515: Mary: Mother of Jesus

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Well, I was annoyed by how he's kind of like, man, I'm above all that political crap.

He was, though, right?

He was an annoying centrist douchebag.

Yes.

they're all corrupt.

It literally was an argument between a Jill Stein voter and a Kamala voter, and then Joseph is just the deciding voice with all the parties are corrupt, so I refuse to vote.

You're gonna both sides the Roman Empire,

also a Jill Stein voter.

Got it.

God awful

movie

movies.

Welcome back to the Gamcast, where each week we sample another selection from Christian cinema because fuck happiness.

I'm your host, No Illusions, and sitting 700 miles to my immediate left is my good friend Heath Enright.

Heath, welcome back.

Let's get biblical.

Oh, yeah.

Sort of.

Biblical.

And Eli is off this week, but we're excited to welcome in a para guest masochist in his place.

You know, Gam guest masochist Hall of Famer Dan Beecher from Thank God I'm Atheist and Data Over Dogma, which he co-hosts with less experienced guest masochist and biblical scholar Dan McClellan, who you also know from his TikTok and from his new book, The Bible Says So, What We Get Right and Wrong About Scripture's Most Controversial Issues.

Dan, Dan, welcome to the show.

I appreciate you putting me first, and uh, thank you for having me here.

I appreciate it.

You bet, you bet.

You're first in the list of Dan and Dan, yeah.

Okay, you could tell by the comma.

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

We watched Mary Mother of Jesus.

It's the story of the greatest pedophile ghost story ever told.

Good news for you.

And just to save the confusion, I've noted you guys in the notes as smart Dan and cool Dan.

We actually had a fight about who was which.

Oh, did you?

Well, no, look, I appreciate you finding a good moniker for each of us, but I frankly just don't think Dan is that cool.

I mean, I appreciate it.

So, I told Eli, I said, I put him down as smart Dan and Cool Dan, so they'd both be like flattered, but also upset.

So, but I almost did smart Dan and other Dan to see what would happen.

We all know I'm other Dan.

To which Eli said, You fucking coward, you fucking coward.

The muscle in the brains.

So, cool, Dan.

How bad was this movie?

Well, well, if you

me.

I'm cool, Dan.

Well, if you like spin-off movies where a peripheral character gets her own time to shine, but you hate when that character takes an active role in her own life or makes choices or really does anything other than obey men, you will love this movie.

Oh, man, I know a lot of people like that.

By the way, hey, Dan, great well.

Thank you.

Holy shit, Eli himself couldn't have welled better than that.

Look, I aspire to Eli levels of well.

It's just something I work on.

There you go.

It cracked at just the right time, too.

Yeah, to be Eli-esque.

And smart, Dan.

And I'm genuinely curious about this one.

How biblically accurate was this movie?

Not.

There's very little biblical about this movie.

Obviously, there are characters, there are events that we know from the Bible and from extra-biblical history.

For instance, we're recreating a lot based on Josephus's texts.

But a lot of the characters and the events are being shuffled around in the service of creating more drama and advancing the narrative.

But the overwhelming majority of the narrative, kind of the main outline, is being taken from a second century pseudopigraphical text.

And pseudepigraphical is a $2 word that means false writing, meaning it wasn't written by who it claims to be written by.

Oh, like the Bible.

Yes, there are a bunch of pseudopigraphy in the Bible.

And the text was known as the Proto-Evangelium of James or the Proto-Gospel of James.

It's also sometimes called the infancy gospel of James.

And this is actually where a lot of the traditions that we have about Mary come from.

So if you've seen paintings or video or whatever where Mary's riding a donkey down to Bethlehem, that's the Proto-Evangelium of James.

Oh, okay.

What?

They didn't even do the donkey.

I'm ripped off.

I feel ripped off in this.

I did too.

I was so ready for the donkey the whole fucking time.

And for her to be in her signature outfit, she's never in that when she's like an adult at least.

Yeah.

I feel like they tried a donkey and it went really badly and they had to switch stories.

No, notoriously hard to work with, the donkey.

And there's an idea that is very common that Joseph was an older man, that he had children from a previous marriage.

That comes from the Proto-Gospel of James as well.

So you're saying that.

that their main primary resource, they didn't even do most of the things from it.

Yes.

Because when you're trying to tell a story about Mary, the mother of Jesus, you've got like the magnificat, you've got the beginning of Matthew, and that's it.

Sure.

And so, if you're going to make up a whole biography, a whole story, and you need it to be Netflix-level epic, you got to find some material.

And so, they went to this for portions of it.

The skeleton of this narrative comes from the Proto-Vangelium of James, but there is obviously a lot that's changed in the the movie.

But the broad narrative outline is from the second century text, which is not historical at all and includes some really crazy stuff that you don't see in the movie.

For instance, the midwife shows up too late.

She has already given birth.

And so she checks Mary's vagina to check to see if the hymen is still intact.

And God sets her hand on fire.

What?

Because of that.

Yes.

Holy shit.

How did they skip that?

Like while checking?

Yes.

So like she pulls out her hand, fire.

And then she has to pray to God to have the fire go out.

But where did the fire come from?

Why did they skip all the good things?

This movie was so boring.

Firehand would have at least spiced things up a little bit.

That would have been amazing.

Yes.

No,

I certainly wouldn't have seen that coming.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is there a like a pseudopographical list of bad action beats by any chance that they were also coming from?

Yeah, the thing.

Well, that's the thing is that honestly, I assume that most of this was just coming out of the writer's ass.

It's interesting to find out it was coming from any kind of Vesaurus.

All right, so is there anything we want to nominate this one for being the best at being the worst at?

Best, best hat.

Oh, my God.

Crazy priest hat.

They have serious hat game in ancient Israel, apparently.

This was such a bizarre part of the movie.

I was like, when did we get to Arrakis?

This is right.

Oh, yeah.

This movie references dune all the time like throughout the whole thing.

There's dune references everywhere.

Yeah,

yeah, it's got a lot of dune.

It's got like one in particular, one of the priests has um i'm gonna say a sumo jock strap made of check smiths.

I was thinking it was Berber carpet.

It looks like something I would buy for my cats to scratch on or something, right?

Like, yeah,

oh, yeah, no, they that in and his his was the best hat, but like, there was a top 10 crazy hats in this movie.

Oh, man, it gets good.

A lot of good hat work.

Oh, man.

I think the best, worst depiction of Jerusalem at the turn of the era was every everything I saw, like, the, you know, it opens up in the Judean desert.

It's like, that's 100% not the Judean desert.

That is the Sahara.

These people have never seen the Judean desert.

It doesn't look like that.

Then they got Jerusalem, where the temple, for some reason, is outside of town.

Yeah.

And way outside of town.

Is being built from scratch, evidently, rather than just being renovated and being expanded, which is what actually happened.

And they show the fortress that Herod lives in, but that fortress was literally connected to the Temple Mount, but they have them like two dunes away.

More dune references.

Yeah, what do you got?

Like you're running a shuttle service from the main town

to the temple?

I'm I'm going to go with best worst use of an international treasure.

Uh-huh.

Because this movie has the great

Anthony Hopkins.

This is two-time Best Actor of Academy Award winner, countless other awards, over 150 IMTB credits to his name.

Hannibal Lecter himself

has the great honor of speaking the words written by the inimitable Timothy Michael Hayes.

Anthony Hopkins is so mad.

It's the business.

Oh my God.

He went to the same school as Eli and has fewer IMDb credits than I do.

The writer of this film.

I am 100% positive they had Anthony Hopkins' grandchild hostage to get him to do this because they purposefully torture him.

and us

throughout the entire movie.

And I think in retaliation, he acts like a lunatic through most of it.

Yeah, it felt like he was mad at the movie after a tiny amount of time on the set.

And so it was either like the grandchild hostage, like you said, or sometimes maybe it felt like a different vibe.

Like maybe they, I don't know, snuck him a little bit of mushrooms or something because he was just in a crazy fugue state for some of the other stuff, too.

Almost the entire time, 90% of his monologues are to inanimate objects.

It's crazy.

Yep.

So, and I was going to go with with best, worst, just being able to sense it.

So, like, 37 times in this fucking movie, somebody will see Mary and go,

oh, that's the mother of God right there.

I can just tell.

I can just tell when I'm around a mother of God.

That's how lazily written, what was his name?

Timothy Michael Hayes managed here.

All right, well, I'll tell you what, we've kept the audience waiting too long for this one, so we're going to keep the break brief.

And when we come back, we'll dive into all the edgier seed action that is Mary, mother of God.

Come on, Thunderclap.

Come on, Thunderclap.

No.

Perfect.

Hey there, Heath.

What's with the

outfit?

Oh, this.

Well, to be honest, Noah, at the last show, you showed up looking so snazzy that I got a little jealous.

So I figured it was time to up my style game.

And this is the result?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I figured the wider the lapels, the thinner I look in comparison, right?

Oh, those are lapels.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Lapels.

What did you think they were?

Front wings, maybe?

Because of how they flap.

Flap, sure.

Yeah.

But Heath, if you're looking to up your style game without breaking the bank, you should do what I did and check out Quince.

What's

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It's the reason I was getting so many compliments on my style at the Portland Live Show.

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Quince.com/slash awful.

Awesome.

I guess I won't be needing these lapels anymore.

No, so have you checked to see if you can glide with them like in Breath of the Wild?

Oh, no.

Yeah, you should probably double-check that before you get rid of them.

Yeah, good call.

Dan McClellan, come on in.

Thank you.

Yeah, have a seat.

So I loved your book.

The Bible says so, what we get right and wrong about scripture's most controversial issues.

Available now at fine retailers everywhere.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

What are you doing?

I did love his book.

Okay, so as you know, we here at Netflix are committed to cashing in on Jesus

or sharing the good word of our Lord Lord and Savior or whatever.

So anyway, we're going to do a movie on Mary, and we're running into some issues that we thought only a biblical scholar of your caliber could help us with.

Yeah, what kind of problems?

The story's boring.

It's boring.

Boring as hell.

Oh, my God.

I'm sorry.

You find the story of the birth of Jesus, the single most significant occurrence in human history, boring?

Yeah.

Of course, like, where's the action?

Where are the dance numbers?

Where's the sex?

You're asking where the sex is in the story of the Virgin Mary.

Okay, okay, maybe not sex, but there's got to be at least a sword fight in there somewhere, right?

There you go.

No, there are no sword fights in the nativity.

I feel like there's probably at least one sword fight.

Not a one, sorry.

Okay, all right.

Well, what if

she were to have to fight a crocodile?

Oh, nice.

Or an army of crocodiles.

Because you captured the baby Jesus.

Got to get him back.

Okay.

Okay.

Awesome.

So much better than the original story.

Okay.

Fine.

Maybe.

There's one sword fight.

I suppose it's possible they might have been attacked by bandits on the road at some point or something like that.

All right.

There we go.

And Joseph could stab Satan in the back with a gladius.

Too far, Henry.

Maybe not.

That's really going to happen in the movie, isn't it?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

And we're back for the breakdown, and we're going to open up on the world's silliest production logo, that aloe logo.

Yeah, I was expecting Vera to come out.

Is that the woman walking up the stairs?

Yes, uh-huh.

So, yeah, so we get our production logos, and then we see a couple on a horse just hauling ass.

A title card comes up and tells us that we're in the Sinai Peninsula, AD 1.

And the problems begin.

And then it says, Annodomini,

the year of our Lord.

Yes, in case we don't.

The year of our Lord, like, oh, okay, I get it.

Yeah, we definitely need to emphasize that.

Nobody knew what was going on here.

Yeah, it wasn't that at the time.

It was just like a year.

Like, Annodomine was going to 525 CE, I'm pretty sure.

Seems like the Lord, the Domini, would know about zero being a thing.

I don't know.

I'm just saying.

Seems like you're going to got that.

I love the cartoon with the, oh, there I go again, signing BC on my checks.

But we've already got a problem, though.

Yes.

AD one

is a good four years after the death of King Herod.

Jesus was supposed to have been born during the life of King Herod.

And we see what seems to be an infant Jesus, who should be four to six years old by this time.

He's really small for four to six.

Yeah.

If the gospels are at all historically accurate, which they are not, but they're just, they're playing fast and loose with their sources here.

So it's a problem.

What?

A Christian movie playing fast and loose?

Never heard of it.

Yeah.

So Mary cuts in as the narrator.

She goes, I was chosen and I'm like,

raped to deliver a gift to the world.

And then she says, you may think that you know my story, but You were just probably relying on the Bible and history and shit.

So you are not ready for what you're about to see.

Well, when she said, you may think you know this story, you don't.

I was like, that's true because none of the people who actually know this stuff would watch this movie unless they were forced to.

Hi, Dan.

It's a sore spot.

It's okay.

So we're going to back up 18 years and we're going to meet Mary's dad, Joachim.

He's wandering in the Judean, the Saharan desert, I guess.

He's wandering in a desert.

They're all the same.

Yeah.

Apparently, he's doing the 40-day fasting thing because God won't gift him with a child.

Yeah, I want to know how you present that to your wife.

Like, what's the approach there?

Right?

Like, honey, I'm going to go out into the wilderness for a month or two.

Just take care of everything at the house for me while I'm gone.

Okay.

It's going to be really good for my motility out there.

I'm going to bring my golf clubs, but that's just because

I might need them to survive.

For beating off snakes, just

there'll be a lot of beating off.

So, yeah, but he cries to God to give him a child, and then a voice in the wind goes, He hears you.

And we're like, Oh, like a subtle, we're going to do a subtle thing here where there's an angel, and then just suddenly Gabriel appears looking all weird and half feline in his little blue teleporting scarf.

Oh my God.

He, and he dressed like Ingmar Bergman's death.

Right.

Big hood on, like, and it's flowing robes.

I was, I thought it was death.

I thought

the dude was going to die.

And he's, he's giving like a pretty important message from God here.

And he's like, hey, bud, God's giving you a daughter.

Okay, poof.

And he's gone again.

So

he's like, sorry, sorry, what?

And Gabriel has to zoop back again and explain and be like, sorry.

So I zoop back.

