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Wicked: For Good · This Film is Lit

• 0:04
  Speaker A: This Film is Lit the podcast where we finally settle the score on one simple Is the book really better than the movie? I'm Brian and I have a film degree, so I watch the movie but don't read the book.
• 0:15
  Speaker B: And I'm Katie, I have an English degree, so I do things the right way and read the book before we watch the movie.
• 0:22
  Speaker A: So prepare to be wowed by our expertise and charm as we dissect all of your favorite film adaptations and decide if the silver screen the or the written word did it better. So turn it up, settle in and get ready for spoilers. Because this film is lit, We can't let good be just a word. It has to mean something. It's Wicked for good and this film is lit Foreign. Welcome back to this Film is like the podcast we talk about movies that are based on books. It's the second episode of our 2026 summer series breaking down the second half of the Wicked story, both in the book and the second movie, Wicked for Good. A little bit different than our normal format because we both read and both watched the movie. So we're just gonna go taking turns talking about all the stuff we liked better in each, but we're gonna start as we always do. If you have not read the book or watched Wicked for Good recently, here's a brief summary of the film. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. Just a reminder. I do use chapter markers, so if you don't need this summary, you can just skip right ahead to the next segment.
• 1:47
  Speaker B: This summary is sourced from Wikipedia, and if you haven't read the book, it will not help you because they're completely different.
• 1:54
  Speaker A: Yes, but this is spoilers very different.
• 1:57
  Speaker B: Summary of the movie Sometime after defying the Wonderful wizard of Oz, Elphaba Throp, now branded as the Wicked Witch of the west by Madame Morrible, continues battling for animal rights from a forest hideout, Glinda Upland. Now the wizard's spokesperson is engaged to Fierro Tiglar, now captain of the Gale Force. As Oz celebrates the grand opening of the Yellow Brick Road, Fierro reveals he is attempting to locate Alphabet, though Glynda insists Elphaba does not want to be found. Elphaba encounters some animals leaving Oz, including her former caretaker, Dulcibear, and encourages them to fight against the wizard. The Cowardly lion dissuades them, blaming Elphaba for freeing him from his cage as a cub, the only home he had known, and exposing her as the reason for the wizard's flying monkey spies Elphaba visits her sister Nessa Rose, who has inherited their father's governorship of Munchkin Land. Nessa Rose prohibits the monk, the Munchkins. Nessa Rose prohibits the Munchkins, including her servant Bach, from leaving without her approval. Elphaba enchants Nessa Rose's shoes, giving her the ability to fly. Bok, deciding Nessarose no longer needs him because of this, and having learned of Glynda and Fierro's wedding, tries to leave Nessa Rose. She casts a love spell from the Grimory, but it backfires, shrinking his heart. Elphaba's attempt to save him turns him into a Tin Man. Elphaba returns to the Emerald City, where Glinda implores her to join the wizard. She accepts under the condition that the flying monkeys be free. Chestery, one of the monkeys, reveals several animals imprisoned within the wizard's lair, including Dr. Dillamund, who has lost his ability to speak. Reaffirming her resolve to fight the wizard, Elphaba frees the animals, interrupting Fierro and Glinda's wedding. Fiero helps Elphaba escape and joins her, concluding that they are having an affair. Glinda vengefully suggests that the wizard and Madame Morrible lure Elphaba out by spreading a rumor that Dessarose is in trouble at their hideout. Alphabet and Fierro profess mutual love. He suggests that she should go to an abandoned castle, Kiamo Ko, for shelter. Morrible, realizing a simple rumor would not fool Elphaba, creates a tornado that brings a house from Kansas that fatally crushes Nessa Rose. Glinda gives Nessarose's shoes to the house's occupant, Dorothy Gale, and directs her to the wizard, promising that he can help her return home. A fight begins between Glynda and Alphaba before the Gale Force arrives. Fierro intervenes and holds back the guards by threatening to kill Glinda, who finally accepts that he loves Elphaba. While the guards drag Fierro into a field and savagely beat him as punishment, Elphaba escapes with the monkeys to Kemo Ko, where she casts a spell to save Fierro's life. Believing she has failed and lamenting all her previous failed attempts to do right, she decides to embrace her perceived wickedness. Dorothy, alongside Bok the Lion and a scarecrow, meets the wizard, who instructs them to kill Elphaba and bring him her broom. Bok rallies the citizens of the Emerald City against Elphaba, lamenting that her public image is built on lies. Glinda confronts Morrible about the tornado, but Morrible rebuffs her. Glinda rushes to Kiyamoko to warn Elphaba about the mob. Elphaba kidnaps Dorothy and imprisons her to retrieve the shoes just as Glynda arrives. After Chesteri informs them of Fierro's apparent death, Elphaba decides to surrender, imploring Glinda to withhold the truth from the people and entrusting her with the Grimory. They reaffirm their friendship in a tearful farewell. Glinda hides and watches in horror as Dorothy douses Elphaba with a bucket of water, seemingly melting her. Having regained speech, Chisery gives Glinda the green elixir bottle that belonged to Elphaba's mother. She brings it to the wizard, who realizes that he is Elphaba's biological father and the reason for her power. Ashamed of his actions, he leaves Oz. At Glinda's demand, Glynda directs the monkeys to apprehend and arrest Morrible for her crimes. She finishes telling her story to the Munchkins and re establishes rights for the animals, who get their voices back. The scarecrow, revealed to be Fierro, transformed by Elphaba's spell, returns to Kyamoko and finds Elphaba hiding under a trapdoor, having faked her death. Protect Glinda's reputation. Elphaba and Fiera depart Oz through the surrounding desert while the Grimory opens for Glinda.
• 6:54
  Speaker A: We have so much to compare. As we mentioned, there's so many differences between this book and this movie, so we got a lot to talk about. We're gonna start, as we always do, with what we thought was better in the book. You like to read?
• 7:11
  Speaker B: Oh, yes, I love to read.
• 7:13
  Speaker A: What do you like to read?
• 7:17
  Speaker B: Everything.
• 7:18
  Speaker A: All right. We're gonna start with better in the book, which is all the stuff that we thought was better in the book and. Or stuff that we did not like in the movie. This is gonna be an interesting episode, Katie. As we said, leading into this, lots to talk about, but it's a. It's a different episode this time than the first one, where the first one was, wow, we like both of these things this time, not quite the same thing.
• 7:40
  Speaker B: Kind of the opposite.
• 7:41
  Speaker A: Kind of the opposite, which you will. It will become more and more clear as we get further and further into this episode. But I wanted to start with some stuff that I did like in the book, which is one little line that cracked me up, was very early on, we catch back up with Elphaba. Well, with Fiero we are seven years. Five to seven, he said five years. Yeah. Five years removed from the events of the first half of the book and the movie. I'm not sure if they don't ever make clear how long it's been.
• 8:11
  Speaker B: It's been indeterminate.
• 8:14
  Speaker A: Some number of movies, I think, but I don't remember like, what exact number it was. Anyways, so it's been some indiscriminate amount of time in the book. But in the. Or in the movie. But in the book it's been specifically like five years. And so Fiyero is catching back up with other people and he's trying to find Elphaba specifically. And he shows up in this town, or he's not trying to find Elphaba,
• 8:34
  Speaker B: he's in the Emerald City. And I think he sees her.
• 8:37
  Speaker A: Yes. He goes into this church to, like, briefly pray. He's not looking for her, I don't believe he just happens to stumble across her. But he goes into this church to pray. And. And in this church, there's. They have a shrine to Saint Glinda.
• 8:51
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 8:52
  Speaker A: Who Glinda is named after. And he's kind of thinking about. He sees like the little relief for the painting of Saint Glenda or whatever. And he thinks to himself, he couldn't remember her particular legend, nor the uplifting way she had gagged on death for the sake of her soul and for the edification of her admirers. Which I was like, boy, that's the most Catholic thing I've ever heard.
• 9:13
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 9:14
  Speaker A: And so I had to go look it up immediately because I was like, ways McGuire Catholic. And. Yes, he was Catholic all the way up until he went to Catholic school through high school. And so I was like, that makes sense because there's a lot of Catholic guilt in this whole story. Guilt and shame is like a big.
• 9:30
  Speaker B: Yeah. Kind of recurring guilt and shame. And the. The way that he structured the religion of the unnamed God is very. Feels very similar to Catholicism.
• 9:40
  Speaker A: It's broadly Christian, like Christianity, but there are definitely elements of it that feel
• 9:46
  Speaker B: very Catholic, particularly the. The saints. Yeah, that's a very Catholic thing.
• 9:51
  Speaker A: And just the way he talked about. Nor the uplifting way she had gagged on death for the sake of her soul is just.
• 9:57
  Speaker B: That's how you become a saint.
• 9:59
  Speaker A: Yeah. But he does find Elphaba in this church. As she's there, she's meeting. She's using it as a meeting spot to meet a contact for her revolutionary Activities or whatever. But he does talk to her and then ends up following her back to where she's staying. And she's kind of staying in this old corn warehouse or something like that is like a hideout basically. And he kind of follows her in and meets her and talks to her and she's like, all right, you can come in and chit chat for a little bit and we can catch up. But it is revealed that in this warehouse she has a cat that she is feeding that she calls Malky.
• 10:35
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 10:35
  Speaker A: Which I wish we had seen in the movie somehow. I don't know if she just. At her little lair, she could have had a cat there. But it's a white cat named Malky who likes milk, which I thought was funny and cute. But as she's talking to Fiyero like she's kind of explaining, you know, that what she's been up to, which is being a revolutionary fighting back against the
• 10:55
  Speaker B: wizards somehow is involved like in some capacity with the revolution.
• 11:01
  Speaker A: Yeah, we don't know the exact. It's all very nebulous and vague. It is not like in the movie at all where she is. She basically in the movie she's like the whole thing seemingly and is kind of like leading it herself and is in charge of it and blah, blah. And this in the version in the book, it's a much more realistic. As we alluded to in the first half, she's not the only person who cares about this. And so the vibes we get in the book is that she is just one of the pieces in a larger. Yeah, Revolution.
• 11:29
  Speaker B: You know, she's very clear too, like that she doesn't even know.
• 11:32
  Speaker A: That's what she says.
• 11:33
  Speaker B: Yeah, she doesn't know who's in charge.
• 11:34
  Speaker A: Assuming she's not lying to Fiera. She. She says that she doesn't know who's in charge and we never find. Find out like who's leading this or like where she's getting her directions from or whatever or anything like that. But she has a great line to him at one point where he's talking about how he knows. I don't remember the exact context of it, but he is a higher up.
• 11:54
  Speaker B: Yeah, he's a prince.
• 11:55
  Speaker A: He's a prince. Yes. Because. Yeah, that's the other thing, which he is in the movie as well. But in the movie, in this one they may. In the second movie they make him part of the like Guard or whatever. The Gale Force specifically, which is not even the Guard. They're in the book. They're just explicitly like the ss, like the wizards version of the ss, like his secret police. And that's kind of the vibe in the movie as well. Although it seems more just like general army guys or whatever. But he is part of that in the movie. In the book, he's just like a prince who has connections, basically. But he's not part of, like, the wizards army or anything like that. But she says to him, beware high connections with bastards. When the revolution comes, there won't be mercy for toting ass lickers. It's like, all right, comrade Elphaba, she said, you get the wall too, Fiero.
• 12:41
  Speaker B: No bootlickers here.
• 12:42
  Speaker A: Yeah. And so they kind of have some back and forth about, like, the cause and what she's doing and why and all this sort of thing and what. What Fiero's up to. And there was this one really great line that again, I. I really liked in the book that I believe it's, Fiyero has this thought, I'm fairly certain about, like, why he's not helping or anything like that. And the thing he thinks to himself is that doubt is much more energy efficient than conviction.
• 13:11
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 13:12
  Speaker A: And I was like, boy, yeah. That is a thought that I very much can appreciate. I think a lot of people can appreciate is that it is a lot easier. It's a lot harder to both have conviction, but actually do something and stick to those convictions and follow through on them. And that it's a lot easier to be like, well, I don't know. I don't know if actually this is, like, what you're doing is necessary or, you know. Yeah. Doubt's just a lot more energy efficient.
• 13:38
  Speaker B: So I. I feel like I should like the movie's portrayal of the plight of the animals more.
• 13:49
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 13:49
  Speaker B: Because we actually interact with multiple animals.
• 13:52
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 13:54
  Speaker B: Talk to a couple different animals and some characters that we already know from the first movie come back. So. So, like, I feel like I should like that more. But I thought that Fiyero, the scene where he's in the cafe watching the family of bears in the prison camp was like a million times more effective than anything in the movie.
• 14:16
  Speaker A: Oh, it absolutely is. And it's not in the movie because it's too sad.
• 14:20
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's too sad. It's too dark.
• 14:21
  Speaker A: It's too dark. It's too intense. Because for people who haven't read the book, what that scene is, it's literally he goes to a cafe in the Emerald City, and I guess it borders on some sort of concentration camp on a higher floor.
• 14:34
  Speaker B: I think and is, like, looking down
• 14:36
  Speaker A: into the prison yard and he basically is like. He's. He's at a cafe on the. Just outside the walls of Auschwitz. It's not Auschwitz. I don't think it's an extermination camp, but it is a prison camp for animals where they are beaten and. And he sees, like, a small bear get, like, clubbed over the head or whatever. And I'm not sure if it's implied if it dies or not, but it's. Yeah, the. Yeah. It is a. An incredibly dark and revealing scene about, like, the state of this world. That, again, is just way too.
• 15:07
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 15:09
  Speaker A: Sad for what the movie is trying to be as a musical. But to your point, it is. It does way more effectively communicate kind of like, the stakes and what's going on here in a way that the movie just never even attempts to really. We just see sad animals talking about how they don't get to. Now, again, we see some of the. Like, there are signs, like, no animals allowed on train. And, like, there's allusions to that, but you really don't see too much of, like, the explicit cruelty towards.
• 15:36
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 15:36
  Speaker A: Other than in the first. Really. The first movie is where you see more of it. You don't see almost any of it in this movie, to my memory, although we've only watched it once, so.
• 15:45
  Speaker B: Also in this section, the Emerald City section of the book, we catch up with Glinda. She, like, runs into Fiyero at a store.
• 15:54
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 15:55
  Speaker B: And we find out that she's married now. And she's married to a guy named Sir Chuffrey, which I just wanted to call out as an incredible name.
• 16:05
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 16:05
  Speaker B: It is 10 out of 10 on that one.
• 16:07
  Speaker A: Sir Chuffrey.
• 16:10
  Speaker B: I also thought it was interesting that in that section, Glinda explicitly confirms that Elphaba is allergic to water.
• 16:17
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, she does. And we see that multiple times throughout the book that she is actually seemingly, like, when she cries and stuff, it, like, burns her face and that sort of thing. Although they. They're intentional. I think the book is intentionally vague about it. But she does drink stuff. Like, she drinks. She drinks liquid liquids that have water. Yeah. And we. She gets drunk at one point, like.
• 16:45
  Speaker B: Yeah. On, like, red wine.
• 16:46
  Speaker A: On, like, red wine later in the story. So, like, she can definitely. That's. I think the book intentionally is like, ah, who cares? We're not gonna go into, like, if she can drink or not. The book does specifically point out that she can't bathe.
• 16:59
  Speaker B: Yeah, she does not bath traditionally. She, like, Oils.
• 17:02
  Speaker A: Yeah. Instead of bathing, which I thought was interesting.
• 17:04
  Speaker B: But we move forward from the section in the Emerald City.
• 17:08
  Speaker A: So to be clear. Yeah. We get. That's when we get our first time jump of the second half.
• 17:13
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 17:13
  Speaker A: Which is her. She and Fiyero have an affair together.
• 17:17
  Speaker B: Yeah, they have an affair. Like an ongoing like months long.
• 17:19
  Speaker A: Months long affair. She's on a mission that she doesn't follow through on. To kill Madam Morrible.
• 17:26
  Speaker B: Yeah. And she's not. She's not able to follow through on it because they're a bunch.
• 17:29
  Speaker A: There are a bunch of children.
• 17:30
  Speaker B: Children around her.
• 17:31
  Speaker A: It happens. And at that same night Fiyero is then discovered in her.
• 17:36
  Speaker B: Yeah, he goes to her hideout.
• 17:38
  Speaker A: Yeah. And is.
• 17:39
  Speaker B: And the police are like, they're waiting and they capture him.
• 17:42
  Speaker A: But we don't know. We never. And literally we never find out what happened to him.
• 17:45
  Speaker B: Right. We assume that he's dead, like most of the characters.
• 17:50
  Speaker A: The book assumes he's dead.
• 17:51
  Speaker B: Yeah, the book assumes he's dead, but that's never explicitly confirmed.
• 17:55
  Speaker A: And in that moment I did not assume he had died. I assumed he had just been like clubbed and captured.
• 18:00
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 18:00
  Speaker A: Because he gets like, like I think it's described as him getting like clubbed over the head and then like it fades to black essentially. And then we time jump. And so I assumed that he was just captured and then we were going to get something at least resembling the second half of the second movie or the second act of the musical. But no, he just never.
• 18:18
  Speaker B: Yeah, he just vanishes and does not come back.
• 18:20
  Speaker A: We'll talk more about it later as kind of where that goes. But I thought that was interesting because it's not what I was expecting.
• 18:25
  Speaker B: Yeah. So we time jump again and when we come back in the next section, it's like years, years later, like 10
• 18:37
  Speaker A: years, seven years later. I think it's seven years later and
• 18:41
  Speaker B: Elphaba has been living in a Monterey.
• 18:45
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 18:45
  Speaker B: Which is basically a nunnery.
• 18:47
  Speaker A: She's been a nun.
• 18:48
  Speaker B: Yeah, she's been a nun. Or at least living with.
