517: Emma Smith: My Story

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Speaker 1 So here's a weird fucking moment where it occurred to me that at this point in the movie, Emma is telling Julia the story of Joey telling her the story of Moroni telling him the story of Nephi carving out the story of the Book of Mormon.

Speaker 1 And I'm currently telling the listeners about that, right? So this is deep. We're deep now.
And that whole thing, the movie, is like, oh, we're winning right now. We're establishing

Speaker 1 a clear trail of evidence on this. Yeah.

Speaker 1 God-awful

Speaker 1 movie. Movie.
Movies.

Speaker 1 Welcome back to the Gamcast, where each week we sample another selection from Christian Cinema because I'm pretty sure that technically makes us a true crime podcast, and those are popular.

Speaker 1 I'm your host, No Illusions, and sitting 700 miles to my immediate left is my good friend Heath. And right, Heath, welcome back.
Mormon Movie Month Capper. Let's do it.
Screen meeting. Yeah, possibly.

Speaker 1 Oh, well, relax. It's Mormons, though.
Yeah, right, right, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Acoustic. Well, yeah, there you go.
For fuck's sake.

Speaker 1 I want 500 virgins to sing this intro screen in an air where it doesn't count. And that voice comes from 900 miles to my northeast and belongs to my bad friend, Eli Bosnick.

Speaker 1 Eli, how are you this fine afternoon, sir? I don't think the members of the Morbin Tabernacle Choir have to be virgins. I don't know.
I hate the virgins.

Speaker 1 They're virgins. Come on.
If you fucked a member of the Morbin Tabernacle Choir or Donnie and Marie. Right, man.

Speaker 1 So tell us, Heath, what will we be breaking down today?

Speaker 1 We watched Emma Smith, My Story.

Speaker 1 It's the story of Catholic God, I'm pretty sure, getting mad about Joseph Smith starting a cult. Oh, interesting.

Speaker 1 And then that God proceeding to murder everyone in his family one by one for 90 straight minutes. And nobody takes the hint that, like, nobody takes the hint.
Stop being a cult, man.

Speaker 1 I'm kill so many of your family. It's like a fucking horror movie.
Yeah, right. Yes.
But the killer is Emma Smith's womb.

Speaker 1 And Eli, how bad was this movie? Well, if you love the Joseph Smith pseudo history, we get every single Mormon movie month.

Speaker 1 And I know you do, podcast listener, but you wish we got more movies about what a great husband Bill Clinton was,

Speaker 1 you

Speaker 1 will love this movie. Okay.
So I just want to sort of get, no, you know what? I'll save it for my best part. Okay, I'm going to save it for my best.
All right. Yep.
Yep. We got that coming around too.

Speaker 1 So, Heath, is there anything you would like to nominate this one for being the best to be the worst at first? Yeah, I'm going to go with Best Worst, failing the Bechdel test. Right.

Speaker 1 So, again, the title of the movie is Emma Smith, My Story.

Speaker 1 And it's the story of Joseph Smith

Speaker 1 told by one of his like 40 wives.

Speaker 1 The entire movie is framed as Emma talking to her adult daughter, Julia, and still I don't think it ever passes the goddamn band managers

Speaker 1 they have a narration scenario outside of the universe where it's supposed to be just two women talking and they fail yes they do if one of them had called a timeout to take a shit

Speaker 1 out test but no

Speaker 1 so all right so i was going to go with best worst p l according to imdb this movie made 881 000 on a five million dollar budget

Speaker 1 the opening weekend was under a hundred grand and by by the way, that's not, that doesn't represent a failure, right?

Speaker 1 That represents how much money the Mormon churches decided it is worth to have this bullshit version of their history on film somewhere, right? It was worth $4.1 million to them. They can afford it.

Speaker 1 That's a

Speaker 1 good absolute, it's so funny because whenever we do a Mormon movie month, someone will be like, oh, they must be running out of Mormon movies by now. Podcast listener.

Speaker 1 We could do a whole other podcast of Mormon movies. Now, we would lose Heath Enright to the demon that is suicide on week three.

Speaker 1 So I could, I could barely keep him in for two out of the five weeks in a month. It's not a good idea for company cohesion to do Mormon movie month, the podcast, but just know the materials.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, it's not because we're running out of films. I'm going to go with best, worst.

Speaker 1 Are they going to talk about it? Because look.

Speaker 1 Even in the modern sense of Joseph Smith, which is that he was like kind of a flawed prophet who wasn't perfect and made some mistakes,

Speaker 1 nobody in the Mormon church says Joseph Smith was a good husband.

Speaker 1 The only thing he is more than a bad husband is a liar, right? It is just provably, demonstrably, that he is one of the worst husbands in history.

Speaker 1 And most of the incredibly well-maintained communications between Emma Smith and Joseph Smith are: dear Joe, God, you fucking suck. Love Emma.

Speaker 1 So, to make the truly, like the monitor, the Bill Clinton joke is actually not apropos. He is a significantly worse husband than Bill Clinton.
And I'm counting what we know about the Epstein files.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. Well, the thing is, is that when you wrote, Are They Gonna Talk About It? There was like 31 things you could have meant by that, right?

Speaker 1 Over and over again in this movie, because I know the history, I'm going like, oh, the movie's not gonna.

Speaker 1 I'm going to mention why they're doing that, why they're running from that state, why they're upset at that bank. Nothing.

Speaker 1 nothing yeah because the movie has to spend the whole time skipping the joseph smith files every time right they come up and you pod the movie right pam bondi dives in front of them like uh kevin coster and the bodyguard yeah so all right well i'll tell you what we were just about to start the breakdown but then you doubted us so it sank further into the podcast so now we have to do an ad instead It's your fault.

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Speaker 1 All right, everybody, welcome to the first ever Writer's Room meeting for our Emma Smith biopic.

Speaker 1 I am so excited to tell the story of the first lady of Mormonism. Right? She endured so much.
Exactly. Like how at first her father didn't approve of Joseph.

Speaker 1 Well, her father... never approved of Joseph.
Well, I'm sure he does now, like, you know, in heaven.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I guess so. And we could talk about the Mormons being driven out of New York and Ohio and Missouri and Illinois.
Right, yep, right. For no reason, though.
For no reason.

Speaker 1 We're going to say it was for no reason? Well, it's, you know, because, you know, people hated them. Right.
Right. But why are we saying people hated them? No reason.
I feel like. That's what I said.

Speaker 1 Okay, but what about the revelation of plural marriage? That was like a really huge part of Emma's life. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we can't really get around that one, can we? No, we cannot. Okay, so I'll tell you what, let's dedicate two sentences to how hard it was for Emma when he married other women.
And children.

Speaker 1 The children, those were just spiritual marriages. No, they weren't.
No, they weren't.

Speaker 1 And we're back for the breakdown, and we're going to open up on production companies that cancel out. Candlelight productions and morning dew pictures.
That's a fizzle. And hey, you know what? It is.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, so this is a movie brought to us by the Joseph Smith Jr. and Emma Hale Smith Historical Society.

Speaker 1 Yeah, in case you're wondering about the objectivity we're going to get.

Speaker 1 Hey, if you're ever having a bad day at your job, imagine what it's like to grow up loving history your whole life, thinking maybe I want to become a historian, and then becoming a professional liar for another bad dude's marriage for your whole life.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. No kidding.

Speaker 1 It's also, it's funny that like a Mormon movie is going to open up with a quote about how when you're kids, you don't see things how they really are, but then when you grow up, you do.

Speaker 1 Kids believe in insane, weird lies. Enjoy our Mormon movie about what we say at our historical society named after famous Mormons about the revelation that Joseph Smith had at 14.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 So, so okay, so we get our VO, and there's going to be like a kind of a competing narration thing here because we're going to get narration from old Emma Smith, but also from her adult daughter, Julia.

Speaker 1 Yes. And we get a narration from her adult daughter, Julia.
I'm going to say 15 minutes before who the fuck she is is introduced to the movie. So I was very impressed by that.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Hello, I'm not Emma Smith, but who am I, Batman? Follow my wings, and you may someday see. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm literally sitting there looking at a genealogical tree going, okay, well, if they're counting the adopted kids, this could be Julia, or maybe one of the sons has a high-pitched voice.

Speaker 1 They had me googling and looking. I learned who Julia Murdoch Smith is, and I learned like who Louis Bideman is, and some like weird details about all of them.
Yep. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, it's a good play if that's what they're going for.

Speaker 1 And that's the thing that you always have to keep in mind when you're watching these Mormon movies is that this is Marvel movies for Kara, right? Like, she just had no idea.

Speaker 1 Like, to them, they're like, oh, fuck, it's Julia. Holy shit.
Whoa. I love her fucking, the thing she does with the cards.

Speaker 1 So, but, but she goes, she's like, you know, mom could sense that dad was going to die in jail. And I'm like, everyone who ever met that man could sense he was eventually going to die in jail.

Speaker 1 Joe Smith was about to get killed by a mob, like every day of his adult. Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1 So close every day. Everybody knew.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, but she's like, you know, but when he died, my mom was left as a widow with five children. And that's when Lewis Bideman cozied up to her, the son of a bitch.

Speaker 1 I guess he stepped out on Emma and left her with another kid from his side piece. Yeah.
And then the side piece was kind of like stupid or whatever, couldn't handle it and had.

Speaker 1 had to give the kid to Emma to take over. Yes.
So the side piece was Nancy Abercrombie, I believe, again, in my weird Googling.

Speaker 1 And Nancy Abercrombie, maybe not a great mom, but smart enough to smudge up the little boy for excess sympathy and then

Speaker 1 bring the kid over to Emma. Wright just squeezed him through a couple of fucking chimneys on his way.
Yeah, he comes in there looking like a pig pen in Charlie Brown or whatever.

Speaker 1 And the movie really plays to us that Emma Smith had no previous experience with her husband's cheating on her. Yes, right.
No, exactly.

Speaker 1 Totally new territory for her. But she took in the kid.
She took in the her husband's love child and

Speaker 1 she was so saintly that she hired that kid's mom to work at her hotel. Wow.
Okay. That feels more like a spite hire than like a really good person.

