HBO's The Last of Us Ep 2

Warning This podcast dates spoilers for the second episode of the Last of Us on HBO Max. Hello, my name is Jason Concepcion and I'm Rosy Night, and welcome the next revision of the Crooked Media podcast, where we dive deep in your favorite shows, movies, comics, and pop culture.

In this episode, in the Airlock, we're digging deep into the Last of Us episode Don't Eat the Bread, Don't Eat It, No Cake, and in nerd Out, we're doing a very relevant theory from Brandon. Let's go Brandon and if you want to supportive of the theories, if you want to jump around, as always, just check the show notes for the time stamps.

Coming up the air lock, We're stepping out of the airlock into the overgrown and ruined halls of a colonial museum in Back Bay, Boston for the Last of Us Episode two.

Titled Infected.

Titled Infected show of course created by Craig Mason and Neil Druckman, creative director of the game for Naughty Dog Epeed by Mason, and of course this episode directed by game creative director Neil Druckman.

Perfect timing as well, because Neil's about to introduce the big Bat, the Big Bat, the Big Boss, the big Boss, and he does it well.

We open in Jakarta, Indonesia, September twenty third, two thousand and three, a place where Joel at this time was confused about its location, didn't exactly know where it was. A military man enters a restaurant, interrupting the lunch of a woman who is dining there. Her name is Ibu Ratna. She is a professor at the University of Indonesia specializing

Don't go close, don't do it. It's just don't do it. That talk should come before I suit up. I feel like they're not ever fully transparent to the good doctor. They rub her out of lunch, they take us somewhere. She thinks she's being arrested. Then they're giving her, you know, a little bit of breadcrumb's news until she gets into this room and learns the true horror.

And the horror is that there is a young woman lying on the slab there. Doctor Ratna goes up, inspects the victim, finds a what is apparently a human bitemark on her ankle, cuts it open with a scalpel. There's a spongy, fungal mushroom material in there. This is shocking. Doctor Ratna then reaches into the woman's mouth and pulls out a site we're all familiar with by now. Those all those wriggling worms, kind.

Of tentacle fung guy poked their way out creepily, and she just freaks out.

She's out, She's out, all my way out. Later on, she debriefs with the General. He tells her the victim was infected thirty hours ago in or around a factory that processes flour and grain. She says, oh, flour and grain. That's the perfect incubator for this fun guy. Now let's stop here.

Okay, let's pause, because we're about to get to the big. The big theory there is.

There has been a theory out there that obviously, this is this infection spread by bites, we've seen that, but how did it explode across the world at once? And one of the theories was bread. Yeah, it got into the flower supply and all these flower products that went out across the world carried it and that's how everybody got sick at once. On top of that, there is the cake theory.

I love this because this is so in the game a lot of people like is the same as the game is. In the game, there's a mention of kind of infected crops, and that's really about as far as it goes. But the cake theory is great, and you are the one who introduced this to me. And the cake theory is if you remember, in that kind of heartbreaking cold open Joel forgets to bring a cake back

You know what's funny is in episode one, Joel jokingly tells the Adlers that he's on atkins, meaning he's just eating meat, no carbs, and everybody on Atkins made it, and day.

We made it. You were just way. I just had a light I had a light. I had a light bulb moment. Just then when we meet the Adlers, the Sun is feeding his mother biscuits, and Sarah didn't meet the cook reason exactly, and then she was the first person that we saw who was infected. So I think the bread theory is really important, and as we will get to momentarily when we start to get in the rest of the episode, I think that it expands. He goes to a dark pas.

Okay, So we learn again from the from the gen that an employee at this flower processing plant became violent or attacking her coworkers, bit several of them, one of whom is this dead woman here on the slab, and that at current time, fourteen workers are missing from refactory. Doctor Ratna is shook. She's horrified, she's horrified, she's on word by this. The general is like, Okay, so obviously we came to you as one of them. How do we fix it as one of the most foremost you know,

Here's what you do.

You call up you're in the military, call up your fighter wing and just fucking bomb the city.