• 18:50
  Speaker A: Living as a nun. Yeah.
• 18:52
  Speaker B: For this period of time. And there's a boy with her who is Lier. Who is the text confirms as her son. But she never confirms.
• 19:05
  Speaker A: She never confirms it. Yeah.
• 19:08
  Speaker B: So anyway, all of this to say when we catch back up with her, she is deciding to set out on a journey to Kemoko, which is where Fierro's widow and his children.
• 19:21
  Speaker A: That was his.
• 19:24
  Speaker B: It's like their winter palace.
• 19:25
  Speaker A: Yeah, like his palace or whatever. That he would go to. And so, yeah, she's going to visit his family because he has kids and a wife out there.
• 19:32
  Speaker B: So they. She and Lir embark on this journey along with a caravan of people. And they have like, a guide, like, guiding them through the journey into the Vincus.
• 19:44
  Speaker A: Yes. Because they have to have a guide because it's a wild land.
• 19:48
  Speaker B: It's a much less.
• 19:50
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot more rural. It's a lot wilder. So, like, they need somebody there to be able to talk to these different groups because there's a bunch of different political, like, and tribes and stuff like that. And so they just need somebody to. To kind of like guide them through this.
• 20:02
  Speaker B: And also. Yeah, and also it's more like almost like you're going through like the Old West.
• 20:09
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's what the implication is because they're literally on a wagon train. Like, it is. This is like going out west and you need a guide who's going to talk to the different indigenous people and stuff to be able to get you through.
• 20:20
  Speaker B: But the thing that I really liked about that section of the book is that as they're traveling along, Elphaba slowly acquires like, a menagerie of different animals that she has. And, like, by the time they get to Kiyamoko, she has a dog and a monkey and two crows and a swarm of bees.
• 20:44
  Speaker A: I thought that was interesting because I forgot that I was like, oh, once we get to the end of the book and she's like, sending these animals out, I was like, oh, that's a thing that happens in.
• 20:53
  Speaker B: Yeah, that's a thing that happens in
• 20:54
  Speaker A: the wizard of Oz, at least in the book and some of it in the movie, at least, like the monkeys and stuff. But yeah, so that's actually where she. She finds Chestery on this trip. Like, it's not. He's not just a part of the royal guard or at the palace or whatever already, which is how the musical does it, which I think works fine. But she literally finds him, the dog. She has Killy Joy grabs him, is going to like, kill him, and she's able to rescue him at the last second. But yeah, she collects this whole menagerie. I thought that was interesting because I wasn't. I didn't realize, like, oh, that's like we're doing, like, how she gets the things that she uses in.
• 21:27
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's also a very, like, old school witchy thing to have like a bunch of familiars.
• 21:32
  Speaker A: Yeah. So she arrives at Kiamoko and Boy, we are getting to the part. And we'll talk about this in the other segment. But not my favorite part of the book. But what I do like about this aspect is I do think that having. So the whole reason Elphaba is going here, essentially we find out it is slowly revealed, is to basically just kind of apologize and seek forgiveness from Sarima, who is Fiyero's widow. Again, presuming that Fiyero is dead, she's going there to kind of seek forgiveness for Fiyero's death. She feels responsible for getting him killed or captured or whatever because he was canoodling with her. And then obviously, on top of that, they were having an affair. She feels guilty about that. So she has layers upon layers of guilt built up on her about this. And so she's going there to, like, try to apologize. And she wants to explain the situation to Serima, and Serima never lets her, which I think is really.
• 22:28
  Speaker B: Will not hear what she has to say.
• 22:30
  Speaker A: Yeah. But I thought it made for kind of relatively compelling characterization for both Elphaba and Sarima. There's elements of what I. I do like going on in this segment. And, like, specifically what we kind of learn about Elphaba is the most interesting. Just takes way too long to do. But we'll get to that. We'll get to that.
• 22:49
  Speaker B: Particularly the first conversation that she and Sarima have where Elphaba is trying to tell Sarima what happened between her and Fiyero and what happened to Fiyero. And Serima's just like, I don't want to hear about it.
• 23:05
  Speaker A: I don't want to hear it.
• 23:05
  Speaker B: Yeah, but there were two lines that I really liked in that section. The first being when they first, like, sit down to talk and they're kind of exchanging pleasantries. And then Elphaba's like, before we say 10 sentences of nonsense to each other, I have to tell you something.
• 23:23
  Speaker A: It was good.
• 23:24
  Speaker B: And then the other one at the end of that section, and Alphabet has kind of accepted that Surima is not ready to hear whatever.
• 23:32
  Speaker A: Yeah. She's like, you're not gonna. We're not gonna talk about this. We're just not doing it.
• 23:35
  Speaker B: Yeah. And she says, I intend to befriend you so thoroughly that you will change your mind.
• 23:41
  Speaker A: That reminded me of something from something else. I don't.
• 23:43
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Which is a great line. But also, she never does that.
• 23:47
  Speaker A: No, she doesn't even really try all that much, which makes sense for her character. Yeah, we'll get into it. I think I Have a note about it here in a minute. About what? This section about the whole. What we're doing with Elphaba versus in the book versus what the movie is doing with her. I actually think is really. It's actually like. Is like the biggest difference is, like, what the goal of the book is versus what the goal of the musical and the movie is. And we'll get to that in a second in terms of Elphaba's character. But again, yeah, we'll talk about that here in a minute.
• 24:17
  Speaker B: So we're at Kiamoko for a really long time. That the. The biggest. It's the biggest section of the second half of the book.
• 24:24
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 24:24
  Speaker B: And one thing that I did think was fun is that at one point, Elphaba goes to talk to Sarima's six sisters that live there with them, and they also will not hear what she has to say because Surima has forbidden them to. But they do tell her what they think happened to Fierro. And I thought it was kind of fun that both Surima and her sisters were correct about what he was getting up to in the Emerald City. They just each only had half of the story. Like, he was having an affair, which is what Sarima thought. Yes, but she thought he was having an affair with Glinda. Yeah. And that Ser Chuffrey offed him for this.
• 25:11
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 25:13
  Speaker B: And the sisters think that he got involved in some kind of political enterprise which then went wrong and ultimately got him killed.
• 25:21
  Speaker A: Yes. Which is also correct. Yeah, they did. Yeah. I thought that was fun, too. They do actually have it done. Nailed. They're just slightly off a little bit, kind of. Yeah. Another thing that's interesting here, we talked about it in the first episode, in the first movie about, like, whether or not the Grimory would show up at all.
• 25:38
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 25:38
  Speaker A: And it does. It shows up here in the second half. But unlike in the movie, where in the movie the wizard already has it and is, like, trying to be able to read it.
• 25:47
  Speaker B: And it's like a legendary book of Oz.
• 25:48
  Speaker A: It's like a legendary book of Oz that he has that nobody can read and that Elphaba can read. In this one, Elphaba actually finds the Grimory at Keamo Co. While she's there, she. And she's there for years.
• 26:00
  Speaker B: Months.
• 26:01
  Speaker A: Months, if not years at this point. Like, ultimately, at this point, she's been there, like, months, I believe, when she finds the book. But she stays there, like, over the winter. And as she's, like, looking around, at one point, she finds this old book. In one of the towers. And she asked Sarima about it and Sarima basically relates that it that at one point in the past this mysterious sorcerer with a long white beard may have been implied to be Merlin. Maybe.
• 26:25
  Speaker B: I have that note.
• 26:26
  Speaker A: Oh, do you?
• 26:26
  Speaker B: Okay, I have a lot of thoughts on this.
• 26:29
  Speaker A: He said he left it there as payment for their hospitality or whatever, but he specifically said that it came from another world and it's implied to be that it came from our world and that he is a traveler from our universe, essentially. He also says though, that it's too powerful destroy and that he needs to leave it there, basically. And that just like hold on to it. And she's like, okay. And so she just has that book and that's where. That's where Elphaba finds it and gets it from. Which I thought was interesting. And it adds a whole lot that. Yeah, you have a lot of notes about it here.
• 27:03
  Speaker B: Okay. So one specific thing that I think is better or at least makes more sense in the movie is the Grimory being written in an ancient magical language. Like it's. Because it's written in the movie. It's written in like a language of Oz that they have forgotten how to read or something like that. In the book, the explanation is that the Grimory was from our world. So Elphaba could kind of read it because she was of both worlds. Because the wizard is still her father. Yeah, in the book. And he's from our world. But here's the thing. Why? Why would the Grimory be from our world? What are the implications of that? Because our world doesn't have magic. And that's a hell of a detail to just Dr. And do nothing with Maguire.
• 27:57
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 27:58
  Speaker B: Like, and who traveled to Oz to hide it. Was it Merlin?
• 28:01
  Speaker A: Yes, I think. I literally think yes.
• 28:03
  Speaker B: Like, is this the expanded Wicked universe where all of the stories are real?
• 28:08
  Speaker A: I think so. I think that's probably. Honestly, yes. The truth is that that is supposed to implied to have been like Merlin or something like that, who came and dropped this book off. And that it is a real magic book. That also would have made sense why nobody there could read it. Because they seem to read English. They seem to speak in English, seemingly. Because like the wizard shows up and can just talk to him. Dorothy shows up and can just talk to him. So if it were just from our world, it would presumably be written in English. But if it's a book that Merlin had from back in the day, it's written in Old English or Middle English or whatever. Nobody's going to be able to read it. You know what I mean? So I. I think that literally might. Yes. That might be, like, what we're supposed to kind of get from it, which I think is kind of fun. But, yeah, I don't.
• 28:51
  Speaker B: I don't. I like. Okay. Arguably the movie's version is less interesting. Yeah, right.
• 28:57
  Speaker A: Yeah, I would agree.
• 28:58
  Speaker B: But the book left me with so many more questions than answers about the Grimory that it just pissed me right off.
• 29:05
  Speaker A: That's fair. That's fair. Another little thing, that scene that we get while she's at Keamoko is we get. And we get this story twice. The kids ask for, like, a bedtime story, and Sarima tells the story of the witch and the fox babies, and Elphaba ends up listening to this the first time, and she doesn't end up liking the ending. The way the story plays out, it's kind of the. The Cyclops story from. From the Odyssey actually. Like, it, like, roughly, it's like the witch captures these foxes and traps them in, like, her cave or whatever, and every day she opens the door and then essentially it's a very similar to, like, the Cyclops story from the Odyssey, but at the end of it, they're able to trick her or something. Like, I don't remember the exact details, but they basically, like, trap her in the cave so that she can't come out. And I only mentioned it because it's very. It's. It's literally that lines from that story are the final lines of this book. Yes, like, the final, like, three lines. And it's because Elphaba's story ends up kind of echoing that story about that the witch and the fox babies. And the whole point of that, which is a thing that happens a lot in this, is this kind of Maguire's playing with this concept that, like, there's almost like these archetypes of. I don't know if. And he leaves it intentionally vague in the story if, like, the witches are all like, the same entity reoccurring over time or that. You know what I mean? Like, and the book specifically has like, a Elphaba kind of question that whether, like, Morrible and Yakkal and the Kubrick witch are all, like, the same entity that, like, have kind of, like, keep coming back. And maybe Elphaba is also part of that in some way. And we get the kind of this interesting layer to, like, the. The. The magic world building. And almost similar to, like, Lord of the Rings has, like, the idea of, like, the Via The Valar or whatever. There are like these kind of like supernatural entities that like come down to this, this world and like occasionally they will like leave and come back in different forms and stuff like that. And I think we're going for a similar thing there. And so part of like a lot of what Maguire does in this is stories that echo stories from the past that kind of echo and line up with the story that is taking place currently.
• 31:32
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 31:33
  Speaker A: And kind of all of these similarities. And he's also just playing, I think broadly with the fact, I say this all the time on the show, that literally nothing ever changes, that it's the same struggle always, forever. And so like you have the same kinds of people like showing up to like stand up for the disenfranchised and all that sort of stuff. And I think the Kumbrick witch kind of represents that in different ways and all that sort of stuff. All that to be said, I think it's really interesting. None of that makes it into the movie, I think, because it would be really hard to, I think to deliver in a way that movie audiences would kind of be able to parse. It's already kind of in like again, intentionally vague and nebulous in the book. Yeah, it's really just more about like world building than anything. But it also, I think is just playing again with the secular, cyclical ways that are history repeats and that cycles repeat. And because this story is also again, about cycles of trauma and cycles of abuse and all of that sort of stuff. And so I think a lot of it is just. I don't know, I really like that element of this book. I think when this book is at its best, it's when it's playing with some of those like, deeper, interesting, philosophical, like spiritual, supernatural, world building elements is the stuff I found most interesting. I guess there's another great. There's a great little line in the book that I really enjoyed where so we were introduced to all the kids of Fiero. He has like four or five kids. One of them is Nor who's a girl. Manic is like a boy. And then there's. I think it is. And there might be one more that I'm not.
• 33:12
  Speaker B: I think it's just those three. And then there's Lier, technically.
• 33:14
  Speaker A: Lier. Yeah. But at one point they're. They're talking about something and Noor suggests that like maybe one of the thing they're talking about is magic and Manic or Irgy or one of them like snaps back at her. They're all very cruel kids. Like, that's the other thing is, like, they're not great, terrible children. Which is kind of the whole. We'll get into that a little bit. But he Noor is like, well, maybe it's magic. And Manic, like, says to her, you think everything's magic, stupid girl. And nor responds with, well, everything is. Which I thought was great because she's kind of right. And. Yeah, in. Especially in universe, everything is magic to some extent. And again, like, that's kind of the vibe we get is that all of this is connected in some weird, behind the scenes, spiritual way. Like, all of this is kind of this broiling, weird, interconnected.
• 34:03
  Speaker B: Mm.
• 34:04
  Speaker A: Yeah. I like. There's moments in this book that I like, and we'll get to the stuff that we don't. A whole little thing that gets completely cut out from the movie in this section is. And I only have this in here because of the joke I made is that Manic makes Lear hide in a fish well. And I was like, surely this will end well.
• 34:25
  Speaker B: Great.
• 34:26
  Speaker A: Just that I literally didn't mean to write it that way, but I did. But yeah, he. He. They're playing hide and seek, and he forces Lear, essentially. Yeah.
• 34:34
  Speaker B: He, like, talks him.
• 34:35
  Speaker A: Talks him into hiding in a well, and Lear almost drowns. Yeah. I think I have a note about that later that we'll talk about. Or. Yeah, this is like, my next note. I don't know what your note is here.
• 34:45
  Speaker B: This is. I think this happens while Lyre is still in the well. Because he's in there for, like, a while.
• 34:53
  Speaker A: He's in there for, like, more than a day. Yeah. Like multiple days.
• 34:56
  Speaker B: But within that time frame, Elphaba is criticizing Sarima's parenting, which is deeply rich.
• 35:04
  Speaker A: Yes. Ironically.
• 35:06
  Speaker B: And she says, I believed in obedience, and I don't believe it hurt me. And then Sarima claps back. Then what did hurt you?
• 35:17
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Because she is. She's giving him trouble about, like, not like Sarima. Not like.
• 35:23
  Speaker B: Yeah, she's, like, punishing her. Yeah, your kids are really badly behaved, which is true. But Elphaba was not in a place to be criticized.
• 35:31
  Speaker A: Anybody's parenting. Which gets to the next. Next point here, which is they do find Lear in the well. Apparently dead. He seems pretty dead. They. They do some form of rudimentary CPR on him. Like, nanny is there. Luckily. Nanny.
• 35:46
  Speaker B: Yeah, Luckily's nanny.
• 35:47
  Speaker A: Because if Nanny's not there, that kid would just be.
• 35:49
  Speaker B: Nanny's the only one in this book who knows how to do anything.
• 35:52
  Speaker A: Who knows how to do anything and who is not a complete monster. Like. Yeah. At least in. In. So she is in some ways. But so they do rudimentary CPR on him and. And revive him. And I thought there's another great moment here, though, where, like, she's in, like, all right, take him to his bed. Like, we gotta wrap him in blankets and take him to his bed so he can warm up. And they're like, well, he doesn't have a bed. And she's like, where does he sleep? And they're like, on the floor. And Nanny's like, what the. Is wrong with you people? And even. Yeah. Including. She, like, scolds all of them, including Alphabet, because Alphabet also is just. Well. And. Because the whole thing we'll realize is that Elphaba is in denial about this being.
• 36:32
  Speaker B: Yes. Deeply in denial about this being her child.
• 36:35
  Speaker A: Her child. She tells later. She. She like, recounts this and basically just says she has no memory of him being born. And, like, the whole time period, like, after Fierro died or, like, disappeared. And then, like, she was in the. The. The mountary. The nunnery for, like, two years. And she says it was all like, a blur. Like, she might have been. She was also on. She said, like, on drugs and stuff like that, but it was all like, a blur. And she just doesn't remember any of it. So she does not remember giving birth to Lier. Yeah, but it. The text of the text is very explicit.
• 37:08
  Speaker B: Explicitly, Explicitly confirms that he is Fo's son.
• 37:13
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 37:13
  Speaker B: Which means he's got to also be Elphaba's son.
• 37:17
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 37:18
  Speaker B: I felt terrible for Lear for the entire second half of the book. Elphaba was not out here breaking the cycle.
• 37:24
  Speaker A: No. Not at all. Just a terrible parent. And we'll get into that. But that's. That is. The book does take a whole different turn in the second half, where every. Like, people are complicated and messy and suck in different ways in the first half. But in the second half, like, every character just kind of sucks. Like, it's just. And it's just like a bad person, which is the whole point. And I don't know if I have a better place to talk about it, but one of the things, like, the whole point of the second half, what the book is doing, why. Why Elphaba sucks in the book is because the book isn't. Is like a writing exercise in, like, how do we get Elphaba to the place where her character is the character of the Wicked Witch of the west? That we see in the original wizard of Oz book and in like, the movie.
