mentions, just chills in the meat shed with Jackie’s dead body and then comes out with like, like rations and says, Oh, I was getting these, but everyone knows she’s just kind of saying, Yeah. And they really dissect, they play games together. We see it’s this very fun, Norman Bates esque situation where Shauna is talking about all the things she’s guilty about, how her and Jeff got together, you know, the future that she wants to have it. It’s really sad. And Sophie Neilisse is so good again, great casting. You really feel like that’s young Melanie Lynskey.

 

Jason Concepcion There’s with Jackie and Shauna. And then Shauna as an adult. There’s something really interesting here about, like. Sexuality in the sense of like a true attraction, the things that turn a person on, but also shame.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah.

 

Jason Concepcion Certainly in the in adult Shauna’s life, we see this later in the episode.

 

Rosie Knight Oh Yeah.

 

Jason Concepcion Her and Jess, you know, she, she kind of allows herself to be vulnerable about the things that turn her on. And it’s very interesting because, you know, Jackie and Jeff, the issue there was that Jackie was not ready to have sex with Jeff and and Shauna. It you could say kind of use that as a way to kind of pull Jeff interweb and the way that represents in. That in China’s psyche is really fascinating.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah, I think that’s such a great point. I love that moment where she’s talking to her and Jackie arguing about it. Jackie says it was because the reason we argued was because I wouldn’t sleep with him, you know? And Shauna says, Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. But because it’s just her psyche, Jackie goes, Yeah, you did. Yeah. And it’s this great kind of personal argument about the way you can repress things that you’re ashamed of and things that you did. And also, I feel like for the first time in this episode, we get it with a little bit with Van and Ty in the wilderness, and we get to hear the kind of reminder of how different things were in the nineties about sex, especially for young women, about being queer or about being sexually active. But anyway, you know what? That doesn’t matter. Because what ultimately ends up happening is that Shona does not learn something from this. She to get angry at her own psyche and Owen dead best friend and knocked over, knocking off Jackie’s ear, which will set on a domino effect to the final moments of this episode that you will not believe. So you know what? Instead of just leaving it there in the meat shed she puts in her pocket.

 

Jason Concepcion And I question I question the decision making. But I get it.

 

Rosie Knight I get it. You know, it’s it’s a tough.

 

Jason Concepcion Shauna is chaos incarnate.

 

Rosie Knight Shauna is. This is what I love about this episode. And I love how the beginning of this season, I feel like it was close to it and KeyShauna killed Adam, but they kind of made an hour of allowances by the end of this episode. I’m like, Sure not. Is the chaos cyclical that everything else happens around?

 

Jason Concepcion I agree.

 

Rosie Knight With that.

 

Jason Concepcion She is like a a high functioning freak. Yeah, she puts she has this facade, the regular wife and mother, you know, living this kind of upper middle class suburban life, like after the terrible things that happened.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah.

 

Jason Concepcion Because of the crash when she was teenager. But in reality, inside, she is just a mess.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah. And that’s. I think that’s why the show speaks to so many people, because there’s so many great moments about, like, the perception Shauna is the unsatisfied suburban housewife, but she wouldn’t hurt anyone. But in that first season, you have to just kill that rabbit who’s in her garden. She has this violence and this fury in her that she may hide better than someone like Misty, but it’s still there and it makes these characters just ultimately compelling when Misty.

 

Jason Concepcion Misty knows who she is. Like, Yeah, lies come from the fact that she knows who.

 

Rosie Knight And she needs to hide it.

 

Jason Concepcion It right. And she understands that. She understands the world would reject her. Shauna is Shauna hates her life, hates everything about her life, how normal it is. She has always kind of.

 

Rosie Knight We see how she’s scared of becoming her mom and marrying Jeff, living that suburban life when she’s a teen. But that’s exactly what happens to her.

 

Jason Concepcion And so she’s always kind of craved a more kind of dangerous existence, but at the same time been afraid to, like, go after it. And so she is drawn to these situations that could just blow up her life like that is the thing she can.

 

Rosie Knight Such a good way of.

 

Jason Concepcion Saying it is like anything that could absolutely melt her entire life down, destroy everything, turn her daughter against or turn her husband against her.

 

Rosie Knight Put her in prison.

 

Jason Concepcion And put her in prison. That is the stuff that attracts her.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah. And we really we get a great glimpse of that, too, because we start to see that Shauna isn’t actually that bothered about covering up Adam’s matter at all. And she is out of all the girls in the nineties. She is dealing with the crash. The worst at this point. Misty She’s doing okay. She’s a little bit upset that she’s been cut off from cooking. Drew is seeing as she poisoned everyone with mushrooms. And not only that, but purposefully poisoned assistant coach Ben. Yeah, this is also interesting here because we basically get a look at the JV squad who were barely in the last season. You might have seen a couple of the reactions. Yeah, but but now they take center stage, including a new cast member who plays this kind of theater lover, Krystal, who’s humming along and annoying everyone and breaking into song. Very good, weird, sketchy character. I love her. And the best thing is that we get this moment here that kind of shows that her and Misty might become friends. As long as Misty doesn’t mind like harmonizing with her.

 

Jason Concepcion Yes. Yes.

 

Rosie Knight And it’s like the offer is too good for Misty to turn down as someone who’s always seeking out friendship and who is yet to find any kind of friend in this kind of terrifying.

 

Jason Concepcion Extremely.

 

Rosie Knight Hard. Yeah. And I think that’s one of the things she does so well here, is she she puts across this desperation, this like trying to hard that makes you understand why it might push people away, but it’s incredibly empathetic and feels just really sad. It’s such a great nuanced performance that manages to be scary and hilarious and sad and compassionate and creepy. It’s so good. And in the last two that we kind of catch up with in the past of Van and Tai, this is very interesting to me. I guess I hadn’t really realized until this episode that their romance was entirely secret from the other girls. This is something that they are keeping we here girls reference. Oh, y they were saying, how exactly are they talking about their boyfriends? All this kind of stuff. I found that to be very interesting because I think that setting up a potential future conflict and also it separates them from the rest of the group, which bodes badly because Ty has been having these violent nighttime outbursts. She’s been hunting Vann, she’s been climbing up trees, she’s been eating dirt. And it’s gotten to the point where Vann and Ty now sleep in the attic with their arms tied together by rope. So it’s a desperate situation, but I think.

 

Jason Concepcion That will only continue. There will only.

 

Jason Concepcion Continue to continue and must be real. We know Van is essentially immortal. She survived that plane crash. Apparently, she survived that move by a wolf. She is our moral guide and I love her.

 

Jason Concepcion X-ray Vision will be back.

 

Speaker 1 <AD>

 

Jason Concepcion And we’re back.

 

Rosie Knight In the present. In one of my funniest moments, I have watched this episode so many times at this point because of writing different stuff about it and what you get for that pod and everything. So Jeff’s failing business that you had to go to a loan shark for. Yeah. Is now doing exceptionally well since his wife murdered. Like he answers the phone he’s talking about This is McDonald’s because I’m selling six pieces like crazy. This man is loving life and the business is doing great. Since Shauna married Adam, which I’m saying is a blood sacrifice, that went right.

 

Jason Concepcion I got to say. Yeah, I gotta say, I. I am still holding to the idea that most of this stuff is just kind of like, in the eye of the beholder.

 

Rosie Knight Exactly.

 

Jason Concepcion But it is really interesting that all of a sudden his business has just gone through the roof. So many people. That guy in the guts.

 

Rosie Knight It’s really fun because that’s what I think I’m loving the most about returning to this world is they’re giving us so much power in our subjectivity. Is it supernatural? Is it not? Is. But after, like the fourth time I watched the episode, I was like, Shit, why? It’s just business. Go ahead. Well, I was like, This seemed like it wasn’t intentional. But apparently in this world, if you just murder someone, like, something good is going to happen to you. Speaking of weird culture, in the past, we kind of learn that Travis is just completely consumed by. The quest to find his brother Harvey, that we last saw him on the doomed coming night, where he missed, where he ran away after they were trying to orgy murder his brother.

 

Jason Concepcion And I mean, troubling thing and I understand it.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah yeah. We get has been I mean this is ironically I kind of love that they wrote this into the plot. It makes sense because it’s his brother but it’s also the thing that every viewer wants to know, Where is Harvey? Where is Harvey? Harvey wasn’t Adam they did say they’d considered in the career is said that in season one they’d considered Harvey being Adam and Adam being Harvey, but they decided not to do it. So where is he? Is he still alive? Did he die in the wilderness? Travesties like seeing dead foxes and thinking it’s his brother. It’s. It’s not like supporting him. She’s going out and searching for Harvey every day, even though it’s winter. And it seems unlikely that he would be in any way alive. But this is a show where people can survive a wolf attack.

