‘Say Nothing’ Series Finale: The Squeeze of a Trigger

What's up, everybody? Chris Vernon here, and welcome to a new season of the NBA and The Mismatch.

And huge welcome as well to my new co-host, Dave Jacoby. I can't wait to link with you twice a week, every Tuesday and Friday, right here on The Mismatch to break down everything that's happening in the league.
Who's playing well, who we loved, who we loathed, trade rumors, team dysfunction. We've got you covered right here.

So follow us, subscribe, and hit us with those five-star ratings on Spotify or wherever you

get your podcasts.

And also don't forget to follow us on social media.

That's at RingerNBA and check out the full mismatch episodes with the two handsomest

podcasters in the history of podcasting right on the Ringer NBA YouTube channel. Hello, welcome back to the Prestige TV podcast feed.
I'm Joanna Robinson. I'm Rob Mahoney.
We are here to wrap up our coverage of Say Nothing. It pains us to only bring you two podcast episodes about this tremendous season of television.
But these are the times we live in, Rob Mahoney. These are the times we live in, you know? I'm just so upset.
I say that because we could have been even more upset and we could have been living with the terror and the tragedy and really the tough vibes that come with the back half of these episodes, but bad vibes masterfully executed,

Joe, I have to say.

I just think it's a great season.

The best bad vibes

I've experienced all year, perhaps.

If you have not heard

our first episode,

we covered episodes one through four

of Say Nothing,

as well as some sort of

historical context,

stuff like that.

