214. Poisonings

is a roller coaster ride. The entire series is just like a completely me yelling what the fuck over and over again in the.

the power to heal and to harm. Most data about murders via poisoning use a definition of poisoning that includes standard poison, but also murdering with a poisonous use of narcotics like sleeping pills. The FBI does not include poison gas because that falls under the category of asphyxiation. Very interesting there. So most cases of poisoning involve one perpetrator

and one victim who know each other pretty well. Poisoning is an intimate crime, and Hollywood loves showing us up pernicious powder slipped into a drink from a heavily jeweled ring, a noxious nectar mixed with a salve, or a deadly draft mixed into a delicious dinner. Okay, that's enough alliteration right Across cultures, the line between cure and curse was razor thin. And in every age, societies have asked the same anxious question, who controls these powerful substances and what

happens when they choose to harm instead of heal? And yes, I will take full responsibility for writing those terrible alliterations. I figured why not go out here at the end of our run with a purple prose?

or even their touch was thought to be deadly. Indian military texts also detail pragmatic tactics like contaminating enemy wells and smearing arrows with toxins from snakes or rotting animal matter, basically biochemical warfare. The Chinese practice of gu poisoning arose from a practice where venomous insects and snakes were sealed

in a vessel until only one survived. Allegedly, the resulting tocsin was believed to cause wasting, illness, and enemies, and was considered a form of black magic, often linked to women, of course and marginalized groups in southern China, and.

the medical spectrum are like homeopathy. At the same time, Greek physicians such as Diascorides and Galen catalog poisonous plants alongside remedies, underscoring the often incorrect belief that the line between medicine and poison was razor thin and it was determined only by dosage and intent.

Take three point thirty one BCE. Live tells us about the so called Matrons poisoning panic, in which during a plague, dozens of elite women were accused of secretly mixing He's deadly poisons that were promoted as cures. Were they murderers or victims of mass hysteria hard to say, but the city responded with trials and executions, and mass hysteria turned the focus on women again. I mean, how many times have we talked about this.

right on hand. Fast forward a few centuries in a crime scene looks a lot more targeted and Imperial Emperor Claudius dead after eating mushrooms served by his wife Agrippina. Tacitus and Suanitas both describe it. One version even has a doctor finishing him off with a poisoned feather. I mean, hey, he's almost dead. You can use that feather over there to see beat up the process, I guess. And then

there's Lacusta, the professional poisoner. Nero basically kept her on a retainer in fifty five CE he wanted his rival Britannicus out of the way, and Tacitus says that Lacusta whipped up a brew that got slipped into his drink and boom, Britannicus collapsed at the table. Lacusta became infamous, the ancient world's first celebrity poisoner. She could have had a whole episode on Dayline for sure.

ritual specialist. When it got translated into Greek, the word became pharmacose and that could mean healer, drug maker, potion mixer, or poisoner, and by the time it hit Latin, it morphed into malificos or just evildoers, and the English translators of the sixteen hundreds living in the middle of a witch panic settled on which so instead of broomsticks, we're really talking about people, often women, who knew how to

make potions. And in a world where medicines and poisons sat right next to each other in the same cabinet, that knowledge was terrifying to people. That anxiety shows up everywhere. The existing Roman laws about thaneficium and the poison panic in the Middle Ages, and of course the witch trials. Yeah, I mean that says everything about how seriously they took it. Then in Renaissance Italy, poison became part of everyday political drama.

City records in Florence listed poison prices and contracts. There's the well known shadowy reputation of the entire Borgia family, with multiple members accused fairly or not, of lacing wine with arsenic at banquets. Then there are later figures like Julia Tafauna, who created and delivered a clear, tasteless and odorless liquid into bottles labeled as holy water or cosmetics. It was named Aqua Tofauna. The poison was intended to give women a means to end permanently their abusive relationships

by dosing their husbands slowly over weeks. The symptoms started out as low key enough that it looked like a natural illness, weakness, stomach pain, wasting away. It was a perfect cover. But at the heart of all of this is arsenic. Sometimes with the little lead or belladonna thrown in, but the heavy lifter arsenic. Its colorless, odorless, tasteless one dissolve, and once inside the body it systematically shuts down vital processes.

