Dishwasher

References

• Technology Connections
  • Your dishwasher is better than you think (tips, tricks, and how they work)
• Mathew Broderick
• Addicted to Love
• The Brave Little Toaster
• The Mangler
• Untamed Heart
• the.sequel.nobody.wanted
• Almost Plausible: Washing Machine
• Christian Slater
• Transformers
• Stranger Than Fiction
• Being There
• Forrest Gump

Transcript

[Intro music begins]

[Thomas]
I almost want Patrick Warburton.

[Shep]
Yeah, but he does too much stuff. So whenever you hear him in a thing, it’s like, “Oh, that’s Patrick Warburton.”

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s true.

[Shep]
Whereas when you hear Christian Slater, it’s like, “That voice sounds familiar.”

[Emily]
“Why do I know that voice?”

[Shep]
“Who is that? Why do I know that voice?” All right, I’m sold on Christian Slater as the narrator.

[Thomas]
Okay, I’m gonna start over.

[Shep]
All right.

[Thomas]
The dishwasher was distressed.

[Shep]
That doesn’t sound like Christian Slater.

[Emily]
Remember, do a bad Jack Nicholson.

[Thomas]
(Bad Jack Nicholson/Good Christian Slater voice) This was odd because dishwashers are inanimate objects.

[Emily]
Dead on. Dead on.

[Shep]
That was too accurate. And now I’ll be distracted, so probably just do it in your regular voice.

[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 here with me are Emily-

[Emily]
Hey, guys.

[Thomas]
And F. Paul Shepard.

[Shep]
Happy to be here.

[Thomas]
Today’s ordinary object is a Dishwasher, and we’ll create our Dishwasher movie by taking turns pitching story ideas, choosing our favorite one, and then working out the plot. Before we do that, I want to give a big shout-out to the YouTube channel Technology Connections, which is a fantastic channel anyway. But he has a great video about how dishwashers work and the right way to use one. The tl;dr is that you probably aren’t using yours correctly. We’ll link to the video in the show notes on our website. Alright, Shep, you are on deck first this episode.

[Shep]
Really? Okay. Matthew Broderick’s girlfriend breaks up with them, so he goes undercover as a dishwasher at her new boyfriend’s restaurant in a bid to win her back. Oh, wait, that’s Addicted to Love from 1997. Okay, here are my real pitches. Due to a phone mix-up, a crime scene cleaner (that is, a criminal that cleans up crime scenes)…

[Thomas]
Ah, okay.

[Shep]
And a dishwasher swap jobs for the day. Like, they get the call. Like, “Come clean up this place.”

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
The dishwasher thinks, “Okay, I’ll come clean up this place.” And it’s dead bodies. Whereas the cleaner gets called in, and it’s just wash dishes, and it’s, he’s so relaxed and zen and-

[Thomas]
Now I feel like it’s not like a bloody crime scene, but it is dead bodies and there’s nobody there. Cause he, the assumption is “We’ve called the right person. He knows what to do.” So he shows up and he thinks, “Oh, they’ve had a hard night of drinking. They’re all just passed out. I’ll just quietly clean up these dishes here.” And so he’s like in the kitchen cleaning all the dishes. He’s like, “This is kind of weird, but all right.” And then somehow finds out that they’re dead. It feels very mid to late 80s.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
I love this. This is great.

[Emily]
This is a good one.

[Shep]
All right, here’s my other one. A cursed dishwasher gets dishes really clean, but when its hunger is not sated, it starts eating some of the dishes and then the family pet. And then it breaks loose.

[Thomas]
Hopefully not in a Brave Little Toaster kind of way where it has to like drag like a battery and a bucket of water behind it and stuff, you know?

[Shep]
Right. More like, oh, golly, what was the old movie?

[Emily]
The Mangler?

[Shep]
The Mangler!

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
The vaguest description, and Emily goes, “Oh, I know exactly what you’re talking about.”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
That’s it for me.

[Thomas]
All right. I have a couple here: Isabella grew up helping her mother cook daily meals, learning traditional Mexican dishes from her abuelita, and her whole family cooks together at social gatherings. Now she aspires to be a great chef and moves to a big city to pursue her dream. She can’t afford to go to culinary school, but feels her cooking skills are solid enough to land her a job in a professional kitchen. Unfortunately, the only position anyone will offer her is as a dishwasher. She finally accepts one of the jobs because, well, she needs to pay her rent. One day, a Michelin-star chef visits the restaurant to scout for talent in his kitchen. The rest of the staff are falling over themselves to impress him and although Isabella is excited to meet him, she never lets her work fall behind. The chef is dismayed by the sycophantic behavior of the staff, but notices her dedication to her station. He offers her a job as a dishwasher at his restaurant and she accepts. In the new kitchen, she is able to demonstrate her cooking skills, and rises through the ranks, eventually opening a restaurant of her own.

[Shep]
So have you seen Addicted to Love? Because there is a scene in Addicted to Love where he releases a bunch of cockroaches into the restaurant, and he ignores the chaos going on behind him and is laughing to himself while he’s washing his dishes. He gets praised for staying at his station and continuing to work through all the chaos.

[Thomas]
That’s funny.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
My other idea: it was my short story that I wrote years ago for my Chapter One sort of idea. It’s about a dishwasher who, concerned for its owner’s welfare after her sudden disappearance, turns into a human and goes looking for her.

[Shep]
I love it.

[Thomas]
If we want to go down that road, I do have the story up.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
Otherwise, Emily, what do you have?

[Emily]
So a quiet, introverted dishwasher whose heart was replaced by a baboon’s, falls in love with a waitress at a diner where he works. He saves her from an assault one night and the relationship builds there. Oh, that’s just Untamed Heart. Never mind.

[Thomas]
Also, when you first started saying “A dishwasher and it had its heart replaced,” I was thinking of the machine and I’m like, “What?”

[Shep]
It’s nice. It’s quiet. It runs on a baboon heart.

[Thomas]
Yeah, maybe that’s how yours escapes. It eats someone’s heart. And so now it just has its own circulatory system that keeps it alive.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
Alright, so here are my real pitches: Barbara asks her husband Steve for a dishwasher for their 15th wedding anniversary.

[Shep]
Steve!

[Emily]
He gets her a blender. She asks again for her birthday, and he gets her a new set of pots and pans. She grows increasingly frustrated when she requests the dishwasher for a gift for every special occasion. She finally asks him why he won’t buy her one. He says she doesn’t need it. She’s a perfectly good dishwasher and they could spend the money on more important things. A month later, he buys some new tools for his wood shop. This infuriates Barbara and she murders him, sells his tools, and buys a dishwasher.