 

Jason Concepcion And everybody, everybody. I think he’s alive simply because everyone is like, there’s no way.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah, exactly.

 

Jason Concepcion Like the amount of people telling him that there’s no way he’s alive tells me that he’s got to be out there.

 

Jason Concepcion Exactly. And in a very weird moment, Lottie gives him like a saucy, boner inducing fireside vision. When he’s having a panic attack. She, like, puts her hand on his chest and shows him this tree stump that is kind of pulsing with life. And she says, Harvey’s okay. And obviously Nat’s like, Fuck you, like, say less. You can’t say that shit that she’s like, say a lot fucking less action.

 

Jason Concepcion Like, Yeah.

 

Rosie Knight This is bad. You can’t say that to him. But that again, to me, I am. I believe that we could see out of Harvey this season and I believe he may well be with Lottie.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah.

 

Rosie Knight She could have. She’s, she seems to have some kind of a survival instincts within this forest. Like you said, it’s somewhere that she feels like she’s thriving. Maybe there’s some way that she’s hidden him away, or she’s kind of keeping him secluded and, you know, inverted commas safe. We also learn something interesting here again, which I think really leads into the lost of it all, which is like not while she is helping Travis look for his brother is actually like making a map and marking out the territory that they are. It’s good. And she’s you know, she’s using topological like sketches to show mountains. And she’s doing this in secret with Coach Ben. But there are like, weird things about like, they’re not finding any game. The animals are just gone. And it kind of it’s a very big map. So I think we’re going to. Start to see some hints that maybe everything is not what it seems. But like you said, it’s all about perception.

 

Jason Concepcion I wonder if this is going to end up being some like top secret former military installation like X-Men two. You know what I mean?

 

Rosie Knight Like or like.

 

Jason Concepcion Like strikers. Yeah, like strikers. Like facility that created mutants, like far in Canada. Something like that.

 

Rosie Knight That’s like the beleaguered Showtime. They’re like, You know what we need? We need Wolverine. We’re just putting them in. This is. This is old man Jonathan. He’s been living it. No, I think you’re right, though. Like, essentially some kind of X-Men to Stranger Things kind of situation where it’s like, this is a weird military base. There’s a reason your plane would end up there. There’s a reason there was another plane that there’s a reason there’s a cabin there, you know, and there’s a reason why you’re 800 miles away. I think that could be a very interesting and quite likely twist. You know what? Even if that was the truth. Then some of the girls go out and somehow one of them was Shauna, who is a true fool like I am every day mad at Shauna. She kept Adams belongings. She said to Misty, she destroyed everything, but she’s like looking emotionally at his ID card. She’s dreaming of going to prison like. And she’s like cooling up. Jeff, his very successful furniture business, and she’s like, Hey, we got to destroy Adam’s things, including his art studio, where I definitely never went and definitely didn’t have sex with him or kill him. And I heard it somewhere close. So let’s go.

 

Jason Concepcion What a? Now, I think that Shauna is so repressed. Because this is such a bad idea.

 

Rosie Knight Mm. Like, so bad. Like this is like it’s a bad idea. And also bad ideas that have been and bad plans in television. This is up then like top five. Like, don’t do it up there.

 

Jason Concepcion It’s way, way up there. And the only way it makes sense is that Shaun is so repressed that what happens there is the things she wanted to happen all along.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s a reason that she went there, and that’s the only way she could get. And the thing that is most interesting so this also I will just say, this is one of my ten tinfoil hat theories I’ll throw out that they get. It stinks of weed. There’s somebody next door who was Adam’s studio mate who’s blaring music voice That’s Harvey. And that’s how Adam knew so much about Shauna. That’s my theory, is Harvey was Adam’s friend, and they were, like, scheming on her together. But anyway, they get in there and shock horror, the studio is actually filled with pictures of Shauna in varying states and undress. They’re very beautiful. Now, I will say that if I were. If Misty was there, I think Misty would have probably been like, Oh, don’t do this, but be leave these up, because then you can say, this guy was stalking you and you killed him in self-defense if they catch you, just sayin. But Jeff and Shauna are extremely fucked up, and I’m starting to believe also have probably killed at least one person before.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah, because they are just like.

 

Rosie Knight They’re so chill and.

 

Jason Concepcion Ready to do it. Yeah, they’re ready to do this.

 

Rosie Knight They decide to get down to business. But hint I’m not talking about destroying the paintings. They Shauna like, she starts telling Jeff about how much it turns her on to think of him cheating and how she’s no longer ashamed of who she is. And they sort of, you know, seems like they’re going to get it on. It’s unclear. I feel like at the end whether that was something that happened. I think like they tried. I couldn’t tell whether Jeff was ashamed it happened or he kind of got uncomfortable in the middle, which understandable, seeing as you’re fucking your wife in the studio of the man that she murdered. I could understand why.

 

Jason Concepcion Lydia helping to cover it up. And you’re actively helping her to destroy evidence of the crime family.

 

Rosie Knight Like there’s a lot going on that just focus on sex. Also, I would say, again, terrible ideas that have been had in history and covering up murders just like top and tightening out the faces on these paintings is like so sus. And I know that they definitely missed one. So this was just a terrible idea all around.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah, either either burn the entire. Here’s what I thought I was going to bring it down. Yeah. Burn the whole building down.

 

Rosie Knight What’s one more murder of the next guy?

 

Jason Concepcion Or whatever it is, or take all the paintings and burn them. But don’t, one, fuck in the place leaving DNA and hair and well, who knows by grabbing.

 

Rosie Knight It’s so much like you do not want to go in there with a black light, you are going to get caught. This is a terrible idea.

 

Jason Concepcion Then like destroy the paintings in a way that anybody walking and be like, What the fuck happen to these? Right? Yeah.

 

Rosie Knight Like bad, bad. Find out who these are off because they were obviously the person who did the turpentiningd hiding what has it. Just like such bad choices and plans. And if she’d have just called Misty then it would have been fine. And I want to say I did not include this in the full recap. It’s not necessarily story relevant, but I do have to say one of the best scenes of this episode happens after this, which is when Jeff goes and sits in his car and listens to Papa Roach, This is My Last Resort, and like hits.

 

Jason Concepcion He’s like into it.

 

Rosie Knight He’s like hitting the the wheel and he’s feeling so angry about Shauna and it’s just such a good, weird character.  I loved it. Speaking of good, weird character moments, there is like this great sequence of events where Misty goes to show have a showdown with the motel manager all over the place where notwithstanding, she wants to know what happened. He won’t tell her anything. And Larry, the motel manager, is like probably the first person who’s ever said no to Misty when she tries to blackmail him. It’s so funny. It’s so good. And eventually she kind of just, like, annoys him and gives him creepy Cheshire cat grins until he says, Well, she laughed. She paid in the middle of the night. And Misty’s like, absolutely heartbroken because she kind of believed that odd couple and.

 

Jason Concepcion She’d been abandoned. Yeah.

 

Rosie Knight She thought that odd couple friendship that they built while looking for the truth of what happened was something real. And then she realizes once again, Misty coming through with the win. The only observant person, the only clever person, the only person paranoid enough to know what’s going on. She notices that the door jam of where of Nat’s old room is splintered and she realizes that Nat was kidnaped. The true hero of Yellowjacket strikes once again.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah.

 

Rosie Knight Like, what the fuck? Nat is still alive. Good. Love Juliette Lewis smashing it in this performance and she is pissed. She’s tied to a bed.

 

Jason Concepcion As one would be.

 

Rosie Knight Oh, she is absolutely furious. And so then we get a new character here. We get Nicole Maines, who’s so brilliant, and she comes in and and she looks a lot like Lottie. That was my read. I felt like, is this Lottie’s daughter? Like.

 

Jason Concepcion And she I thought the same thing Yeah. Because I will tell you what I think and that is there’s a lot of weird sex shit happening in this cult. Absolutely. No no it’s for, I don’t know for a fact yet, but what I’ve seen thus far of Lori’s life and career as a Wiccan priestess lead me to believe that there’s a lot of weird sex shit happening in this cult.

