Daniel Horowitz Garcia and Edward Hall

[00:01] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: My name is Edward Austin Hall Today I am 58 years old. The date is Tuesday, February 4, 2020. And I am at StoryCorps Atlanta with Daniel Horowitz Garcia my friend and colleague.

[00:22] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I am Daniel Horowitz Garcia I am 49 years old. Today is Tuesday, February 4, 2020. I am at StoryCorps Atlanta. I am here with Edward Austin Hall my friend and colleague and fellow geek.

[00:37] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: There we go. And that sets the tone for the 40 minutes, doesn't it? So last night I watched the pilot for Picard.

[00:46] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[00:47] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Rumor has it you watched it today.

[00:49] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I was doing research. I was doing research for a conversation today.

[00:54] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yes. And what did you see there?

[00:59] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So there's this thing about Star Trek. I really like Star Trek. I've always liked Star Trek. I have. But the thing about Star Trek is if you are darker than loose leaf paper, they mess with your forehead.

[01:14] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yes.

[01:15] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Which they did. There have been, I think there have been two Latino characters ever on Star Trek. One was Torres. She was the one on Voyager who was Klingon and human.

[01:28] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Okay.

[01:29] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Forehead, messed up forehead. Still count her as Latina because, you know, like this. It's the Puerto Rican thing. If you have any Puerto Rican, you're Puerto Rican. It doesn't matter. Like, she could be Puerto Rican and Klingon, she's still Puerto Rican. I don't know if she. I actually don't know if it's cannabis, but last name Torres. I countered. And then there was an extra in like two or three episodes of DS9 who was killed, of course. And he. In the. He was. Had a speaking role though. So in the last. I know the last scene where he dies, he just starts battling in Spanish.

[02:03] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Is a killed mid sentence.

[02:05] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I think he's a fade out. He just starts. He fades out and dies. He's with.

[02:10] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: He dies mid sentence. It's kind of like he's killed for speaking Spanish.

[02:14] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Just a little bit. A little bit. Like with Juno Diaz. Juno, Dominican writer. And he says there are people who learn who are fluent in Elvish, but if you put one line of Spanish in a novel, they lose their minds.

[02:32] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[02:32] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And that. So, so we should explain, like the scene. Like it's the first.

[02:37] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: It's the second.

[02:38] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Six minutes. It's six.

[02:39] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Six minutes.

[02:39] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Six minutes.

[02:40] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: And it's the second scene. Third. Third scene. But the first not involving the title character. It's. Let's call her the MacGuffin.

[02:54] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Okay. Yes.

[02:55] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Of the show, of the episode. And she's with her boyfriend who is played by a black actor, I believe It's David Canzel. Carzell.

[03:07] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I thought it was Carol. Carol.

[03:09] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Z, E, L. L is the last syllable and it's C A N or C A, R. I looked and he's playing a Zaheyan, which is not a race I had ever heard of in the Star Trek Continuum. Interestingly, there's an invisible black character in this episode, if I'm not mistaken. The Daystrom Institute. Remember the killer computer from the original Star Strat? Star Trek. Star Trek.

[03:33] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: The first one. The one that nobody could watch. The V'Ger.

[03:35] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: No, no, the original series. Remember they in somebody invents a computer that's supposed to take over a starship and run it and it ends up wiping out like a significant chunk of Starfleet. You never saw this one.

[03:50] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Don't remember this.

[03:51] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: So it's. I believe it's Fred Williams. It's the guy. I think it's the guy who plays. Played Dracula. Excuse me? Blackula. And you know, one of his. He's doing kind of a Shakespearean turn.

[04:02] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And he's the voice of.

[04:05] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: No, he's the inventor of the doomsday machine. Because they always make the black guy the inventor of the doomsday machine. Dyson. Anybody? Terminator. Hello. What's his name? Right, right. Brother from another. Brother from another apocalypse. Yeah.

[04:24] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So he. So he's a black character, but he's an alien.

[04:29] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right.

[04:30] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And he has locks. But he doesn't really have locks.

[04:33] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right. They're more like growth. Yeah, yeah, almost.

[04:36] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And his eyes.