Yep, she said what she said my whole life. I've worked on this, my whole life. There's no cure. We can't do anything. There's no study. Come on, there's nothing. And you know what, it's a really brilliant reflection of the first Cold Open, where the scientists sat on that stage of the talk late night talk show and said, if this happens, we lose. I hate a quitter. But it turns out she was right. Yeah.

She then tearfully says, hey, can I get a ride home just to spend the final moments here in Civilization with my family. We go back to twenty twenty three. Ellie wakes up in a patch of sunlight and this beautiful kind of like idyllic patch of grass in the middle of this former It's wonderful.

So it feels so unfless perfect mix of bleakness and beauty. Yes, story does so well.

Joel and Tess are watching her like hawks. Joel has this right, right way to do it. He's like, show us your arm. Ellie does no change. Joel and Tests have never ever seen anything like this. But they're not all the way there to believing that Ellie is actually immune, and Joel is further away certainly than Test is. Ellie is like, hey, so we got this far. We're all the infected. I heard that they're just swarming out of here New city.

You can't leave the quarantines out because you'll just die.

And Joe was like, yeah, don't worry about that, which is Ellie rightly says, well, I'm gonna actually worry about it because it seems like a big deal. Test then is continuously pressuring Ellie to tell her what Marlene's plans were. What did Marlene want with you? Ellie says that Marlene found her after she was bitten, and then, rather than kill her, which is usually what you do, she and the fireflies watch her. They ran tests on her, you know. Test is like what tests? And she's like, yeah, I

Bella Ramsey is just killing it, okay, and let's stop here. As well, because this leads to another theory, right that we spoke about briefly. Why didn't Marlene shoot Ellie? Now, this has to be directly tied to the fact that the first episode, Marlene tells Ellie that she was the one she played feder Military School when she was a baby.

Least, it lets us know that this is not Marlene's first rodeo with seeing if someone was immune. Like she's done this, they had a system in place for exactly.

They had a testing system. X ray Vision will be back.

And we're back so Ellie goes off uh to do what one does when they wake up in the morning, and Testing and Joel have a little conversation. Test is trying to convince Joel that this could be real. What Ellie's Ellie's immunity, that might be a legit, and that they should just go forward with dropping her to the Fireflies and getting the truck from them so they can go find Tommy. This is probably their best shot at

It's so hot it's like cheering on a rulers, and they're really generous that like, oh, you know, you can have some of oz, and Ellie's like, don't worry about it and pulls out this like huge chicken salad sandwich on its massive bread. Let's talk about the bread.

Okay, So there's two There's kind of like two variables here. First option one, nobody knows that it was bread and flowers exactly.

So they're just eating it, and they're just eating it. I guess like.

Additionally to that would be the possibility that they know it's bread and flour but they figured it out. Yeah, they figured out how to fix it, which I don't buy all.

The other option is that the fireflies know about the bread and they're feeding it to Ellie to check that she doesn't get infected or to build up a unity dum, which is incredibly bleak, but I also think very fitting. And I think it's really interesting because after that cold open, like the big chat in our discord was like why would they show her eating bread? So and you know, nothing in this show is unintentional, so I'm really interested

I think that I think what is probably going on here is that there are certain people in the know who understand that bread and flour were the thing that

Here's so.

Playing the game and watching the show, the game kind of goes into this more. But the the I started realized playing the game again that Joel and Tests were on their way to being.

Robbered like they will. They were Robert was like their competitor.

They were like moving up the ladder of like criminal kingpins in the QZ.

If they didn't kill so many people, they would have had an army, but they killed everyone army because they kept killing everyone. But no, no, definitely, like I think that this episode and this series honestly just over these two episodes, like it's done so much to expand on Tests, who was essentially just like an outrageous like death dealer, kind of like serial total psycho and like, you know what, that's fine because in the game it serves a purpose.

That in her last last moments in the game feels more out of desperation and like let's just like finish it and actual feud.

And also realizing how valuable Ellie is.