Speaker 1 That was like, all right, and now you watch me raise your fucking child. Well, it is shit.

Speaker 1 And the thing is, is that like this was after Joseph Smith died and like the city of Nauvoo had pretty much emptied out and she owned almost the whole city.

Speaker 1 Like, so she could have just given the lady a place to stay, but she's like, no, you work for me now.

Speaker 1 Like, I get it, but like, let's just be honest. That was spite.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then we get the title. It says, Emma Smith, My Story.

Speaker 1 And Julia the voiceover goes, you know, my mother was always taking in strays. I was one of them.
And this is where we sort of get the framing of the movie, right?

Speaker 1 So the Julia the voiceover lady has come back to take care of mom and her dotage after her second marriage fell apart. Right.

Speaker 1 And they're going to like sit there and reminisce about their lives together with no connective tissue other than that's what happens next in the movie. In a podcast narration studio.
Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1 All they need is the can headphones and everything's complete.

Speaker 1 Now, again, if you know anything about Smith family drama, you also understand that having Julia be like the doting companion to Emma is a little like if you did a documentary about the Menendez parents and the narrator was one of the Menendez brothers.

Speaker 1 This is a person who tried to escape her family into a different religion twice.

Speaker 1 Twice.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but you'll never know that from this movie. Also, like, this is where we introduce the fact that old Emma will speak only in wisdom nuggets.

Speaker 1 Yes, I wrote, mom speaks entirely in slogans from the back of a bag of chocolate cheese.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But a couple times she fucks it up. Like right here, she's like, lilacs are beautiful, just

Speaker 1 like dying people. Yes.

Speaker 1 Like, all right, mom, like, you fucked up that toll house one. You ever see a sign with the cracker barrel and you wonder, who the fuck wants that in their house?

Speaker 1 Emma Smith. Emma Smith is who wants that in her house, apparently.
And she's going to tell us that. So yeah, but ultimately, like she flashes, we flashback, right?

Speaker 1 We fall into our first flashback, which is Pennsylvania in 1813. Now, this is long before she met Joseph Smith.

Speaker 1 There's a legend amongst Mormons that her dad was straying from the faith when she was a little kid. So she prayed to God to give him faith again, and then he came back to the religion.

Speaker 1 So we're going to see that play out. One of those famous atheist pioneers of the 1800s.
Yes, right, of 1813 America. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But yes, but we start this off with him going like, there'll be no prayer in my house, little seven-year-old girl. Damn it.
God does not intervene in our lives and is, in fact,

Speaker 1 going to slap that Bible out of your hand. This is 1813, Pennsylvania, motherfucker.
We are atheists. So you have to make a swastika cake for a Nazi if you're going to be able to do that.

Speaker 1 Right, you have to.

Speaker 1 That's how we are. So, yeah, but dad overhears her praying, and that's enough to change him back into the religion he was born into and almost certainly was his entire life, right?

Speaker 1 Because God listened to her prayer. And then we speed cut to grown-up Emma meeting Joseph Smith.

Speaker 1 Now, obviously, they're going to revise a lot of Joseph Smith's history. That's the whole point of the movie.

Speaker 1 But one of the most important revisions that they want to make here is that Joseph Smith was a hard-working guy that was always working real hard, right?

Speaker 1 So every time we see him, he's like covered in sweat from a hard day's work. Joseph Smith never did a hard day's work in his fucking life, right? That was his defining characteristic.

Speaker 1 But we see him, he's holding the shovel

Speaker 1 and here's the best part because the way they actually met right because we assume that he was hard at work in the potato fields the way they actually met is he was doing his treasure con

Speaker 1 on her dad's property when he met Emma. Yes.
That's why he has the shovel. He's had a hard day of going, nah, you doubted me.
And there's no more.

Speaker 1 But here's the thing, too, is that he didn't actually do the digging, right? He was the guy who looked at the magic rock and told him where the treasure was going to be. His buddies did the digging.

Speaker 1 So even that is overselling. What a piece of shit.
Yeah, he should have just been holding a clipboard instead. Yes, right.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 But yeah, so, but we learn here that her dad did not approve of her budding romance with this obvious con artist, right?

Speaker 1 Because like at this point, like he had conned her dad into a place to stay for like however many weeks they could pull off the no, no, it's down here somewhere act.

Speaker 1 And then he had moved on to another farm, right? Once his dad sent Joseph Smith packing, he moved on to a different farm and started running the same con. That's when this part of the movie is set.

Speaker 1 Yes. So, but of course we get a falling in love montage that is just damn near every falling in love cliche alphabetically.

Speaker 1 She outskips him in stones. I want him to start hitting her.
Don't know. Hey, the prophet of Mormonism, really bad at skipping stones.
Really bad at the stone.

Speaker 1 It's not a huge deal, but like he's coming in way too high at the

Speaker 1 list.

Speaker 1 He gets two hops. You accidentally get two hops.
Right, right. But yeah, so she, but she outskips him.
She outplays him in chess because he's an idiot.

Speaker 1 Like, I know, maybe Emma's real, real smart, but also he's an idiot.

Speaker 1 Hey, the prophet of Mormonism, not good at chess either. I think that's a little worse.
Yeah, right. Really wanted a flashcut to God being like, what are you doing, man? Protect your bishop.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, but then they have a snowball fight and they learn to dance and blah blah blah more love because they ride horses together she's also better at that than he is he pushes her on a swing yeah and i gotta say emma smith for what is this 1813ish pennsylvania oh no we're a little bit further ahead sorry like 1820 something pennsylvania god he keep on yeah all right no i'm with it i'm with it she spends a lot of time on a very well coifed like hair helmet thing she's got going on yes all the time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, she looks like the predator was like a judge in England all at the same time.

Speaker 1 Well, what's funny is because there's like three fucking pictures of her, and she has her hair like that in all the pictures.

Speaker 1 So they're like, She always wore her hair like that, even to ride horses, you know? Always looked like a raggedy and all. Yes, right, right.
So, okay, but that montage ends with them.

Speaker 1 She's like, he's helping her spool thread, and she's talking about how her dad still doesn't approve, and you know, he won't let her marry him.

Speaker 1 i get like it's tough when your job is podcaster yeah right yeah when you're talking to dad about something like that be like i'm gonna be an eventual cult leader gold ghost finder dig guy not not great for talking to dad billion well after i'm dead they'll have billions it's crazy how much money they'll have but yeah but they ultimately decide fuck dad's approval they're just gonna get married anyway

Speaker 1 yes they they get married without her dad's permission And look, I know through like a modern feminist lens, fuck it, marry whoever you want, but that was also an incredibly shameful thing at the time.

Speaker 1 So it speaks to the revisionism of this movie that Mormons have already settled on, but she was just one of those 1800s feminists

Speaker 1 who didn't like to be told what to do. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Also, we should probably point out that because so little happens in this movie that we haven't talked about on the show before, the closed captioning is so weirdly lazy in this movie.

Speaker 1 At this point, the older Emma comes up in narration and she says, When you're in love, you come to rely on each other.

Speaker 1 And that's translated in the closed captioning as, When you're in love, you come to be inaudible, inaudible.

Speaker 1 Well done, guys. Okay, so now we're going to jump ahead to 1827.
It's we're in New York. They're sitting around.

Speaker 1 Emma and Joseph are sitting around the Smith family table talking about how much physical labor Joseph Smith always does and the family in general.

Speaker 1 He sure is hardworking. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Darling, is that the sweat of your brow? I see.

Speaker 1 Why, yes, it is. Yeah, right.
You're a feminist. I was just fixing my bootstraps.
Yeah, right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 They get done eating and he goes, let's go do more chores, us hardworking Smiths that always work hard.

Speaker 1 So they go to leave, but on the way out, dad stops to tell Emma how hot she is or whatever, but in a nice way. He's like, you know, my son did good and married a hot chick.
Right.

Speaker 1 So, and then once all the men leave, there's a moment here where Emma sits there talking to Joey's mom about Joey, obviously, last week passed the Bechdel test. No, that was crazy.

Speaker 1 But mom explains that, like, you know, the family is fractured by not all having the same religious beliefs.

Speaker 1 And she turns to Emma and she says, but, you know, I keep praying that we'll all find one faith and I know God will answer my prayers one of these days.

Speaker 1 Now, what we're supposed to see is, well, yes, Mormonism will be the fulfillment of that promise, but the reality of it is that there's like a 90-year-old lady going, one of these days, God will listen to me.

Speaker 1 And that's fucking hilarious. Yeah.
Also, to be clear, the religion they're going to settle on is Joseph's con. Yes, right, right.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Because lest we forget our history, the Smiths, the family, were a family of con people. Yes.
Right? They're the fucking lies of Lach Lamora of 1800s, upstate New York.

Speaker 1 And the reason they didn't get along is that his family were like, That's a bad con, Joe. We should just keep doing the treasure one.

Speaker 1 And he was like, I'm telling you guys, we're going to have a trillion dollars in Utah.

Speaker 1 Right. But like at this moment, he's got all he's got is I'm digging up a gold trapper keeper at some point eventually.
And it hasn't even happened yet. Right.

Speaker 1 So, and then we back out of the flashback long enough for like Emma, like old Emma, she makes a point about the power of prayer and how prayer fixes everything.

Speaker 1 And Julia's like, hey, you know, my life sucks right now. So if God could fix it, he's been a real dick about it.
But Emma's like, well, no, it's God's fault when it's good.

Speaker 1 When it's bad, it's your fault, though. You know, when a child doesn't want to be held and she's like, yeah, real pain in the ass.
She's like, that's you. You're like, that's for God.

Speaker 1 A little problematic pumpkin inside a problematic pumpkin. That was impressive.
So, okay, so meanwhile, in the flashback, Joey's telling Emma about when his brother Alvin died.

Speaker 1 And I guess the minister said he was going to go to hell because he wasn't baptized. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, one thing that we should point out, and if there is like an overarching theme of this movie, it is that a lot of people credit Emma for influencing Joseph.

Speaker 1 Well, sorry, a lot of people credit Emma for influencing God, who eventually spoke to Joseph,

Speaker 1 about the idea of eternal families. So, they're planting the seeds of that here, right? Yes.

