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So, I was only recently introduced to HDTGM, but I got Stitcher Premium and have now listened to all 215 episodes (watched Serenity last night and listening to 216 today) in a matter of a few months. I decided to wait until I had listened to them all before joining the forums, so here I am. Now I just need to get used to waiting for new episodes.

Honestly, that was my first thought too.

I don't have it handy, but I recall the line about the step-father's profession at the end was that he was "in construction." I didn't take that to mean that they weren't actually wealthy, but rather that the step-father was mobbed-up — which would explain his overall affect, propensity to violence, and the inability for the son/mother to seek "justice" through traditional channels.

I was 13 going onto 14 as a freshman basically because of when my birthday falls in the year and the pretty rigid rules for my school district of when you can start elementary school, so I wasn't so surprised about his age. Also the fact that he's a prodigy can further alienate a kid in a shitty situation, further pushing him into the world he was changing to get closer to his dead dad.

June thought it was interesting (I want to say she said “nice”) that the son programmed his decidedly not-Greek father and his mother as being wealthy, but I think it had more to do with the son trying to break the game. Basically, the movie is about predestination versus free will. Dill is programmed to perform certain tasks and only those tasks (i.e. fish for Justice, retrieve cats, and hustle Diane Laine). In order for him to get Dill to perform an action that is not in the game’s initial script, he has to reprogram it. In the movie’s terms, what Dill experiences throughout the course of the film is the figurative reality of what his son is literally rewriting. Ultimately, the son wants Dill the Fisherman to become a Dill the Murderer so he presents a series of “incentives” or “temptations” to do so. Each of these “incentives” can be translated back into the real world as a line of code. So, the ten thousand dollars, the ten million, his partner’s need for money for his granddaughter’s college fund, sex with Anne Hathaway, are all just metaphors for each failed attempt at getting the video game character to do what he wants him to do. When he is finally successful rewriting the code, he gives himself the in-game justification that video game character of “Dad” has just learned his son is being beaten by his step dad; however, that’s not literally what the kid wrote into the game. Like, he didn’t write “stepdad beats me [enter].” That’s just his imagined justification for his video game character doing something that he’s not supposed to be doing. Once he achieves this, not only does it reinforce his own justification to commit murder (i.e. to protect someone he loves) it gives him the courage to break and re-write society’s ethical and moral “codes” for himself.

Honestly, I didn’t feel like at the end the kid was psychically coding a reunion with his father so much as he was writing code in his head. In the same way a novel exists in the mind before it exists on the page, by the end of the movie, Dill’s son has become so immersed in the game that he no longer needs a computer to “interact” with the it. It all begins and ends with him. He’s the Alpha and Omega. This is why the shot of him running on the dock begins with a camera zoom through his pupil. We are entering his subjective reality. It all exists inside of him. Also, did anyone else see any similarities between the scene of the son at the end and Norman Bates at the end of Psycho? Both movies end with murderers, both sons, sitting motionless in jail as the camera slowly zooms in on them as their inner thoughts are revealed to the audience. In Norman’s case, we are made to understand that the “mother” personality has fully taken over (spoiler?) and that he has become completely untethered to reality. Likewise, in Serenity, I believe we are supposed to infer that the act of murdering his stepfather, regardless of whether or not it was justified, has caused him to retreat within himself. Essentially, the more he “reconnects” with his virtual father the more cut off he will become to reality.

This is basically the twist of a certain Black Mirror episode, but instead of a holonovel/game, the program is a modeling simulation — calculating probabilities, suggesting possible outcomes, and informing decision-making in the real world. (I never watched it, but the finale of Enterprise takes place in one of these, in the holodeck of the Enterprise D during the events of the TNG episode "The Pegasus") That's what I keep gravitating to when I try to explain what the kid was trying to accomplish with this game — his way of asking his dead dad what to do about his abusive new dad. But the problem I keep coming up against is whether Dill has agency or whether he is essentially being controlled by his son. I just don't know if there is an internally consistent answer there.

I did like how Dill couldn’t get out of bed until the alarm clock went off, reinforcing one of the rules of the game.

Maybe. The movie seems to go out of its way to set the IRL kid up as "The Creator" (just look at that haloed close-up him sitting in the jail cell at the end), not "The Modder." Everything you describe could happen to an original game build. Plus, this movie really wants to explore the whole God-creation-personhood aspect, which I feel like relies somewhat on the IRL kid being the creator.

If the game didn’t want Baker to kill the stepdad at the beginning, why did all the NPCs talk about the terrible things the stepdad did? After Baker tells The Rules who changed the game and why, The Rules agrees to help him kill. So why do the NPCs suddenly switch to encouraging him to fish? Shouldn’t there behaviors be reversed?

When Catherine (Diane Lane) visits Baker at his house/storage container, it starts with a wide exterior shot. She says she’s looking for her cat. When they both go inside, the camera returns to the same exterior shot and the cat has suddenly appeared. I thought this might be a reference to the glitching black cat in The Matrix; a sign of changed or broken code.

Does the boy kill him self at the end to be with his dad?