[04:37] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Succulent. Yeah, they're like succulent plants growing out of his scalp.

[04:41] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: It reminded me of like. What is that? Artichoke?

[04:47] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Uh huh.

[04:48] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Like if you imagine an artichoke, he.

[04:50] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Had a bit of an artichoke, but.

[04:52] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Like dark, dark black. That was his hair.

[04:54] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right, like glossy, glossy, glossy black artichoke.

[04:58] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: On top of his head.

[04:58] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right, right, right. But lobes. Right, like lobes on top of his head.

[05:01] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And then his eyes were kind of weird, funky weird, and they blinked different and Stu.

[05:06] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yep, yep, yep.

[05:07] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And then what happens to him, Ed?

[05:09] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: He catches a knife in the chest. I think it's the most brutal killing in the episode. Short of the McGuffins. Yeah, the McGuffins. The McGuffin. So, yeah, the woman and the black guy who are dating and therefore it could be read as punishment. Don't. Don't go outside your lane. Both get axed in the worst ways in this episode.

[05:37] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So it was. But the other thing that got me is it's a good episode.

[05:43] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: It's pretty good.

[05:44] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Like it's a good. I mean, I've always thought I've seen. But it's a good show.

[05:47] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: It's a good show. It's got, it's, you know, hats off on the production values. Yeah, hats off. I really think that the two places that science fiction must go on the one hand to really think about our role in the universe is to recognize that there's not just one. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson says, When did the universe ever make one of anything? So we can't presume that we say universe, but now we strongly suspect there are multiple universes. And so the idea of multiverses, I'm just reading last night about string theory, you know, if that's true, okay, nine dimensions, you know, most of which we can't perceive at all. So that could in fact be parallel worlds that are right next door, which is to say it could be parallel earths. That has to be explored. But more important to me than that is the idea of artificial life. And artificial life is at the very center of this pilot.

[06:49] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yes, yes.

[06:53] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: And I've, I've given a talk about this mainly from the standpoint of like androids, particularly in the Marvel universe, because they have had a recurring key role there, whether it's vision, whether it's Scorpio and his Zodiac fighting the Defenders, which is really. I mean, to me that's the first masterpiece of science fiction, not the Galactus trilogy, folks. David Anthony crafts, right? 48 defenders original run. 48, 49, 50. Where this is Jake Fury, Nick Fury's younger brother. Or is it building a life model, a superpowered life model, decoy, Zodiac all his own.

[07:38] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Why?

[07:38] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: So he can have somebody to drink beer with. This is one of the great tragedies of superhero comics. And, but. And it, and it get right and it gets at. Part of the tragedy is.

[07:51] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: But. And when did that come out, though?

[07:54] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: 70S.

[07:54] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So in the 70s, it's like right.

[07:56] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Around the time Star wars comes out.

[07:58] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So but if you think about it, the banality of like building an Android so you can have somebody you drink beer with. And now like actual interactive robots are being built. And what are they being built for? Sex.

[08:10] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Oh, sure. No, we knew. Look, so any new technology is going to have either pornography or sex work in its vanguard. In its vanguard. And I'm not just speculating about that.

[08:23] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: No, that's. I mean, that's what drives.

[08:26] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: That's the printing press. That's everything.

[08:28] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah, especially what drives computers. But I think more told, more central to that is from the 70s until now it's this Swiss March. Well, it's about men and men not having relationships. Right. So it's like, it's a lot easier. It's a lot easier for this guy to build an Android, to have somebody to drink beer with than it is to make a friend. Right. It's like the limit of the imagination as what I think really good science fiction and fantasy kind of explore. Like, remember those movies when everybody was terrified? So here, like, I think science fiction is in fantasy, but mostly science fiction is about the technology we're afraid of. Right.

[09:10] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[09:10] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And horror is about the thing we're afraid of. Right. So this is where. I don't remember. It's Milton Davis or Balogun who talks about how like zombies is really fear of black people. Right. Because the zombies really come up around Haiti and everything. So, like the fear of the zombie horde is the fear of black people and especially working class people taking over and taking.

[09:31] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yes.

[09:32] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And attacking people. Right.

[09:33] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Zombies have class and race whatever color their skin or what their bank balance is.

