Cassette Tape

This episode discusses suicide and suicidal ideation. Please take care when listening. If you or someone you know is in an emotional crisis, reach out to the National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting 988.

References

• Tiffany
• The Jets
• Wonder Woman
• Lost in Dinosaur World
• Mind Machine
• Miracle Berry
• American Psycho
• Phonograph Cylinders
• Ethan Hawke
• Juliet, Naked
• Men in Black
• Get Out
• Ted Bundy
• Narcan
• Dollhouse
• Joss Whedon
• iZombie
• Billy Mays
• Martha Stewart
• Firefly
• Red Herring
• Erotic Asphyxiation
• Aokigahara
• Virginia Woolf
• xkcd: Password Strength
• Epistolary novel
• The Lake House
• Memento
• Hackers
• Flatliners

Transcript

[Thomas]
Hey story fans, before we get started, we just want to let you know that today’s episode discusses suicide and suicidal ideation. Please take care when listening.

[Intro music begins]

[Shep]
Well, it’s not just her. It’s the other researchers that did it. She’s just one of the researchers.

[Thomas]
Hmm. Right, right.

[Emily]
It’s the Flatliners group.

[Shep]
I never saw Flatliners, but…

[Emily]
Oh, well, that was a wonderful joke.

[Shep]
(laughs) Oh, the Flatliners group. HAHAHAHA! Just, Thomas, just edit that together so-

[Thomas]
Yeah, yeah, I got you.

[Intro music]

[Thomas]
Hey there, story fans. Welcome to Almost Plausible, the podcast where we take ordinary objects and turn them into movies. I’m Thomas J. Brown, and in the mix, we also have Emily-

[Emily]
Hey guys.

[Thomas]
And F. Paul Shepard.

[Shep]
Happy to be here.

[Thomas]
On this episode, our goal is to create a movie plot about a cassette tape, something all three of us grew up with.

[Shep]
In the mix. I get it now.

[Thomas]
Do either of you remember what your first cassette tape was? Or if not, what was your favorite tape?

[Emily]
I remember the first cassette tapes I purchased. I bought two the first time, I was five years old and I bought Tiffany-

[Thomas]
Nice. Good. Classic.

[Emily]
And um, the Jets! Jets, Jets. And their big, big one that I loved the most was You Got It All and it’s oh so cheesy eighties music. But I was five and I absolutely adored it.

[Thomas]
Shep, do you remember your first cassette tape?

[Shep]
Well, I mean, I had cassette tapes that weren’t musical cassette tapes.

[Thomas]
That’s true. I guess the question assumes they’re going to be musical.

[Shep]
Right. I had a cassette tape that came with a DC coloring book that was a story.

[Emily]
Ooh.

[Shep]
And I remember listening to it until the batteries died in the tape player and Wonder Woman’s voice got slower and deeper.

[Emily]
What was your first cassette, Thomas?

[Thomas]
Probably also a story. I had several of those. There’s one that I- I don’t think I have the cassette for it anymore, but I have the book somewhere. And it was like some kid going through this, like, monster, excuse me, through a dinosaur park. And he, like, I think he, like, drops this radio off of the train, or somehow he, like, falls off of a train. And then he’s, like, just wandering around and he ends up, like, riding this ride that isn’t complete yet. And in the middle there was a map. You, like, folded it out and you’d see the entire park.

[Emily]
That’s a very bizarre story that I now want to read.

[Thomas]
I’ll see if I can dig it out. Emily, it is your turn to pitch first this week.

[Emily]
A young couple is renovating a house in the hopes to begin a home-flipping side business. In the basement, they discover a hidden room full of unlabeled cassette tapes.

[Thomas]
Well, this is shady.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah, of course.

[Shep]
A hidden room in the basement. That’s how you start? You’re not going to find anything good in a hidden room.

[Emily]
Nope. The young man, Mark, wants to just toss them and move on. But Brooke is very curious about them. She takes a box up to their old pickup, which still has a tape deck in it, and puts one on to listen. The only thing she hears is static and maybe like the faint remnants of someone speaking. She disappointingly throws the box in the back of the pickup and helps Mark continue their work. That night when they get home, Brooke brings the box in with her. She’s still curious and finds an old boombox to review more tapes. Most of them are just disjointed static, but one seems to have a strange pattern to it. She knows she can hear a distinct rhythm to the static. She becomes very entranced with it. That night she listens to as many tapes as she can and researches the home’s previous owners. She finds one was an eccentric professor who believed he could record the earth’s thoughts. She soon falls into a rabbit hole of mystery surrounding the quirky and possibly delusional professor.

[Shep]
Possibly delusional.

[Emily]
Possibly.

[Shep]
So possibly he’s correct.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
And the earth has thoughts that we can understand.

[Emily]
Yes. And he somehow taps into that with the magnetic poles and cassettes and-

[Thomas]
I like the idea of him just, like, putting a cassette on the ground.

[Emily]
Right? I haven’t worked that part out, but I just thought it would be an interesting, you know, like we do the telescope for radio waves from space to signals.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
So this man was just trying to hear the earth’s thoughts and signals.

[Thomas]
Yeah. It’s a cool idea. I thought that was going to go way darker, too, just based off of how it started. It’s like, “And then Brooke takes them to the truck…” I’m like, “This is not going to end well.”

[Shep]
Yeah. Why keep them?

[Thomas]
Static and faint voices like, what are you releasing into the world, Brooke?

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
I was really close to going that dark with it, but I was like, you know, this movie exists somewhere. We’re just, let’s move on.

[Thomas]
All right, Shep, what do you have for us?

[Shep]
In an alternative retro-future, think late seventies, early eighties, people can record their personalities onto cassette tapes. Then other people can listen to the cassette and through a kind of machine-assisted hypnosis, become that person for a while. Did anyone have a mind machine in the eighties? You guys know what I’m talking about?

[Thomas]
Yeah, it sounds familiar.

[Shep]
It had, like, glasses with lights on them, and they’d flash the lights in certain patterns, and they’d play tones in different headphones.

[Thomas]
Yes, that’s right.

[Shep]
The idea was to put you in a trance.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
So my mom, being a hippie witch, was full-on into that and bought me one. And supposedly it had, like, you know, learn foreign languages and stop smoking.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
And-

[Emily]
That answers my question.

[Shep]
So you play tape while it’s doing this. Anyway, that was what came to mind. So instead of a tape telling you to stop smoking, it’s a tape with a different personality on it that kind of records into your brain.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
But, like hypnosis or, you know those miracle fruit candies that change your tongue senses?