• 38:13
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 38:14
  Speaker A: How do we get. How do we. Like, it's an exploration of. In the chronicling of the life's events that lead a person to become that person who is like this weird, cackling, like, insane villain who is doing bad things and for, like, weird reasons. And like, even her own internal logic doesn't really make sense. Like, that's the. Where the book Elphaba gets to. It is her descent into madness becoming the Wicked Witch of the West. What the movie is doing is, okay, how did the Wicked Witch of the west become the Wicked Witch of the West? But the answer is. Well, she didn't really. She was misunderst.
• 38:54
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 38:54
  Speaker A: And like. Yeah. And so, like, we don't really like what she. The stuff she was doing at like, we're kind of viewing her actions in the original wizard of Oz book and the wizard of Oz movie through a different lens because we understand her motivations differently.
• 39:09
  Speaker B: Yes. The movie is reframing her motivations so that we get a different character entirely.
• 39:18
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 39:18
  Speaker B: The book is taking a character and saying, okay, how do we take this character and make her into this character?
• 39:26
  Speaker A: How do we take a character who's like a normal person, more or less, and get them to the place where they are an insane cackling villain? Yeah, basically. And. And which is interesting. And I like both of them in different ways. They're just doing very different things. And. And so what that does, though, in the book is it gives you an Elphaba who is a lot more messy and a lot more complicated and a lot less of like, just a hero who's misunderstood or whatever.
• 39:54
  Speaker B: Pretty unlikable.
• 39:56
  Speaker A: She is very unlikable for most of the book. The second half of the book, at least in the first half, she's relatively like, whatever. And they're all, like I said, they all have their foibles. But in the second half of the book, she just sucks most of the time for. For understandable reasons too. She's become just. She becomes disillusioned with everything because hero dies.
• 40:14
  Speaker B: She has these kind of lofty ideals, especially in the first half and the beginning of the second half.
• 40:21
  Speaker A: Beginning of the second half of the
• 40:22
  Speaker B: book, but everything that she tries to do fails.
• 40:25
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. She's unable to kill.
• 40:27
  Speaker B: Never successful at anything that she tries to do.
• 40:29
  Speaker A: She never is able to do anything. Fiero ends up being killed because of it. Who she was in love with and was, like, the one person who, like, really, you know, loved her seemingly. And so. Yeah. And it's just her spiral into insanity, which, again, is really compelling, but it's not. It's. It's so different. And it's so much less satisfying to read. Like, it's not fun necessarily to read. It is interesting, but that does result in a. Yeah, we get very different characterizations of Elphaba. Like, in the first half of this book, I was like, all these characters more or less feel similar to the
• 41:03
  Speaker B: movie versions and similar in a way that I found surprising. Yes.
• 41:07
  Speaker A: Based on what we'd heard. But then you get to the second half, we're like, okay, yeah, this is where everybody's talking about, like, it's nothing like the movie or the musical at all. One of the things that's not in the movie that is really cool that I liked in the book, though, is Sarima has this very compelling monologue about the different types of anger, like hot anger and cold anger. And she genders it specifically and says that men practice hot anger, whereas women practice cold.
• 41:31
  Speaker B: Yeah. And the quote is, and girls need cold anger. They need the cold simmer, the ceaseless grudge, the talent to avoid forgiveness, the sidestepping of compromise. They need to know when they say something that they will never back down. Ever. Ever.
• 41:48
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 41:49
  Speaker B: And I'm not usually one for gendering emotions, but I will say that I relate to this on a perhaps concerning level.
• 41:57
  Speaker A: I had a feeling you would identify with that one quite a bit. Yeah. Yeah. It was one of the reasons I jotted that down. Yeah.
• 42:03
  Speaker B: The ceaseless grudge, indeed. Yes. Yeah.
• 42:08
  Speaker A: Another thing that happens in the book. I have this in better in the book.
• 42:13
  Speaker B: It's just interesting.
• 42:14
  Speaker A: It's just interesting stuff because I will stress again that I actually didn't enjoy reading this sect at all.
• 42:19
  Speaker B: Yes. I really struggled through the second half.
• 42:21
  Speaker A: This whole section into the Vincus where they. She's spending all this time at Kiamo Co was a slog. I had such a tough time getting through it because.
• 42:30
  Speaker B: No, it was brutal.
• 42:31
  Speaker A: It drags on forever. And I just. I didn't really like. To the point we said earlier, none of the characters are particularly likable, which is the point. They're not. They're not supposed to be likable. But that does make for a reading experience that is like another page of these kids messing around in this castle. And I just don't. They're all. They all suck. And Serima sucks and Elphaba sucks. And like every. You know, it's just like. And it's still another like 20, that it just goes on and on and on. But after. Because Elphaba realizes that Manic is the one who is responsible for goading Lear into the well and almost getting him killed. It's very obvious when they find him, like, based on Manic's reaction. And then the next day, or a couple days later or sometime there, shortly after they get Lear out of the well, they're outside in the courtyard and this is during winter and there's a bunch of icicles on the castle. And at one point Manic is out, like walking through the courtyard and Elphaba is like thinking about him and how angry she is at him about what he did and how. What a cruel child he is or whatever. And actually he's not even so much thinking about that. She's just thinking about kind of the concept of anger and stuff like that in this moment. And she's staring at an icicle and magically accidentally.
• 43:47
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 43:48
  Speaker A: Causes it to fall off the castle and impale Manic in the skull and kill him. And so Manic is killed by a falling icicle, which again, is crazy and not something would make any sense to be in this movie as it is. But it's interesting. Like kind of.
• 44:06
  Speaker B: Yeah. Well, and it's interesting the way that the book handles Elphaba's powers.
• 44:13
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 44:13
  Speaker B: Because it's really different from the movie.
• 44:15
  Speaker A: Very different.
• 44:16
  Speaker B: The movie is a pretty traditional, like, she says a spell and she waves her hand around and things happen and
• 44:22
  Speaker A: sometimes she can't really control it. But like. Yeah.
• 44:25
  Speaker B: Whereas in the book it feels a lot more motivated by like. I don't want to say emotions because I. It's emotions.
• 44:35
  Speaker A: I would say that. Yeah.
• 44:35
  Speaker B: But also it's like, like will almost her intent and not even like.
• 44:42
  Speaker A: Not even.
• 44:42
  Speaker B: Not even, like. Yeah, not in a straightforward.
• 44:45
  Speaker A: Because like, the whole point is that she wasn't like trying to kill me.
• 44:48
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 44:48
  Speaker A: She wasn't.
• 44:49
  Speaker B: She wasn't like staring at the icicle going, follow the skull. Fall on his skull.
• 44:53
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 44:54
  Speaker B: It was a little more like, like back ended and like unconscious.
• 45:00
  Speaker A: Because the same thing happens earlier in the story when they're on that trip to Kiamoko and there's this like obnoxious cook guy with him who's an. And he gets stung by a bunch of bees and killed after they find the bees. And Elphaba didn't. Again, at least as we are related. Unless we're getting an unreliable narrator, which is not impossible, but as related. Elphaba was not like, like intentionally like,
• 45:24
  Speaker B: it wasn't like, hey, bees.
• 45:25
  Speaker A: Hey, bees, go kill that guy. But it is revealed later by the. The elephant goddess that she. People who didn't read this are like, what? She. They. They meet an elephant shapeshifter? It's fine. The elephant shapeshifter that they meet, Princess Nastako or whatever her name is, basically says, like, yeah, you were respons. Like, it was the bees that killed that guy and you did that.
• 45:46
  Speaker B: Like, yeah, the bees, like, read her. Her unconscious.
• 45:50
  Speaker A: Her unconscious desires and, like, did it and. And there's almost like this layer of, like, karmic justice to it. Like, it feels like the whole point is like, she can't do man. Because even. That's the other thing is we get to the end of the book, she has, like, one of her big frustrations. She's like, I literally can't even do spells. Like, what am I. I don't remember the exact context of it. Towards the end, there's this moment where she's like, I've never gotten a single spell to actually, like, work. Like, she can't do magic, really. She. But she kind of can sometimes. And it. To me, it almost feels like it.
• 46:19
  Speaker B: It's.
• 46:19
  Speaker A: It requires there to be like, a karmic imbalance that. That, like, her will, like, forces the universe to, like.
• 46:27
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 46:27
  Speaker A: Seek out justice or something. Almost. I don't know. It's really interesting. I. I like all that stuff. I thought it was kind of compelling. Again, even if this whole section is kind of boring. We also find out that the wizard is running Hitler Youth summer camps.
• 46:39
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 46:40
  Speaker A: Just a little detail that I thought actually that actually could have worked something like that in the movie. I think. Could have worked pretty well. But yeah, he runs these summer camps for all, like, the kids to go to.
• 46:50
  Speaker B: Yeah. Cause we find out that, like, he makes all of the munchkin kids.
• 46:53
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 46:54
  Speaker B: They're like, required to go to these summer camps.
• 46:56
  Speaker A: They're forced to go to these summer camps where they're indoctrinated and stuff like that. Yeah. Okay. Another scene. I have this in. Better than the book. It's not really better in the book, but I thought it was kind of. Well, parts of it are. Nor at one point finds Elphaba's broom. And Elphaba has this broom that she got when she was in the Mountary. Mother Yackel was one of the, like, the head. The main. The highest sister or whatever of the.
• 47:22
  Speaker B: So she was the Reverend Mother.
• 47:23
  Speaker A: The Reverend Mother of the Monterey gave her this broom when she left. And it turns out that this broom is kind of magic or whatever. And Nor is able to like, fly on it.
• 47:33
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 47:34
  Speaker A: But this whole scene is basically just an allegory for like, sexual maturity kind of.
• 47:40
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 47:41
  Speaker A: Anyway, so the scene as it plays out is kind of funny. I think you could do a version of like, something like this in the movie. But, like, Nor finds the broom. But she's. It's because she's. I don't even know. There's so trying to explain some of this stuff in this book is so difficult without like 8,000 layers of context. But she finds this broom and she ends up flying up on it accidentally and flying out the window. And she's naked while this is all. Or at least topless while this is all happening. And the broom, like, carries her up to the next window where Elphaba. And then I'm just. I thought it was funny because I'm imagining the scene play out in my head.
• 48:16
  Speaker B: Right.
• 48:16
  Speaker A: Of like, this kid who, like, is like topless. She's like 10 at this point.
• 48:20
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 48:21
  Speaker A: Like, it comes flying up on a broom to their window and. And like, literally Elphaba does like a spit take with her tea or whatever or something like that and. And like, commands the broom to go back down and she flies back down. It's a funny idea. The thing that's really interesting and weird about it though is that the scene is. Plays out like the kind of. Again, her like, sexual awakening.
• 48:42
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 48:42
  Speaker A: But I'm pretty sure the book is. Says she's 10 in this.
• 48:45
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think she's like 10, which.
• 48:49
  Speaker A: I don't know.
• 48:49
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, we're at least approaching the age that I would say a
• 48:56
  Speaker A: lot of people start to have.
• 48:57
  Speaker B: Start to have that. Those kind of thoughts.
• 49:00
  Speaker A: Because the whole thing is prefaced on her like, going. Finding all these. All of these soldiers have showed up and are staying in their castle that like wizard soldiers or whatever. And she like, finds them attractive and she's like going up to like, cleaning their room and she's being. She's like, excited at the idea of like, smelling their stuff. And like, again, the idea is that she is growing into her. Like she's growing. Going through puberty or about to start going through puberty. But yeah, she is like 10. It feels young. It's.
• 49:27
  Speaker B: I don't know. I didn't really care for this. I thought it had some kind of strange men writing women, but actually men writing girls vibes that I didn't really care for. I. Yeah. And I wasn't sure I was having A hard time figuring out what the point of that stuff being in the story was.
• 49:51
  Speaker A: I will agree with that. It doesn't feel like it's really leading any.
• 49:54
  Speaker B: To the extent that I was like, okay, why is this here?
• 49:57
  Speaker A: Yeah, it does.
• 49:59
  Speaker B: Why. Why are you. Why are you weirding me out with this?
• 50:02
  Speaker A: Yeah, because it doesn't even feel like it's not like the point in the way, like. So, for instance, comparing it to like the philosophy club scene from earlier. Philosophy club scene, while it's strange and weird and has some. Some like, kind of. I know a lot. Plenty of people, like, aren't a big fan of that. I can at least understand like, why that's in there as like the weird experiences that happen when you're in college and like the stuff. Stuff that you can get up to and like the kind of the. The weird, like, sexual boundaries that you push in college and stuff like that there. I can at least understand all of that. And, and in the context of the first half of the book, it makes perfect sense because we are following all of these college kids, you know, like university age kids through their university experience. And that's kind of a part of that thing. This part, though, like, Nor, you're like, it's not really like a main character. She's not really. Now, I. I think part of this is all muddied a little bit by the fact that I believe like, Nor and Lear become like main characters in later books.
• 50:59
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think you're right about that.
• 51:01
  Speaker A: I think like, they end up being kind of important characters later, so that some of this, at least to some extent, is setting groundwork for future stuff. That being said, I don't understand what this necessarily has to do with anything, but I mentioned earlier that the broom came from Mother Yakal. And as I mentioned too, like Mother Yackel is because Yackel is this name that keeps recurring.
• 51:23
  Speaker B: Yes, we keep hearing the name Yackel in different.
• 51:26
  Speaker A: In different contexts, different places. And it's like kind of this recurring thing and I like, even to the point where it's kind of implied that Mother Yackel is like, is the Kumbric witch of old or whatever. Or at the very least is like a reincarnation of the Kubrick witch or like a part of the same kind of spiritual entity as the Kumric witch, like almost. Almost as if like the Kumbrick witches, like, and like which witchcraft or witchery or whatever is almost like, like the Speed Force or something.
• 51:58
  Speaker B: Right.
• 51:58
  Speaker A: That like, manifests as people in our. You Know what I mean? Like, it's this entity outside of the universe of Oz that occasionally manifests physically as different people within Oz is kind of the vibe a little bit that I get from it, but it also reminded me the whole Kubrick witch thing and like this whole thing with the broom and like the, the thing he found earlier where, where Bach found the inscription of her with the. The Kubrick witch. Like the drawing where she has like the silver slippers and it's like a little dog or whatever. And it's kind of implied to like evoke imagery of like Dorothy with Toto and stuff like that. Is that the Kubrick witch in this kind of feels like the Bene Gesserit in like Dune or whatever. Where they almost feels like the. And. And she Alphabet even alludes to. This is like how much of this is like part of a plan or like it's part of like this greater arc, like design or something like that. I don't know. I think all that stuff is really compelling. It's all left again, intentionally, incredibly vague and nebulous.
• 53:02
  Speaker B: Yeah, we don't get any answers.
• 53:04
  Speaker A: There's not really any answers, at least in this first, first book. But I do like the way that the, the story just kind of alludes to these bigger ideas of like in the same way that I find the Bene Gesserit really compelling because she also ponders that like maybe Morrible is also similarly like Yakkal or something like that. Or again, the way she describes it is never like they're the same person, but like, I, I don't know how to.
• 53:31
  Speaker B: They could be versions of the same.
• 53:34
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 53:34
  Speaker B: Entity.
• 53:35
  Speaker A: Something like that. I don't know. It's. I, I find all that stuff really interesting. The movie doesn't do anything with any of that. Again, I get it because I think it's kind of too nebulous.
• 53:43
  Speaker B: Yeah, like. Yeah, like nebulous and like esoteric. I think to.
• 53:48
  Speaker A: To really like explain in a movie. Yeah, in a two and a half hour movie or whatever. But anyways, I like it. I think it's kind of cool. This is a little side that I did not catch at all. Elphaba is catching up with
• 54:04
  Speaker B: her dad.
• 54:05
  Speaker A: Her dad. She goes back to visit Nessarose. Her dad asked her to come back to visit. She goes back to visit. She's talking to Frax, who does not die in this. Compared like in the movie, he's dead at this point and in the musical he dies right at the end of the first act. But he is not dead in this. He's still alive. And because Nessa then ascends to the.
• 54:24
  Speaker B: Ascends to the leadership, the Eminence.
• 54:26
  Speaker A: Or through her grandfather. Yeah, because her grandfather passes away and that's where the. The title comes to her. And it's not through her dad. She's talking to her dad about the past and he mentions they're talking about Turtle Heart. And he says she kind of realizes that Freck's like, loved Turtle Heart. And he says, yeah, both me and your mom did. We shared him.
• 54:47
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 54:47
  Speaker A: And I was like, wait a second, what? And it is revealed in this moment here in the second half of this book that they were both sleeping with Turtle Heart.
• 54:56
  Speaker B: They were a throuple.
• 54:57
  Speaker A: They were a throuple, but like a secret throuple. Like it seems like they were a throuple but not. Not like open about it. Maybe. Maybe they were.
• 55:06
  Speaker B: I don't know if he has. I mean, definitely. I don't think like other people knew.
• 55:12
  Speaker A: No, no. Yeah.
• 55:13
  Speaker B: But like, as. As to whether. I mean, I. I think both.
• 55:18
  Speaker A: I guess they did. Yeah.
• 55:19
  Speaker B: Because he knew that she. That.
• 55:21
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 55:21
  Speaker B: Melena, clearly. Yeah.
• 55:23
  Speaker A: That's interesting. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Well, anyways, my whole point was that boy, I did not catch any inkling of that.
• 55:29
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 55:30
  Speaker A: In the first half of this book there was any illusions to the fact that he was also like into Freck or Turtle Heart and sleeping with him.
• 55:37
  Speaker B: It did feel a little bit like a post writing part one decision to me. But. But part one is mostly for like focused on Elphaba as a young person.
• 55:47
  Speaker A: Yeah, she just not.
• 55:48
  Speaker B: Why would. You know? Like. Yeah, you know.