[09:39] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah. So. But in the 80s, the thing we were terrified of is nuclear war. We're all going to die from nuclear war. So all these movies that came out, remember, like the day after and all this stuff where. Because like, oh, this is what's life going to be like after? So literally millions of dollars are spent trying to figure out what the world would be like after a nuclear war. And that was considered easier than not having a nuclear war. Like, okay, well, perhaps we could do something policy wise to make sure nuclear war doesn't happen. No, that's not realistic. Yeah.

[10:13] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: It's two minutes to midnight as we sit here.

[10:15] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah, right. I think now it's like 100 seconds or something. It's like under two minutes. It's so the.

[10:21] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I know they advanced the Doomsday Clock recently.

[10:24] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So I feel like Star Trek has from the very beginning. Like Roddenberry is Star Trek talking about the potential liberation value of technology. Hey, we don't have to do crap work anymore, you know?

[10:40] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: And therefore, infinite abundance.

[10:42] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yes. Yeah, yeah. An impending power. An unending clean power source.

[10:48] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yes.

[10:49] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So everybody can have. Right, right. And it's in that.

[10:54] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Unless they're synthetic.

[10:55] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Unless there's. Well, Roddenberry has that like liberal imagination. Like the 1960s liberal imagination. Right. That. And I've been thinking about this because we're just coming down off Martin Luther King Day was like two weeks ago. And it just drives me nuts when people like Martin Luther King Day drives me nuts. But people talk about like the I have a Dream speech. And I'm like, you should read Letter from a Birmingham Jail where King literally says, hey, I understand where the Klan members coming from. I don't agree with him, but I can understand. I don't understand white liberals. What the hell is wrong with you? Like, I understand why that guy wants me dead. I don't understand why you're okay with it. You know, and so, like, that kind of part. So there's this part about, like, there's that classic one that the guy who used to play the Riddler was on. Remember?

[11:52] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Frank Gorshin?

[11:52] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Frank Gorshin, where he's.

[11:54] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right, he's black on one side, he's white on the other side. And of course.

[11:57] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And it's like, oh, well, this is.

[11:59] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: What are you fighting over? Well, I am black on the left, he is black on the right.

[12:04] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah, exactly right. Which is more an indictment on how white liberals saw race in the United States than it was on about race in the United States. It was like, do you really think that's what this comes down to? Really?

[12:17] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[12:18] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Right. It's just like, I don't like him because, like. Really?

[12:20] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah. Well, look, I don't know. Joss Whedon always manages to mangle his pilots. And his season openers, the season open.

[12:34] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: All his fault.

[12:35] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Okay, but I'm just gonna tell. I'm just gonna say it, right? Like, every. Almost every season opener for Buffy, for example, is crap.

[12:44] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Okay, yeah, that's. The season finales are amazing.

[12:48] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: But. But wait, there's more. Star Trek, the Next Generation, the forebear of Picard. Right. Has the single worst piece of dialogue to issue from a black actor's mouth.

[13:07] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Wait, wait. That is such a bold statement. I really. You gotta have to.

[13:12] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: It's so true. Of course. It's LeVar Burton.

[13:14] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[13:14] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Playing Geordie La Forge. And they're brainstorming something or other, and you can see LeVar Burton. Let me back up a second. There is a way of playing a line you do not want to deliver, and you deliver it under duress and you give it such an intonation that anyone who hears it knows I actually fought against having to say this, but I'm saying it anyway because I lost. Right. So that's Linda Hunt in the David Lynch Dune, I am the housekeeper. Right here, it's La Forge. Somebody says something, and then he says, and I quote, ooi. You don't remember him saying oo wee? He absolutely says, ooey.

[14:11] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Really?

[14:11] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: He really says, ooh? In the pilot.

[14:15] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: In the pilot.

[14:16] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: In the pilot.

[14:17] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Oh, man.

[14:18] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: What? It's something at Far Point or whatever it's called.

[14:21] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[14:22] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: And so. And if you look at his body language, it's really clear. He's like, oh, my God, I do not believe these white people are making me say this.