Yeah, Ellie tells them that what she knows is that there's apparently a firefly base camp somewhere out west where doctors are working on a cure, and Joel finishes her sense is whatever, he's heard all this shit before. The key to finding the vaccine is me, and he's like, come on, this is the test you're gonna this is what you're gonna buy. How many times have we heard this. There's no vaccine, there's no medicine, there's nothing we can do.

Yeah, exactly. And also, I will say this is really where you start to get from this scene. You will getting now dialogue just directly lifted from the game. The first was more of a loose adaptation that brought things from the game. This episode is so close really, so

One of the lines that is ripped straight from the game is Ellie saying, hey, can I have a gun, which she asks about one hundred times in the game. They say no, because who wants to get shot in the back by a panicky like fourteen year old Yeah, and she's like, well, I'll just I guess I'll just throw my sandwich at the infected, which I think they'll like it because it's, you know, part of their history. They then head off into the kind of like sunlit

Suggested, they just bombed the city.

The American government at least came came to the realization that their best course of action was just bomb the fuck out of cities. And it didn't work everywhere, but it appeared to work in Boston, where they managed to set up the quarantines. Now they come to like a place where a building is partially collapsed across the street. So this is the direct past path to the old State House. So what's left is the short path and the long path. And apparently the short path is like you will get killed.

Yeah, it's it's it's the long path. Oh that you die. Papy's like, I think I'll just yeah, long path.

So they go through this hotel, and here's a very telling moment that kind of dovetails nicely with what you were saying before about tests, the difference between game tests and and show tests, in the way that this test there's almost something vaguely parental about her and the way she talks to Ellie. Notice that Ellie walks next to her this whole time. Doesn't walk next Joel.

You know.

Joel did say like I will kill you, but he is walking next to Ellie this whole time, and there, you know. And then Ellie Tests is being very generous about telling her about the dangers of the open city. She asks how Ellie got bit. Ellie's like, oh, I went into the mall and the QZ that's blocked off

And Test is impressed.

And you can tell that Ellie is really feels she really feels good any compliments. She feels good about the fact that someone is.

Like and I think where she sees in Test, that's someone that she would want to be like, you know, someone who can survive this for twenty years, who can kind of thinks it's bad ass to go into an empty mall and get bit just for the sake of it, like very chaoke behavior, but really it's a chaotic world.

So that's a really wonderful part of this scene because you know, Ellie is like looking at this, I mean, the city's in ruins, but it's beautiful, and she's like, what the she was She's almost disappointed that it's not as dangerous as everybody says.

Where's the whole idea is they keep you in the quarantine zone by telling you the moment you get out, it's like it's like walking dead walkers. They're coming to the fences, they're gonna eat you. But when you get out there, it's beautiful. It's overgrown. Nature has kind of found its way, and so far she hasn't seen a single zombie, so she goes affected.

So there aren't the ones with the split up and heads that's see in the dark, like bats and Tessandol are like.

They don't they look at each other and They're like, I.

Guess we came out at which point you hear the the trademark screen each yeah and infected, and Joel is just like, Okay, let's just keep moving and let's go. They come to the flooded lobby of a hotel, which Ellie recognizes because she reads books. She is really having fun, like she's turning this into an adventure. It's obviously very dangerous, but she's never again been outside before and she goes to the front desk, rings the bell. There's this whole little scene about checking into the hotel.

And Joel's like, you are weird kid. He's like, you are true weirdo. But you know, it's really nice because in the game, Ellie's always she's like always singing and like being trying to teach us about to whistle and do in like weird shit because to her like little laughs when because it's not like she's getting to explore this world, but the horrors of the world and the fact that's broken down are not new to her, like

Eventually, Joel and Ellie get their first moment alone when Tess has to find in an alternate path through another part of the building that's collapsed and Joel compliments Elie's switchblade killed with it. She asks where he's from. He says Texas she is. She asks where Tests is from. She says Detroit, which is in Michigan, and Ellie's like, I know that because I went to school. The parallels

Yeah, those are the ones you don't want to meet.

