Subscribe to the show in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you find your favorite podcasts!

Minute 105 – We Put Being Too Sweet On A Bagel!

Deirdre pauses at the door on her way out, shares a look with Evelyn, and staggers off looking like someone dropped a bomb on her. Waymond, still kneeling in front of his handcuffed wife, tells her he doesn’t know how he did it — he just talked to Deirdre — and he is openly, unmistakably crying while trying to look like he isn’t. Then he stands up, picks up a broom, and sweeps the broken glass while quietly singing a Chinese New Year song. Meanwhile, in a green-lit Hong Kong alley, Foxy Waymond says Evelyn’s father used to call him too sweet for his own good, and maybe he was right. And in the Alpha Verse, Waymond stands in front of the wife who stabbed him, arms out against a dozen jumpers, saying please.

We stop the episode to sit with what Ke Huy Quan is doing here — real tears, in a performance where the character is trying not to cry, in a conversation that’s clearly scarier to him than facing down the police. We talk about the specific kind of masculine melodrama that wrecks audiences, and about the twenty years Hollywood took from all of us by not casting this man. And then Lester looked up what Waymond is humming while he sweeps: “Gongxi Gongxi,” written in 1945 to mark the end of the war, tied to an older myth about a beast that came each winter to eat villagers — so at dawn, neighbors ran out, saw each other alive, and shouted congratulations. Not on winning. On surviving. Waymond is standing in the wreckage of his marriage singing a song that means we made it through the dark together.

Lester and Kynan attempt to explain, evaluate, enlighten and elucidate the Academy Award-winning film, Everything Everywhere All At Once, minute by multiversal minute!