Not a criminal law attorney, but anyone here think Patrick could get away with defense of another? Looking at the laws of Florida, assuming Patrick lives in Florida, I think his actions may constitute defense of another. The rule says you can defend yourself or another with deadly force of you reasonably believe that such conduct is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself/herself or to another. Here, his mother was getting beaten and being told, “I’ll put you in a hole.” Through a child’s perspective and experience with this step father, he could reasonably believe deadly force was necessary. The only issue is he was playing the game for who knows how long before he acted, and he seemingly was hyping himself up to do the kill. This doesn’t make it seem like self defense of another if he had time to think about his action to come, then it comes off as preplanned vs spontaneous self defense. In general, defense of another is usually applied when a person sees another person in danger and steps in to help. Self defense is a bit easier to explain as you can generally only strike back if the attack is continuous. Basically, it’s not self defense if you hit someone after they punch you and walk away. To me, this situation isn’t exactly the same knowing he essentially planned it out.

Hm I'm not sure I agree with this. Oh sure, there'll be haters of everything, but I think "the best films of all-time" should be fairly set in stone, give or take. I guess I'm in between subjectiveness and objectiveness here; I think we can answer this question, but it maybe isn't definable. That's a wishy-washy statement, I know. Maybe I'm wrong and it's unanswerable. Still, the question isn't "how many awards did The Godfather win?" it's "why is this so good?" That's where the focus should be. Wouldn't the list be better if "consider how many major awards it won" was replaced with "has an innovative structure and a story filled with remarkable characters" or "builds a cinematic universe" or whatnot? My takeaway from Unspooled is that perhaps the 'general consensus' that led to the AFI results needs some shaking up and modernization, and I think the criteria is a big part why.

I get what you're saying, but it seems like a matter of semantics and subjectivity to me. What is the difference between a really good movie and a great movie? Is my 5 stars the same as your 5 stars? If not, is there an exchange rate? All of this is a matter of semantics, and if we're talking about weird ways to think about art, using stars and superlative adjectives and lists fits the bill in my book. Experiencing art is intrinsically personal and is often something that can't be quantified or ranked or even put into words. We want to because order tends to be more pleasing than chaos (or maybe that's just a hint of my OCD tendencies), but feelings are chaos and art is about feelings. To this end, I strongly disagree with your conclusion that the fact each person generally only loves about 20% of these films is a failure of the criteria used to select them. It isn't. It's a failure that is intrinsic in the endeavor itself. How did the criteria not give us a set of 100 universally adored and lauded movies? Because there is no set of 100 universally adored and lauded movies! You might think only 20% of these films are great, and I might think only 20% of these films are great, but it's not the same 20%. Sure, there are a few films that are going to be agreed upon by almost everyone, like Citizen Kane, and there are probably some people who think every film on the list is deserving of its position, but the vast majority of people are going to agree with some picks and disagree with others. (To bastardize an Abe Lincoln quote, "You can please all of the people with some of the movies, and you can please some of the people with all of the movies, but you can't please all of the people with all of the movies.") So if someone is going to attempt this foolhardy mission of quantifying the unquantifiable and universalizing the personal, it makes sense to try to wring every possible droplet of objectivity out of this extraordinarily subjective process, and the AFI's criteria seem like a pretty reasonable system to do that. But we, as listeners of this podcast, are not trying to be objective, and that's fine. One of the community things I enjoy most about this podcast/project is seeing how different everyone's personal lists are. I see that a perk rather than a flaw. I objectively see the importance of E.T. and how many people love it and to some degree I understand why they love it, but I don't, so I put it at 41 out of 52. So yeah, be as subjective as you want; that's part of the fun. But again, in terms of trying to make things objective, I think the AFI's criteria are solid. (Also, this isn't necessarily the context you meant, but I don't see how it's weird to consider other people's opinions about something when forming your own opinion, and that includes art, and it includes critics and industry professionals. Sometimes I see their points and it informs my opinion, and sometimes I think they're wrong, but I think it's natural to take those things into consideration.) Interesting! I'm not a fan of 2, but I do appreciate how 1 and 2 go together, with contrasting existential crises from Buzz and Woody respectively. In 1, Buzz realizes he isn't universally valued as unique, and in 2, Woody realizes that he is. And one reason I don't like 2 as much is that it felt like a bit of a retread, in that both films end with the main character realizing that their value lies in how much Andy loves them. So because they have the same emotional beats more or less, it kind of makes sense that either serves as a good intro to 3? I'd still love to hear from someone who started with 3. It's been a long time since I saw it, so I honestly don't know how well it works.