I should have spelled this out.

Your family is going to be like in charge of the savior of the universe.

Okay, poof again.

I like that it was like, you'll get a daughter.

And you could just see on his face, he's like, fuck.

And he's like, no, a good daughter.

Oh.

And then I don't know what's going on with whatever's written on his hands.

Right.

But that was definitely something stolen from a 1970s sci-fi movie.

That was, it's definitely not Aramaic or Hebrew or anything like that and it looks like it was written with a ballpoint pen like it was it was not it was hastily done whoever did that he's got a donald trump weather forecast going on on his hands and he's he's got like some weird chic implants or something i i don't know what the hell they were going for there I just want to point out that as the mother of Mary was walking through the desert, there was only one set of footprints in the sand because no Jesus yet.

No, not yet.

Well, actually, there was a tiny little, there were these tiny little zygote prints, but you couldn't, you couldn't see him from where you were.

So, okay, so, but meanwhile, so I guess, I guess, Mary's mother, Anne, she's just been steady praying by a window for the 40 days or whatever that Joachim's been out in the desert, but he's back now.

He is back and ready to fuck.

First, Gabriel shows up in Anne's bedroom for the first time.

Oh, that's right.

Yes.

She smiles a little too much in anticipation of, I think, a sex thing.

And she's like, oh my God, it's like hot skeletor.

What's happening?

And you're like, no, no, no, cut, cut.

And then Joe Kingsback.

Hey, there is only hot skeletor, okay?

We can all agree.

He says, I heard there's a problem with Dinah Cable.

I just think that it's so interesting because

this is.

the depiction of the Immaculate Conception, right?

The conception of Mary.

Yes, the Immaculate Conception is not about Jesus's conception.

It is Mary's conception.

And they found a way to make it all about the man.

So I think that's fantastic.

Yep.

They giggle in each other's arms or whatever.

And he says, our prayers have been answered.

And then we cut to, this is such a weird cut.

It says, Mary's birth home, nine months later, we see

Joachim helping Anne down onto a stool, and that is it for that scene.

Like then we immediately cut to Jerusalem.

May have been the best scene in the movie.

So so like in case you were curious whether or not she occasionally sat down whilst pregnant we we settled that for you

i mean it was unlike the rest of the scenes of the movie mercifully short no that's fair that's my favorite scene i think that's my favorite okay and also by the way that is not remotely what nazareth looks like or no like at that no no no no no no no they get none of the locations the settings right nazareth would have been a little tiny hamlet on the side of a hill in basically a little bowl.

Basically, mountains are coming up all around it.

And it's just, it would have been like five acres of scattered buildings.

Oh, okay.

And so I get frustrated about this kind of stuff.

You're going to see.

Okay,

one of those scattered buildings, though, was definitely a bed, bath, and beyond for everybody to get their clothes.

Right, exactly.

I had just a lobby at one of those hotels that Eli makes me stay at.

Yeah.

So, but then we, so then we immediately do this super fast cut to Jerusalem.

This is the title card.

They had such verbose titles at the bottom of the screens on this fucking movie.

It says Jerusalem, Herod's Judah, 17 BC.

And then we pan over like his castle, and it looks so shit.

Like

a good indie video game would have had better graphics than the pan we do over this castle.

And why have we gone forward in time and then back in time?

It's such a

because we're all the fucking time.

The title card sets up.

It was like one oh yes or whatever.

And this is where the start of my best worst happens because Anthony Hopkins first line is my people,

which

not exactly friends Roman's countrymen.

No.

You know what I'm saying?

It's

Hopkins must have really wanted a new boat.

Yeah, right.

I genuinely, I was like, is that fucking Anthony Hopkins for real?

I actually googled, hoping it was a lookalike that they found.

It's not.

It's really him.

Yeah.

No, he's, I honestly, he must be trying to see if there is a string of movies bad enough for them to take back the knighthood.

Also, history-wise, maybe Dan, you could tell me for sure.

I thought Herod came from Arab descent.

I know that Sir Anthony Hopkins, perhaps, also, but I didn't seem exactly right.

So he was of Idamean descent.

In your face, he

probably feel so stupid right now.

He's Idamean.

Duh.

Sorry, Dan, you were saying what we all already knew.

But the

and they keep saying, oh, he's not even a, he's not even Jewish.

The Idomeans live to the south of Judea, and there was a time when during these wars where you have the Maccabean Revolt and all this stuff, where they actually conquer the Idameans and forcibly convert them.

So the Idameans become Jewish.

So Herod is descended from a people that was forcibly converted to Judaism generations before.

So he's some people thought of him as only like half Jewish, but they don't address that too much in the movie.

They just dismiss him as not a Jew.

He's Jewish.

Right, right.

Yeah, right, right, yeah.

So, okay, so, but he announces at this point that he's going to rebuild and enlarge the second temple, right?

Yes.

I love that everybody's mad about this.

He basically says, I'm going to do something to honor God, even though people will be mad, which isn't that what God continually tells everyone to do?

He likes

great big temples, didn't he?

Wasn't he into that?

What a bad guy he is, this guy who's building a bigger temple to the Lord.

Yeah, so then we get our first of, I think, something like 26 scenes of like a shit stirrer standing outside rousing rabble.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this was the video of Zoran Mamdani from an Andrew Cuomo commercial.

Looked very similar.

But that's like, yeah, this is where we first get the whole, you know, he's not even Jewish.

He doesn't go here

line from one of the Herod's enemies.

Show me your dick right now.

But he explains that they must follow aristobulus whose name i practice saying correctly this morning aristobulus yes and that

there was no aristobulus who was a high priest in this in this time period there was an aristobulus ii

who was appointed by herod as high priest in 36 bce

and then drowned a year later by herod in jericho at 35 bce so okay there was no aristobulus who was a high priest in this time period so this is just this is just one of the things that that historians are like, what the hell are they doing?

Because

they're just toying with stuff.

They're just a cool sounding name, I guess.

Okay.

Follow-up question.

Did that Aristobulus have a white sister from Minnesota by any chance?

With like a thick Minnesota slash trying to do British, which means ancient Israel?

Yes.

Oh, my God.

If we're going to get into the accent, we're going to get into the accents of this movie.

Because we already have like a bunch of Americans and then Anthony Hopkins, but it gets much worse later on.

Oh, yeah.

Especially when the dude comes in to warn them about the soldiers coming.

Yes.

We're going to get to that.

That's a lot later.

But yes,

the guy from the Washington Heights area of Jerusalem.

But Aristobulus III was the brother of Herod's wife and who's in the movie, Mary Omni.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

So that is historical, but that is from almost 20 years prior to where they're setting this.

And Herod started building the temple in 19 BCE, not 17 BCE.

So like the timeline is all screwed up.

We're all over the fucking.

They could just get it right if they want.

It's like not changing anything to get that right.

That's why Mary's like, you think you know my story?

We're making everything up.

Right, right.

So, okay, so that, but this is where Minnesota Mariamne comes into the synagogue and she's like, Aristopulus, you have to go into hiding because there's a Roman heavy beating the crap out of the rabble rouser from the other scene right did they dress her like princess leia on purpose

there was a couple of times couple of homages

help me aristobulus you're my only hope

so and this is also where we meet marcellus he is the like anthony hopkins main henchman throughout he'll be the main bad guy he henches pretty good he's a good

hench is okay

and i think i assume he's just here so that we can kill off a character that's like not a historical person or not somebody from the Bible who like we, you know, like we would have plot armor or whatever.

And make sure Eric Adams is our next mayor in New York

because he's awesome.

So, okay, so meanwhile, Anthony Hopkins and his wife are sitting at a absurdly comically long table.

Okay, I laughed so fucking hard.

So they show us the table and it's like, okay, silly, like royals have big tables, but then they give us a wide shot and it's fucking hilarious.

They're so, they're both like just out of the frame a little bit and in the frame a little bit and just a table.

It's so good.

Yeah.

They're landing jets on that thing.

Yeah.

I was like, are you even allowed to do the either side of the extraordinarily long table trope as anything but a joke now?

God, it is so tired.

Since Bug Bunny, that's joke only for like sliding salt too far or whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Also, I'm pretty sure they just recycled a Last Supper set from a different gam movie.

Okay, that makes sense.

If you just imagine all of the apostles behind it, you know where they got this table.

There you go.

So, okay, so but then Herod's like, I want to offer a toast to you being a bitch.

And he does this whole stupid thing where he's telling her that he's killed her brother.

And like, we have this like inner cut with the brother getting killed.

right and then he slowly walks over to her all menacingly and like glinting sword out and he's like okay you're still not getting it yeah i'm killing you too right now i thought that's obvious

i'm killing you now

and this was she was so this really happened well at least she was killed by herod but this happened around 29 bce so several years after her brother was killed by herod and several years before any historical mary would have been in in utero.

So again, they're just mushing it all up together.

Gotcha.

And there are traditions that say that he killed her in kind of a fit of jealous rage.

He was paranoid because she was descended from the Hasmoneans.

That's the dynasty that was the part of the Maccabean revolt.

And so her family was very, very popular.

And so he was afraid that she would be able to raise opposition to him.

So killed her, immediately regretted it.

And then some traditions describe him trying to embalm her body in honey or something like that and preserving her body for several years.

Cool.

Why would they leave that out of the movie?

Well, here's the thing.

I was horrified that they had not because later on, she's going to be sitting at the table again.

And you don't see, she's not in focus, but Anthony Hopkins is clearly talking to her.

And I was like, please do not let that be her corpse.

Oh,

the honey corpse.

Yeah, but

no, she just vanished

because it was him descending into madness.

Yes, can I just say, ladies and gentlemen, listening at home, Dan is going to be clearly doing this throughout the entire thing, so I'm sure Noah's going to cut most of it out.

So, if you want the four-hour extended cut version, you have to become a patron of the show.

We learned about a long feud between the Hasboneans and the Neverwazians.

It was like the whole

Brob Ding Nagian.

Okay, get it right.

So, yeah, so then, so now we cut to Mary being born, right?

Sure.

And her mom looks at her after she's born and she's like, be strong.

You've got a whole movie to get through.

You know,

I just, you know, a lot of long time and very strange cinematography was spent on this delivery, which.

Why do I always have to watch shows that pad for time when I come on this show?

Well, because all christian movies pad for time man there's just no other way to do it

yeah it's true it's true so yeah so so we get her being born can we do just like a christian haiku one week or something

with gravity one of the veggie tales certainly those are what 20 minutes yeah there you go there you go

people have asked us for a lot a lot of the times why we don't do veggie tales they're too good that's the problem

so okay so now we've got joachim he's overseeing the olive harvest and several years later Mary's like, you know, 12 years old or whatever.

She's chasing butterflies.

Yeah.

Because, you know, of the innocence.

Yes.

And because if you don't have, they were worried about running out of movie cliches.

If they didn't, you know, kids chasing butterflies while their parents call to them to set up the fact that this is an idyllic life that won't last.

Yeah.

Also, they seem to think we wouldn't get that Mary is a good character in this.

they have her chase the butterfly, and then she's like a butterfly whisperer.

Yeah, yeah,

they all come to her and flit around beautifully.

Well, because butterflies know the mother of God when they see one.

I wanted other animals, like I wanted not attractive animals to also flock to her there, but no, it's only like the fun, beautiful,

who's just like, she's great.

Come to me, my spider friends.

Okay, that's bees.

It's a lot of bees now.

We gotta.

So then we cut to Herod and Marcellus, who have, we're 12 years later, they have aged remarkably well over those 10 years, right?

Sure.

Yeah.

And Anthony Hopkins literally starts this scene with like, Lulu Lou, doing genocide, Herod stuff.

Genocide.

Yeah.

It's my favorite stuff.

Yeah, Marcellus is telling them that there's a lot of discontent these days.

He says, you know, the Pharisees want you to take to strike against the Hill Raiders.

He goes, Hill Raiders, huh?

He's like, in case we need an action beat later.

And then this lady, I don't know who this lady is supposed to be that's sitting there as well, but she goes, there are also rumors of a savior.

Yeah.

Hey, Dan.

Yes.

Were there rumors of a savior before Mary was even pregnant?

And if so,

for how many centuries?

Because it seems like it wouldn't have been that localized yeah but i don't know well you have the messiah stuff really is in vogue after herod's death when rome takes over because rome is uh the direct rule of rome is a lot more oppressive and so you have a lot of folks who are trying to fight against that and then you get these folks who pop up out of nowhere and and develop followings and then get brutally massacred by rome it was certainly there was discontent with herod and you had a lot of folks who, the zealots, for instance, the Sicari were the group that would go around and

target people for assassination.

But there were talks of messiahs for many centuries going back to the Babylonian exile.

So this was not something that was incredibly unusual, but it's also not something that had anything to do with Jesus.

All right.

So what you're saying is a messiah is another thing that they stole from Dune in this movie.

Oh my God.

Look at your own fucking shit, guys.

Okay.

So, but yeah, but she's like, there's a savior coming.

And Anthony Hopkins is like, wait a minute.

Tell me about this savior.

He's a little suspicious.

He also stops to tell us that he's going to kill her husband, Costaborus.

Yes.

He words it so great.

He's like, hey.

Would it be terrible?

You don't know.

You don't.

You wouldn't like it.

Sarah, like, does he need to finish the porch or anything before I just give me a just give me a sense, like one to 10, how bad would it be for you if I just go and kill your husband?

Is that cool?

Oh, that makes it so much easier.

Yeah.

God.

And so

this was also a real character.

Custabaris was executed around 27 to 25 BCE.

because he protected an enemy of Herod's.

But the thing that annoyed me about this movie is every time Anthony Hopkins was on screen, it was like the director was like, remember you're pure evil, go yes.

Everything is just trying to paint them as just the epitome of evil.

Like there's no, there's no nuance here.

It's just these are good guys, these are bad guys.

Yeah, sometimes he murders a bunch of babies, but sometimes he also played with the dogs, people.

Come on.

Did he murder a bunch of babies?

Because we'll get to it.

Oh, yeah,

he maybe didn't.

What we're saying is that Netflix chicken the fuck out is what we're saying.