[Thomas]
Steve finally gets his comeuppance.

[Emily]
Yep. Alright. When Soledad’s dishwasher becomes sentient, she embarks on an erotic journey of self-discovery and sensual pleasures. I might be watching too many TikToks of a woman who reads really weird erotica simply because it exists and her followers keep sending her suggestions.

[Thomas]
So you’re saying that IP is spoken for or…?

[Emily]
No, no. Well, I mean, it’s not.

[Thomas]
Oh, okay.

[Emily]
I didn’t get it from there. This is the one I popped up with on my own.

[Thomas]
I see, I see.

[Shep]
Dishwasher erotica? Now, washing machine erotica, I understand, but dishwasher erotica?

[Thomas]
You can’t just take any machine that washes things, and… What are we doing? Car wash erotica next? Come on.

[Emily]
All right, so those are my pitches.

[Thomas]
Which pitch do we like the best?

[Shep]
I’d say for the phone mix-up, just hearing the premise, we can probably imagine most of the movie because it’s not that original of an idea. We’ve seen mix-up movies before.

[Emily]
This is true.

[Thomas]
Sure.

[Shep]
Among Emily’s, the baboon heart one is really calling to me, but that’s-

[Emily]
Oh, so good. You just gotta hire Christian Slater. That’ll just clinch it.

[Shep]
Hire young Christian Slater. Among Thomas’s, the dishwasher whose owner disappeared, and so it turns into a human to look for her is the most interesting.

[Emily]
Yeah. That is a really interesting one to go.

[Thomas]
I agree.

[Shep]
I don’t think I’ve seen a movie where a dishwasher becomes a man that I can remember.

[Thomas]
Or we haven’t seen it yet.

[Shep]
I have seen Transformers, but I don’t think that counts. I like the imagery of a dishwasher that is turned into a person that perhaps gets picked up by the police and is in the back of a police car, turns back into a dishwasher.

[Thomas]
He does. That’s exactly what happens. Yes.

[Shep]
Strapped in to the, you know, seat.

[Thomas]
Yep. There’s not a lot that I wrote, but that is a thing that I wrote in the story. Or no, maybe I didn’t write that.

[Emily]
Just thought it?

[Thomas]
I have notes. Oh, yeah, it’s in my notes section, not the part that I wrote. But yes, that was an idea that I had had, because I like that idea too, of the cops being like, “What the? How? What? Wh-… how?”

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Oh. One of the other notes I have is that the brand is a Kenmore and they hear his name as Ken Moore.

[Emily]
I like that. That’s clever.

[Shep]
Especially if we get Kenmore to sponsor us. All right, is this what we’re doing? Let’s decide so we can start.

[Emily]
Yeah, let’s do that.

[Shep]
All right.

[Thomas]
Alright, since this is the one we want to do, I’ll read the short story I originally wrote and we can figure out the rest of it from there.

The dishwasher was distressed. This was odd because dishwashers are inanimate objects and therefore incapable of having feelings.

[Shep]
Okay. Pause. This movie needs a narrator for sure.

[Emily]
Oh, like the, uh, what’s the one with Will Ferrell?

[Thomas]
Yeah, I know what you’re talking about.

[Emily]
Stranger than Fiction.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yes.

[Emily]
I love the narrator bit in that.

[Shep]
Yes. Agreed.

[Thomas]
(narrating)

The dishwasher was distressed. This was odd, because dishwashers are inanimate objects, and therefore incapable of having feelings. Nonetheless, this dishwasher was distressed.

The dishwasher was a small, portable model. It had wheels, and normally sat facing the kitchen sink. One might think that the dishwasher’s greatest joy would be to wash dishes for the young woman that owned it, but like most of us, the dishwasher’s job and its passion were not the same thing. In actuality, the dishwasher’s favorite activity was to look out the window over the kitchen sink and watch the animals that spent time in the large, leafy tree outside. There were squirrels, many different birds, and sometimes a large orange cat, which the dishwasher thought probably lived in the apartment downstairs.

Whenever the young woman needed the dishwasher to clean the dishes, she pulled it close to the sink and turned it around to connect its water hose to the sink’s faucet. This allowed the dishwasher to do its job, but like an office worker stuck in a cubicle, its view was of an uninteresting wall. It was odd that the dishwasher should care which way it faced, because dishwashers are inanimate objects, and therefore incapable of seeing. Nonetheless, this dishwasher preferred to look out the window over the kitchen sink.

Typically, after the dishwasher finished cleaning the dishes, it wouldn’t be long before the young woman would move the dishwasher back to its place facing the window. This time was different, however. The dishwasher had finished cleaning the dishes two days ago, and the young woman had not yet unhooked it from the sink, or even come to check on it. It was odd that the dishwasher knew how much time had passed, because dishwashers are inanimate objects, and therefore incapable of comprehending the passage of time. Nonetheless, this dishwasher had noticed enough time to pass for it to get bored.

As the dishwasher sat there for the past two days, it had tried to figure out what it had done to deserve this. Why was the young woman punishing it? There was that one time when it had tried to rush the job so it could go back to looking out the window sooner, but this plan had backfired when the young woman, dissatisfied with the still-dirty dishes, made the dishwasher run another cycle, and properly this time. All in all, the endeavor had taken longer than if it had just cleaned the dishes the right way in the first place. This happened long ago, and the dishwasher felt it had learned its lesson then. She couldn’t still be mad about that, could she?

Now, the dishwasher was distressed. Even when the young woman had been cross with it, she came back as soon as it was done. No, something about this time was different. Had something happened to the young woman? The dishwasher thought it had heard a strange sound coming from outside the kitchen shortly after it had started cleaning the dishes, but the sound was hard to hear because dishwashing is a noisy process. It was odd that the dishwasher had heard anything at all, because dishwashers are inanimate objects, and therefore incapable of hearing. Nonetheless, this dishwasher had heard something odd.

At that moment, the dishwasher heard another sound. It was a loud, fast banging, which the dishwasher recognized as a sound it had heard before. Voices usually came next, so it listened intently.

“Police!” called a muffled voice. “We’re here with the super. We’re coming inside!”

Next came a scattered jingle, and then a rush of footsteps.

“Police!” shouted several disjointed voices throughout the apartment, followed by calls of, “Clear!”

