An Unbreakable Radio Cypher and John Wilkes Booth's Diary in Liverpool (Episode 5) Transcript
Audio version of the episode can be found here! Enjoy.
Hannah: A murder in the aftermath of the Civil War draws together a long-serving MI5 officer and a gentleman rat.
Jennie: Somebody write this.
Hannah: Hi, and welcome to Somebody Write This, where we use a random plot generator to give us an idea, and then brainstorm how that could be a thing somebody might want to write. I'm Hannah.
Jennie: And I'm Jennie.
Hannah: And to help us with our brainstorming today, we have a guest. Welcome, Doug Van Hollen.
Doug: Hi. It's so great to be here.
Hannah: I'm so glad you could join us. Doug and I were actually co-hosts on another podcast together that is on an indefinite hiatus, called Flick Fights, where we used the movie ranking website Flickchart to put two movies head to head and debated which one was better. That was how we first met each other. And I'm very excited that he's back on the podcast, particularly because he was one of the first ones as well-- or, well, the first one-- to send in a piece of writing based on something that we did in the podcast, which was super fantastic. Doug, this hasn't been released for you yet, but our podcast on December 12, we read a little tiny bit of your script that you wrote. So I would love to hear about when you first heard that podcast, did that idea immediately come to mind? Or was it something where you sat down and were like, I'm going to write something about this?
Doug: Well, really what it comes down to is, I'm in the, let's say, the fifth year of working on this novel, and I am so dedicated to not working on the novel that I will write a one-act play instead of work on my novel that day. So that's really what it came down to. But also honestly, the the discussion that you guys had around that plot-- Like the kernel of the plot by itself was not necessarily inspiring, until you guys started to really bat it around, and you guys have like-- I think that you guys are sort of like the Muses of the Internet. Like you're able to distill down these-- Because really this is like a transmission from the Delphic Oracle. Like these random plots are just, they're not really intelligible. But you're like the priestesses that kind of like communicate to the rest of us about how we're supposed to treat it. So it was just a very inspiring process.
Jennie: I'm not sure, but that might be the best compliment we get on this podcast ever.
Hannah: I think that needs to be our official tagline.
Jennie: "The Muses of the Internet."
Hannah: Oh, well, I'm very happy that you get to be a priest with us and join us in the Oracle as well today, it's gonna be awesome. Yeah, and I talked a little bit as well, because in addition to doing the Flick Fights podcast for Flickchart, you're also one of the Flickchart bloggers and you do a lot of writing about storytelling. I know you just had a new one come out a little bit ago. So talk a little bit about your latest piece. What about those stories inspired you to go down that route?
Doug: Right. The article is about Robocop and The Crow. What struck me is that those two movies take place in Detroit and they are both about death and resurrection. And there just seemed to be a tremendous amount of parallels between the plots, the sort of Christlike plots of the movies, and then the plight of Detroit itself as a city, as like a real historical city. And I just found that it was just a very rich way to start to look at both those films and about why those films had to take place in Detroit.
Hannah: Awesome, awesome. We'll definitely make sure that we leave a link to that. Between fiction and nonfiction, do you have a preference or is it so different that it's hard to compare the two? Although well, we're Flickchart members, so we're used to having to compare things that we shouldn't have to.
Doug: Yeah, I guess I'm a fiction guy. I mean, the nonfiction that I write is mainly for Flickchart, but it is right-- It is nonfiction about fiction. So you know, I think that really what's really in my veins.
Hannah: So fiction-adjacent.
Doug: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Hannah: Awesome. Final question before we move on. I really love finding this out from our guests. Are there themes or genres or locations or characters that you find yourself really drawn to over and over again, throughout your story consuming or writing?
Doug: I think that whenever there is an accurate and at the same time sensitive depiction of bitterness, of like real human self-hatred, either internally directed or outward directed, I think that that's a component of the human condition that shouldn't be shameful, and that we need to, you know, make it a part of art in order for to actually reflect the full spectrum of the human experience. So I mean, it's a strange-- I don't, you know, like to say that I like art about bitterness, but I do. The movies and the books that I like, they all have like really angry characters, but which are written about sensitively?
Hannah: Yeah, I really enjoy art that looks at sort of these darker sides of humanity that it-- Sometimes art feels like the only place where that can really safely be explored. And I think that that can be very powerful and it can be very empowering and very healing for a lot of people to find that kind of thread. Yeah, so we'll see if our story today holds itself-- It seems a little quirkier than really lends itself to a deep philosophical discussion of bitterness, but who knows. So, as a reminder for our audience and for ourselves, our synopsis today, our plot today, is "A murder in the aftermath of a civil war draws together a long-serving MI5 officer and a gentleman rat," neither of which belong in a story about the Civil War. So I am so excited to figure out how we're going to tie these two together and how the war plays in and what the murder is.
Jennie: Now, how soon after-- How long does an aftermath last?
Doug: Oh, that's a deep question. Deep question. So reconstruction typically is thought to last like 15 or 20 years. Okay, here's another important question. Which civil war? Right? Like we're Americans here--
Hannah: You're right, it does say "The Civil War"--
Doug: A lot of countries had a civil war.