Speaker 1 Which is the like, well, I just can't imagine imagine God would ever make us go to heaven without our families, which we should point out in the early 20th century was one of the major appealing things about Mormonism.

Speaker 1 It's the God forever family. Right, right.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, but they talk about that. And he takes her out to the spot, like in the woods where he originally met Jesus and God,

Speaker 1 right? When he was a 14-year-old who was supposed to be doing his chores at the time.

Speaker 1 And like Julia, like as the voice of the viewer, I guess, comes in, like the older Julia comes in out of the flashback, talking over it and goes, like, hey, maybe dad, who was 14 at the time, like, didn't really meet God and Jesus in a forest clearing while he was supposed to be doing his church.

Speaker 1 Maybe he was lying or mistaken. And Emma's like, shut up.
No, no,

Speaker 1 it was true. Julia keeps doing that, jumping in and being like, I think you were all lying to me like so much.

Speaker 1 And Emma has to be like, we're doing a Mormon movie. Shut up.
He had truthy eyes. Fucking hell.
Yeah, right, right. His, you could, I, you didn't look in his eyes and see how truthful they were.

Speaker 1 Shut up. Julia, get out of the podcast.
Right. Yeah.
I really wanted Julia Heckles to continue throughout the movie. Like, he's lifting up the plates, and Julia's just like, 200 pounds.
Yes.

Speaker 1 At least 200 pounds. Right.
Well, so, okay.

Speaker 1 So here's a weird fucking moment where it occurred to me that at this point in the movie, Emma is telling Julia the story of Joey, telling her the story of Moroni, telling him the story of Nephi, carving out the story of the Book of Mormon.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I'm currently telling the listeners about that, right? So this is deep. We're deep now.
And that whole thing, the movie is like, oh, we're winning right now. We're establishing

Speaker 1 a clear trail of evidence on this. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Can I also say what's so obvious from this movie is that Emma wasn't part of a con.

Speaker 1 And there's a little bit of sadness to that.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 when you read between the lines of like the Smith family, you can see the moments where like the brothers were playing along.

Speaker 1 And then like, here's this person started playing along, and then this guy gets in the con, and Emma's just sitting at the bottom of the hill while Joseph pretends to dig up golden plates, being like, Hope he's warm up there with his real golden plates that I actually believe he has right now, right?

Speaker 1 Right, so yeah, so we see that we see a brief shot of him carrying the 200-pound golden plates under one arm around or whatever, swinging them. It's the best in the narration.

Speaker 1 You get Julia being like, wait, wait, wait, mom,

Speaker 1 you were there when he found the golden plates?

Speaker 1 And mom has to be like, I did not. Almost.
Well, I saw them, right? He let me shuffle, and then I saw the golden plates after that.

Speaker 1 The show is called the scathing atheist, but we're all equal. How could he do that if he let me shuffle? It doesn't make sense.
Otherwise, it's real.

Speaker 1 I get to rap the ads.

Speaker 1 I also, I love that there's like, as she's like waiting for him to show up with the gold plates, you can hear like these like demon voices in the woods going, he's not a prophet. It's all bullshit.

Speaker 1 You know, so that the viewer who's thinking that is like, oh, that's the devil whispering to me in my head, right? Turns around. It's your dad.
Dad. Oh, sorry.
I just don't want to come for a visit.

Speaker 1 Her dad hating Joe is the best. He's the healing of the rule so much throughout.
They try to soft play it, but her dad hated Joe every second forever of his entire life. And you got to,

Speaker 1 his dying wish was, fuck Joe. Like, that was his, like, his dying words were like, also, Joseph Smith is a piece of shit.
He's a a fucking line con artist.

Speaker 1 You're converting to the religion of that novel he's working on? That's nothing. He doesn't have anywhere.

Speaker 1 So then we cut to the fucking ruffians that are planning to pre-persecute Joseph.

Speaker 1 There's even a shot where, like, there's a guy like lifting a gun to shoot Joseph from like eight and a half feet away. And another guy puts his hand on it and goes, not yet.

Speaker 1 Smoke bomb. Yeah, right.
So,

Speaker 1 but then we get, we see a pitchfork mob coming after his golden plates, but they cleverly hid them in a barrel. Nobody thought of that.
We get Isaac yelling at Emma.

Speaker 1 And of course, and this is a big theme of this movie as well, right?

Speaker 1 Because this movie will never admit why anybody hated Joseph Smith, why people hated the Mormons, why Isaac Hale, Emma's dad, didn't like Joseph. Wright.

Speaker 1 So in this moment, what we hear him say is, you married a dreamer, Emma. And I'm like, I don't think that was his issue with the government.

Speaker 1 I think he's that word was a harsher language word in reality if anything similar happened. Convicted conman.
Yeah, yes, there you go. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he also points out, he's like, also, and your husband is too stupid to read a book. How the fuck is he going to translate a golden Bible?

Speaker 1 And the voiceover is like,

Speaker 1 he was, though. He was too stupid to read a book.

Speaker 1 That actually proves that it's magic because he was that stupid. But somehow

Speaker 1 the gift of God write something as beautiful as the Book of Mormon.

Speaker 1 Alma? Are you kidding me? Unless they had the gift of Shakespeare himself. Yeah, right.
So, yeah, so, but, and then we start seeing the part where like Martin Harris is

Speaker 1 like acting as his scribe. And this movie never shows the fact that Martin Harris can't see the plates.
No. Right.

Speaker 1 Like the, like eventually when they, later on in the movie, when, when she's scribing, they'll, they'll show that.

Speaker 1 But at this point in the movie, they leave out the fact that Martin Harris wasn't allowed to see what Joseph was looking at at the time. Because, of course, that's an eight-year-old lie.

Speaker 1 That's the kind of lie an eight-year-old would tell you, and an eight-year-old would be able to call bullshit on it. So the movie doesn't want to show you that yet.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and a Mormon apologist will argue that Joseph didn't have his face in a hat for the entire translation, which is true.

Speaker 1 A lot of the time there was a curtain, but he had his face in a hat for some of the translation. Most of it, yes.

Speaker 1 I would have depicted it in my movie is what I'm saying okay like just to be clear if your argument is our prophet didn't have his face in a hat the whole time the whole time

Speaker 1 you're starting in a bad

Speaker 1 that's a very weak starting position yes

Speaker 1 so okay so then we get Joey she said Emma's pregnant so Joey's singing and doting on her as he did as such a wonderful husband but then there's rain and bad music which means that the the baby doesn't make it.

Speaker 1 Right? Yeah. And she has to come up at this point and she's like, yeah, you know, for somebody specially favored by God, he killed a lot of our babies.
Like a lot.

Speaker 1 He killed a ton of our babies.

Speaker 1 And I guess since we're at rock bottom anyway, this is also the point in the movie. And this is one of the like Eli, you know, are they going to mention it moments?

Speaker 1 Are they going to talk about it moments? Right. Where they start talking about how Martin, how Martin wanted proof to show his wife of the golden Bible's power.

Speaker 1 And so against God's wishes, Joseph let Martin take the pages to show them to his wife and then lost the pages.

Speaker 1 Now, of course, again, if you've been listening to our show for a while, you know what really happened is Martin's wife stole them and said, regenerate one fucking page from this and I'll believe it.

Speaker 1 And Joseph couldn't do that because he was making it up as he went along, right? That's what really happened. This movie won't admit that and just says, oh, Martin lost it.

Speaker 1 He just, he spilled out of his car near the river. Yeah.
They don't even admit that they eventually got the pages back. Did they get the pages back? Yeah, no, she gives the pages back.

Speaker 1 And that's when Joseph is like, well, now we have to tell a different Nephites version of the story. Yeah, I thought it was because he couldn't reproduce them.

Speaker 1 Right. Like, I think the Mormon story on this is somebody who's like, okay, well.
You could just translate that again, right? Like, I guess the scribe would have said that to Joseph. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Joseph was like, yeah, no, totally. Hold on, hold on.
Bring, did you hear that? I I got another call from God. Just give me a second.
He said, scrap Lehi.

Speaker 1 I'm going to do like Nephi and Omni now instead. It's important.
So yeah, it's cool. It's fine that we lost

Speaker 1 completely different shit. Slightly different.
Yes, exactly. Yeah, because God's mad at me for letting you take the pages.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, so yeah, so, so, but again, like, it doesn't even make sense within this movie because the movie doesn't want to get into all of that shit because that makes it so obvious that it's a fucking lie.

Speaker 1 So the movie's just like, he's lost the pages.

Speaker 1 And then, like, us, the viewer, are like, well, yeah, but you're just, you're translating what was that a week of work if you're hustling 116 pages writing it out you know but yeah but but you know of course they're devastated and so emma prays like she's never prayed before joey goes to do very hard physical labor which he was known for doing a lot of damage

Speaker 1 They have this moment where like she comes out to the garden and she's like, you've been working straight for 93 hours, as you so often do. Please at least take a drink of water.

Speaker 1 She's like, don't want to drink of water. You want to work hard like I always do.
No,

Speaker 1 I'm too tireless and fastidious and hardworking. I'm too penitent.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 And everyone hates me for no reason.

Speaker 1 And I have a normal relationship with social media. And it's actually, if you think about it, it's Twitter's fault.
I had to quit.

Speaker 1 Twitter was bad. I remained good and had a chill time.

Speaker 1 But Emma comes out. She gives him some Bible wisdom and he learns the important lesson to always listen to the voices in his head, right? He'll never doubt those again.

Speaker 1 But eventually, so God forgives him and lets him start translating different pages, right? But now Emma is his scribe because fuck Martin and fuck his wife. You're bullshit.

Speaker 1 Also, Joseph can't translate or pee when you're looking, so we get to see the curtain between

Speaker 1 the plates and him and Emma as the scribe on the other side of the table. Well, and this is a moment where like they try to pretend that his ignorance proves he's being truthful, right?

Speaker 1 Because there's this moment where he's talking about the walls outside of Jerusalem, and he stops and he looks over at Emma and he goes, wait a minute, was Jerusalem a walled city? And she goes, yeah.