A man the dishwasher had never seen before came into the kitchen. The dishwasher wondered if he was here to move it back against the wall. The man stood in the doorway pointing at things with an odd, black finger.

“Clear!” he shouted at the dishwasher. The dishwasher didn’t know what it was supposed to do, but the man left before the dishwasher could figure it out.

Over the next few hours, there were many more voices and many new and odd noises that the dishwasher had not heard before. There seemed to be a commotion in another room of the apartment, and every once in a while some new person would step into the kitchen for a moment, getting the dishwasher’s hopes up, only to quickly leave again.

Eventually, long after the dishwasher had stopped getting its hopes up, a man came in and walked right up to the dishwasher. He tried to use the sink, but the dishwasher’s hose was still connected.

“Rogers! Come in here and move this thing out of the way,” the man yelled. Another man came into the room and began to remove the dishwasher’s hose from the faucet.

This seemed promising. The dishwasher cautiously allowed itself to be optimistic.

The man wheeled the dishwasher away from the sink.

This was it! After days of waiting patiently, the dishwasher would once again be able to look out the window over the kitchen sink! Perhaps it had been a test. Yes, that’s it, a test of loyalty. Or perhaps faith. Yes, a test of faith, that made sense. The young woman had wanted to make sure the dishwasher would never give up on her, and it felt proud that, although it had momentarily been concerned for her welfare, it had never lost hope that she would return it to its place across from the sink. She must have told these men—these “police” as they seemed to call themselves—to move it back.

The man who disconnected the dishwasher from the kitchen sink moved it against the opposite wall. The front of the dishwasher was now pressed up against the wall, and it couldn’t see anything at all. It was not dismayed, however, and knew this was all part of the test. Soon, the young woman would return, see that it had performed admirably, and she would turn it around so it could look out the window once again. The dishwasher had faith, and would not give up hope.

Three days later, the dishwasher had given up all hope. A few hours after the man had pushed it against the wall, the noises in the other room abated, and the apartment had been quiet ever since. The dishwasher had thought it was being tested. It thought it had done a good job. Now it didn’t know what to think. It was odd that the dishwasher had any thoughts at all, because dishwashers are inanimate objects, and therefore incapable of thought.

But none of that was as odd as what happened next.

[Thomas]
And that’s where I left off.

[Shep]
This doesn’t have the dishwasher turn into a man at all.

[Emily]
There’s no man.

[Thomas]
That is what happens next, is that he turns into a man.

[Emily]
How does he turn into man? Like, what happens?

[Thomas]
I imagine it’s like flip of a switch. Boom, he’s a guy.

[Shep]
Is he still full of dishes? He did just run a load.

[Thomas]
No.

[Shep]
What happens to those dishes when he turns into a man?

[Thomas]
I guess they get absorbed?

[Emily]
They become his bones.

[Thomas]
There you go. Right? He has-

[Shep]
He’s got china.

[Thomas]
It’s bone china. Yeah, yeah.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Emily]
But like, what… What’s the impetus for him becoming, like, what’s the switch? Like, I get that he just becomes a man, but like, magic?

[Shep]
He’s bored and lonely, which is unusual because he’s, as an inanimate object, dishwasher is incapable of being lonely.

[Thomas]
Or bored.

[Shep]
Or bored.

[Emily]
Okay, so since he’s sort of like, not a typical dishwasher, because he can see somehow, even though dishwashers can’t see, and he has feelings.

[Shep]
He’s Ken Moore. Not Ken Less.

[Emily]
So he just thinks himself into existence as a man.

[Shep]
Sure. It’s magical reality.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Right.

[Shep]
It doesn’t have to make sense.

[Thomas]
Oh. So in my notes, I have: “What happens next is that he turns into a human. He eventually learns to control his ability to switch between human and dishwasher forms. But at first it happens at odd times. Early on, he gets arrested for being in the girl’s apartment, which is still an active crime scene. The cops cuff him and put him in the back of their car, which spooks him, and he turns into a dishwasher. The cops are baffled about how he got away and how he managed to put a dishwasher in the back of the cruiser. But a dishwasher is useless to them, so they take it out and leave it by a dumpster.”

[Emily]
How do they get it out of the cruiser? It’s bigger than the doors.

[Thomas]
It’s a portable one, so it’s like, just barely.

[Emily]
Oh, my portable one was massive. It was a full-size dishwasher.

[Shep]
So what happened to her?

[Thomas]
I imagine she died. Her boyfriend murdered her.

[Emily]
Well, she’s clearly dead.

[Thomas]
Yeah, but I never had an- I mean, this was only ever designed to be a chapter one.

[Emily]
Mmhmm.

[Thomas]
So she doesn’t have to be dead, I guess.

[Emily]
But she got kidnapped?

[Thomas]
Well, I would imagine she’s, like, incapacitated somehow, nearing death. They take her to the hospital, and she makes a recovery, if that’s what we want, or she’s dead. And then he… I don’t know what he does.

[Shep]
He gets a job as a dishwasher with a tiny apartment that looks out onto a tree where there are birds and stuff.

[Thomas]
So it’s like a Being There sort of thing, where he’s just sort of this simpleton who does a really good job at this one menial task, and he’s just sort of, like, happily goes along through life?

[Shep]
I mean, what is the tone of this movie? It starts with a woman’s disappearance, so I wouldn’t say happy-go-lucky.

[Thomas]
Well, Being There starts with the guy he’s working for dying.

[Shep]
Yeah, that’s true. But then it’s, we’re just making Being There, so let’s not do that.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s true. Do we want him to be reunited with her or not? And then that can inform whether she is dead at the beginning or in the hospital the whole time.

[Shep]
Yeah. If she’s in the hospital as a Jane Doe who’s in a coma, they don’t know who she is. She’s just a missing person. The police don’t know that she’s in the hospital. The hospital doesn’t know who she is. He’s got to track her down. But what happens to him at the end? Does he go back to being an inanimate dishwasher? I think that’s the goal. Because that’s when he was happiest was as a dishwasher looking out through the window.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
That’s all he wanted out of life, was to do that.

[Shep]
Right. So she doesn’t know him. It’s not a rom-com. they don’t get together.

[Thomas]
Yeah. He likes seeing the outdoors. So I think it would be very exciting at first for him to be outdoors, but he doesn’t know anything about the world, so it would also be confusing and scary and he would potentially have, I don’t know. Things that are unpleasant would happen to him.