Victims would start with violent stomach cramps, then nausea and vomiting. Diarrhea was so severe that it led to dehydration. The victim's skin would slowly lose color, becoming an ashen gray, sometimes even further marred by dark lesions, and in high doses it calls convulsions and collapse of the cardiovascular system. But in slow doses, like with aquatafauna, it looked like tuberculosis or simple decline, which was called consumption.

wasn't hanging or beheading, it was boiling alive. One of the first executed was Richard Ruce, a cook accused of poisoning a pot of porridge in Bishop John Fisher's household. He was literally boiled to death in Smithfield Market. So through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, poisoning wasn't just a crime. It was a cultural obsession, tangled up with witchcraft trials, royal scandals, and social control. And at the center of it all was the same anxiety we saw back in Rome.

Who controls the potions and what happens when that power is used to kill instead of cure.

of its power. A husband or a rival could weaken over the weeks, losing weight, their hair, becoming brittle, skin pale, until they just essentially wasted away. No suspicious knife, woo, no obvious crime scene, just this lingering illness, and without chemical tests, no one could prove otherwise. This is where the science starts to change the story. Paracelsus, a Swiss physician in the early fifteen hundreds wrote quote, all things

are poison, and nothing is without poison. Only the dose makes the poison end quote, which is true to medications and things that we talk about in today's day and age. Certainly circling back to earlier Eastern perspectives, Paracelsus looked at substances like arsenic and mercury not just as tools for murder, but as potential medicines if measured carefully.

bottles so people wouldn't mistake them in the dark. And in nineteen o six, the Pure Food and Drug Act banned dangerous ingredients and the nineteen twenty Dangerous Drugs Act targeted opiates. And in the modern world, while we see fewer poison murders, the pattern continues. When it does surface, it's often in healthcare settings, serial poisoners abusing access to medications.

But now toxicology is incredibly advanced and we can detect trace levels of toxins that would have been invisible just a century ago.

Glorny found was surprisingly consistent across time and cultures. You can almost sketch a prototype poisoner. It is someone often tied to healthcare or science fields, where they both have access to an array of potentially poisonous substances and the knowledge of how to use them. Many of the profile studies show individuals with complex personality traits that are shaped by their life histories like attachment issues and those made

them more vulnerable to committing these crimes. Their motives are rarely random. Poisoning was usually about secondary gain, and secondary gain is the indirect benefit that a person receives from their symptoms or behavior, such as attention, financial compensation, or avoiding responsibility, and that's beyond the primary effect of the condition itself. So in these cases, the drive is the money, control or reclaiming power over a victim right.

risk adverse. So unlike offenders who use physical violence, poisoners actually avoid confrontation, so instead they tend to plan carefully, manipulate others, and strike in ways that con seal their hand. Some experts compare their methodical planning to writing a script for a play. Every step kind of mapped out, every risk considered.

This is again reflected in doctor Johnson's research that shows poisoners often show signs of emotional immaturity and inadequacy, and they're thought to compensate for these perceived deficits through manipulation, a hunger for control, fantasies of power, and an exploitive interpersonal style. Many were spoiled or came from unhappy homes. Psychologically, it's as if they never grew up. They take what they want without regard for others, driven by greed, lust,

or resentment rather than empathy or moral restraint. Definitely leaning heavily here on the influence of narcissistic elements within their personality. Put together literature and case files show that they have recognizable patterns. The studies authors suggest that these patterns could be the basis for an early warning system that would help professionals spot suspicious behavior before it escalates into a crime.

of both the so called organized and disorganized defenders. When you dig down a little deeper, I do want to say we don't use this caveat much, but it's worth noting that with these descriptors, they're not to be confused with the psych use of them in evaluations, where we might talk about someone being organized versus disorganized, which really kind of in that case refers to an individual's executive

functioning processes. In this use, we mean that those are just planners, very careful planners, versus those that are more impulsive. So you know, we have some overlap and like our psych folks and our listeners and just you know, true crime criminal justice listeners, and I think sometimes we have to make that differentiation.