Speaker 1 And he goes, oh, I didn't know that. And we're supposed to be like, oh, wow, he was learning from the book he's translating, so he can't be making it up.
But like.

Speaker 1 Most large cities at the time were walled. That would be like guessing somebody's right-handed.
You know, you wouldn't like. Also, you just lied about what you're using.
Was it a red card? No? Okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I knew it was a black card. Yes, it's me.

Speaker 1 So, oh, like, there's another moment where they try to do the same thing. He's like, well, I don't know how to pronounce this name, so I'm just going to spell it out.

Speaker 1 But, like, this was supposed to be written in hieroglyphs. It's not a phonetic alphabet.
You can't spell out something written in, oh, it says owl, snake, upwards, snake. I mean, come on.

Speaker 1 The fuck

Speaker 1 are you talking about? To be clear, I would have loved if the name he was spelling out in that case was Anti-Nephi Lehi. Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 Emma's just like, hey, check again. Yes.
Yeah, no, no, no, check again.

Speaker 1 But yeah, but so, and then, of course, as he's doing that, like we get old Emma's voiceover going, I never doubted him, even a little bit.

Speaker 1 We sort of half-ass introduced Oliver Cowdrey as his other scribe now

Speaker 1 at this point. And that she didn't get to see the plate.
Yeah, she was very upset about that. Oh, this was the best.
Because, yeah, Emma's like, yeah, so Joey was definitely, I was, I was the scribe.

Speaker 1 I was definitely going to be allowed to see the plates. And then the movie has to be like, fuck, no, he was a dick about it.

Speaker 1 And then we find out that he let some other lady in town, Mary Whitmer, yeah, see the plates. And Emma's furious, which I get it.
Okay. It is actually the only story that is funnier than that.

Speaker 1 So this is Mary Whitmer and the ex-Mos in our audience will know how this story works. So he was conning the Whitmers.

Speaker 1 And of course, one of the Whitmers, if not both of the Whitmers, are two of the three witnesses, not the eight, not to be confused with the eight witnesses that

Speaker 1 just felt the plates through their pants. Right.
That were just like, yeah, no, it's there. I bet you.
I sure fucking bet. The three witnesses.
So one of them was a witner. Mary is their mom.

Speaker 1 And Mary walks into the house. This is the real story.

Speaker 1 Mary walks into the house one day and goes, Hey, I was just outside and there was an old man who turns out to be the angel Moroni and I saw the plates.

Speaker 1 And that is how Mary Whitmer saw them.

Speaker 1 She fucking improv gamed her way into Mormon history or forced them to yes and her yes and and they had to be like yes and Mary's in the fucking book now because they can't just go like oh bullshit Mary uh yeah she heath catching me in a lied her way into Mormon history

Speaker 1 oh yeah you're you didn't the text message didn't send but it would be on your side of the phone right no

Speaker 1 but this movie this movie from the perspective of Emma plays it as Mary being this like young hot woman

Speaker 1 and Emma's like you know that Mary? Yes. That bitch Mary got to see the plates.
How was it, Joseph? Does he look at the plates better than me? You don't even know how I look at the plates.

Speaker 1 She asked how big it was when the plates were hard. And I was wondering.

Speaker 1 But think about what a prick, like, just stop for a second and think about what a prick you'd have to be to do this to your wife as well, right?

Speaker 1 Like, like, your wife is devastated that she didn't get to see the plates while somebody else did. And you don't at any point go, come on, there's no fucking plates, lady.
You know, like, geez.

Speaker 1 That's the thing. There's a thing inside Joseph Smith's head that you have to empathize with, where he must have been up some nights being like, practicing, being like, Mary, it's all fake.

Speaker 1 But if you play alone, you can say that I shoved a plate inside you, but you got to be, she's not going to be cool. She's not going to be cool.

Speaker 1 All right. Well, this movie seems entirely unaware of how unspeakably cruel all this shit is when you know that Joseph Smith is lying.

Speaker 1 So we need a minute to process that, but we'll be back after that with even more of Emma Smith, my story.

Speaker 1 And then I said, the treasure will be here soon. Wow, Joseph, that's amazing.
Hello, boys. Can I get you anything?

Speaker 1 No, thank you, Mrs. Whitmer.
Thanks, Mom. We're good.
We're good. Okay, well, good luck on your

Speaker 1 little book. I'm a firm believer now that I've seen the plates.

Speaker 1 Sorry, Mary, what? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I just, I went out to milk the cows and I was approached by the angel Moroni.

Speaker 1 He said, Mary, you have been waiting so long and you've been so faithful that I'm going to show you the plates.

Speaker 1 And then he did.

Speaker 1 He showed you the plates. Really? Really? What did they look like?

Speaker 1 Golden plates with ancient writing on them.

Speaker 1 What kind of ancient writing? Oh, are we locking down what the writing on the plates look like? No.

Speaker 1 Ancient is fine. Great.
So, you know, just when you're listing the witnesses, quick reminder that I saw the plates too.

Speaker 1 Wouldn't want to leave me out because then people might think that I was lying about seeing the plates and there weren't any.

Speaker 1 Well, what a miraculous moment for Mormonism this is. Yes.
Yes. Miraculous indeed.
This is actually what happened in Mormon history. Yep.
Sure is. Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Fucking nonsense.

Speaker 1 And we're back for more of this shit, and we're going to rejoin the action with Isaac telling Emma what a transparent con artist Joseph is some more.

Speaker 1 He's the fucking best. So you haven't even seen the fucking plates?

Speaker 1 I wanted him to like start talking to Julia in the flash forward, flashback universes.

Speaker 1 You get it. She gets it, right?

Speaker 1 This future woman gets it. I don't look at the fucking plates.
I tell you that right now. Thank you, Julia.
Yeah, so Julia's like, come on, mom, you didn't, you never peaked.

Speaker 1 And so she's like, no, I never peeked to look at the plates. I could, I did lift.
It was heavy. I lifted it.
I felt them through the cloth a couple of times, but no, I, I trusted him.

Speaker 1 I'm like, well, then why did you lift it and feel it through the cloth?

Speaker 1 But okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Julia, get out of that fucking narration room.

Speaker 1 But then, okay, so back in the flashback, Joey brings home the first copy. of the Book of Mormon, right?

Speaker 1 And I just, fun fact, when they brought the Book of Mormon to the printer, they were like, This is the divine word of God. Don't change anything.

Speaker 1 And he's like, Do you want me to fix the atrocious spelling and punctuation at least? And they were like,

Speaker 1 Well, fuck, let's let me well, let me ask. I'll find out and I'll get back to you.

Speaker 1 God says that actually,

Speaker 1 that comma is optional. Yeah, so it doesn't

Speaker 1 strict rules. But yes, yeah, we'll run it through the Eli filter.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 So, Red Squiggle.

Speaker 1 So, but then we see like this montage. And this is, of course, this is part of Mormon movie bingo, right? Where like people are reading the Book of Mormon and just wowed by its brilliance.

Speaker 1 So apparently he gave Emma her copy. She read it cover to cover while standing up in the woods.

Speaker 1 This is a weird choice. It was the first copy.
It was like one copy. I wanted her to just grab the book and like.
tear out 116 pages and like dive into a pond or something.

Speaker 1 Well, I can reproduce those ones though but yeah but she reads it and she loves it and then we get joey telling a room full of people that if they each recruit five people who recruit five people below them it's free money then yeah right you can just sit back so but yeah we watch um some people get baptized joey baptizes his dad right

Speaker 1 papa smith gets gets baptized And that feels, I bet the Smiths,

Speaker 1 when their dad agreed to be in on the scam, that probably feels like me and Heath feel when we've been doing an unfunny bit for 11 minutes and Noah acknowledges it and we know it's going to make it into the edit, right?

Speaker 1 I can't row this boat through the syrup anymore. Neither can I.
Yay! I made it in the podcast.

Speaker 1 We're our own religion now.

Speaker 1 And then we're like, syrup, syrup, syrup. You can't cut it, syrup, syrup.
Yeah, right, right.

Speaker 1 And then we get, and this is another one of those Marvel movie moments, right? We get the elect lady revelation.

Speaker 1 So at a certain point after the church was all started, Emma was like, oh, you know, wow, like, doesn't seem like God's given me much to do.

Speaker 1 It'd be a shame if I was upset and told everybody about, you know, what happened when I looked under the cloth. And he's like, oh, you know what? God just decided that there is, you are an elect lady.

Speaker 1 Yes, you are. Yeah.
Emma was like, that bitch, fucking Mary, yes, handed her way into the book array. This is bullshit.
I'm the elect lady. What does that mean? Did you write it down? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Joseph is like, yeah, that's you, babe. That's totally.
You're the elect. You're the only wife for me forever.
That's right. Elect

Speaker 1 lady. Elect lady.
She's asking, she's like, what does that mean? He's like, well, it means you have to stop with all your backsass.

Speaker 1 That's literally in the revelation, by the way, that she couldn't talk back to him anymore. It's so free.
It's such transparent bullshit.

Speaker 1 You have to read it. I really recommend reading the the

Speaker 1 because if you sent it to your wife, she'd be like, hey, hon, what?

Speaker 1 Hey, fuck you, though. It's also so clear that he was like, and it's all the things that I think you're good at.
You can sing the hymns. Yep, you get to write the hymns, huh? I know.

Speaker 1 No keeping the money. You're being right.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Sign this NDA and you're in the boss. It's really your church.
I just, it's just my name on the deeds and everything. She's pregnant again.
We learned that here.

Speaker 1 she thinks maybe she's got twins in there this time

Speaker 1 they die too though they also die yeah but not yet

Speaker 1 she's like one of elon musk's like brood mares it's terrible

Speaker 1 how similar that is yeah so but then we we get her singing pregnantly out the window you know just thinking about her husband and all his wisdom and now they're moving to ohio no reason sometimes it's just nice there you just want to change an air cleveland live show was lovely.

Speaker 1 It was. It was.
It was

Speaker 1 very friendly city. Friendlier than I came to.
I see everybody.

Speaker 1 Rock City. Nope.

Speaker 1 But yeah. So, but her dad still doesn't.
We learn that her dad still doesn't approve of Joseph Smith. There's this moment where like she tries to give her mom a copy of the Book of Mormon.