Yeah.

They were like, what if he just brought them all to his palace for him to look at?

Kidnap him.

A little mild kidnapping.

Well, that's, that's fine.

Oh, we'll get there.

Also, in terms of that rumor, that means, like, if there's a rumor just in town at this moment, that means like Joachim and Anne are walking around town being like, oh, nice, nice finger painting your kid made.

Our daughter's going to birth the savior of humanity.

And people know that.

We are grandkid.

And I want to know who did Gabriel visit to start spreading this rumor.

Right.

Because the rumor had to come from somewhere.

It's not like somebody was just struck by Mary's jequie and was like.

Right.

It's Ioakim.

It's Anne or it's Gabriel.

Yeah.

Those are the three suspects.

Yeah.

Speaking of which, so we cut to Anne and she's making a

foreskin kebab.

I don't know what the fuck she's doing.

She's doing she's making something.

They look to me like figs, like dried figs.

Okay.

That had been squished.

All right.

I've never squished a dried fig, so I'll take your word for it.

But you have kebabbed foreskin in your day.

You know what?

We each do our own thing.

Dan, I don't think this is really the appropriate venue to talk about it.

But suddenly Gabriel Batmans his way into the room, right, and gives her that knowing look.

Yeah.

So we cut back to Mary.

She's racing dad home from the harvest, giggly in her innocence.

And then she's like, hey, guys, that teleporting feline human human-angel hybrid stop by today.

So,

yeah.

I like that as they were, you know, when Mary, as the young girl is running home,

she races her dad home or whatever, and he says, She's very fast.

And I was like, oh, good.

I was worried that in a movie about a very important woman, we wouldn't learn anything substantive about her except.

what important men she was in proximity to.

Right, right.

No, but she's fast.

We got speed.

Well, what's weird about this to me is that they set that up twice, right?

Because the little kid, Noam, her little friend, also talks about how fast she is.

And I'm like, okay, well, they're sloppily setting this up because she's going to have to run from the bad guys later or whatever, but she doesn't.

Never comes up.

It's just nothing.

All right, but so Mary's dad takes her up to the top of a scenic hill to give her the talk.

Okay.

The talk being a teleporting angel guy made me pinky swear to give you to God when you were 12 years old.

Okay, Mary, how do I explain this?

So, yeah, birds, bees, you gotta a ghost uh that's pretty much it

that's the talk right what's funny is she he says i made a promise in exchange for your birth and she starts crying she was positive that he was going to sell her into sex slavery right yeah like that's a hundred percent what she was thinking Now, here's the other problem with this.

This is in the proto-evangelium of James, the proto-gospel, the idea that she was because like she spends most of the rest of the time prior to giving birth to Jesus in the temple.

That's not in the Bible.

That's entirely in the proto-gospel of James, but she's presented at the temple when she's three.

Oh,

and yes, so they were like, ah, we'll just, we'll just change it.

Nobody cares.

Yeah, I feel like that's probably because, like, otherwise there'd be like a five-year-old scrubbing floor in the temple.

You're like, all right, that's awkward.

We're doing like three-year-old Hogwarts now.

It looks weird.

You got to just change the temple.

And this is where,

like, I've already, I'm already incensed about the settings of this movie, but then they bring her to Arrakis with a lady with a, with a giant, a three-foot fucking Bene Gesserit potato chip on her head.

Oh, my God.

I love that.

I'm glad that you saw it too, because

I have her in my notes as the Bene Gesserit for the rest of the show.

She's absolutely the Bene Gesserit.

Yes.

And when they had the guys with the different styled ribbons on their head, I was just flashing back to Kramer not wanting to wear the ribbon.

And the guy goes, whoo, who doesn't want to wear the ribbon, pants?

Those three guys obviously were okay wearing the ribbon.

Yeah, they were.

Clearly.

Here's what I hate.

I hate that I'm not,

I don't know history well enough because we see them on the road to the temple.

And I hate that I don't know history well enough to know if that horse-drawn surrey with the fringe on top is anachronistic.

Stagecoach?

It feels anachronistic.

Profoundly anachronistic.

It was a fucking stagecoach.

I believe those started, what, the 16th, 1700s or some shit.

And also, the temple is always outside of town again.

I don't know why.

The temple should have been right next to Herod's Palace, but I don't know who was in charge of set design, but I suppose I could look it up.

Don't bother.

Boo.

Get some 15-minute cities going.

Come on.

Fucking communist.

So so this was also sort of as a personal one for me that was a little bit weird because her mom's name is anne and then the old the betty jesserit lady her name is anna and i'm like man if her next maternal figure is named lucinda that's gonna start freaking me out a little bit it's gonna be a little weird at that point so yeah so but then oh also like as she's walking through the temple we see a lamb being slaughtered foreshadowing anyone nailed it

and then they have this awkward scene where the priest questions her and they're very clearly they're trying to like evoke the like Gom Jabbar moment from Dune here, but he's just like, is she the vessel?

And they're like,

yes.

Yes.

Did the Wom Jabbar vibes check, whatever.

Literally everybody seems to know exactly what's happening here, which just like.

How?

Why?

Why does everybody know what's going on here?

And also, once again, our protagonist is literally just a vessel she has nothing going on yeah

and yeah the you expect somebody to be like lisan al-gaib yeah

but at any moment yeah well and also i want to point out because of course this movie retcons mary's age right we're very clear oh this was 18 years ago oh this was when she was 12 six years bc you know all of this so they're taking out the awkward part of her you know god impregnating her when she's a teenager and everything or when she's 14 years old or whatever.

But now they've just made him into a groomer, right?

Because they're like, like, she's been clearly marked out since birth, which I don't know that they've fixed it, is all I'm saying.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I also love that they go and they drop off this kid.

I

will say this: always a safe bet to leave your children unattended with the spiritual leader of the

never,

never that's never gone wrong in the history of anything.

So, okay, so now we do another time jump and we finally get the final actor that is going to play Mary, right?

We get like the adult Mary.

She's washing floors of the temple.

She's doing embroidery.

She's being without sin.

Yeah, because when you're running a temple and you have the future mother of the savior of all humanity hanging out, child labor, right?

That's what you're doing.

Well, you might as well get your floors washed out of the deal.

Yeah.

But okay, so here's the thing that fucked with me on this, right?

Literally the one thing that you absolutely had to do with this character to keep, you know, to stay in keeping with the mythology is you had to make her without sin.

So the first thing we see her do is lie to a priest about her indolence making her skip prayer and then talk back to the priest after he calls her out on it.

Yeah.

I don't think that's very merryful of her, is it?

Well, you know, the idea of the old, the old misfit novitiate nun.

It's the classic, how do you solve a problem like maria

i didn't want to get too catholic about this i think yeah right there you go so yeah so but when she talks about the priest chuckles so we know it's all right she's just charming and so

it's a good thing you're pretty yeah

also who are all these other girls there like were there were there girls schools in the temples dan i don't know like were these the other cabinets for mother of god like was it is this is this like that scene in the matrix where there are all the potentials?

Oh, yeah, you know, the ones.

The only thing I can assume is that they're, because the temple would have been a place where the orphans would have ended up and they probably would have been put to work.

So there probably was some kind of child care institution of some kind going on there.

But yeah, this is a little too handmaid's tale for me.

Very sure.

Where they're showing up for these weird prayers and showing up to class or something like that.

Yeah, it was a little weird.

But it felt like they were setting up some sort of like bracket tournament for mother sacred or something like that.

Mary is way ahead.

She's so ahead she can like skip class sometimes.

Right, right.

She's a one seed for sure.

Yeah, so there's also this point where like after class, they're all walking along in this incredibly handmail.

Like they don't have their heads covered.

And I think that's only because it would have looked too handmaid's tail if they did, right?

Oh, you know, they tried it.

Yep.

They shot shot it and they were like, oh, God, no, that's Gilead.

We're in Gilead now.

But she sees a beggar, right, on the streets.

So that day, after she's done eating, she looks around and she's like, Hey, are you going to finish that to a bunch of the girls around her?

And she gathers food for the beggar.

I just, I want to point out, she finished her own food, right?

She didn't give any of her food to the beggar.

She just waited and saw whatever, what other girls didn't like that meal that day.

She's eventually with child, Noah.

She's eventually eating for two.

That's called entrepreneurship, Noah.

That's obviously obviously making the most of it.

Yeah.

It's like putting on the mask first in the airplane before you help, you know?

Right, yeah.

It's important.

So, yeah, but she goes out and feeds bread to all the beggars so that we know what a good person she is and everything.

And then we, so she's walking along when suddenly some creeper starts creeping at her, right?

And it plays like a proving scene, right?

Like she's going to have to show off her kung fu skills at this point.

But no, this is Satan.

He's come to

pre-corrupt her, I guess.

Point of order.

This is Lucifer.

Oh, gosh.

Dan, you want to go into Lucifer v Satan?

Because they're not the same person.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, Lucifer is not identified as Satan until well after the Bible.

But that's a long story.

But the flies here, somebody noted that you get this buzzing of the fly in a bunch of places.

And this is very clearly referencing the name Beelzebub, which is, again, a name that's not really associated with Satan until the New Testament.

But Beelzebub would mean lord of flies, and it is an editorialization of the Northwest Semitic storm deity whose name was Baal.

But sometimes they were referred to as Zevul Baal, which just means Prince Baal, and Baal means Lord.

So Prince Lord.

And they're like, nah, I'm going to call you Prince of Flies.

Okay.

So anytime you'd be like, Beelzebub is new, you just have a little fly go,

yep.

And that happens a dozen times in the movie.

It really does.

They really lean the fuck into that, don't they?

I want there to be more entomological identifications of characters.

We got butterflies for Mary.

I do like that.

Yes.

Yes, right?

Flies for Lucas.

Flies for this.

I think everybody gets their own bug.

Why are we not doing that?

No, right, right.

Lean.

Caterpillar.

You got a lamb, too.

So there are mammals involved as well.

Sure, sure.

I got an actual fly in my room while I was watching this and it.

It was Jeff Goldblum.

So, but yeah, but so he's trying to tempt her.

He's like, do you think Herod is like the best?

And she's like, no, God is the best.

And he's like, gotcha.

But then.

Out of the darkness, a voice yells, Lucifer.

And I laughed until it fucking hurt.

Gabriel shows up and I'm like, karate, fight.

But no.

No.

It's That's pretty good.

They don't do any kind of fight at all.

They do like magic versus magic.

So we just see both of them with like their faces getting red, being like, magic, magic, magic, magic,

and then they both zoop away.

They do the weird camera shutters that are also a reference to Dune.

They do these weird things where it's like

and the visual goes a little squiggledy.

And I, I, they like literally, they, everybody on set of this movie watched Dune right before they did literally anything.

I think you're right.

So, okay.

So, then we get King Herod's procession coming into town.

He's come to put an eagle on the temple, and the people of Jerusalem are looking at it like it's truck nuts, right?

Okay, I laughed a lot at this giant eagle, too, because Herod's, it's supposed to be like a big, like, hail Caesar.

I don't know, some big impactful moment hoisting this thing up.

And he's got his soldiers carrying this huge metal bird.

And then they cut to like a close-up of the soldiers having so much trouble putting up the bird thing.

Yeah.

It's the best.

Like clearly the prop was too heavy.

Yeah.

Right.

Or either that or somebody was way overdoing it.

So I just like that they went with the Portlandia put a bird on it.

I just think that's cute.

So yeah, so but he tells the people, we're going to put a bird on your temple.

And the people are like,

well, then.

And so then the high priest that questioned Mary earlier, he comes out.

Do you mean Baba Ben Buddha?

Baba Ben Buddha, yeah.

His name is not silly.

Yeah.

Nope, not at all.

Baba Ben Buddha comes out.

And Baba Ben Buddha is like, hey, maybe, you know, what would be another great place for your ego would be out anywhere else than that.

And Anthony Hopkins is like, I'm glad you're here because I have prepared a porcupine stabby crown and it would be super fucking awkward if I had to send for you.

This makes it way cooler.

Right.

I just, can I just reel it it back just quickly and just point out that Herod in this scene was dressed in this ridiculous thick gold robe and a dumb ugly crown.

And clearly, even Anthony Hopkins realized it because as soon as he's done addressing the crowd, he just takes them both off and throws them on the ground.

He's like, too fucking hot out here for me to wear this.

He's going to be fucking Burger King.

I'm Anthony Hopkins.

And this is something that actually is is supposed to have happened in real life.

Josephus, a historian, talks about this.

It's something that would have happened toward the end of his life, around the time of the birth of Jesus, where he puts this Roman eagle on the temple and everybody's outraged.

But Baba Ben Buddha was not involved because he had been dead for like 20 years by this time.

Quit ruining the movie, Dan.

They're ruining the history.

Neil deGasse Tysoning, our movie here.

He's dead.

But honestly, I think that the reason that they resurrected this character is because anthony hopkins put in his writer i get to say baba bambuda 11 times in a fucking row at some point in your movie and they're like well we got to write around it guys yeah and then he says it like 42 times in the movie and they're like yeah

we can't really do anything sir anthony hopkins i feel like he was just unraveling on the set like yes i guarantee the script did not have him screaming baba bambuda baba bambuda over and over he just thought everything was so stupid he started incoherent yelling.

And they were like, It's Anthony Hopkins.

He must be doing genius stuff.

This might be the first micro dose of the mushrooms on the set.

It's not into Anthony Hopkins' peanut butter or whatever.

That is a macro dose, my friend.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, I'll tell you what.

If we don't give him a break soon, Anthony Hopkins is going to start throwing poop around.

So we're going to pause there, but we'll be back in a minute with even more of Mary,

Mother of Jesus.

Hey, Noah, have you seen my kebab skewers, like my good ones?

Those aren't your good ones?

Yeah, I need the extra long ones.

Okay, so normally I'd ask why at this point, but I think I got this one.

Oh, okay.

Based on that pile of wax on the floor, I'm assuming your cheesed-based subscriptions are getting out of hand and you're putting your empty baby bell waxes on sticks to keep track of them?