 

Rosie Knight Completely this. And also, it just feels. Yeah. It’s giving us the weird sex cult vibes we know that they were taking from real life inspiration. That is something that’s been very relevant recently. It feels weird, but this young girl is like she’s green in the captivity game.

 

Jason Concepcion Yes.

 

Rosie Knight They should not upset not to be in charge of Nat. Nat is a true survivor. Like she will do anything to survive. And she does essentially like playing this kind of cat and mouse game nice-ing up  the girl and eventually getting a fork and stabbing her with it so she can escape.

 

Jason Concepcion That is that was fucking ruthless.

 

Rosie Knight That shit was bad ass. I mean she went for the eye. Like she would have killed her but luckily the cat kind of she, she, you know, she, she blocked it with the hand and now she has a fork in her hand, which she probably doesn’t feel too lucky about actually. And Nat is out of there, like, boom, not this is not happening to me. You are incorrect. She is also at first I was like, Oh, she’s running away. But no, she’s going to find Lottie. Like.

 

Jason Concepcion She’s like what the fuck?

 

Rosie Knight Like she fucking knows. And this is great because before this moment they really play in with expectations. We see Lottie. Lottie is arguably like the only one in the group who’s kind of doing any kind of processing of what happened. She seems to be wealthy, she seems to be successful. So this is like a great moment because until now what we’ve really seen of Lottie’s call is like it’s a wellness place. People that live healthy, they look healthy, they’re in a beautiful nature. They’re wearing creepy robes. But maybe that’s just our own perceptions of what I call is. No, because when Natalie gets into those words, she sees people with terrifying like animal masks and they’re burying a man alive.

 

Jason Concepcion Yes. And yes.

 

Rosie Knight It seems like he’s into it.

 

Jason Concepcion I would hope so. I certainly. Listen, I, I think, you know, as a person who spent a lot of time around hippies earlier in my life, younger than my time and have seen seen the hippies kind of grow up. I know a lot of people who have become ensconced in different levels of of the wellness lifestyle. A lot of it is like, Hey, drink this tea and you’ll never get sick, that kind of thing. Yeah. And it goes beyond just the kind of like eat organic that kind of like every day.

 

Rosie Knight Oh, yeah. It’s a totally different situation.

 

Jason Concepcion To me that you can, that you can do. It’s, it’s I think for people who have been around it or been in it in that kind of orbit of it, this felt very much like a thing that I could see people I know getting involved in.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah, Yeah. That I think, again, it’s all about like you saying it’s all about the eye of the beholder. Is this just this way of Lottie kind of recreating in a safe, inverted commas space the feral nature of being in the forest as it’s something that people want to connect with and pay a lot of money for. Or is she really doing some weird like blood ritual that’s still very up in the air, but not is like legit about to like. Cave. He’s had him with a branch like she’s like. Why the fuck should I? And Lori is extremely chill, like, to a point of being patronizing. And she absolutely knocks Nat for sex by telling how, like, you. You don’t want to do that because I’ve got a message, and it’s from Travis.

 

Jason Concepcion Bom, bom, bom.

 

Rosie Knight And obviously, you’re like, Wait a minute. Well, that actually, if I was Nat, I’d be like, Well, fuck you, because didn’t you wipe his bank account before I did? So, like, what kind of message? But Nat is in a very unstable place. Juliette Lewis does this bit of face acting specifically with the way she kind of grinds her teeth over her lips in this scene? That is just fucking heartbreaking. Like, she knows there isn’t probably nothing honest and real about what Lottie is about to tell her, but she wants to hear that more than anything in thagt moment.

 

Jason Concepcion The talent in the show is off the charts for acting talent. It’s very it’s great.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah. And we kind of get this very interesting moment in the present here that I think is. Very well handled and kind of, Tawney Cypress again, give her all the props. She creeps into the underpass underneath our house, finds her blood shrine, and is like half shocked, but also not shocked and.

 

Jason Concepcion Then not shocked enough.

 

Rosie Knight No, she didn’t laugh like she it’s almost like when she sees it, she kind of realizes. And then in case you weren’t sure that she was the one who was culpable for this blood shrine.

 

Jason Concepcion I was not sure.

 

Rosie Knight Right.

 

Jason Concepcion Last season.

 

Rosie Knight And I wasn’t either, because an even earlier run, like when her wife was yelling at her and she was like, I don’t know. But then when she was like, Oh, fucking it in But in this moment she turns to Steve, Get out, Steve, we’ll be rooting for you, Steve. And she says.

 

Jason Concepcion Poor Steve.

 

Rosie Knight And she says, Oh no, don’t worry. Like that was a mistake about you. I was like, What do you mean? Like you weren’t supposed to kill her? I mean, I hope so. Like what? I’m like, what? Like this was an accident? I’m guessing so. From what we’ve seen, especially, we get this, we get some great moments here with her and Van. It seems like this sleep disorder that she has where she sort of is violent and asleep. She’s the woman in the tree she claims she hates or something, some kind of disassociation that implies here I think that she was in that state when she did it. But I was cracking jokes when she was like, sorry, Steve, I’ll do better. And I was like, Tai, get some help.

 

Jason Concepcion Creating a whole shrine, decapitating your dog, setting up little trinkets down. That’s a lot of work when you’re asleep.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah. How she got down there? Like, when did she out of the dog. The dog went missing before he ended up in the shrine. Like this Seems at least a slight plan. Maybe, I guess a tinfoil hat throw out there is. She was still in contact with Lottie or someone who was involved in this blood cult kind of situation, and she delivered the dog but didn’t know what they would do with it. Now, I think she did it, but I’m just saying.

 

Jason Concepcion I think that Lottie somehow has been able to place like a post hypnotic suggestion into Taissa. And I think.

 

Rosie Knight I could definitely see that.

 

Jason Concepcion And I think because she wants to promote whatever it is that she’s doing and you get a powerful state senator elected and now certain things get easier for you and whatever, you know.

 

Rosie Knight She already has a lot of power.

 

Jason Concepcion You can do except right, you maybe you get tax exempt status or whatever, whatever it is. Right. But I think that. She did that to Taissa, and I think she’s trying to do that with everyone, put somehow break their minds and put something in.

 

Rosie Knight I like that. Well, we.

 

Jason Concepcion That she can trigger and I think she’s triggering these.

 

Rosie Knight We know that in cults, they use hallucinogens to break people’s will and stuff. So we could see that most. It’s almost like, you know, has not been setting up her own like Black Widow Network or Skrull Network, where she just, like, triggers people by saying, like, a certain word. Like, think about it. Imagine if time not you had stayed in touch. And she was like, I’ll send you these wellness drinks. They’ll help with your sleeping. But really she’s dragging her in, kind of giving her strange hypnosis. I love this. And I love, like you said, I think there’s a great version of this which will we’re getting close to the end. And I think near the end, you could say subverts this a little bit. I like this idea that Lottie could be the nightmarish cult leader who is planning all of this or she absolutely could not be and is just like a wellness scammer.

 

Jason Concepcion And I think it could be  that too. She’s just a scammer.

 

Rosie Knight It’s just so exciting. Yeah. Yeah.

 

Jason Concepcion And although kidnaping like we know, we know. We know at the very least, they’re involved in kidnapping.

 

Rosie Knight She’s into criminal shit. She you know, she’s doing some criminal. She’s at least kidnaping people. You know, I would say in the theory, you could argue that there’s a version where it’s like she kidnaped not because she was relapsing Cults do stuff like that.

 

Jason Concepcion You know, I wanted to help you with your.

 

Rosie Knight Lies.

 

Jason Concepcion Addictions.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah, But yeah, it’s really interesting stuff. And then we get it’s really funny because she does this brutality of the the the scary sheep masks and Nat and this and then you go to this kind of suburban ideal of Jeff and Shauna who are just so much scarier than Lottie could ever be. And, and they decide that they’re going to get rid of Adam’s belongings by burning them on a barbecue, but then immediately cooking food on the plastic fire. What is wrong with them?

 

Jason Concepcion Throw the stuff away in different places, bury and throw it down the sewer in a bit. Like especially when, as we have seen Jeff and Shauna, his daughter Callie, is all up in that building in particular business kind of being the worst as teenagers often are. But like.

 

Rosie Knight Oh, she’s the.

 

Jason Concepcion Fucking worst.

 

Rosie Knight She’s the fucking worst. But, you know, and the funniest thing is this is how good again the performances are right here. It’s really like Kylie you had to fucking worst. Like, Why are you trying to snitch on your mom? Like, your mom is crazy, but like, leave her be, man. Like, why are you.