So if you're just catching up with the show, you will want to listen to that pod before you listen to this one. Also, if you're in the mood to listen to pods about Say Nothing, I can heartily recommend what The Watch has been doing.
Chris had a great interview with Patrick Radden Keefe, who is the author of the book and a producer on the show. And then Andy Greenwell and Sean Fennessy had a conversation about Say Nothing and how much they love it.
So it's just like a love fest over on The Watch and over here about this show. Spoiler warning, I guess, for history.
At this point, I think anything that's in the book, I feel at liberty to say I was sort of censoring myself a little bit on some stuff just to like respect the surprise that the show is trying to hold back. But cars on the table.
We're here to talk about evil little maniacs. Do no harm.
Theater people. I lay waiting and the people in the dirt.
Rob Mahoney. Yes.
I told you that part one of this, our coverage was like the fuck around. Then this is the find out half of the season.
How did the find out half of the season land for you? I think very well, which is to say very hard in a lot of cases. And there's varying degrees of that, right? There's a lot of actual tragedy in the form of disappeared loved ones and the search to find them.
There's a lot of tragedy in terms of like PTSD and addiction and people grappling with the things that they've done or didn't do. And I think grappling for us as an audience with like the rip roaring good time of the first half of this season.
And as we said, the kind of good fellas ascent into this story and then where it leaves all the characters by the end of it and where it leaves us by association and kind of engaging with the story in this way by the end of it. I do want to like, I'm primarily interested to talk to you about the figure, the real life figure of Jerry Adams.
And now that you've like sort of seen the full arc and in terms of like, you know, Sean and Andy were talking about the success of the show being that it operates in the moral gray. And you and I were talking about in the first half, this idea of like a show that is not like passing judgment on these young revolutionaries and like not, not really down on one side or another.
And then we got an email from a listener who's like, but the book hates Jerry Adams. And I was like, and I would say the show does not come down favorably on Jerry Adams at the end of the day.
But that's something that I'm really curious to talk to you about. But I don't want to linger too long in what's left out from the book adaptation because Patrick in his interview with Chris and we talked about this in our first episode, acknowledged that when you're adapting source material, there's a difference between reading a book and watching a show.
And so leaving things out, we talked about this with Shogun all the time, leaving stuff out is almost always in service of giving us a better TV experience, which is going to be different from your book reading experience. I do have a few notes about this back half, just before I knew what was missing from the book, before I had read through the rest of the book.
There are things like Kitson is established as this antagonistic force, and then he literally just disappears from the narrative and i feel like we yada yada over like brendan's time in prison which is like very uh narratively important to the story or what happened to the the mcconville kids after you know um their mom was abducted and all this sort of stuff like that that in in order to drill down very closely on basically Dolores and like, and then like the, the Jerry fallout. So I guess leaving aside what isn't there, because you're not a maniac, you're a little maniac like me and you did not, you know, consume a lengthy audio book over the span of a week.
What do you think about some of those feel like you skip over or Kitson just evaporating from the story and stuff like that? I'm very interested to talk about it in these terms as an adaptive work. Because for me, just with the experience of watching the show, I certainly clocked it.
And I think the Kitson one is notable because you almost don't quite notice it's happening until like, oh my God, we're jumping 10 years into the future. Oh, it's the end of the series.
I literally haven't seen that character in five episodes. Right.
They were such a prominent part of the story. And it's crazy to think that the last time we left Kitson was in the conversation we brought up on the last pod about like this triple agent cost of war, like psychological manipulation that he was trying to run against the IRA.
That's the last we heard of that character or saw that character, even had him mentioned in the show, which is an insane thing, narratively speaking, to grapple with. That said, I found myself really kind of appreciating the rhythm of what was being dropped in and out of the story for this particular show like it is a it is a story that is is grappling on a lot of levels with the idea of disappearance and the idea of your your mother can be taken in the night and you will never see her again and not just that but like everyone in the town around that is is so complicit in it that they're just like not going to talk about it it is a fact of life that people areishing off the face of the earth.
And so to have it be kind of part of the story in a way where, yeah, like Brendan goes to prison, we don't follow him in there. And so he just disappears from the story until he suddenly reemerges.
Like the idea of these people popping in and out of each other's lives, I think it's kind of consistent with the story that they're trying to tell. And it made it as a viewer, I think, really rewarding in some sense, right? Like seeing the McConville kids reunited as adults when it's clear these people just haven't even seen each other in a long time in many cases.
They not only lost their mother because she was taken from them, but like half their siblings aren't even really their siblings anymore. They didn't grow up together.
And having all of these reunions, having all of these moments of characters zigging in and out of the story, it left me feeling that Say Nothing is deeply empathetic, but it is not very sentimental. And I think that's an interesting line and a balance to draw for a show.
That's a really good characterization. I really like that.
We should just probably ask them, but I am interested narratively if a reason to not show how truly traumatic and I think actually some of the toughest stuff for me to digest in the book is what happened to the McConville kids, just like the lives that they led. To not show that is to maybe when we have characters like Dolores and Marion who were according to this story, and we'll talk about sort of what is known what is not known uh directly involved in her death in in jean's death then it sort of softens the impact of what they did because if we just see those those kids tormented then doler is a character we're asked to have a lot of empathy for and marion uh marion by extension like maybe it's just even harder for us to stay in that empathy space if we see the the reality of the fallout yeah um but something i something we edited out of the first podcast which you wisely called out is because because the show had not made it clear that g mcconville died that night essentially essentially, or soon thereafter.
This phrase that Patrick Raddenkeith likes to say, and maybe existed before he started talking about it in the book, but this idea that 10 children were made orphans with the squeeze of a trigger. And so that's why this figure looms so large as the emblem emblem of the cost of this movement there's yeah so many there's costs across the board there's there's costs to brendan and dollars and like all these people as well but in terms of like a figure that people can have nothing but empathy for it's these children and in in in that sense, Kitson vanishes from the narrative.
And then Helen sort of, even though we meet her in the first half, her younger self, she really, Laura Donnelly as adult Helen sort of just really emerges in this last couple episodes as having to carry all of that on a character that I don't know that I felt I had like, I expected that Helen was going to be this, like such a through line.

Do you know that I felt I had, I expected that Helen was going to be such a through line.

Do you know what I mean?

I think making Helen one of the anchors

of the back part of the show,

and really everything after the time jump,

is very smart, and it reorients the story clearly.