Yeah, yeah, I was doing that, but now I'm moving to an abacus to keep up, so I need the long ones.

Yeah, yeah, that tracks.

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Great.

Thanks.

No problem.

So I guess you could throw out all that empty wax, huh?

Actually, I'm probably going to keep it.

Maybe for an art project because I have all the colors, right?

Wait, you have the green?

The vegan one?

No, no, gross.

I melt the yellow and blue, and I make my own.

Oh, okay, yeah.

Well, hello there, Mary.

Who are you, and how do you know my name?

Oh, I know a lot about you, Mary.

I know, for example, that you carry a great burden.

Oh, everybody knows that.

They can see me carry the water up from the river through the gardens every morning.

No, not, no, not that burden.

I mean, a burden that you carry inside of you.

Oh,

oh, oh,

that is actually

a friend's egg vibrator.

I'm just holding on to it.

What?

That fucking gross.

No, no, no.

I mean the spiritual burden that you carry.

And I want you to know that there's a way that you can actually

stop.

Oh,

hey, hey, Gabe.

Um, what s are are you stationed over here now?

Tempt not the vessel that God has marked out, for his mighty hand is upon her.

Right, right.

No, I wasn't I wasn't doing that.

I I was just like making conversation.

No,

you weren't.

You were trying to tempt her.

I saw you.

No, I wasn't.

Yes, you were.

Hey, hey, you stay out of this.

What seeketh thou, my fallen brother?

She is still but the vessel would you corrupt the wine by defacing its urn would i corrupt the can you just like talk normal

okay fine plain english what the fuck is your plan here she's not even pregnant yet right yeah i i just thought that maybe if i like corrupted her what like you thought if jesus would come pre-corrupted then well

or i thought maybe i could corrupt the like

i don't know the egg can you corrupt an egg The egg?

Are you serious?

Okay, yeah.

No, it sounds silly when I say it out loud.

I hear it.

Yeah, you should go.

I'm going.

I'm going.

Sorry.

Hey, Mary, really sorry to bother you.

I'll be back when it makes like more sense.

Sure.

Oh, you meant the god baby burden.

Yes, of course I meant the god baby.

And we're back for more of this shit.

We're going to rejoin the action with Mary tending Baba Bambuda's wounds, right?

She's giving a little pep talk.

She's like, hey, you know what else doesn't have any eyes in it?

The word team, which is what we are now.

Team.

So she takes care of him.

She walks off and Marcellus accosts her.

We didn't mention it before the break, but when Herod was addressing the crowd, he had a moment where he like stared at Mary and he knows a mother of God when he sees one, right?

So it was a little weird flash for him.

Was that it?

Because I feel like that was, he just slipped back into Hannibal Lecter and was like licking his chops.

He looked at her like he was going to eat the shit out of her.

Getting a taste for some father beans.

Yeah.

It felt like the film crew was just following around Anthony Hopkins like David Attenborough.

When he's staring at a girl, I bet he's doing it brilliantly.

Yeah.

But Marcellus wants to know what like weird Jewish spell she put on him or what, right?

Didn't he say you threatened the king or something like that?

And it's like, you got all of that from Anthony Hopkins pausing for a few seconds while looking at her.

I didn't understand how he interpreted all that as threats.

Yeah.

But just as he's about to stab her in the face for being stared at by Anthony Hopkins, Anna shows up and she's like, uh-uh-uh, no face stabbing in this wing.

And he's like, okay, no face stabbing.

Benny Jesserit, it must be doing.

She used the voice.

Is that what it is?

Yeah.

I don't want to go to the pain hole.

But he vows, he says,

I will stop.

I will find out and stop whatever Jewish magic that you're using against Herod.

Yeah.

So now we obviously need ourselves a fucking Joseph.

We've already taken the first break, right?

So we cut to a construction site where some fucking rabble rouser is rousing rabble again.

Does nobody ever talk about the weather in this universe?

Yeah, he just comes in hot like, hey, buddy, hump day, am I?

We're plotting a revolution now,

and I'm trying to figure out which one of these guys is Joseph.

You think it's going to be the cutest guy, but he's the one stirring up shit, so it's definitely not going to be him, right?

I just think, yeah, A,

Joseph, very famously, I think we can all agree, is a carpenter.

So, why he is chiseling rocks for a Roman aqueduct, I do not understand.

Well,

yeah, he's like, he's like sulkily making a knot in this moment, like a Boy Scout practice thing or something.

So Carpenter is actually not the best translation.

Probably something like Craftsperson or Handyman or something like that is a better rendering of Tecton.

You're saying this movie got one right?

No, I'm not saying that.

How dare you

saying that?

Don't let this get out.

No, but a lot of people think he would have been a stonemason because in this time and place, there was not a ton of wood around to be used for carpentry.

building mostly took place with like mud brick and stone so it's likely he was just a handyman just a jack of all trades all right worked in uh in whatever materials they had can he come to my house my oven's broken

mary's isn't am i right am i right

it's working well i was annoyed by how he's kind of like man i'm above all that political crap you guys he was right he was an annoying centrist douchebag yes yeah they're all corrupt it literally was an argument between a jill stein voter and a kamala voter and then joseph is just the deciding voice with all the parties are corrupt so i refuse to vote you're gonna both sides the roman empire

so

also a jill stein voter got it

i just like i like that they're complaining about roman taxes dude where do you think your salary is coming from while you build that aqueduct yeah right right yeah and this is also just something that's going on in the background like you have these two are like muttering over Rome, and then you have the one guy who's working in Nazareth for Joachim, who's just like, are you going to let this happen?

Don't you know what?

And then he turns him in for because his daughter got pregnant before she got married or something like that.

So that never pays off.

The whole

background of are we for or against the revolution never really pays off.

We're the people's front of Judea.

And it's the Judean people's front, you splitter.

So, but yeah, but that's the thing.

It's literally the only thing anybody ever talks about and it never goes anywhere.

Okay, so now we get Joseph.

He's hunting ducks with a sling.

Mary's out doing her river wash, right?

And he's about to like kill this duck when Gabriel appears in the way.

And I wrote in my fucking notes, it would be hilarious if he's just like, hey, angel guy, could you get out of the way of my duck?

But then he does.

He does exactly that.

He's like, can you nudge a little over?

I got a duck.

Little to the left.

I'm trying to sling at a duck here.

He's like, you're not going to believe this, but this duck is going to have duck Jesus.

So I have to watch out for him.

Phil Robertson walks up.

Hey, I got the perfect.

Can we just point out also that Gabriel at no time is comforting or like makes you feel safe?

Or he is the creepiest dude ever like he is no less creepy than the guy that they have playing Satan absolutely agree he's the creepy guy in a movie where Anthony Hopkins is trying to be creepy yeah yeah

so okay but then he's like hey can you get let me get the duck and he's like no the hunting is better around the bend and he's like

But the duck is right fucking there.

How better?

You're lying.

I can see the duck.

Have you ever had Eider duck?

Because it is delicious.

Oh, sure.

Well, fatty.

So, but then he sees Mary just being beautiful.

She's like, she's like standing there with a scarf as though she's experiencing wind for the first time.

Yeah.

And the notion that this little girl would be on the side of the river in like an all-yellow ensemble.

Yes, right.

With this lacy scarf is like, how wealthy do they want us to think this family is?

This is not how people got along back then.

I don't think, like, today, if you were going down to the river to do your wash, you wouldn't wear your yellows.

Yeah, but yeah, yeah, I feel like it'd be a lot of earth tones.

They're working with a lot of bright, like, pastels with fancy dyes.

Bed Bath, Neond is what they're working with.

And from across the river, this guy sees a girl, probably a teenager, playing with her scarf in the wind, so potentially developmentally disabled.

Possible.

And he just goes, goes, hey, what's your name?

and jumps into the room.

I want to have sex with you a lot.

Hey, hey, I think you're real cute.

What do you want to do something?

I got a duck sling.

Okay.

Are we just like making fun of each other now on the show?

I thought,

whatever.

Yeah.

Her weird scarf flows away into the water.

And Joseph immediately is like, I'm going to get it.

I'm going to get it.

Genuinely felt attacked.

I was like, this embodies my entire middle school and high school experience in three seconds of me.

Right, because he starts swimming across the river.

She just fishes it out with a stick, and she's like, You fucking idiot.

And I wrote in my notes, oh, Heath, man, that's rough.

I could have got it for you, though.

She's gonna

come for you like

what's your name?

Now she's further away.

Well, I don't know why I tried that.

Well, yeah, he demands her name, but all she gives him is uh, she says, I'm the daughter of Joachim of Nazareth, right?

Yeah, I want to answer, What's your name with my dad's name from now on?

So speaking of her dad, we go back to the olive orchard where the rabble rousers are out rousing rabble.

I guess first century BCE Jerusalem was basically fucking Russia in the 1910s.

I don't know.

But this is where we meet the NART guy who comes up to Joachim and he's like, hey, man, you need to stomp out this rebellion that's happening.

you know, that's being promoted on your olive orchard.

And Joachim's like, yeah, but, you know, fuck Herod, right?

there's a prophecy about a savior like nothing matters there's no stakes buddy we're fine yeah it doesn't matter that's gonna happen in this movie will matter i get the sense the movie like feels obligated to comment on class struggle but is also kind of like the freshman who is like gotta write an essay on this but doesn't really care and doesn't isn't about to do any research they don't feel strongly about this at all but they're like oh i gotta put it in there yeah well and also they don't want to risk being woke right like they don't want to be too like yeah right.

Yo, by the way, I spent so much fucking time trying to figure out how to write an all Romans are bastards joke that didn't just come out as the word Arab.

So,

I fucked so many of my jokes up.

All right, so, okay, we're back at the temple.

Mary is stirring a pot and chopping veggies.

This is my favorite scene in the whole fucking movie, right?

Because Mary is trying to find a delicate way of asking Anna what she does for dick,

right?

Absolutely, that's what's happening.

Yeah, I just like that anna says i haven't left the temple in 47 years um herod literally just built this temple liar

we saw it we saw it happen in the flashback but mary's lobbying hard for this like rum spring as best she can she's like hey listen buddy jester uh like i'm pretty sure i'm gonna birth a savior i think you know about the magic too can i get like i don't know like a gap year before that i want to

do stuff

It took a long time to get to this pivot in the narrative because it's like Mary, the mother of Jesus, what happens?

She gives birth to Jesus.

And it's like, I kept thinking of the scene from a Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie, The Touch of Satan, where the guy's like,

well, I suppose this plot's not going to unfold itself because

finally something is happening in this movie that is not just somebody creeping.

Yeah, she's like, hey, you know, I bet I could probably do more good if I went out there where all the penises are.

Anyway, so then we cut to Joseph.

He shows up at Mary's dad's house asking if he can marry her, right?

And dad gets all shotgun in the background of the prom photo about it.

Point of order, he doesn't just show up and ask if he can marry her.

He literally doesn't introduce himself at all.

He just knocks on the door and goes, Hey, can I have your daughter?

What a fucker.

I mean, it's idiotic, but ballsy, I'll give him that.

It is.

Hey, it works.

It totally works.

So what are we?

Yeah, and he didn't know her name, and he gets Joachim to say it.

He's like, oh, you want to marry Mary?

And he's like, Mary, ha, tricked you.

Now I know her name.

Literally, literally.

What a great start, man.

You're trying to get this, you know, okay here from dad.

Also, Dan, wouldn't that have, wouldn't the opening gambit here be a monetary offer?

Isn't that how this worked back then?

Oh, that absolutely was a part of it.

There was a bride price that would have been paid in exchange because they're basically purchasing the procreative capacities and the sexual availability of another man's daughter.

Wow.

Why wouldn't Netflix have left that part in, you think?

Yeah.

I'm a craftsman.

I brought you this sheep shank.

Is this helpful?

And I love how the writers are just punting.

to Gabriel for everything.

Yes.

Like, this is, how are we going to get them to accept this?

Who cares?

Blue angel.

I saw a guy in a blue robe and mom goes, a blue robe?

And I'm like, a lot of people have blue robes.

At least ask if he had anything weird about his knuckles

or his cheeks.

Was he creepy as hell?

Yeah, something.

It's technically not Deus Ex Machina.

It's an angel of Deus Ex Machina.

Don't be an asshole.

This is good writing.

So we cut to Mary.

Mom shows up at the temple and she's like, hey, good news.

You're getting married.

But Mary, who is, I guess, fresh from the 20th century, is like, What?

You're selling me off like a prized steed?

And she's like, No, we didn't do the bread.

That's how marriage works.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, exactly.

That's what it is.

I do.

Yeah.

Whoever wrote this scene has definitely never read the Bible.

Yeah.

Because, yeah, it's very clear about how marriage works.

Ah, she's like, yeah, no, we didn't even get money, but hey, you're upset.

You haven't seen how fuckable this guy is.

She says he's serious and very handsome.

Serious?

Yeah, what?

All I've seen is a dopey 20-something goofball who sees a pretty girl and jumps in a river.

Like, literally, he has all the seriousness of a golden retriever.

And he's like, he's like Pete Davidson handsome.

So, like,

at best.

Like movie star typical handsome.

Although, you know, credit to Pete Davidson.

Yeah, sure, sure.

He's making it work.

So, and then we cut to their, I guess this is like their pre-marriage.

So, back then, you would have had a betrothal ceremony, and then like as much as a year later, you would have had the consummation of the actual marriage.

So, okay.

So, this is standard.

Now, it did not take place in front of the nigesserate.

It did not take place with the ribbon hats and the big potato chips.

Does that even count?

Does the clock start on that waiting period for?

But do you

wear the Princess Leia hairdo that whole time, though?

During that ceremony?

That's the important thing.

Also, do you have a messy whisper fight while everybody's like, hey, we can all hear you?

We're trying to do the

right in front of a big crowd of people who are all looking at you and you're having a.

I'm blind now.

I have extra hearing.

Right there.

It wouldn't matter.

I was just thinking of the Spaceball scene at the end.

I was like, he didn't take the money.

It's like, how did you tell me he didn't take the money?

But as this is all going on, right, as they're like seeing that, she's seeing her parents off or whatever, Marcellus watches on, sure that she's up to some shit.