Hannah: I did go "America-centric."
Doug: Yes, but you're right. So we could be talking in terms of 1880-1890, talking about the American Civil War.
Hannah: I think I'm leaning toward that only because--
Jennie: That's the one we know about?
Hannah: In 15 minutes, I don't-- Yeah, if I had extra research time, I think it would be fascinating to look at other civil wars.
Jennie: But we don't do research on this show. We just fly by the seat of our pants.
Doug: What? No, no, no, we do. Look, so, MI5 was founded in 1909. There.
Jennie: You're googling right now, aren't you?
Doug: So I think I think that this puts us in a pretty good sweet spot. Like we could fudge that date to be a little more turn-of-the-century.
Hannah: Well, but it's a long serving MI5 officer, so not only does it have to be established by the aftermath of the civil war, it has to be around for a while.
Doug: That's true. Okay, so now we're talking about time travel. I have no problem with that.
Hannah: Or is this a future civil war?
Doug: I like that. That's not bad.
Hannah: It could be a civil war, maybe in the UK?
Jennie: Maybe after animals have started to mutate into intelligent beings because it's a gentleman rat. They obviously have culture if he's a gentleman.
Doug: Yeah, that's true.
Jennie: All right, how crazy are we going with this?
Doug: How long does it take for an organism to develop culture? So I guess about 5000 years for humanity before you could say that we had some sort of culture.
Jennie: I think we need to discuss the assumption that this is taking place on Earth at this point. 5000 years in the future, we could very well be on Mars or even in another galaxy.
Doug: That's true. I would be disappointed if we hung out with that Ministry of Intelligence prefix for our secret services that long. That would be very disappointing.
Hannah: Does "MI5" mean something else in 5000 years?
Jennie: Mars Intelligence Service!
Doug: Mars Intelligence Service. Not bad. Not bad.
Jennie: Okay, so we're on. We're in Mars, right after the Civil War of Mars.
Doug: Right. The most interesting part about this is a murder in the context of a civilization that's recovering from a civil war. That's a really fascinating part of this, where you have some sort of like, semi-mundane law enforcement activity that is taking place at a time when the fabric of civilization is still kind of coming back together. I think that there's a lot of opportunity for moral ambiguity about people sort of like, "Why are you bothering to take this one murder so seriously? You know that the corpses are stacked and high down this alley." So I think that that's the best part of this,
Jennie: And especially the word "murder" compared to, say, the word "assassination," which is way more specific and might be involved with the war. I think a murder, like you said, it's mundane. It's not directly related to the conflict at large.
Doug: I guess this is sort of like- I'm thinking of films like The Third Man. The Third Man is about a crime that takes place in the aftermath of a war. And there was a tremendous amount of fun that was had in that movie, just sort of like being able to discuss the echoes of societal trauma in the context of, you know, smaller interpersonal traumas. So I think it's a lot of juice here.
Hannah: I think you could do some interesting things with this. If this is 5000 years in the future, who knows how long it's-- Maybe there's been peace for a very, very long time. Maybe the civil war was hugely-- It was something that really shook everybody up because it was maybe the first really intense conflict in anybody's remembered timeline. And that got really like-- undoing a lot of society that could have happened. Like right now it's a different scenario and it's hard to even conceive of what it would be like to have that conflict--
Jennie: In our days of--
Hannah: --when it had been centuries or millennia, even maybe,
Jennie: In our current days of perpetual war. But our space exploration stories that we have already imply that we would kind of need a worldwide collaboration to reach that level of space travel and colonization, so that makes perfect sense.
Doug: What if this was the first murder?
Hannah: Ooh.
Doug: Right. That there'd been so much peace that we had actually achieved a murderless society until this civil war, and that the trauma of the war somehow changed something in the psyche of the civilization.
Hannah: Oh, I love that.
Doug: So the police are suddenly like, "What do you mean, one person decided to end another person's life not on the battlefield?" and they have to kind of reprocess how that works.
Jennie: None of them were soldiers.
Hannah: They ended the war and they're like, "So now we go back. We finished the war." But it turns out that can't just be put back into a bottle. When anger and hate is released out there it does not go back in.
Jennie: This is getting really fascinating.
Hannah: Okay. So I love our location. Let's play a little bit with our characters. How they play into this.
Jennie: Who is this officer and how long has he been serving and what about this rat society? Is this the only rat or like did we colonize Mars with the rats?
Hannah: We colonized Mars with the rats, and MI5 is is the people who are living on Mars now.
Doug: No, the rats do what rats have always done, which is stow away aboard our-- They're just fricking freeloaders, we take them everywhere.
Jennie: They survive everything.
Doug: Exactly, and then they end up owning whatever whatever land we end up dropping that ship on. So that's what I think, is that there was a family of rats that freeloaded on the first space ark and then, you know, evolved from there because they ate some mutagens or something.
Jennie: Yeah, who knows what's on Mars that rats would find to eat?
Hannah: Okay, so did they evolve alongside the humans or did like the humans land, say, "There's nothing here," and leave and the rats just went on on their own and so now there's just this planet of rats.