[Shep]
He tries to pet the orange cat and it scratches him.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Or he sees a dog and it gets excited and then gets barked at and scared.

[Thomas]
He gets mugged.

[Shep]
Does he have anything to steal?

[Thomas]
Fine china! Oh, wait.

[Emily]
The muggers don’t know that until after they mug him.

[Shep]
They try to mug him, but he doesn’t recognize guns. He thinks it’s a weird black finger, and he shakes their hand.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Has he seen people shake hands before? So he shakes the gun.

[Thomas]
So do we like the idea of her being in a coma and then he finds her somehow? Does he go to her hospital room and then turn into a dishwasher in the corner and she, like, wakes up and is like, “What the fuck is my dishwasher doing here?”

[Shep]
I think that if she sees him, she sees him as a man, but doesn’t recognize that it’s her dishwasher.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Obviously.

[Thomas]
So when he gets to the hospital, she’s still in a coma, and so he’s sitting by her bed for days or weeks or whatever. He tells nurses, “Oh, yeah, we’re good friends. I’ve known her for years.”

[Emily]
“I live with her.”

[Thomas]
And yeah, yeah. And then when she wakes up, she just thinks, “Oh, this is some volunteer here to sit with the coma patients and hold their hand and say nice things and hope that that wakes them up or whatever.”

[Shep]
That could be emotional. If he knows this is like their one chance to have a conversation and for him to tell her anything he wants to tell her, because after this, he’s going to leave and go back to the apartment and turn back into a dishwasher.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
See, I kind of want a cheesy moment. Like, maybe they’re together like that, and it is his one conversation, but he’s also a dishwasher, so he’s not like, you know, super emotionally intelligent. So his conversation is, you know, like, maybe it’s becoming spring as she’s waking up and they talk a little bit, and he’s like, “Hey, look out the window. The squirrels are out hunting again. It’s gonna be nice soon.” And like, that’s it. That’s the conversation. Just something simple and plain like that.

[Shep]
That’s Being There!

[Emily]
Is it?

[Shep]
I like that, though. Where… I, see I’m doing Being There again, where he is saying “It’s spring and life is renewing and there are squirrels and it’s a sign of a good spring (whatever).” And she’s interpreting it as this deeper thing. She just survived this trauma. She got hit by a car or whatever and it’s a long road to recovery.

[Emily]
And he’s just talking to her about the things he loves the most.

[Shep]
Right. But she’s like, “This is my spring. This is… I can come back from this. I’ve gone through winter. That’s the worst of it. And I’ll get better from here.” And he is telling her she’s going to be fine because the nurses told him she’s going to be fine.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
So he’s just repeating what he heard.

[Thomas]
So I’m thinking about the structure of the story. I’m just trying to figure out when does he find her? It feels like its during the third act. His lowest low is basically giving up. “I don’t know. I don’t know where she is. I don’t know how this world works. I don’t know how to find her. Maybe shes gone. Maybe she left me. Maybe I left her.” I don’t know how he finds her. But that feels like, for him, that’s his emotional low point.

[Emily]
Yeah, that makes sense to me.

[Thomas]
Because that’s his goal throughout the film, is to find her. Right?

[Shep]
It must be.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
It has to be, because otherwise he could just, now that he knows he can become a human, put himself in the spot. But he’s grown attached to her.

[Thomas]
Yeah. He likes her as a friend.

[Emily]
Yeah. Like-

[Thomas]
Almost like as a family member. He cares for her.

[Emily]
Well, I was thinking he likes her the way he likes the trees and the squirrel and the orange cat.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Like, it’s his world.

[Thomas]
She’s one of his comfort items.

[Emily]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
The world is not the same without her.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
Yeah, he likes being outside, but he doesn’t like being outside because now the tree canopy is so far away, you know, it’s not the same.

[Thomas]
Oh, and there’s weather.

[Shep]
And there’s weather. He gets rained on. Now, he normally doesn’t mind water, but normally it’s inside him.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Now it’s on the outside. “I’m not a dish. Water is for dishes.” I can see how he finds her, though. Assuming she got hit by a car near the apartment, if he’s in the area, he could eventually hear of this incident that happened where someone got hit by a car and got taken to the hospital, and she got mugged by the same people that mug him earlier.

[Emily]
Mmm.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
That’s why she doesn’t have her ID on her.

[Thomas]
Ah yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah. Would it be cheesy if he, you know, in the course of looking for, figures out that he doesn’t have money and he needs money, right? To do things? Would it be cheesy if he applied for a job as a dishwasher in the diner around the corner because he sees a sign that says, “Dishwasher’s wanted”?

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s great.

[Shep]
I don’t think that would be cheesy. That’s how I just imagined it would go.

[Thomas]
The whole way that he finds out that he needs money is because he doesn’t have any when he gets mugged. The mugger’s like, “How do you not have any money?” He’s like, “Well, I don’t know. What do I need to do to get money?” He’s like, “Get a fucking job, man.”

[Shep]
“Do you have a job?”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
“This is my job.”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
“Oh, I’ll do this job. It seems easy. Give me your money.”

[Thomas]
“Give me your money.” Yeah.

[Shep]
So do the muggers beat him up? And if they don’t beat him up, why don’t they beat him up?

[Thomas]
If they beat him up, he’s got to turn into a dishwasher.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
I could see them not beating him up because they’re just like, “This guy’s got something wrong with him.” Like, “He has more issues and no money.”

[Shep]
They tell him to come back with some money. That’s just a line that they say, like, “What are you doing in this neighborhood? You don’t have any money. Come back with some money,” or whatever. So he gets a job and then goes back and tries to find the muggers to give them money because they asked him for money before.

[Thomas]
I’m trying to think about things, like, what is the end of the first act? Like, what sets him on his journey? And then, like, what’s the mid-second-act turning point? What are those major story beats?

[Shep]
I thought what set him on the journey was being arrested by the police and then turning back into a dishwasher in the cop car and being dumped on the side of the road. Now he has no choice but to go off on a journey because he is not in the apartment.

[Thomas]
Yeah. So he spends a bunch of time in the apartment just by himself as a guy?

[Shep]
I would imagine so. Because he’s there long enough for the police to come back. Like, the neighbors have to report hearing some sounds from that apartment or something. He turns on the TV or something.