Right.

Marcellus is such a weird MacGuffin.

Right.

Because it was like,

if we don't have Herod coming after her, we got nothing.

Really?

So we got to find a way to have Herod coming after her.

And it's like, we can't have Herod.

directly engaging this chick.

So we got to get a henchman to be like, something's up with this lady.

I don't know what it is, but I'm going to find out.

Anthony Hopkins is flying a drone over the scene.

That's not really, that doesn't make any sense as a spy.

Right, but no, you're absolutely right, though.

That's the impetus for it, right?

Because they have to have him coming after her before he's coming after her.

Otherwise, what the hell would this movie be about?

Yeah.

Right.

So, okay.

So now she's somber and pious.

You can tell because she's staring at the moon.

Oh, my God.

Again, in cliche movie trope bingo, looking at the moon as the universal cliche for discontent is uh

we you definitely get a square there yes I got the impression maybe it's like you know if you hear that prophecy from your dad that a ghost from heaven is gonna impregnate you you're staring up a lot just like checking

that makes sense that makes sense but then also like filling out some more spaces on your bingo card there dan she goes into the room with an absurd number of lit candles like one of those candles would be out by the time you lit the last one but she goes in there and she's got to pray and she says, she's like, hey, God,

you've sent literally every named character in this movie an angel except me at this point.

And I'm the one that's going to carry your kid.

That seems weird, right?

Maybe I'll just hang out with that Lucifer guy.

He never makes me do anything I don't want to and he talks to me.

Yeah, there you go.

And she's doing this to this like weird shrine in front of the scroll of the law, which is not at all how things worked back then.

No.

It is kind of creepy, but it works.

Yeah, clearly.

Because then we have the blue man crew shows up.

Yeah, he pops in and he's like, don't be afraid.

You found favor with God.

And I'm like, well, that might be a reason to be afraid

given how this works out.

I want her to be like, I have, sir, I have never been more afraid in my entire life.

But this is where he tells her that she's going to have God's kid, right?

There's a point where she's like, that's impossible.

And he stops the rain and starts it again.

He says, all things are possible with God.

And I'm like, well, you have teleport powers.

I think that's more impressive because Rayden sometimes just stops and starts again.

So teleportation doesn't happen.

Well, she said, that's not possible.

I can't have a child.

And at first, I was like, why not?

Did she think she was infertile?

And then I realized she's probably saying, I'm only a child myself, which means that even the movie knows how not okay this is.

Well, she's she's supposed to be like 17 or 18 by this time, which would have been, she would have been, the biological clock would have been ticking for her family and her community.

But at the same time, like, what he says is exactly is, you are to become a mother and have a son.

And, like,

okay, you can say that to somebody.

They're not going to be like, today?

What?

Like,

this is, this is not chronologically bounded.

Like, this could be a problem.

Right, yeah, no, right, exactly.

A few clicks down the road.

You're betrothed and everything.

So, yeah, this does make a lot of sense at this point.

Yeah.

So I don't know what was going on in between the lines there, but it still doesn't make sense to me.

Yeah.

But he tells her about the coming God baby.

She smiles.

This is my favorite retcon in the whole movie, right?

She smiles and she looks up and she says, Let it be me.

Boom.

Consent.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not quite the magnificat of the New Testament, but

they've got a tone tone to strike here.

You can't be all giddy and singing praises on Arrakis.

It just doesn't work.

God, I hope I get it.

I hope I get it.

There's already a prophecy.

This is an angel now confirming it.

You don't need to

sing the chorus line wishing song.

So then, so now

somebody at Netflix says this should be an explosion or something.

So the big bridge that we saw in the background earlier blows up for no reason.

It has nothing to do.

Aqueduct.

Okay.

It has nothing to do with the rest of the fucking movie.

There's not going to be like a water shortage that we have to explain or whatever.

Yeah.

Herod is mad.

Herod's not mad.

He's just disappointed.

Right.

And his revenge for them blowing up his aqueduct is taking a census.

Yeah.

It's the census thing, they acknowledge and don't acknowledge this.

It is Schrödinger's census because it's happening oh it's not happening oh it is happening oh it's not like oh it's just taxes oh it's a like they i mean obviously the census is like one of the weakest parts of this story because that's just not how anything works yeah and we know when the censuses happen because they tend to keep real good track of census usually you write down what you figure out in a census

generates a lot of paperwork it's another way the movie's just like well we got to fold it in somewhere and like, all right,

yes.

Give it to Hopkins to do.

And it totally screws up the plot because this is, you're supposed to be like, oh, yeah, the census that required Joseph and Mary to come down from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

So Jesus could be born in Bethlehem.

Right.

But Nazareth wasn't a part of Herod's kingdom.

Yeah, it wasn't Herod that called the census.

Yeah, and he's the king of Judea, and Nazareth is not in Judea.

It was in an entirely different part of the Roman Empire.

And ultimately, this stupid movie doesn't even make him go to Bethlehem because of the fucking census.

It's just, it's nuts.

Yeah.

Yeah, they're like, we got to skirt around the people doing the census and get to Bethlehem.

What?

So, okay, so now we're back at the temple.

Mary has just told Anna about the baby, about the, well, I guess not the Immaculate Conception.

Let me cross that out of my notes so that I don't look like an idiot.

And Anne's like...

or Anna's like, yeah, no, I believe you.

Everyone else is just going to assume you fucked Gabe, right?

Because he's pretty fucked up.

And I'm not going to say a word.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

But Dan, is it like

the next

like 3,000 minutes of this movie are going to be everybody mad that she's pregnant?

Right.

Would it have been a big deal for a betrothed woman to be pregnant?

Because it doesn't seem like that would be like this big, huge against the law deal.

Well, they wouldn't have.

I think they would have known when she entered Joseph's household.

That would have been when it would have been consummated.

And in the text of the New Testament, they're already betrothed and it says she was discovered to be with child and not wanting to make a public example of her, he thought to divorce her privately.

So there is, at least in the New Testament, they're trying to keep it on the down low.

Nobody would have known.

But yeah, there would have been concern if that had happened.

Now in the movie, they're going with the proto-gospel of James, where people do find out about it, only they don't give her a hard time.

They give Joseph a hard time.

Yeah.

Oh, interesting.

Like, my thought is just that, like,

this is his issue.

Like, if he's not mad, nope, it's not like, it's not a criminal issue.

And you can imagine.

It's a torches and fucking pitchforks issue, man.

Okay.

Well, yeah, in this one, it is for sure.

Yeah.

If they come to him, he's like, I'm just as upset as you are.

Why are you giving me a hard time about this?

But in the proto-gospel of James, they get upset at Joseph, but then they make Mary undergo the trial of bitter waters or the sota, which is in numbers five.

This is the thing that a lot of people today imagine incorrectly was a recipe for an abortive patient.

I still think you're wrong about that.

Okay,

you can think that all you want.

But

they make her undergo this ordeal and she passes with flying colors.

And so everybody's like, all right, well.

cool seems like another good thing to put in the movie yeah it's like a like a witch trial thingy yeah well they got to spend the time talking talking about this revolt that nobody cares about.

Right, right.

Yeah, exactly.

You got to make room for that.

Well, right.

So, and they, and they have like, here's the part where it would have gone, right?

Because they, they, like, somebody overhears her telling Anna about it and tells on her, right?

And then the priests bring her in, and they're like, we have to kick you out for being pregnant, like, you know, a modern-day Christian school might.

Yeah.

Because we're the bad guys.

You're being fired from being enslaved here.

Deal with it.

She's like, okay.

Right.

Well, she was already engaged to be married, though, right?

So, like, she was leaving.

So, yeah.

So, but Anna's like, on her way out, she's like, Don't worry, this is all part of the plot.

And then she goes back home for a very awkward explanation with mom, right?

Yeah.

But she's like, I was told by a man in blue, and mom's like, Man in blue.

Well, I have to believe anything that you say from now on.

Everyone's immediately on board.

If you say the word blue or scar or anything, they're like, oh, my God, the guy with discovered the thing.

Oh, he's awesome.

It's like Cobra Commander, kind of too, and Skeleton.

I would have picked up quite quickly on that.

I would have been like, hey, you got to give me money to go to the movies because there was a ghost.

A man in blue.

Yes, right.

Yeah.

If that was your mom's trigger, yes, you'd know.

So, but mom's like, no, don't worry about it.

You'll do great.

With great power comes great.

Oh, fuck.

That's taken.

Wait.

Come back to me.

Come back to me.

Yeah, yeah.

Mary goes, I should tell dad.

And Anne goes, nope, nope.

You would get rocks thrown at you to death, apparently, is what we're going with.

So

she sends Mary off to live with John the Baptist's parents to be.

Yeah.

And when she gets there, of course, Elizabeth can tell she's pregnant because she knows a mother of God when she sees one.

I love that there's the moment where she goes to Elizabeth and Elizabeth says, the child in my womb jumps at the sound of your voice and therefore abortion is bad.

Oh, gosh.

She's like, yeah, oh, you have a kid too.

Wow, my kid would be lucky to even be your kid's sidekick.

I can tell your kid is going to be better than mine.

She literally says that.

Although, could I just say something?

And this is shocking in a movie that has Anthony Hopkins in it, but the woman who plays Elizabeth is the best actor in the movie by far.

She's actually really great.

Good acting job.

Yeah.

No, yeah, she, yeah, she nailed it.

She nailed it.

So, and then we cut to Anthony Hopkins talking to the would have been a honey corpse if they'd had the guts for it.

Or if they'd hired Dan as their historical consultant, although I think he'd have shot himself in the face by now.

I don't want my name associated with this Netflix property.

Yeah.

So much much that we actually had to black out the part where we said his name on this podcast.

It's crazy.

They are literally making Hopkins monologue to inanimate objects.

Like he's holding a plate.

Yeah.

Like he's talking to a chair that's full and then not like this is.

Yeah.

They are punishing this man.

They hated this guy.

Well, and also they've got him telling his own backstory to the chair.

I'm like, my God, this is so lazy.

Yeah.

This is the mushrooms full on at this moment.

He's like looking at his hand for a while and then his face in the mirror and he's like making himself cry at himself.

It's fucking awesome.

So then, okay, so we fast forward.

Now, John the Baptist has been born.

Mary's holding the baby in and she goes, oh, you're a natural mother, like the mother, like the proto-mother.

And then

I love this moment too, because like Zachariah says, honey, we got to go over to the grocery store, whatever, you know?

Okay.

Oh, and by the way, he looks genuinely terrified to go to the market.

Doesn't he?

Yeah.

He's like,

and

tears off.

Okay.

This was one of my favorite moments, too.

So we talked about some accents.

Zachariah went pretty close to crazy drunk Boston guy.

Yes.

Just being like, man, we got to go and fucking stop and shop.

Let's go.

And she goes, after he does that accent, she goes, ah, that voice, right?

Because they wanted to nod at the bit where Gabriel goes all Ursula from Little Mermaid on him, but they didn't want to get all into all of that because that's a whole thing, I guess.

Yeah.

I did enjoy all the stupid men in the story who are not helping at all and are completely unaware of the like magic that's allegedly happening.

They're just yelling stuff and getting in weird fights about nothing that doesn't matter.

And all the women are just blissfully being subjugated.

to him.

Yes,

with their magical intuition where they know everything that's going on, they're like, hey, you're pregnant.

I know.

And I can tell.

Yeah, you're, oh, look at this.

You're a natural mother.

The women are all just divinely intuitive about everything.

And the men are like, we got to go to the market.

Is this such a shit?

Is this Christian feminism?

Do you think they did a Christian feminist portrayal of a God impregnating a teenage girl in a movie?

Yep, I think they did.

So then we go back to the construction site where everybody's laughing at what a cuck Joseph is.

Right.

Yeah, now we're doing the construction workers are course and always give each other clichés.

Yes, I do.

Right.

The movie might take place in New Jersey.

I'm not sure.

That did look like the New Jersey desert to me.

Yeah.

But Joseph's like, hey, what is everybody pointing and laughing at me for?

What's going on?

Is there a joke or something?

And the dude's like, oh, no, your fiancé is knocked up.

And

he's like, you know, he's like, oh, take that back.

Okay.

And they get into a fight.

Right.

When it comes to shit talk, that is pretty weak.

It is.

Like,

yeah.

Take it back.

Uh-oh.

Although.

Also, they're like, hey, everybody knows your girl's knocked up.

Why do they not, why do they all also know it's not his?

Right.

Like, that would be the same.

There's no reason to it.

Like, oh, hey, you got some before the marriage happened.

Good on you.

Or whatever.

But like, no, it's like, ha ha, you're just a cuck.

Look what happened.

Yeah.

And he's like, no, I'm not a cuck.

Take it back.

Yeah.

It doesn't work well.

Take it back, guys.

Yeah.

So he gets into a fight.

Somebody knocks him out with a brick or some shit.

And then he comes to.

He's in the desert.

And Gabriel is hovering over him going, all right.

I probably should have told you before your coworker.

That's, that's honestly,

right?

I get teleported.

It's not like I didn't have time to get there.

Hey, buddy.

You remember when you walked in and I was like smoking a cigarette on the bed in your house?

You You gotta check out the ethical slut.

It's important.

Learn some compersion.

I'm an angel.

And then so then we got Mary and she has to confront her dad and she's like nine and a half months pregnant at this point.

So he's gonna know pretty quick.

And also I guess he's heard from whoever the construction workers heard from too.

Can I just say that she walks in and her dad is there kind of doing the dishes and he turns around and he's got this long dish towel around his neck and it looks vaguely like a tallit and it is the closest anyone in this movie comes to looking Jewish.

So yeah, she's like, so I'm pregnant with the with the Messiah and he goes, oh, you're pregnant with a, with a Moojer kid.

And she's like, fucking what?

Have you tried praying about this?

And he's like, if I pray,

we started the fucking movie with me out for 40 goddamn days and I invented praying.

Have I tried fucking praying?

But then he warns her, he's like, you know, all of the townspeople could gather together and try to stone you to death for this in the next scene, to which I wrote, like, wow, your Universal Code of Ethics must really suck then.