I'm sensitive to what you're saying

about the idea of taking out the McConville kids' lives as the overarching narrative or kind of a through line of the entire series, decentering what they went through and decentering the trauma and the desperation and the despair that comes with something like that. I think they do a pretty good job in the series of kind of catching us up on the emotional aspect of that if not the literal like what have these people's lives been like? But in the sense that I want to get back to this in the kind of larger conversation about how Dollars and Helen almost become like unwitting allies in a way.
Like that's a stretch of that term, but like their interests become aligned at a certain point in terms of revealing the truth. They do that, but you also get the moments where Helen is reading about, you know, dollars in the news and like the terrible trauma that she has sustained and been like, what the fuck? Like she gets her moment to call it out in a way that I think is really, really necessary for the balance of this kind of story.
But overall, I want to talk about it in this way, which is you can either show the story of the victims or you can show the story in this case of the people who are pulling the trigger and setting the bombs and who are involved in the IRA. Or you can try to do both at the same time.
Doing both is always going to be hard in terms of how you juggle those things together. And if we're going to anchor the story around the people who are pulling the trigger, I think you can that when you create the obligation of like who has to initiate change here right like helen wants answers but like dolers has to find it within herself to be like i want to tell everyone what happened because this is fucked up and it's very fucked up that jerry is at the front of this whole movement pretending to never know any of us and and in particular the conversation that dolers and Brendan have about like, if he is abdicating any responsibility, it is falling on us and we are carrying it every day.
And what Dollers as a person and as a character ends up doing with that is using it to reveal the truth ultimately and using it to shine a light on some of these things. And like, clearly not a perfect person, clearly not a perfect character.
But if you're going to anchor your story with with the people pulling the trigger the people who are like villain-ish uh if you want to borrow the play adaptation of doler's life uh this is what they have to do like this is the kind of role they need to play in your story for it to work yeah i think i think that's really astute and i think that like i think it's a i think a lot of the adaptive choices work for me and so i'm not i'm not here saying like it's in the book, it needs to be in here. I'm just always curious about those choices and like, why do you decide to excise this? Why do you, for the Brendan side of it, he was in the same prison with Bobby Sands.
So that whole stretch, he did a failed hunger protest right before Bobby Sands. Like if you want to call it successful, successful hunger protest.
And so there's like, there's this domino effect of like the way in which dollars and Marin, um, their protest and their, uh, protest specifically against force feeding is what led to Bobby Sands and that hunger strike movement with resulted not only in his death, but a number of other participants in that hunger strike because they could not force-feed them because of the work, if you want to call it that, that Dollars and Merritt had done on that front. And Bobby Sands is just this huge turning point in the movement.
And you and I both recommended the film Hunger, which covers that. Michael Fassbender doing an incredible job playing Bobby Sands.
That's a huge part of the story that the show just leaves out. And I can understand why, because A, a really great version of that story already exists.
And B, something that Patrick said, even in the context of his more involved narrative in the book is that it's not, he didn't set out to chronicle everything that happened in the troubles in those 30 years. Um, and so like bloody Sunday and like all these other sort of moment, you know, integral moments in this movement are, are kind of footnotes in his book, Bobby Sands, because he's connected to both Brendan and, you know, like Jerry, you know, Jerry knew him, Brendan knew him, you know, like he's woven through that way.
But I can understand that if they're trying to sort of like, I'm sure there were versions of the script where that was all in there. And then I'm sure that they were just sort of like, we can't, it's just slowing down the back half of our story.
This story is known and out there. We're not doing Bobby Sands a disservice for leaving him out.
His, his legacy is known. So we just basically get that.
See, all we have is that scene of Brendan in the prison, watching Jerry give this interview And it is, I think, one of the most effective. Anthony Boyle as young Brendan is, I think, tremendous throughout.
But the scene where he's watching Jerry give this interview and watching Jerry disavow the IRA. Yeah.
And the shot of him looking up through like the cage that's around the TV screen. And that's the last we see of young Brendan is him left behind in a cage, you know, by this person that the show went to great pains and the book does as well to establish how close the two of them were inside of the movement, not just as leaders, but like in that sequence that makes it into the show where Brendan cuts his arm open on the window and Jerry comes personally.
Coming out of the shadows, leaving the morgue where he would hide away. Jerry exposes himself in a very uncharacteristic way because Brendan was such a close friend of his.
So this becomes not just an ideological split, but just such a personal betrayal between two people. Absolutely.
And I think that's the way you bring it to the people who are watching this show. Like you can have the historical epic that is spanning literal decades trying to explain like the Northern Irish conflict in a broader sense.
It's always going to be hard to not have a series like that at arm's length. And the way you bring it in is with scenes like that and with relationships like that.
And honestly, for everything Jerry Adams has done, you can judge a lot of that character and a lot of that person and the actions he has taken or disavowed that he has ever taken, but the stories portray certainly that he took them. But then you get to moments like at the end of this show, when Jerry is being interviewed by the police.
And when they insinuate that he was friends with Brendan, and he says, we were friendly. I'm like, fuck this guy.
You know, it's like there is an understanding on a human level of these people who were in a terrible situation, a violent situation, one that they were participating in and propagating in certain ways, but they were in it together. And when those people start abandoning and turning on each other, and if you're someone like Brendan, how could you not feel abandoned by ultimately the arc of Jerry's career? Even just watching Dole was in an identical position when she was being arrested and facing life in prison, refusing to disavow her involvement in what happened, refusing to take accountability because of what it stood for to do that.
And so, yeah, like that character is going to feel like a coward. That character is going to feel like a turncoat.
That character is going to feel like they have none of the greater Irish interest at heart or the overarching question of these last couple episodes