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
It doesn’t last forever. It’s a temporary change.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
So that’s what this does. It’s a temporary change of personality. So it’s great for things like undercover work. And you don’t get access to the other person’s memories, just their personality. But often that’s enough. So let’s say you’re lacking motivation to exercise. You load up a fitness personality. Or you’re trying to negotiate for a raise at work. There’s a Patrick Bateman personality for that. So that’s the setting. Now, the main character’s sister has gone missing, but they have a personality cassette of her and can become her for short spans of time. What would she have done in a given situation? Well, there’s no need to guess. We can find out directly. But using the same personality cassette over and over and over again risks losing your personality entirely. So can our protagonist solve the mystery of their missing sister before that happens? Or is the sister’s personality gonna fall into the same trap as before?

[Thomas]
I do like the idea that he’s at the bottom of a well with his dead sister. Like, “Well, shit.”

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
“Well, now I know what happened.”

[Thomas]
Yeah. “Worked too well.”

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
So how does the exercise tape work? This is a total aside, by the way. How does the exercise tape work if you can’t use the same one over and over again? Do you have to buy a library of tapes and go through them?

[Shep]
You have to have time in between, but, yeah, I like the idea of having a library of them.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So you listen to different personalities. You get a suite of exercise professionals and you just go through them.

[Thomas]
Right. Twelve tapes or something like that. And you just cycle through them.

[Shep]
Right. I’m picturing the commercial on TV. Twelve fitness experts, three payments of $39.99.

[Thomas]
It’s six tapes. They’re two-toned, so each side is a different color. They come in a little binder thing. Each day, you flip over one of the tapes so you don’t forget where you are. So you listen to it and you put it back the other way around.

[Shep]
Yeah. Thomas has the whole system worked out.

[Emily]
Wow.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
I like that one.

[Thomas]
Yeah. That’s a great idea. My first one is just a really simple idea. A tape where when you rewind it and play it again, the contents of the tape are different. That’s all. I don’t know. Maybe different music, maybe different speech. Maybe it’s, I don’t know, connected to a ghostly realm. I have no idea. Ooh. Maybe it’s quantumly entangled to some other universe or something like that. And so it’s a way of recording messages back and forth. I don’t know.

[Shep]
I like the idea of recording messages back and forth. Then you’re communicating with someone.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
You can either send or receive. You can’t do both.

[Thomas]
Yeah. My next idea: a woman buys a cassette at a thrift store that has music by a local solo artist. The songs really resonate with her, and she goes on a quest to track the guy down. Could be a rom-com if we wanted to.

[Shep]
Could be. Unfortunately, the guy died in 1890.

[Thomas]
Wow. Amazing that he made a cassette tape then before he died.

[Shep]
It transferred from the original wax cylinder.

[Thomas]
I see. I see. Boy, the sound quality would be so bad. Well, is there one of these ideas that we particularly like and want to explore?

[Emily]
I like the retro-future one.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s cool.

[Emily]
I like the rom-com one. But it does remind me of an Ethan Hawke movie that came out recently. Finding Julia?

[Thomas]
Yeah. Juliet Naked.

[Emily]
Juliet Naked.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah. Which 100% loved, but-

[Thomas]
Yeah. I liked that movie.

[Emily]
It has a similar vibe.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
But I also love those kind of movies. So.

[Thomas]
I do like the retro-future one as well.

[Shep]
All right, let’s do it.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
I think Thomas can completely see the marketing for this. You know, the way that you describe the exercise cassettes have the different colors on either side.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So you flip them and-

[Thomas]
As somebody with ADHD, you know, you got to keep yourself organized somehow. So these kinds of things just come naturally.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
You learn tricks over the years.

[Shep]
What else would there be these cassettes for?

[Thomas]
I think certainly actors would want them.

[Shep]
Hmm.

[Emily]
Yeah, take method acting to a whole new level.

[Shep]
Right. How long does it take to put a personality in? And how long does it last?

[Thomas]
I would imagine that it takes the length of the cassette, so probably about an hour.

[Shep]
Okay, then how long does it last?

[Emily]
Does it depend on the personality or the person receiving?

[Thomas]
Oh, it’s probably a combination of things. It’s like, the more you do it, the longer it can last. Can you reverse it? Is there an antidote for it? So if you only need it for 3 hours, but it lasts for eight, and you want to go back to yourself for this party you have to go to later, can you do something that will go back? Or is it like, “Boy, you better plan way ahead.”

[Emily]
I have the best answer to this: flash cube bulb.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Emily]
You get a flash in the face resets you.

[Shep]
That’s a.. Get Out.

[Thomas]
Men in Black.

[Shep]
That’s Get Out.

[Thomas]
Oh, it’s also useless for actors then.

[Shep]
See, I was thinking it’s late seventies, early eighties. So it would be drug-based. You take a certain pill-

[Emily]
Oh, there’s that, too.

[Shep]
And it kind of washes it out of your system in 15 minutes or whatever. So if it lasts for 8 hours, that’s a good amount of time.

[Emily]
That’s a day.

[Shep]
That’s enough to last your whole work day.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
And I think that’s great because then you have people who are just totally strung out on personalities.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
Everyone knows someone who’s addicted.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
And maybe there are big groups who are trying to get this whole industry shut down because it’s hurting people in the same way that alcohol and cigarettes hurt people. This is hurting people, but it’s legal. Oh, there’s a cult for sure.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Oh, yes.

[Emily]
That would be bonkers. I love it.

[Thomas]
Another question I had was, let’s say I have a tape for a chef. I want to cook a really great meal, and I do that. I listen to the tape. I have the personality. I’m able to get some of those skills, or at least that thought process down of, like, “How would I approach this?” Do I remember those things? Is that, now, have I learned, like, “Oh, okay, I see how he went about this”? Or is it only while I’m under the influence of the personality, like, am I making memories?

[Shep]
I’m looking at it like hypnosis. When you’re under hypnosis, you still remember everything you’re doing.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
You don’t forget afterward. So that’s this. You still remember.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
You wouldn’t necessarily make the same choices. You wouldn’t have the same instincts.

[Thomas]
Sure.

[Shep]
But you remember what you did.

[Emily]
Okay, so you have the memory of the actions.

[Shep]
But maybe not ‘Why?’

[Thomas]
There’d be some shitty person who sets up, like, a padded room where you get to have a serial killer’s personality.

[Emily]
Oh, well, yeah, of course that would happen.

[Thomas]
So you can experience “What was he thinking?”

[Emily]
Yeah. You’d have black market dealings like that, you know, Ted Bundy tapes and-

[Thomas]
Right, right.