Doug: A planet of rats! That's awesome.
Jennie: But at some point humans would be living there too, otherwise there wouldn't be MI5 officers.
Hannah: So maybe that's where a little of this civil war came from. The rat has been-- It's been this planet of rats, and then the humans came back and saw, oh, hey, things are happening here. They settled in. Things seemed okay for a while. They became part of the civilization--
Jennie: But is it racist to assume that the MI5 officer is a human and not a rat?
Hannah: I don't know.
Doug: Exactly. They're all rats. It's rats all the way down.
Hannah: I'm on board. So it's an MI5 officer and a gentleman rat. So just separating out the gentleman and the officer-- "An Officer and a Gentleman" is our show. There we go.
Doug: This is a really disturbing sequel to Ratatouille.
Hannah: So what do MI5 officers do in this culture, in contrast to the gentry of Rat Planet?
Jennie: The Martian rat culture.
Doug: Let's see. If we presuppose that murder had been abolished, so they're dealing with sort of petty larceny and pickpocketing, I'm imagining.
Hannah: Yeah, if murder had been abolished, who would you bring in to deal with something like this? Would you bring in a psychologist kind of person, like someone who studies human behavior as a whole, and be like, "We have no idea what to do with this"? Or rat behavior, not human behavior.
Jennie: Well, if you're taking the idea that the rats colonize Mars, and develop their society there, and developed it murderless, possibly, then when murder suddenly becomes a part of the society, you would go back to the society you knew who had been dealing with murder since the beginning, which is the humans. Cain and Abel, right? We've been murdering each other from the beginning.
Doug: We're so good at it. We're so good at it.
Jennie: Right. So the rats would be like, "Okay, how do we? What's going on?"
Doug: Yeah, "Let's get a murder expert. A human."
Hannah: That is so fascinating.
Jennie: So maybe they don't have like an MI5 in the same-- Because they have different needs, right? They've never had to investigate a murder before, and so they would have to bring a human over from Earth.
Doug: Right. Also explains why the rat is simply a gentleman. They don't really have law enforcement in the same sense in a utopian society.
Jennie: Right, so a mayor or something. A political character.
Hannah: I think it's about that time where I have to throw everything out the window by sharing our title. I'm going to give us all permission to shorten or to adjust this because it's a doozy. So I'm going to send it to you but I'm also going to read it out loud. Our title is "An Unbreakable Radio Cipher and John Wilkes Booth's Diary in Liverpool."
Doug: That's not terrible. You need a colon in there.
Hannah: I do.
Jennie: It's like two titles.
Hannah: Or maybe this is a two part miniseries and the first part is called "An Unbreakable Radio Cipher" and the second part is called "John Wilkes Booth's Diary in Liverpool."
Jennie: You know what? The second half of that, "John Wilkes Booth's Diary in Liverpool"? I mean, that's a guy who's famous for killing somebody.
Doug: Right, in the aftermath of a civil war.
Hannah: Oh my gosh, you're right.
Jennie: What if the rats have named areas of Mars after ports on earth because that's where they're from? So this is Liverpool, Mars.
Hannah: Maybe that's one of the few pieces that they are able to get their hands on for studying murder--
Jennie: Maybe that diary is what inspired the murder.
Doug: Oh, someone was shot in the back of the head at a theater.
Hannah: And they're trying to figure out what's going on with this. Okay.
Doug: And so they need a human who has studied this sort of thing.
Hannah: Okay, how does the radio cypher...
Jennie: I don't know how that fits. Unbreakable radio cypher.
Doug: It seems indispensable though. I wouldn't want-- Like there's a rhythm to that title that allows that is really intriguing and I wouldn't want to eliminate it, but I do think that it's going to be--
Jennie: Like "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society." Like it's so long, but you have to have it all there.
Doug: Yeah, yeah. This must be the second act twist is the unbreakable cypher.
Hannah: Do we need to swap the title? Do we need to make it "John Wilkes Booth's Diary in Liverpool and An Unbreakable Radio Cypher"?
Jennie: Or what about "John Wilkes Booth's Diary in Liverpool: An Unbreakable Radio Cipher"?
Doug: Well, that's true. There are book ciphers that you use an established text in order to generate the cipher text, so you can use a book to somehow generate your code.
Jennie: But it's a radio cypher.
Doug: Well, you could talk it on the radio. Those things could be connected.
Jennie: Maybe we need to go back to the conclusion of the book or this story, however, it turns out, although it sounds like a novel, possibly even a trilogy. But what is the conclusion? Is this humans helping rats get back to their murderless society? Or is it teaching them to deal with the inevitable?
Doug: I mean, I don't see a happy ending, but I never do.
Jennie: Bitterness, right?
Hannah: I feel like it can be a-- It's a dystopia ending. I feel like this ends with them finding a way to get their society possibly back to where they need to be. Maybe it was a person who found John Wilkes Booth's diary and drew inspiration from that. And they're like, "Okay, if we eliminate, if we get rid of this, this and this, or if we contain things this way, we'll be able to keep it." But with this dark sense of, A, the rats who are having to deal with this are forever in a sense kind of poisoned by this, having to be in contact with this.