• 55:51
  Speaker A: Yeah. I think it is an intentionally kept, intentionally vague in the first part. And then this is kind of a reveal. And I think this is. Leads to the idea of that. I think it's playing with the idea of learning things about your parents that you do.
• 56:01
  Speaker B: Yes, absolutely.
• 56:02
  Speaker A: Like later in life you're like, holy shit. I had no idea. Like when I was a kid I had no idea that this was going on with my parents or whatever. And so I think it's kind of leaning into that, which I thought again was interesting and I kind of liked it because I liked Turtle Heart as a character and I was like, good for Frecks. I'm glad that they all made that work out.
• 56:19
  Speaker B: Overall, I think Nessa Rose's story is more interesting in the book.
• 56:25
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 56:26
  Speaker B: I thought the part about her having Munchkinland secede from Oz was really fascinating and not at all Anything I was expecting to encounter in this story.
• 56:38
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. She has such a minimal. And that's what my next note is about is a complaint about the movie and the musical to that extent. But I've always found Nessa Rose's characterization and narrative in the musical, in the movie to be super clunky because it's so rushed.
• 56:55
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 56:55
  Speaker A: Compared to everything else. And this one, though, because of one, the. The time jumps. But two, we just get a lot more scenes and we learn a lot more about Nessarose in this book than we do in the movie, in the musical. And I. I agree. I. I thought that was really interesting. I also think. So the reason that Freck's wrote Elphaba and wants her to come out and visit Nessarose is because Nessarose has risen into essentially be like the governor of Munchkin Land. I think they say that that title later. She has the Eminence ship or whatever that she got from her grandfather, but her dad messages. Elphabone is like, you need to come help her because she's crazy. Yeah, basically. And he basically outlines that, like, he has become a little bit more reasonable in his old age. Like his religious mellowed has tempered and mellowed out. And he is not kind of the same religious fanatic that he used to be.
• 57:46
  Speaker B: But Nessarose very much is like fire and brimstone.
• 57:50
  Speaker A: Fire and brimstone. And he's kind of worried that her religious fervor is going to make her mess things up. Yeah. And spoilers. It does. That is the plot line as it plays out in the book is that Nessa Rose, Because Elphaba basically refuses. She's like, well, I'm not going to sit here and like babysit you and like be your advisor or whatever. And because of that, or maybe not because of it, maybe it would happen either way. But ultimately Nessarose does become like a despot. It. And that is why that. That actually buys in a little or tracks a little bit better with what we see like in the wizard of Oz movie or like the original movie is that like, they're all like celebrating, like all the Munchkin lands are thrilled and hate her. Whereas in the movie you would be a little less inclined or understanding of like, why they would hate her or whatever. You know what I mean? Like.
• 58:37
  Speaker B: Right.
• 58:38
  Speaker A: She has done some bad things in the movie. We see her like, create like the. She doesn't let Bach leave and she like has like a no movement thing for Munchkin Landers or whatever. But it all just feels so sudden and out of.
• 58:49
  Speaker B: So crushed together too. Like, she does that, like, almost immediately before the scene where she dies.
• 58:56
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 58:57
  Speaker B: So I'm like, I mean, yeah, sure, you hate her because she's a dictator. Absolutely. But also it just. It just feels so, like, crunched together. Yeah.
• 59:07
  Speaker A: You're just like, oh, she makes this rule and then immediately dies. And it's like, how much. What. What was even. Yeah, you know this. And you see so little of it, whereas it's. It's. You don't see a whole lot of it in the book, but the timeline and everything going on and. And just the way that Nessa Rose is characterized in the book, it's much more. You're like, okay, I get how she becomes the weird, despotic authoritarian leader that she is, whereas in the movie she's just like a nice girl. And that's what this leads into. My next note, which is like. It's such a mess in the movie. Like the whole scene where Nessa turns Bach into the tin. Or she doesn't turn him. I guess technically Elphaba turns him into the Tin man, but where she, like. He comes in and she's like flying. And then he like, is like, well, I'm going to leave. And she's like, no, you can't leave. And then she tries to do a spell and it like gets. Destroys his heart or whatever. And then Elphaba has to turn him into something that doesn't need a heart, so she turns him into a Tin Man. It's all so rushed and messy and like, it's like just one scene. All of that happens and it just feels like Nessa feels like a completely different character than she did in the first movie without much explanation or real. Again, we get. It's like, okay, her dad died and she has all this responsibility and Elphaba left her and disappeared for a while. It's all there. And like, I get why she's different, but it requires a lot of extrapolation and you kind of just have to like.
• 1:00:24
  Speaker B: Yeah, you kind of have to be okay with, like, taking a couple.
• 1:00:30
  Speaker A: You have to fill in the blanks yourself.
• 1:00:32
  Speaker B: Filling in the blanks. Yeah. And I also think it's better that Bach isn't the Tin man in the book.
• 1:00:40
  Speaker A: Yeah. Spoilers. Bach is not the Tin man.
• 1:00:42
  Speaker B: I totally get what the movie and the musical were going for by having that be a character that we know. But the whole plot around him becoming the Tin man is so dangerously thin that it just doesn't work for Me.
• 1:01:01
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, I. I would agree with that. I will say that it's. It isn't very clearly inspired by the book because, like, him being the Tin man, the musical is clearly. Because I had this in the movie. Nailed it. But Alpha does speculate at one point she suspects that Nick Chopper, who is what they call the 10 million.
• 1:01:20
  Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's his name from the wizard of Oz book.
• 1:01:24
  Speaker A: But she speculates that Nick Chopper, who becomes the Tin man, is specifically a victim of, she says, her sister's spite and magic. Yeah, so that is what happened with BOK it was, you know, like BOK was turned, like, by her sister and stuff like that. So there is a, like, connection there. And she does, as you mentioned earlier, speculate that the Cowardly lion is the lion cub from the classroom. And then eventually. And we'll get to it. She does think that the Scarecrow is Fierro. So, like, the musical just takes all of that and goes, okay, but what if.
• 1:01:56
  Speaker B: Actually, we'll just make that real.
• 1:01:58
  Speaker A: We'll just make that happen. Have. Yeah, that actually happened. Which I thought was. Again, it's kind of interesting, if nothing else. One little detail that is in this book that was cracking me up is that when she goes and she visits Glinda. Glinda has or does she visit Glinda? Is this when she's.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker B: She's in Munchkin Land and I think she just happens to run, or. No. Is it when she comes back for Nessa's funeral?
• 1:02:25
  Speaker A: Yes, I think that's what it is. Because she meets Glinda one time, I think. Yes, it's when she's back for Nessa's funeral. That's what it is. I. I believe that's one. Anyways, it doesn't really matter, but Glinda has this thought in the book where she said she thinks to herself that she could recall. She's trying to remember something about Elphaba, and she can't remember it, but she says she could recall far more clearly how she and Alfie had shared a bed on the road to the Emerald City City. How brave that had made her feel, and how vulnerable, too. And it's like the only line in the movie. And so. Also, spoilers. Glinda's barely in the second half of this book. Like, literally. This is the.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker B: Yeah, we interact with her, like, twice.
• 1:03:03
  Speaker A: Yeah, I have this in better in the book because somehow the movie was even less Sapphic than the book or the musical, which is wild to me because I thought they were definitely going to Play that up, if anything. Like, I would have thought so. In a modern interpretation, a modern adaptation of this story and in something where, like, a subplot or like a fan canon or whatever that has been, you know, speculated on and played around with by people forever. A million fanfics and stuff about it. I really thought they might lean into it a little bit.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker B: And it kind of seemed like they were going to in the first movie.
• 1:03:37
  Speaker A: And then this one is completely devoid of anything remotely approaching anything like sapphic undertones to their relationship. They are literally just friends in the second half of this movie, which is fine. It's just interesting. And I thought it was particularly interesting that this book at least has one line that, again, alludes to this idea, because they only reconnect on this one moment in this one scene. And in that reconnection, Glinda thinks about the time they shared a bed together. It's like, okay, yeah, another little backstory part of Elphaba's life that I think is really compelling and helps you understand who she is. The. The kind of stuff that doesn't show up in the movie. But again, I understand why is that. She recalls a time where when she was a kid and she went to Quadling country with Frex while they were on their. Like, their mission missionary trips, basically. And Freck's, it turns out, went down there to try to apologize to Turtle Heart's family, tribe, whatever about, for his death. Basically tried to do the same thing that Elphaba tries to do in this.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker B: Again, again, with the, like, cyclical nature of the. The story.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker A: Yes. He goes down there to try to apologize for Turtle Heart's death. Because I don't. If you don't recall, we mentioned this in the first one, Turtle Heart. And they remind us in the second half of the book, Turtle Heart was sacrificed to try to get by, like, the Munchkin landers in their town.
• 1:04:58
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:04:58
  Speaker A: To try to get rid of the drought that was going on. And so Frex goes down there to try to apologize for this happening, and the matriarch within Turtle Heart's tribe or whatever just is having nothing, none of it, and just, like, hits him and, like, hits him in the face with, like, a reed or something. Like she's holding some plant or something and hits him in the face. He's kind of taken aback by this and. And he. He has this outburst like. Like, why are you so mad at me? Or why won't you forgive me? Is. Is this not punishing enough for what I've done? Gesturing to Elphaba, who is there because she is a green child. And he's like, you know, it's just not punishment enough. Again, just gets a lot of it really helps kind of set up the backstory of why Elphaba is the person that she is. And. And this backstory of her dad being like, hey, this child of mine, is that not appropriate punishment for anything bad I've done? You can kind of understand why Elphaba has the hang ups about guilt and shame that she does. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:59
  Speaker B: There's also a scene in the section where she goes home for Nessa's funeral where she has a conversation with the wizard. And a lot of stuff happens in that scene. But I just really want to call out one line in this section. She says to him, sir, I think you were a very bad wizard.
• 1:06:20
  Speaker A: Yes. Yeah.
• 1:06:23
  Speaker B: And then we catch up with Avarick from the first half of the book. The guy.
• 1:06:28
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:06:29
  Speaker B: Elphaba goes to a dinner party at his house.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker A: Yeah. She sees him and he's like, yeah, come over for dinner.
• 1:06:34
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:06:35
  Speaker A: And I thought an insane dinner party with like. Yeah.
• 1:06:41
  Speaker B: Elphaba going to this dinner party and forcing all of his guests to discuss the nature of evil is so objectively funny.
• 1:06:49
  Speaker A: So avarik. I don't know if we know exactly what he is, but he's like some higher up whatever.
• 1:06:55
  Speaker B: He has like some kind of inherited
• 1:06:57
  Speaker A: title and so he's friends with like all of these, these upper crust society people and they're having an obnoxious dinner together.
• 1:07:05
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:07:05
  Speaker A: And Elphaba shows up and they spend the whole dinner debating the, the concept of evil. Yeah, basically. And it's so funny and. But like she even like tells them like she confesses to them that she like murdered. Because this is right after the whole Madam Morrible thing, which we'll talk about. But she confesses that she like killed Madame Morrible.
• 1:07:24
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:07:24
  Speaker A: Or like killed a woman like, like. Or like the day before or whatever. And they're like, oh, they're all like tittering over it at a. It's that classic. I'm trying to think of a great example of this, but like. Oh, you know what it reminds me of a little bit is like when we rope like and rope. When they're talking about like. I can't remember the exact context, but they're talking like they're talking to their college, old college professor about like the evil and stuff like that. And it kind of reminds me of that it was like this like very high minded discussions of like what it means to be Evil and what evil even is. And yeah, they're all just getting more and more drunk and then they all. At the end, they all give her a round of applause for such a great evening of conversation or something. I can't remember this. Very strange. Yeah.
• 1:08:10
  Speaker B: The only thing that I could think during that scene was that book. Elphaba should have just become a humanities professor. And I say that with love. Some of my favorite people are humanities professors. But you all know I'm right about this.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, 100%. Absolutely. One of the things I thought was really interesting is at one point she gets some miracle elixir. I don't even remember where exactly she gets this from the same bottle from. I don't know, whatever. But she ends up getting some. A miracle elixir. And she takes some and has like a miracle elixir fueled dream one night.
• 1:08:39
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 1:08:40
  Speaker A: Where she is able to like, see the wizard's past.
• 1:08:43
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:08:44
  Speaker A: Again, because this is all like nebulous magic that is all kind of interconnected in weird ways. So she has this dream where she's able to like, see the wizards, like, previous life. And we get like this little vignette of him being turned away from a job because he's Irish. Like, there's like a sign that says, like, Irish need not apply. And I was like, oh, that's so weird. So, yeah, we see the wizard being discriminated against for being Irish. And I don't. That's just, again, to set up, I guess, the parallels between, like, he is now the person perpetrating.
• 1:09:14
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:09:14
  Speaker A: Discrimination that he was once a victim of in the same way that Elphaba is perpetrating, you know, abuse and stuff in the way that she was a victim of. Yeah. Just kind of exploring the cyclical nature of. Of violence and all that sort of stuff. But it was interesting. I was like, oh, okay. I don't know if I would have guessed. I guess maybe in the. In the original movie, is he. Does he like, have a noticeable Irish accent?
• 1:09:35
  Speaker B: I don't think.
• 1:09:36
  Speaker A: Like, is he canonically Irish in the story? I don't know.
• 1:09:40
  Speaker B: Not that I know of.
• 1:09:41
  Speaker A: I just thought that was interesting. He's clearly Irish in this version of the story.
• 1:09:46
  Speaker B: Yeah. And it's an interesting kind of historical reference too, because we know the wizard then comes to Oz and becomes the dictator who, like you said, like, perpetrates these crimes that he was once a victim of. Are very similar crimes. Which I think is interesting. Like, to pull like the Irish history in America in for that.
• 1:10:15
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:10:15
  Speaker B: Because Irish People in America became white.
• 1:10:19
  Speaker A: Yes. Became the oppressor. They became white and joined the oppressor class eventually. Yeah, to some extent. Yeah. No, and it totally works in that regard, which is. It's also a similar thing. We talked about this. Obviously, that's a huge part of. Kind of the thematic workings of Sinners as well, is that there's the whole reason that the vampires are Irish and playing Irish music in that. Is that. That was. Was another group that was.
• 1:10:42
  Speaker B: Yeah. Discriminated against.
• 1:10:43
  Speaker A: Discriminated against. But then was able to join and become part of. Because the vampirism in that is white hegemony. Hegemony. Yeah, White hegemony. And Irish have become part of that and so have incorporate. You know, they're. They're part of the hegemony at this point.
• 1:10:58
  Speaker B: And.
• 1:10:58
  Speaker A: And in Sinners, they're there to offer to the black people, hey, come join. Be part of multiculturalism. Come be part of the white, white hegemonic power structure. You just have to, like, sacrifice your gifts to us and let us take them and use them and that sort of thing. Yeah, it's all really interesting. So, like I said, I. There's a lot of interesting stuff in this book, but, boy, it's a boring second half. I mentioned it earlier, but she does send out Killy Joy, who. Which is the dog, and some other dogs that I guess he's friends with to, like, go fetch Dorothy.
• 1:11:30
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:11:30
  Speaker A: And this is the. Because this is the scene in. It's like wolves is his description.
• 1:11:34
  Speaker B: Yeah, the scene in. I remember explicitly talking about it in our wizard of Oz episode, which was forever ago.
• 1:11:42
  Speaker A: Forever ago.
• 1:11:42
  Speaker B: Because that was like, our fourth episode ever. And she. She sends these animals after them in that book. And the Tin man kills them all with his axe. And then she sends the pros out. And for some reason, the Scarecrow has a Glock. Like.
• 1:12:01
  Speaker A: Does he?
• 1:12:01
  Speaker B: Yeah. Remember, he has, like, a pistol and, like, mows them all down.
• 1:12:04
  Speaker A: Oh, I don't remember that. I thought in Brain. I remember him just, like, strangling them or something.
• 1:12:08
  Speaker B: Maybe that is. But he has. He has a gun in the movie, I think, though.
• 1:12:12
  Speaker A: Maybe I don't remember that at all.
• 1:12:15
  Speaker B: I think he does.
• 1:12:16
  Speaker A: Well, Fiero has a gun, you mean? I don't know what you're talking about. Like in this movie, like in Wicked.
• 1:12:21
  Speaker B: No. And the wizard of Oz, he has a gun. I think so.
• 1:12:25
  Speaker A: That seems insane. I don't remember that at all. I'll take your word for it. I don't recall him having a gun. But what I remember you saying about the birds was that he liked, like. He, like, grabs.
• 1:12:35
  Speaker B: It's been a minute since I read it. I think you're right.
• 1:12:38
  Speaker A: I think that's also what they say in this, is that he just like. Like grabs.
• 1:12:41
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:12:42
  Speaker A: They kill them all and kills all the birds. But. But the. The. This book kind of reframes it through the lens of her, like, in. In her descent into madness. It's her, like, she thinks she's going. Sending them out to, like, go bring them. She's like, go bring them here. Not, like, in an evil way.
• 1:13:00
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:13:01
  Speaker A: Just, like, go fetch them. And then she's, like, perplexed when they kill all the animals. She's like, what are they doing? Yeah, but it's also clearly, like in madness. And she's also getting more and more upset as this is all happening and getting. And, like, ultimately to the point where she just decides she's gonna. I don't know. It's very interesting. And I said this. It really is a difference between what the movie and the book are trying to do. The book is. This is how this, like, all of the weird, insane she does in wizard of Oz makes sense to her.
• 1:13:27
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:13:28
  Speaker A: In this. This. In the context of this book. And the movie is like, no, that's actually, like, the book doesn't even. Or the movie and the musical doesn't even mess with any of this stuff.
• 1:13:36
  Speaker B: No.