[Shep]
Of course, the serial killer tapes are illegal, and the government’s trying to crack down on them.

[Emily]
Mm hmm.

[Thomas]
Yes, yes, absolutely.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
We probably better get to this story.

[Emily]
This is so much more fun.

[Shep]
See, now I’m going off on a tangent. You know, they have this underground seedy den where people listen to serial killer personalities, and one of them has someone break out of their room during the 8 hours when they have that personality.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah.

[Shep]
And what can they do? Can they call the cops?

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
Because they’re- It’s an illegal operation.

[Emily]
The responsible person would take their sentence and call the cops.

[Shep]
Right. So of course they don’t do that.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Is there, like, a Epipen-style thing that they can jab the person?

[Shep]
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Emily]
Oh, yeah, because we talked about it being a drug thing.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
Force give them the drug?

[Shep]
Yep. That’s good. That’s good.

[Emily]
All right, perfect.

[Shep]
So cops carry, you know, tranq darts, except it’s the not tranquilizer, but it’s the mind clearing-

[Thomas]
Right. Well, it’s like-

[Emily]
Narcan.

[Thomas]
Yeah, it’s like Narcan, except it’s for this. And so, yeah, all the first responders have it. Is there a particular sign that somebody is under the influence of a personality tape?

[Shep]
Pupil dilation.

[Thomas]
It’s pretty standard. Right?

[Shep]
Right. And you gotta be real close to see it.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Their pupils are different sizes. That’s how you can tell. One’s big and one’s small.

[Thomas]
Ah, there you go.

[Emily]
So when they’re under the influence of the personality, they just would make the decisions that person would make based off of-

[Shep]
Yes. Well, the decisions that person would make if they had all of your memories.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
So this main character, which is it, a man or a woman? We don’t know. Or haven’t said.

[Emily]
If it were a man, you get that extra layer of exploration of, you know-

[Thomas]
There’s a scene where he absentmindedly walks into the women’s bathroom.

[Emily]
Yeah, but where, you know, like, I- When we talk about things, I think about things differently than you guys do. Based off of my experience as a woman, your experiences as a man.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
So he would be surprised at either the decision he’s going to make… Now, would he, at the time, know, like, “This is not normally what I would do,” or is that part of how the personality takes over? It’s like, nope. Instantly, this is the next decision.

[Shep]
Well, it would be her personality.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
So she wouldn’t be surprised by any decision that she makes.

[Emily]
But he would be surprised about the decisions being made.

[Shep]
Right. But he’s not the personality running at the time.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
He’ll have the memories afterward-

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
But in the moment, it’s her in his body and his memories.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
So if he knows that she has gone missing and loads up her personality now she knows she has gone missing.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
So she is also motivated to find herself.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Why does the sister have her personality recorded?

[Shep]
That is a good question that I didn’t answer in the pitch. Is she working in the black market? Is it, you know?

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah. I mean, that would add immediate tensions or suspicions for this story. It would be a great avenue for him to go down.

[Emily]
Well, yeah. She’s a working woman, a woman of the night.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
And herself probably uses other personalities to help fulfill-

[Emily]
Some of the fantasies.

[Thomas]
Exactly. Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah, yeah.

[Thomas]
So is the brother always trying to sleep with the guys, he’s trying to hit on the people?

[Shep]
I mean, if that’s her personality.

[Emily]
That’s where I was getting it. If that’s her personality, is, she is just open for business for everyone at all times. But she has his memories. Wouldn’t she know that he’s straight? So would it be that he’s hitting on women all the time? It’s just his sex drive has gone up?

[Thomas]
And how weird to be in a different body all of a sudden.

[Shep]
Yeah. These are all things that you can explore in the movie. So if she’s a lady of the night and uses personality tapes to satisfy her clients, is it possible that she has a personality tape of her own as a backup safety measure in case she uses too many personality tapes in a night and has a personality psychosis, break, whatever they want to call it. When you use too much and you overdose on personalities.

[Thomas]
Right. Then you Perkan her-

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
And give her her own personality back and-

[Shep]
Right. You make a backup. That’s just good stand- standard industry practice.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
You back up your personality if you’re going to be using a lot of personality tapes.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s true.

[Emily]
That works.

[Thomas]
Because she would use several in a night. Yeah.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
So.

[Shep]
Every night.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Man. She’s busy.

[Thomas]
Maybe she’s a high risk.

[Emily]
Mm.

[Thomas]
She’s accepted that she’s going to go for the guys who want fantasies. There are a lot of women who won’t do it.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
It’s too risky or it’s too expensive to create your own personality backup or whatever.

[Emily]
I was thinking maybe she has to work for, like, she’s not self-employed, because then she could easily limit herself to, “I’m only gonna do two jobs a night, that will require two personalities.”

[Thomas]
Sure.

[Shep]
Right. So she’s not self-employed. She’s working for some pimp who works her too much.

[Emily]
Mm hmm.

[Shep]
So let’s decide what happened to her so we can build a mystery around that, so we know where it’s going.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So what did happen to her? The obvious thing that you assume is that she had the personality psychosis or something.

[Emily]
And just went off the rails and disappeared.

[Shep]
And went off the rails and disappeared.

[Emily]
Yeah. She could have also been kidnapped, taken by a John.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
I was thinking that as well.

[Shep]
Or murdered by a client, and then they, you know.

[Thomas]
Or she’s wanted out of this lifestyle for a while and she finally managed to escape and just had to go and hasn’t had a chance to contact her sibling and say, “Hey, I’m running away. And by the way, I’m just fine.” At the end of the film, is she alive or dead?

[Emily]
Yeah. Okay.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
So, this is a terrible thing, but I want her to be dead so you can have the poignant thing while her personality is still in the body.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
When she realizes what has happened, she writes a letter to her brother. “Stop using my personality tape. It’s not good for you. Let me go.”

[Emily]
Oh, I love it.

[Thomas]
Ooh. Does she tell him to destroy her personality tape?

[Emily]
Yes, 100%.

[Thomas]
It’s the only bit of her left, but-

[Emily]
Yeah. But it’s the only way to let her go.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
It’s the only way for him to move on.

[Shep]
I mean, just put it in a safe, man. Stop using it.

[Emily]
No, it’s too-

[Shep]
You don’t gotta destroy it.

[Emily]
The temptation is still always going to be there, and if it’s destroyed, it can’t be used.

[Thomas]
Another thought I had is that she probably made this personality tape, like, a few years ago. Has her personality changed in that time? So it’s not quite up to date.