Jennie: Like this has happened and it still could happen in the future.
Hannah: Absolutely, like an uncertain-- On the very very surface a happy ending but with the knowledge that there is nothing to keep this from happening again, and the people who had to deal with it now have a piece of that inside them whether they really wanted to or not.
Jennie: This burden they have to carry now for society.
Hannah: Yeah, just being in contact with a level of malice that they had not encountered before.
Jennie: So this turns the diary into like forbidden knowledge. Is that why the cypher? They took it out of written form and out of something that they could understand into a code and then destroyed the original so they still technically have it, just nobody can access it.
Hannah: Yeah. Okay, we are coming up on about 15 minutes of talking about this. Is there anything else that-- Do we feel like-- This has gone in a very interesting direction.
Jennie: I like it. I want to watch this movie.
Doug: Yeah. So, A, it's obviously steampunk, and, B, I think it should be hard R erotic thriller.
Hannah: Okay, okay...
Doug: No, I'm kidding.
Jennie: Hannah's all, "Okay!" Willing to go along with it.
Hannah: Hey, I feel like how you have to do this podcast is being like "Okay, this is what we have. This is what we're doing. We will find a way to make it work."
Doug: "Yes, and."
Jennie: Okay, so this is I guess where we have the questions for the listeners. You guys get to take it from here. Do you like setting it on Mars as much as we do? We like the idea of this being on Mars. What started the civil war? We didn't discuss much about the actual personalities of our characters here, the officer and the gentleman rat.
Hannah: And we really didn't get into details about the murder itself. I mean, in our version, it kind of became inconsequential. The murder existing at all was the part of it that was so horrendous, but maybe there's something more there as well. I think there's a lot of pieces to this and a lot of stuff for listeners to jump in on.
Jennie: Got a lot to explore, definitely.
Hannah: Absolutely. All right. Before we close out today, we want to go ahead and first of all, thank our guest. Thank you, Doug, so much for joining us today.
Doug: Well, thank you.
Hannah: Yeah, go ahead, let us know, is there anything that you would like to plug for our listeners, a social media or a new thing that we can link to in the show notes?
Doug: No, just read my stuff for Flickchart and you can follow me on twitter @dsubnet0.
Hannah: Awesome. And we'll put both of those links in our podcast description as well, so that you can follow along with Doug's writing. So let's go ahead and close out with taking a second to each shout out a story that we think our listeners should check out. Mine this time-- I've done three of these recommendations now. I think I need to take this time to share my very favorite television show, which is Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It just ended. It's a four-season complete story. It's a musical TV show about this woman who is deeply unhappy in her life and ends up moving from New York to California to follow a guy who she dated when she was 16. And it's very funny, but it also ends up being this really poignant and beautiful and compassionate look at mental health and at female friendships and relationships and it says a lot of really powerful things and it makes me cry a lot, but in a powerful way, and it's all on Netflix. I can't recommend it highly enough. Jennie, what do you have for us this time?
Jennie: I'm actually going to plug a popular TV show. You guys don't really need my my recommendation to watch this because either you're into it or you're not. But I have a thought to share about it that, if you're watching it for the first time or watching it again, maybe something to think about that I thought was funny. So I've been watching Supernatural. And this is for the later seasons. It's my first time going through, and so there's a lot that I haven't seen and so I won't spoil anything for anybody. But what I was thinking about is this is one of one of the many stories we have as a society where we explore ourselves and spirituality and our relationship with God, and we do it through the medium of stories, which is really interesting to me. And I had the funny idea yesterday, like, what if these little stories we make up about ourselves and God and the universe, and God just thinks they're cute, and like hangs them up on his fridge? You know, like, our little scribbly drawings about what we think the universe is like, and he's like, "Oh, you guys are so cute. That almost looks like a tree."
Doug: That's kind of the best case scenario actually.
Jennie: Because I think sometimes people worry about blasphemy and all that, but I love the way that we as humans explore ourselves and our origins and all the unknown like that. And so just in that context, I'm recommending the show Supernatural if you haven't watched it, just to explore that particular way that show is exploring the supernatural.
Hannah: Yeah. Awesome. All right, Doug, what do you got for us?
Doug: Well, I am rereading Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. It's my favorite book of all time. I reread it I guess every other year. It's kind of long, but it's just absolutely remarkable that something can be so funny and not seem to know that it's funny. That's my favorite kind of humor is where-- If a novel can be deadpan, then Confederacy of Dunces is deadpan. And at the same time, it is incredibly efficient at creating a really rich, weird, dynamic view of New Orleans in one particular period of time and these really strange characters that are established in all of their quirks extremely really quickly. So even just from like a writer's workshop point of view, it's an absolute masterclass in characterization and world building, but it's also like the funniest damn thing ever written.
Hannah: All right. Well, that is our episode. As a reminder, you can find us every other Thursday wherever you get your podcasts.
Jennie: Follow us on Twitter @writethispod. And if you've been inspired by this episode and have questions or comments or a story or anything else, email us at somebodywritethis@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.
Hannah: We'll be back with another episode in two weeks. See you then.