Yeah, And she asks if he's ever killed any and he says, yeah, a lot. And she asks is it hard knowing they were people once? And he says sometimes it was, And then she asks him, you know, how hard was it to kill that soldier? You know when he had that flashback? To the night on the riverbank with Sarah in his arms, and before he can answer, Test returns and she's got bad news that Hey, so the way we have to go it's just all infected.

It's an infected party. You know, the long way that was supposed to be the safe way and now the long way is also the dead way, and there's just like infected everywhere, and it's it's all bad. But we do learn something very interesting here. This is a cool episode if you want to know about the cordyceps virus and that infected because we kind of get to learn through Ellie's eyes a little bit more about them.

Yeah, you see the sun kind of moving across the landscape, you know, as clouds kind of go across the face of the sun, and as this sunbeam moves across these kind of this lolling hundred crowd. Yeah, they all react to it in Unison, and Ellie's like, oh my god, they're connected, and Tessa's more than you know, and she tells them that those fungal tentacles they grow underground too, and they're like a fungal web, like an internet for

And I believe that is new as well. That is very new.

Yeah, that is very new and very terrifying. And Tess again is being very warm in the way she's delivering this. She's she's she even says something to the effect of listen, I'm not telling you this to scary. I'm telling us because you need to know. Yeah, because you're immune, but but you're not immune to getting ripped apart.

I love that line. She's like, yeah, you're immune to getting bitmed, but you're not immune to like a zombie coming and like tearing your limbs off, Like sorry, babe, but and then bad news. The short way is the only way now, baby, Through the museum.

Through the museum a beautiful red brick colonial covered in fungal tentacles.

The door is literally like lock hut.

Joel goes over, touches one of the big tentacles it is. It's bone dry, and he.

Says, well, you know, maybe feel positive.

So they get ready to head in flashlights come out tests and Ellie, you know, have another talk. Test is like, listen, you just stay behind us. We're gonna move very slow. If anything happens, you get between me and Joel. And then the guns come out, and this is an interesting moment.

Yeah, definitely some kind of first responder kind of situation. And also it fits in with what we know of Test, which in the game, the little things that we get to see about, she's usually the one who's giving Joel stuff to fix his wounds and wrap it up, and they do a nice inversion of that in this episode. But yeah, I thought that was a really great catch from you. And again, you know, Ellie just wants a gun. Yes, she's give me a gun. She's like, I've got and

Now, Joel and Tess are initially feeling pretty good. They find this like this group of dried up and dead infected, so they know good they're dead. But then flashlight pan over to the side and there's like a body that's been dead like two hours.

And it's like it's like ripped apart, like it's throat stripped off. Ellie's freaked out because Ellie's like, I've been bitten and that's not some It couldn't have done that to me, Like this, what is this? And Tess's face, the fear on their on their faces is so good. Yeah, the way she's like, maybe maybe he died outside and maybe he goes outside and and you know they know that that's not true. They don't want to see it.

Joel then tells Ellie, Okay, listen from this point forward, silence, silence.

Okay.

Have you seen that movie with John Krasinski and Emily Blunt? All right, you see that one, But no, that didn't come out yet.

It didn't come out. Ye never came out. Okay, but it's like that. Yeah, not quiet, silent side, no quips, no like strange bits about being in a hotel. Just fucking do it and don't say shit.

So they go forward and they're you know, they creep their way forward, and at one point, Ellie steps on a dried vine and they're just like, oh ship. And then there's like a building collapse on the stairs and they're like, oh shit. They eventually get into kind of one of the display halls and behind them as they go up, the staircase collapses behind them, which draws the attention of a clicker. You hear it screech first, and then you hear the as it's searching, you know, with it's audio waves.

It comes up and.

Ellie is crazy with her you can see it on her face. How absolutely terrified she is. And then there's another screech, and now it looks like, oh shit, there's two of them. Joel gestures to Ellie. He says, like, you know, saying essentially, hey, they're blind, but they can hear,

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's so good. Like I was just saying this to Vascilla's before, like our super sound guys like that. When you play the game, you see the yellow outline, you see the implication of a fungus, but you're so busy trying to kill it and it's scary, and a lot of times you see them outside though, I have to say the Museum they adapted it perfectly.