[Emily]
Oh, yeah, that’s good. Oh, so she’s a little extra confused about why, you know, a little confused about why she’s dead? Because she would never take that risk. That’s not who she is.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Or she always told herself she would never do that-

[Emily]
Exactly.

[Thomas]
But when confronted with whatever the situation was that led to it. Yeah. That’s good.

[Shep]
How did she die?

[Emily]
Does a client kill her?

[Shep]
Well, is she the hero in her story? Did she save someone and give up her life? Is that the personality that she has?

[Emily]
Did she save another young whore?

[Shep]
Yeah, that’s what I’m asking. What kind of story do we want this to be?

[Thomas]
Yeah. I could see that. Some other girl she’s been sort of trying to… mentor is maybe not the right word-

[Emily]
Right. Yeah.

[Thomas]
But protect this girl in a way, because she sees this girl making a lot of the same mistakes that she did or going down a path that she doesn’t want somebody else to experience. And so she thinks, “Okay, I’m gonna try to help this chick.”

[Emily]
And then at the end, when she tells her brother to destroy it, he doesn’t. He instead gives that personality, that strength of character, to the young girl she was trying to protect.

[Shep]
Does he want to turn her into his sister?

[Emily]
I don’t know.

[Shep]
That’s a weird, weird thing to do.

[Thomas]
So she sees this girl get, like, an offer to go to a party or go do something risky, something she knows, this is a bad idea. And the pimp or whoever is trying to take advantage of her lack of knowledge and experience. And so she ensures that that girl is not available or not able to go do that thing.

[Emily]
She takes her place.

[Thomas]
Yeah. She goes instead, and it has fatal results, because she called it. She was right. This was a bad idea.

[Shep]
Or the girl hasn’t made a backup. She’s new.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Oh.

[Shep]
It just needs money. She’s like, in her mind, this is going to be a temporary thing.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
And the sister knows. Oh, no. If you go in here, you’re going to be stuck here. And her handler is feeding her tape after tape, like intending to overwrite her personality because she doesn’t know better yet. And the sister knows what’s going on and sneaks her out, breaks her out, gets her out of there, and then the pimp kills the sister for taking his money away.

[Emily]
I’m gonna ruin this for us now.

[Shep]
Go ahead.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Emily]
We’re just writing Dollhouse.

[Shep]
Damn it.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Shit.

[Emily]
I’m sorry. I’m like, “This is great. This is a great idea.” Yeah, it was. It was a really good. Good first season. Really, really great.

[Thomas]
Yeah. I don’t know a lot about Dollhouse, but the more I think about the few things I do know…

[Emily]
Literally, we just wrote Dollhouse. Except for, instead of a cassette tape, they put them in a chair. They do the light thing, they do the personality swap. And if you get too many personalities, you split, Alpha, and she found out about it, and they purposely messed her up. And Alpha’s trying to protect her in the first season and come and save her. And then the detective guy.

[Shep]
All right, is there anything on this that we can salvage, or is it Dollhouse all the way down?

[Emily]
Fuck. I think it’s Dollhouse all the way down.

[Shep]
Damn it.

[Thomas]
Well, I mean, I guess what I’ll say is that Dollhouse doesn’t have a conclusion to that storyline.

[Emily]
This is true. It did just go off the rails onto a whole other storyline.

[Thomas]
The core idea is not, I don’t think, totally unique. Right?

[Emily]
No, no. It’s not.

[Thomas]
So.

[Emily]
I think we can salvage some of this. I think we have to get away from the prostitution.

[Shep]
All right.

[Thomas]
Okay. That and, like, the intentional overloading.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Good shout, though, Emily.

[Shep]
Yeah. Good catch.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Don’t announce this at the end of the episode.

[Thomas]
Right!

[Emily]
Right. That’s what, I’m like, when it hit me, I was like, “Do I just wait until the end?”

[Shep]
No. Say it immediately. Okay. No prostitution.

[Thomas]
Well, let’s take a break. And on the break, we’ll try to come up with some new thoughts and a new direction.

[Shep]
We don’t even have a story yet. We just have the setting.

[Thomas]
I quite like the setting, though.

[Emily]
It’s a really good setting. I like the idea.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Emily]
We just have to come up with something other than a noir piece with prostitutes who overload personalities.

[Shep]
Yep. All right, let’s take a break.

[Thomas]
All right, well, when we come back, hopefully we’ll have some better ideas.

[Emily]
Fucking Joss Whedon.

[Shep]
Fucking Joss Whedon.

[Thomas]
Fucking Joss Whedon.

[Break]

[Thomas]
All right, we’re back. Do we have any idea?

[Shep]
Yeah. What was- So, what does she do that she makes choices that lead to her demise?

[Emily]
Mm hmm. Nope. That is iZombie. Never mind.

[Thomas]
Yeah, I’d had that thought earlier.

[Emily]
It was like, she’s a detective.

[Shep]
Well, my thought earlier is that she works undercover, but if she’s working undercover with a different personality, her personality is not helpful.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
We need something where it’s her personality led her to a situation that caused her demise.

[Thomas]
I mean, she could be an influencer.

[Shep]
Yeah, but it’s seventies, eighties, it’s not really a thing yet.

[Thomas]
But there were people who, what we would, we would now call them influencers who were sort of minor celebrities then.

[Shep]
Right. But then this is back to her being an actor or something where she’s on TV.

[Emily]
No, no.

[Thomas]
No, I mean, like-

[Emily]
Like, she’s a-

[Thomas]
What’s his name? Billy Mays. But you gotta have somebody like that who, like, that’s their thing. Or, like, Martha Stewart. I mean, maybe she’s more of, like, a celebrity, though. But, like, Billy Mays is like, a minor celebrity. Like a regional celebrity.

[Emily]
But she’s her own personality, though.

[Thomas]
Right, exactly.

[Emily]
She wasn’t-

[Thomas]
That’s the thing, is, like, she’s selling herself as the brand, right?

[Emily]
Her brand. Yeah.

[Thomas]
But, like, look, yet look at any of those people where it’s like they are their own brand or, like, their personality is what made them famous.

[Shep]
Alright, but if you are a celebrity and you go missing, more than just your brother are going to be looking for you. I think we’ve written ourselves into a corner.

[Emily]
So do we just rewrite Dollhouse, then?

[Shep]
It’s a dilemma. It’s a real dilemma because fucking Joss Whedon used the Dollhouse idea-

[Emily]
Before we had it.

[Shep]
Before we had it. That’s how greedy he is.

[Emily]
That’s right. You didn’t save shit for us, man.