• 1:13:37
  Speaker A: She sends the. The monkeys out to get her at one point to, like, bring her there,
• 1:13:40
  Speaker B: which we do see in the wizard
• 1:13:42
  Speaker A: of Oz, which we see in the wizard of Oz, but she doesn't do all the other, like, animals going out. And again, because the movie isn't really interested in dealing, and the musical, for that matter, isn't really interested in, like, actually perfectly lining up with what the original story was doing. But during that whole scene where she's sending out all these different groups, at one point Nanny, because Nanny and Lear are there, all of this is going down, and they're, like, preparing for their guests or whatever. And she. When she. I think it's when she sends the birds out maybe to, like, go get them, and she. Or she even says, like, and blind them or something like that. Because, again, she's losing her mind at this point. And Lier says she's blinding the guests coming for dinner. And Nanny responds, well, that's one way to avoid having the dust, I suppose, which I thought was a very funny line.
• 1:14:29
  Speaker B: I. Yeah, I continued to really enjoy Nanny in the second half of the book. I Was very happy when she randomly shows back up.
• 1:14:37
  Speaker A: I was like, oh, thank God. It definitely helped. Yeah. From there on out, having her around,
• 1:14:42
  Speaker B: another moment of hers that I laughed out loud at was when she greeted Dorothy by observing that all of her arms and legs are in the right places.
• 1:14:50
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 1:14:51
  Speaker B: I don't know if I would consider this better, per se, but I thought it was really interesting that we see where the idea of Fierro being the scarecrow comes from.
• 1:15:01
  Speaker A: Yeah, I thought that was interesting because
• 1:15:03
  Speaker B: there's one point where Elphaba is like, she sees them. She knows they're coming.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker A: I think she might be looking in the looking glass and sees them or whatever.
• 1:15:11
  Speaker B: And she starts to fantasize that maybe Fearro isn't dead and he's sneaking back in this disguise as the scarecrow.
• 1:15:19
  Speaker A: She began to think that behind that painted cornmeal sack of a face, there was a face she would know, a face she had been waiting for. And so, yeah, that's how the. And. And again, that's clearly the musical just takes that and goes, okay, actually, let's make that real. Let's make that real. But, yeah, the move. What the book is doing is that she, in her desperate, insane, like, again, descent into madness, she. She desperately hoping and thinking that maybe Fiero is still alive and the scarecrow is him. But she actually has that dashed pretty quickly is when she sends the birds out. He, like. Or no, the bees. I think when he sends the bees out, the scarecrow, like, pulls all of his stuffing out.
• 1:15:56
  Speaker B: Yeah. Can, like, protect him from the bees.
• 1:16:00
  Speaker A: And when that happens, she goes, oh, well, it's clearly not Fiero. Like, he.
• 1:16:04
  Speaker B: He's.
• 1:16:04
  Speaker A: He's now empty clothes and that. So that makes no sense. But I thought that was interesting. Yeah. That it's. It's you. You can see why the musical and movie does that. But it does very much change what's going on there. Again, to a point that I get, because the story is like the movie and the musical, or the musical specifically, I guess, and thus the movie are like, well, we need an ending. Isn't the most depressing thing ever.
• 1:16:29
  Speaker B: We need something.
• 1:16:31
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:16:32
  Speaker B: A little bit uplifting, a little bit
• 1:16:33
  Speaker A: of an ending at the end here. That is not the saddest thing.
• 1:16:37
  Speaker B: Yeah. A little moment that I enjoyed. When Dorothy gets to the castle, she's like, like, I'm sorry, I can't stay. I. I have to find the Wicked Witch of the West. And Lear just goes, oh, don't worry. She also lives here. Yeah, she's here.
• 1:16:55
  Speaker A: No, you're good.
• 1:16:55
  Speaker B: You're in the right place. I also liked that Dorothy was genuinely trying to help Elphaba when she threw the water on her.
• 1:17:03
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:17:03
  Speaker B: Because her like her dress had caught fire.
• 1:17:05
  Speaker A: Is that not implied in the original movie?
• 1:17:06
  Speaker B: I think so, yeah.
• 1:17:07
  Speaker A: I thought that was.
• 1:17:07
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:17:08
  Speaker A: It's been so long since we watched it. But I thought in the original movie that's the same thing as like.
• 1:17:11
  Speaker B: Yeah, she catches fire and I can't. I couldn't remember because it's been so long since I've seen the wizard of Oz if it was like wholly motivated by that or not. I think it is, but I. I liked that. Whereas in Wicked for Good it seemed to imply that she was actually trying to murder her with the water.
• 1:17:29
  Speaker A: Water. Yeah, it does seem like that. Yeah. For sure. A better in the book because it's not in the book is terrifying. De aged Jeff. They didn't even need to do it. Is the most annoying thing because it's so obvious in that scene from behind that. That is supposed to be Jeff Goldblum and the wizard, but it's. We get a replay of the scene from the first movie where he shows up and. And seduces Elphaba's mom.
• 1:17:55
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:17:56
  Speaker A: And sleeps with her. I say seduces and then drugs her and sleeps with her and. But we see it again this. In this movie and then we get a reveal of the wizard, like his face. And it's just de aged Jeff Goldblum. But it looks absurd. It's so bad. It looks so bad. Oh my God. A little detail in the book that I thought was fun is that after everything is wrapping up, like the story is done, we're getting. We get kind of bounce around to get like a little leg.
• 1:18:25
  Speaker B: We get the Star wars fly through of the entire universe. That scene that George Lucas added to the end of.
• 1:18:35
  Speaker A: Oh, to the end of Return of
• 1:18:36
  Speaker B: the Jedi where we like zip everybody partying, celebrating.
• 1:18:41
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. We get a little bit of like after the witch has been killed. But one of the things we see is we jump to the philosophy club, which is no longer an underground sex dungeon club and is now an underground headquarters for the robot uprising.
• 1:18:55
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:18:56
  Speaker A: Grametic, the guy who. The robot who belonged to Madame Morrible and who killed Dr. Dillamund in the book on moral's orders is. Is leading an underground group of tiktoks of robots who are like discussing a class revolution.
• 1:19:14
  Speaker B: Basically.
• 1:19:14
  Speaker A: They say I was like, that's pretty cool. I like that. I could see. I imagine the other books go into that eventually. I. I would think I'm going to
• 1:19:21
  Speaker B: say a robot revolution I could get on board with.
• 1:19:24
  Speaker A: That's pretty sweet.
• 1:19:26
  Speaker B: I think I hated the end of the movie.
• 1:19:28
  Speaker A: I hated a lot about the movie.
• 1:19:30
  Speaker B: Yeah. I mean.
• 1:19:31
  Speaker A: But. Yeah.
• 1:19:33
  Speaker B: But I think I particularly hated the end of it. It was so tidy.
• 1:19:37
  Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. Which is. I mean the musical wraps up similarly. So. Right. Like. Like what. Is there a main difference that I think the.
• 1:19:47
  Speaker B: The movie did a little bit more particularly where. Because the. At the end of the musical there's nothing about Glinda giving the anim fights back.
• 1:19:57
  Speaker A: Yes. That doesn't have. And like marbles. Like wrap up. I guess.
• 1:19:59
  Speaker B: Yeah. We don't really get. I don't think then like the. And then like particularly the scene that the. Of the animals like coming up out of the hole in the ground. Like they were just waiting right there for the duration of the film.
• 1:20:12
  Speaker A: Makes literally no sense. We saw that very early in the movie. They're all like, we're leaving. We gotta get out of Oz. And so they like dug up a tunnel under the yellow brick road tunnel and underground like an underground railroad kind of thing. It's really on the nose.
• 1:20:26
  Speaker B: We're so clever.
• 1:20:27
  Speaker A: But. And, and, but, but yes. Then at the end of the movie we just see them coming out of that. But like ostensibly they would have been gone for months at this other.
• 1:20:37
  Speaker B: Like for however long.
• 1:20:38
  Speaker A: However long the plot of the movie took place over, which is at least days, if not weeks, if not months. And. But they're just there again. And it's like. And again it's. I get what you're doing. But. But it doesn't. It's so silly. And me.
• 1:20:49
  Speaker B: And to my memory the musical ends with. It's implied that Glinda is going to like take the reins in Oz.
• 1:20:59
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 1:21:00
  Speaker B: Because the wizard leaves. I don't remember exactly what happens to Morrible at the end of the musical that escapes my memory.
• 1:21:09
  Speaker A: I think she is. She gets her. She must get some sort of.
• 1:21:12
  Speaker B: Yeah. Something come up.
• 1:21:13
  Speaker A: And.
• 1:21:13
  Speaker B: But. And then like. But the musical ends with like Glinda sad and Elphaba and Fiyero being like, okay, let's leave. I wish we could tell her, but we can't. And the movie gives this kind of very tidy like wrap up where it's like, everything's fine now. Everything's great. Glinda fixed everything. All of the animals are allowed back in the cities and it's all fine. It's all great. Worry guys.
• 1:21:40
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I was Also cracking up at the end is like, after everything gets wrapped up, we cut back and, like, Glinda is, like, getting ready to go, like, assume whatever power she had. I don't even know. Well, she's getting ready to go do the scene from the first movie. She's getting ready to go do that.
• 1:21:56
  Speaker B: Getting ready. The. She's putting on her Glinda costume and she's going out in the bubble.
• 1:22:01
  Speaker A: Yeah. To do the. The opening scene of the first movie. But we get. It's like. It's, like, set to Avengers music and it's like, all shot in slow mo as she, like, puts her tiara on her. It's very silly. It's. I thought it was very silly. And it was, like, very hard to take seriously. And then the movie ends on the final shot. Because I was wondering. Because we had mentioned in the prequel, like, in one of the trivia facts, like, oh, Cynthia Rivo said that she. She knows what Ariana Grande whispered in her ear or whatever. And I was like, when is that scene going to happen? Because it's not. It hasn't happened yet. And then we just cut. It's just a flashback scene to them from earlier in the movie when they
• 1:22:41
  Speaker B: were at Shiz to an earlier flash
• 1:22:43
  Speaker A: to an earlier flashback from earlier in the movie of them at Shiz from the, like, early. From the first movie timeline. And they're just, like, sitting in a field and she just leans over and whispers something in Elphaba's ear. And then the movie ends and it's literally just there to recreate the famous poster.
• 1:23:01
  Speaker B: Yeah, the famous musical.
• 1:23:02
  Speaker A: The musical poster of Glenda whispering in Elphaba's ear. That's literally just there for that. And you're like, like, what. Why is this here? Like, it doesn't make any. It's. It. It's such a cheap, like, cop out of, like, a. We need an emotional button on the movie. And, like, I guess we'll also make it this visual reference to. To me, it just. It makes. It doesn't narratively or thematically fit with anything else they're doing. It's just a weird. Not that it doesn't fit at all. Like, I get it. That relationship is important ending on them sharing a moment together. But. But it. Like the thing like, oh, she whispered something there. But it's like, what? Who cares? It's nothing. Right? Like, it doesn't. It's not implied.
• 1:23:42
  Speaker B: Like, ending on a moment between them. Fine.
• 1:23:45
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 1:23:46
  Speaker B: But that particular moment.
• 1:23:48
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 1:23:48
  Speaker B: There's no reason for it to Be that.
• 1:23:51
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 1:23:51
  Speaker B: Other than to have people point at the screen and go, the music posters, the musical poster.
• 1:23:56
  Speaker A: Yeah, because it's not like there was some moment where, where earlier in the movie she was like, hey, remember that time at Shiz when we were in the field and I, and you whispered and I told you something or whatever. Like, it's never alluded to. And so, like, and there's not even anything that, like, you could imagine what she would be whispering that would make sense or mean, really Anything? Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, it's like, what could she have said that would mean something? Like, I love you.
• 1:24:22
  Speaker B: Sure, sure.
• 1:24:23
  Speaker A: Maybe, like, but that's like, we already knew that. Like, we don't need, like, that's not like some reveal or like, like a moment that, like, does anything. I, I, I much I, I want to be with you. Like, but if that's the case, then, then it's a failure because none of the rest of the story plays with any of the staffic undertones or anything like that. So it's not that it's, it's nothing. It's nothing. It literally means nothing. And so thus including it is such a cheap, like, just. Yeah, like, remember the poster? Like, sure. I get. I, I hated it a lot. Made no sense to me. Well, and in contrast, I think the book actually ends on kind of an interesting note. As I mentioned earlier, it ends on the, the line, the final lines from that poem about the witch and the fox babies or whatever. And it does, I think. So the big difference between the book and the movie and the musical is that in the movie and the musical, Elphaba survives. Yeah, she is, she survives. She is not killed by the water. It's all like a trick or a ruse or whatever.
• 1:25:22
  Speaker B: Yeah, she goes into a trap door.
• 1:25:23
  Speaker A: She goes into a trap door door. In the book, she dies is the implication is that she is killed by the water and she just dies. But there is at least a little bit of an inkling of the idea that maybe she's not dead. But because the final lines are. And there the wicked old witch stayed for a good long time. And did she ever come out? Not yet. That's the final line. And again, there being the implication that maybe the Wicked Witch of the west
• 1:25:50
  Speaker B: could come back or maybe that we're playing with that, like, reincarnation idea.
• 1:25:55
  Speaker A: I think that's more likely is, that is more, more importantly is less that Elphaba specifically may return, but that the spirit of the Kubrick witch may be reincarnated Once again, in a new form to whatever, blah, blah, blah, that sort of thing, which I think is kind of interesting and compelling and is much more interesting than the movie's terrible ending. Ending. All right, that was plenty of all the stuff we wanted to talk about and better in the book. Let's go ahead and talk about the stuff we thought was better in the movie. My life has taught me one lesson,
• 1:26:27
  Speaker B: Hugo, and not the one I thought it would.
• 1:26:31
  Speaker A: Happy endings only happen in the movies. This is gonna be relatively short because this movie sucks. Spoilers. I. It is. It is not. I was hoping that maybe I would be, like, pleasantly surprised in that, like, what I had heard about it not being as good would be, like, incorrect. No, everybody was. Yeah. Spot on. Absolutely. I did kind of, like, the opening set piece of her attacking the gale force as they're, like, building the yellow brick road.
• 1:26:58
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:26:58
  Speaker A: It's kind of fun at moments. Although I did think it was kind of weird that she, like. She, like, cuts free the, like, buffalo.
• 1:27:06
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:27:06
  Speaker A: Rhinoceros things.
• 1:27:07
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:27:08
  Speaker A: That are, like, being forced to help, like, lay this brick. Road. Road. And I assumed she was gonna, like, rescue them or, like, chase them off, but not. I don't.
• 1:27:17
  Speaker B: I mean, they run off.
• 1:27:18
  Speaker A: Do they run off? Okay, they do run off. I guess I missed that part. But, yeah, she just kind of. They. I guess they just run off, but it's. It's fine. It's like, you needed some, like, opening kind of action beat or whatever, and I thought it was fine.
• 1:27:29
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:27:29
  Speaker A: I like some of the visuals, like, the yellow brick road with the Emerald city in the distance and.
• 1:27:33
  Speaker B: Right. And it is a decent enough, like, introduction to, like, okay, this is what we're gonna be doing in this story. Like, here's what she's up to. I really hated the brief surfing on the broom moment.
• 1:27:45
  Speaker A: Completely agree, please. Yeah, we don't need to do that. Yeah. She does a thing where she, like. She, like, kick flips it and, like, spins it and, like, jumps on it and you're like.
• 1:27:54
  Speaker B: All right, all right. I thought the movie did a better job of explaining what Glenda does and, like, why she's hanging around, being a public figure.
• 1:28:07
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:28:07
  Speaker B: I felt like. I felt like the movie's version of her was more in line with the original books and the 1939 film than the book's explanation was.
• 1:28:18
  Speaker A: Yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah.
• 1:28:20
  Speaker B: Because in the book, she's basically just, like, a socialite.
• 1:28:22
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:28:23
  Speaker B: Who happens to be there when Nessa Rose dies.
• 1:28:26
  Speaker A: Yeah. But in this, she's Much more. In the movie she's implied to be much more of like. Which is also what the book implied at the beginning that she was going to be doing when War has her whole like, I'm gonna. I'm forming a team to like Nessa and Elphaba and Glinda. Yeah. And so you think it's gonna be something like that. But no, she's kind of seems to be like a socialite. But like you said, I think the movie's version makes sense. I also like in the movie, the flashback to her childhood. Yeah, I thought that's a nice little scene where we see that she's like unable to do magic but desperately wants to. It helps facilitate and set up the falling out between Glinda and Elphaba a little bit better in the story where Elphaba is able to do magic and is flying around being the hero, doing
• 1:29:05
  Speaker B: magic, doing the things that Glenda wants to be able to.
• 1:29:07
  Speaker A: Glenda wishes she could do and can't. And it motivates their falling out and their disagreement a little bit better, which I thought was good, but. And it also like the moment too. Like, I like that her mom is like supportive and, and says like, well, your smile is all the magic you need or whatever. And she. And it. And you can tell that like, clearly Glinda took that at least somewhat to heart because that's what she uses. That's how she applies her trade now is through her charm and through her, her, you know, her ability to charm people. I like the bubble transportation device. It's fun. Morrible gives her this big contraption that lets her fly around because she can't do magic. They exposit the hell out of that scene. Like, Morrible is like, so we know because you can't do magic, we have created you a bubble machine that will make people think you can do magic. So that way they don't know that you can't actually do magic. And it's like, all right, we don't necessarily need all that of the exposition here, but the bubble machine is fun.
• 1:29:59
  Speaker B: It did annoy me that Morrible acts like Glinda is dumb for calling it a bubble.
• 1:30:04
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:30:04
  Speaker B: In that scene. Cuz is literally a bubble.
• 1:30:08
  Speaker A: Literally.
• 1:30:08
  Speaker B: It says bubble on it.