Doesn't sound very tientally dictated to me.

But just then, there's an insistent pounding at the door.

It's Joseph.

He wants to know about this her being pregnant shit.

Yeah.

He's literally like, hey, it's Joseph.

I just got beat up and I had a hallucination.

Let me in.

But no, they will not.

And they're like, no, actually, as it turns out, they tell him that she's not there.

So he leaves, but she chases after him.

Nine and a half months pregnant and all.

So now we've got her, she's running down this crowded street, but damn it if Lucifer isn't there at the head of a literal goddamn torches and pitchforks mob.

Yeah, they're in downtown Jerusalem and all three of them happen to run into each other.

Yes, right, yeah.

Jerusalem's a pretty big place.

It's like New York in that way.

Yeah, yeah.

And the most frustrating thing about this is like, all she had to do was was be like hey i was praying in front of this creepy ass shrine and blue robe guys showed up and said zap you're pregnant and they should have been like oh all right well i get that in that case yeah but they never this is one of those movies where like if they just explained what happened that would have resolved the tension right so they they got to ratchet up the tension so they're like and then and then joseph runs after and uh

so annoyed with the writing here yeah when lucifer sees her, he goes, ah, the temple whore.

I've been looking for you.

And I thought, I mean, who isn't?

That's not just a tab on my computer.

That's a whole window.

Everybody's looking for the temple whore.

Yeah.

But Lucifer's trying to get him to like, to attack her, but he's doing it like a guy who's trying to coax a crowd into singing him happy birthday, right?

Like, it's not like his idea.

He's just trying to make somebody else come up with that idea.

Trying to start slow claps that don't work.

Yeah.

And shouldn't he just be able to like inspire everybody?

You would think.

Supernaturally.

It's kind of his thing.

Yeah.

And since he can just kind of appear in the temple to confront her, you would think he doesn't need to look for her.

Yeah.

Fair.

Don't know why he's just like, oh, shit, there she is.

She's.

Guys, be cool.

Be cool.

I got a whole thing.

It felt like the movie just zooped him back to be like, hey, still the main bad guy for later, just so you know.

Okay.

And Lucifer's hood gets pulled back just enough to reveal that he is Heath.

Oh, okay.

Is it Heath?

He wasn't that tall.

But so they get her and they get Joseph, right?

And they're like, hey, you should throw the first rock at her, you know, because she's your fiancé.

And he thinks about it, but he just can't throw a rock at her to death.

So he throws this rock at Satan.

He picks up a hammer and waves it around to the 63 63 people that have them completely surrounded.

So they all back off and he and Mary run off and escape.

It's so good.

She is again nine and a half months precious.

Yeah.

He just he throws one rock at a demon, to be clear, but like regardless, just one rock and then a hundred more people surrounding you in a mob.

Like he thought he, you know, threw a smoke bomb and everybody's like, Cool, smoke.

That's nothing.

We're still a mob right here.

Pull up your hood.

But they get away.

I don't don't know how.

Assassin Screwed still.

They won't know it's you.

You just have to get two blocks away.

But yeah, so they run through the crowd.

And then we've got this bit where, like, they're hiding in a cellar.

They can hear the crowd still looking for them or whatever.

And then they just share a very awkward silence.

Okay, that would, I laughed at this too.

So they're in their hiding spot, and they're both like filing their nails and somehow like

eating clicky food with like provisions.

Long, long, long pause.

Finally, Mary looks over and she's like, seriously, it's a ghost, baby.

It was a ghost.

It's God's God's God's kids.

And Joseph, quite unbiblically, is like, no, I'm already over it, believe it or not.

I am, I'm good.

I am good.

I am.

Well, he says, I will love this child as best as I can, and I will love you as best as I can.

Oh, that's fair.

I mean,

yeah, it was like, obviously, you're lying, but I'm going to be cool about it.

I'm probably going to hate both of you forever, but I'll do my damn thing.

I'll do my best I can.

Good loophole, good Heath loophole.

Yeah.

Now,

in the New Testament, we do have the angel coming and visiting Joseph and letting him know this is actually God's child.

What?

The one time he actually is supposed to show up, he doesn't show up in the movie.

It's an outrage, I tell you.

Yeah, but now Joseph's got a

fucking unofficial stepkid situation, which is awesome, right?

It's a good thing.

Mary's just looking around waiting for Gabriel to pop in to like confirm it.

She's like, I don't know.

It's It's ah, fucking no-call, no-show.

You got to be kidding me.

Any minute now, Gabe.

Come on.

All right.

Well, it looks like the plot is about to start.

So let me give

Act Three the hard sell.

Will there be a sword fight?

Will the bad guys be like,

Will the good guys be all like, ah, ooh, they got me?

Find out the answers to these sound effects and more when we return for the also a Messiah is born conclusion of Mary,

mother of Jesus.

Oh, how I love summer.

I said,

oh, how I love summer.

Hey, Heath, you just walked in and said that out of nowhere.

It wasn't clear I was supposed to respond right away.

Okay, so.

So what makes you love summer so much?

So glad you asked.

Thank you for asking.

Something about summer just makes me feel my best.

And that's why I'm creating healthy meal habits for myself.

Healthy meal habits that last.

Okay, but like 30 minutes ago, you were making an abacus out of empty baby bell waxes to keep track of your runaway cheese budget.

That is accurate.

Yes.

Yeah, so I'm thinking you might need some help.

You should try Green Chef.

What's

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And with their new heat-and-eat meals, you can enjoy a delicious, wholesome meal in just three minutes.

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All right.

Well, as you know, from my wide variety of empty wax colors, I enjoy variety.

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But have you actually tried it?

I have, and it's been great.

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All right.

Thanks, Noah.

No problem.

So, how's the art project with the baby boy wax going?

Pretty good.

Pretty good.

You ever see the stuff people make with those felt crown royal bags?

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Yeah, so I upholstered a couch.

You want to check it out?

I no, I don't.

It's a cheester field.

Okay.

Cheester.

Come on.

All right.

No, that's pretty good.

So my Davey scored two goals in his soccer game yesterday.

Oh, that's great.

You must be so proud.

What up, bitches?

Oh, hey, Ann.

Hey, what you talking about?

What's the hot goss?

Give me the deets.

I was just saying that Davey scored two goals in a soccer game.

Cool.

Cool.

Two goals.

They still lost that game, I'm pretty sure, but that's cool.

That's That's cool.

My Mary's going to birth a savior, BT Dubs.

I'm sorry, what?

Yeah, she's going to be the mother of the savior of humanity.

Yeah, just repeating it doesn't help.

Yeah, how would you know that?

Oh, an angel told me.

Fucking awesome, right?

You got visited by an angel?

Yeah, yeah.

Super cool guy.

Kind of emo looking.

Infinity scarf.

He did a sweet trick with a teleport.

Wait.

Was it a blue scarf?

Kind of like tealish matching robe, whole outfit thing.

It was, it was like a cerulean, I think.

Was it?

It's a weirdly good guess.

It was close to what you said.

Yeah, so hate to break it to you.

What?

That's not an angel.

That's Chad, the farmhand.

Sorry, what?

Did he call himself Gabriel?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's Chad.

I fucked him too.

Yeah, me too.

Same girl.

What?

What are you talking about?

I didn't fuck him.

Oh, come on, Anne.

Yeah, you did.

Be honest.

It's just us here.

Us.

Fine.

Fine.

Yeah, I fucked him.

I knew it.

So he did this thing with the scarf?

Yes, so good.

No, yeah, worst sex possible.

Don't tell Joachim.

And we're back for still more of this shit.

And we're going to rejoin the action with Joseph and Mary getting hitched.

Right?

They both put on their prettiest headscarves.

They do.

They do.

And we see Joachim, father of the bride, just drinking.

That's like the first thing.

He's standing next to them.

And he's just drinking.

And then he's like, oh, it's a...

It's a ritual cup for everyone.

No, I know.

I know.

I know.

I'm passing it in a second.

And of course, they pass it to her, the nine-months pregnant woman, which feels like you're giving wine to, should she be drinking wine?

Jesus' fetal alcohol syndrome.

Yeah.

Jesus comes back as a fetus.

So, but I also, I find this funny that, like, they speak Hebrew for the purposes of the wedding.

Well, if you can call it that.

Okay.

Well, yeah, I was going to say, I don't think I'm in a place to judge, but they go for Hebrew anyway.

But it's like, that's just what they'd have been speaking, isn't it?

Or would it have been Aramaic and they got it double wrong?

It would have been Aramaic, and that's going to come up in the next scene as well.

Oh, interesting.

But yeah, they're kind of muttering the blessing is being muttered in Hebrew and not very clearly or well.

So they decided to go with the translation and then still messed it up.

Yeah.

Although

it was English at the betrothal.

It was, yeah, right.

Yes.

And there was a lot of overlap between what was being said at the betrothal and what they would say at the actual wedding.

You would think, yeah.

So, okay, so they share the marital wine.

They share the marital blankie that they both get under.

Everybody rejoices.

And then all the musicians play, not together, just at the same time.

Yeah.

It genuinely sounds like they doled out some drums and rudimentary pipes and flutes and said, here, you extras, just sort of do what you can with these.

Hey, guys, you want to just jam?

literally for the wedding party and then you got to love the six people who try to start the dancing at the wedding

for a while that is apparently timeless and then you got the guy who thinks joachim is a traitor off in the corner just kind of like

yes just sitting there just like i'm gonna narc later on in this action just

so gonna narc on you

He's plotting his betrayal.

So Mary and Joseph, they head back to their house.

But damn it, if the townsfolk, the angry zealots, haven't trashed it for like her transgressions against God, right?

Oh, I was wondering if that was just the Jewish version of decorating the car for the wedding.

No,

you kill everybody's rabbits and trash their house.

And mom and dad follow you home on your wedding night.

It's fun.

Yeah, what?

What was going to happen there if the house wasn't?

And

they've written Zonah on the wall in red, which is Hebrew for harlot or whore, whore,

but not Aramaic, which is what

normally graffiti in this time period is written in Aramaic.

Well, the graffiti that they should have had is for the next scene, which is

when they literally say, Romans, get away from our God, which should have been written as Romans go home.

Go.

Yes.

Yes.

Romanes eunce domus.

Yes.

In six-foot-high letters.

Yeah.

So, but then that night at the temple, everybody's like starting shit.

They try to, they pull the eagle off from before and throw it to the ground.

It's even funnier this time when the angry mob guys are like, rabble, rabble.

Wait, turn, turn to my left.

Turn.

Everybody stop rabbling for a second.

Turn it.

Pivot.

Pivot.

Well, and then they go to throw it down and they're like, you guys have to back up more.

We don't know how much it's going to bounce.

Guys, guys.

Owie, my fucking finger is pinched.

My finger is pinched.

Pick it up.

Pick it up.

Okay, rabble now.

I wasn't lying.

They do say, Romans get away from our God.

That's an actual line from the movie.

I just think they're not thinking long-term enough.

Just wait a few centuries and the Romans will take your God to a whole nother level.

Yeah, that's true.

So, but the Romans, they're fighting back against this insurrection.

But then Narc guy just comes to Marcellus because he knows the main bad guy when he sees one.

And he stops him mid-Pogram.

And he's like, hey, man, Joachim is up to some shit.

His daughter's up to some shit.

Two days away, by the way.

Like, Nazareth is not two dunes away.

This is

a long way away.

This is a two-day hike.

Wow.

So, but then Mary and Joseph find out that people are coming from them, right?

So they escape via their proto-stagecoach.

Yeah, I was going to say, how long is it in covered wagon day?

And again, outside of Herod's jurisdiction, Marcellus has no jurisdiction in Nazareth.

He's actually going going and invading Roman territory by

heading into Nazareth.

I feel like they'd notice.

You'd think, yeah,

you're stepping on some toes there, Marcellus.

So, yeah, and so at this point, like Marcellus, he hears that there's a daughter who's up to some shit.

He knows which daughter it is, right?

Because he stared angrily at her before.

Why would he know that?

He's like, oh, a woman in this movie?

I know.

So he goes to her house and he like threatens her housemaid with a candle

to tell her what the superpowers are.

I would just, I was waiting for her to just go,

yeah.

Well, fuck, I'm just going to re-light it.

Now I'm going to re-light it.

Bro, candles aren't that menacing.

Now I'm going to put some wax on you.

It's a little bit warm.

Oh, shit.

Tell me now.

Kind of kinky.

Are you trying to waxboard me?

That's nothing.

And then she starts talking about there's going to be a star.

Yes.

It's like, how does she know about the star?

Yeah.

Why?

Did she hear the song?

Is she a Zoroastrian magus?

What is happening?

So Joseph and Mary were like, hey, servant lady.

Yeah.

So we're about to take off.

We're going to follow a wandering star.

Probably higher and brighter.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Than all the others.

Okay, bye.

Don't say anything about it.

What would higher mean?

Yeah.

Marcellus is like, that's not how stars work.

Brighter, I guess.

You're lying to me.

You can't follow them.

They're all up, I guess.

Because you're in space.

If you're in space, I guess you could follow one.

So, yeah.

So, meanwhile, so Mary's monologuing to Unborn Jesus.

They're riding

to safety or whatever.

And at one point, as they're riding to the safety, one of the guys says, be careful.

There are Hill Raiders out this way.

You know, just so we know.

Hill Raider.

Yeah, Hill Raiders.

So that we know when the action beat shows up.

Oh, this must be Hill Raiders.

There might be Jawas.

Yeah, right, yes, yes.

Ah, but the sand people go in single file to hide their numbers.

No, the dude shows up in fucking Hollywood's version of Native American war paint.

Yeah.

Right.

To attack their.

Oh, my God.

It was like this weird thing.

He's suddenly peeking up like a frogman, just barely coming out of the water or something like that.

Right, yeah.

But he's got mud all over his face like he's hiding from the predator.

I don't know what was happening.

He's going to try to steal Nancy Pelosi's gavel or something.

So, and then so they attack, and Joachim pulls out his actual fucking sword and actually fucking sword fights the Raiders.