Jennie: And as they say, you must go behind the door to mend old breeches.
Hannah: A murder in the aftermath of the Civil War draws together a long-serving MI5 officer and a gentleman rat.
Jennie: Somebody write this.
Hannah: Hi, and welcome to Somebody Write This, where we use a random plot generator to give us an idea, and then brainstorm how that could be a thing somebody might want to write. I'm Hannah.
Jennie: And I'm Jennie.
Hannah: And to help us with our brainstorming today, we have a guest. Welcome, Doug Van Hollen.
Doug: Hi. It's so great to be here.
Hannah: I'm so glad you could join us. Doug and I were actually co-hosts on another podcast together that is on an indefinite hiatus, called Flick Fights, where we used the movie ranking website Flickchart to put two movies head to head and debated which one was better. That was how we first met each other. And I'm very excited that he's back on the podcast, particularly because he was one of the first ones as well-- or, well, the first one-- to send in a piece of writing based on something that we did in the podcast, which was super fantastic. Doug, this hasn't been released for you yet, but our podcast on December 12, we read a little tiny bit of your script that you wrote. So I would love to hear about when you first heard that podcast, did that idea immediately come to mind? Or was it something where you sat down and were like, I'm going to write something about this?
Doug: Well, really what it comes down to is, I'm in the, let's say, the fifth year of working on this novel, and I am so dedicated to not working on the novel that I will write a one-act play instead of work on my novel that day. So that's really what it came down to. But also honestly, the the discussion that you guys had around that plot-- Like the kernel of the plot by itself was not necessarily inspiring, until you guys started to really bat it around, and you guys have like-- I think that you guys are sort of like the Muses of the Internet. Like you're able to distill down these-- Because really this is like a transmission from the Delphic Oracle. Like these random plots are just, they're not really intelligible. But you're like the priestesses that kind of like communicate to the rest of us about how we're supposed to treat it. So it was just a very inspiring process.
Jennie: I'm not sure, but that might be the best compliment we get on this podcast ever.
Hannah: I think that needs to be our official tagline.
Jennie: "The Muses of the Internet."
Hannah: Oh, well, I'm very happy that you get to be a priest with us and join us in the Oracle as well today, it's gonna be awesome. Yeah, and I talked a little bit as well, because in addition to doing the Flick Fights podcast for Flickchart, you're also one of the Flickchart bloggers and you do a lot of writing about storytelling. I know you just had a new one come out a little bit ago. So talk a little bit about your latest piece. What about those stories inspired you to go down that route?
Doug: Right. The article is about Robocop and The Crow. What struck me is that those two movies take place in Detroit and they are both about death and resurrection. And there just seemed to be a tremendous amount of parallels between the plots, the sort of Christlike plots of the movies, and then the plight of Detroit itself as a city, as like a real historical city. And I just found that it was just a very rich way to start to look at both those films and about why those films had to take place in Detroit.
Hannah: Awesome, awesome. We'll definitely make sure that we leave a link to that. Between fiction and nonfiction, do you have a preference or is it so different that it's hard to compare the two? Although well, we're Flickchart members, so we're used to having to compare things that we shouldn't have to.
Doug: Yeah, I guess I'm a fiction guy. I mean, the nonfiction that I write is mainly for Flickchart, but it is right-- It is nonfiction about fiction. So you know, I think that really what's really in my veins.
Hannah: So fiction-adjacent.
Doug: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Hannah: Awesome. Final question before we move on. I really love finding this out from our guests. Are there themes or genres or locations or characters that you find yourself really drawn to over and over again, throughout your story consuming or writing?
Doug: I think that whenever there is an accurate and at the same time sensitive depiction of bitterness, of like real human self-hatred, either internally directed or outward directed, I think that that's a component of the human condition that shouldn't be shameful, and that we need to, you know, make it a part of art in order for to actually reflect the full spectrum of the human experience. So I mean, it's a strange-- I don't, you know, like to say that I like art about bitterness, but I do. The movies and the books that I like, they all have like really angry characters, but which are written about sensitively?
Hannah: Yeah, I really enjoy art that looks at sort of these darker sides of humanity that it-- Sometimes art feels like the only place where that can really safely be explored. And I think that that can be very powerful and it can be very empowering and very healing for a lot of people to find that kind of thread. Yeah, so we'll see if our story today holds itself-- It seems a little quirkier than really lends itself to a deep philosophical discussion of bitterness, but who knows. So, as a reminder for our audience and for ourselves, our synopsis today, our plot today, is "A murder in the aftermath of a civil war draws together a long-serving MI5 officer and a gentleman rat," neither of which belong in a story about the Civil War. So I am so excited to figure out how we're going to tie these two together and how the war plays in and what the murder is.
Jennie: Now, how soon after-- How long does an aftermath last?
Doug: Oh, that's a deep question. Deep question. So reconstruction typically is thought to last like 15 or 20 years. Okay, here's another important question. Which civil war? Right? Like we're Americans here--
Hannah: You're right, it does say "The Civil War"--
Doug: A lot of countries had a civil war.
Hannah: I did go "America-centric."
