Evelyn is marched the length of the Bagel Temple, a real downtown Los Angeles building that used to be a working Catholic cathedral, past rows of white-robed acolytes including one very recognizable face standing just behind her shoulder the whole time. Jobu hands her a Dr. Seuss-style picture book titled, in a nice bit of self-reference, Everything Everywhere All at Once, with the line “I am your daughter, your daughter is me” written in cheerful rhyme. Evelyn flashes back to a tense, unfinished moment in the Winnebago, and Jobu closes things out with a line that sounds wise enough to stop the scene cold: right is a tiny box invented by people who are afraid.
We spend a good chunk of this episode on the temple itself, the former Cathedral of Saint Vibiana, now an event venue that’s hosted music videos for Beyoncé and The Weeknd, and we correct ourselves on an earlier mistaken claim about which building this actually is. We also dig into a deleted draft of this scene that gives the silent acolyte standing behind Evelyn real dialogue, defending Jobu’s worldview almost like recited scripture, and what it means that the finished film cut her lines but kept her devotion written all over her face. And we talk about why an earlier, more philosophically tangled draft of this confrontation, one that actually argues about whether Evelyn’s understanding of the multiverse is correct, got simplified down to something much more emotional: Jobu doesn’t need to win an argument about reality. She needs her mother to admit she got something wrong.
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