 

Jason Concepcion She’s going through a lot of shit.

 

Rosie Knight She’s going through a lot of shit. Having affairs and murdering people you want on that plane. You’re dressed up for Halloween in your mom’s cheerleading costume like you are the worst. And I was just blew my mind that Jeff was like, Yeah, we’ll just grill up some franks on here. I was like, Are you trying to kill yourself? This is, I mean.

 

Jason Concepcion Jeff’s a moron.

 

Rosie Knight They set fire to a tree. They they eat these nasty plastic franks. And basically, like Callie, as you pointed out, is like, Fuck you, I don’t want to eat this shit. And you guys have got some sore shit going on. And as the episode comes to a close, we see Kylie discover Adam’s ID card.

 

Jason Concepcion BOM But you got to make sure that shit is burned.

 

Rosie Knight Literally his face like you can just what you did. Really just visit some way like you had the.

 

Jason Concepcion Most horrible come on down.

 

Rosie Knight With scissors. You’re just gonna have his face. His face is there. Peter Gadiot’s beautiful face. And he’s looking up at Callie. And Callie is like, I’m going to fucking take this bitch down. Like Callie’s ready had teenage resentment of her Mom is going to take down her whole family. If she’s not.

 

Jason Concepcion Gonna burn that shit.

 

Rosie Knight I’m going to tell you. I believe Shauna would kill her own daughter. She would do it. I believe it. So Kathy should watch her back because it’s going to end badly for her. We get like a rabbit of sweet wilderness news as Ty and bang kind of tell each other that they love each other. Yeah, very cute. But it only happened off the tie. Almost ripped Van’s lip off. Yeah, in a kind of nighttime, violent trance. But I think they’re setting something up here. We don’t get to see Lauren Ambrose, who plays Adult Van. We know she got cast earlier this year. Yeah, we don’t get to see her, but I think they’re basically establishing like Van isn’t scared of Taissa. Van accepts Taissa for who she is. Van even with Taissa’s nighttime trance is all this stuff. And I would assume that we will see Tai return to Van as that kind of place of safety. That’s my guess. It could be something else. I think the clip of Van that we see in the credits kind of sees her being. Distracted by somebody knocking on her door or something, which feels very similar to mass kidnaping. So maybe it won’t be that sweet, but that’s kind of where my gut is going with it. Travis and Knapp, on their little excursion, Discover what looks to be the magical tree from Travis’ sexy vision. And it’s still blooming in the middle of winter, so that’s strange.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah.

 

Rosie Knight Fake tree. Maybe if we’re talking about, like, a military base, something like that.

 

Jason Concepcion I’m telling you. Weird chemicals, like the old. Like it’s the old beach. Like something like this is like a poisoned area with totally genic chemicals that are doing weird shit.

 

Rosie Knight Oh, that’s a good idea. I like that. The idea that something’s seeping into the ground and even the meat that eating is actually infected by it.

 

Jason Concepcion Like they’re always. What if they’re always eating a low level of whatever the. Yeah. Whatever has suffused the landscape, you know.

 

Rosie Knight So I will say. I was rewatching the first season when I was doing the recap for the show and I’m writing about Misty, found a lot of magic mushrooms very, very quickly. They were just pulled off. They had dinner there. So I think you could be on to something that they there’s kind of some kind of infusion that’s making them have this kind of group hysteria. And really Nat is so far the only one who doesn’t seem to have bought into it at all. But all of that great episode love this episode, But it’s all basically irrelevant because the big news of this episode is that the cannibalism is finally begun. And I will say, Yeah. It’s what we’ve all been waiting for. The crowd goes mad. Cannibalism. Cannibalism. I was shocked to see who the first cannibal me two turned out to be. They did a great job, as we said in this episode. They set up and they set up and they set up this kind of chaotic black hole in the middle of the show and it is Shaunaa. So by the time this happened, I yelled, but I was like, Oh. So the final moment of the show, which is just so good and so gross. Shauna is just chillin, walking around the cabin and she just pulls Jackie’s ear out of her pocket and she holds it close and she just swallows it. And there it is and her friend has been dead for two months.

 

Jason Concepcion And there is the title of your episodes, Friends, Romans, Countrymen.

 

Rosie Knight Let me in it. That’s good. Oh, okay. Okay. Questions that I have for you off this episode. So I want to know, is Shauna the Antler Queen? We all feel like it’s Lottie because of the cult and like the kind of the regality. And we saw Lottie wearing a headdress. But I’m like, if Shauna is the first cannibal, is she the one who spreads it within the group?

 

Jason Concepcion Gosh, I don’t know. I would not be surprised, but I also would not be surprised if it’s this. It’s the junior varsity. Become the people closest around.

 

Rosie Knight Oh, my God. I love that.

 

Jason Concepcion Around Lottie that become the people that she, you know, the younger, more impressionable. They don’t know her as well. And she’s able to kind of create her identity with them. I do wonder if it’s going to be them who are the closest to her.

 

Rosie Knight I think that makes a lot of sense, especially because the one person we know is in that circle is Misty. And if Misty makes that connection with Krystal, she would likely tag along with whatever kept her in the friendship group, the popular group also. That makes a lot of sense because then you can assume that the older girls may actually become the prey because we still have that big mystery from the first episode. Who was the girl running through the forest? You know, who was the girl that they slit her throat? And they potentially, though we can’t confirm or deny that off that.

 

Jason Concepcion How much do you think Shauna and the rest are aware of what Lottie is up to these days?

 

Rosie Knight That I think is the biggest question of this season. I think the fact that Nat like breezed out there and just immediately knew that she was looking for Lottie and was screaming for joy makes me think that Lottie might not necessarily be that secretive. But I will also say, we know she’s not like a celebrity Well, in this person, because the final line of the last episode was Nat’s ex AA sponsor basically saying to her, Who the fuck is Lottie MATTHEWS? So it’s not it’s not someone who is actually she’s not like, famous. But I think like to me, I actually think the biggest bet I have now is that Shauna knows. I just think Shauna and no Shauna, I think Shauna probably kept tabs on Lottie because then she could be another one of those intrusive thoughts and secrets that constantly promises to burn down her life. Yeah. Like, oh, what if somebody found out that I knew? And then that leads to the next question, which is, you know, we were saying, like, is the captor who was fighting with not have got their fork to the hand, was that Lottie’s door? I think that’s like a good bet.

 

Jason Concepcion I think it’s a good bet as well.

 

Rosie Knight But MyNameIsDan, one of our Discord users. He brought something up that people in our discord were very into, which is is that character that Nicole Maines plays actually Shauna as Wilderness baby. Don’t. Don’t, Don. Because you know my timelines, right.

 

Jason Concepcion To find out what happened to the wilderness.

 

Rosie Knight We need to find out, baby. We’re back to the baby conversation again. We had babies because I.

 

Jason Concepcion I like that one, too.

 

Rosie Knight Me, too. Because also the thing is, right? So I. Hilariously I just like didn’t my I’m not going to maps, first of all. And second of all, the narrative of the show was so engaging that I kind of just hadn’t really put together that it was 25 years since, even though they say it many times, but like to me I was just like, Well, maybe Carrie was the baby. Like, how old could you? And then it was this episode where I was like, Oh no, that’s like how she’s like a teenager. This is that’s not the wilderness baby. That’s like a different baby. So who where is the wilderness baby? I will say super producer, Saul, I’m going to put this one out there. It’s a very bleak tinfoil hat. There is a cover your ears if you don’t want to hear it.

 

Jason Concepcion Oh, no.

 

Rosie Knight He suggests maybe they ate the baby. And did they maybe could. It could have been the case.

 

Jason Concepcion I will say that if. Lottie has been raising the wilderness baby. How would she get the baby? Here’s what I. Here’s how I think it could happen.

 

Rosie Knight Okay.

 

Jason Concepcion Shauna, we’ve seen that she has shame issues, guilt issues, particularly around her. Her expressions of her own sexuality.

 

Rosie Knight Which the baby is living proof of.

 

Jason Concepcion Maybe is, maybe they get rescued. And Lottie says, You know what? I’ll say it’s mine. Hmm. I’ll say it’s mine

 

Rosie Knight I think that could definitely happen.

 

Jason Concepcion I’ll say I got pregnant in the forest. And I’ll say it’s mine. Mm hmm. And maybe. Maybe this whole thing with this mysterious guy all of a sudden coming out of nowhere to proposition her sexually and this whole affair that happened that resulted in murder. I would not be surprised if Lottie’s pulling the string that as well.