logistically or practically. Take Mary Anne Cotton, a nurse go figure who is often called Britain's first female serial killer in the nineteenth century, she poisoned at least fifteen people, usually her own children and husbands, with arsenic, and for years she got away with it by making their deaths look like natural illnesses. But her slip up came when she started talking too freely about collecting life insurance before

her last victim had even died. That inconsistency ray suspicion, and toxicologists finally tested the bodies, finding the arsenic she thought was invisible. It's a classic example careful planning on one hand and a careless human mistake on the other

that brought everything crashing down. So when we turn to look at personality traits a little bit more closely and kind of start tying this in with what we know about criminal psychology, I think the discussions in our field, though often anecdotal, do commonly describe poisoners in certain ways. So generally throughout the literature, you're going to see them described as cunning, remorseless, and even greedy, especially when it does come to financial gain and the stories of collecting

life insurance policy after life insurance policy. But we also see them described as calculating about their timing, like really doing the research and knowing how long the toksin will take to act, and then also preparing alibis accordingly. So to this extent, it's probably not surprising that they're also described as being highly intelligent and methodical in studying poisons

and planning. So they're having to utilize dangerous substances that could harm them too, right, so there has to be really this careful planning and execution so they don't end up becoming a victim of their own deadly aspirations. Here, we also see in the research that they tend to exhibit those dark triad traits that we've talked so much about before, especially machavelianism, you know, that cold hearted detachment that really leads to manipulation being something easy for them

and easy skill for them. And then the psychopathy of course, that callousness, really having that strategic deceit about them to go through with this. Additionally, the literature shows that they're highly deceptive, emotionally detached, and again very very strategic, especially when it comes to gaining some sort of personal advantage their life.

was rampant for years until antibiotics came along. How many people before or even when arsenic and lead testing became quantified, when they could actually do it. That means you would have to be in an area where you could test for that, right in a city. I mean, if you're in a rural area, the local country doctor, is he

really going to be able to do that? So fascinating stuff here about something that's just been hopefully I mean, I think actually one of the things the points we get to is how difficult it is to get away with it now. But the history of it, I think is always going to have a little bit of mystery to it. But we do have a really great example. This one has been done several times in various forms of media, in true crime and podcasts and even some

sort of investigation discovery type shows. Is the case of it, doctor Harold Shipman, and I really like using him, even though he's been talked about a lot, because he's a perfect nexus of personality disorders and poisoner profiles. And he was a British family medicine practitioner. Like I said, he's been profiled on many true crime shows, but we would be remiss in leaving him out of this. On the surface, Shipman was everything that you would want in a doctor.

He was calm, methodical, always professional, and so old school at the time that these crimes were happening that he spent a significant portion of his practice doing house calls. Now, on one hand, you would think that's wonderful. Look how much he cares about his clients, and he actually goes out into the field and goes to people's homes, something that really just doesn't happen today unless you're rich enough to afford concierge's medicine. But it also was part of

his profile. The more you're going into people's homes, the more you have control over the environment, right. But that was the kind and compassionate facade that covered up one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history. Shipman was alleged to have murdered hundreds of his patients, often elderly women, by quietly, calmly, and methodically administering lethal dosis

of diamorphine, which in medical terms is medical heroine. Although he was only convicted of the murder of fifteen of his patients, the flip side of his compassionate persona was this calm, cold, measured killer whose crimes entailed no screaming, no blood, and no signs of violence, just a gradual decline with elderly patients that looked like natural death, and Shipman knew how to falsify all the paperwork to back

it up. His behavior matches what researchers show about poison intelligent, meticulous, emotionally detached, and quite manipulative. He did not kill impulsively. He planned, He controlled every detail, and he relied on his medical authority to cover his tracks. This is the ultimate example of the organized poisoner. He chose a substance that he had easy access to, he knew exactly how it worked in the body, and he crafted an alibi

before anyone could ask questions. Again, cold, calculated and chillingly effective, until the growing number of victims and patterns in the death records of those victims finally exposed him.

is something that's really creepy about him. Like I guess you could see him as like this bespectacled, bearded tweed wearing doctor with the big black bag, as this calm authority figure. But I find him to be, at least the pictures I've seen, to be quite a nerving.

men use guns so much of the time. Yes, it is more popular for women to use poison than men, but in raw numbers, we can say that men kill more often with poison because they're killing way more often, right, I think that's the important science to get in there.

from it altogether. Similarly, and I find very interesting, drowning is more common for women, as we have covered in previous episodes on women who kill, especially in cases involving their own and sometimes multiple children. But aside from gender,

some other interesting breakdowns. White women are more likely to kill with poison, and perpetrators are generally not targeting victims of other races, largely of course, due to the odds that still in this day and age, the closest to you are generally going to be the same race.