[Thomas]
Right. Does he… Is he naked at first, and then he finds some clothes, her boyfriend’s clothes? Or-

[Shep]
Uh, so if it’s her boyfriend’s clothes, because they reported she has this boyfriend, whatever, and he could have been seen wearing whatever outfit. And so they see him in that outfit and like, “Oh, that’s the boyfriend.”

[Thomas]
Hmm. So I feel like that time he spends in the apartment watching TV, looking at magazines, whatever. That gives him a small foundation for not being totally alien when he’s out in the real world.

[Shep]
Right. He’s gotta see her mail and know the address because that will come up later.

[Thomas]
Right. Okay, so, yeah, the end of the first act is getting arrested?

[Shep]
Are you asking us?

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Yes. Yeah. Yes.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Emily]
I assume that’s it.

[Shep]
The first act is she disappears. He starts turning into a man. Oh, you can see him learning how to do it.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah, that’s good.

[Shep]
He does it for a little bit.

[Thomas]
Right. Things scare him and he turns back into a dishwasher.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Like when he first turns the TV on. He’s not expecting that.

[Shep]
I just see, I’m just picturing the dishwasher just appearing in the living room and then rocking for a second and then settling into place.

[Thomas]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Does he need to sleep, as a man?

[Shep]
If he does need to sleep, he sleeps as a dishwasher.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah, totally.

[Shep]
So he doesn’t need a bed. He needs a corner that he can go in.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Because that’s how he was at the apartment. He was up against the wall. He needs a wall to feel comfortable enough to sleep against.

[Thomas]
Right. That’s how he feels secure.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that makes sense. So he’s out in the world looking for her, exploring, getting mugged, getting a job.

[Shep]
Well, I don’t know if he’s looking for her at first because it wasn’t his intention to leave the apartment.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
His intention was to wait there for her to return because this is another test.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
But then why does he turn into a man? So that doesn’t… Those two things are in conflict.

[Thomas]
Hmm. Yeah.

[Shep]
He must want to move around because he sees the cops moving around, and that is a convenient form. So he wants to take that form that he has seen.

[Thomas]
To be able to look for her?

[Shep]
To look for her.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So that she can come back and turn him the right way around.

[Thomas]
Well, if what he wants is to be turned the right way around, he can do that. He’s in control of that.

[Shep]
Oh, then he misses her because she’s like the squirrels and the birds. She’s part of his environment.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
And now that she’s not there, his environment is incomplete.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
His world is literally not the same without her, and he kind of likes to have things the way they’re supposed to be.

[Thomas]
So does he leave the apartment? I feel like the first time he leaves the apartment, he just leaves the door open behind him. He doesn’t know he needs to close doors behind him.

[Shep]
Oh, does he even know that it’s leaving the apartment? Because in the apartment, he can go from room to room.

[Thomas]
All right, so the hallway is just another room. Does he walk into someone else’s apartment?

[Shep]
I mean, what kind of character are we making here? What is the tone of the movie?

[Thomas]
I mean, considering he’s trying to go back and give the muggers money, it feels a little goofy.

[Emily]
It’s that endearing Forrest Gump goofiness.

[Shep]
But going into someone else’s apartment is not endearing Forrest Gump-style goofiness.

[Emily]
But you’re thinking like a person. He’s a dishwasher. I mean, it’s not, like, malicious or anything, and we’re not creating a character that’s robbing or perving out on people.

[Thomas]
Especially if what he’s doing is looking for her, then- “Is she in this room? Is she in this room?”

[Shep]
Ah.

[Emily]
Yeah. You start out with him looking through all the rooms in the apartment, and then he gets to the door, into the hallway, and there are (gasp) more doors.

[Thomas]
Oh, no. You sounded excited. He would be like, “Oh, more doors.”

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
“This is going to take all afternoon.”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So someone doesn’t come out of their apartment for something in the hallway and leave their door open temporarily, and he just zips right in behind them.

[Thomas]
No, he’s just like trying doorknobs, I think.

[Shep]
All right. Oh, if he’s trying doorknobs, someone’s going to come to the door because they heard someone trying their doorknob.

[Thomas]
Yeah, yeah.

[Shep]
And they’re like, “What are you doing?” And he’s like, “Oh, I’m looking for…” What is her name? We need to give her name. Samantha, time is up.

[Emily]
There you go.

[Thomas]
All right.

[Shep]
You had your opportunity to come up with your own name. It’s Samantha.

[Thomas]
Sure.

[Shep]
So he tries the doors, and one of them, someone comes to the door, and is like, “What are you doing?” And he’s like, “Oh, I’m looking for Samantha.” Do they tell him what apartment she’s in? Or do they just tell him she doesn’t live here?

[Emily]
Well, he wouldn’t know the numbers right away, so I think it would be funny or a good moment if they’re like, “Oh, she’s in apartment 3B (or whatever).”

[Thomas]
He’s all excited. He goes in, he’s like, “Wait a minute, I was just here.”

[Emily]
Yeah, “This is my apartment.”

[Thomas]
“This is my apartment. This is where I came from.” I think it definitely depends who answers, right? Because some people would be all skeptical. Who’s this guy looking for her that I’ve never seen before?

[Shep]
Right, right. Oh, he’s not asking where Samantha lives because he knows that. He says “Samantha’s not at home. Is she here?” So they don’t have to tell him what apartment it is because he already knows that. And then it’s not as, you know, this person doesn’t know where she lives. And is just trying all the doors. He’s looking to see if she’s at the neighbors right now.

[Thomas]
Presumably, the neighbors know she’s missing, or some of them do, anyway.

[Shep]
Oh, and they have to break the news to him. And they’re like, “Oh, sweetie, I have bad news.”

[Emily]
Would you get, like, a middle-aged woman who’s just off of work, who’s like, “Oh, you haven’t heard? Come on. Come in. I’ll make you some tea.”

[Thomas]
Would she invite in a strange dude?

[Emily]
She’s lonely and she needs friends.

[Shep]
Does she have cats?

[Thomas]
I was just going to ask that.

[Shep]
Because he likes cats.

[Thomas]
Maybe that’s where the orange cat is from.

[Emily]
Yes.

[Shep]
See, that would be an amazing coincidence. No, no coincidences.

[Emily]
Why would it be a coincidence? He lives in the apartment building. He looks outside.

[Shep]
Downstairs. Downstairs.

[Thomas]
Doesn’t have to be.

[Shep]
If it’s an upstairs apartment, how is the cat getting out to climb the tree?

[Emily]
They’re wily.