• 1:30:10
  Speaker A: It literally says bubble.
• 1:30:11
  Speaker B: Like, why are you acting like she's stupid for saying it's a bubble? I get that you don't like her, but she's correct.
• 1:30:18
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. One thing I liked about the movie, and I say liked very loosely here, is that it feels at Least somewhat connected to the first half. Half or the first movie.
• 1:30:28
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:30:29
  Speaker A: And the first half of the musical. The second half of this book barely feels connected to the first half of the reading experience.
• 1:30:37
  Speaker B: It's got the same characters in it,
• 1:30:39
  Speaker A: kind of some of the same characters, but, like, you get a ton of entirely new characters. All of the shiz people are, like, gone.
• 1:30:46
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:30:46
  Speaker A: Like, basically entirely. Fiero's in it briefly for, like, a chapter. Glinda shows up for like, one scene.
• 1:30:52
  Speaker B: Yeah. We reconnect with Bach like, twice.
• 1:30:55
  Speaker A: We briefly reconnect with Tibbet. Like, there's a handful of. But like, it's all very. Which, again, I think is intentional. It's. Everybody has gone on to do different things in their life and everybody's. You know, but it's just like all of these different characters. Also, the pacing is just entirely different.
• 1:31:11
  Speaker B: Thing of the second half of the book was.
• 1:31:13
  Speaker A: It's crazy compared to the first half. The first half. I mean, we still got that episode out late, but every time I sat down to read it, I felt like I was. It was like, moving pretty good.
• 1:31:21
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:31:21
  Speaker A: I was like, all right. Yeah. Yeah. And we're going through it pretty good. This half. The end of the Vinca section just never ended. And it just. It feels like it takes forever struggle. Once we finally got to the. The murder in its afterlife or whatever, things started.
• 1:31:34
  Speaker B: Yeah. Things picked up again a little bit. I. The. The Emerald City section wasn't too bad.
• 1:31:41
  Speaker A: I didn't hate that part with her and Fiero's romance and all that was fine.
• 1:31:45
  Speaker B: And the. But the. Into the Vincus segment, it just drags on forever. Went on forever and ever and ever even.
• 1:31:52
  Speaker A: And like, the other part that feels so different is, like, the first half. Half, there's, like, stuff happening. There's, like, narrative stakes. You're like, we're trying to figure out what happened to Dr. Dillon, what's the stuff he's working on. They're trying to help him. All of this stuff going on with the animals. What's going on with Madame Morrible and, like, the politics of, like, what she's trying to recruit. That there's, like, all of these things going on, and then the second half just screeches to a halt. It's just like, here's a hundred pages of Elphaba being guilty about Fiyero being dead and these shitty kids, and it's just 100 pages of that, and it's just like, okay. Yeah. And it just. Like I said, at least in the movie, it Feels tonally and like pacingly relatively consistent.
• 1:32:35
  Speaker B: Ish.
• 1:32:36
  Speaker A: Kind of. Kind of. I say that, but then I think about it.
• 1:32:39
  Speaker B: I'm like, at least feels like a more reasonable continuation of what we were doing in the first half.
• 1:32:47
  Speaker A: It doesn't feel like we're just. Because it kind of feels like in the second half of the book they were almost just like abandoning everything that happened in the first half. It's doing like an entirely new thing, which is not really. Again, because what we're doing is trying to get Elphaba to the point where she becomes the Wicked Witch of the west, which means we have to go down this route of her losing everything and failing and everything going poorly so that she gets more crazy and more desperate and more disillusioned. And so that's what we're doing. But because that's what we're doing, it's like, oh God. Whereas at least in the movie it's like, yeah, this feels like it's connected to what was happening in the first half because we're not trying to get to a point point where she's this desperate crazy villain. You didn't want to see the, the
• 1:33:29
  Speaker B: elephant shapeshifter I was really fine with. I mean, I was fine with skipping a lot of the stuff in the second half of the book, but I did want to particularly call out the Princess of the Scrow, who was also an elephant. I thought that part was just really confusing and it doesn't ever really come back or like matter.
• 1:33:48
  Speaker A: It comes back thematically a little bit at times. Yeah. Yeah. Cuz again, the, the. The idea here is that this elephant is also kind of another manifestation of the Yakal or the Kck. Like I think, I think like, like kind of. Yeah. Of like this magical force or whatever. To that point though, just getting rid of all of. Into the Vincus there. None of that's in the movie. Yeah, like at all. And it's not actually all bad, but the whole chapter, like I said, just drugs so hard. It. It's just h. It's brutal. Like, I actually liked learning about Lier and like some of the other relations of Fiero. Like I think there's some interesting stuff in that section. It just could have been handled in about half the page count.
• 1:34:33
  Speaker B: Absolutely.
• 1:34:33
  Speaker A: Like, I think. I think you could get all of the same stuff out of it in like half as many pages. And then we could have maybe spent a little bit more time on some other stuff either earlier in the book or later in the book or whatever. But God, just Getting rid of all of that worked a little detail, like, moment in the movie. One of the very few moments in the movie that I actually thought visually was kind of nice and worked pretty well was the juxtaposition of Glinda during the wedding walking down the aisle with all the butterflies and everything cut back and forth with Elphaba discovering all of the animals caged in the wizard's, like, basement or whatever.
• 1:35:04
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:35:05
  Speaker A: She's, like, walking down that aisle in this, like, dark room with all the animals in cages while elf Glinda up above is walking down the aisle for the. The wedding ceremony. It's all beautiful and colorful and amazing. I thought that was kind of fun. It's one of the very few moments in the movie where I'm like, hey, they had a thought. Thought. They did a thing that's, like, interesting.
• 1:35:23
  Speaker B: They did an interesting visual.
• 1:35:25
  Speaker A: They did an interesting visual thing. It's like, the only time. We'll talk more about that here in just a few minutes. And then another moment in the movie that I really liked is that Glenda suggests that they spread a rumor that Nessa is in trouble.
• 1:35:40
  Speaker B: Yeah. As a way to.
• 1:35:41
  Speaker A: As a way to Elphaba out. I thought that's a really good moment in the movie because it's, like this moment of weakness for Glenda. She just had, like, the big fight with Elphaba.
• 1:35:50
  Speaker B: She just got all of her dreams crushed.
• 1:35:52
  Speaker A: Yes, exactly. And so she's, like, kind of in this moment of weakness and she's very upset. And so she. She kind of agrees to help them by being like, hey, if. Yeah. If you tell Nessa or tell her, put out the rumor that Nessa is in danger, she'll come running to help Nessa. I thought it was a really good performance moment for Ariana Grande in that scene. And it's a good character moment that I think works and helps us get towards the end of.
• 1:36:16
  Speaker B: You know, I'm not super married having this in this section, but I think it's fine here. It was weird to me that in the book, Elphaba doesn't seem to be the Wicked Witch in a way that's implied by any of the source.
• 1:36:33
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:36:33
  Speaker B: I guess what you're saying, like, she. She becomes such. But not until, like, literally, very, very
• 1:36:40
  Speaker A: right before she dies.
• 1:36:41
  Speaker B: Yeah. Like, it's not like people are running and screaming from her.
• 1:36:45
  Speaker A: No. She can go and, like, visit.
• 1:36:47
  Speaker B: Yeah. She moves about Oz seemingly perfectly fine.
• 1:36:51
  Speaker A: Yeah. And then people aren't, like, scared of her or, like, anything. Like, she's not a Wanted fugitive or anything like that. Yeah, I thought that was interesting too. And it's like, feels a little at odds with what you would imagine of the Wicked Witch of the west, right? That you learn from the wizard of Oz? Yeah, a little bit.
• 1:37:06
  Speaker B: Not like a lot, but a little bit bit. We already talked about this some. I'm also not super married to having this in this section. I did find it frustrating how much of the stuff in the book didn't really go anywhere. And I know that that's a big part of the point is that it's all like, nebulous and there aren't really any answers. But it was like, like the whole thing with Mother Yackel being a person who keeps cropping up up throughout Elphaba's life felt really important. But then it seemed like nothing really happened with it.
• 1:37:41
  Speaker A: So maybe we get some interesting stuff with it in later books. Maybe.
• 1:37:44
  Speaker B: Yeah, maybe more interesting.
• 1:37:45
  Speaker A: But to your point, it doesn't matter to Elphaba's story really. Like for her specifically, again, for context, for us as readers, it's like a little bit interesting to kind of view her story within this wider context. Context of like the Mother Yakal and the Kumbrick Witch and all of this sort of stuff. Again, as her story is like another chapter of the same kind of story that's been happening forever. Like, and that's kind of the point. But to your point, it doesn't, it does still feel a little disappointing that nothing really comes together. Which again, I think is the point. I think is that's how we get to the point where. Because none of it comes together for Alpha. But that's part of what gets her to the point of desperation and, and yeah, kind of insanity that she gets to by the end of the book. But yeah, I, I, I can't disagree with what you're saying there. All right, let's go ahead and talk about some stuff that the movie nailed. As I expected, practically perfect in every
• 1:38:47
  Speaker B: way we mentioned, there's that there's a little flashback close to the beginning of this movie where Elphaba and Glinda and Fiero and Nessa and Bach are all like, they're in, it's when they're in school and they're all like, hanging out in a field and like, laughing and having a good time together. And that that little flashback did feel similar to what was described in the first part of this book.
• 1:39:15
  Speaker A: Yes, 100. I had the same note that that flashback felt exactly like, like it captured the exact kind of spirit of the first half of this book of. Yeah. Being in college with your friends and like shooting the. In a field or whatever like that. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:39:30
  Speaker B: It's. And it happens in a different way, but Nessa Rose does become the ruler of Munchkin Land in both.
• 1:39:36
  Speaker A: Yeah, she does. She becomes the governor and ultimately ends up being an authoritarian leader that they hate.
• 1:39:41
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:39:42
  Speaker A: And it makes more sense in the book. But. But, but yeah, it does happen in both. I thought it was kind of funny in the movie. In this movie we get a character named Averick, but there's nothing like the average of the book is that at one point when Nessa is in her office, this like, guy comes in.
• 1:39:58
  Speaker B: Yeah. He's like another munchkin.
• 1:39:59
  Speaker A: Another munchkin who's similar to Bach. Like a servant or a. What assistant or something like that. And she calls him Averic. And I was like, oh, look at that. It's just an Easter egg.
• 1:40:08
  Speaker B: Just a little Easter egg. For people who read the book.
• 1:40:10
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:40:12
  Speaker B: They also got the monkey's name Chestery from the book.
• 1:40:15
  Speaker A: What do you mean?
• 1:40:17
  Speaker B: The, the. Just the name.
• 1:40:19
  Speaker A: Oh, you mean him being named Chestery in the musical and the movie.
• 1:40:23
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:40:24
  Speaker A: Comes. Is he. Because it comes from this book. It comes from this book and the. Well, and we find out why he's called Chestery in this. Is that they name she. When she finds him. She names him Chisery because he chitters like he. Like that sounds like the sounds he makes when he's like talking before she tries to get him to actually talk.
• 1:40:42
  Speaker B: Yeah. I don't think the book ever explicitly confirmed it, but I felt like in the book it was implied that the tornado was also somehow magicked up to get rid of Nessarose.
• 1:40:54
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:40:56
  Speaker B: Albeit in order to cripple Munchkin Land's ability to secede from Oz and not to. To flesh out AlphaBA.
• 1:41:02
  Speaker A: But yeah, it does. It does imply. It seem like it's. It. It was something that the wizard.
• 1:41:07
  Speaker B: Yeah. Or somebody was able to do.
• 1:41:10
  Speaker A: To do. Yeah. Because there's another element of that in the. In the book that I thought was compelling is that like they're talk. There's like a little bit of brief discussion of how long. Like because Munchkin Lance is seeds from Oz and they're like talking about like. But Oz hasn't like attacked them or anything. There's not like a war happening to like fight over.
• 1:41:28
  Speaker B: Oz has not retaliated.
• 1:41:29
  Speaker A: Alice has not retaliated yet. And part of that is that they know that Oz has enough Grain stores, like, in the city, that they don't need anything from Munchkinland yet. But eventually, once grain stores run out,
• 1:41:44
  Speaker B: they're going to Munchkin Land. Is the breadbasket.
• 1:41:47
  Speaker A: The breadbasket, yeah.
• 1:41:48
  Speaker B: Of the continent.
• 1:41:49
  Speaker A: I thought so. Little things like that in the. In the book are fun again, just little, like, allusions to, like, the actual geopolitics of Oz are kind of interesting.
• 1:41:57
  Speaker B: Elphaba and Fiero do have an affair.
• 1:42:00
  Speaker A: They do. They have a lot of sex in the book. They're. They're doing it every which way, like, constantly. Lots of oil involved as well.
• 1:42:09
  Speaker B: And scarves.
• 1:42:10
  Speaker A: Yes. Oh, yeah. She has a sex scarf she wears. That's weird. She says that like a costume for lovemaking. It's like a scarf around her waist.
• 1:42:17
  Speaker B: It's a scarf that he bought for her. And yeah, it's interesting.
• 1:42:21
  Speaker A: This little line in the book cracked me up because I was like, hey, that feels like. It's kind of like, like the visual mom moment they reference at the beginning of the first or the end of the first movie. There's a line in the book where she's leaving somewhere. I don't remember where, but it says she whirled in a small cyclone of black skirts and scarves. And it reminded that specific line, reminded me of that moment in the first movie at the end during the fire. She, like, whirls around, swirls in slow motion, which is also evoking the tornado, obviously.
• 1:42:49
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:42:50
  Speaker A: But I thought that was funny. I, like, was like, that kind of reminded me of that moment from the first movie. I wonder if that's where they pulled that idea for that visual moment. And then my last note is. Oh, no, we already talked about that. That was my last note. All right, we got some random stuff to talk about, but we're going to really get into it in Lost in Adaptation. Just show me the way to get
• 1:43:10
  Speaker B: out of here and I'll be on my way.
• 1:43:13
  Speaker A: Yes, yes.
• 1:43:15
  Speaker B: And I want to get unlost as soon as possible.
• 1:43:17
  Speaker A: Possible. So this one always just turns into kind of our catch all weird segment for our summer series. But we got lots of stuff to talk about here.
• 1:43:24
  Speaker B: Well, as I was watching this movie, it was interesting to me that in Wicked For Good, specifically, like, even more so than in the stage show, at least to my memory, and more so than in the book, I felt like it was being strongly implied that Madame Morrible is more the main villain, even, like, manipulating the wizard.
• 1:43:48
  Speaker A: Yes, it does seem like that in the movie that, like, she is the one pulling the strings, like. Yeah, 100%. Whereas in the book, it's very much the wizard who is doing everything, like Morrible.
• 1:44:01
  Speaker B: And Morrible is, like, involved.
• 1:44:02
  Speaker A: Yeah. And you could even, I think, argue that she's maybe pulling the strings on a larger scale in a way that, like, the Bene Gesserit are in Dune, like, in that kind of way. And, like, making really broad, big moves for, like, what she's trying. Because, like, at one point Elphaba like, wonders or, like, posits, like, is all of this, like, part of Morrible's plan? Like, is me doing all of this? And everything that has happened, like, have
• 1:44:32
  Speaker B: I actually been manipulated? Yes.
• 1:44:34
  Speaker A: Have I actually been manipulated? And everything since that meeting where she tried to recruit us has actually, actually been, like, part of her. Part of her kind of plan or whatever. And I think you were kind of. The book leaves it nebulous as to maybe that is kind of true. And I think what we're supposed to get there is that again, maybe Morrible is part of this, like, kind of larger, again, not super well defined architecture of the universe that is, like, kind of guiding things along. But what she is not is, like, individually and specifically pulling the strings of, like, what the wizard is doing.
• 1:45:10
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:45:11
  Speaker A: No, the. The wizard seems to be the person doing all of that in the story. Like, he's an evil guy doing evil in the book. In the movie, he just seems to be kind of like a dope who's maybe being, like, maybe used by.
• 1:45:25
  Speaker B: Not a good guy.
• 1:45:26
  Speaker A: Not a good guy.
• 1:45:27
  Speaker B: But it does feel like she's doing more direct manipulation of him in this movie specifically.
• 1:45:34
  Speaker A: Yeah. In particular, there's a scene that I thought was really silly in the movie, like, in the way it plays out, out towards the end, where when Dorothy and them all show up.
• 1:45:43
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:45:43
  Speaker A: Morrible comes into the wizard and is like. So there's this girl here named Dorothy with a tin man and a straw guy and a lion. They all need something so we can use this. And she, like, lays out the whole plan for him and, like, she's the one who, like, says it all.
• 1:45:57
  Speaker B: I don't. I don't.
• 1:45:58
  Speaker A: And I was like, I don't know if that's in the music.
• 1:45:59
  Speaker B: I don't think it is.
• 1:46:00
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting. Speaking of Madame Morrible, I had to put this in Lost an adaptation, because I didn't know where else to put this. But one of the things that happens in the book is that Elphaba decides, you know what I Didn't. Wasn't able to kill Morrible all those years ago when I was supposed to back in the Emerald City and it got Fiero killed or whatever. I'm going to do it now. Finally going to go kill. So she goes to visit Madame Moral, goes to Shiz.
• 1:46:29
  Speaker B: Yeah, she goes back to Shiz and is some, for some reason surprised to find that she's not the, the head of the.
• 1:46:36
  Speaker A: The school anymore or whatever anymore. But she finds her. She's like in hospice essentially. She gets there and is like, oh, she's dead already. I was too late. She's already dead. But she goes in and finds her like laying in bed, like not moving and again, implied to be dead already. And like, because the book says she was like 15 minutes late or something like that. Like she just passed away. But in her anger, what she does is she grabs a trophy off of the bed nightstand next to her and caves Madam Morrible skull in.