Speaker 1 And her mom's like, oh, you know, I would love to

Speaker 1 read that.

Speaker 1 I have to wash my hair. I can't.
No, I can't.

Speaker 1 The dad would not allow it. He would never allow it.
You know how much your dad cares about religion, a topic we've already covered in this movie.

Speaker 1 That's why I can't read your boyfriend's novel.

Speaker 1 So she's like, this will be your last chance to be a Mormon. She's like, oh, no.

Speaker 1 And then she leaves. And the FO comes over and goes, I never saw my parents again.
I'm like, oh, my God. That's so fucked up.

Speaker 1 But okay, so now we arrive in Ohio. It's 1831.
Emma gives birth to the twins. They die.

Speaker 1 I can't tell if this midwife actress is just phoning it in or if she can tell that the twins aren't going to make it and she's really kind of wasting her time there. I don't know.

Speaker 1 Also, this is when Emma is baptized. And I'm so mad that we didn't get to see Emma's baptism because this is what happened during Emma's baptism, according to Wikipedia.

Speaker 1 Quote: Emma was baptized by Oliver Cowdrey on June 28th at 1830 in Colesville, New York, surrounded by a group of mocking people.

Speaker 1 The three of us just over there on the

Speaker 1 all right. So, but Joey like comforts her after her second and third miscarriages.

Speaker 1 They've got this element in this in the movie where like every time one of the babies does, she writes its name in the Bible or whatever. So we go back to that.
It's getting cramped. It is.

Speaker 1 And she's doing the margins now. Okay, this Bible is completely full, every margin full of dead babies by the end of this book, because God is just murdering this family one by one.

Speaker 1 Killing the fuck out of these babies. But luckily, though, God was murdering other people, too.
It turns out that there was another lady on the very same day-ish.

Speaker 1 that her twins died, another lady died in childbirth, and her husband didn't want the kids, so she gave them to Emma and Joseph to raise as their own. This includes Julia, right?

Speaker 1 The one that we're telling the story to. Yeah, in the words of of the prophet, Dibs.
Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And old Emma comes in to be like, yeah, it was actually a blessing that they died those babies, if you think. God killed your mom, Julia, during

Speaker 1 and I got you. So yep, so win the win.
God's awesome. Really, if you think about it.

Speaker 1 And then, like, the movie just wants to get out of the way and they go, and yeah, also one of those babies dies too. Yeah, so yeah, yeah, right.
Well, we'll get to that baby diet in a minute.

Speaker 1 But then we cut into town, right? So we're at this shop in town where some local rabble rousers are stirring up some anti-Mormon sentiment with their pamphlets and shit.

Speaker 1 Oh, we got the, yeah, this lady is like hyping her new Mormonism unveiled podcast. Yes,

Speaker 1 an Exmo podcast. I liked her character throughout.
She was fun. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, so she, and we get another one of those moments where they can't actually admit what people's issues with Mormonism were, right?

Speaker 1 Because she, like, Emma comes into the store and this lady confronts her with a pamphlet and she goes, no good will ever come of talk of revelations.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, well, you're, you like the Bible, though. Like, so, like, obviously you don't think that, right?

Speaker 1 But she can't be, you know, like, your husband is raping our daughters. And, you know, that complicates the movie.
So.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But the podcast lady does explain, like, at the very end, she's like, also, the whole town's going to kill you.
What? Nothing? Yeah, right. Nothing.
I think just a pamphlet.

Speaker 1 And then we we smash cut to the mob

Speaker 1 for Joe. Yes, where they tar and feather him.
Yes, which this movie is very sure is the fucking stations of the cross.

Speaker 1 Well, it's like, yeah, every time we watch a fucking Joseph Smith movie, we have to watch this.

Speaker 1 And they always try to make it look terrible and dramatic, but it's too silly for that because you look like a chicken at the end of it. It's just funny looking.
Babe, do I look stupid right now?

Speaker 1 I ferns a little bit. Do I look stupid? They're doing like a tending to his wounds scenes afterwards.
And the movie is going, you see that, everybody?

Speaker 1 It's pretty hard to get tar off because it's very sticky.

Speaker 1 Well, so, okay, so here's the thing: in tarring and feathering, like people were very often injured because they put hot tar on them sometimes. That's not what happened to Joseph Smith.

Speaker 1 But yeah, like after that, it's just a big pain in the ass, right? Like maybe the solvents you use to get it off could burn you, like it could be caustic or something like that.

Speaker 1 But like generally speaking, afterwards, it's just like, it's not like you don't, you don't have like huge open lesions like the guys in Chernobyl, right?

Speaker 1 It looks like they spread on room temperature tar with like a butter knife and he had some little spots. Yeah, rolled him around in some feathers.
And feathers. Which, hey, you know what?

Speaker 1 He kind of had it coming. So, but chicken torture or no, Joseph preaches on.
The next day, Julia's brother died.

Speaker 1 Mormonism tries to make it seem like it's the crowd's fault that the baby died because the baby had pneumonia and like the door was left open when they grabbed him and tarred and feathered him.

Speaker 1 And it's like, yeah, but, but Emma was there, you know, so I don't know. I'm refusing to mask up.

Speaker 1 A little too heavy for both. I'll just leave that one on the floor.
Right, yeah. Easy fine.
That one's coffee as it is. I got a little space in the margins of the book.

Speaker 1 So, but yeah, so then the brother dies. And then, of course, this backs us out of the flashback long enough for Julia to say, hey, hey, you know what? That's.
How about the problem of evil?

Speaker 1 That's my brother that we're talking about, right? Like, God. Julia, shut the fuck up.
Yeah, right. Right.
Which is old Emma's answer. I've been saying this all time.
Right.

Speaker 1 She's like, well, you know, God's ways aren't our ways. He's like, she's like, oh, God's ways are murdering my baby brother.
And she's like, shut, hey, shut the fuck up now.

Speaker 1 Way more than your baby brother, Julia. Pay attention to the story.
Come on now. Are we still rolling? Why do we keep keeping these?

Speaker 1 And now this is where Brigham Young joins the fold. It's weird how little of Brigham Young is in the Emma Smith family.
See, isn't that strange?

Speaker 1 Hey, fellas, did Brigham Young and Emma Smith ever interact in a way? They got along super swell, right? They're good friends. Good buddies.

Speaker 1 So, and then we get. How could Brigham Young ever show you a guest anymore?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 we get all the kids running around with Joseph Smith. He apparently invented jogging.

Speaker 1 And then, like, once again, they can't admit what people's actual problems were, right? So we see all the ladies, all the church ladies in the shop complaining about how impious her husband is.

Speaker 1 But the reason they're like, the impiety they're talking about is the way he runs around like a child, having such fun, like a scamp, not, you know, raping the children and living off of conning other people and shit.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right. The women in town are like, hey, your husband's like fucking idiot prophet.
Look at him running around with the kids. And she's like, or maybe

Speaker 1 only

Speaker 1 idiots would listen.

Speaker 1 That's so close to the actual fucking life. Like, almost quote, and then the movie was like, mic drop, we're winning right now.
Yes. She was certain of it.

Speaker 1 She might as well say crazy like a fox and then walk out.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Right. Because what the lady says is like, you know, your husband says that he was like the word of God was revealed to him at 14 years old.
Do you really think God would talk to a 14-year-old?

Speaker 1 She says, well, maybe only a 14-year-old would listen. And I'm like, why?

Speaker 1 Right. Like,

Speaker 1 like at any age, if God shows up, I feel like you'd listen. But

Speaker 1 so fucking dumb.

Speaker 1 So, so okay so Joey preaches more which is boring for us I guess but I guess like for the Mormon audience watching it's supposed to be a whole like can you imagine seeing him back in his small venue days oh my god like it's supposed to be that moment or whatever I remember when it was just Joseph Smith and that couple from that astronomer company watching in a garage somewhere yeah so But then there's this moment where like, I guess Joseph Smith is revealing his desire to build the temple in Kirtland, Ohio.

Speaker 1 But of course, women weren't allowed in the meetings. So she has to learn about it when Hiram comes out to get some tea or something mid-meeting, right?

Speaker 1 But she's worried. She's like, well, that seems really difficult to do, and we don't know what we're doing.
And we keep getting angry mobbed. It seems like it's going to be a way.

Speaker 1 We're going to build it. And then right away, a mob again.
And we have to run it. We're going to have to make a building for them to sort of focus on.
Seems like a bad plan. Yep.
Yep.

Speaker 1 But they're like, no, we can do it because Joey's magical. And then there's this weird moment where, like, Julia prompts the movie to tell us more about Joey's travels, right?

Speaker 1 She's like, hey, so when you miscarried the next kid, Joey was nowhere to be found, but that's totally normal and cool, right? It wasn't like. Julia, you're fucking killing me over here.

Speaker 1 Yes. Okay.
Miscarried. He was gone.
That all did happen. But I saw, but I saw, let me finish.
A baby after that did

Speaker 1 not die one time. Did live, yes.
So God nailed it. You know, they gave me this big list of questions you were going to ask, and I don't remember this one being.

Speaker 1 Well, there's a very like two. She's like, but then the next one lived, and there's a very like, and it was a real baby, not like you and your brother kind of a feel from old Emma's VO at that point.

Speaker 1 And now, okay, so now some of the church ladies, including Pamphleteer lady, are starting to like maybe think there's something to this Mormonism, right? Yeah, even the Mormonism exposed podcast lady.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 she's into it. They're hanging out at apparently Pier 1 imports of Kirtland, Ohio in 8th and whatever.

Speaker 1 Or modern day Cracker Barrel, whatever it might be. It's one or the other.

Speaker 1 So, but yeah, and we see all the men folk building the temple. We see Joey doting on Emma to her son.

Speaker 1 There's this great moment where he's like, yeah, you know, it was your mom that helped my lies be more believable because she kept asking me questions that God would obviously have thought of.

Speaker 1 This part, I believe, oh, yeah, that she was just like, Hey, man, your book's fucking so dumb. You got a retcon of you things.
I'll tell you, I'll tell you what to do.