[14:36] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So, I mean, it's not coming out of nowhere. No, but. And Next Generation did a really good job of dealing with, like, they lay in canon about how they've wrestled with what is life, what exactly life. And okay, we know sentient life has rights. So when do we call something sentient? And they. They talk about that with Data. They lay all this groundwork with Picard about all this stuff. They don't do a really good. After Gene Roddenberry dies.

[15:05] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[15:06] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Is when Star Trek as a whole starts dealing with more complex questions. Right. So it's like after he died. I think it's after he dies, there's the lesbian kiss on Deep Space Nine. But it's definitely after he dies when you get like, the marquis invasion. I mean, the marquis start resisting and it's suddenly this great, this paradise. Literally what Cisco calls Earth, he calls it multiple times on multiple episodes. It's paradise. Right.

[15:37] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: So which is what he refer.

[15:39] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Earth is paradise.

[15:40] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Paradise.

[15:41] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Okay. And because there's the. From the Gamma Quadrant. Yeah, the. Those aliens that can shape the wormhole.

[15:49] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, Odos.

[15:50] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Odos people, they can shape shift. And so they go to Earth and they're running havoc. And because of that fear, Earth becomes more and more authoritarian because nobody can tell who they don't know. There's only like three or four aliens.

[16:04] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Tell who the enemy.

[16:05] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Who's what? No one can tell who's what. Which also talks by not just a white fear, but a male fear. Right?

[16:13] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: That's right.

[16:14] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: If I can't identify you at sight.

[16:16] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right.

[16:17] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Your race and your gender.

[16:18] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Wait, you're not a. And you like what?

[16:21] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah. Then it's a huge fear. Right. So Cisco calls Earth paradise on multiple occasions. But when they talk about the Maquis and how the Maquis are resisting the Cardassians, and the Maquis are these Federation citizens that live on these planets. And then in negotiation with the Cardassians, another alien empire, basically, the Federation gives up control and says, okay, you people, you have to move from these planets. And the folks are like, we're not moving. This is us and this is our home. We're not leaving. And there's a whole episode around about Back to Next Generation stuff about Native Americans who left leave Earth to go and Settle and then are forced to settle again, but they don't. They end up fighting the Cardassians and Deep Space Nines is when the Maquis, which are these people who rise up against the. And they. And you look, in all good literature, the villain has a point, right? So the Maquis are considered the villain, but what they pose to it is like, you say you are paradise and you say you fight for all of this and yet you abandoned us the second we needed you.

[17:29] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yes. Let's go back to that lesbian kiss for a second.

[17:33] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Okay?

[17:34] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Because as you may recall, it involves the Trill. Right, and the Doctor.

[17:40] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Dax.

[17:40] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, Dax.

[17:41] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And then.

[17:43] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right.

[17:44] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Jadia Dax. And.

[17:48] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Doctor. Is it Doctor. What's her.

[17:51] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: No, it's not a recurring. No, no, no, it's not a recurring character.

[17:55] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Okay.

[17:56] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Because it's a. It's a love from her past. Dax's past. And so the problem.

[18:01] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: In love with the Trill, who's like a parasite, right?

[18:05] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: No, no, Dax is the parasite. Well, not a paradigm. She's not a parasite. She's a. What do they call it when you have two.

[18:14] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Symbiote.

[18:14] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Symbiote.

[18:15] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: A symbiote.

[18:16] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So Dax is a symbiote and Jadzia is the host. Right. And so when they're joined, they're Jadzia Dax. Right, got it. And so they have. And there's this culture. Yeah, so this culture has this whole. All these rules around it because Dax the symbiote, lives for an extremely long time. The hosts do not. And so what they've determined is the only way for the host not to go insane and try to fix every wrong in their life is to say, this is a new life. You cannot go back. That person is dead. But so Dax is still in love with this woman.

[18:52] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[18:53] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So the what's never addressed in the episode. If I remember right, it's never addressed as like, they're the same gender. That's not the issue. The issue is it's Jadzia Dax. The other Dax is gone. Right. So they're supposed to cut off ties.

[19:08] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right.

[19:09] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: But she doesn't want to. And that's where all the complications and so on rise.