Correction: The kid did not make the game, but was modding it by adding in characters that represented his dad, mom and stepdad. That's explained when nerdlinger gets to Dill and tells him about the game being basically a bunch of minigames set within this island world, with fishing being one of the more popular ones and the favorite of the son. But with the son modifying the game so that he could play out this fantasy, the game was trying to combat that kind of intrusion by doing things like having the nerdlinger give Dill a uber-fish finder, the son of the store owner coming back to town because he was "lucky," and even Djimon's character paying some locals to beat the stepdad up so he didn't come to the boat. With modding, it can be done so much that the game becomes unplayable because it get's bogged down with extra data and items that it didn't forsee being a part of its coding, and what this kid was doing was basically loading a code from Grand Theft Auto complete with murderous spouses, escorts, drunken tourists, and the ability to kill, into a game of Club Penguin, and the code of the original game was trying to level itself out as to not become unplayable, before whatever gobbledeegook about the kid being god was said to nerdlinger and he decided to help out Dill. As for the various M. Night clues there were quite a bit of them, and they were pretty easy to see knowing the twist beforehand. Things like the opening scene being an aerial run over the ocean up to Dill's boat was a bad opening cutscene, the camera pans were laggy changes in camera angle due to the modifications to the game, the side mission of finding Diane Lane's missing cat, the offering of better bait or equipment were microtransactions, and how all of the townspeople are NPCs in that they just talk solely in mission prep dialogue to the fact that there are only really maybe 10 people on the island and never more than 4 on screen at once. Even scenes where Dill isn't present like the ones with the mom and stepdad in the hotel are pulled from expansive sandbox games like GTA and Assassin's Creed where expository scenes are shown to the player outside of their character to give them a bit more backstory before moving forward in the game. What I found funny was that this movie is basically a film version of a second opinion that was read during the Jack Frost episode where the writer wrote that they put a snowman together in the hopes their dead dad comes back like the dad in that film. It's like Stephen Knight heard that and thought, "I can make that movie but I'll update it with video games."

While wearing a t-shirt with a bulls-eye on it as he lists all of his allergies.

The way they served up the step-dad to be killed was particularly hilarious to me. Here they were, alone on a boat...He had been beat up all to hell, was drunk as shit, was being a complete belligerent asshole, talked direct shit about Dill's kid, and there was even a line somewhere about the only police being out of town. The only thing that would have made it better was for him to have gotten accidentally covered in chum while counting a huge wad of cash and spouting off about having no parents or siblings.

I posit to this forum that there never is a moment where Dill actually becomes sentient. By necessity, he is always doing exactly what his coding as a video game character tells him to do. The salesman character says that the game used to be just about fishing, but then slowly became about committing this murder, which implies that the IRL kid has changed the focus of a game he's creating. Fair enough -- the evolution of a piece of work is a natural part of game development, and artistic creation in general. But if the game has been changed, so too must Dill's coding also have been changed. The murder of the stepdad avatar is the game's new critical path. If Dill and Plymouth Island and all the NPCs are in existence, this means the game must be turned on and someone is playing. If not, it can only be that these characters are just alive and functioning of their own freewill in the game, in spite of what the player is having them do. And that is what is known as a "broken game" -- when the character doesn't do what the player tells them to, the game is broken. What this must mean, therefore, is that Dill's "coming into awareness" is part of what he's programmed to do as part of the course of gameplay. He is still doing what his code is stating he should do. This is classic determinist philosophy. Freewill is predicated by one's ability to choose and then act upon that choice. If the choice is made for you and if your actions are not of your volition, you don't have freewill. IRL kid is essentially the god/creator of the in-game universe. Nothing happens in the game that the creator doesn't know will happen. If Dill's awakening is something god knew would happen, then it isn't really sentience. He's still just doing what he's programmed to do. He has the illusion of freewill, but not actual freewill because he doesn't transcend his programming. If Dill has any consciousness, it can only be in a Get Out-type scenario, where Dill is aware of himself and somehow still being carried along on the game's path against his will or better judgment.

The news broadcast is outside the matrix.

But that's in the game. Maybe the kid coded this into the game to cover his tracks????? Or that's the reason and the anagram is just for us watching the movie. If that's the case, I'm really over people having anagram names in movies.

They explain this that is close to the name of one of his favorite teachers? First McConaughey says this and then the news broadcasts quotes a teacher with a name that is a riff on Baker Dill.

Addressing Baker Dill being sentient: He does seemingly start to become sentient when he pulls the knife on the 2 drunk guys in the beginning. That's the beginning of things starting to go awry. I assume that when Baker pulled the knife, this could also be the moment that the kid got the knife in meatspace? We as the audience know something is off because that's when the salesman first misses Baker, he's very confused as to why Baker isn't there at the coast. He should have been there according to the strict predictability of video game timing. Something changed. I guess you could assume this is when the kid started to code the game into the new game: killing the stepdad. ? Before this time, it was just Baker being the player in the fishing game. I don't think Baker has the literal spirit of the kid's father, but I do think this is the "eaten the forbidden fruit" moment. Whether he has free will is unclear and doubtful, but I do think he became sentient.

But then they couldn't have given us the gem: "a hooker who can't afford hooks."

Wow I can't believe I have been calling John "Paul" all this time and no one corrected me. I sort of thought when the son showed up in the video game that it meant he was also dead? (I wasn't sure if he had killed himself or perhaps had been killed for his crimes?) I'll admit to checking out towards the end. Mostly my take away from this is that maybe I should take a vacation to Florida. And then I googled if it was filmed in Florida and it was not. It was filmed in Mauritius, and I was like, Oh I should go there. But it's kind of far and then I ended up looking in the Caribbean. Long story short, I went to Antigua in May.