[Shep]
That’s okay. I have this kind of western, Sci-Fi in space idea.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
Okay, sounds good.

[Shep]
All right, what are we gonna do? She does something, but she’s not famous. No one is looking for her.

[Emily]
What if she’s a professor of psychology and she’s discussing the philosophical implications of using the tapes?

[Shep]
Is she for it or against it? She has to be for it if she has a backup personality tape of her own.

[Emily]
Or is she against it? And that’s a shocking twist reveal when we find it.

[Shep]
But we gotta find it very early if he’s gonna be using it throughout the movie.

[Emily]
Then maybe she’s pro. But then why would they kill her? If she was against it and it was some kind of government conspiracy, that would make sense. What if she figured out a way to make it permanent?

[Shep]
Ooh. Is she one of the researchers that developed it? How did she die? How did she die? Let’s get back to that. Did she get killed or did she kill herself?

[Emily]
Why would she have killed herself?

[Shep]
That’s what I’m asking.

[Thomas]
She could be suicidal or have some kind of personality disorder or something. She doesn’t like herself. And that’s why she became a researcher, to develop this technology, was to try to change her personality or escape herself.

[Emily]
So she helped develop it as a means of overcoming some other personality disorder.

[Thomas]
Right. And so she made the backup of herself. It’s not a backup. It’s just an early experiment. You experiment on yourself early on because you don’t need to jump through hoops to get volunteers for this, what is probably a pretty hard to get past the ethics boards thing.

[Shep]
I like this idea a lot because that means that her personality tape is not her latest personality, but her as a younger person.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Right. It’s very old.

[Shep]
And also explains why it exists. She’s not selling her- She’s not a celebrity selling her personality.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
It doesn’t have a backup of her personality. It’s just an early test.

[Emily]
And it could explain why she would be against it later if we wanted to go that route. Big Personality needed to kill her.

[Shep]
Big Personality. Yeah. Did she get killed or did she kill herself? How does the younger personality react to discovering that her older personality, if she’s killed herself, has killed herself.

[Thomas]
If what her goal with the research was, was to replace or fix or whatever this ideation that she was having, then she would probably be disappointed.

[Emily]
I’d be grief for sure.

[Thomas]
But also not, like, shock, not in the same way.

[Emily]
Right. It would be, “It didn’t work,” kind of.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Like a denial of, more of like, “It didn’t work.”

[Thomas]
Right. And maybe that’s, like, inspirational for this younger personality to, “Well, let me review everything I did. Maybe I’ll see something that she didn’t.” The problem is he doesn’t have that knowledge. So while the impulse may be there because of her personality, the memory of all the education she went through is absent.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
Is she rich? If she helped develop this technology that we see all over the place…

[Emily]
Potentially, yeah.

[Thomas]
If it helps the story, then yes.

[Shep]
I mean, it could be, if this is a mystery, that could be another red herring that she was murdered for her money or something.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Emily]
Yeah, yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Murdered by a competitor or somebody who thought that she was out to sabotage the business that she had helped built.

[Thomas]
Everything’s a red herring. You assume she killed herself because her younger self had suicidal ideations. You assume she was murdered because she was very wealthy. She was very unpopular with the purists. Just as there are cults around this, there are anti groups. Right?

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
“Think of the children,” and blame her. But it turns out, nope. She just liked being strangled while she had sex or something like that.

[Emily]
Auto-erotic asphyxiation. It’s not even- Not even-

[Thomas]
Not necessarily auto-erotic.

[Emily]
No, there wasn’t even another person there, it wasn’t technically suicide, but she did die by her own hands.

[Thomas]
No. You need another person to disappear the body.

[Emily]
That’s true.

[Thomas]
Unless she was, like, big into auto-erotic asphyxiation in the middle of the woods.

[Emily]
You know, some people have things for coffins.

[Thomas]
There’s a cabin that she rents once a year that no one knows about.

[Shep]
Where is her body?

[Thomas]
Well, is it suicide or murder?

[Emily]
Okay, we have to pick one of those.

[Thomas]
Or manslaughter? Yeah.

[Shep]
Okay, where is her body, and why isn’t it discovered immediately? That’s my question. Where is her body, and why isn’t it discovered immediately? If it’s murder, that’s why it’s not discovered immediately. They hid the body.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
If it’s suicide, where’s the body? Unless she walked into the ocean, the body’s gonna be wherever she left it.

[Emily]
Yes, but maybe she left it in the woods because she’s- Because sometimes people do that.

[Shep]
Yeah, there’s that island in Japan where people go and hang themselves.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Virginia Woolf walked into a river with her coat full of rocks.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
That’s right. Yep.

[Emily]
Some people don’t make a big show of it. I think to get more red herrings or make more of a mystery out of it, it’s gotta be something like she was in a remote location. Where she either was drug out there, or killed out there, or committed suicide out there. And it’s not clear at the beginning. Maybe that’s part of the mystery.

[Shep]
If she is rich, she could have cabins in the woods somewhere.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
She could have lots of properties. She just goes and visits one of them.

[Emily]
And she could have been followed and murdered, or she could have gone on her own. Do we want that to be the mystery, or do we want to know at the get go?

[Shep]
So it’s easier to have a mystery if her body is missing.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
Because it’s like, what even happened to her? Could she still be alive?

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
But then it’s like, well, then it was probably murder if the body is missing?

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Or, like Thomas said, it was an accidental death. Maybe she died at a party and they panicked and hid her body.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
We struggle with mysteries on this podcast.

[Emily]
No, we struggle with decisions.

[Shep]
Well, which would be a more compelling story, a more rewarding story to have experienced.

[Emily]
Taking the idea, as an American audience moviegoer, I would say having her be murdered would be more relatable. Not relatable, digestible. Easier for more people to accept and find compelling. Whereas if she committed suicide, you’re going to put off some people. Because some people have strong opinions about that. And it might be a more powerful story, but it might be more isolating to an audience.

[Shep]
Ah, see, now, do we want a powerful story, or do we want a commercially successful story?

[Emily]
These are excellent questions. I think since we’re writing a-

[Shep]
Damn capitalism.

[Emily]
Seventies, eighties, near-future noir film, let’s just go for the better story.

[Shep]
Okay, so she put rocks in her pockets and walked into the ocean.

[Emily]
Sure.

[Shep]
That’s why her body is missing. But the brother only knows that she’s gone missing. Nobody’s heard from her. She’s disappeared. Her body has not washed up on shore yet.

[Emily]
Right. And we don’t have a suicide note. Will there ever be one?

[Shep]
Yeah, we don’t have a suicide note yet. Maybe she walked into the lake by her cabin.