[19:16] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Then maybe I'm thinking of a different lesbian kiss, because there's a lesbian kiss that in fandom circles is considered kind of the chicken shit option. Oh, yeah.

[19:26] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Well, if we're talking about that, then Xena Warrior Princess wins for all of us. There's the quote unquote lesbian kiss.

[19:33] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Let's not go afield. Let's not go afield. Stick to stay on point here. Stay on far point here. Yeah, you know, I just. I don't remember it well enough. I know I either watched it or tried to watch it. I just don't remember it well enough. But yeah, when it, when it. Weirdly for a show about so, so, so many others.

[20:00] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah, they're not very others.

[20:02] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Star Trek really has trouble depicting the other.

[20:05] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: They really. Yeah, they do. They really do.

[20:07] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: They really do.

[20:08] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And the aliens are not. No one's really alien. Which again is tied into this liberal imagination, especially the 1960s liberal imagination. Underneath, we're all just the same kind of stuff.

[20:18] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, I mean, they're not the only sinner in that regard. But I want to say Star Trek pioneers, that idea that is perhaps adopted, if not stolen by Marvel Comics, that there's a superior race that has seeded humanoids all over not simply the galaxy, but all over creation.

[20:43] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah, no, that's canon maybe.

[20:45] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[20:46] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Oh, well, actually now I don't know if it's canon because of the films and I mean.

[20:50] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: And I think Larry Niven does a bit of this in the known space stories.

[20:54] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[20:54] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I believe the protectors seed humanoids. Right. I mean, and they're close enough that Louis Wu can have sex with a woman who naturally grows a beard on Ring World.

[21:10] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: By the way.

[21:10] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: That's right, by the way. By the way, did I tell you I won a subscription to the magazine of fantasy and science fiction? No, I didn't mean to rhyme there. You know how I did it, huh? Okay, let's back up. So Ring world. Larry Niven. So real short, a ring world. For those of you who have never played Halo or never read Larry Niven, Take a Dyson sphere. Yes. This is like essentially a hollow ball. It completely surrounds the sun, so you're not wasting any of that good energy. This is a real concept pioneered by the scientist and futurist Freeman Dyson. Cut away. Imagine your standard globe that has an equator taped around it.

[21:50] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[21:50] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Cut away everything that's not the tape. Where the equator is from the top and bottom.

[21:55] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[21:55] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: That hoop that's left. Stick a sun in the middle where you would have the hot boiling core of a planet. And then stretch that ring out till it's one au, right, the earth's distance from the sun. Now spin it fast enough so there's gravity on the inside. That's a ring world. Okay? Now if you live on the inside of that ring, right, you can't see an au. So the ring world looks from the Surface of the ring world. Like a gigantic arch stretching on either side and then disappearing as it gets close to the center. Right. So close to the. Close to the sun, the primary around which it spins, not orbits. Okay, so now you know that part. And then again, because there's all these protector created humanoids as well as other aliens who are not humanoid at all, like the Kzinti, who are actually owned by Paramount and Star Trek for screen purposes because Larry Nivens sold them the software weapon for Star Trek the Animated Series. They were going to be in Star Trek Enterprise if it had gone one more season. Man. Cousin Wars. There is a practice called rishathra, which is sex between people of different. Right. Species. Sentient species. So essentially it's alien sex and it's called rishathra.

[23:27] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Okay.

[23:28] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Now, the contest in which I won honorable mention was take the title of a famous work of science fiction. Could be a movie, could be a book story. Turn the title using each letter into an acronym describing the plot. So rishabhra, question mark. It's Naughty genetics. While. Oh, Ring looms. Grammatically Ring World. That's how I won.

[23:56] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yay.

[23:58] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I had other submissions, but I don't remember what they're.

[24:04] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I haven't thought of that. I thought of Larry Niven's Ring world in a bit.

[24:08] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Larry Niven.

[24:09] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I mean, all of them. It's like this con. Well, that's the conversation we were having about, like there was a lot of these. The old guard of science fiction. And then when I, when I was a kid, I read all of them. Everything.

[24:21] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[24:22] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: But you know, that's also like saying, you know, if you're in a room with one book and like I read every room here. I've read every book here. You know, like, it's not that big a deal. Like, they were limited, so I mean, I've read them all because that was what there was to read.

