Whiteboard

References

• Mind Mapping
• Non-Fungible Token
• Almost Plausible: Printer
• Ghostwriter
• The Pedestrian (game)
• Bruce Wayne
• Death Note
• Absolutely Anything
• Air Gap
• ASMR
• The Magic School Bus
• Candyman
• Freddy Krueger
• 27 Dresses
• Bechdel Test
• Se7en
• Final Girl

Transcript

[Intro music begins]

[Shep]
I don’t know how I’m feeling about this.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Let’s back up to where you’re comfortable and let’s go a different route.

[Shep]
Okay. So the whiteboard can talk back.

[Emily]
Just scrap the whole thing.

[Shep]
Writing is hard.

[Emily]
Why is this one so hard?

[Shep]
I don’t know. It feels kind of just generic.

[Emily]
Have we run out of ideas?

[Intro music]

[Thomas]
Hey there, story fans. Welcome to Almost Plausible, the podcast where we take ordinary ideas and turn them into movies. This show has three hosts, and they are Emily-

[Emily]
Hey guys.

[Thomas]
F. Paul Shepard.

[Shep]
Happy to be here.

[Thomas]
And me, Thomas J. Brown. This week’s Ordinary Idea is a whiteboard. They’re big, they’re flat, they’re shiny. The pens smell weird. I am definitely a whiteboard guy. I love a good brainstorming or mind-mapping session on a whiteboard. What about you two?

[Shep]
Oh, yeah, absolutely.

[Emily]
I love whiteboards.

[Shep]
I mean, behind me is a 6’x6′ whiteboard.

[Thomas]
I noticed that.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
All right, who wants to pitch their idea first?

[Emily]
I can go first this week. I got a handful. I’m not going to lie, they’re not the greatest.

[Shep]
Just in that expectation bar real low to start with.

[Emily]
Way low.

[Thomas]
See, so when we choose one of hers, she’ll be all like, “Oh, really? Me?”

[Emily]
Okay, my first pitch is a whiteboard that can magically solve any math problem, no matter how complicated. It’s used at a university for many years. But, in the English Department, so nobody knows about its powers.

[Thomas]
Nice.

[Emily]
And then one day one of the students is doing a math problem before his math class, he’s got a little time to kill, found whiteboard, is trying to do it, and he discovers that it will solve any problem and it proves some sort of awesome math theory thing that I don’t understand because I have an English degree.

[Shep]
So it only does math problems.

[Emily]
Only solves math problems.

[Shep]
Okay.

[Emily]
My next one is a whiteboard, in a big city’s Homicide Department, is almost cleared and there’s like one or two unsolved murders left. And this one detective is determined to get it solved before the end of the year.

[Shep]
So they’re not closing the precinct or anything. He’s not retiring. Just an arbitrary-

[Emily]
Yes, they have it within two cases and he’s like, “We got to clear the board. I want one day no murders.”

[Shep]
They’ve never gone through Christmas with a clear board.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
Just always had that hanging over them. But this year, they’re so close.

[Emily]
Yup. And he’s going to solve it.

[Thomas]
He’s like, up there, “All I want for Christmas is you… to help me solve these last two cases.”

[Emily]
All right. Third one is a blank whiteboard is sold as an NFT and the artist is instantly a millionaire. But the whiteboard he sold is actually a cursed object and whoever writes on it will suffer dire consequences.

[Thomas]
Man, how would you ever figure that out?

[Emily]
I don’t know.

[Thomas]
Oh, it feels like two totally separate ideas mushed together.

[Emily]
It might be…?

[Shep]
It sounded like there was a cursed whiteboard. And you’re like, “Yeah, but what if we could make this an NFT?”

[Thomas]
I mean, may as well give it a shot.

[Emily]
Trying to punch it up for the modern generation.

[Thomas]
All right.

[Emily]
You know, everybody’s crazy about them NFTs now.

[Shep]
It takes a couple of weeks for this to get edited, though. By the time it comes out, NFT fads might be over.

[Thomas]
The whole bottom would have dropped out of the entire NFT market more than it already has.

[Emily]
And my final pitch is a normal suburban man goes about his normal life. We see him go to the grocery store, library, et cetera. Everything’s normal and happy. And he’s got this big whiteboard in his living room. And every now and again he adds a name in a different color and they alternate through the rainbow. Turns out he’s a serial killer and he’s writing the names of his victims. But he also leaves a tiny whiteboard with the same color of a dot on his victims. And he’s The Whiteboard Killer.

[Shep]
So that’s the serial killer pitch for this week?

[Emily]
Yes.

[Shep]
Okay. I mean, a serial killer that’s leaving whiteboards behind is surely going to be easy to catch.

[Thomas]
Right. You just go down to Office Depot and be like, “Alright, who’s been buying a lot of whiteboards?”

[Emily]
Maybe he makes them himself. Maybe he cures them in his garage.

[Thomas]
Maybe he inherited, like, 100,000 whiteboards.

[Emily]
Maybe he’s a whiteboard salesman.

