My friends Tinkered Thinking (author of White Mirror & The Lucilius Parables ✍️📚) and Jameson Olsen (host of Becoming the Main Character 🎙️🧝♂️) came back for the ultimate extra-nerdy Project Hail Mary conversation: everything we loved, questioned, and overanalyzed about both the book and film. 📙🎬
🚨 If you haven’t read the book or seen the film, bookmark this and come back. Seriously. This one’s worth avoiding spoilers and going in blind. 🚨
We go deep on the book first, because it’s the foundation and the more complete version of the story, then turn to the film, the production, and what the adaptation gained and lost.
Some of the rabbit holes we go down: 🕳️🐇
Not a reluctant hero. An avoidant one, which is very rare!
Why making Grace alone on the ship is the decision that makes everything else possible, and how a group of humans may have reacted differently to first contact.
Stratt runs one algorithm on every choice, and it’s the one most of us are too squeamish to run. Why she’s the best character in the book, and why the film’s karaoke scene is its worst mistake.
The most alien alien possible: no face, lives in ammonia, looks like a spider. Weir stacked the deck against Rocky on purpose. So why do we love him? 🕷️👽
Is Rocky a preview of humanity's first contact with AI? 🤔
The one plot change in the film that Andy Weir says he wishes he’d thought of for the book.
A species that never looked up, and what that says about everything humans built because we happened to see the stars. 🔭
“Everybody did their job” on the film. The imperfectionist cinematography of Greig Fraser. 🎞️ 🎥
Gosling carrying a whole film alone in a room with a puppet, a four-hour cut you’ll never see, and why the book is still the canon.
And, as always, we wander: Interstellar’s water-planet plot hole (Tinkered’s blood boils), whether more gravity would actually make Grace stronger rather than older, R2-D2 as the secret hero of Star Wars, the James Joyce theory of the “kneecapped” modern male, and me-burgers. 🍔
Amaze!
(Yes, it’s a kind of reunion episode, with the same crew as on the pod for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms ⚔️🥚🛡️🏰🐴. We had so much fun, we had to do round #2.)
🎧 Listen on Spotify
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📺 Watch on YouTube
🗄 More TV & Film Podcasts from the Archives 🍿
🎧 A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: Going Deep with Tinkered Thinking and Jameson Olsen ⚔️🥚🛡️🏰🐴
🎧 White Mirror: 31 Stories, a $1,000 Puzzle, and Sci-Fi to Reboot Your Childlike Wonder 🦾🪞📖🦋
🎧 David Senra on Deadwood (also: founders, entrepreneurs, civilization, Henry Singleton, Walt Disney, David Ogilvy, etc)
🎧 Sicario by Denis Villeneuve: Going Deep with Ed William and Dylan O’Sullivan 🎥 🎬 🎞️ 🍿
🎧 The Last of Us: Going Deep on HBO’s Amazing Show with Matt Reustle and Tinkered Thinking 🍄
🎧 TENET Deconstructed: ↔️ Christopher Nolan’s Mind-Bending Time Thriller 🔁 (with BOTH Tinkered Thinking and Dylan)
🗄 More Podcasts from the Archives 💡
🎧 The Cost of Glory with Alex Petkas: Timeless Lessons from Ancient Greece and Rome 🏛️🏺📜 🏹⚔️🦅⚖️
🎧 Going deep on Constellation Software with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)
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