So it's it comes close, it swings its face towards them into the beam of the flashlight, which whoever did that? Don't do that? And please, and Ellie gasps, and now it's fucking on. And one thing we could say about this these version of the clickers is they are way heardier than the video game. The video version, they take some gunshots, but if you get like two head shots, it's going to go down.

Yeah. Yeah. The thing that I'm depending on your difficult I was gonna say I'm very bad at heeadshots, more of a four or five person. But you know what I will say, I'm going to be very interested to see how the clickers take it later on, because what I ended up finding was very easy, and my difficulty saying is once you start modeling your melee weapons, you can kill them in a couple of swipes. Yeah, I wouldn't want to get close to one of the clickers

Care So, uh, the fighters on the first clicker, the one that's closest to them.

Takes like four or five like, oh, it's directly the tour Zoe.

No reaction is fighting with Jewel like nothing happened, which kind of makes sense you think.

About it, because if it's if it's just the body is essentially a shell. Yeah, that's why would it damage it? You know, you have to get to that that cerebral cortex or wherever the main fungus is. Shoot ahead like everything exactly. Movie. That's the rule.

Test and Elly run big, big fight. At the end of it, they do take down both clickers and Tests is okay.

Except for it twisted. Great, She looks good, fine, she says, I'm fine. I twisted my ankle. That's it. Okay, let's move on. Ellie got bit again and she's like, well, at least it was me if it had to you one of us.

Right, We're fine, and they go out over the roof. They get on the roof, Tessa's looking at Joel sadly as he's taping her up.

I love it. You get and you get this like these moments. Something that I love about this show that it understands about the game is these like moments of like empathy and compassion and comfort and these tiny moments that people can have together, like when he's wrapping her foot and they're kind of talking. And again you go from this deep, dark, horrific hauls where you're kind of chased by this nightmare monster onto this beautiful, sunlit rooftop

Now, there's a there's a small interaction here that I think tells you a lot about Joel and Test's Joel is like, hey, so you know, maybe we don't know what happened with that first bite. Maybe this is the bite that's gonna it's gonna get and Test snaps, She's like, can you just take the good news, you know, and maybe this time we can actually win? And it what it suggested to me and I thought this was great writing.

Is that.

Contra the game, Test was the more hopeful one. Yeah, in their relationship.

Joel Joel and in the in the game, he's dead inside, but it's like he's dead inside and he just follows Tests and does whatever she wants. But here he's dead inside and that allows him to do the terrible things that need to be done, whereas with Tests, Test can take it, but she's tired of giving it out. She wants that little bit of hope. She doesn't want to be killing people. She wants to imagine that this time they can actually win. Yeah.

This this felt like a window into their relationship that maybe Tests is the person who's like, oh, maybe it's real this time, maybe we can do this, maybe we can do that, whereas Joel's like, this is never changing. This is what we're doing right now.

Joel goes over to Ellie.

Tests stays behind to kind of tape herself up, and you can see the State House across the way. It's beautiful under the sunlight. And as they move out, there's a great moment where Joel glances at his watch and just like takes one look at the broken watch. They get to the state House, firefly convoy is there in front of the building. No sign of the firefly themselves.

Suspicious.

Yeah, not good.

Joel goes up.

He checks the truck gets streaked with blood. There's's dead bodies all around, torn apart by infected blood trail that's leading up into the State house, and Ellie's like, oh, they went inside. Test now grabs Ellie by the arm and rushes in because she's ready to like she's done, she's ready to find out, like is it real?

What's next?

Probably, you know, depending on you know, probably because of the reveal it's about to happen, because she is one she is inspired by and buoyed by and really deeply by like this sliver of hope that she's feeling, and also like, hey, if there is a cure.

But can we cook it up real quick? I maybe have it? How's it going? How's it going?