pull some power back. And also women were becoming land owners, so it's like, hey, we can't have women owning land. Let's accuse them of this and accuse them of that and get our power back. It's just another you know, subjugation of gender roles throughout history, and all.

and not that surprising gender data point. Poisoning accounts for more than two percent of husband killings, while poison is used in just over half of one percent of wife killings.

her motives appear to have been financial. She inherited property and dowries from her victims.

and he had been poisoned, but he survived. So the subsequent instigation, after the family notified the police, then started to expose her pattern. Abakari has reportedly confessed, even saying that she has lost track of how many she has killed, stating that up to fifteen husbands she's had that she's killed.

It's very interesting. We'll see what happens, if anything. Human rights groups have long raise concerns that confessions in Iran can be forced through torture or threats against loved ones, and some people are just really questioning how these quote unquote confessions have come out.

the lunch, which also nearly killed Wilkinson. At her sentence hearing, Wilkinson said that he feels only half alive without his wife, describing her as a woman full of faith, kindness and love. He said that his life is greatly impoverished without her and the Pattersons, but offered the accused forgiveness, praying that she will use her time in prison to change Aaron Patterson faces life sentences for each murder and up to

twenty five years for attempted murder. Prosecutors are pushing for life without parole, calling the crime so cruel and horrific that she deserves no mercy. The judge agreed the case was horrendous and sentencing for September eighteenth, twenty twenty five.

a further frightening than diagram of offenders. The typologies we just shared can range from parents who medically abuse their children for historyonic attention, to healthcare workers seeking the power of life and death, to assassination with complex drives. The goals are as different as the.

on more specific and individual targets. One of the most well known victims of politically motivated assassination by poisoning is former Russian spy Alexander Litvienko, who was fatally poisoned in London after drinking tea laced with polonium two ten, a very rare and very radioactive isotope. Litvienko was a former officer with the Russian security Services, the KGB and later

the FSB, Russia's primary domestic security and counterintelligence agency. In the late nineteen nineties, Litvienko accused his supervisors of ordering assassinations of political enemies, and later published books alleging that the FSB staged terror attacks to consolidate Vladimir Putin's power. For that, he became a target, fleeing Russia in two thousand, receiving asylum in the UK, and then began working with British intelligence while continuing to publicly criticize the Kremlin.

is an extremely rare radioactive isotope. It's a substance that can only be manufactured in state run nuclear facilities. This was the first confirmed case of lethal polonium poisoning. The investigators later suggested it was chosen because it's tasteless, odorless,

and nearly impossible to detect with standard tests. For the assassins, it was supposed to be the perfect silent weapon, but what they didn't account for was the radioactive trail it left contamination in airplanes, hotels and restaurants all across London. Litfienko's deathbed statement accused Vladimir Putin of ordering the hit, and subsequent UK inquiries and the European Court of Human Rights concluded the same that his poisoning was a state

sponsored assassination. Beyond silencing a critic, the message was clear, defection and dissent would not be forgiven, no matter where you fled. The means of poisoning seems to have been meant to have been discovered to highlight the message. Essentially, we know where you are and we know how to get to you. And in our earlier points about motivation, this case shows that it's not always about money, not always about jealousy, but political power and intimidation on a

global stage can also be the case. Chillingly, the weapon wasn't a medieval herb or an arsenic powder, but a radioactive isotope wants to use in nuclear bombs. Definitely strong message designed to hear and.

Dozens were hospitalized. The cause not food handlers, not bad hygiene, which is the polite way of saying that staff weren't washing their hands. No, this was deliberate. Members of the rajnis Shei cult, led by ma Anan Sheila, had cultured the bacteria salmonella in their commune's lab and spread it across salad bars at ten local restaurants. The motivation power at the ballot box. The Rajnichis had already taken over nearby town, renamed it Rajenish, and wanted to extend control

by winning county elections. Their plan was simple, sick in the vote in population so that their candidates would win. It was the first large scale bioterrorist attack on US soil. This particular example shows a great deal of calculation, planning, and implementation. The cult members bought the bacteria from a medical supply company, grew it in their own labs, and tested it first by dosing county commissioners with contaminated water.