[Shep]
I think that it should be a different cat. And then he should talk about the orange cat that he likes. That gives them something to bond over because he has never seen this type of cat before.

[Thomas]
Right. So she’s skeptical of him at first. And then her cat comes to like, see “Oh, the door is open. What’s going on?” And he sees the cat and gets all excited and is like asking her about it and talking about the orange cat. She’s like, “Oh, you like cats?” And that kind of softens her up. And he like, has all these thoughts about the orange cat. “Oh, I don’t have my own cat, but I like seeing the orange cat. Have you seen the orange cat?” She’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s Thor, (or whatever).” All right, let’s take a break, and when we come back, the rest of our story for Dishwasher.

[Break]

[Thomas]
We’re back from our break. When we left off, Ken Moore was meeting one of the neighbors and discussing cats, and that was his in, I guess, to show that he’s not a total weirdo.

[Shep]
Right. She does ask him, like, “Are you her boyfriend?” Or, like, “How do you know her?” And he’s like, “Oh, no, I just work for her.”

[Thomas]
Ah, yeah.

[Emily]
I like that.

[Shep]
And that seems a more normal, you know. He knows about her boyfriend or whatever.

[Emily]
Yeah, he’s a dishwasher. He doesn’t have romantic or sexual feelings.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Right. Because it would be unusual for dishwasher, as an inanimate object…

[Thomas]
What are the major story beats that we still need to hit here? What are the big things we haven’t figured out?

[Shep]
What is the point of the story? What is the point of the movie? Where are we going with this?

[Emily]
Can it just be a movie about a dishwasher who becomes a man so he can become a dishwasher again?

[Thomas]
It’s about finding your passion, right?

[Shep]
See, then I would have him not return to her apartment as her dishwasher because that’s where he started.

[Thomas]
Hmm. That makes sense.

[Emily]
But sometimes you like to just have things be the way they’re supposed to be.

[Shep]
Okay, if he’s a man-shaped dishwasher in this magical reality, I want the neighbor to know that, eventually. I want him to be her dishwasher.

[Emily]
Well, yeah. Because maybe Samantha needs to, you know, she might need some recovery time so she can’t actually come back home.

[Shep]
I mean, even if she does. Although if he is in her neighbor’s apartment and she ever comes over, she’s gonna think, “My neighbor stole my dishwasher. I came home and it wasn’t there.”

[Emily]
That’s why she gives the neighbor the dishwasher. Because the neighbor and her have been friendly and- Ooh, and the neighbor, when she comes to pack up her stuff to move wherever she’s gonna move, because she needs somebody to care for her and they’re not gonna stay in her tiny apartment.

[Thomas]
What if Samantha never wakes up from the coma? He still says that line because the nurse says, “You should talk to her. She can hear you.” And then it’s not Being There because she’s not like, “Oh, what deep meaning there is behind this.” It’s more just like the audience going like, “Oh, whoa. This could have multiple meanings. Interesting.”

[Shep]
So I want him to end up in the neighbor’s apartment as her dishwasher. But she knows that he is also sentient and talks to him and makes sure that he’s turned the right way around to look out the window.

[Emily]
Does she start feeding her cat on top of him?

[Shep]
I mean, if the cat’s food is next to him, the cat would come over and rub against him.

[Emily]
That’s good enough. Yeah.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
Which he likes. That’s his equivalent of petting the cat.

[Thomas]
Mm hmm. Is the neighbor an ally, then? Early on? Like, does he demonstrate to the neighbor his ability to turn into a dishwasher? She’s, “Oh, how do you know Samantha?”

“Oh, I work for her.”

“Oh. Didn’t realize she had people working for her. What do you do?”

“Oh, I wash her dishes.”

“Ah, you like, a clean her apartment or something?”

“No, I just wash the dishes.” And then, I don’t know, maybe that conversation goes on a little bit, and he’s like, “No, let me show you.” And then turns into a dishwasher.

[Emily]
Oh, and then she suggests not doing that.

[Thomas]
Yeah, yeah.

[Emily]
“If you’re going to be out in public, might be best if you not show everyone this.”

[Shep]
She sounds really calm for someone who just saw-

[Thomas]
Oh, no. She freaks out the first time for sure.

[Shep]
So we have him leaving the apartment now and not being arrested in the apartment.

[Thomas]
Yet.

[Shep]
Do we want to get back to that scene?

[Thomas]
Yeah. I mean, we kind of need to, huh?

[Shep]
Okay, does that happen after he has met the neighbor? And had kind of a Real World 101, where she’s like, “Don’t turn into a dishwasher in front of people.”

[Thomas]
Sure. Right. Because why doesn’t he do it immediately when the cops arrest him?

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
So maybe he goes, I guess they couldn’t take him all the way to jail. You can’t book him.

[Shep]
Right. You can’t book him. He can’t turn into a dishwasher in the cell.

[Emily]
He’s got to do it in the car.

[Shep]
He’s got to do it in the car.

[Thomas]
Is there some other person who’s been breaking into apartments or something? And the cops think it’s him. And so they’re saying, like, “Oh, you’re going down.” Like, “We caught you red-handed this time, and (whatever).” I’m just trying to think of, like, why, if he’s just been told, don’t turn into a dishwasher, why does he turn into a dishwasher almost right away? What is it that finally scares him enough into doing this?

[Shep]
Oh, maybe he doesn’t get arrested in the apartment.

[Thomas]
That would work. Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Okay. He leaves the building for some reason. Why does he leave the building? What does she tell him?

[Thomas]
She could explain that Samantha’s not anywhere in the building. Although she’s gotta know he’s gonna leave and that he’s totally unprepared for that.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Perhaps she doesn’t realize that his quest is to look for her. She thinks he’s just casually looking for her. And that once she explains, “Oh, she’s not even in the building, she’s somewhere, nobody knows where she is,” that he’ll just go back into the apartment, not realizing, oh, he’s gonna go out into the world looking for her because that’s what his reason for being is at the moment.

[Shep]
I’m still processing that she sees him turn into a dishwasher and doesn’t have a larger reaction. What is going on in her life, where she’s like, “Yeah, this is fine.”

[Thomas]
Well, I mean, I think she does have a big reaction at first.

[Shep]
At first, but then you’re like, okay. She gives him a primer on how to be a person and sends him on his merry way. He is a dishwasher. He’s not ready for the real world. Or maybe he takes things really literally, and she’s like, “Go back to the apartment.” And he goes back to the apartment, but then is like, “Well, she’s not in the apartment and she’s not in the building. I’ll leave.” So he goes back to the apartment door and then turns around and goes to the stairway. He did what she told him to do. She didn’t say, “Go back to the apartment and stay there.”