• 1:47:09
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:47:09
  Speaker A: With a trophy that says in appreciation of everything you have done. Which is a fun little.
• 1:47:15
  Speaker B: Fun.
• 1:47:15
  Speaker A: Fun but holy. I was like. And then I was cracking up because then in the movie, taking this back, we get to the end of the movie and we get the scene where Glinda goes to confront Madame Morribal after everything has gone down. And I had the briefest insane thought that. Boy, would it be hilarious. Hilarious for this movie to keep one super faithful book moment. And Glinda shows up and just caves metaphorical skull in with a, with a hunk of metal. And that's like how that plot line ends. I would like. Jesus Christ. Obviously that's not what happened. She just has her like arrested or whatever.
• 1:47:52
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:47:52
  Speaker A: But oh my God, that would have been so good though. Just out of nowhere, Glinda just beats her to death with a hunk of a trophy. Just like, wow, where did that come from? And then turns to the camera and goes, no, that's really in the book that happens. Oh God. We do have. And I put this here because I didn't know how to feel about it. We. I mentioned earlier that Tibbett does show back up. Tibbett was the one who was drawn into the sex show at the philosophy club and had sex with the tiger. He shows back up and ends up while Elphaba is at the Monterey. They have like a, like a hospital essentially take care of like, like the poor and infirmed or whatever. And Tibbet shows up and she actually ends up caring for him as he passes away. And it's strongly implied to kind of be like an aids, like, type of allegory thing.
• 1:48:41
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:48:41
  Speaker A: Tibbett is gay or, like, seemingly gay in the story. And as we mentioned in the first one, in the first half of the book, it's alluded to that he's gay. Him and Crop, I think both. And again, he has sex with the tiger and then dies of some mysterious illness. And it's kind of. Of implied to be something that he contracted from having sex with a tiger. And I was like, I don't know how I feel about this. It's clearly an AIDS allegory. Yeah. And I was like. I guess I thought about. Initially I was like, a little weirded out by it, but then I thought about it more and I'm like, well, this is clearly, like, Maguire's a gay man who was writing this in the early 90s.
• 1:49:15
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:49:15
  Speaker A: This is very clearly, like a personal and, like, probably a thing that he has some, like, close ties to in a way that is a little.
• 1:49:24
  Speaker B: I also had a note about it being a nod to the AIDS epidemic. I. To me, it felt like a fairly understated yet clear reference to something that I'm sure loomed very large in Maguire's life in 1995, you would imagine.
• 1:49:38
  Speaker A: Yeah, I just thought it was a little. I don't know. I was just unsure how I felt about how it was all presented. But I think it. I think it's. Like I said, it's clearly like a personal kind of like.
• 1:49:48
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:49:49
  Speaker A: Anecdote or not anecdote, but like a personal thing that he was kind of working through and which is what this whole story is, actually. I found out out, literally, along with finding out that he was Catholic, I found out that Maguire, on Wikipedia, was. His mother died in childbirth giving birth to him. And then when he was like, six months old, his dad dropped him off at an orphanage, and he was raised in an orphanage. And I was like, okay, so this whole book is him working through stuff, like, very clearly, like, kind of like traumatic childhoods and like, again, that idea of like. Like feeling guilty for being responsible for your mother's death or something. Like. Which it's a little bit different. Like, Alphabet isn't responsible for her mother's. Or she does a little bit, I guess, but it's less so that. And she's more so feels responsible for, like, Nessa Rose and.
• 1:50:34
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:50:35
  Speaker A: And all that kind of other stuff. But there's elements of that. And it's like, oh, okay. Yeah. This is all clearly Maguire, like, working through that stuff, through allegory in A way that I think is interesting. Again, I like a lot of the elements in. In this book, even if I think. Think by the end, I didn't love it as a. As a reading experience necessarily.
• 1:50:53
  Speaker B: Little random moment that I need to talk about. When Elphaba finds Chestery.
• 1:51:00
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 1:51:01
  Speaker B: Should they hear this, like, crying from an island in the middle of, like, a river? And Killy Joy swims out there and they see him, like, trying to eat something that looks like a baby. Elphabet does not care for this, but obviously can't go in the water. And then she does, like, an Elsa ice run across the the line. Is the water turned to ice as she ran foot by foot of ice under foot by foot of hurry. And is that not exactly what happens in Frozen, like, right before Let It Go?
• 1:51:42
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, no, that is also.
• 1:51:45
  Speaker B: That is a crazy, weird Idina Menzel connection.
• 1:51:48
  Speaker A: It really is. It's also the thing that, like, Iceman does in, like, X Men all the time. Yeah. Or like, Frozone. There was no way to go through the water. That would be death. But her feet went out anyways. They hit the water hard. The water hit hard back. The water turned to ice. As she ran foot by foot of ice under foot by foot of hurry. A silvering plate formed instantly cantilevering forward, making a cold, safe bridge to the island. Yeah.
• 1:52:13
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:52:13
  Speaker A: Literally. Yeah, it's very funny. I. I thought. Yeah, this is very interesting. She's straight up. That is weird.
• 1:52:19
  Speaker B: But it's like, literally, it's like he predicted that.
• 1:52:22
  Speaker A: It is kind of like he predicted it. We find out in the book. And I don't know where I wanted to put this, but I just had to include it because it's wild. In the movie and in the musical, Elphaba creates the flying monkeys by accidentally by doing a spell that she doesn't really know what it does.
• 1:52:36
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:52:37
  Speaker A: And it ends up transforming the. All of the monkeys into flying monkeys, giving them wings. In the book, she intentionally is doing this not through, like, spell work, but by, like, being Dr. Frankenstein.
• 1:52:50
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:52:51
  Speaker A: We literally get, like, a section where it talks about she is spending all this time, like, doing surgery and experimentation on monkeys, trying to sew wings onto their backs and make them work. She's using magic to, like, try to make. Make it work, to, like, enchant the specifically, like, the muscles and the neurons and stuff to, like, make it work. But, yeah, she's literally Dr. Frankensteining these monsters or these monkeys. And I thought that was interesting. Again, even if I didn't know exactly how. Where I wanted to go with it, including this section. The thing about Nor. We have a moment in the book where she has a confrontation with the Wizard.
• 1:53:30
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:53:31
  Speaker A: And she's like, I want to talk to the wizard and maybe I can convince him if I give him the Grimory.
• 1:53:36
  Speaker B: I think, yeah, he wants the Grimory.
• 1:53:38
  Speaker A: He wants the Grimory. If I give him the Grimory, maybe he'll tell me what happened. Because at this point, everybody at Camo Company had been kidnapped. We're years later, the whole royal family, everybody was gone. It was just. All that was remained was Nanny Elphaba and Lear. All of the. Everybody else got kidnapped. And we will find out in this scene, they're all dead. At least that's what he says. Except for Noor, who is Fiero's daughter. One of his daughters. The wizard has her, like, captive and, like, manacled and shackled. And it says that he is like, that he. She is her. His protection from Elphaba. Basically saying that, like, she. He knows that she won't, like.
• 1:54:19
  Speaker B: Yeah. Attack him or won't risk retaliation.
• 1:54:22
  Speaker A: Won't risk retaliation if he has. Nor. Because he could hurt her. Her. And I was like, jesus Christ. It does a good job, really, driving home how evil the wizard is. Because it's like, deeply.
• 1:54:32
  Speaker B: It's deeply up.
• 1:54:33
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's very up. Totally tonally out of line with anything that the musical could do. Like, it would not make any sense to be in the musical or the movie, but it is kind of interesting. He also mentions that IRG was killed with a paraffin necklace, which is insane. That I think that's a reference to necklacing, which is like a real world awful thing that I recommend not Googling. And that is a little bit of those moments where it's like, maybe we're going a little too hard here on, like, relating this to real world atrocities in a way that feels maybe a little tonally inconsistent at times. Yeah, like, I. I don't know. Like, we're referencing, like, ways people were killed in, like, the Rwandan genocide in this just. I don't know, because at the same time it's. It is like, thematically and narratively what the story is about. But I don't know, there's just moments where we get, like, some of these, like, really, like, intense scenes of cruelty and violence that don't entirely feel in line with, like, the rest of the book.
• 1:55:35
  Speaker B: I agree, necessarily.
• 1:55:36
  Speaker A: I. I don't know. I didn't have that at all in the first half. I thought like even the weirder stuff and like, like the Philosophy Club and some of the other moments in the first half, like Dylan being murdered and stuff that all still felt, felt tonally in line with like what this felt like the book was doing some of the stuff in the second half at times feels a little.
• 1:55:57
  Speaker B: Yeah. I do think that perhaps McGuire just struggled to marry all of the like, different ideas that he had for this.
• 1:56:06
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:56:07
  Speaker B: In a way that felt smooth and.
• 1:56:11
  Speaker A: Yeah. Completely cohesive.
• 1:56:12
  Speaker B: Yeah, completely cohesive.
• 1:56:14
  Speaker A: All right, we gotta talk about. I have this here because I didn't know where else to put it, but we have to talk about the music additions and the movie. There are two new songs in the movie and not only that, we're going to talk about maybe some of the things the movie doesn't do, but two new songs in the movie. I put them here because I didn't know where else to put it because my notes for both of them is that it's fine.
• 1:56:32
  Speaker B: Yeah, they were fine.
• 1:56:33
  Speaker A: No Place Like Home is the first one, which is an Elphaba song. I, I enjoyed seeing her actually trying to fight for the animals because book Elphaba gives up on that like very quickly.
• 1:56:43
  Speaker B: And it's like, yeah, she has a, one very sobering conversation with a cow. And then we like never, never talk
• 1:56:50
  Speaker A: about it again really at all after that. Which makes sense, I guess. But that song no Place Like Home, it's, it's obviously, it's also like a, a reference to.
• 1:57:00
  Speaker B: Right. To the movie.
• 1:57:01
  Speaker A: The movie. The wizard of Oz movie. Which is like, fine. Whatever. It's fine. The second one is the Girl in the Bubble, which is a Glinda song. It has some. Again, it's a fine song. I, I, I like what it's doing thematically for Glinda, like a little bit more. Explain her motivations in that moment of the musical at a time where it's maybe not as clear like why she's doing the things she's doing. And so I think it works for that. I also really liked it had some of the only interesting visual stuff where we get a bunch of kind of cool digital pass through mirrors and stuff. I don't know if you noticed that where we're going in and out of
• 1:57:39
  Speaker B: mirrors and we're like playing with the idea of like reflections and then at
• 1:57:42
  Speaker A: times you don't know if you're in the mirror and then all of a sudden we pull out of the mirror and it was like we were watching reflection all the time. I thought that was stuff was all really cool. My big complaint is that the songs are both fine, but that, boy, the music editions feel like such a wasted opportunity.
• 1:57:58
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:57:59
  Speaker A: Because the whole point to me of expanding the second act of this musical into its own film is that you can make it a more satisfying experience, both narratively and musically, because the second act of Wicked is notoriously, a bit of a letdown on both of those counts. Yes, absolutely. Narratively, it's not quite as uplifting and fun. As said, it's a bit of a downer. So there's that whole element of it. And then on top of that, it is. Musically, it's hard. It can't compete with the first act in across the Board, but specifically with Defying Gravity at the end of the first act. And so I'm like, all right, you have a chance with this movie. You're adding music to it. You can flesh this out and make it work. So what do they do? Do they add two emotional ballads? Yeah, the second act is dying for a big set piece or. Or two beyond. No, like, no Good Deed is like the big set piece number.
• 1:58:56
  Speaker B: That's the big number of the second
• 1:58:58
  Speaker A: act, which is fine, we'll get to that in. In a second. But it's dying for, like, another big set piece moment, musical moment, and they just don't do it. So not only do you not get. Get the bigger emotional highs that they had the freedom to add by adding, obviously you're not going to match Defying Gravity, and I'm not saying you should try to, but you could do something in the second act to try to bring some more of that energy musically into it. But not only do you not get that, you then get two more emotionally heavy. Like, this is what I'm feeling. This is like, my emotional baggage, like, and what I'm working through. Song songs that make it even more of a, like, trudgery to get through. It's just like, what are. Why would you do that? I was blown away. It felt like such a missed opportunity.
• 1:59:46
  Speaker B: It's a choice for sure. And then on top of all that, I didn't even feel like they did anything all that interesting.
• 1:59:53
  Speaker A: With no good entirely musically or visually.
• 1:59:56
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:59:57
  Speaker A: Musically it's the same. Yeah. I think.
• 1:59:59
  Speaker B: Yeah. I don't think they did, like. They did their own kind of thing with Defying Ground A little bit. Yeah, a little bit.
• 2:00:04
  Speaker A: It's mostly the same, but, you know, they. They put a spin on it at times. Yeah. But I don't think there's anything super unique about no Good deed.
• 2:00:12
  Speaker B: No.
• 2:00:13
  Speaker A: It's also the other big issue I had with it is it's ugly. That's the biggest sin of this movie. This whole movie is ugly. We talked about it. I thought people complained about that about the first movie. And I was like, I think it looks fine for the most part. Like, it's not. There's things I could. I would do differently or whatever, but for the most part, it's colorful. A lot of the sets are cool. The big musical numbers are fun to look at for the most part, and exciting and interesting. This. There's none of it. The second act of it has. This movie has nothing to your point. No. Good Deed is so muddy. Like, the idea behind the visuals are kind of cool. She's walking around in like this, like, it's almost like an M.C. escher style. Like.
• 2:00:51
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:00:51
  Speaker A: Kind of like underneath a castle thing.
• 2:00:54
  Speaker B: Yeah. It almost looks like the castle's kind of floating on something.
• 2:00:57
  Speaker A: Like the foundations. But the foundations are, like, floating. And there's like. Like these staircases and all the. All the monkeys are flying around. And like, it's an interesting idea, but it's all CGI and it's all brown, muddy cgi.
• 2:01:11
  Speaker B: And it looks like.
• 2:01:13
  Speaker A: And it hasn't faked too. I think part of it is just literally either maybe they ran out of time or budget or something.
• 2:01:19
  Speaker B: Like, it looks.
• 2:01:20
  Speaker A: It just looks not done.
• 2:01:22
  Speaker B: Like an early 2000s music video.
• 2:01:24
  Speaker A: That's the literal note. It looks like a bad 2000s new metal music video. It literally, I'm pretty sure, looks like the music video to end the end by Lincoln Park. There's the one where they're on top of that tower.
• 2:01:36
  Speaker B: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
• 2:01:37
  Speaker A: And the, like, wind is blowing in his face or whatever. Yeah, it looks like that. But, like, quality level. It looks like it's crazy. It's muddy and. And brown and it's all cgi. And like, again, the big shot at the end where it pulls out to a wide and all of the.
• 2:01:54
  Speaker B: The.
• 2:01:54
  Speaker A: The monkeys are flying around her. Like, I understand what we're going for there, but visually, it kind of looks like a screen saver or something. Like it. Yeah, it's so ugly. It's so ugly. The as long as your mind scene, which is like the. The. The. The emotional, like, romance song between Elphaba and Fiero after. I think it's right before they have sex. It's so close to being beautiful. Like, they're in this, like, her treehouse thing.
• 2:02:21
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:02:22
  Speaker A: And like, they're walking around and we get. And there's, like, moonlight coming through the trees. And you can tell. They have the idea of, like, what they need to do to make this pretty, but it still ends up being so muddy and gray and it's all artificial and cgi. And it's. The contrast is so minimal that, like, the background and their faces in, like, all of the shots are the same brightness and, like, color palette, that it all just blends into this ugly, well
• 2:02:52
  Speaker B: and muddy mess, you know? Not that the first movie wasn't also a ton of cgi.
• 2:02:59
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
• 2:02:59
  Speaker B: But it's like, they didn't even try with this.
• 2:03:02
  Speaker A: It's crazy. It's crazy. And. And even though the first one had a lot of cgi, what it also had was really cool sets. There were a lot of really cool big sets. Now, to be fair, part of that is at Shiz I. They just built all those sets for shiz or whatever. And we're not at Shizu for this half. But, like, the. There's nothing remotely close to the cool set piece of, like, the library dancing through life. There's nothing even one tenth of as cool as that scene in this movie. Even, like, the. The choreography from popular. Like, that everybody. Or not popular? Not. What is this feeling like that everybody that, like, goes popular on Tik Tok every, like, six months or whatever? Like, the. There's nothing like that. Oh, they're sorry. There is. Is. They recreate almost that exact same choreography for, like, the opening music number. Like, the overture at the beginning. We. When we reintroduce Glinda, we get like, the. Almost.
• 2:03:54
  Speaker B: Yes, almost the exact same scene of her walking.
• 2:03:56
  Speaker A: Of her, like, walking with all of the people behind her doing very similar choreography. And you're like, you couldn't come up with anything. And again, I'm not saying it's the exact same, but it's similar enough. And it's just everything. I. I couldn't get over that. The. The as long as your mind scene at the end of it, they're like, in these trees. Trees, like, embracing. And the moonlight is like. There's, like, moonlight beams coming down from the sky through the trees. And I can see what they want. They want the scene from Lord of the Rings when Arwen and Aragorn are standing on the bridge. That's what they want it to look like. But either they don't know how to do it, or maybe that's not what they want, because if I can't. Part of the issue. Oh, God. Is a whole different. We got. I gotta Move on, because I'm gonna go on another tangent. But I don't think it's that they don't know how to do it. I think it's just that they. I guess that's not what they wanted, but, man, they should have wanted it because it. What they. What you get is so muddy and lifeless and joyless. It's just ugly. I couldn't get over it. So we talked. I think we read a pre. Like a review or something that talked about for good and how it was kind of, like, disappointing or something. And I was like, how. How could you mess up that scene? Holy. They did. Holy. They did. It's a per. It's just the one. It's just the arrangement from the musical. I think, like, they don't do anything. Yeah.