[24:36] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right. It was a much smaller field then as people made the point, you know, before it exploded and essentially took over the world. Right. When. When you and I grew up.

[24:47] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[24:48] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: The top grossing film in history was nothing like science fiction.

[24:54] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[24:55] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right. Like it was Jaws for a long time.

[24:58] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[24:59] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: And still in terms of like unadjusted. It's still Gone with the Wind, I think.

[25:03] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Well, still, like if you think about when Jaws came out, I don't know, late 70s, 10 years ago was the first time that there was an actual large film that did not have a happy ending.

[25:16] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah. Mm.

[25:18] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: You know, and that would Night of Living Dead. Yeah, like, other than that, like, it's. It was in general, the. I mean, for a little bit in the 30s, before you had, like, the MPAA and all that stuff that. And you. The good guys won. You knew who the good guys were. The good guys always looked like good guys. They were always guys, you know, like, all that stuff was just the same. And then Night of the Living Dead comes out. I think 911 dead also has a black actor who is the living, which starts the trend. Sorry, no. If you haven't seen that Living Dead.

[25:56] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Now, shame on you.

[25:58] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: But my. That also starts the trend of black people can't live through the film.

[26:04] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: That's right. Which. Rob, who's it is it. Hollywood Shuffle makes perfect hash of that, right?

[26:16] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I don't know if that's. I don't remember the.

[26:18] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: This is. It's. I think it's an assemblage of vignettes. Or it might be about some actors in Hollywood. It's been so long since I've seen Hollywood Shuffle. But, yeah, like, a bunch of actors are standing around all black, Right. And they're bit players now, saying, like, so how long into the movie is until your character dies? Right. So, yes, that syndrome. Which brings us back around to Pet Card, which was.

[26:45] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I mean, six minutes. I looked. It was six minutes in. You could just buy it. And I was like, wow, this is interesting. Where is this going to go? And then, boom. It. I was like, oh.

[26:56] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I mean, just a brutal. Yeah, a brutal slaying.

[27:00] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I mean, part of me is like, okay, I. For Star Trek, that was shocking.

[27:08] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: It was.

[27:09] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: That was a shocking scene for a Star Trek episode.

[27:12] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: It was. The violence was a surprise.

[27:14] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah. To something. Because usually it's not like bad things don't happen in Star Trek, but you don't see it in Star Trek. You just hear about the fallout afterwards. Right? This was.

[27:24] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: You see big things blow up and you. You can. You might. You might see, you know, someone sucked out into the void or incinerated maybe.

[27:32] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: But you're not there when, like, the genocide happens. Right. Or you're not. You're not there when the horrible. You're there when people are like, everybody. You're there when everyone's trying to pick up the pieces. Right? This is. It's right there in front of you.

[27:46] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[27:46] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Very clearly, these two people, very much in love. All the stuff. He's very. He's kind of cute. They're so adorable together. Brutally killed, and you're like, what the hell just happened? And why?

[27:56] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I kind of got A whiff of it. Honestly, as he was checking the Replicator.

[28:00] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: A little bit, it was like. But. But that's it. Like, in the micro, you're like, oh, this is very different from Star Trek. But in the macro, it's like, well, no, this is actually right.

[28:09] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: This is par for the course.

[28:10] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: This is a trope.

[28:11] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: And.

[28:14] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And for Michael Chabon, I don't know, for him to do that, I was like, oh, really? You're gonna go with the cliche?

[28:21] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Start right there. Right there.

[28:22] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: You're gonna start with the cliche, really?

[28:24] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah. You know, I. Yeah.

[28:31] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: You know, it was.

[28:33] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Wasn't it? Didn't Walter Mosley get fired or left the writers room of the show?

[28:41] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: He definitely did not finish that. He would.

[28:44] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: He. Yeah, yeah, it was. It was. It was. Right. And it wasn't that. And was it that show? I guess it was that show. It's the 100%. Walter Mosley was in the writer's room for one of the Star Trek shows that is in production. And I don't know if it was Picard or Discovery.

[29:01] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: It might have been Discovery.