[Thomas]
Yeah, there you go.

[Emily]
He has access to them.

[Shep]
He inherited 100,000 whiteboards, but each one is only one by three inches, so they’re completely worthless. And that drove him insane.

[Emily]
Alright, that’s all I got for you guys. Who is next?

[Thomas]
I can go. The first is a whiteboard where any creature drawn on it comes to life, but it is two dimensional and it cannot leave the whiteboard. Or maybe it can. I don’t care. Whatever sounds better.

[Shep]
That is almost exactly my second pitch.

[Thomas]
My second pitch is some people, maybe kids, I don’t know, they discover a long forgotten whiteboard with something impactful written on it. Kind of like Emily’s math solving one. This is like a world changing Eureka type of equation or information or something like that that’s written on there.

[Shep]
And do they erase it so they can use the board? Do they understand the significance of the cure for the zombie apocalypse that’s written on this board or-

[Thomas]
Yeah, I suppose so. Otherwise, pretty short movie, right? They erase it and they play hangman and the zombies win. My last pitch is a sentient whiteboard that helps a guy in an office by giving him great ideas and helping him come up with great presentations, stuff like that.

[Shep]
That’s very similar to my first one.

[Emily]
That one actually kind of combines my first one in one of my printer pitches.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah, the politician.

[Thomas]
That’s right. All right, those are my pitches. Shep, what do you have?

[Shep]
Well, pitch number one, a whiteboard that writes back to you. So you write something on it and then it responds.

[Emily]
Like Ghostwriter. But in the whiteboard.

[Shep]
Yes, Ghostwriter. Oh, that’s so good. Okay, so that one’s a done idea. Never mind. Pitch number two, a magical whiteboard that animates what’s drawn on it.

[Thomas]
It’s a really familiar idea. I wonder-

[Shep]
Yeah, it’s very similar. I thought maybe one of the animated drawings could leave the whiteboard and visit other nearby signs or boards. But then the whiteboard gets moved and they have to make their way back to it. And then. Oh, wait, that’s pretty much the 2020 side-scrolling platform puzzle game, The Pedestrian. It’s a fun little game. Pitch number three, draw a place or portal on the whiteboard and you can go through it to reach that place or some new place. And number four, whatever’s written on the whiteboard comes true.

[Emily]
“Emily marries Bruce Wayne.”

[Shep]
Well, that’s kind of like Death Note, I guess. Death Note is you just write someone’s name and how they die, and then they die in that way.

[Emily]
Yeah, but we could do positive things with this.

[Shep]
Right. As long as it doesn’t fall into the hands of evil.

[Emily]
What are the chances with the human race so kind as it is?

[Thomas]
Are any one of these jumping out at anybody?

[Shep]
What was the- I’m thinking of the movie I was very disappointed with… Absolutely Anything? Is that the…? He had the power to do absolutely anything. What a waste of a premise.

[Emily]
What did he do?

[Shep]
Almost nothing.

[Emily]
Nothing.

[Shep]
Yeah. So I don’t know where you would take if you had the whiteboard, that you could write anything on it and it would come true, that is basically the same premise of Absolutely Anything. And what could you actually do with it? I mean, movie budgets are limited.

[Emily]
I like the whiteboards that are communicating back. Like either it’s solving the math problem for you, it’ll respond when you write, or whatever you write comes true.

[Thomas]
We all kind of had something along those lines, so I feel like that’s what’s in our heads the most.

[Emily]
I think that’s something we can all explore well.

[Thomas]
Okay, so is it actually sentient or is it magic?

[Shep]
If you look on my list here, is it alive? Is it artificial intelligence?

[Thomas]
Yeah, there you go.

[Shep]
What does it want? Those are all good questions. So does ink just appear on its surface?

[Emily]
Well, if it’s sentient, then it can be like a handwritten type thing. And if it’s magic, then it would be a case of whatever you write. It takes that ink and then appears. The new word-

[Shep]
I like it taking the ink.

[Thomas]
Yeah, I like that too.

[Shep]
Now, can it only communicate through being written on, or can it hear or see what’s going on in the room?

[Thomas]
I think it needs to be able to do that because this is a movie and it would be so boring to have all these writing scenes.

[Shep]
So what does it want?

[Emily]
Is it evil? Is it good?

[Shep]
I mean, I’d like it to be good, but that’s my preference.

[Emily]
I’m tired of evil things trying to take over and destroy everything.

[Shep]
Yeah, I’d like to escape into a movie.

[Thomas]
Is it something that wants to do good? And people are trying to use it for evil?

[Shep]
Like a villain is using it to brainstorm his evil plan on, and it keeps changing stuff. So he’s like “Poison the water supply.” It’s like “Pick up litter.”

[Emily]
Actually, I kind of like that idea, if it was, like, a cartoon villain who wants to do that. And instead of poisoning the water, the equation for the poison, it would turn the equation into eating the litter. It would be like some sort of algae that would clean up the lakes.