 

Rosie Knight Okay. I love that theory because I do think that Adam, being a follower of Lottie’s, whose job was basically just to unsettle and kind of upset Shauna and play on those weaknesses that Lottie knew she had. I think that’s very legit and very likely. I think Not probably knew what he was up to, but didn’t care. The one the funniest is Misty seems like the one who’s probably like least of all bothered because she was probably like, Oh, Lottie was never my friend. These girls were my friends.

 

Jason Concepcion Like, I feel like I could tell Misty anything.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah.

 

Jason Concepcion You know, whatever has bothered me, whatever I’ve done that I’m ashamed of, I feel like I could tell Misty and Misty would be like, it’s fine. Here’s how we fix it.

 

Rosie Knight Final question. Speaking of our beloved Misty is like, So she killed the John the the P.I. that Taissa hired, Jessica, at the end of the last season. Is that going to come back and bite her? Oh, she just.

 

Jason Concepcion It has to. Come on.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah, it feels like it has to. I feel like that and Adam’s that they’re going to be these kind of dueling things throughout and take them down. But I also like the idea that she’s like a killing Eve, like early season killing Eve style killer who just kills people and just gets away with it.

 

Jason Concepcion I’ll make I’ll make a tinfoil hat prediction. I think it’s going to be her parrot that undoes her. It puts her at risk of suspicion for that murder that.

 

Rosie Knight I think is such a good call.

 

Jason Concepcion I absolutely think the parrot isgoing to start saying murder shit.

 

Rosie Knight I believe that. Absolutely true. Also, the parrot has a prominent place in the first season.

 

Jason Concepcion It really does.

 

Rosie Knight Credit. So like and I think you’re right, because guess who is down there? Listen in when her and Shauna a practice for the police. It was the parrot. Jason, you’ve blown my mind that that was the one. Now, I can’t wait to cover the rest of the season and see how the power plays into it.

 

Jason Concepcion We’ll be following Yellowjackets all season here on X-ray Vision. Up next, Hivemind with Scream VI co-writer Guy Busick.

 

Jason Concepcion <AD>

 

Rosie Knight Welcome to the Hive Mind, where we explore a topic in more detail with the help of expert guests. This week, we’re thrilled to have Guy Busick, co-writer of Scream VI and 2022’s Scream. Hey, Guy, thanks so much for being here.

 

Guy Busick Thanks for having me.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah, I love Scream so much. I have a Scream tattoo and I’m like a huge. Yes. Yeah, a little, little ghost face up there with the thumbs up.

 

Guy Busick Oh cool. I love it.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah. So it’s just like a dream I loved and I loved the new Scream movie. And.

 

Guy Busick Thank you.

 

Rosie Knight I loved Scream, you know, IV inverted commas. I love the core four. So we’re just. We’re so stoked to have you here. But seeing as this is X-ray Vision, which is all kind of mine and Jason’s hub for all the things we love, I’ll start with a little bit of a less horror focused question and say, What’s your comic book origin? What was the thing that got you into comics and made you love comic books?

 

Guy Busick I think it was Batman 89. It was the summer that that came out and I was walking around the mall. I was in a bookstore, and I saw the cover for Death in the Family, and I was like, What the hell is that? They killed Robin. So I, I picked that up and then found out that, like, people voted for that second Robin Jason Todd to die. And then I just started buying more Batman comics and graphic novels and compilations like trade paperbacks in anticipation of the movie. The time the movie had come out, which I saw I think seven times in the theater, I’m probably 13. I think that summer I was kind of caught up on a lot of the so-called classics of the era. And then so Batman just got me into like so Robin and the Teen Titans. So then I’d get into the Teen Titans who became the New Titans. And so I catch up on the New Titans, and then Batman was in the Justice League. So I start reading Justice League, and it was in that wonderful Justice League international era. Yeah. And so and from there it was like then I went back and read Crisis on Infinite Earths, and I was just a DC had from then on. I just got it. Everything Green Lantern, Hawkman Flash, all of it and some Marvel. But I didn’t become like a dyed in the wool Marvel fan until the movies. Until the MCU. There were just a few, only a few characters that I was really invested in. And for whatever reason, I love them all in comic book form, in TV and movie form. But for whatever reason, I was really drawn to the DC Universe, and I still am. I still love those comics and those characters.

 

Jason Concepcion Well, it makes sense, thinking about, you know, Batman and 89 Batman of that era of being your entry point. What about your entry point into horror? What was the thing you worked so much in the horror genre? What was the thing that really got you into horror?

 

Guy Busick You know, I wasn’t a horror kid growing up, and I think part of it was that, like, my parents were a bit protective of like R-rated and stuff like that. So that very same summer that Batman came out, I guess it was the fall because I met Ryan Murphy, my co-writer of Ready or Not, not the Ryan Murphy of American Horror Stories fame.

 

Rosie Knight Another horror writer, Ryan Murphy.

 

Guy Busick I always have to clarify. And he was also into Batman and movies and comics and all that great stuff. I remember we talked about Gotham by Gaslight, this book that had come out that summer, and that’s was one of our first bonding points, is we were kind of feeling each other out, like, Are we going to be friends? Is this cool? Are we living here? And we became really, really close friends. And he was the horror kid. And so he would, you know, like I could watch all this stuff at his house that I could watch on my own. And it most of it turned me off. I was like, I just I don’t get it. It’s not for me. I don’t really like these characters. Blah, blah, blah. And now I look back on a lot of that stuff and I’m like, I was so wrong. This is bad. But as a kid, I just kind of maybe I was just a little too protected for it at the time. So it was Scream, you know, ironically, it was wow. I saw it opening day in 1996, and it was the one that blew my mind. With Kevin’s just amazing script and Wes’s direction and that cast, that classic amazing cast. And for the first time I was like, Oh, horror can be fun, it can be funny, can be meta, you can have a conversation with your audience. And for the first time, I’ve seeing myself in a horror movie, as you know. Randy, the movie nerd.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah.

 

Guy Busick And it was just like, I care about these characters and when they die, it hurts. It’s not so much about the killer, it’s about the victims. You’re really on their side for once. And it was a murder mystery. They’re just like, How can it be all of these things in a horror movie? And so that’s when I think my my true love started. And then I went back and rewatched a lot of others from earlier periods and was like, okay, yes, now I kind of get it, but it was like Scream kind of broke the dam for me. And then the fact that they were able to follow that up in 12 months with another great Scream. Like we thought.

 

Jason Concepcion Actually incredible that that happened.

 

Rosie Knight Like, argueably.

 

Guy Busick It really is.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah.

 

Rosie Knight Arguably one of the best horror sequels of all time. And they did it within a year.

 

Guy Busick Yeah, within a year. And I was like, well, they I mean, they must have rushed it. How could it possibly be high quality if it’s 12 months later? And they did it again. And I was just like, I just I am in awe. And so the fact that I’m now, you know, getting to talk to Kevin, work with Kevin on Scream movies is just blowing my 21 year old mind in the past, somehow, you know, if I could just go back and say, you’re not going to believe this, but this movie that changed your life in terms of loving the genre, like you’re going to get to work on that someday. I just I still can’t believe that it’s so surreal and I’m pinching myself. And any time I’m writing a legacy character, you know, created by an earlier writer, you know, Kevin in particular, like writing dialog for Gale and just writing the name Gale, I just like, How did I end up here? This is just a dream I loved. So yeah.

 

Rosie Knight I love that so much. And I guess kind of you could you talk a little bit about like how you did get there? Obviously, like Ready or Not, you have like Purge, Standing as Evil, but Ready or Not, it was just such a huge smash. People just in a way, it had its own Scream impact. It made people excited for horror. It made people feel like that was something different that you could play with in this world. What was that like for you, kind of getting to make this independent, unique take on horror and then having it so well-received?

 

Guy Busick Well, that’s just really lovely to hear. So happy to think that people might have had that experience.

 

Rosie Knight I know so many people who weren’t big horror heads that just absolutely adored it.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah.

 

Rosie Knight So memories and.

 

Guy Busick That really means a lot to me.

 

Rosie Knight The writing ‘s so fun.