[Emily]
Mmm.

[Shep]
And so the suicide note is there at the cabin, which he has to find the cabin to find the note.

[Emily]
Find the body. Yeah.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
So this brings up a good question with the whole personality choices thing. He doesn’t know the cabin exists, but her personality would have maybe a yearning to go be in a remote place.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
How does he mesh those two ideas together? I guess.

[Emily]
How does he connect the dots?

[Thomas]
Right, so maybe he knows, “Oh, she’s trying to get away. She’s trying to be alone. She wants to have time away from everybody.” Does she own this cabin? Is it an Airbnb she gets every year? Is it a timeshare she bought? And then how does he figure that out? Because he doesn’t know that it exists. So her personality in him wouldn’t know about it. It would just know, “These are the feelings I’m having. I want to be alone. I want to be in nature.”

[Emily]
They, as children, frequented an area of New England. Not one specific spot. You know, they went to different various cabins, whatever was available in that region. And that was her fondest memories. You know, she’s got the, her favorite smell is fall leaves, and, you know, so he’s drawn to those and that solitude and loneliness. And then, I don’t think it would be too hard of a stretch for him to think about, “I remember her always being happiest in this corner of the country,” and we just, that’s how we get it narrowed.

[Thomas]
If that’s a place they went together as siblings when they were younger, then I think it’s entirely reasonable for when her personality is in control of the body for him to recognize, “Oh, I’m having these nostalgic thoughts for this place.”

[Emily]
Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to get at.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
That would make a reasonable direction there. So it’s not out of nowhere, and he’s not something like magic in his head. He has sort of that at least direction.

[Thomas]
Then, if you, like, look at her browser history and see, like, “Oh, she’s looking at cabins on (Airbnb or Vrbo or whoever’s sponsoring us).”

[Shep]
Right. He needs her personality to get onto her computer, though, to get the password. Not that she knows the password, but she can, like, “Here’s what I would make the password.”

[Emily]
Mm hmm.

[Shep]
You could see her in his body trying several passwords, like, “Okay, what would I do? What would I do?”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah. That would actually be a fun scene.

[Thomas]
“Looking around, what are the things on the desk that I would put together. Horse battery staple…”

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
Sh. Stop giving away my passwords.

[Shep]
Well, then, see, it’s kind of a mystery noir detective, where she’s the detective trying to find what happened to herself, and she’s borrowing her brother’s body to do it.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah, I like that.

[Shep]
Because he’s not active while she’s active.

[Thomas]
So that brings up another question that I had, which is, okay, let’s say it does last for 8 hours. That was kind of what we had decided on. Is it after 8 hours, like a switch flips, or is it a gradient over time? Like, you become more and more yourself? And so at what point are you in control, but you’re still getting sort of whisperings of that personality? Like, is there a point where it’s sort of switching back and forth a little bit?

[Shep]
I’d like it if it were as if a switch were flipped and there isn’t the gradient.

[Thomas]
I mean, that certainly makes it cleaner and easier.

[Shep]
Because you could have a point where it’s important that it’s her personality and it’s getting up to the line.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah.

[Shep]
So you have that audience tension. I don’t know what that would be yet. But because they can’t switch back and forth how they have, she has to leave notes for him. Like, he knows what she did but doesn’t have, like, he maybe not, won’t remember what her feelings were. And so it’s like two detectives investigating the same disappearance, independently, leaving notes for each other. It’s him and her. She’s in the body for 8 hours a day. He’s in the body for 8 hours a day, and then he’s sleeping for 8 hours a day. So she investigates for a while and then leaves a journal entry, and then he blinks out and wakes up as himself and reads the journal entry and goes, “Okay, here’s what I’m going to do next.” And it continues to investigate because he can’t listen to the tape again because that would mess up his personality.

[Thomas]
Right, right. And I think we can establish that right away because he’s like, “I’m going to download this personality. She needs to know what’s going on. Here’s this journal. I’ll write the situation in here.”

[Emily]
Oh, then you get a cool epistolatory thing going.

[Thomas]
A what?

[Shep]
What?

[Emily]
I can’t say the word epistolatory.

[Shep]
What does it mean?

[Emily]
It means letter writing story. Where you write letters between each other.

[Thomas]
Oh, so it’s The Lake House. Got it.

[Emily]
Yes.

[Shep]
Oh, no.

[Emily]
No, no. It’s The Lake House meets Memento. So it’s perfectly fine.

[Shep]
Yeah. If you combine two ideas, that’s a whole new idea.

[Emily]
100%.

[Shep]
See, now you’re kind of selling me on it. It’s The Lake House meets Memento.

[Emily]
I’m fully committed to this Lake House meets Memento. Only she’s writing notes about where she’s left off. So when she comes back, she knows what’s happening and he’s doing the same.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
But they’re also communicating through letters in the journal to each other and coming up with ideas and, like, so you can have moments where they’re having, you hear both of their voices having that conversation through montages because we don’t need to see the entire investigation.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
But you get kind of a nice moment of seeing their relationship and how it was in reality.

[Shep]
Right. See, now I kind of want there to be a 30 seconds of overlap or something because you put that thought in my mind of he wants to talk to his sister and he can directly for 30 seconds once a day.

[Thomas]
It’s like calling collect.

[Shep]
Yeah, because it’s the eighties.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
But I also like the idea of Memento, where he doesn’t know what’s going on when he wakes up.

[Thomas]
So it feels like the thing that will serve our story in that way is that she has access to his memories, but does not create new memories.

[Shep]
Or… uh…

[Emily]
Oh, yeah. Then why would they need to have that conversation?

[Thomas]
Exactly. They wouldn’t need to write it down because anything he thinks, she has access to. Anything she thinks, or learns, he has access to.

[Shep]
Well, see, now you’ve put the idea in my head that we see the movie from his perspective first, where there are gaps in time, like Memento.

[Thomas]
Oh, interesting.

[Shep]
Where he’s journaling his whatever, and then he puts the mind machine on for the first time. And then there’s a gap, there’s a jump into the future where it wears off and he doesn’t know where he is or what’s going on. And he has to read the journal.

[Thomas]
And all the I’s are dotted with hearts and-

[Shep]
Right. The handwriting is different. And so you see him going through these sequences of trying to figure it out, and at one point the journal is missing and he has to figure out what’s going on based on just context. And then you get to the end, basically the end, and then the film is from her perspective. So it’s two films, him in jumps and then her in jumps, which, other than Memento, when has that been done?

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s really interesting.

[Shep]
I think it would be interesting to see, to experience.