[Shep]
I like this idea because if it’s animated, then it explains why he keeps it and keeps using it. Because the whole point was to have this smart whiteboard. Like, he spent all this research and development on it. He achieved AI, and it’s going to help him to take over the world, but all it wants to do is make the world a better place. “But, boss, why do you keep using it?” “Because it’s The Whiteboard. This is the… We made this!”

[Thomas]
“Look, we spent $50 million building this thing.”

[Shep]
Yeah. Our pitch is a supervillain versus his benevolent whiteboard. Who’s going to win this battle? One of them is a stationary board.

[Emily]
But the villain has a daughter who also has a kind heart, and she and the whiteboard become friends.

[Thomas]
So maybe he does stop using it, but it’s just mounted to the wall in the lab.

[Shep]
He can’t get rid of it.

[Thomas]
So it’s just there.

[Shep]
It’s stuck there observing all of his plans.

[Thomas]
Right. But the daughter will come in and draw on it and write on it, and it’ll interact with her.

[Emily]
Yeah. Did we exhaust this plot?

[Thomas]
What is it’s…? What is the end? How does it-

[Shep]
Well, its goal is to stop the villain.

[Thomas]
I think it needs a bigger goal than that, though. The villain needs to be a hindrance to its goal. Well, if it’s an AI, it could easily outlive the supervillain. So maybe the supervillain creating it is just the beginning of the movie.

[Emily]
Oh, so does he just, like, fade away and die or become a-

[Thomas]
Yeah. He eventually dies and the whiteboard is just there.

[Emily]
It’s just in this lab that exists.

[Thomas]
Yeah. And then the daughter sells the lab because it’s years later, and she’s trying to liquidate her father’s holdings and stuff.

[Emily]
I got to pay off those debts for that volcano.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Yeah. The UN never paid that ransom.

[Thomas]
He invested it all in NFTs, and then…

[Shep]
Oh, yes, if the bottom fell out of the market.

[Thomas]
So do we like that idea, though? That it outlives its creator and that’s just the beginning.

[Shep]
Sure. Yeah.

[Emily]
I like that.

[Thomas]
Okay, who comes next? Benevolent or villain?

[Emily]
Benevolent.

[Shep]
It’s got to be benevolent because we just had villain.

[Thomas]
Does this person start benevolent and then become a villain as they recognize like, “Oh, I have all this power thanks to the whiteboard”?

[Shep]
They’re asking it questions like, “How could we do this? How could we do that? What are some of the security risks in this thing so that we can guard against it?” And then the whiteboard reveals all of the security flaws that can be exploited.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Does he go from good to bad back to good in the end?

[Thomas]
Yeah, I think that’s kind of what the arc is. Right?

[Shep]
So who’s this new character?

[Emily]
She, because we need more female representation in the science world. What’s she setting the lab up for? What kind of a lab is it now?

[Shep]
Oh, it’s like an environmental studies lab.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
The villain was into global stuff, and so she’s trying to save the planet. The problem is there’s so many stupid people on the planet, and if she were just in charge of everyone…

[Emily]
Let’s think of some accomplishments she achieves that make her kind of get a bigger head before she starts to be like, “I know what I’m doing. Everyone needs to listen to me. I need to be in charge.”

[Thomas]
I think the whiteboard would be super excited if it was trying to get the villain to clean up the planet.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah.

[Thomas]
And then here comes this woman who’s writing things up there, like, “Step one, generate more algae” or something like that. And the whiteboard is like, “What? Yes, do that! Great!”

[Emily]
Yeah. So she comes up with a plan to increase the algae to help clean up stuff.

[Thomas]
Is this thing air gapped? Like it doesn’t have access to the Internet, right?

[Shep]
That’s a good question. What’s the use of an air gapped whiteboard that has artificial intelligence if it can’t answer your Google queries?

[Thomas]
So then why doesn’t it just do stuff on its own? It’s just been watching YouTube.

[Shep]
“Why do you keep watching the same videos over and over again?” “Well, it has puppies.” Or it has cats. Because they clean themselves.

[Thomas]
As I say, he likes watching ASMR videos where people are erasing whiteboards. So this starts out really good. They’re making progress. She’s getting accolades. Yeah. Nobel Prize. Probably tons more funding.

[Emily]
Lots more money.

[Shep]
Or maybe she doesn’t get more money. Maybe that’s the problem. She gets awards and accolades, but no one puts their money where their mouth is and actually contributes to potentially funding the solutions that she has found because it’s not profitable. It’s not good business sense.

[Thomas]
Does she convince the white board to do something wrong in the name of justice? It’s going to help her steal money or rob a bank or something like that so that she can pay for the things that are going to achieve their goal.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
A white-collar crime. Hey. That’s got to be okay, right?

[Thomas]
Right. She justifies it somehow, and so it works and she’s like, “Shit, here we go. This is the thing to do.”

[Emily]
When she keeps doing the good things and things are improving, but now she’s saying they could improve faster if she didn’t have all this red tape in order to get her projects going. She has the funding now, but now she’s got to fill out this paperwork.