• 2:05:16
  Speaker B: I don't think they did anything new
• 2:05:17
  Speaker A: with it, which is fine. If you're like, this is the, like, song everybody knows and loves. We're not gonna change it a bunch. We're just gonna do it as it does, which is fine. I also get that it's, like, supposed to be very intimate moment. We're not like. We don't need a big set piece or lots of intricate. We don't need the, like, traveling through the world.
• 2:05:34
  Speaker B: Perhaps we could have had some interesting lighting or anything.
• 2:05:40
  Speaker A: Because what it is, is them standing in an empty courtyard that is clearly, like, the volume or something. Because they're just standing on the edge of a cliff with an entirely cg, like, landscape and sunset out.
• 2:05:52
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:05:53
  Speaker A: On the other side of them. And they're just lit completely flat. And they're just standing there seeing each other. It's so. So boring and ugly. And the performances in the moments are like, the way they sing it is fine. It sounds nice, but there's nothing remotely compelling happening on the screen while you're watching. What to me is like, the entire, like, thematic part is supposed to be
• 2:06:19
  Speaker B: the thematic and emotional climax of the entire story. And it looks like ass.
• 2:06:25
  Speaker A: It looks like it's this boring, ugly, gray, muddy ass. And I just can't fathom how. Again, not that the first movie was perfect in that regard, but. Holy. How is it the same creative team that made dancing through life in the first movie and then did the.
• 2:06:44
  Speaker B: It's really. It's like they gave up.
• 2:06:46
  Speaker A: It is 100 feels like they didn't try.
• 2:06:48
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:06:49
  Speaker A: Which is. I'm. I'm not saying that's what it is, but that's what it feels like. Because you're like, how did you do the stuff you did in the first movie. Movie. And then this movie looks like this. I just don't get. I don't get it. I don't get it.
• 2:07:00
  Speaker B: I posted on our social media. I do, like some, like, letterboxd review screen grabs for some of our content. And one of them that I had posted was just. Somebody wrote. Yep. That's the second act of Wicked.
• 2:07:14
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 2:07:14
  Speaker B: And after watching this movie, boy, did I feel that even harder. Like they've literally just transformed the second act and didn't try to make it interesting.
• 2:07:24
  Speaker A: No.
• 2:07:25
  Speaker B: Didn't. They didn't try to make it. To make it sparkle? They didn't try to make it their own. They didn't even try to make it pretty.
• 2:07:31
  Speaker A: No. And what. What's the point of splitting them if you're. Because that's the whole point. That's what drives me insane. That's the whole point, if you're gonna split it into two movies, is that you can do something interesting with this movie. You can make it more compelling than the second half of the musical is. Not that. Again, not the second. But I think what it is is that I think they were too scared. Scared. I think they were scared to upset. They knew the only people who are gonna care about this are Wicked Die Hard fan. Like, it's not the only people, I guess. But like, they knew, I think, that we, like, they were worried about getting blowback for changing anything, I think. Maybe. I don't know. But they changed quite a bit in the first one. So I don't.
• 2:08:11
  Speaker B: Well, and that almost. Gosh, I don't know. Because it almost makes me wonder, like, if they had taken more of a breath in between making the first movie and the second movie, if maybe we would have gotten something different. Because plenty of people who were not Wicked Die Hard fans got to see that first movie and loved it.
• 2:08:32
  Speaker A: And loved it. Yeah. And that's what's crazy to me though, is that like. Yeah.
• 2:08:36
  Speaker B: And then they squandered all that goodwill.
• 2:08:39
  Speaker A: Well, and then the other thing that's crazy is that because part of me was like. Well, because I was thinking earlier, I was like, why does it look so much worse? I'm like, well, it's not like the first movie made billion, I think, a jillion dollars. It's not like it's because the first movie struggled and so they, like, cut the budget on. You know what I mean?
• 2:08:54
  Speaker B: Right.
• 2:08:55
  Speaker A: Like, that would make sense if, like, the first one looked great. It actually didn't do very well. So we were cutting the. Pulling the budget Back. So the second one, the CGI doesn't look great, but the first one made like, didn't make like $8 trillion billion dollars. Wasn't it like super successful? I'm fairly certain. That was like what I read when I looked at the Wicked. I like, let me double check here. Yeah, it made 764 million against a budget of 150. It made plenty of money. It was, it was a big success. It made a bunch of money. It like, there's no way that they like needed to pull the. Hold on. What is this? So the budget of the first one is 150 million. Let's look at what the budget of Wicked for good was.150 million. Same budget, exact same budget.
• 2:09:39
  Speaker B: Money laundering. Where did all that go?
• 2:09:41
  Speaker A: There's just no, it makes no sense sense that I that it looks so much worse. Anyways. All right, we got a handful of odds and ends before we get to the final verdict.
• 2:10:00
  Speaker B: The beginning of this movie does some like, propaganda stuff where we show the Alpha Elphaba's image being like propagandized throughout Oz. And I, I be honest, I think the Ministry of Propaganda scene from one of the last Harry Potter movies was more effective. Yeah, I think they did it better.
• 2:10:21
  Speaker A: You know what I couldn't get over and I don't think this is true. But if you did you notice that the, the, the Wicked Witch posters they put up all look like AI Slop posters? Yeah, I don't think they are. I, I, I think it's a coincidence because that, but it's that one specific font. Yeah, that's like, is on all of the AI Slot posters was on the Wicked Witch posters. And I'm like, okay, surely that's a cuz like AI hadn't blown up in the way that it is right now. It existed in there. But like that, that font and those posters were not ubiquitous in the way that they are now. So I don't think they were just like threw it into AI to make the. I don't. I would be astonished if that's what happened happen. But it did keep cracking me up. Every time I saw one of those posters that it looked like an AI Slot poster, I was like, that actually tracks. So it works with the.
• 2:11:09
  Speaker B: Yeah, it works thematically.
• 2:11:11
  Speaker A: Yeah. I don't know if you noticed this,
• 2:11:12
  Speaker B: but I thought I did notice this.
• 2:11:13
  Speaker A: I thought it was a very strange choice.
• 2:11:15
  Speaker B: It was an odd choice.
• 2:11:16
  Speaker A: So at the end of Couldn't Be Happier, which is like one of the first musical numbers, Glinda is Up there. And she's singing. And she's singing like about.
• 2:11:25
  Speaker B: It's the sad. Not a love song. Between her and Fiyero.
• 2:11:29
  Speaker A: Between her and Fiyero. And she's singing. And we get this moment where. Where as she's singing, there's confetti falling. And then the confetti slows down and like stops falling. Like time has frozen and like. Which kind of works. Like, okay, we're in this moment. Like she's singing this very emotional part of this song. But then if you notice in the background, Madame Morrible is on the stage and she is moving normally. She like shuffles off to the side. And then we get a couple shots of reverse shots where we see out into the crowd watching her sing during this moment. And the people in the crowd seem to be moving normally. I mean, they're not moving much, but they don't seem like there's frozen.
• 2:12:09
  Speaker B: Yeah, they don't seem to be.
• 2:12:10
  Speaker A: Or like in slow mo or anything like that. And I'm like, what are we doing here? So did like the confetti freeze and nothing. What is happening? I was just very confused by what was going on there. That was a very strange choice.
• 2:12:23
  Speaker B: Yeah. So during this number, Fiyero finds out that. That he's apparently going to be marrying Glinda. Yeah. Her and Madame Moral have decided. And he has this one line that is just brutal. He says to her, if it makes you happy, of course I'll marry you.
• 2:12:42
  Speaker A: Yeah. Did you notice this? My next note.
• 2:12:47
  Speaker B: No, this cr.
• 2:12:50
  Speaker A: It's the only. The only, like little.
• 2:12:54
  Speaker B: Well, this. And my next note. Note.
• 2:12:56
  Speaker A: Oh, okay. Yes. Well, it's the same scene.
• 2:12:57
  Speaker B: Yeah, it is.
• 2:12:58
  Speaker A: But when they go. She goes to visit the Wizard. To like. Or not goes to visit the wizard, but she ends up back.
• 2:13:04
  Speaker B: I don't remember. Elphaba goes to like confront the Wizard. I guess.
• 2:13:08
  Speaker A: Yeah. Or whatever.
• 2:13:09
  Speaker B: I don't remember how she gets there now. I've already blocked. Yeah, I've already. Memory. Hold it.
• 2:13:14
  Speaker A: But she ends up there and she's talking to the wizard and this is the wonderful music number. And then her and Glinder like talking about. And like. And they're trying. The wizard is trying to convince Elphaba, like, I'm not a bad guy. Blah, blah. All that sort of stuff. But they get this scene where they have this whole music number and they like get on a swing and like fly around his.
• 2:13:34
  Speaker B: His like his little like whatever.
• 2:13:38
  Speaker A: But when the swing they sit on, they walk over to it and Elphaba or not. Elphaba, Glinda takes like these two sticks. She like creates this. I don't. I would have to go back and watch this scene again to even see, like, what is happening here. But she creates this, like swing that they sit on by taking these two sticks that are like literally have like forks at the end of them. And she like pushes them together and they like wedge together. They literally like scissor together.
• 2:14:06
  Speaker B: They scissor like Barbie dolls.
• 2:14:07
  Speaker A: And it is a very intentional closeup on those stick. Like it's not from a wide. We get a closeup of those sticks going together. And I was like, what that a cheeky scissoring joke? Like, surely it had to be. I think it is. I don't know. But then. Yeah.
• 2:14:22
  Speaker B: Yeah. Then immediately after that, in the same number, Elphaba and Glinda are like waltzing around the room while rainbow lights swirl around them on the walls. And yeah. It was the. The most gay that this movie ever was.
• 2:14:38
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yep.
• 2:14:41
  Speaker B: When we go to Elphaba's treehouse lair, I kind of loved that. Her Pepe meme wall.
• 2:14:50
  Speaker A: Pepe Sylvia. I was like, what is Pepe meanwhile? You mean like the frog?
• 2:14:55
  Speaker B: Yes, I mean the meme where it's like the guy pointing at the wall.
• 2:14:59
  Speaker A: Pepe Silvia, I believe, is the.
• 2:15:02
  Speaker B: She has. She has a conspiracy wall, we'll call it then, that just has Save the animals written on it in giant red letters.
• 2:15:12
  Speaker A: Letters. Yeah.
• 2:15:15
  Speaker B: Also finally got to see the sex cardigan. Yeah. That I heard so much about when this movie came out. It was like the only cultural moment that this movie had when it came out was the sex cardigan. Yeah.
• 2:15:29
  Speaker A: All right.
• 2:15:30
  Speaker B: Or at least that's the only one that I saw.
• 2:15:33
  Speaker A: Yeah. Another thing that hit me about this time, especially with after seeing this now and watching all the non changes they made, I was like, you were right. This feels really weird as its own movie vindicated again. If they had made the changes, maybe. But without any of the changes. This feels so weird as its own movie. It just.
• 2:15:50
  Speaker B: There's no point.
• 2:15:50
  Speaker A: It's like. Well, it's not even that there's no point. It's just like structurally it's a very strange movie by itself because they. Again, because they didn't change anything. They should. What they should have just done is made it a three and a half hour movie with an intermission.
• 2:16:03
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:16:04
  Speaker A: Like. Or something like that.
• 2:16:05
  Speaker B: And you know what? That makes me even madder that they had the chance to reintroduce intermissions.
• 2:16:10
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 2:16:10
  Speaker B: To long movies. And they squandered it.
• 2:16:13
  Speaker A: They could have. And which would have been great too, because they would. It would have been like a theatrical experience. Like, that would have, you know, like they could play it. Like going to see the musical where there's just a full intermission in the middle. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's as its own movie. It totally does not work at all because again, because they didn't change anything.
• 2:16:30
  Speaker B: My last note here is that neither of these properties explain the Wicked Witch arriving and leaving via a burst of fire.
• 2:16:38
  Speaker A: You're right.
• 2:16:39
  Speaker B: As she does in the wizard of the wizard of Oz.
• 2:16:42
  Speaker A: Yeah. All right, before we get to the final verdict, we want to remind you you can do us a favor by hanging over to Facebook, threads, Blue Sky, Goodreads, Instagram, any of those places interact. We'd love to hear what you have to say about Wicked for Good and Wicked the book. We obviously talked a lot about the. The entirety of the book now, and we have talked about the second movie, but it's your time to chime in. We're gonna do this. Obviously this episode's coming out a little bit later, late, so we're gonna have to turn around that pretty quick on the next prequel episode. So you only have a few days to get those comments in and the
• 2:17:12
  Speaker B: prequel will probably be at least a day later than it usually would be. Yeah, but I don't want to put it out like, or anything.
• 2:17:20
  Speaker A: So, yeah, we. We'll hold off as long as we can, but get that feedback in as soon as you can and we will talk about it on the next prequel episode. You can also help help us out by heading over to Apple, Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to our show, write us a nice little review, drop us a five star rating. That really helps us out. You can also help us out by heading over to Patreon. Do this film is lit, support us there and get access to bonus content. We're a little late on last month's bonus episode, but we're going to have it out here in the next few days, so look out for that. And then we will have our August episode out shortly thereafter. If you have something you would really like for us to talk about, you can support us at the $15 a month level and get access to priority recommendations where we talk about whatever you would want us to talk about as soon as we possibly can. Katie, it's time for the final verdict.
• 2:18:02
  Speaker B: Sentence fast.
• 2:18:04
  Speaker A: Verdict after.
• 2:18:06
  Speaker B: That's stupid. I'm at a loss. It's difficult to say which of These was the bigger disappointment. The meandering second half of the book whose message appears to be everything is pointless, actually, or the flat, lifeless film that squandered the opportunity to expand on the second act of Wicked. Let's discuss the book first. I enjoyed the first half. I almost picked it over the movie. The second half was a wild tonal and structural shift. It wandered around, it, time jumped, it lingered too long in some places. I think I found the Emerald City section to be the most interesting overall. And even that section was just a bit frustrating in its refusal to have things happen instead of belaboring its philosophical ideas. And let me be clear, I get what the book is doing. It's essentially about a person who never lost the revolutionary drive of their young adulthood while all of their friends did, and went on to lead, quote unquote, normal lives. But I 100% absolutely understand why someone looking to adapt this book would read it and say, maybe we kinda just expand out from the first half and ignore most of this. This. But the movie is not getting out of this unscathed either. What a waste of two hours. After all that, you literally just put the second act of Wicked onto film with hardly any changes worth mentioning. The second act of Wicked, the notorious for being a huge letdown second act of Wicked, Wicked for Good had exactly none of the sparkle and charisma that its predecessor had. Bad. Not only that, it's like they didn't even try. The second half of the book is interesting. I'm not sure it's interesting enough to make up for everything else about it, but at least it tried. Comparing the complete properties, I would have to say that my preference is for the musical, and I don't care if that's a cop out. Comparing Wicked for Good to the second half of the book, I'm gonna give this one to the book. Book it was boring like 75% of the time, but the movie was boring like 100% of the time.
• 2:20:31
  Speaker A: Boy, I have no idea what to do with this one. When I finished the first half of the book, I was like, why does everyone hate this? And then I read the second half. The second half of this book is tedious, meandering, and an absolute chore to read. It loses all of the momentum that the first half had and screeches to a halt so we can spend years in the vincus with Elphaba, watching children lead traumatizing young life lives. And Elphaba descends slowly into madness. There is something compelling buried in there about the nature of evil. And how lives go astray, but it's buried in page after page of tedium. I've rarely been more ready to be finished with the book, so you'd imagine perhaps that the movie might have an edge here. This movie was boring, ugly, and a gigantic waste of an opportunity. I've always found the second act of Wicked to be a letdown after the stellar first act, and I thought splitting the musical into two films would give them the time to time and opportunity to really make the second act sing. They did nothing of the sort. The musical numbers are boring, there's more CGI than ever, and it's all a brown and gray mush that is absolutely hideous to look at. It's genuinely hard to believe that the same creative team was behind both films because Wicked for Good has none of the charm of part one. The story works fine. It's a much neater and more digestible story that leaves you with a happy ending. The book very intentionally does not give you a happy ending, and that's fine too.
• 2:21:53
  Speaker B: 2.
• 2:21:53
  Speaker A: But it's also not interesting enough to make up for how dour it is. All that to say I have no idea. I hated the second half of this book and I mostly hated this movie. Both are pretty egregious examples of wasted opportunities. But the book has the good grace to offer some interesting philosophical musings in the second half that at least offer some minor reward for the absolute slog of a read that it is. The movie had the chance to be special and for some reason decided against it. So for that reason, I'm giving it to the book. Katie, what's next?
• 2:22:24
  Speaker B: Up next is my birthday episode and we're going to be talking about the Princess and the Goblin because I want to.
• 2:22:31
  Speaker A: Sweet. Never heard of it.
• 2:22:33
  Speaker B: It is a 1991 animated film based on the children's novel by George MacDonald. This film is not streaming anywhere. I am going to have to share a link to it on the Internet archives. Nice.
• 2:22:45
  Speaker A: That's fine. This is for Deep Cut fans.
• 2:22:47
  Speaker B: Yes, this is for Deep Cut fans.
• 2:22:49
  Speaker A: These are for real fans of the Pod. That's fine. It's your birthday. You're allowed to do that. But. And then we go back to another big blockbuster right after that. So we went from Wicked to to Goblin. What is Princess?
• 2:23:01
  Speaker B: Princess and the Goblin.
• 2:23:02
  Speaker A: And then the movie after that is another big blockbuster. So get everybody back on board for that. But no, that's fun. I'm looking forward to seeing what it is. I I I don't know anything about it. So we will learn a little bit about the Princess and the Goblin in the next prequel episode. Until that time, guys, gals, non binary pals and everybody else keep reading books, keep watching movies and keep being awesome. Sam.