[Thomas]
Yeah, I like that idea. And I think it would be an interesting writing challenge for whoever writes this to tell the story in a way that’s like, kind of complete, but some key things are missing. But it’s not so complete that you’re like, “Well, I get what was going on,” you know, and turn it off halfway through.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that would be really cool. Plus, you get at the end, her recognizing that, “Oh, gosh, I’m dead.” That’s maybe the climax of the film, is her realizing that she’s dead. We already know that as the audience. Or do we? Maybe we don’t. I don’t know. Depends again, how you write it.

[Emily]
Maybe we don’t find out until she does. It’s still the mystery of did she die or did she disappear?

[Thomas]
And then the sort of denouement is her personality wearing off and him coming back and, yeah, you get that 30 seconds or whatever. Maybe you don’t. I don’t know. But, like, going back to him and then it stays on him to the end of the film.

[Shep]
Right. So it’s his segments. Her segments, and then him at the end.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Where he can read her journal. She’s writing something at the end, after she’s discovered whatever, and then it’s back to him. But now we hear her voice.

[Thomas]
Right. We don’t know she’s dead because she’s the one who discovers it.

[Emily]
Yeah!

[Thomas]
He never discovers it. She discovers it.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
And that’s her suicide note, because we’ve discovered that she’s committed suicide. Right? We wanted to go with that, but she didn’t actually write a suicide note in real life because she’s put together what happened. She knows what happened. She knows the reasons.

[Shep]
Or she did write a suicide note, but it was in a non-obvious place where she thought her brother would find it.

[Emily]
Hmm.

[Thomas]
Right. Hmm.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
It’s on the backside of a poster, a movie poster that she had on her wall that was something special to the two of them when they were kids.

[Thomas]
It’s in that place where she put that thing that time.

[Shep]
Yes, exactly.

[Emily]
Yeah, 100%.

[Shep]
Thomas gets it.

[Thomas]
But she could even take that note and stick it in the journal.

[Emily]
Oh, yeah.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
So there’s an extra piece of paper after her notes and he reads it and… Yeah. Ooh.

[Emily]
That would be lovely.

[Thomas]
I feel like we’ve turned this around.

[Shep]
Oh, the voiceover at the end isn’t the journal, it’s the suicide note.

[Emily]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So it’s in her voice that we don’t hear until then. Cause she’s- It’s his body the whole time.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Do we ever hear their thoughts?

[Emily]
Occasionally.

[Shep]
I mean, if it’s Memento style, then. Yes. Like, right when they come out of it and they’re trying to orient themselves, you hear their thoughts, and then the segment plays like normal, if that makes sense. Right? Isn’t that how they did it in Memento?

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
So the audience knows about the personality tapes thing all along, right?

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
So the movie opens where, like, she’s missing, and he’s trying to figure out what’s going on, and he finds out she has a personality tape.

[Shep]
I mean, he must know that she has a personality tape.

[Thomas]
That’s true. Yeah.

[Shep]
If she were one of the developers of it, he would assume that she must have it somewhere.

[Thomas]
Yeah, yeah.

[Shep]
Or maybe he knows where it is.

[Thomas]
She gave it to him for safekeeping or- Yeah.

[Shep]
Not necessarily even safekeeping. Just like, “This is my records room, where I have my research and stuff.”

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
“And here’s the first personality tapes that ever existed. These are museum pieces. Here’s me, and here’s my assistant.”

[Thomas]
It could even be, like, in a shadow box, like the first personality tape.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Well, it’s not just her. It’s the other researchers that did it. She’s just one of the researchers.

[Thomas]
Hmm. Right, right.

[Emily]
It’s the Flatliners group.

[Shep]
I never saw Flatliners, but…

[Emily]
Oh, well, that was a wonderful joke.

[Shep]
(laughs) Oh, the Flatliners group. HAHAHAHA! Just, Thomas, just edit that together so-

[Thomas]
Yeah, yeah, I got you.

[Emily]
So now we are combining Flatliners meets The Lake House meets Memento. I am on board with all of this.

[Shep]
Well.

[Thomas]
And a sprinkling of Dollhouse.

[Emily]
Yes.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Emily]
Sprinkling, a nudge.

[Shep]
Just a sprinkling without the prostitution.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
A non-copyright infringement sprinkling of Dollhouse.

[Emily]
Yes.

[Shep]
Just during one of the flashback scenes where you see them as kids, she’s playing with a dollhouse and winks at the camera.

[Thomas]
That’s where the suicide note is. It’s in her dollhouse.

[Shep]
See, you’re saying that as a joke.

[Emily]
You joke.

[Shep]
But if you establish it in a flashback. So it’s at their parent’s shitty cabin at the lake that they just stopped going to because they moved to civilization.

[Emily]
Oh, I love it. It’s a dollhouse at the lake house. This is perfect. And she’s left a memento in the dollhouse at the lakehouse.

[Shep]
Yes. It’s a memento in the dollhouse at the lake house.

[Emily]
Sold!

[Thomas]
It’s in the mailbox of the dollhouse at the lake house.

[Shep]
Flatliners!

[Thomas]
And she’s dead. So, flatliner. What was I going to say? It could be the case that her family was selling or the estate or whatever was selling that lake house, and then it was purchased by a trust, and he doesn’t know who operates that trust. He’s just like, “Ah, some, probably just some financial group or something bought it.” But it’s her. She has all this money. She wants to protect this childhood thing. Maybe they have extended family that’s like, “Oh, we should get that.” It was the grandparents who built the place, and it was willed to her family, and the extended family always felt like they had rights to it or something. Maybe there was something like that. And so she’s like, “Oh, I’ll create this trust. The trust will buy it. Oh, out of the family. There’s nothing we can do anymore.” But really, she’s kept it in the family. But he doesn’t know that.

[Shep]
Nobody knows it. It’s a secret.

[Thomas]
That’s the whole point.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
That’s why he doesn’t think to go back there. He’s like, “Oh, someplace like that.” No, not someplace like that. That place. But he doesn’t know that.

[Shep]
So it’s like, in the background of- her desktop background is a photo of her in the woods. And he’s like, “I recognize that tire swing or whatever. That was where we grew up as kids. But she’s an adult in this photo. We haven’t had that house in our family for 20 years.”

[Thomas]
Sure, something like that. Somehow there’s some detective-y path that he follows.

[Shep]
Right. Do we want to explore-? Because there’s so much things that we haven’t talked about yet. All the red herrings, all the dead ends that he goes down.