 

Guy Busick I mean, yeah, it was, it was a confluence of I mean, all the planets aligned basically. You know, Ryan and I, we met when we were 13. We moved out here right after high school, went to college, different colleges. But we were always, you know, still very close. And then we would write together or write separately for many years. And we were working in different genres, but we were selling pitches for big action sci fi things and they just weren’t getting made. And so we just made a conscious decision, Let’s just do something smaller, low budget genre so you don’t need a star, you know, And horror is just it never goes away. It’s always going to be popular. And so we settled on that. We came up with the idea, I think, in like 2013. Wow. And we wrote the spec and it didn’t set the world on fire. And so at that point, it’s like 2014. It hasn’t, it hasn’t sold. We slipped to a few producers, no one bit. So I’m thinking I’m going to quit the business at this point. And my good friend James Vanderbilt. Jamie, who’s my co-writer on Scream 2022 and Scream VI. He’s a very close friend, too. I met him because he went to college with Ryan. So it’s just all a very small world kind of situation. But Jamie was a big fan of that script that was called Family Ritual at the time. Not Ready or Not. And the wedding element wasn’t part of it. Believe it or not, which is which is pretty much its whole identity.

 

Rosie Knight Especially that final shock.

 

Guy Busick I know right. The bride with the with the cigarette and all covered in blood and but it was basically like the Alex character bringing Grace home to see if he can get permission to marry her. And it was like over the Easter weekend or something and then get out happened. Oh, and it was like, well, that’s already the horror version of Meet the Parents. And so we had to pivot and then we came up with the wedding thing and it was on track. But yeah, I mean, it was a slow process. It took about six years from, you know, coming up with the idea to it coming out. Wow. But we found radio silence. They pitched on it, and we immediately when we met them, we knew this is going to be a long and fruitful partnership. Matt, Tyler and Chad are just we all share a very, very similar sensibility. We kind of all have like a hive mind speaking, voice, lifestyle. And I love those guys and I knew that they were the right people for it. And then Searchlight came on board and like our Rejects, they’re completely got it. The marketing was great and it was just really cool. I mean, that one is always going to hold a special place in my heart, not just because it was my first produced movie. I don’t count the other one, but but because it was original and it was so different and so odd and it was a little bit hard to put in a box because it again, wasn’t just one thing. And I always say, you know, you can draw a straight line from scream to ready or not. Hopefully it’s a fun ride first and foremost, and hopefully it gives you characters or at least one character that you really like and root for and want to see make it through. And you know, again, you mentioned Summer. It’s like that was lightning in a bottle.

 

Rosie Knight Mm hmm.

 

Jason Concepcion Oh man.

 

Guy Busick It couldn’t have been better casting across the board. But wow, her performance is just just next level. And so to get to bring her back for Scream VI.

 

Rosie Knight Yes.

 

Guy Busick Was a treat for everybody. You know, I was I wasn’t. I didn’t get to be on set when she was doing her scenes. I had already come back from from Montreal. But watching those dailies, my my wife and I were in stitches because her outtakes, you know her like there are different takes of that scene are just she’s so funny and likable and goofy and it’s like she said that that’s the character that she’s played that’s closest to her. And I find that just lovely and.

 

Rosie Knight All of that.

 

Jason Concepcion So how did you get there from Ready or Not to the Scream franchise? What was you know, how did that kind of evolve?

 

Guy Busick That was a very strange story, and it’s one of those things that never happens in this business. And I consider myself one of the luckiest people on earth because it’s my good friend Jamie, who I mentioned. I met when we were 18 and freshmen at different colleges. He has a company called Project X Entertainment that has produced these screen movies, and they had a deal with Spyglass Media Group where I think it was just for TV, but they kind of had a general meeting with with Gary Barber, who owns and runs it, and they had acquired some of the old Weinstein Company assets, Scream being kind of the main one, like the big one that he really wanted to do something with. And Jamie’s been a longtime Scream fan, too, and he had met Kevin Williamson early in his career. And Kevin was very, very kind and supportive of him when he was sort of a baby writer. And so Jamie was like, Well, I would really like to try something with that. And Gary was like, Well, would you write it? And he said, Yeah. And so they walked out of that meeting and they had screamed. And he he knew he didn’t want to. They knew what he wanted radio silence. And he knew he didn’t want to do it by himself. And he picked me because I you know, he knows how much reverence I have for the franchise and how much love I have for Kevin and Wes and those first four movies. And I think he was also a little busy at the time. So I was like, if I could split the work, that would be great.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah.

 

Guy Busick And so he called me and I was in New York, which is kind of funny because we had been doing VI in New York, but I was on my wedding anniversary with my wife. It was our ten year anniversary. We had just come out of play. I saw that he had called. I was worried that one of our many projects together had fallen apart and I didn’t want to call him back. And I was like putting it off. And I called Ed and he just said, Hey, so all the projects are fine because he knows me, knows that’s for my brand. And he goes, Because you want to write Scream V with me. And I just my jaw dropped. And, you know, I was just in shock for like the next hour. And so I came back and we watched the four movies in person together, came up with our wish list of. What do we as fans want to see in a Scream movie? If this is the last one we ever get. What is it? How do we as fans create something that we would love? And we were just completely in sync and it was so easy to work together and nothing. The scripts were always easy, but I think a lot of ideas just kind of came to both of us independently, and we were sort of surprised to be like, Oh, you thought of that too? Oh my God. Okay, we’re really of one mind on this thing. And writing that, that, you know, first draft of five, it didn’t take long at all. It was just like we kind of went through it in just a few weeks. And that’s that was that was how I was just invited. It doesn’t happen like that. It just.

 

Jason Concepcion So the journey.

 

Guy Busick Of the pitch on it, it’s the dream, you know, It was just here it is. And, you know, I’m I’m grateful that he had put the trust and faith in me that I could do it. And, you know, now we’ve done two together and it seems to be working out. So I you know, I’m very, very grateful and very proud.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah. Like what? So what was it like then to not only get to play in this sandbox, then your getting the legacy characters back, then the movie comes out and people just love it and it makes a ton of money, which is kind of your dream in this really hard time for cinema and kind of cinematic distribution. Yeah, Scream is a hit. It’s a hit on a small budget. What was that experience like?

 

Guy Busick A relief. It just we we just thought if anyone’s going to ruin the franchise, at least let it be a couple of guys who absolutely love it and want to and and yet we didn’t want to ruin it. And so when it came out and it did connect with with, you know, longtime fans and new fans and did well financially, it was just it was a huge relief. We didn’t break the thing that we love, you know, we actually were able to contribute and keep this thing alive and not just put it back on life support, but it was well-received and people wanted more. And people did like, you know, the new characters. And so this was gratifying. It just I felt very and again, just relieved that we didn’t ruin it and create the worse. The one that you just killed it forever. And yeah, I was I was proud that we pulled it off because it had been 11 years, you know, since four. And people really had kind of moved on from it. And Kevin, who moved on from it, was like a lot of people involved in have done for we had no guarantee that we were going to get those legacy actors back. We just kind of were like weird blind faith. We write it, we try to write the characters as being in different places than we’ve seen them before, so give them something new to play. We know they love each other and we know they love, you know, Wes and Kevin. But it was a leap to think that they would want to do a screen movie without us. Yeah. And so we just we had to take a shot and, you know, we got them and we were thrilled. We did. We weren’t sure we were going to and we got it. And they came back and that was, like I said before, like writing dialog for Sidney Prescott or Gale Weathers for Dewey. Riley was, you know, it was just a trip.

 

Jason Concepcion I would imagine there are certain challenges to bringing back this franchise that are unique. You know, you’ve got to have that that killer cold open. You’ve got to be able to play with the tropes of the form in a way that is entertaining. You’ve got to have a great murder mystery. What what were some of the things that as you’re watching these four movies in a row, you thought, okay, we got to do this, we got to do that?

 

Guy Busick I think it’s just the formula has always been the same, but with different types. Certain elements of it are dialed up or dialed down. I think one of the things that we really looked at was let’s make it really legitimately scary again. Yeah, because some of the meter got turned up a little higher and three and four. So and not to say there weren’t wonderful scares and three and four, but I didn’t feel some of the I don’t even know how to put it, but just that gut level.

 

Rosie Knight You want to feel the kills.

 

Guy Busick Terror.

 

Jason Concepcion You want to feel the kills.

 

Rosie Knight Like Wes’ death in V, I think about it a lot. You feel, it’s horrible.