So they get in there and everybody's dead, and Joel reads the situation. One or more of the fireflies got infected. There is a fight as the healthy ones fought the sick ones, and then everybody lost. In Joel's words. Tests is then like okay, well there's got to be a fucking map or a radio or some kind of indication about where Ellie was supposed to go.

And Joel's like, okay, we did it done, Yeah, we dropped ahead. Let's go.

Let's go home, he says, and then Test snaps it's not my fucking home, which is like a hugely revealing comment again from Tests who all the while, you know again, it suggests all the while, all the while, all the way, Test has been like hoping for a real place, a real end to this.

Uh.

And then she says, you know, my luck had to run out, sooner or later, I'm going to stay behind. And Ellie gets it Test was bitten.

Uh. Joel is shaded by this.

Test shows him the wound which is on her neck and it's already like fung this out.

And she's like, look at Ellie's this is like three weeks ago, Like what the fuck is wrong with you?

This is this is real because look at this exact dialogue from the game where she her reaction is like oops, right, you know, yeah yeah. Test then begs Joel in an increasingly emotional appeal, to take Ellie West to find Tommy and his group and.

To stop this, to cure this. She's like, your brother was a fly, firefly, like if anything he knows.

Joel is like, they won't listen to me. They're not going to listen to me, Like I don't I've never been a firefly person, and I don't.

Want to do this, Like I have no investment in this, this is like your thing.

And Tess is like, you can do it because they'll listen to you, and you need to keep her alive and set everything right, and please say yes, Joel. In that moment, an infected corpse you know, shakes to not life after life, whatever you call it. Joel walks over shoots it. But that corpse happened to be laying in a pile of the cordy SIPs fungal net, which transmits the signal to a nearby horde, and you can hear them screeching, growing louder, and they'll be there in about

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah exactly. Joel's relationships are defined by the people closest to him.

That he's he's a selfish guy, but it is cool. He's selfish, but in a really an understandable and humane.

In a way that you can relate. It expands almost like a like a force field, like an invisible woman force field around those he loves. And yes, it's gonna be really important and I'm very interested to see where this goes. Because so let's talk about test dying. This is almost identical to the video game, almost an accept in the video game, she's killed by federal soldiers. So I love this choice because I think that it's really interesting that now we have the two people Joel's loved.

Don't talk about Tests. We're not talking about Test anymore. Don't say her name.

I'm interested to see if if they go the exact same route, because that's a really it's a really rough, like emotional journey for the two of them. I agree, But yeah, I'm just like I so many people in our discord were just so upset that Test died. Anatov is so good, so good that even though I knew where was going it, it still kind of shocks you because you're just like, she was so good. Didn't you want to keep her around, didn't you want to take

I mean we're already at this point about fifteen levels into the game, you know, fifty missions exactly.

Your this is the end of chapter three, and there's twelve chapters in the game. So I'm I'm very interesting.

Now, I think people are surprised at how quickly test went out, even though as you mentioned, she does go out in the same exact portion of the story the game version of the story that she does in the television version.

Of the story.

But well, first of all, it feels like you spend a lot more time with her one because she kills about a hundred people, and.

The predominant experience of tests, and you.

Know, depending on how good you are at the game, you could spend you could have by that time have spent anywhere from five from three hours to ten hours.

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly.

Somebody in our discord had a really funny comment that that alerting the first clicker, Ellie Gasping, validated his play style, which is being bad at stealth.

No, no, no, I have to do stealth. I've been playing the game, and like, if I try and go chaos mode, I'm the opposite because if I go chaos mode, I lose. I lose every time, whether it's a clicker, especially if it's a soldier. But yeah, it's really fun. This is just such a good show, and I think they're making a lot of really interesting choices. Agree because also as well, this is a show where twice now within the first two episodes, they faked you out on

It's really well done in a great story, and I think one of the things two episodes in that we can kind of count on is how they're going to fill in the blanks of the game. I mean, there's significant blanks in the game.

We don't know.