[Shep]
If only we could hack that computer.

[Thomas]
Just bypass all of these restrictions.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Because time is important.

[Thomas]
Right? We’re already behind.

[Shep]
It’s got to reach a point where something is unconscionable.

[Emily]
Wouldn’t she want to become some sort of, like, world dictator at some point?

[Shep]
Yeah. That would be the fastest way to solve the problem.

[Thomas]
So she has to have something to dangle over everybody so that they do her bidding because it’s 7.5 billion to one. So she has to have the nukes.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah, Let’s give her the nukes.

[Thomas]
Oh, they’re going to dispose of the nukes. That’s the plan. The whiteboard is like, “Yeah, that makes perfect sense.” But of course, that’s not really what she’s trying to do. She’s just trying to get control of them.

[Emily]
So she can control the world.

[Thomas]
Does she nuke something to demonstrate that she actually has power?

[Shep]
What kind of pitch is this? It seems very lighthearted up to this point.

[Thomas]
We don’t have to go this direction.

[Shep]
We don’t have to go in any direction. This is all optional.

[Emily]
Maybe not have her go to that extreme so that she doesn’t have to serve long prison terms or face certain death because we want redemption.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah. I forgot that was coming.

[Thomas]
What does happen to her afterward? I mean, if she does this, she’s going to jail forever.

[Emily]
We did kind of write her into a corner there, didn’t we?

[Thomas]
So far.

[Shep]
I don’t know how I’m feeling about this.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Let’s back up to where you’re comfortable and let’s go a different route.

[Shep]
Okay. So the whiteboard can talk back.

[Emily]
Just scrap the whole thing.

[Shep]
Writing is hard.

[Emily]
Why is this one so hard?

[Shep]
I don’t know. It feels kind of just generic.

[Emily]
Have we run out of ideas?

[Shep]
Normally when we’re doing this, we’ll be able to see scenes in our mind and go, “Oh, yeah. And then they say this, and then this happens,” and there’s like an emotional resonance there. This is just falling flat to me.

[Emily]
Is it just the blah-ness of a whiteboard and its limited functionality?

[Shep]
I mean, I was the one that did suggest it, so…

[Thomas]
We know who to blame.

[Shep]
Yeah. I take full responsibility. This is my fault.

[Thomas]
All right. So whiteboards, they’re white, they’re shiny. Everything that you write on them is theoretically temporary. You typically find them in an office or a school. Ink smells bad.

[Emily]
This one’s hard.

[Shep]
It is.

[Emily]
Why can’t we do it?

[Shep]
I thought it would be easy because there’s so many possibilities with the whiteboard. It could be anything. Maybe that’s the problem. It’s not constrained enough.

[Thomas]
What about, like, a Mrs. Frizzle type of situation?

[Shep]
Oh…

[Emily]
We go into the whiteboard.

[Shep]
Yeah. But it’s a specific school teacher, right? Mrs. Frizzle type, where she can draw stuff on the board and it comes to life, or she can draw a place on there and then take the kids on a school trip. We can do a whole PBS series on this. The Magic Whiteboard. It’s very much The Magic School Bus.

[Thomas]
The Mystic Whiteboard. The Helpful Whiteboard?

[Emily]
Instead of math, it teaches philosophy. Or instead of science, it teaches philosophy.

[Shep]
So you have a teacher that can bring drawings to life on the whiteboard, and people think that it’s the whiteboard and they want to steal the whiteboard, but it’s not the whiteboard, it’s the teacher. But then it’s not about the whiteboard, it’s about the teacher.

[Thomas]
I mean, do we like this idea enough to explore it?

[Shep]
I don’t know if I like any of the ideas, if I’m being honest.

[Thomas]
None of them really wowed me.

[Emily]
I like bits and pieces of them, but after a while, it’s like, “Okay, I’m bored with that.”

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
All right. A serial killer has a magical whiteboard.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah. Now we’re talking.

[Thomas]
Which he uses to create portals into his victim’s homes.

[Shep]
This has got some hooks in it. So I think you’re saying it as a joke, but I’m kind of on board.

[Thomas]
Half joke.

[Emily]
It would make it easy for him to evade the police for longer.

[Shep]
Yeah. It’s magical reality. He’s literally a supernatural killer. So it’s not like a magic whiteboard. It’s a supernatural serial killer who is using the whiteboard to create these portals into places so that he can kill people.

[Thomas]
All right. Well, it sounds like we have an idea that might have legs. So let’s take a quick break, and when we come back, hopefully we’ll have a story for you.

[Break]

[Thomas]
All right, we’re back. We don’t have a lot of time left, so this might be a little thin on details, thinner than we’re used to.

[Shep]
We can do it.

[Thomas]
But let’s aim for really broad strokes because I feel like we don’t even have that yet. So if we can at least accomplish that, I’ll feel like we did what we came here to do.