[Thomas]
Right. “And wait for her to come back.”

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
So I feel like the information about Samantha being missing and not being in the building, that’s all pre- he turns into a dishwasher.

[Shep]
Yeah. Because it would be hard to process that sort of exchange of information after the revelation that he is this magical being.

[Thomas]
So she’s kind of, like, still a little out of it and taken aback by having just experienced this and-

[Shep]
Right. She’s wondering if she got her meds wrong. She’s having a nervous breakdown. She looks at the tea, like, “Did something… Did he slip something into the tea?”

[Thomas]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she maybe she shooshes him out and she’s, “You should go back to-“

[Shep]
Yes. She’s not comfortable being with him because he’s not a person.

[Thomas]
Yeah, yeah.

[Shep]
And just wants him out right now because she’s not processed what’s going on.

[Thomas]
Right. So she says, “Oh, go back where you came from.”

[Shep]
“Go back to the apartment.”

[Thomas]
“Go back to the apartment,” whatever.

[Shep]
“Go back to her apartment.”

[Thomas]
So he does, but is like, “Well, but there’s no reason to be here. She said, she’s out there, so I’ll go out there.”

[Shep]
Right. And this is where he gets mugged.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
He doesn’t have any money. He hasn’t learned about money yet. Does he try to mug someone else because he’s seen, this is how you get money?

[Thomas]
Oh, is that how he gets picked up by the cops?

[Emily]
Oh, yeah.

[Shep]
This is what I’m thinking.

[Thomas]
Yeah, yeah.

[Emily]
That’s a good way to do it.

[Thomas]
All right. And so then he’s in the backseat. “What’s going to happen to me?” They just explain, “You’re going to go to jail, you’re going to be locked up,” blah, blah, blah. And he panics.

[Shep]
So I imagine that he has to take little breaks during this time, where he turns into a dishwasher temporarily, like holding your breath. So turning into a person is a thing you can do for a short amount of time. He hasn’t trained himself to do it longer yet. And so he leaves the apartment, and he turns into a dishwasher temporarily on the sidewalk, and then he turns back into person and keeps walking and gets mugged and learns how to mug. And so you see him turn into a dishwasher again, looking out on where people are walking, like, trying to find someone to mug to get money, and then tries to mug someone, and it goes very poorly.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
He doesn’t have a gun or anything.

[Thomas]
He just points his finger at them because he’s-

[Shep]
Right. So he points his finger at someone and says, “Give me your money.” And the guy, thinking he’s a homeless person, takes his wallet out, takes a dollar out and gives it to him. He’s like, “Well, this is working great.” All right, at the diner where he’s working, he overhears the incident of the car accident that hit someone. Is there comeuppance for the muggers? Do they get arrested or anything?

[Thomas]
I feel like that’s a problem for the writers.

[Shep]
All right.

[Thomas]
I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other.

[Shep]
So he hears about the car accident, discovers where the victim was taken, goes to the hospital, discovers that’s Samantha. There she is.

[Thomas]
He’s got to have some bigger clue that that might be her. Because if we’re sticking with the idea that the lowest low is him giving up looking for her, he’s gotta do a lot of searching.

[Shep]
Was that what we were doing? I forgot about that.

[Thomas]
I mean, that was what we said.

[Emily]
Right. Yeah.

[Shep]
I don’t remember that at all.

[Thomas]
That was before the break. That was so long ago. So, I mean, a fair amount of time could have passed. Samantha may not have an apartment to go back to. Right? No one’s paying her rent.

[Shep]
Right, well, is her boyfriend taking care of the apartment? If he’s not the murderer, and he’s just a good guy, and she’s disappeared.

[Emily]
Maybe between him and her family, they’re taking care of rent for when they find her because they don’t want to give up yet.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
I mean, it’s been a while, but it hasn’t been that long.

[Thomas]
Right. We’re talking like weeks, not months.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
He also has no expectation of how long it should take. I mean, he could give up after a couple days and be like, “Well, I guess I’ll never find her.”

[Emily]
Mm hmm.

[Thomas]
I mean, I think he should wait a little longer than that. But we also need to see in that time, part of the second act is him doing things, like, what is that mid-second-act turning point? And I don’t know. I’m not sure where, like, what’s a big shift that could happen in the story.

[Shep]
How big of a shift do you want?

[Emily]
Could it be as simple as the shift from he’s at first confused and scared by the world to he’s adjusted to it, being outside and is figuring it out, which is why he has the job now and he has a couple of friends?

[Thomas]
I think maybe the mid-second-act turning point is he starts off, all he’s doing is looking for her. The whole first half of the second act is that’s what he’s doing. Because if the beginning of the second act is now he’s out in the world, he’s trying to find her. And so the mid-second-act turning point is he gets that job. And so now he’s spending time cleaning dishes at work. But also. So it’s like, what it is, is he’s starting his own life. So he has a job. Like you said, he’s going out with people. People are inviting him out to places. And he’s like, “Oh, I guess this is what we do. Okay.”

[Shep]
Or he’s going. “Well, maybe she’ll be there.”

[Thomas]
Right. And he’s walking around looking for her as well and trying to do stuff.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
I don’t know what happens in the second half of the second act that fills that story out. But we know sort of that’s the midpoint. And then we know the end point is he gives up hope.

[Emily]
I think we see more of the neighbor friend in the second act because we’ve introduced this character, who knows he is in fact, a dishwasher, and-

[Thomas]
Oh, for sure. Yeah. We’ve got to bring that, that’s got to come back.

[Emily]
Yeah. So a lot of that could be her helping him, you know, figure out more places to look or explaining more of the world. You know, stuff like that.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Well, developing their relationship-

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
As basically, she will be the new Samantha for him eventually.

[Emily]
Yeah, yeah. Which makes that ending with the cat rubbing up against him as he’s washing her dishes a little more like, aw, she took him in.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
How do they get back together? Does he go back to her apartment, or does she find him at the diner?

[Emily]
The neighbor lady?

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Either one.

[Shep]
Right. Let’s pick one.