 

Guy Busick Yeah. Yeah. No, it really is. It was a that was a rough one to think of and. Right. And shoot and feeling really was so good. And it was like, Oh, God, that’s really hard to watch. But another thing we went back to was really making sure the audience knew that these there are stakes again. We went back to II and we were like, we didn’t nobody wanted Randy to die. That was terrible. And midpoint in the movie. You know, Randy are sort of audience identification character in many ways as being the movie nerd is taken from us. And then three and four, you know, the core three, the big three make it through. And we were like, I think we’re going to have to kill one fourth. And it was a really rough conversation because we loved those characters. And Dewey has always been my personal favorite. And so that was a brutal realization to go. I think that’s correct for this story, because it’s all a lot of story problems for him to die. Because why else would Sidney come back to Woodsboro ever? Yeah.

 

Rosie Knight LIterally. Like ever.

 

Guy Busick There would be no reason nothing could get in there except for, you know, avenging her friend, you know, And so that it made sense. And it would also, you know, Gale obviously would then have a real and the audience would be really, really pissed off. And but yeah, it’s like it’s coming up with the murder, which is coming. I think the hardest things are always who is it and why, What’s the motive? And because the motive is always of the time. And it’s they’re always very, you know, very good, very smart. And I love, like Joe Roberts. And for, you know, it’s like I don’t want it’s my film friends. I want fame.

 

Rosie Knight My favorite. Yeah, I love Jill. Emma just absolutely killed it.

 

Guy Busick Yes, she did. And I completely agree. And so that was another one who was like, that’s very of the time of, you know, social media becoming is in blowing up and, you know, 2010, 2011 into what it’s become now. And so for us, it was like, okay, how do we these movies always have a conversation with their audience and they always comment on not just the horror tropes of the time, but also just pop culture horror as a genre, movies in general, you know? And so it was like once we kind of found that toxic fandom angle.

 

Rosie Knight It ws so good.

 

Guy Busick That was something that we had been witnessing in the last few years. It was just we’re like, okay, that’s it. That’s what we have to say right now. And it works perfectly in a Scream movie, which is a movie about movies and fans. And so it really clicked. And then in terms of, you know, The Killers, it was like so much of five is an homage to one. And we just thought it would be really fun to go back to the boyfriend and have it be, You know, we wrote that part.

 

Rosie Knight I love how much he looks, he looks as soon as you cross Jack Quaid, you’re like, He’s got to be the killer, right? And then you’re like, Well, well, no, that would be too obvious. And I love, you know, he’s the killer.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah.

 

Rosie Knight Like, literally him.

 

Guy Busick And we copied that from one because.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah.

 

Guy Busick Matthew are telling you over and over. And yet they pull it off and it’s still a shock when, when they’re the killers. And that’s just Kevin’s brilliant writing and Wes is directing and, and those performances by those two iconic actors. But yeah, it was like, let’s, let’s do that. Let’s try to do that same magic trick where it’s like, Oh, it’s got to be him. Oh, no. And now it definitely can’t be him. Oh, God, it wasn’t. I was right the first time.

 

Rosie Knight Okay, So I just I know we haven’t even gotten to VI yet, but, like, I just need to ask, As you talked about Skeet, I screamed the first time in five when you revealed, like, the door of Billy Loomis and kind of bringing back Skeet as this other legacy character. Could you talk a little bit about that choice? Like, did you get any pushback on that? Because it’s real late stage horror movie sequel stuff, which is why I loved it. But was that something that people were like, It’s not going to work. It’s too out there. Like we need our final girl to be pure and kind of follow those older the rules.

 

Guy Busick Absolutely. I think not so much. On the Billy Loomis as illegitimate daughter. We didn’t get a lot of pushback on that. We got a lot of pushback on the idea that we would actually see.

 

Rosie Knight Me. Yeah.

 

Guy Busick And they were nervous. And we understood why. But there were conversations and they said, if you, you know, if he agrees to do it, do it. We may not end up using any. And, you know, it may be a voiceover. It may not be any kind of dialog with Billy at all. And then once they saw it and nobody ever brought it up again. And I will say one thing about the push back was that gave us confidence that we were doing the right thing by trying and at least was we pitched the whole thing to Kevin and he maybe even read the draft at that point. And he said the one thing that doesn’t feel like a scream movie is this seeing the sort of phantom Billy that’s in her head. And he’s like, That’s why I think you have to do it.

 

Jason Concepcion Oh, wow.

 

Guy Busick And that was like, Oh, thank you. You just gave us the best kind of permission to go and try something. It’s a big swing, you know, as you say, it could have gone horribly wrong. If it had, it wouldn’t have made it in there. But yeah, I mean, Billy and Stu are, you know, as much a reason for the success of that movie and for kind of a love of the franchise as any of the other cast members. You know, they scattered messages just I mean, I was quoting them on the way to the car after my first screening of it, you know, because they were I mean, those performances are just the stuff of legends. So we were Jamie and I got really excited at the idea that this is Billy’s legacy and Billy’s going to be in it, and Sidney is going to have to come face to face with Billy’s daughter, who, you know, he got Sam’s mother pregnant while he was with her, most likely because she refused to sleep with him. And so he went outside of that relationship. And here we go. And to have those two women fighting side by side was just kind of we thought that was it just gave us the giggles. We thought really.

 

Rosie Knight It’s a lot of fun.

 

Guy Busick Thing. Yeah.

 

Jason Concepcion How early in the process did the idea of having a family of of killers come to be?

 

Guy Busick That was pretty early. And I will say, you know, full transparency. We didn’t always know it was Richie’s family.

 

Jason Concepcion Oh wow.

 

Guy Busick But we did love the idea of three ghost faces. And it’s kind of a hard overcome to imagine three people being like minded enough that they’d want to go on killing sprees together and have the same motive. And so we came up with family, I think, out of the desire to want to do three for the first time.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah.

 

Guy Busick And then it really finally clicked when we were like, there’s there’s something that’s not because we also wanted the motive in VI to be primal and not sort of intellectual because the motive in V was about an idea about movies, about wanting my favorite franchise to get back on track. So I’m going to help out. And it’s not really primal. It’s just more of an intellectual exercise. So with this one, we’re like, It’s going to be something really, really. Someone has to hate Sam and then, you know, not a huge leap to get from there. This is this is a family full of psychos, and this father is just so twisted. All of his kids ended up this way. Yeah. And you notice that Jack Champion, you know, pleases and looks a lot like Jack Quaid.

 

Rosie Knight He does look like him. Like, I thought that was why I recognized him. Then I realized it was Avatar.

 

Guy Busick But, yeah, an Avatar.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah. Yeah, He really does like him.

 

Guy Busick He really, you know, sprouted up since Avatar. I mean, he’s just like this really tall, good looking guy. And, you know, obviously he’s great in Avatar is kind of a kid and he really spread out. This is the first thing he did after Avatar, and it was like his second set after years and years on these the James Cameron movies. But like, they look so much alike. Like one of the character was Jamie or William or one of reading Silence said, Don’t stand together on the red carpet. People will figure it out.

 

Rosie Knight That’s so good.

 

Guy Busick It was funny.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah, I love as well, like, there’s so many parallels here with Scream II, not like from the quickness that you guys made the sequel to then having them in this different location to that and having, you know, the end be in they add to this. So that family connection makes a lot of sense because of Billy’s mom being the killer into, well, one of the killers. So could you talk a little bit how early did you realize this was also going to be not just a scream movie, but like a scream to kind of reaction and response and homage?

 

Guy Busick We actually tried to dial that back, you know, oddly, I think it was we just didn’t want to be seen as sort because, you know, obviously one was very, very, V was very similar to one. And so we wanted now that we’ve kind of hopefully done what we set out to do, which is like remind people what scream is, why it’s different, why it’s cool. And here are the new characters. We wanted to I mean, it’s very goofy, but our sort of internal logline was if we were playing the hits in five and VI is the punk rock B side, and we wanted to do our own thing and take really big swings. And so we didn’t other than the college setting, we didn’t really consciously think about all that stuff. And it’s funny because in talking to fans now or friends or or doing interviews. There’s a lot of nods to too, that we weren’t even aware of. We knew that the Mrs. Loomis and Wayne Bailey connection was there, and it’s like he’s only the second grown up face that we have before.

 

Rosie Knight And he’s so good unhinged.