[Emily]
All right, so we need an MO. What is his killing style? Is he very, like, particular, same knife, same whatever? Does he use objects of opportunity, because the MO is just the portal?

[Shep]
He holds whiteboard pens under their nose until they get high from the fumes.

[Thomas]
I was thinking the same thing.

[Shep]
Like, Candyman, you summon Candyman from a mirror, and he’s got that baling hook. Very memorable. What’s a whiteboard guy going to have?

[Thomas]
I mean, he could just… How gory of a film is this?

[Shep]
Let’s go super gory if we’re going to do… Let’s do a…

[Thomas]
Go all in.

[Shep]
Malignant level of gory.

[Emily]
All right. Malignant level gore.

[Shep]
Malignant level of gore and quality. That’s what we’re going for. We can do it.

[Thomas]
Does he torture them or just murder them?

[Shep]
I say murder, instant.

[Emily]
Yeah, he’s straight up.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
He’s got a big flat knife and he just-

[Thomas]
Does he actually enter their living space, or does he just reach through?

[Emily]
I think it depends on how the portal opens in the room.

[Shep]
So the question is, can he come all the way through the portal, or does he still have to be partly on the other side?

[Emily]
So he’s on the whiteboard side, right. Draws the portal, and then the portal opens behind a headboard or behind the head of the sleeping victim, and he goes in and slices their throat.

[Thomas]
He can just reach through.

[Emily]
And so he just holds their head down, (murdering noises), blood splurting, and then portal closes, pulls his arms out. That way, there’s less of a chance he’s leaving any DNA evidence.

[Thomas]
Does he get to control the surface that the portal opens up on in their living space? Maybe every once in all that happens and be like, “Hoo lucky!”

[Shep]
Let’s say he’s like a mathematical genius and he’s calculating. He’s got some formula that he uses to open that portal to a predetermined location. So he does his best calculation and then can peek through it, stick his eye through.

[Thomas]
I like that idea of drawing a peephole.

[Emily]
Oh, yeah.

[Shep]
And seeing how close he is. So you never know if you’re being watched. You can be watched from any surface.

[Thomas]
Oh, wow.

[Shep]
And then he can kill you from any surface. That’s good villain stuff.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
That is good.

[Shep]
That’s good supernatural killer stuff.

[Emily]
Very Freddy Krueger.

[Shep]
Is there a reason that he’s killing? Why is he killing?

[Emily]
For the joy? I mean, why do serials kill?

[Thomas]
Because you choke. Do you mean serial killers?

[Shep]
I didn’t even groan.

[Emily]
Serial killers, typically, it’s an impulse of urge that they can’t control. Usually some sort of sexual gratification comes from it, but not always.

[Thomas]
Does he like that he’s doing this, or does he hate that he has this impulse?

[Emily]
I think he likes it. I think we’re going to go full on. He’s enjoying it. He feels invincible. I mean, that’s part of his weakness is his hubris as he gets more and more victims.

[Thomas]
I bet he really likes the news coverage because they’re just so puzzled.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
They just have absolutely no leads.

[Shep]
Every murder is a locked door mystery.

[Thomas]
Right. Yeah, exactly.

[Emily]
The victims are random. It’s a locked door mystery.

[Thomas]
Are they always women?

[Shep]
I mean, if they’re random, then it could be anyone.

[Thomas]
Is it a sex thing, or is it a power thing?

[Emily]
It could still be a sex thing. And he could have both male and female victims.

[Thomas]
It’s true. Have we ever had a bisexual killer? I don’t think so. In movies.

[Emily]
Not in movies. Well..

[Thomas]
They’re underrepresented at least.

[Emily]
Yes.

[Shep]
I want there to be male and female victims just so that everyone coming out of the theater has that same nervousness. That could be me. That could be me.

[Thomas]
How far is his range? Can he open a portal anywhere in the world?

[Shep]
If he can open a portal anywhere in the world, they won’t even know that there is this serial killer. Because all the victims are going to be too far apart. If you want the police to be after him, then it’s got to be limited to just the town that he’s in.

[Emily]
So how do we make that limitation?

[Thomas]
It’s just that’s the limitation. We don’t explain it.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
I think that’s one of those things that no one’s going to question. And if they do, it’ll just be like “Huh.” It’s not going to be like, “Well, that movie is terrible because they never explain.” Is that how he gets those groceries? Does he do other things with the portal if he never leaves his apartment?

[Shep]
No. They’re grocery delivery services, man. You don’t need to risk your portal discovery.

[Thomas]
Why would you ever pay for anything.

[Shep]
So that you don’t get caught because you’re a mass serial killer?

[Thomas]
It’s a good point.

[Emily]
Yeah. So why doesn’t he ever leave his apartment?

[Shep]
He’s shy, he’s agoraphobic, he’s afraid of people.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
And so that’s why he kills. He kills whoever is on the front page of the newspaper because they’re out there and he’s not. And he’s jealous and angry, and they shouldn’t be popular. He should be popular.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Everything makes him feel powerless.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
And so anytime somebody appears powerful, he doesn’t like that. He’s jealous of it. He wants to take their power away and have power over them. He’ll show them.