[Thomas]
I mean, there have to be a bunch. But I think the tricky thing about the story structure we’ve set up where it’s: we watch his version, then her version, is like, what is the legwork he’s doing? And it’s got to be interesting enough to keep people in their seats until the second half comes along.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Because I feel like the most important work is happening when she’s in control of the body.

[Shep]
Right. But she is putting him in situations. So he listens to her personality tape first thing in the morning.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
She investigates during the day and then leaves him in a situation where it’s like he has got to figure out what’s going on, and the audience has to figure out what’s going on.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
How long are the segments that we see? We know that in linear time, they take 8 hours. But how much movie time do we want a segment to take?

[Thomas]
I don’t know that it needs to be, or even should be prescriptive. I think that somehow we need to establish that, hey, each of these disjointed feeling segments is an eight-hour span.

[Shep]
Okay.

[Thomas]
So that when he suddenly is like, “Oh, what’s going on?” he knows that “Oh, it’s been 8 hours since I listened to the tape.”

[Shep]
Right. I’ll reframe the question. How many days is the investigation?

[Emily]
No more than two weeks.

[Shep]
Two weeks is a lot.

[Emily]
That’s why I said no more.

[Shep]
Okay, well, that’s a good upper bound, then.

[Emily]
How much is too little? Is three days too little?

[Thomas]
Yeah, that seems really fast, doesn’t it?

[Emily]
I mean, most crimes are solved within the first 48 hours.

[Shep]
Right. But they didn’t solve this one.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
That’s why he’s got to investigate.

[Emily]
All right, so-

[Shep]
Maybe she’s already been missing for 48 hours. Maybe she’s been missing for more than that. She’s been missing for two weeks.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
And so the cops are like, “Well, we didn’t solve it. So. Missing persons, what can you do?”

[Emily]
But she’s a rich white lady.

[Shep]
But, yeah, maybe it’s even on the news.

[Thomas]
Sure. It probably would be. One of the founders of the-

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
One of the founders of this technology that’s in controversy right now because of the psychosis that some of the practitioners are experiencing.

[Thomas]
Oh, maybe there’s even like a lawsuit against her.

[Emily]
Mmm.

[Shep]
Ooh.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
And so they’re like, “Oh, she’s run away.”

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
She’s skipped the country or whatever.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Well, I like the idea of another founder being embroiled in controversy because then maybe they might have, for, that could be one of the red herrings is-

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
Do they have motivation to have murdered her to clear their name in some way?

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Right, right.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
So was she murdered by another founder? Was she murdered by the cult? Was she murdered by the anti-cult? Did she skip the country? Like, committing suicide isn’t even in the top four.

[Emily]
No. It’s like, yeah, I don’t think he even considers it until after two sessions of being her. Then maybe he gets that. Because in her twenties, she’d still have had that problem.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
That suicidal ideation would have, even as motivated as she was, clearly, because she was a founder of this great technology, she’d still have that in the background. And he learns that. Maybe that’s the first he realizes how bad it was. He knew she was depressed.

[Thomas]
Maybe he didn’t even know. Like maybe one of their parents committed suicide and so she never wanted to tell him.

[Emily]
Mmm.

[Thomas]
Because she felt like “That’s too heavy. that’s a burden on him. I don’t want him to worry about me. I’m seeing a therapist. I think I have this thing handled.”

[Shep]
Oh, oh. One of their parents committed suicide and he found the body, that’s why she walked into the lake, so that he wouldn’t find her body.

[Thomas]
Wow.

[Shep]
She doesn’t want him to have that trauma.

[Emily]
That’s why she’s missing.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
So is there a note that’s a generic one that’s like on the table in the cabin. But then there’s the note that’s for him.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
The personalized note that apologizes to him or whatever that’s in the dollhouse.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
That’s heavy. Well, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

[Shep]
There’s so much more to this that we could- I could spend a week writing this.

[Thomas]
For sure.

[Emily]
This might be one of those that we’ll have to come back and do an addendum episode for.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah, this is a really cool world.

[Shep]
I like the setting. I like the world. I like the characters. I want to-

[Thomas]
Keep playing in this sandbox?

[Shep]
Yes, yes.

[Thomas]
Yeah. For sure.

[Shep]
But our time is up.

[Thomas]
Our time is up and we would love to hear your thoughts on today’s episode about a Cassette Tape. Would you add it to your mixtape or would you record over this one? Guys, those were really hard to come up with. “Cassette tape” does not have idioms. Let us know by leaving a comment on our website, reaching out on social media, or sending us an email. Links to all of those can be found at AlmostPlausible.com. I frequently tell people about this podcast, but since I’m one of the show’s creators, it’s fair to say I’m biased. What the show really needs are more unbiased evangelists. So do us a favorite and tell someone about Almost Plausible. I don’t think there has ever been a more appropriate time to say that Emily, Shep, and I will catch you on the flip side on the next episode of Almost Plausible.

[Outro music]

[Shep]
Fuck Joss Whedon!

Addendum

From Thomas:

If, like Emily, you are interested in reading Lost in Dinosaur World, the book I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, you can borrow a copy from the Internet Archive. You can listen to the accompanying audio on YouTube. If you would like to own the book and the cassette tape that went along with it, copies pop up on eBay from time to time. In doing research, I found a book and tape still in the original blister pack!

I also found out that Lost in Dinosaur World was actually the second in a series of four books, all written by the same author. If you heard my description of the plot in the episode and thought, “Gee, that sounds a lot like the plot to Jurassic Park,” well, you’re not alone—Geoffrey T. Williams, the author of the Dinosaur World series thought so as well!

Here’s the thing, though: Lost in Dinosaur World was first published in 1987—three years before Crichton’s novel became a bestseller that would eventually be adapted as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster. As author, Williams immediately cried foul, pointing to the numerous similarities between his work and the work of Crichton, and eventually Spielberg. And in the wake of the film’s massive success, a fed-up Williams brought a lawsuit against Crichton, Spielberg and everyone else in his way, attempting to prove that his copyright on Lost in Dinosaur World had been infringed upon.

Source: Paste Magazine

Unfortunately for Williams, he lost both his initial lawsuit, as well as an appeal. But that didn’t stop Lost in Dinosaur World from hitting the screen. A 27-minute-long VHS video was released in 1993, which you can watch on YouTube. (The main kid is even dressed exactly like Alan Grant.)

I’m not going to lie to you: It’s rough. Like, really rough. In fact, I would suggest you don’t waste 27 minutes of your life watching it. Instead, watch this two-and-a-half-minute video of… Actually, I don’t want to ruin the surprise. You can “thank” me in the comments.