There's a lot about the fireflies we don't know. There's a lot about how federal works that we don't know. You know next to nothing about how the fungus spread. And the fact that you know, episode one, you get all this interesting backstory. You follow Sarah for a lot longer than you initially think that, you know, considering how long you follow a drole. Episode two, you get how

Stuff, which is what the game does, so replicating those

Later this week, for our Friday episode, we're going to be covering the video game and second installment of our coverage of the Last of Us video games, so check back for that, and of course we're going to be covering the Last of Us on Hbox every Wednesday. In your Headphones Up next nerd Out.

In today's nerd Out, where you tell us what you love, am why, or as you have been doing recently, share a theory with us that makes you excited, which is obviously we love theories. The tim foil Hattier the better, But so far, I have to say we've been getting a lot of very sensible theories. And yes, we have a new theory from Brandon that is about how a real life incident could possibly inspire the way that the MCU chooses to introduce mutants. So Jason joinerated the theory.

Sure, Hi, Jason and Rosie, Hi, I've been behind on podcasts and catching up and every time you talk about mutants needing to be hated and feared, I have thought and forget to send it in. I think there's a really great and effective way to do it that the audience would buy immediately. Make it a pandemic. Agents of Shield kind of use this idea with terogenesis during they're in Humans ARC, and I think it would work really well in our post pandemic time. My two sense things.

Yeah, in Humans pterogenesis and kind of the way that they get their powers, which is you have to go through this process where the terodymis brings out your powers. There's definitely a way with mutants because terogenesis is very similar to like the mutant gene being activated. We know that in the Weapon X program, and even if even in like the Deadpool movies, which everyone's really familiar with, there's this idea that you can activate a mutant gene.

Now, fun fact, the Terrogen bomb and Terror Genesis, you know, the kind of elevator pitch of that storyline was that a bomb filled with terrogen miss was detonated in the atmosphere, causing lots of people who have the latent in human gene to develop, including Kamalakon, including Kamalicon. Now, fun fact, this was done in Marvel Comics pre Disney's acquisition of Fox as.

A way to bring the mutant to the screen with because they didn't own the IP at that exactly, so at the time there was it was quite hard to find a Fantastic Four comic because they didn't own the IP. It had been licensed away, and it was very hard to find a comic that was solely focused on the X Men and the terror gen Bomb and the Cherogian myst and people like Kamala Khan who was originally pitched

Yeah, no, thank you, thanks for and if you have theories or passions you want to share, hit us up at x ray at crooked dot com. Instructions in the show notes.

That's it for us, Rosie. Anything to plug uh. You can follow me on Instagram and let the box. That's my only social media, Rosie Marx with an X. I will be writing a bunch of stuff in the lead up to A Man and the Wasp Quantumania, which obviously we are very excited about, and we'll be getting more excited about In the upcoming weeks. You can check out my writing at IGN, Nerdict, Polygon, Den of Geek, all

You can find me in your podcast reet every Wednesday, Every Wednesday, right here, right here, mut And that's about it right now. I'll watch Primo when it comes out on Amazon freebe sometime I don't know, in the spring end or summer of twenty twenty three, and we'll catch you.

On the flip side. Five star reviews, five star ratings. We want one.

No, we want two, No, we want three, no, four, keep going five? Yes, perfect, we want five star ratings.

We want five.

Five star ratings. On your podcast review rating platform of choice. Here is one from Bills Preston. Love this pod, Thank you, Bill x Ray is at the top of my list of awesome pods. I love listening to Jason and Rosie. The depth of their comics and pop culture knowledge. It's amazing, super pumped. The show is coming twice a week in twenty twenty three.

That's all right, it is. Let's do it twice a week. We're pumped too, And if you want to read a transcript of the show something I'm very excited about, they are posted beneath the show notes on the Crooked website for each episode within a forty eight hours of you being able to listen. Says a great way for more people to be able to experience the show.

Catch the next episode on Friday, January twenty seventh, and remember we're bringing you two episodes a week, two to two two two episodes a week. That's twice the episodes twice, the deep dives two times, the everything else. Subscribe to us on YouTube, where you can now watch full episodes of this show. Plus follow the at XRV pod handle on Twitter and check out the discord. Come to the discord, folks.