 

Guy Busick He’s so great and he’s the funniest guy in person. So we knew that was there. And then the theater thing actually gave us pause, was originally that, that the Shrine Museum was just in a warehouse somewhere and they couldn’t find a location in Montreal that that really worked like nothing just felt right. And so the location scout showed radio silence that and they were like, We think this is it. And Jamie and I were like, I don’t know. We don’t want to look like we’re just copy pasting from, from do. And so we went out to Montreal to look at it and we went, okay, it’s going to feel different enough and it has this creepy, different kind of vibe. But yeah, it’s a it’s funny how much to made it in there without even conscious. Maybe it was something, you know.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah.

 

Guy Busick So I’m happy about that because it is kind of a neat echo, but we almost try to go the other way, whereas like, let’s make sure we’re not just new and too, right?

 

Rosie Knight Yeah, no, I think the opening does a great the cold open does a great job of switching it out by having that reveal and kind of doing something very different and having that good. Who the fuck cares about the movies so that you’re very intellectually far away from too. But it’s just obviously a couple of times I was like, Oh, they’re awesome. This is a movie that loves to as well.

 

Guy Busick It really is. Yeah. And other people have pointed that out as well. But yeah, that was the thing that got us really excited was that opening. And the very bizarre thing about the opening is that Jamie and I came up with that independently of each other and we came to our first meeting to talk about what Scream VI should be, and we had both written down that we start it we knew was going to be New York. We had already decided that, but we were like, okay, I think I pitched him first on our zoom and I was like, okay, this is going to sound weird, but let’s do like imagine a traditional scream opening phone call, you know? But it’s New York, so it’s already feels a little different, but, you know, more or less traditional. And he’s got the last line who does the slash And you think we’re going to go to the title card like always and then we just hold on him for an uncomfortably long time and then he takes the mask off and then we follow the killer to the point where you might think for a second, if you knew nothing about the movie. Is this from Ghostface, his point of view? Yeah. And then that guy who’s kind of doing it for traditional reasons, like carrying on the previous killer’s work or whatever, Like, I want to finish Ritchie’s movie. Like, that guy gets killed by a really scary Ghostface, who doesn’t care? But you said, Oh, and. And he got this kind of look on his face, and I’m like, Oh, he hates it. That’s stupid. Never mind. And he holds up his notepad and he’s got it written down like traditional kill Ghostface takes off mask. We follow Ghostface, Ghostface killed and we’re like, Whoa, okay. We’re really sharing a brain on this one.

 

Rosie Knight That it’s so cool.

 

Jason Concepcion But finally, you know, the horror genre we talk about Scream Queens. The queen of Scream is Sydney herself. Nev Campbell Yeah. Recently she was quoted as saying that she had a conversation with her and she really liked the the latest addition of the franchise.

 

Guy Busick That meant a lot to me, yeah.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah, That must feel good. Eddie, would you ever know? No strings attached. Do you ever think about bringing, bringing Sidney back?

 

Guy Busick Unfortunately, always out of our hands. I mean, these things just like, as much as people were mad at radio Silence or us.

 

Rosie Knight Or studio, right?

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah, it’s studio.

 

Guy Busick It’s not. It’s not up to us. And so even at the script stage, people are like, well, at least writer in. And it’s like, no, we’re told who is going to, you know, be available who they you know, what. So it’s really out of our hands. I mean, all I can say to that is I love the character Sidney Prescott. I love Nev Campbell as an actor. I think she is synonymous with the Scream franchise. As a fan, I would really love to see Sidney come back.

 

Rosie Knight Exactly.

 

Guy Busick As a person involved in screen movies, I can’t say. But as a fan outside of it is like, even if it’s not me, even if it’s years from now, I want to see that. So I hope that, you know, that can happen at some point in time because it’s Sidney, you know.

 

Jason Concepcion Gary Busick, thank you so much.

 

Rosie Knight Thank you so much. So much fun.

 

Jason Concepcion Congratulations on your success.

 

Rosie Knight Yeah.

 

Guy Busick Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

 

Rosie Knight Here’s to the next one.

 

Jason Concepcion Yeah. Up next, Nerd Out

 

Rosie Knight In today’s Nerd Out, where you tell us what you love and why or a theory you’re excited to share. Lucas pitches this on Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot series.

 

Lucas Adams Jason Rosie. Everybody had X-ray vision. My name’s Lucas Adams. I wanted to first off, say thank you so much for the podcast. I really, really love it. I think I’ve learned an incredible amount about sci fi fantasy, comic books and everything. I love nerd out. I wanted to share my nerd out, which is a series of books thus far too. I think there’ll be more called The Monk and Robot Series by Becky Chambers. The first book is Awesome for the Wild Built. The second book, which just came out a few weeks ago, is called A Prayer for the Crown Shai and the first book, a Song for the Wild Belt. Basically, we have used robots to build up our world, almost destroy our world, and they have gained sentience and they leave. They simply, as a group, decide to head out into the world in the wilds and be by themselves, forcing us to face our own existence without them. Luckily, we make a lot of really good choices that help save ourselves, but it doesn’t come without some struggle. This book, however, is about a team monk, as they’re known in this world named sibling Dex, and they decide to explore the world in a different way and go out into the wild, where they come across a robot named Mos Cap and the robot has been sent by other robots to see how humanity is doing and basically to ask the question, what do humans need? And so they build a relationship with one another. They explore their relationships with themselves in the world, both the natural and built world as it was and as it is now. And then in the second book, they continue this journey. And I don’t want to give away too much. And just it is two short, wonderful meditations on technology and our living, breathing earth and our relationship to it and ourselves and the other people around us, and in this case, robots. I highly recommend it. I highly recommend Becky Chambers. She also wrote The Wayfarer series, which is a really fun space travel action series that also asks some really great relationship questions about relationships with ourselves and other species and our place in the world and how we treat those around us and how we experience things and people and other things that are different from us. I think everybody would really like it and I am so happy to share it. Again, thank you all so much for everything you do. I love your podcast. Have a great day.

 

Rosie Knight Thanks, Lucas. If you have theories or passions that you want to share. Hit us up at xray@crooked.com. Instructions in the show notes, as always.

 

Jason Concepcion That’s it for us. A big thank you to Guy Busick. Rosie, any plugs? Plug, plug, plug, plug.

 

Rosie Knight You can find me@RosieMarx on Instagram and on Letterbox’d. The usual places. I have a newsletter link will be in the show notes and you can find me here if you want to read about Yellowjackets and all my wild theories and citizen detecting, you can find that IGN. And I’ve got a lot of stuff at DC.com at the moment so go there too.

 

Jason Concepcion Primo dropping May 19 for the Amazon freebie. You can watch it for free. It’s right there at any freebie ads, just like the just like the old times. But of course, if you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber, you can get it done without the hassle. Actually, I don’t know. I don’t how that works.

 

Rosie Knight I don’t know about that.

 

Jason Concepcion I don’t really know how can be free, but May 19th. Just put that in your brains.

 

Rosie Knight And you.Better watch it. I’ve got the screeners so I can say it’s good.

 

Jason Concepcion And of course, subscribe on YouTube where you can watch full episodes of our show X-ray Vision. And don’t forget to follow @XRVPod on Twitter and check out the Discord to meet and hang out with lots of amazing folks, fans, listeners, and Rosie and I.

 

Rosie Knight Us, we’re there.

 

Jason Concepcion Five star ratings. Five star reviews.

 

Rosie Knight Five stars. Five stars.

 

Jason Concepcion We love them. You got to give it to us. Here’s one from Jam064: my favorite podcast at the moment. It’s funny and informative in many ways. I could listen to Jason Rosie talk about anything. Five star power.

 

Rosie Knight 55555.

 

Jason Concepcion Thank you Jam064. X-ray Vision is a Crooked Media production. The show is produced by Chris Lord and Saul Rubin. The show is executive produced by myself and Sandy Girard. Our editing and sound design is by Vasilis Fotopoulos. Delon Villanueva and Matt DeGroot Provide video production support. Alex Reliford handles social Media. Thank you Brian Vasquez for our theme music. We’ll see you next time.

 

Rosie Knight Bye.

 

Jason Concepcion Hey, Mike, this is Histoff from Mureen. Yeah, I’m just calling on behalf of your state senator, Taissa Turner, phone back and listen. I understand we just had an election, Mike, but it’s not too early to start thinking about the next cycle. Now, you might be hearing some spurious rumors about the pet decapitation. Those are all being put out there by the senator’s disgruntled partner. There’s nothing to that. There’s no cult stuff, no eating of dirt, no climbing of trees, no strange behaviors, no talking to herself. That’s all I have to say, Mike. Vote Taissa Turner, in the next election. We’re happy to have your support. I’ll take my answer off the air.

 

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