[29:02] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: It might have been Discovery.

[29:03] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Oh, that's a good show, too, though.

[29:05] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I've not seen it.

[29:07] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: That's a good. That's the trouble about all the streaming stuff now. It's very difficult.

[29:11] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah. I'm not. You know, I capped it at Disney.

[29:15] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[29:19] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Because I got to have my Marvel fix. I saw some still images and actually, like, seconds of footage from WandaVision. Falcon and the Snowman. Yes. I meant to say that Falcon and the Winter Soldier. I swear, I think that they're calling back to Falcon and the Snowman. The old. The Sean Penn spy movie. Oh, yeah, right. Somebody could not resist that callback. And that's why it's not Captain America and the Winter Soldier, but. And I guess a still image from Loki all, I think ran during the super bowl. And so somebody was picking them apart on io9, but. Yeah. And WandaVision looks as completely bizarre as it has been set up to be. Do you know what it is?

[30:25] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: No. It's WandaVision.

[30:27] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: So, you know Vision was brutally murdered in Infinity War.

[30:32] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[30:32] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Thanos digs the mind gem out of his forehead and pops it into his little glove and wham, bam, goodbye, Sam. What is it? Snapchat, everybody?

[30:47] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[30:48] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: So. Well, half of everybody. Half of everything, too, if it's alive. And so. And because. Right. Like, he is debatably alive and is killed. And the way that he's killed, he's not snapped.

[31:10] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[31:11] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: So he's not brought back plus, they got a whole. They got a Mind Gym to, I don't know, put wherever it was the Mind Gym needed to be.

[31:19] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[31:23] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Although, I mean, at that point, I feel like the Mind Gym should be envisioned, but.

[31:27] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Well, they have to destroy all the gems.

[31:30] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: That's right. It's destroyed. So there is no. There's no Mind Gem to go back. And Vision. That's right. So, you know, in the comics, famously, Scarlet Witch, after Vision is destroyed for. I don't know which time.

[31:45] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[31:46] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: She, like, has the comic book equivalent of a hysterical pregnancy because she can warp reality. She produces two kids, even though we presume that a synthezoid, which is what Vision was in the comics, or an Android, which is what he is on screen, might not be capable of reproducing with a human woman, even an enhanced one. But, yeah, there's a couple of different comics about this going back decades. The most recent of them by Tom King, in which it's not Wanda, but it's Vision, who tries to create an Android partner and two Android children for himself. Almost an echo of what Wanda did previously. And then she also, at one point, if you remember the House of M storyline, where she kind of wishes everybody has their perfect world, and it ends up being a world where mutants rule the world. Yeah. Magneto's, like, literally running the world. Yeah, there's some. I think two of the Young Avengers, the twins and the. In the Young Avengers are Wanda's kids. So, yeah, it's gonna deal with a lot of that. Like, if you had the power to warp reality and then you wound up basically with ptsd, what would happen? What would you imagine?

[33:12] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Huh.

[33:13] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: And so. And, like, a lot of it is Wanda and Vision kind of dressed like they're not only not like they fell asleep watching sitcoms, but very specific sitcoms, and now they are the stars of the sitcom. But it's different sitcoms. Some of them black and white, some of them in color.

[33:29] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: That reminds me. That sounds a lot like the way they're. I think it's Legion.

[33:34] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah. Right.

[33:35] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Where you don't realize it's a superhero movie until a few. Excuse me. Superhero show until a few episodes in, when you're just like, oh, well, this guy's every.

[33:43] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: He's right. He's out of his mind. He's not out of his mind.

[33:45] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah, he, like, you know, he's not schizophrenic. He actually is hearing other people talk, and he can move stuff.

[33:52] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: That's right.

[33:52] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Which I think actually is a. As an establishment for A plot goes back to Woman on the Edge of Time. Right.

[33:59] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: March Piercing.

[34:00] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah. Yeah. Which. I mean, you read that novel, you don't know, at the end, is she really traveling back and forth through time, or is she imagining this, you know? And was.

[34:10] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Would be Buffy really a slayer, or was she always in a madhouse?

[34:13] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Oh, yeah. You know, now, Buffy was a slayer. I'm more. I was more of an angel guy.