Speaker 1 Here's some lies you can fix a little bit. Yeah, that's what Doctrines and Covenants is.
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, and so, of course, all the while, like, Emma's big thing is that she's writing the hymn book for Mormonism. Right.

Speaker 1 And so now she's going to sing a bad song just because, like, they can't do a good song because they're stuck with the shit that Emma actually wrote. Well,

Speaker 1 that's the thing, right? If you know anything about Mormon hymns, truly the biggest lie in this movie is what a gifted musical artist Emma Smith.

Speaker 1 Even devout Mormons will be like, yeah, no, I mean, the hymns aren't good.

Speaker 1 We put them on the fridge. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 They're in the book.

Speaker 1 So Joey tells the kids the bedtime stories about how god was will not burn emma's mom in hell forever for turning down that book of mormon she'll get a second crack at it after she dies right

Speaker 1 very important

Speaker 1 and then we get the whole temple it's it's built now and all the congregates are singing her shitty hymn and we see like a bunch of perfect two by fours with sealant on the end

Speaker 1 to put together this perfect temple uh-huh sure do So, yeah, but now it's all done. They're ready to like inaugurate or whatever the fuck they call it when they consecrate it or whatever.

Speaker 1 And we see our first like shot of the pews.

Speaker 1 And there's like a black dude sitting right behind Emma Smith. That's exactly what I was going to say.
There is a black guy in the crowd shot.

Speaker 1 I will remind you that the Mormon church acknowledged that black people have souls in 1977.

Speaker 1 I think it's 1978 when they allowed them to have the priesthood. I think they were allowed to have souls way back in like the late 60s.
But yeah, there was

Speaker 1 no chance in fucking hell. They were way more woke than you said, Eli.
Yeah. No, apologies.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Also in this crazy temple, we see, I'm going to describe it as like a game show set, like a

Speaker 1 raised pharmacy counter, but like Hollywood squares above that with like spots for each of them ranked. Right.

Speaker 1 Like it was just, it was, yeah, a weird, insane reflection of ego going on at the front of that goddamn church. Yeah.
But yeah, so, and then we get gardening wisdom.

Speaker 1 This is where Julia learns about the importance of believing in people through a pumpkin or whatever. Right.
That is so fucking dumb. Oh, and come up and for Mean Podcast Lady.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Because, like, now she gets it or whatever. So she's also doing.
pumpkin shit. And so Emma's like, even the smallest of seeds can grow.
It says in the book my husband wrote mean podcast ladies.

Speaker 1 He's like, yeah, no,

Speaker 1 I was mean in my show. I get it.
I'm Mormon now. Okay.

Speaker 1 But once the temple was finished, things just got worse. People were unhappy there in Kirtland.
No reason, no reason at all.

Speaker 1 So, and it certainly wasn't that Joseph Smith took everybody's money and then started a bank with it and then bankrupted the bank. Then it had nothing to do with that.
Everybody was just upset. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The movie says that like, yeah. So everybody kind of got mad, even though the temple was there.
But Joseph actually called it because he is a prophet.

Speaker 1 He called it that people would start doubting him. And I was like, yeah, well, I mean, it's easy to make a prophecy about angry victims of bank fraud when you're doing the bank.
Yes, right. Yes.

Speaker 1 I foresee me fucking you guys over.

Speaker 1 That's the hardest prophecy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but people were leaving left and right. Even Harley Pratt was going to leave for a while.
And this is another fucking Marvel movie moment, right?

Speaker 1 Like where it's like, Harley Pratt's going to leave. And then she talks him out of it.
And then he doesn't.

Speaker 1 And it's like they have introduced and resolved an issue in one fucking minute of movie time. But, you know, this is fucking Harley Pratt.

Speaker 1 That's fucking Mitt Romney's great-great-granddad right there. You got to include him.
Just me pointing to someone in Spider-Man Across the Universe.

Speaker 1 So that Spider-Man's actually actually from a comic in the 1980s. He wasn't Peter Parkins from a different ultimate universe.
Yeah, exactly. Cool.

Speaker 1 I wrote it down. I did.

Speaker 1 So then Emma and Joey, you know, they marvel over the temple they've built, but they got to leave now again. No reason.

Speaker 1 It's literally them standing over their fucking fields of gold. And he's like, we should get the fuck out of town.

Speaker 1 I saw them.

Speaker 1 Tar takes a while to heat up, but not like forever. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 1 She goes, will things be better in Missouri? He goes, you know what would be great would be French toast. I'm in the mood for French toast.
Are you in the mood?

Speaker 1 But then she, you know, like elderly Emma, outside of the flashback, waxes poetic about the mighty, mighty Mississippi a little bit. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Very important. And then we cut to Missouri in 1838.

Speaker 1 And there's this amazing exchange where voiceover Julia goes, well, wasn't Missouri supposed to be the promised land? And Emma, the old Emma, is like, It was, but something went terribly wrong.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, with God's promise?

Speaker 1 God is not great at Google Maps. He's more of a map quest guy and nobody uses it anymore.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, so, but the movie like kind of fast forwards through the time that the Mormons went to war against the state government of Missouri, right?

Speaker 1 The sentence they use for that, by the way, is false charges were raised and Joseph was betrayed. Yeah, they don't even mention what the false charges

Speaker 1 were. Stolen election.

Speaker 1 The charges were plotting to assassinate the governor, which he absolutely fucking did.

Speaker 1 Yeah. The movie fast forwards for obvious reasons, but it also accidentally makes it kind of funny.
It was like, Missouri, 1838, God's new plan, posse on horses coming after you. He said, Joe!

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, it's funny because like at this point, I'm like, wait, was this the time they tried to assassinate the governor?

Speaker 1 And I looked it up and it's really hard because like Joseph Smith was arrested apparently 42 goddamn times in the course of his life. So it's already

Speaker 1 tried to Google it. There was no answers that were like just about this moment.
It was very hard to find. Yeah.
Chat GPT's just smoking a cigarette.

Speaker 1 Do you want to know about the times he wasn't trying to overthrow? Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 That would actually be

Speaker 1 easier.

Speaker 1 This is also where we get a very funny moment. And I'll put this in the notes for our patrons.
I'll make sure Tim grabs an image of this.

Speaker 1 This was the best, worst accidental mistake for the subtitles here.

Speaker 1 So they're having this very dramatic scene. He's in jail.
Remember last Mormon Movie Month where we did that whole movie about the time he was in jail? And then I got him. He bribed his way out.

Speaker 1 Deja vu. I was like, I've seen this.
Yeah, I think so. Seven or eight times.
The movie in the movie. Yeah.
So they're having a very dramatic talk during that flashback.

Speaker 1 And he says, Can I get you anything? And she, the actor, goes, huh, huh.

Speaker 1 And the subtitles on tubi.com, where we watched this film, thought it was the word hummus. So there's this very dramatic moment of the two of them by candlelight, and the caption just says, hummus.

Speaker 1 Can I get you anything hummus? I can go for some hummus.

Speaker 1 Babe, can I get some pitas to a little pita wedges? No, right.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to eat it with my hands. But she goes, has God forsaken us? And he goes,

Speaker 1 hummus.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 curiously doesn't have an answer for that. So then we see the Mormons getting run out of Missouri.
He's still in jail. They're moving on to Illinois.

Speaker 1 And you can tell it's bad because everybody's coughing a lot, you know.

Speaker 1 And the Mormons in jail with Joseph are starting to lose faith in him as well, right? Because he's supposed to be magical and he's not helping in any way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and we get a bunch of letters back and forth between Joseph and Emma, like while he's in jail. Apparently, he's like getting letters.
He's getting all the stationery he needs to send letters to.

Speaker 1 People are very, very serious about the human right of letter writing throughout this moment in history, I guess. Clearly, yeah.

Speaker 1 And, but the letter that he sends is like, he's like, read this to the congregation. Dear the congregation, don't worry.

Speaker 1 Believe it or not, this is exactly how i drew this play up this is supposed to happen all i wrote my notes all part of

Speaker 1 the track

Speaker 1 yes

Speaker 1 all right well we've already seen this story a dozen times before so it's kind of hard to inject any suspense before the break but i'm going to try anyway here we go

Speaker 1 will this movie explore the rift that plural marriage tore in emma and joseph's relationship Will it confront the numerous public denials of Joseph's polygamy she made even after she knew about it?

Speaker 1 Will it detail the schism after Joseph's death where her opposition to Brigham Young tore the young faith in twain?

Speaker 1 No, but stick around anyway for the sanitized to the point of dishonesty conclusion of Emma Smith, my story asterisk.

Speaker 1 Emma went on to be a senator from New York State.

Speaker 1 Emma Smith, you have been a true and faithful servant. Welcome to heaven.
Welcome to heaven, Emma. Emma.
Oh, well, wait, who are you, child? Don't you recognize me?

Speaker 1 I'm your son who died in childbirth. Oh,

Speaker 1 what a blessing. What a blessing.
I'm so glad to see you. And so am I.

Speaker 1 Me too. Me too.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. I kind of forgot how many of you there are.
And we're just the infants. All the others are here as well.
What a wonderful,

Speaker 1 wonderful miracle. And of course, Joseph is here with all his wives.
All of his wives? Yep.

Speaker 1 Every single one. Feels like it might get a little crowded.
Indeed, it is, mother. Crowded with love.
Together, all 50 plus of us forever and ever and ever. You know what?

Speaker 1 I think I might be a little Jewish.

Speaker 1 Nice try, mom. Come on.
They're fuck.

Speaker 1 And we're back for still more of the shit, and we're going to rejoin the Momo settling into NaVoo, Illinois, to build their theocracy. This is God's fourth take at a promised land.

Speaker 1 They don't even bother to say they moved this time. They're just like, Nauvoo.
Snips, we're in Illinois now. You know.
And Joey's back. There's a great moment.

Speaker 1 She looks behind her, and Joey appears in a silhouette. And she's like, You got away.
And he says, They let us go. And she says, Is there more to the story?

Speaker 1 He goes, Nope, that's all there is to the story. You let us let us go.

Speaker 1 But she says, I shall never cross the Mississippi again.