Doug: Yes, but you're right. So we could be talking in terms of 1880-1890, talking about the American Civil War.
Hannah: I think I'm leaning toward that only because--
Jennie: That's the one we know about?
Hannah: In 15 minutes, I don't-- Yeah, if I had extra research time, I think it would be fascinating to look at other civil wars.
Jennie: But we don't do research on this show. We just fly by the seat of our pants.
Doug: What? No, no, no, we do. Look, so, MI5 was founded in 1909. There.
Jennie: You're googling right now, aren't you?
Doug: So I think I think that this puts us in a pretty good sweet spot. Like we could fudge that date to be a little more turn-of-the-century.
Hannah: Well, but it's a long serving MI5 officer, so not only does it have to be established by the aftermath of the civil war, it has to be around for a while.
Doug: That's true. Okay, so now we're talking about time travel. I have no problem with that.
Hannah: Or is this a future civil war?
Doug: I like that. That's not bad.
Hannah: It could be a civil war, maybe in the UK?
Jennie: Maybe after animals have started to mutate into intelligent beings because it's a gentleman rat. They obviously have culture if he's a gentleman.
Doug: Yeah, that's true.
Jennie: All right, how crazy are we going with this?
Doug: How long does it take for an organism to develop culture? So I guess about 5000 years for humanity before you could say that we had some sort of culture.
Jennie: I think we need to discuss the assumption that this is taking place on Earth at this point. 5000 years in the future, we could very well be on Mars or even in another galaxy.
Doug: That's true. I would be disappointed if we hung out with that Ministry of Intelligence prefix for our secret services that long. That would be very disappointing.
Hannah: Does "MI5" mean something else in 5000 years?
Jennie: Mars Intelligence Service!
Doug: Mars Intelligence Service. Not bad. Not bad.
Jennie: Okay, so we're on. We're in Mars, right after the Civil War of Mars.
Doug: Right. The most interesting part about this is a murder in the context of a civilization that's recovering from a civil war. That's a really fascinating part of this, where you have some sort of like, semi-mundane law enforcement activity that is taking place at a time when the fabric of civilization is still kind of coming back together. I think that there's a lot of opportunity for moral ambiguity about people sort of like, "Why are you bothering to take this one murder so seriously? You know that the corpses are stacked and high down this alley." So I think that that's the best part of this,
Jennie: And especially the word "murder" compared to, say, the word "assassination," which is way more specific and might be involved with the war. I think a murder, like you said, it's mundane. It's not directly related to the conflict at large.
Doug: I guess this is sort of like- I'm thinking of films like The Third Man. The Third Man is about a crime that takes place in the aftermath of a war. And there was a tremendous amount of fun that was had in that movie, just sort of like being able to discuss the echoes of societal trauma in the context of, you know, smaller interpersonal traumas. So I think it's a lot of juice here.
Hannah: I think you could do some interesting things with this. If this is 5000 years in the future, who knows how long it's-- Maybe there's been peace for a very, very long time. Maybe the civil war was hugely-- It was something that really shook everybody up because it was maybe the first really intense conflict in anybody's remembered timeline. And that got really like-- undoing a lot of society that could have happened. Like right now it's a different scenario and it's hard to even conceive of what it would be like to have that conflict--
Jennie: In our days of--
Hannah: --when it had been centuries or millennia, even maybe,
Jennie: In our current days of perpetual war. But our space exploration stories that we have already imply that we would kind of need a worldwide collaboration to reach that level of space travel and colonization, so that makes perfect sense.
Doug: What if this was the first murder?
Hannah: Ooh.
Doug: Right. That there'd been so much peace that we had actually achieved a murderless society until this civil war, and that the trauma of the war somehow changed something in the psyche of the civilization.
Hannah: Oh, I love that.
Doug: So the police are suddenly like, "What do you mean, one person decided to end another person's life not on the battlefield?" and they have to kind of reprocess how that works.
Jennie: None of them were soldiers.
Hannah: They ended the war and they're like, "So now we go back. We finished the war." But it turns out that can't just be put back into a bottle. When anger and hate is released out there it does not go back in.
Jennie: This is getting really fascinating.
Hannah: Okay. So I love our location. Let's play a little bit with our characters. How they play into this.
Jennie: Who is this officer and how long has he been serving and what about this rat society? Is this the only rat or like did we colonize Mars with the rats?
Hannah: We colonized Mars with the rats, and MI5 is is the people who are living on Mars now.
Doug: No, the rats do what rats have always done, which is stow away aboard our-- They're just fricking freeloaders, we take them everywhere.
Jennie: They survive everything.
Doug: Exactly, and then they end up owning whatever whatever land we end up dropping that ship on. So that's what I think, is that there was a family of rats that freeloaded on the first space ark and then, you know, evolved from there because they ate some mutagens or something.
Jennie: Yeah, who knows what's on Mars that rats would find to eat?
Hannah: Okay, so did they evolve alongside the humans or did like the humans land, say, "There's nothing here," and leave and the rats just went on on their own and so now there's just this planet of rats.
Doug: A planet of rats! That's awesome.