[Shep]
So how is the whiteboard part of it?

[Emily]
That’s where he has to draw the portal.

[Shep]
Why does it have to be on that whiteboard.

[Thomas]
Is the way he ultimately gets caught is that he accidentally draws a portal on something that is not a temporary surface so he can’t close it afterward.

[Shep]
So the portal is still open.

[Thomas]
Yeah. And he can’t close it. He has no way of closing it now.

[Shep]
Oh. OH! That’s why he doesn’t come all the way through the portal. If he comes all the way through, he has to make another portal to get back out. Portals are one way. So if he just leans through, he’s still in his apartment. He can just lean back and he’s back home. But if he comes through, he has to draw a portal. So even if he drew it in whiteboard marker, he’s not going to be in the murder location to wipe it off.

[Emily]
So one of his victims pulls him through.

[Shep]
Yeah. Not his final victim.

[Emily]
No.

[Shep]
No. He kills this one. Whoever pulls him through, he kills. And in the investigation to that, they discover that there is this funky symbol. And by the way, you could put your hand in it and go through. And that’s how they find his old apartment. He had to move after this.

[Thomas]
And that ties him to it so clearly, though. I mean, they’ll have records of who lived there. I mean, it could be as simple as he gets pulled through and then has to… Well, no, he couldn’t draw a portal because he knows he’ll be fucked. He has to leave that house or that apartment or whatever to get back to his apartment to erase his portal.

[Shep]
Except he can’t go outside. That’s his whole deal.

[Thomas]
So he draws a portal under the bed or something like that. He draws it in a place where no one’s going to see it. Or is there some way that he does he find a can of paint, and so he kind of like splashes paint on the wall and pulls his hands back in real quick so that the paint will drip down and cover it up and thereby erasing the portal or something like that.

[Shep]
Right. That’s all good. I like the paint splashing one, but that could close the portal, but it wouldn’t completely cover up the symbol.

[Thomas]
Because it breaks the symbol, the portal closes, but there’s still that part of it that’s there that’s visible.

[Emily]
Yeah. So they’re researching it, so he’s got to be tied to it in some way.

[Shep]
Right. But he could be tied to it. Like, if you were a crazy mathematician who was into this 5D geometry stuff and all these absurd theories.

[Emily]
Yeah. Who was at one time a professor.

[Shep]
He was invited to talk about this, but he was too shy and he couldn’t go out. They were like, “Oh, well, obviously he’s a crackpot. We asked him to come and demonstrate, and he wouldn’t.” So he’s discredited.

[Thomas]
Which would explain why it’s really hard to find any information about him. And why would anybody publish that or keep it around or anything like that?

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
The detective figures out how he’s choosing his victims. For example, if he were choosing people out of the newspaper that had appeared on the front page of the newspaper or something like that, the detective might have a volunteer, maybe like a young cop, play someone to lay a trap.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s good.

[Emily]
Yeah. So it works. They catch him.

[Thomas]
How does he end up getting coming through the first time when he gets stuck in the one apartment? Does he accidentally fall through? Is he pulled through in the struggle? Does a cat startle him?

[Shep]
So I think that there is a mirror or reflective surface or something so that the person he’s going after sees him before he kills them because he’s doing these instant kills, and that’s what he’s accustomed to.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
He thinks it’s always going to work out that way. So he comes through, tries to kill them. They see him and fight over the knife? You wouldn’t intentionally pull him through. It wouldn’t make any sense.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
You wouldn’t understand what’s happening at first. You would just see a knife and an arm.

[Emily]
Yeah. Would he just try and grab the victim and she just tries to pull away and that causes them to lose his balance?

[Thomas]
Is the portal opaque on her side, or is it a window through? Because then she can see his face and he has to kill her now, no matter what.

[Shep]
I like it if it’s opaque, because then there’s that same audience’s fear that any wall…

[Emily]
At any time…

[Thomas]
Right. Yes. So how does he fall through then, or why does he come through?

[Shep]
Now? I don’t think that he should come through. I like the idea that he has to kill them because they saw his face, potentially, although he should be wearing a mask. My point is I want him to be pulled through because he wouldn’t choose to go through because he would have to open a portal back out.

[Thomas]
He does end up killing that person, and then he has to draw the portal and go home.

[Shep]
Yes. Right.

[Thomas]
But he has to-

[Shep]
So he could do the design.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
The portal is open, and then he puts a big dollop of paint above it and then jumps through as it’s coming down.

[Thomas]
That’s good. So does the detective use that remaining pattern to track him down?

[Shep]
I think so.

[Emily]
Yes.

[Shep]
I think that’s got to be the-

[Emily]
That’s the evidence. The big evidence.

[Shep]
Right. “What does it mean? It has to mean something. The paint is fresh enough that probably around the time of the murder.”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
“So the killer did this. The killer put this symbol up here. We need to decipher it.”