Speaker 1 And he's like, well, what if the bulk of the church up and leaves and goes west? She's like, well, I would probably have to create a schism and just keep my group here.

Speaker 1 Okay, because, okay, to be clear, that is what they are apologizing for in that absolutely batshit piece of narration. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 1 What they are not saying is that me and Brigham Young had a schism that would split our church directly in half and lead to dozens and dozens of deaths and a war between our two clans.

Speaker 1 She's like, I don't like rivers. Yep, no matter what.

Speaker 1 I think that's what it is. Oceans, oceans with attitude.
That's what I call them.

Speaker 1 We see a bunch of mosquitoes.

Speaker 1 I thought at first they were just there to trigger Eli's mesophonia, but apparently they're there for us to know that like Nau, Illinois was a malarial swampland because Joseph got really sick at this point.

Speaker 1 He did. Yeah, it's Hebrew for beautiful place, but also malaria.

Speaker 1 Malarial, beautifully, malarial place.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I think we have to establish that it's really malarial because really Joseph Smith's immune system could kick the shit out of almost anything, but, you know, in this instance.

Speaker 1 So, but Emma comes to like nurse him to health and joke around about how much they love each other very much and always do no questions asked. Right.

Speaker 1 So then we see Joseph Smith curing people's diseases with his god magic.

Speaker 1 Is that what was going on in this next scene? Yeah, just laying on of hands. I think they wanted to show us as much of it as they could without having to make the claim as the movie.

Speaker 1 Just like, what prophet can't give a few head pads? Yeah,

Speaker 1 who's assuming he's using anointed oils to cure diseases?

Speaker 1 You said that. It turns out an awful lot of Emma Smith's story is her staring lovingly at Joseph Smith, but then we watch it.
He does more hard manual labor. Okay.

Speaker 1 At this point, we are on the third happy building our temple montage. It had to wear thin, even for them, right? To have the fucking violins in the background.
All right, you know, we get it.

Speaker 1 We're going to

Speaker 1 like at a certain point, the Mormons had to be like, so same plan as the last one. Yeah, same plan as the last one.
Pass me that shingle from Home Depot with a sticker on it. Yeah, right, yeah, right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Like Romans setting up their camp at this point.
No. Did we have plywood in this movie? Yeah, no, no, we have No press board.

Speaker 1 So yeah, but then we get, oh, we get the point where Emma finds out that her dad. So when her mom told her that she couldn't come home anymore because of the Mormonism, she gave her a picture, right?

Speaker 1 And now we see Emma drop the picture because she, and break it because she found out that her dad died.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And Joe comes over and he's like, hey, honey, you seem

Speaker 1 a little down. Do you want me to

Speaker 1 see if God gives us space families? Feels like you might be cheered up. Yeah, I mean, you want a space family?

Speaker 1 Yeah. The transition there was great, too, because it's Joseph preaching and everybody's happy.
And he's like, yeah, God's plan, it's amazing for us. And then literal smash cut to literal pictures.

Speaker 1 Smash, yeah, to an actual smash. Emma's dad died.
Fuck. Yeah.
You know, and then they glue the. It's a little malaria, I think, too.

Speaker 1 They glue the pitcher back together, though, because they can repair their things.

Speaker 1 They tell us that her mom mom died shortly thereafter it's a space picture you get all the free pictures yeah you want you could fix other people's pictures there's a fucked up moment hot up she goes oh you know i really just wanted my dad to be proud of me at literally any point in my life and joey's like oh you know he'll be proud of you dad he'll like dad to him will be proud of you probably He'll learn his lesson in heaven or hell or whatever.

Speaker 1 Wherever he ends up. Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 No, fun fact, basically his last words were, I will never be proud of her because of that husband and his bullshit religion is how his story ends but yeah but her and then her mom died like right after her dad

Speaker 1 yeah they show they show the gluing the picture back together and immediately like while that's happening it's like and then my mom died smash right i thought they were gonna drop the picture again

Speaker 1 Mom's body comes flying down from the ceiling onto the picture. Oh,

Speaker 1 yeah. And

Speaker 1 Julia, the voiceover, she's going to say, she's like, you know, at this point, something inside my mother died from all the grief.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, well, this was also around the same time that Joey started taking extra wives as well. So maybe that had something to do with.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 no, it was just the mom and dad. She was really sad about that picture.

Speaker 1 Nice.

Speaker 1 Had a cow on it and two fields. Yeah.
So, and then, and then her baby gets sick. And damn, if God doesn't kill another one of her kids.
Okay. They have this fucking insane moment.

Speaker 1 Are we going to talk about it? Where she's talking to Joe, the kid is sick, and she's like, Promise me, Joseph, promise me this child will not die. And Joseph is like,

Speaker 1 You want to sing some stuff? What? So, somebody called me from the other room. I have to go and see who is in the other.
As God, I got to go look at the plates you can't see.

Speaker 1 Cut to the baby shattering on the floor.

Speaker 1 Oh, no.

Speaker 1 Babe, should we glue it back together? What are we doing? Oh, fuck. I did have a moment of reflection here where the fourth child of the Smiths died, where I was like, it's a good reminder.

Speaker 1 Like, whenever your boomer mom acts at a turn, she is two generations away from when people had 11 kids and four of them died. She might not be doing a Spanish.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 That was her grandma that you were talking about. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But then we get Joey inaugurating the first Mormon women's club or whatever this is, right? Where he's like, God told told me my wife had a very important lady job. Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's another like, ring, what? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Somebody, an elect lady. Oh, my wife, Emma? Yeah, yeah.
Emma is in charge of the ladies

Speaker 1 auxiliary.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 I wanted one lady to be really disappointed. She didn't get a just, fuck, what are the chances? She's the elect lady hand.

Speaker 1 Oh, man. Maybe next time, God.
Wait, so she gives up, steps up to give her acceptance speech to God,

Speaker 1 and that bleeds into her helping old dying people, right? Because of her saintliness. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But then some ruffians, they come to the Smith household with a warrant. So not ruffians, exactly, police officers.
Well, you know, those ruffians that

Speaker 1 essentially U.S. Marshals.
U.S. Marshals.

Speaker 1 Treason. Treason.

Speaker 1 When you escape from jail. They're supposed to be like bad guys, but it's like,

Speaker 1 you're just right. You did treason, right? Because her answer to them is, I was understanding that we are on base.
Yeah. And they're like, no, no, no, not for treason.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. They're like, you know, where's your husband? And she's like, well, he's not here.
And they're like, why isn't he here? And she's like, no reason that the movie is going to admit.

Speaker 1 He just is out now. Dizzy.
Having prophecy shit. Not hanging out with fucking Mary Whitner, that bitch.

Speaker 1 Very,

Speaker 1 very close to the truth. 37 other wives at this point or whatever.
Normal.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, but she goes, but they say, like, where are we coming from? She goes, are you quite finished? That's the exact delivery. I've been practicing it.
But then we cut to Joey.

Speaker 1 He's busy having new revelations about who he's allowed to fuck.

Speaker 1 And we get this moment where, like, late that night, there's a sound at the door and she's like scared, but it turns out it's just Joseph coming and like sneaking in to tell her how much he loves her again more.

Speaker 1 Right? Yeah. There's also like a moment where he's like, I have to give the kids all a blessing.

Speaker 1 And we get old Julia like backing out of the flashback going, I never knew he came and gave me an unconscious blessing in the night. And I'm like, why would you? That's nothing.

Speaker 1 Why would anyone tell you that?

Speaker 1 So the next morning, Joey has to leave in secret. He's come to the house like to see her.

Speaker 1 And now he's got to sneak off lest the government that is after him, I think at this point for burning down a printing press in revenge for them printing the truth about him, unless they find him.

Speaker 1 You know, he doesn't want that to happen. Right.

Speaker 1 And he gives her a just-in-case I die letter and asks her to check the spelling, which, to be fair, I do the same thing to Anna every time I leave the house. So I get, I do get her.

Speaker 1 And ask her to check the spelling. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And then we get her reading this letter to the congregation, and it's fucking banal and pointless because it's a real letter from Joseph Smith, right?

Speaker 1 And he never said anything profound in his life, but they're stuck with what he's got, right?

Speaker 1 We see a montage here now where, like, they're doing like whatever the double extra super marriage is, yeah,

Speaker 1 space marriage, space marriage, the death outer space marriage that they do, and you got to get like doubled up. I think so, yeah, to really, really count.

Speaker 1 And now it's included in the Mormon marriage ceremony, but that was a con that Joseph ran is he was like, hey, if you're married, you're actually not space married. So

Speaker 1 September and October are filling up everybody. Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 So you want to book your space marriage? I did just build a temple where you could have it. You could do a mid-week space marriage, but like, nobody wants to go to that shit.

Speaker 1 Well, and I'm thinking to myself, oh, wow, you know, if you guys want a montage that involves marriage and Joseph Smith at this point in the movie, do I have good news for you?

Speaker 1 But they leave out the other 30 to 40 here. They couldn't hire all those kindergarteners.
Oh, God.

Speaker 1 The child labor laws. No, you can, you can always make them work like for it.
Fucking seventh graders, please. Sometimes.
Sometimes, yeah.

Speaker 1 So then the ruffians come for Joseph, right? They're going to take him back to Missouri where he's going to hang for his crimes.

Speaker 1 There's a moment where Emma comes out and she scream cries Joseph in slow motion, and it looks just silly as all hell. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I had to mention that because people who watched along would be disappointed if I didn't. She weeps inconsolably as they take him away to

Speaker 1 prison. I don't know about you guys.
Did you watch this on Tubi as well?

Speaker 1 i paid a dollar ninety nine not to have to watch commercials not to have to watch it on tubi okay at this point tubi was having some kind of frenzy where they were showing me the billy bob thornton t-mobile commercial every i'm gonna say six and a half seconds and if you haven't seen that i promise this is related to our watching in the film the commercial is billy bob thornton apparently lost in a field being like they used to kick our ass at cell phone servers but these days rising can suck my ass suck my ass I'm Billy Bob Thornton and what it was crazy because it was always apropos to what was going on in the movie so what happened is like he gets dragged away and she's like Joseph and then Billy Bob Thornton is like motherfuck

Speaker 1 goddamn Jew lovers over at Verizon I'll fucking I'll fight every one of them

Speaker 1 I lost my car. So, yeah, well, you know.