Jennie: But at some point humans would be living there too, otherwise there wouldn't be MI5 officers.
Hannah: So maybe that's where a little of this civil war came from. The rat has been-- It's been this planet of rats, and then the humans came back and saw, oh, hey, things are happening here. They settled in. Things seemed okay for a while. They became part of the civilization--
Jennie: But is it racist to assume that the MI5 officer is a human and not a rat?
Hannah: I don't know.
Doug: Exactly. They're all rats. It's rats all the way down.
Hannah: I'm on board. So it's an MI5 officer and a gentleman rat. So just separating out the gentleman and the officer-- "An Officer and a Gentleman" is our show. There we go.
Doug: This is a really disturbing sequel to Ratatouille.
Hannah: So what do MI5 officers do in this culture, in contrast to the gentry of Rat Planet?
Jennie: The Martian rat culture.
Doug: Let's see. If we presuppose that murder had been abolished, so they're dealing with sort of petty larceny and pickpocketing, I'm imagining.
Hannah: Yeah, if murder had been abolished, who would you bring in to deal with something like this? Would you bring in a psychologist kind of person, like someone who studies human behavior as a whole, and be like, "We have no idea what to do with this"? Or rat behavior, not human behavior.
Jennie: Well, if you're taking the idea that the rats colonize Mars, and develop their society there, and developed it murderless, possibly, then when murder suddenly becomes a part of the society, you would go back to the society you knew who had been dealing with murder since the beginning, which is the humans. Cain and Abel, right? We've been murdering each other from the beginning.
Doug: We're so good at it. We're so good at it.
Jennie: Right. So the rats would be like, "Okay, how do we? What's going on?"
Doug: Yeah, "Let's get a murder expert. A human."
Hannah: That is so fascinating.
Jennie: So maybe they don't have like an MI5 in the same-- Because they have different needs, right? They've never had to investigate a murder before, and so they would have to bring a human over from Earth.
Doug: Right. Also explains why the rat is simply a gentleman. They don't really have law enforcement in the same sense in a utopian society.
Jennie: Right, so a mayor or something. A political character.
Hannah: I think it's about that time where I have to throw everything out the window by sharing our title. I'm going to give us all permission to shorten or to adjust this because it's a doozy. So I'm going to send it to you but I'm also going to read it out loud. Our title is "An Unbreakable Radio Cipher and John Wilkes Booth's Diary in Liverpool."
Doug: That's not terrible. You need a colon in there.
Hannah: I do.
Jennie: It's like two titles.
Hannah: Or maybe this is a two part miniseries and the first part is called "An Unbreakable Radio Cipher" and the second part is called "John Wilkes Booth's Diary in Liverpool."
Jennie: You know what? The second half of that, "John Wilkes Booth's Diary in Liverpool"? I mean, that's a guy who's famous for killing somebody.
Doug: Right, in the aftermath of a civil war.
Hannah: Oh my gosh, you're right.
Jennie: What if the rats have named areas of Mars after ports on earth because that's where they're from? So this is Liverpool, Mars.
Hannah: Maybe that's one of the few pieces that they are able to get their hands on for studying murder--
Jennie: Maybe that diary is what inspired the murder.
Doug: Oh, someone was shot in the back of the head at a theater.
Hannah: And they're trying to figure out what's going on with this. Okay.
Doug: And so they need a human who has studied this sort of thing.
Hannah: Okay, how does the radio cypher...
Jennie: I don't know how that fits. Unbreakable radio cypher.
Doug: It seems indispensable though. I wouldn't want-- Like there's a rhythm to that title that allows that is really intriguing and I wouldn't want to eliminate it, but I do think that it's going to be--
Jennie: Like "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society." Like it's so long, but you have to have it all there.
Doug: Yeah, yeah. This must be the second act twist is the unbreakable cypher.
Hannah: Do we need to swap the title? Do we need to make it "John Wilkes Booth's Diary in Liverpool and An Unbreakable Radio Cypher"?
Jennie: Or what about "John Wilkes Booth's Diary in Liverpool: An Unbreakable Radio Cipher"?
Doug: Well, that's true. There are book ciphers that you use an established text in order to generate the cipher text, so you can use a book to somehow generate your code.
Jennie: But it's a radio cypher.
Doug: Well, you could talk it on the radio. Those things could be connected.
Jennie: Maybe we need to go back to the conclusion of the book or this story, however, it turns out, although it sounds like a novel, possibly even a trilogy. But what is the conclusion? Is this humans helping rats get back to their murderless society? Or is it teaching them to deal with the inevitable?
Doug: I mean, I don't see a happy ending, but I never do.
Jennie: Bitterness, right?
Hannah: I feel like it can be a-- It's a dystopia ending. I feel like this ends with them finding a way to get their society possibly back to where they need to be. Maybe it was a person who found John Wilkes Booth's diary and drew inspiration from that. And they're like, "Okay, if we eliminate, if we get rid of this, this and this, or if we contain things this way, we'll be able to keep it." But with this dark sense of, A, the rats who are having to deal with this are forever in a sense kind of poisoned by this, having to be in contact with this.
Jennie: Like this has happened and it still could happen in the future.