I had been making jokes all through my notes about how there was going to be a fucking sword fight before we were over.

There are going to be two, possibly three, depending on how you count them.

Yeah.

And the mud-faced frogmen end up killing Jokeem and then leave.

Yeah.

Like everybody else is just, it's cool.

We, we only really wanted to kill the one guy.

Well, they leave the horses.

They like they steal a modest amount of their stuff and run off.

And I'm like, wow, that wasn't worth dying over.

Probably should have just offered them that stuff.

Hey, do you want to take the horses too?

No?

All right.

What about the cyber truck?

Let's take the cyber truck.

I feel like we're taking that.

Hey, you guys, I just found that temple whore that literally everybody was after.

Right.

No, we don't care about her anymore.

Fine.

Okay.

These are hill folk.

They don't get that.

Yeah, right.

The hill raiders don't know about that kind of stuff.

So now it's morning.

They've buried Joachim now.

And Anne lays a flower on his grave.

And then they have this weird, stupid conversation, which just they back out of the very stupid shit that they'd been setting up this whole time, right?

Because he goes, well, you know, the Roman soldiers are ahead collecting the tax.

So, Anne, you go that way and distract them while me and Mary go to Bethlehem.

How does that distract them from what they do?

I don't know.

From what?

Distract them from what?

They can't see us from here, right?

You just go a different way.

They need to be distracted.

It makes no sense.

Step.

I feel like he's just coming up with an excuse to get rid of his mother-in-law.

Well, right.

He's just like,

you know what?

Go pay your taxes.

You've been skirting them for a while now.

You really should go pay them.

What if we all just go the other way?

Like right now?

No, no, no.

I think you should go.

I think you should go probably to the Romans and make a diversion.

And guess where they're also going to be?

In Bethlehem.

Well, right, right.

Well, and then, so, and that's the dumbest thing about it, right?

Because they haven't established where they're going anyway.

Right.

We just know that they were trying to escape.

And then he says his family's from Bethlehem.

And I'm like, well, first of all, why the fuck would you have to sleep in a barn at that point?

But secondly, like, well, then that would be the place to go then, wouldn't it?

Just to all of them.

Yeah.

Apparently the Bible is a side-scroller for side characters.

Why I guess when like main

characters can turn around?

Because Anne even tells us at this point, like, well, I'll go to Bethlehem the long way around and I'll meet you there.

Why?

Yeah.

Well, you don't know where they'll be staying.

And again.

Anne owes no taxes to Herod because she does not live in Herod's kingdom.

So

they don't know what they're doing with this.

He basically says, Mary and I will go to Bethlehem.

And he all but says, but not because of a census.

That would be

just to avoid those soldiers.

If you had two parents, it would fuck it all up, especially if they each had two parents.

And then, okay, so now we're back at the temple.

Herod hears about, or sorry, the palace that is miles away from the temple.

And Herod hears about the We Three Kings kings, and that they're out and about looking for a star that's above a place.

All of them are above places.

They're above places

or below, depending on the time of day.

Yeah.

And for some reason, like in the Bible, they come to Herod and he's like, oh, well, tell us, let's find out where this prophecy says Jesus would be from.

But in the movie, he's like, do you know who I am?

I'm the king of the thing.

Sounds real dirty.

I don't know where.

Right?

Yeah.

And

he just roasts religion like from an atheist point of view here.

It was kind of fun because it's Sir Anthony Hopkins being like, okay, idiot messenger, you believe in the dust blown on the wind of dreams across the waters of the moon, idiot.

It's

you.

That's what you sound like.

Yes.

By the way, this messenger is.

doing

who knows what accent.

Like, this is an accent I couldn't even place,

but, but, like, foreign, right?

Where

He's supposed to be foreign and he knows about the wise men or whatever.

I know that there's a tradition of one of the wise men being black, but like he's supposed to be Persian, right?

Yeah.

Like, why is he black?

Yeah, the idea is that they're from the east, which would have overwhelmingly been associated with the Persians.

So don't, I, I can't answer questions about this movie.

They're just making crap up.

Yeah, this is getting,

we've already asked so much.

So meanwhile, Mary and Joseph, they're stagecoaching away away to Bethlehem, right?

Because they apparently had so many horses that they could still split up left over after the Hill Raiders took care of them.

But they get to Bethlehem.

Now, so I do want to ask you this one, Dan.

Because my understanding is Bethlehem would have been a little tiny place at this time, not like this megalopolis that they wind up in, right?

Yeah, no, it would have been a pretty small village, not nearly as small as Nazareth, but nothing compared to Jerusalem.

It's about six miles south of Jerusalem.

And the most annoying part is everybody represents Joseph going from like house to house.

And they're like, no, we're all full up here.

Try down the road.

And that is a misunderstanding of the text.

Because in Luke, all it says is there was not enough room in the, and then it uses a word that means guest room.

And so most scholars today are pretty sure that they were already in a house.

And it just means the guest room where most people were sleeping was already full.

So they had to sleep downstairs where the animals were kept so they were would have been in their family's home so this whole part where he goes to like the motel six and then the red roof in and then the days in none of them where that's that's not that's not built either he's just going literally from house to house and they're all like nope we're full because let me tell you something airbnb is ruining

There's also, before he does that, he like he turns to this old lady and he's like, hey, watch my pregnant wife.

And he gives her a coin.

And I'm like, what's she going to do if something happens?

The crowd starts starts to try to stone her, and that old lady's gonna do some karate or something.

Yeah, she's gonna watch her, yeah,

and they just got robbed, too.

Right, what are they gonna pay for this?

With,

yeah, they were loaded, apparently, yeah.

So, and then he said, He turns to somebody, he's like, Hey, why are there so many?

I know that the census and everything, but but but the movie is like underplaying that.

Why is everybody here?

And somebody says, Oh, you know, there's uh, there's supposed to be a messiah born in this town in the next couple of days.

So, everybody, everybody's like, wanted to get a look.

Yeah, I love, and can we just point out that apparently everybody is aware that the Messiah is coming as a baby, like right now, but nobody's bothering this pregnant lady to be like, hey, is it possible that you're the one?

Right, late, like, yeah, let's say we should probably set aside a couple extra guest beds in case the yeah,

right.

Also, that that's I that's not fucking biblical.

Was Bethlehem full of Jesus paparazzi at the time of his birth?

I don't remember that.

No, there was none of that.

There was none of that going on.

That's just something made up because they've brought up the census, but then they spend the rest of the movie trying to avoid the census

and inventing a bunch of other crap so that they don't have to address the census that they, for some reason, brought up.

Right.

And also, is Gabriel again moonlighting again as the rumor spreader?

Right.

Everybody knows, except for the family

of the Messiah that the Messiah is coming.

Yeah,

you've got an entire Bethlehem full of people who know about this, and yet three scenes ago, we had mobs coming after her to murder her, right?

Yeah, right.

Get your story straight, everybody.

Come on.

So, but then we cut back to the old lady because, like, you know, Mary's having a hard go of it.

She's in labor at this point.

And the old lady that's supposed to be watching her turns out to have been Satan this whole time.

Oh, my God.

This was the best part of the movie.

I wanted the whole movie to be this.

Where they decided to punch it up a bit?

Yeah.

Because you know that, like, those words were said.

Somebody looked at the Bible and said, well, punch this up a bit.

So, yeah.

So he says, wow, you know, looks like God's going really hard on you.

And Mary's like, well, you know,

the Catholics say you just slipped out like a fiberful turd.

So I don't know.

It's like, maybe, maybe, maybe not.

But then she passes out.

He gives her some water and it's evil magic water.

So she passes out.

And then he starts carrying her off, but he's levitating her.

Remember that part in the Bible where Lucifer carries Mary away by levitating her?

He's abducting her into the cool.

It's the best thing ever.

I was like, yes, go off the rails, movie.

This is what we needed from the beginning.

All right, so no, it's the second best thing ever.

Light as a feather, stiff as a ball.

Because the best thing ever is when Joseph sees this, grabs a sword from from the fucking holster or whatever of a of a nearby Roman soldier, and then runs and stabs Satan in the fucking ass with it.

Oh, my God.

Well, I don't know exactly where he stabbed him because it seems like it comes out his chest, but it's like, hey, Mary's levitating right now.

Yeah, right.

It felt very dangerous.

He is very clearly not trained on sword safety.

Yeah, right.

I feel like the sword should have poked out in the levitation space, if anything, right?

Oh, that would have been awesome, right?

Should have just carried her regular.

Why wouldn't he just carry her regular?

Because then the townspeople would be like, hey, is he levitating that lady?

He could have just carried her, or maybe Satan's just like, I'm not going to carry this whole fucking lady.

She's pregnant.

This is a heavy lady.

I come up with weird plans.

I should just kill the baby right after.

I could have just killed her right there in the square when he gave me the nickel.

Fuck.

Where was I even taking her?

I don't know.

Yeah, right, right, right, yeah.

So, but he stabs her in the heart, just like in the Bible, and then she wakes up from the dream and the movie's like, see, see, we're still like, the Bible didn't say she didn't have that dream.

That could have happened.

But now, so now they're in Bethlehem.

They're not in a barn, are they?

There's no manger here.

Yeah, it looks like the ruins of an old castle, like it's World War II or something, and the Germans have bombed the city, and they're like huddled into the corner of this.

I wouldn't call it shelter.

There's no roof to this thing.

It all feels very weird.

Yeah.

And Mary's mom is there too.

So that diversion happened, I guess.

She's back around.

Yeah.

Like went ahead, paid taxes, and then just like turned back and walked back past the taxes.

Paid taxes after she got robbed.

Yes.

Yeah.

Right, right.

Exactly.

And then she found them in this overcrowded city where every hotel is full and they're staying in a bombed out fucking castle from the goddamn Blitz Creek, right?

But she's in labor now.

And apparently this part pissed off a lot of people,

a lot of Christians, because Mary's, I guess, not supposed to, like, she has no original sin, so she's not supposed to have labor pains.

But in the movie, they show her having labor pains.

Yeah, which, by the way, screaming mama giving birth, that's movie trope number whatever.

I think that's bingo.

Yeah,

yeah.

So, but I feel so sorry for this director, right?

Because he had to go out and explain this, but he wasn't allowed to just point out how silly it would fucking look if they just had her having a baby and going, huh, would you look at that?

Yeah.

Baby.

You know, it would have looked ridiculous.

So, like,

Jesus gets born here, to be clear.

Jesus, the Messiah.

And everyone's like, oh, it's kind of just like a regular baby.

That's cool.

I thought it would be like, you know, like shiny or something.

I don't know.

Right?

Yeah.

He's got a halo or something.

Speaking of which, so they, they retcon the whole the star being above it doesn't make any sense thing by having the stars shine a spotlight directly on Jesus uh point of order beams plural pointing in two different directions

who was the other guy was that the backup was that like the the laya skywalker of christianity craig christ in the next movie

but it creates another problem because if the star is actually that easy to follow, Herod just gets to end the movie early.

Right.

Yep.

Sure chaos.

So

they needed to have it.

Have Craig, the diversionary Christ.

Also, such a stupid thing.

Like Anna, we cut back to Anna that Benny Jesserit.

Like, she knows a savior birth when she sends this one or whatever.

Yeah.

So then, and so now Herod is getting word that there's been some kind of miraculous birth in Bethlehem.

He's like, yeah, there's a spotlight star and everything.

Right.

At this point, I wrote in my notes, I'm surprised Anthony Hopkins isn't just holding up his paycheck at this point.

It's almost that.

He's so fucking bored.

He's just playing with like a metal mask thingy that he found on set.

It makes no sense.

They show it for a while.

He's literally like, did you guys see this thing?

I just got it from Amazon.

It's, it was prime day

in the eyes wide shut store on Amazon.

Yeah, right, yeah, right.

So, yeah, but they explain explain it all to him.

So, some dude has come in to tell him.

Some like goat herder or whatever has told him, come in to tell the king that there was a Messiah born and that there are pilgrims already gathering to see the manger where he, well, I guess the fucking bombed-out Blitzkrieg building where he was born, right?

Yeah.

I was going to say squirted out.

I wrote squirted out on my notes, but Dan, I changed it to born for you.

You're welcome.

So, he sends away the shepherd that told him about Jesus, and then he tells Marcellus to kill all the newborn man-children in the whole town.

Well, yeah, he says that.

He says, kill all the baby boys, and then he says, but bring the special one to me, which means that he just wanted to kill him some babies.

Right, because the whole point of killing all the babies is he didn't know which one it was.

So the next morning, Mary's looking over her god baby.

Joseph's sitting off to the back.

Like, he's not sure.

Like, he's like, it's not my kid.

Am I, is that, am I cool, like holding him or whatever?

Right.

There's a long moment of that.

She's like, hey, thanks for not breaking up with me.

She's like, never crossed my mind.

She's like, really?

Because in the book, it says that it did.

I just like that this is an intimate moment with a mother, her child, her husband, and an oddly respectful crowd of strangers standing 20 feet away.

Like they're at the zoo or something.

It's amazing.

He comes over to see the kids.

He's like, oh, it's got God's eyes, you know, or whatever.

And it's not just, it's not just swaddling clothes.

She's got like baby's breath and there are a bunch of sequins in a pattern and a bunch of floral stuff going on too.

Baby's first bib.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The most ostentatious parents I've ever met would not wrap their baby in a bunch of sequins.

Are those the regulator sheets from My Sheets Rock?

And Joseph says, you know, what shall we name him?

And she's like, oh, you know, his dad, I mean, the angel of the Lord was super insistent.

We call him Jesus.

And I thought at the very fucking least, this movie would

have named the kid Yashua.

But no, no, his name is Jesus.

So, okay.

So meanwhile, Marcellus and the fucking Nazgul are charging towards Bethlehem at top speed, right?

We see our shitty Bethlehem, CGI Bethlehem.

The perspective isn't even right.

It's like squirting up the side of the mountain in a way that just doesn't make any sense.

And that's not what the mountains of that area look like either.

And this is where we get the inexplicable accent, the Bronx horseman riding up to warn Mary that the king's men are coming.