[Thomas]
Maybe there’s some sort of dark art that he has learned and somehow the detective is able to link him to that. Is a photo of the symbols something that they would release to the public asking for assistance? “Does anybody recognize this?” Or is that something they would want to keep secret?

[Shep]
I imagine it’s something that they would keep secret.

[Emily]
They would keep it under wraps for the most part, I think.

[Thomas]
Although at this point they’re very desperate and this is the only clue they’ve ever gotten.

[Emily]
Yeah. I was going to say, how many victims have they had? How far? Because it would depend.

[Shep]
How often is he killing?

[Thomas]
It’s not like this is the first or second. This is like 27 or something. And he took a dress from each one and he has a closet full of… no? He’s killing every day, right?

[Shep]
Is it every day or is it every… once a week?

[Emily]
Once a week.

[Thomas]
Does he have a job? So this is like his weekend-

[Shep]
His hobby.

[Thomas]
Because again, you want him to look as normal as possible or he wants to look as normal as possible. So he has a job, he works from home, but he has a job.

[Emily]
Yeah. He’s a medical transcriptionist at home.

[Thomas]
What do we still need to figure out? How does he end up getting caught? I think that’s the big thing we have left dangling in front of us.

[Shep]
Well, they set a trap for him.

[Thomas]
Right. Does that work? Because he’s already been pulled through once. So he’s going to take more precautions to prevent that from happening again.

[Emily]
How about he’s not successful in the trap, but they managed to get more evidence that there’s a strong enough link to get a warrant. Because just knowing he’s associated with the symbol or the expert on it isn’t enough because somebody could have read his wackadoo paper on the Internet. So they get something in that-

[Shep]
Well, they can lay the trap without understanding the symbol yet.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
Because if they figure out the pattern of killing and it’s people that have been in the newspaper-

[Emily]
Yeah. They don’t know it’s a portal yet.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Maybe they never find out the portal thing until the trap happens.

[Shep]
Yes. Oh yeah, they set it up how they assume it is, right? She’s in the paper, she’s at this location and they have police all around the building.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
They’re watching every entrance.

[Thomas]
You couldn’t even crawl through the ducts. There’s cops on the roof there’s, everywhere. They’re everywhere.

[Shep]
Right. So who’s inside the location? Is it just the lady cop or is the detective also in there?

[Emily]
You would have to be in there.

[Shep]
But it’s just the two of them.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Okay. So I can imagine him doing this peephole thing and seeing her and going in for the kill and her realizing that he’s just coming out of the fucking wall like, it’s nonsense. So she can scream and the other detective runs out.

[Thomas]
Is this happening in the bedroom? Is the detective hiding in the closet and peeking out? So the detective sees the arm coming out of the wall?

[Shep]
I don’t know.

[Emily]
Well, I mean, if they have the whole place surrounded, they would have, like, notification that the guy’s coming. They would say, “We see him walking up,” whatever. Right. So he wouldn’t necessarily need to be hiding.

[Thomas]
That’s a good point.

[Emily]
They would just be in the room, chitchatting or whatever, just waiting for whatever to happen.

[Thomas]
Oh, he murders her.

[Shep]
She’s not the final girl?

[Emily]
There is no final girl.

[Thomas]
She is the final girl. They’d end up catching him, but he still manages to kill her because they’re not expecting an arm to come through the fucking wall. So they’re not prepared for that. So that does happen. There’s a scream, the detective comes running in, sees what’s going on, but he’s already like stabbing her. Does the detective shoot him?

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
How fast is he on the draw?

[Emily]
Let’s do that.

[Thomas]
He already has a gun out because he heard the scream.

[Shep]
So she had time to scream.

[Thomas]
She’s not sleeping, she’s just laying there.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
So she sees this arm come out of the wall and come down on her. So she’s screaming and she’s in the process of being stabbed, I mean. Or maybe he doesn’t kill her but he does stab her and she ends up getting medical treatment or I don’t know.

[Shep]
I mean, I like the subversion of because it’s in traditional horror movies, there is the final girl that lives.

[Thomas]
The detective is female. She’s the final girl.

[Shep]
In fact, let’s make the serial killer also female. Let’s Bechdel Test this up.

[Thomas]
Well, we haven’t given them many names, so we better hurry up and do that.

[Shep]
So how is he caught? So the detective just shoots the arms taking out of the wall?

[Thomas]
Or shoot at the wall, but because nothing can go back through… How does that work?

[Shep]
Oh, she tries to shoot him and hits the wall, and it breaks enough that the portal closes and his arm is still through the wall, but the portal closed. Now, you have evidence.

[Emily]
You have fingerprints.

[Shep]
You have five sets of fingerprints and a knife.

[Thomas]
So does it sever the hand, or is their hand just stuck sticking through the wall?

[Shep]
It severs it.

[Emily]
The killer has a stump.

[Thomas]
Okay. He’s definitely going to need some sort of medical attention.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Emily]
Do they go to the ER?

[Shep]
If they go to the ER, they’re going to be caught for sure.