Speaker 1 So then, okay. So then old Emma gives grown-up Julia more river-based wisdom.

Speaker 1 Or actually, I'm sorry, she gives her the same river-based wisdom, but she words it differently and thinks we're not going to notice. Right.
Mom, you already use the river as a metaphor.

Speaker 1 You can't keep doing that. And then Julia goes, hey, dad did be fucking a bunch of other ladies, though, right? Julia, I swear to fucking God,

Speaker 1 you're out of the movie.

Speaker 1 So wait, Heath doesn't live in the house with his new wife. Shut up, Julia.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 look, they have room for activity.

Speaker 1 They see each other all the time. Pierre terre.

Speaker 1 And Ann Arbor.

Speaker 1 So I guess what's good, because I didn't expect that they would touch the plural marriage thing at all. But I guess we have to see Emma being okay with it.
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 1 Which, to be clear, she was not okay with it. It's never at any point remotely.
She's not okay with it in writing. Yeah, right, right, exactly.
On paper in several instances. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But in this movie, Julia's like, well, you know, like, Ma, did that like bother you? And she's like, yes, it bothered both of us.

Speaker 1 Me and Joseph both hated that he had to have sex with all those other women.

Speaker 1 We hated it. First, Emma says, we don't talk about it.
And then Julia's like, okay, but we're the fucking narrators. You have to be.

Speaker 1 She goes, I don't speak of it, but I never ignored it. And I'm like, but that's what ignoring means is not speaking of it.
That's what that word is now. Also, you spoke of it extensively.

Speaker 1 First of all, you wrote a bunch of letters being like, fucking quit it to Joe. And then people were like, hey, is your husband married to a bunch of people? And you were like, no,

Speaker 1 not at all. No.

Speaker 1 He didn't, but they land on like, he got commanded by God. And of course he obeyed.
We were having this fight about the dishes. And then he was like, what's that? Magic hat rocks.
More wives. Okay.

Speaker 1 I guess I'll have to do it. God save.

Speaker 1 Very unhappy. Yes.

Speaker 1 And then we get, we cut to like Joey telling Emma about his impending death, right?

Speaker 1 Because like, again, like this is very common in the Mormon rewriting of history that we have to make Joseph seem like a willing martyr, you know, that walked to his death much like Jesus did, which makes it really weird that he's shot back.

Speaker 1 But okay. He's still doing the St.
Peter thing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Nobody told me we weren't doing backfighting. Yeah.
So, but so in the flashback, we got Joseph talking to Hiram. He's, they're about to like go to Carthage to turn themselves in.

Speaker 1 And he's confessing his undying and unrivaled love to Emma and just Emma. Just Emma.
Only woman in his life.

Speaker 1 And then they're like, you know, they have the whole like, are you scared?

Speaker 1 to go to the thing and he's like no because i'm a willing martyr in this telling of it which makes it really weird that I'm bringing my brother along with me.

Speaker 1 Jesus Christ, I'm evil in their telling too, huh?

Speaker 1 But then we see, like, she, she, we see a moment where, like, she's staring at the picture, like, she's loading it up for his death scene.

Speaker 1 I'm going to spike this thing on the floor so hard when I find out he's dead. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Also, they capture in this parting scene between them, they capture this great moment from Mormon history that I cannot believe they tried to play off as this great romantic moment because this is true.

Speaker 1 Emma said to Joseph right right before he left for Carthage, will you bless me?

Speaker 1 And he said,

Speaker 1 you write it and I'll sign it. Right.
Which is the least romantic thing. It's the he gave her cash as a gift version of a blessing.

Speaker 1 Do you want to tell me what you want? Actually, just you buy the card and you sign it for me.

Speaker 1 Right. Say whatever you want.
Jesus Christ. Yeah.
She's like, he's, she's like, I should get a blessing, shouldn't I? He's like, right, you should write a good one for you.

Speaker 1 I can't give my wives all very, so I got to give all my wives a blessing now.

Speaker 1 It's like animal crackers and paw patrols. Oh, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 But yeah, but then, so he goes off to die. The old Julia, outside of the flashback, sure wishes that her, her dad didn't die.
And then the fucking movie tries to play up.

Speaker 1 It tries to give us the same old lady wisdom again, acting like it didn't, right? Because this is the whole time where she's like, you know, I wish I had your strength, mom.

Speaker 1 And Emma goes, strength isn't something you have. Strength is something you find.
I already used that one, mom, like so recently. Exact same one.
God damn it, Julia, you're out of the podcast.

Speaker 1 But also, like, things that you find are things that you have once you found them, right? Like, strength isn't something you have, something you find.

Speaker 1 Well, like, well, then you would have it once you found it, wouldn't you? That's not an either-or type of situation. Okay.

Speaker 1 Sometimes your God, strength is something you don't know you have because someone sneaks it into your pocket.

Speaker 1 And then we get Emma like reading like young Emma actor and old Emma actor are sort of tag teaming reading the blessing that they wrote that Joey signed.

Speaker 1 And we're getting that over the shots of Joey getting killed. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And they're very much the blessing you would write if you knew your husband wasn't magic, but you also knew that he had started a church that would eventually canonize this letter as an actual thing blessed by the prophet.

Speaker 1 It's like, I'd like to be

Speaker 1 happy

Speaker 1 and super duper Mormon. I want to believe Mormonism really hard.

Speaker 1 The ups and downs, the ins and outs, the facts of life. And there you have it.

Speaker 1 Come and step. The magical power of eat, pray, love.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 I'll be there for you when the rain starts to pour.

Speaker 1 but oh then we get we watch old Julia seeing old Emma walking into the light you know which I guess I guess Julia died first or something I don't know they go into a big weird thing where they're like Julia got cancer in 1880 and died and we're like who fucking cares about Julia Yeah, why did they feel the need to be like, oh, Julia also died relatively prematurely?

Speaker 1 Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 Julia got sidetackled out of the movie. Yeah, right, right.
They show pictures of all her kids, the ones that didn't die in childbirth, right?

Speaker 1 So that we can see who's in the margins of their Bible now.

Speaker 1 And then we learn that when Emma died, her last words were, Joseph, Joseph, I'm coming.

Speaker 1 Only time she ever said it. Yep, probably.
Also a quote from two other wives at the same time at one point.

Speaker 1 And of course, probably not, though. Despite the fact that this is the actual point where the Emma Smith story gets very interesting, the movie's over now.

Speaker 1 Right? Never mind what happened after that, what she thinks of the church that funded the making of this film. Now, the story's over at this point.
And we don't have to do it.

Speaker 1 University, not a big deal. Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 And well, that's going to do it for our review of Emma Smith, my story. That's not going to do it for the episode just yet because we still need to predict what we're going to be watching next.

Speaker 1 We're not 100%

Speaker 1 on that all the time. But Eli, tell us, to the best of your knowledge, what's on deck.

Speaker 1 Okay, first of all sons of provo was a mockumentary no yeah no it would have been hard to joke it was yeah it would have been terrible it would have just been us going you are for an hour

Speaker 1 a devout christian woman tries to warn others that the end times are coming and an evil organization is conspiring to control the entire world we'll be watching 1981's early warning oh back when a film was a film so okay so with that to look forward to we're going to bring episode 517 to a merciful close once again a huge thanks to all the patreon donors that help make the show go.

Speaker 1 If you'd like to count yourself among their ranks, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash godawful and thereby earn access to an ad-free version of every episode.

Speaker 1 You can also help a ton by leaving us a five-star review and by sharing the show on all your various social media platforms.

Speaker 1 And if you enjoyed this show, be sure to check out our sibling shows, The Scaling Adios Citation Native Dnd DD Minister and the Scape Credit available wherever podcasts live.

Speaker 1 If you have questions, comments, or send message suggestions, you can email GodawalMovies at gmail.com. Tim Robertson takes care of our social media.

Speaker 1 Our theme song was written and performed by Ryan Slatnick Bill The Dress on Mars. All the other music was written and performed by our audio engineer Morgan Clark and was used with permission.

Speaker 1 Thanks again for giving us a check of your life this week. For Heath and Wright and Neli Bosnik Omnolutions promise to work hard to earn another tank next week.

Speaker 1 Until then, we'll leave you with the American graffiti clothes.

Speaker 1 God remained angry at the Mormons and he killed Paul Walker. Oh,

Speaker 1 Brian O'Connor. All right, boob.

Speaker 1 Emma went on to start a rival Mormonism with no beer and no hookers. It pretty much failed.

Speaker 1 Joseph Smith's space family planet was extremely crowded between Joseph and all his wives and all his children.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's fucking rural. It's just, it's all a nine-year-old telling you a lie.
That's the thing about Mormonism, right? You'll never convince me Mary Whitmer isn't Jewish.

Speaker 1 Like Catholicism is like a grown-up telling you a lie, right?

Speaker 1 Christ, you know, but Mormonism, because like with Catholicism, like it's like they're trying to confuse you with the Trinity and it's like quantum bullshit at a certain point or whatever. But

Speaker 1 centuries of grown-ups to like, yes, well, right, exactly, exactly. But with Mormonism, it's just like, no, because you can't, when you look, I'm visible, but when you don't look, I can fly.

Speaker 1 I can't fly.

Speaker 1 Stupidness. Sorry.
Fuck you, Jimmy.

Speaker 1 And Mary just yes-anded herself into Mormon history. Yep.
Smart. Well done, Mary.

Speaker 1 All right. Interstitial three.

Speaker 1 Heath would have made it into the Book of Mormon if he wanted to. Oh, absolutely.
Yep.

Speaker 1 Me, I am.

Speaker 1 Oh, sorry. I lost my train of thought.
I'll get there.

Speaker 1 Leave this in.

Speaker 1 This is that you have dementia. I do.
Oh, it could be that. Could be be that.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 This content is can-credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm at their hotline at 617-249-4255 or on their website at creatoraccountability network.org.

Speaker 1 The preceding podcast was a production of Puzzle in the Thunderstorm LLC, Copyright 2025, all rights reserved.

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