[34:22] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Agreed. I like that.

[34:24] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Buffy was really good, but Angel I like better.

[34:26] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Did we talk about the fact that given. Is it. Is it David Greenwald? David Greenwalt's involvement almost. Almost brought Adrian Pazdar, who, you know, has a recurring role on agents of SHIELD as kind of Thunderbolt Ross Jr. What's his name there? Sometimes he's helping out the SHIELD agents, sometimes he's a foil for them. But he had a show of his own, probably more than a decade ago now, called Prophet, where he was a sociopath.

[35:04] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Oh, no.

[35:05] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: It was a. It was this beautiful critique of American. Of corporate America, where he's raised in a box by, like, completely derelict parents and. Yeah, he's. He's a monster. And he's, like, killing off competitors to get jobs and rising corporate America. So because Greenwald controlled that character, they almost brought Prophet in as a foil for angel, really. Which would. Right. I want to live in that alternate world. I want to live in that alternate world.

[35:44] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Wow.

[35:45] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: That would have been so great.

[35:47] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[35:49] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: And to see. Right. Like, Prophet. Because that was the next place for Prophet to go. It was like dark magic. So Walter. Walter White with pentagrams.

[35:59] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Well, that's kind of where angel was gone, except for the puppet. The puppet episode.

[36:03] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Angel ended up angel kind of really, I thought, toward the end. Turned into such a pitch perfect critique of the Bush administration. Right. With the.

[36:15] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Well, there's also that. I mean, that. That. That actually. A good point. Because that's why the puppet episode comes in. Right. Because it's a completely absurd.

[36:24] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[36:24] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And they're like.

[36:25] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[36:25] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah. I mean. Yes. What we're talking about is completely. We're having a debate about whether or not torture is okay. This is absurd.

[36:31] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[36:32] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: You know, but.

[36:33] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, and it's. And it was very much about, like, how. How compromised do you want to be? Right, Wolfram?

[36:40] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah. Yeah.

[36:41] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: The wolf. The ram in the heart.

[36:42] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: It was a good show.

[36:44] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: It was a great show.

[36:46] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Do you ever wonder how, like that in the season, in the series finale, they go that battle, and he's like, I'm taking on the dragon. I want to know how that battle.

[36:55] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Ended up there is a comic that is supposedly canon that answers that question.

[37:01] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Well, that's it. That's the trouble with our time. There's a comic that answers every question.

[37:04] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, yeah. I think the Dark Horse series, that makes sense. Angel series, they did starts off right after that. And an angel ends up. He doesn't kill the dragon, he ends up riding it around. Because what happens is all of. Right. Remember that. You remember there's the episode of angel where he takes an elevator to hell, and it opens on a street in Los Angeles. Just a random street in Los Angeles. Right. And the trick of it is, Hell's right here. All the devils are here, pal. They take that metaphor. They concretize that metaphor in the comic where the minions of Hell and demons overrun the streets of Los Angeles and. Right. This seems to be, if I recall correctly, because I didn't follow the comic that closely. Right. This is objectively known. Like, we don't know what's happened to la. There's like some kind of bubble around it, or maybe not. Maybe people couldn't tell. I don't remember. But that's what it was. It was. It was Los Angeles as the inferno.

[38:13] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Oh, I could see that.

[38:14] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: With angels riding around on a dragon like it was Pern.

[38:20] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: A Skyrim. Are we.

[38:24] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: How are we looking?

[38:26] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Well, actually makes sense, because Dark Horse was where Weedon did those.

[38:30] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: The Buffy season, Firefly.

[38:33] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: After Fly Fi was canceled, he had those comics to explain whatever. What happened.

[38:38] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Well, and Buffy season. What. How long did Buffy last? 7.

[38:42] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I want to say 9, but I don't know. I might be wrong about that.

[38:45] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: No, I think it's seven. And so, like, Buffy season eight is literally. That's a. That's also a Dark Horse comic.

[38:53] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So that makes a lot of sense.

[38:54] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[38:55] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Thank you for being with me today.

[38:57] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Thank you. This was what I needed to take my mind off my trouble. It.