When that worked, they went bigger, salad bars, salad dressings, even doorknobs at government offices. Their nickname for the mixture was salsa. Fortunately no one died, but hundreds of people were incapacitated. People stopped eating out, they stayed home and felt like prisoners in their own town, leading to many businesses being closed, and of course, fear and distrust ran through the community. Investigators later uncovered glass files of salmonella

and the Rajnishi labs, confirming the deliberate plot. Sheila and her lieutenant, ma Anan Puja were eventually convicted and served prison time. Unlike Shipman's need for control or live in INCO's political silencing, here it was about manipulating democracy itself, weaponizing illness to sway an election.

right off drugstore shelves. But because that case was never solved and the motive remains a mystery, and because it's been covered very widely, we're going to turn instead to the Stella Nickel case, which gave investigators both a culprit and a clear motivation in a similar case. So Stella Nichols case is the one that finally put real legal teeth behind tamper evident packaging. In June nineteen eighty six, her husband, Bruce Nicchol, died after taking extra strength etc.

Bruce's death was first chalked up to natural causes. The picture changed when officials tied Snow's death to cyanide and then found another tainted bottle that had come from the Nickel home. The FDA and FBI broad ins testing and amid a nationwide alert, identified a handful of contaminated bottles in the region. Two of them traced Nichol's possession, cementing the theory that someone had seated store shelves to create the illusion of a random poison.

lifted her prints from cyanide related encyclopedia pages. And this is the kind of stuff, minute but substantial, circumstantial evidence that juries tend to find persuasive because each piece points in the same direction. And this was nineteen eighty six, way before forensics files, motive evidence was pretty clear cut. Nicol had multiple life insurance policies on Bruce, with a

double indignity payout for accidental death. Her adult daughter told investigators that before the murders, Nichol had talked about wanting Bruce dead and had tried foxglove also known as digitalis in capsules, and she had openly discussed how insurance money would change their lives. That testimony, paired with the product tampering stagecraft, framed the killings as calculated bid for secondary gain money and freedom, rather than a spree. So what do you think this leakage was about.

an alibi or permission? I don't know. I think it's very interesting and not so uncommon. You know, we hear about this, especially when it's familicide or you know, partner murders like this.

instrumental poison in. Her indicators include advanced research. She had gone to the library, like physically if they're pulling fingerprints off Encyclopedia's method selection, right, something that was odorless, tasteless, was able to put into capsules. She also had seen control and staging, so being able to place bottles to kind of simulate that random seating and tampering in the stores. And then financial trigger insurance, right, she also had that double indemnity insurance plan.

passion or grievance. Even there's no public record of a formal psychiatric diagnosis, but what we can kind of safely say is that her behavior fits the organized, goal driven poisoning pattern that we've been outlining across all of these cases. Legally,

the case mattered beyond Seattle. A nineteen eighty nine Ninth Circuit opinion upheld her conviction under the then new federal statute, clearly stating that product tempering causing the death could be prosecuted federally even when the motive was a targeted domestic

murder disguised as this public hazard. So the Nickel case, along with the Tailanal murders, of course, their precedent really is why we have those triple seal packaging, chain of custody recalls the way that we have all of those precautions that we take to protect the public, and why our shelves look the way they do today.

So another case that we want to cover is William Robert Cable, and this was from twenty twenty, and it's quite a different one that I found really fascinating, and it's pretty unsettling because it mixes premeditation with an additional factor of one of the four aspects of the dark tetrad as opposed to the dark triad, and that is sadism in this instance exemplified as performative cruelty and charged in twenty twenty and later pleading guilty, William Robert Cable

admitted to poisoning eight unhoused people in Huntington Beach, California, by lacing food with oleo resin capsicum, the ultra potent pepper abstract that is used in police spray, and it's a particular version of pepper spray that's reported to be up to four times as strong as standard brands. He was sentenced in April twenty twenty one to four years

in state prison. His prosecutors asserted that Cable targeted a vulnerable population, filmed the aftermath for later viewing, and even then drew an elder abuse count among his multiple felonies and misdemeanors, so his methodology was calculated and coercive. According

to the investigators. Cable and his associates presented the stunt as a spicy food challenge to these unhoused individuals, and he would often enhance his pitch with the promise of alcohol or beer along with extra food to secure the

victim's cooperation. Now, these victims, who were completely unaware that the dishes they were going to be eating had been tainted, suffered intense and drum matic seizure like symptoms, including vomiting, intense mouth and stomach pain, and difficulty breeding, with many