Hannah: Absolutely, like an uncertain-- On the very very surface a happy ending but with the knowledge that there is nothing to keep this from happening again, and the people who had to deal with it now have a piece of that inside them whether they really wanted to or not.
Jennie: This burden they have to carry now for society.
Hannah: Yeah, just being in contact with a level of malice that they had not encountered before.
Jennie: So this turns the diary into like forbidden knowledge. Is that why the cypher? They took it out of written form and out of something that they could understand into a code and then destroyed the original so they still technically have it, just nobody can access it.
Hannah: Yeah. Okay, we are coming up on about 15 minutes of talking about this. Is there anything else that-- Do we feel like-- This has gone in a very interesting direction.
Jennie: I like it. I want to watch this movie.
Doug: Yeah. So, A, it's obviously steampunk, and, B, I think it should be hard R erotic thriller.
Hannah: Okay, okay...
Doug: No, I'm kidding.
Jennie: Hannah's all, "Okay!" Willing to go along with it.
Hannah: Hey, I feel like how you have to do this podcast is being like "Okay, this is what we have. This is what we're doing. We will find a way to make it work."
Doug: "Yes, and."
Jennie: Okay, so this is I guess where we have the questions for the listeners. You guys get to take it from here. Do you like setting it on Mars as much as we do? We like the idea of this being on Mars. What started the civil war? We didn't discuss much about the actual personalities of our characters here, the officer and the gentleman rat.
Hannah: And we really didn't get into details about the murder itself. I mean, in our version, it kind of became inconsequential. The murder existing at all was the part of it that was so horrendous, but maybe there's something more there as well. I think there's a lot of pieces to this and a lot of stuff for listeners to jump in on.
Jennie: Got a lot to explore, definitely.
Hannah: Absolutely. All right. Before we close out today, we want to go ahead and first of all, thank our guest. Thank you, Doug, so much for joining us today.
Doug: Well, thank you.
Hannah: Yeah, go ahead, let us know, is there anything that you would like to plug for our listeners, a social media or a new thing that we can link to in the show notes?
Doug: No, just read my stuff for Flickchart and you can follow me on twitter @dsubnet0.
Hannah: Awesome. And we'll put both of those links in our podcast description as well, so that you can follow along with Doug's writing. So let's go ahead and close out with taking a second to each shout out a story that we think our listeners should check out. Mine this time-- I've done three of these recommendations now. I think I need to take this time to share my very favorite television show, which is Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It just ended. It's a four-season complete story. It's a musical TV show about this woman who is deeply unhappy in her life and ends up moving from New York to California to follow a guy who she dated when she was 16. And it's very funny, but it also ends up being this really poignant and beautiful and compassionate look at mental health and at female friendships and relationships and it says a lot of really powerful things and it makes me cry a lot, but in a powerful way, and it's all on Netflix. I can't recommend it highly enough. Jennie, what do you have for us this time?
Jennie: I'm actually going to plug a popular TV show. You guys don't really need my my recommendation to watch this because either you're into it or you're not. But I have a thought to share about it that, if you're watching it for the first time or watching it again, maybe something to think about that I thought was funny. So I've been watching Supernatural. And this is for the later seasons. It's my first time going through, and so there's a lot that I haven't seen and so I won't spoil anything for anybody. But what I was thinking about is this is one of one of the many stories we have as a society where we explore ourselves and spirituality and our relationship with God, and we do it through the medium of stories, which is really interesting to me. And I had the funny idea yesterday, like, what if these little stories we make up about ourselves and God and the universe, and God just thinks they're cute, and like hangs them up on his fridge? You know, like, our little scribbly drawings about what we think the universe is like, and he's like, "Oh, you guys are so cute. That almost looks like a tree."
Doug: That's kind of the best case scenario actually.
Jennie: Because I think sometimes people worry about blasphemy and all that, but I love the way that we as humans explore ourselves and our origins and all the unknown like that. And so just in that context, I'm recommending the show Supernatural if you haven't watched it, just to explore that particular way that show is exploring the supernatural.
Hannah: Yeah. Awesome. All right, Doug, what do you got for us?
Doug: Well, I am rereading Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. It's my favorite book of all time. I reread it I guess every other year. It's kind of long, but it's just absolutely remarkable that something can be so funny and not seem to know that it's funny. That's my favorite kind of humor is where-- If a novel can be deadpan, then Confederacy of Dunces is deadpan. And at the same time, it is incredibly efficient at creating a really rich, weird, dynamic view of New Orleans in one particular period of time and these really strange characters that are established in all of their quirks extremely really quickly. So even just from like a writer's workshop point of view, it's an absolute masterclass in characterization and world building, but it's also like the funniest damn thing ever written.
Hannah: All right. Well, that is our episode. As a reminder, you can find us every other Thursday wherever you get your podcasts.
Jennie: Follow us on Twitter @writethispod. And if you've been inspired by this episode and have questions or comments or a story or anything else, email us at somebodywritethis@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.
Hannah: We'll be back with another episode in two weeks. See you then.
Jennie: And as they say, you must go behind the door to mend old breeches.
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