[Thomas]
Well, we currently don’t have a way to tell the audience. Oh, wait, we’re keeping her apartment, aren’t we? Because I was gonna say if we get rid of her, if she doesn’t live in her apartment anymore, he could try to go back to the apartment and discover somebody else is there and he’s all confused. And the neighbor lady is like, “She stopped paying rent because she’s been missing, so.” Or her parents are living there. The parents could be living in a different town. And so they’re in town because their daughter, who’s in a coma, is in the hospital. And so, “Well, we can just stay in her apartment while we’re here.” And that way it’s being kept up and whatnot. But he doesn’t know who they are. He hasn’t met them previously, for whatever reason. So he comes to the apartment and they answer the door because someone’s trying to open the door that’s locked. And then there’s a little ruckus and the neighbor lady pops her head out and she’s like, “Oh, wrong apartment. Come in here.” And grabs him and pulls him into her apartment and explains, like, those are her parents.

[Emily]
Mm hmm.

[Thomas]
Like, “You can’t go in there.”

[Emily]
“They don’t know that you’re her dishwasher.”

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
“They wouldn’t understand.”

[Shep]
“I don’t understand.” Okay, that makes sense, because she’s not antagonistic toward him and, like, rescuing him at a moment when he’s in need fits her personality.

[Thomas]
Yeah. I like their scenes together are sort of, like building rapport with each other through their actions and whatnot.

[Shep]
Does he ask if he can wash her dishes?

[Thomas]
I was literally about to say that he, like, sees a teacup and he keeps eyeing it. She’s like, “You want to wash it, don’t you?” The thing is, I mean, we don’t have to stick to any of what I originally said because in the original story, it’s like, eh, he doesn’t love washing dishes. That’s not what he likes to do. What he likes to do is look out the window at everything. But maybe he does like washing dishes. Maybe he takes pride in his job.

[Shep]
Or, it’s a form of intimacy for him to have dishes loaded inside him.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Emily]
Not that kind of intimacy. That’s not where I thought you were going. That’s my job.

[Shep]
Yeah, I’m referencing your pitch.

[Thomas]
Right. He’s taking her load.

[Emily]
Mm hmm.

[Shep]
Yeah, he’s taking her load. Okay.

[Emily]
All love is valid.

[Thomas]
Yes.

[Shep]
And so it could be, like, an intimate thing between them. It’s a, it’s a sign of trust.

[Emily]
Yeah, that’s where I thought you were going with it.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
It’s an intimate, trusting thing.

[Thomas]
So the third act, does he figure out kind of toward the beginning of the third act, he must, right? Where she is.

[Shep]
Well, the parents know. The parents have found out. The police have found her.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Right. Missing person. And Jane Doe shows up at the hospital.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
It’s not too hard to put those two together.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
And it’s been a month. So the parents know. The neighbor finds out from the parents. He finds out from the neighbor. Does the neighbor have a name?

[Thomas]
Yep.

[Emily]
Gloria.

[Shep]
Does it matter?

[Emily]
I gave you a name.

[Thomas]
Yeah, sure. Gloria. That works. So is the third act his…? It’s the completion of his emotional arc, right? It’s him being elated to find her, but then realizing…

[Shep]
Right. Things aren’t going back to how they were. What were you gonna say?

[Thomas]
He needs to let her go.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
And so in the story, regardless of whether after the movie ends, she wakes up from the coma or not, during the film, she does not. Is that what we’re going with?

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
I mean, that’s also fine, because the point is that he’s moving on from her. She doesn’t need to be conscious for that. But he can go to the hospital and visit her and see that, you know, her food tray is all plastic, whatever.

[Thomas]
Everything’s disposable.

[Shep]
Everything’s disposable. Nothing gets washed. He hates it there. Or she wouldn’t, I guess she wouldn’t have a food tray if she’s still in a coma.

[Thomas]
Right. Is there any other major stuff that we need to address, or is everything else kind of up to the writers at this point?

[Shep]
I mean, there’s so much, we’ve barely scratched the surface of this one. This is another pitch where the world is a lot deeper than we have time to explore.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
You know, does he sleep in an alley at night when he’s washing dishes at the diner?

[Emily]
Until the neighbor lady takes him in and offers him a spot on the couch.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
And then he does her dishes while she’s sleeping.

[Shep]
While she’s sleeping?

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah, because she. Yeah, she goes… I don’t know.

[Shep]
How does he load the dishes?

[Emily]
I don’t know. I, yeah, I wasn’t, I didn’t figure out how he loaded himself.

[Thomas]
No, no. She turns on, she starts the wash cycle and then goes to bed.

[Emily]
But I had imagined that he washed the dishes while she slept as payment for letting him stay there and being so kind.

[Thomas]
I mean, he could also wash them by hand.

[Emily]
There’s that.

[Shep]
Right. So he is washing the dishes at night in her apartment. See, it seems very intimate is all I’m saying.

[Emily]
Yeah, but intimate doesn’t mean sexual.

[Thomas]
Right. Well, we’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s episode about a Dishwasher. Did we clean our plates or are we all washed up? 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. We have a list of ideas for episodes that we think would be interesting, but even more interesting to us would be to make an episode based on your suggestion. So go to the contact form on almostplausible.com, send us your idea, and there’s a good chance Emily, Shep, and I will choose it for a future episode of Almost Plausible.

[Outro music]

[Shep]
So just for clarity, who is the narrator? I want to know whose voice I’m imagining.

[Thomas]
Ooh, yeah. Yeah.

[Emily]
Christian Slater.

[Shep]
He does voice work now.

[Emily]
He does do voice work now, and he’s actually got kind of a nice narrator voice.

[Thomas]
I almost want Patrick Warburton.

[Shep]
Yeah, but he does too much stuff. So whenever you hear him in a thing, it’s like, “Oh, that’s Patrick Warburton.”

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s true.

[Shep]
Whereas when you hear Christian Slater, it’s like, “That voice sounds familiar.”

[Emily]
“Why do I know that voice?”

[Shep]
“Who is that? Why do I know that voice?” All right, I’m sold on Christian Slater as the narrator.

[Thomas]
Okay, I’m gonna start over.

[Shep]
All right.

[Thomas]
The dishwasher was distressed.

[Shep]
That doesn’t sound like Christian Slater.

[Emily]
Remember, do a bad Jack Nicholson.

[Thomas]
(Bad Jack Nicholson/Good Christian Slater voice) This was odd because dishwashers are inanimate objects.

[Emily]
Dead on. Dead on.

[Shep]
That was too accurate. And now I’ll be distracted, so probably just do it in your regular voice.