Hey, Mary, I'm a Puga Pega corner.

I've got something to warn you about.

Yeah.

And also, Joseph was supposed to have been warned in a dream that Herod was coming after him, go to Egypt, and they take off.

And this movie loves doing dreams.

Yeah, yet again, the thing that they do the most, they just decide not to do when it's the most appropriate to do it.

When it would make fucking sense.

Yeah.

So, yeah, but they, so they get back in their stage coach and they head out.

Meanwhile, the Romans are just mowing through town, murdering babies.

Now, here's the thing.

Except almost exclusively adults, right?

What I'm watching.

Netflix was not about to show a baby murder on their fucking movie, right?

There's no way in hell they were going to show they were going to get anywhere close to that.

So we just see like people like, I'm going to defend defend the babies, murder you.

And that's what we see instead, right?

Yeah.

And they're going to double, triple, quintuple down on that in just a second.

In the greatest possible way.

Yes.

So, okay.

So we cut to Mary and Joe.

They're on the road to Egypt.

And she's like, oh, we, you know, we should find some place to sleep.

And he's like, okay, we have a covered wagon.

I mean, I guess we could just pull off the side of the road.

She's like, no, I think we should endanger the lives of some random strangers who are going to immediately get killed for helping us.

And he's like, okay.

She's like, hey, let's go find shelter at literally the creepiest house in the middle of nowhere that we've ever seen in our lives.

What could go wrong?

So they're like, hey, do you have a place to put us up?

And they're like, yeah, we sure do.

I feel like you're supposed to say, also, by the way, there are the fucking nine riders are hot on our heels and they're in a baby murdering rage.

Yeah, but they don't have to worry because all the bad guys' horses run in dramatic slow motion.

Well, that's true.

Yeah, they have a head start.

They got all the time now in the world.

This place looks great.

There's a guy in like a grandma shirt dress.

He's in a rocking chair up there.

Let's just hop right in there.

So, okay.

So they take refuge in this house, but immediately Marcellus comes across them, right?

Because he's following their tracks.

So dumb.

And they have the best moment, which is, I'm sorry to cut this off, but they're like, all right, we know for sure that the baby is in that tiny two, maybe three room house.

So here's the plan.

We'll set everything on fire around the house.

house.

Except the house.

Yeah.

Including the extremely dry vegetation that goes right up to the house.

And then

we'll all go into the house.

Wait, then we go in?

So don't let anyone in, including you.

Yeah.

No, it's right.

So did they walk in after setting a circle of fire around themselves?

They walk into the house.

Marcellus is like, I don't need this helmet anymore.

It's just the final battle, right?

So he throws his helmet off, needed it for the ride.

You'd fall.

You hurt yourself.

But Mary and Joe are hiding in the loft.

They're like, where's the baby?

And this couple that they've just endangered is like, there's no baby.

We cut up to Jesus and Jesus is cooing.

And we're like, shut up, baby, Jesus.

You're in danger.

I just love that they're like,

like, they're like, there's no baby here as though.

They probably should have asked, hey, wait a minute.

Is your intention to search the whole house?

Because if that's it, then yeah, they're upstairs.

As soon as you look at the one.

It's literally the smallest place in the world now there is no hiding there yeah how were we to know that they were gonna search baby just chomps down on a dorito really loud yeah

so marcella starts stabbing the ceiling he's like they're obviously in here it's the only place in the house so he starts stabbing the ceiling joey falls he stabs i guess around joey in a circle right so now joseph falls through he starts a sword fight with the bad guys this is sword fight number two three if you count the stabbing Satan one, right?

I don't remember this many sword fights in the Bible.

I got to be honest with you.

But Mary escapes through the upstairs window that peasants' houses often had back in those times.

But she finds herself on the roof and there's fire everywhere.

What will she do, right?

Yeah,

by the way, like when the bad guys came in, the interrogation is like, he stabs the woman.

In like basically, I think in the genitals.

Is that what happened?

It feels like he's, and then he's like, the the next one's in her heart.

Yeah.

And I, I, I got to say, uh, God chooses the weirdest times not to intervene.

I'm just going to point that out.

Well, it's also like the idea that he's like, I stabbed her in a non-fatal place.

Now, it's like, given the medicine that they had and the dead, there are no non-fatal stabbings to the heel.

If he just like bonked around the shin, and it was just like, ah,

there are, there aren't,

there aren't a lot of non-fatal splinters in that.

Yeah, right.

Yes, exactly.

So,

so, okay, so, but she's off on, she's on the roof with baby Jesus trying to escape.

Joseph gets away, he gets outside, he sees her up there, he tosses up a basket.

He's like, here, lower the baby in the basket so that we don't have to deal with the whole you just throwing him to me thing.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, he got that basket, and I thought, and my heart leapt.

I really thought they were about to invent the sport of basket Christ.

I thought he was going to hold it open, and they were

in.

the baby in.

I was so excited, but it didn't happen.

It was so sad.

Airball.

No!

Yeah, so

hands are up a bunch of popsicle sticks and rubber bands for an egg drawer.

So, okay, with the random guy that they stopped and sentenced to death for helping them, he fights really hard, but ultimately he's killed.

So Marcellus gets away.

He's charging towards Mary, but Joseph side tackles him.

Yes, side tackles him.

Actual side tackle.

Only way it could have been more apropos to this movie is if he'd gotten him with wrist control.

I shit you not.

Eucharist control.

So the two of them fight.

Ultimately, Joseph traps Marcellus in like a flaming net.

Yeah.

He gets caught in that and dies.

I'm pretty sure this was the origin story for the hound.

Oh, interesting.

Oh, and by the way, his death was the most most pathetic death I've seen because he's being burned alive, but he just kind of lets out a few weak groans and just kind of resigns himself.

Yeah, right as hell.

Quietly being burned alive.

He's kind of like, eh, eh.

It would be a whole thing to try to untie this.

This will be in the Bible, probably.

It's like, really, movie?

Now's the time you're not going to go with an obvious cliched trope of someone screaming as they burn.

Right, yeah.

Fine.

And you got to to have them running either through a door while they're on fire or into a lake.

And there's a lake right next to the house.

Yeah.

But, but no, he just kind of goes

and dies.

So, but, but Mary and Joseph and Jesus charge right through the fire on their horse because God's protecting them from the fire.

And that's how did that not end up in the Bible?

Joseph and Mary with baby Jesus in tow, galloping on a horse through a wall of fire to escape the legions.

You'd think somebody would have wrote that down.

Yeah.

And

I want to see the meeting that took place at Netflix where they were like, all right, imagine this.

This is the climax.

They're on a horse.

They're galloping through a wall of fire.

Marcellus is pitifully dying.

And they were like, love it.

Here's a million dollars.

Yes, right, right.

They charge into the sunset.

And I'm like, really?

I mean, I know that is the way Egypt would have been, but still so okay so but so that we cut to them galloping way too fast for there to be a baby on that fucking horse this is where we've basically caught up with the opening scene now well there's the there's the back and forth between the wider shot where they're galloping through the water and then the close-up slow motion where they're just barely moving

and then back to the galloping and then back to the slow motion where they're barely moving.

I was very disappointed in the facts through there.

But this is where Mary's like, yeah, we need to take the baby to the temple to get him blessed.

And Joseph's like, well, there's so many soldiers.

And she's like, doesn't matter.

We are blessed, which is the closest I have ever seen a movie get to just having a character say, we have plot armor.

We're going to put on the full plot armor of God.

Were they not just blessed when they were hiding in the house?

Right, yes.

To fight for their lives and almost died?

They were blessed then, too.

Right.

She's just like, nah, turns out we'll get away.

Why are we doing diversions if we're blessed?

Everything that's happened so far.

Right.

Did they actually go back to the like in the Bible, Dan, do they go back to the temple?

Do they, they're like halfway to Egypt and then they're like, oh,

well, here's the thing.

The nativity accounts in Matthew and Luke entirely contradict each other because it is only in Matthew that they have to flee Herod.

In Luke, that doesn't happen.

Oh, okay.

They're just hanging out in Judea in Luke.

And so at 40 days, they present Jesus in the temple.

And that's what

I

get to meet Jesus.

So anytime you try to harmonize the two different nativity accounts, you've got to find answers to stupid questions.

And so this is their answer to this stupid question.

Mary going, we're blessed.

Yeah.

Mary's like, we got to go back.

We didn't get the guys in the big hats to say their magic Jew words at our baby and cut off part of his dick.

Right, exactly.

So they go back to do that, and them showing back up at the temple is going to be intercut with this amazing fucking scene where now Marcellus has brought, well, I guess not Marcellus,

his minions or whatever, have brought back all the newborn babies from Bethlehem.

And apparently Bethlehem like had a fucking Cincinnati, Ohio worth of newborn babies.

It is a smorgasbord.

Like, I don't know, how many people in Bethlehem?

Like maybe a thousand, two thousand?

Normally, census, call it.

There would have been about 2,000, yeah.

Okay, so let's say it was like 100,000 people because of the census.

That's still like one baby boy born yesterday in

146 of them.

They've lined them up everywhere.

Like when you bring in groceries, but you brought too many and you can't put them on the table anymore.

Right.

So they've got them just spilling out all over the fucking place.

All of them are crying, so it's hilarious.

It's like like me getting on an airplane or whatever and and herod's like

man what the fuck is this i told you to kill the babies

listen you said to kill all of them and then also bring the messiah i feel like i was doing the best thing to synthesize all that stuff i didn't know which one can you put the mask down that you're playing with so we can call it

except that he's not because because he's already talked to the mask so this time he the scene opens with him monologuing to a baby, which I suppose doesn't technically count.

He's interrogating the baby.

It doesn't count

as an inanimate object, but close enough.

Right.

Okay.

This was 100% just the film crew being like Anthony Hopkins is like yelling at a baby or something.

I don't know.

We'll work it in somehow.

So yeah, so all the babies are crying.

They tell him, oh, we didn't get the right baby, but we brought all these babies anyway.

He goes to stab the baby, but he can't because Netflix is not going to have that shit on their fucking show.

So everybody has to sort of walk out on him like they don't respect him anymore or whatever.

By the way, were we clear that they do say we slaughtered all the male children except the newborns that are here now?

Like, what?

Why did you kill the male children that aren't newborns?

This was a newborn thing.

I just wanted to be extra, extra on it because new is kind of, you know, I feel like you could have interpreted it and you would have would have been mad.

I was very clear.

This was newborn.

So can you put the mask down one more time?

Mask down?

So yeah, so then as all of this is happening, he is like, he's rolling around on the floor and this is intercut with Mary just standing there triumphantly like, I won the movie, right?

So

then we get Mary and Joe bringing their baby to the temple, danger be damned.

And Anna gets him in past the guards again because she knows a Messiah baby when she sees one.

And she brings him to Baba Ben Buddha, who knows a messiah baby when he smells one, I guess, as well.

Yeah, it's funny because as they approach, the guard is like, first of all, there are randos walking in and out in a steady stream here at the temple, but the guard steps in front of her, right, them.

Yes.

And like...

Bene Gesserit just does her like, come in, Mary.

And he's like, oh, I should have killed her when I had.

Ah, damn it.

Yeah, right, right.

So they bring her in, and Mary in the narration she's learned something here today or whatever right she gives us her little monologue and then she looks directly at the camera at the end which is a weird choice and that's it she says sorry she says in the end love will save the world and i want to know when because

it's been 2000 years

yeah

such a good ending literally mary looking at the camera like you said being like, and nothing is going to happen that's bad to my baby.

Yes.

And yeah, and then fucking Tinkerbell comes in with her fucking wand and closes it up.

All right.

Well, Dan, Dan, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you for having us.

Oh, thanks for having us.

This is a lot of fun.

Always a pleasure.

And real quick, while we still have you here, remind our listeners where to go to hear more from you guys.

You can go to, I mean, Data Over Dogma, it's on YouTube and it's on anywhere that that you get your, wherever you get your podcasts.

So go check that out.

And I'm on Thank God I'm Atheist over, it's a worse version of Scathing Atheist.

So check that out if you want to.

And then I'm at McClellan, M-A-K-L-E-L-A-N.

That's a phonetic spelling of my last name on a bunch of places, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, or whatever the hell they're calling us.

Go follow him.

He's almost got a million followers on TikTok.

Not quite there yet.

Oh, shit.

All right.

Maybe I'll start engaging with the you in TikTok.

Hey, by the way, if I have any troop movements that Xi Jinping needs to know about, do you know who I should talk to?

No?

Okay.

So I just

like to check when I talk to TikTok people.

All right.

And well, that does it for our review of Mary Mother of Jesus.

That's not going to do it for the episode just yet because we still need to reel ourselves back in next week.

So, Heath, tell us what's on deck.

We've got leap three.

Very exciting.

Leap, a tale of the last days live from Cleveland, Ohio.

All right.

Well, I'm excited as hell for that, but I feel like Mormon Movie Month just keeps slipping deeper into the earth the more we dig.

But with that to look forward to, we're going to bring episode 515 to a merciful close.

Once again, a huge thanks to the Dans for helping out today.

Be sure to check the show notes for links to their various podcasts and TikTok channels and books and whatnot.

And an equally huge thanks to all the Patreon donors that helped make the show go.

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 early access to an ad-free version of every episode.

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

And if you enjoyed this show, be sure to check out our sibling shows, The Scathing Adias, Citation Needed, DD Minus, and The Skeptic available wherever podcasts live.

If you have questions, comments, or send a message suggestions, you can email GodolphinMovies at gmail.com.

Tim Robertson takes care of our social media.

Our theme song was written and performed by Ryan Slot and Kapival Drafts on Mars.

All the other music was written and performed by our audio engineer Morgan Kirk and was used with permission.

Thanks again for giving us a check of your life this week for Heath Henrite and Neli Bosnick.

I'm No Ilusions promised to work hard to earn another chunk next week.

Until then, we'll leave you with the American Graffiti Close.

Jesus went out for a pack of cigarettes, but he's just about to come back any minute.

Mary would go on to have an impressive career in toast appearances.

Joseph,

that's it.

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.

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

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