of the victims requiring immediate hospitalization. The challenge framing, which was the use of a caustic agent that was reported to be at least as four times as strong as police pepper spray, and the decision to videotape their reactions all point to a scheme designed not just a harm,

but also, in the prosecutor's language, to produce spectacle. So Cable may have asserted that he was attempting a ripoff of prank or jackass, or even the spicy food challenge that has been so popular on YouTube, but the acute difference here is that the victims he chose were exceptionally vulnerable individuals. They were in an unhoused situation with any number of unknown medical or mental health issues that could have contributed to their current situation and could have contributed to death.

the camera. This is not unlike a phenomenon that was out there several years back, bum fights, if you'll remember that, where they were pitting unhelps people against each other to fight, like giving them some sort of incentive because of their situation. But this blend that coercive control, pain induction, and the addition of an audience is really congruent with performative cruelty

and really dehumanization. Cable chose targets with little social power or really any means for recourse in the situation.

or food, staging the setup, managing equipment. All of that planning paired with the attention seeking filming, and this gives us its character outline of someone who lacks empathy, who is a sensation seeking offender, and an individual who prioritizes control and spectacle over other conventional motives that we've mentioned previously.

So he faced up to nineteen years if he was convicted a trial, but he only received four years on a plea, which is pretty lax given the crimes, but it still sent a message about targeting unhoused communities with chemical harm for entertainment. This case also underscores how challenge culture can be weaponized, and we've seen it in the ice bucket challenge, where really cruel bullies would fundamentally challenged peer and fill the bucket full of refuse if not

excrement or you'reine. I mean, it's just horrible situations like that.

When you then add in the elder abuse charges, was I think was really smart and good for the prosecutors. This is a clear example of opportunistic victimization focused on multiple kind of quote unquote perceived low resistant groups. So I think, if anything, that case is awful. Thank you for finding it, though, just to kind of put an extra little spin on well, essentially what we started with, what the definition of poison is and how it can

be harmful in several different ways. But I think, if anything, you know, we use more case examples in this episode than we tend to do in our normal ones. But they're just all over the place. I mean, bioterrorism, swaying elections, spies either specific targeted victims, random victims being targeted. I mean this, I thank goodness, it is so so rare and we threw out that statistic, but this could truly be one of the most terrifying means of murder that we've covered.

So it's there's something that I think it connotes seduction in the way it's portrayed. But a modern media example that I really liked because it's also an excellent movie is Gross point Blank from nineteen ninety seven. So I'm going this is almost a vintage This is almost a vintage movies from what your daughter, remember I gave you gave your daughter one of my mom's necklaces from like the eighties, and she's like, is this vintage? It was like, yeah,

I guess it is vintage right. So Gross point Blank from nineteen ninety seven is a dark comedy with John Cusack, his sister Joan Cusack in an absolutely hilarious role, and then Minie Driver. He stars as a character named Martin Blank. He's a professional hitman who reluctantly returns to his hometown of gross Pointe, Michigan for a job that his handler has set him up on. He has to go home

in order to carry out an assassination. It also happens to coincide with his ten year high school reunion after he just completely ghosted everyone, his family, all of his friends, and his girlfriend who's played by Minnie Driver, who he reconnects with. So it's a great movie for the comedy.

Dan Ackroyd is in it, but one of the scenes that shows his skill as an assassin is this scene where he attempts to poison an individual that's in a room will blow him in a hotel, and while the guy is asleep snoring, he drills a hole through his floor into the ceiling of the road below and then just drops a single viscous thread of poison into the snoring guy's mouth. It was like he's really chilling to think that, like that's legit, that could happen.

And my favorite is this side character. Her name is Maggie, and she is the wife of the friend who's trying to figure out these murders, and she writes for pulp magazines. So she starts going, well, these deaths could be accidental, but they could also be murder, and then she starts pulling out the encyclopedia to look at the symptoms, and her husband is like, oh, there she goes again. You know, every time you hear something you gotta get all dark, and I'm like, I love this character.

back in the day. We'll have to get John to comment on that though, but I'm going to go look for it. Hopefully our listeners will go look at those two movies as well.

to overthrow the bad guys, she's just like sitting there. Well, yeah, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was going to be quite so painful.