[Thomas]
They have to do something else.

[Shep]
What can they do?

[Thomas]
What can you do? So does the killer successfully treat their wound?

[Shep]
They can successfully treat their wound, sure. But they know that they’ve left enough evidence behind that it is only a matter of time.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Now they have to flee.

[Thomas]
With a fresh stump. They’re agoraphobic. How are they going to flee?

[Shep]
They can open a portal somewhere.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
But then they will leave that portal behind.

[Thomas]
And open.

[Shep]
And open.

[Thomas]
If the killer opens a portal, let’s say it’s a sheet rock wall, and they get through the other side and then destroy the sheet rock. Is the portal closed?

[Shep]
Well, obviously, we know that it does close. We just witnessed that happen.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s true. So is it then, a race against time? Maybe they immediately figure out who it is and they’re racing to get to that person’s apartment or house or whatever. So do the police arrive before or after the killer has gone through their final portal?

[Shep]
Well, how do we want the detective to catch the killer? Do we want them to physically catch them at a location? Or do you want them to figure out how they are making these portals? And maybe the detective can make one and follow the killer. I want the existence or the ability to make portals to still exist at the end.

[Thomas]
So it’s not just the killer who can do it. It’s the runes or whatever the stuff is that you draw. That’s what gets you out.

[Shep]
Right. If you can understand it, then you can do it.

[Thomas]
Right. So at some point, the detective has to have done some kind of research so that they can understand how to use that power, and then they come through and catch/kill?

[Shep]
Also, you can have the killer and the detective have a conversation, which is always great.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Get that final confrontation.

[Shep]
Right. Because if the killer knows the detective can now do this…

[Thomas]
I think the killer is totally surprised. He doesn’t expect anyone to be able to figure it out. He doesn’t think anybody else understands it or knows it.

[Shep]
Right. What they wanted was validation and for someone to understand their work, and now they have that, and it’s the detective that caught them. But if this knowledge gets out, how many more serial killers do you think there’s going to be? If this technology gets out, how is that going to affect the world? No location would be secure.

[Thomas]
May be the killer saying all of this to the detective. It’s kind of like Seven, right? They want the detective to kill them. They’ve gotten their validation. They’ve got a stump. They’re going to go to jail. “I’m agoraphobic. I’m xenophobic. Just end my life.”

[Shep]
Can they still draw the symbol if they only have their off hand?

[Emily]
They can’t get it quite right, because it’s also about precision markings.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah.

[Emily]
I like the idea of it not being precise and having it be off slightly, because then they can’t continue their work if they can’t control the movement precisely. And if they’re using their off hand, you can’t just learn that quickly.

[Thomas]
But if they just get killed, if the detective is like, “I know I won’t tell anybody about this, and I know how to make sure you don’t tell anybody about this.”

[Shep]
I don’t imagine a detective taking the law into their own hands.

[Thomas]
That’s a good point. I mean, they don’t really have a reason to. In Seven, it made sense. You understood why he did what he did. But here, I don’t think they have enough of a reason to do that.

[Shep]
Yeah, I assume that the killer wouldn’t tell people so that they keep their power to themselves.

[Thomas]
Okay. It’s a chase. They’re going through portal to portal to portal.

[Shep]
Okay.

[Thomas]
This establishes that the killer can easily continue to draw these portals. There’s no way to stop them. Prison won’t hold them. They’ll still always find some way to get out. Killing them is the only way to stop them.

[Shep]
Or just cut off their other arm. That would stop them for a while. Then you can see them in prison trying to draw with their feet or something.

[Thomas]
Well, how do we want to movie to end? Does the killer live or die?

[Shep]
I mean, it could go either way. Do you want to set up a sequel or not? If it’s a supernatural killer…

[Thomas]
Of course it’s a horror film.

[Shep]
Right. You have to set up the sequel.

[Emily]
Then they live, they chop off the other hand and we watch them learn to draw with their feet.

[Thomas]
There we go. We split the difference. They don’t kill the person, they shoot their other hand.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
So it’s useless.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
The person’s then in jail. And yeah, the last shot is pulling back up and tilting down and coming up to, like, a bird’s eye view of them, etching something into the floor of their cell. They’re holding something between their toes.

[Emily]
There we go. Now I can’t pitch serial killers anymore. Thanks.

[Shep]
You got one, though.

[Emily]
I did!

[Thomas]
All right. Well, I think we finally have those broad strokes we were looking for, so we would love to hear your thoughts on today’s show. Was it white lightning or should we go back to the drawing board?

[Shep]
Ugh.

[Thomas]
You can let us know on our website AlmostPlausible.com You can also share your thoughts with us on social media.

[Emily]
You can find us by our handle @AlmostPlausible on Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. We also have a Discord. Find the link on our website.

[Thomas]
We hope to hear from you. And thanks for listening. Let’s all get together again next week for another episode of Almost Plausible.

[Shep]
Bye-bye.

[Emily]
See ya.

[Outro music]