is like, what was this all for

if this is where this was going to end?

And how could someone like Brendan or Dollars

feel like what they did was for anything

if this is how Jerry Adams is going to wrap up

this whole situation?

Right, and it's a line that they literally give Dollars,

like she says it, I think,

four or five different times in the back half.

A bunch of characters.

She's trying to have that conversation with everybody

and it feels like Brendan is the only one

who will really engage her on it.

And at the same time, what makes this such like deliciously complicated story is that Jerry Adams, as we sort of alluded to in the first episode, is the president of Sinn Féin, like a hugely public figure. We get a scene of him and like, he's at, he's at the White House.
Clinton is on the record talking about him. He is just moving and shaking in this time in a very public way.
And there are people who think he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, and there are people who think he is the most traitorous rat that has ever existed. And what is complicated about Jerry Adams is both of those things are kind of true.
Because what I remain, even when the book goes even harder than the show does on all the steps it took for Jerry to get from where he started to where he ended, I am partially convinced, and the book is not trying to apologize for him, but could peace have been negotiated without Jerry? There's a convincing argument that it couldn't have. Not just that Sinn Féin and the political approach versus the freedom fighting approach, but Jerry Adams himself as a convincing, reasonable avuncular we get this earlier earlier scene in, I think it's episode three, I want to say, maybe four, where he goes to that negotiation in England that's cut short, abruptly cut short.
The guy who speaks up at that meeting, played by the guy who played Maren Trant in Game of Thrones, one piece of shit. A lot of Game of Thrones alone.
How did you feel about Father Barristan Selmy appearing in this episode or in this series of episodes? Well, I mean, he's been a fixture in Derry Girls for years. So I've been used to seeing him up there.
For me, it's Art Parkinson who played Rick Gunnstark. Yes.
Appearing as like a nine foot tall strapping lad that really like broke my brain. But like, there were figures in the movement who were incapable of doing the negotiating that Jerry was able to do.
So like is there an argument to be made that this betrayal that he enacted on these particular people, Brennan, Dollers, all these other people was necessary for, he certainly believes so, necessary for the greater good, the greater peace.

That's what's morally complicated

because I can't, I can't,

I fault him for a lot of things.

And to your point,

friendly is a real sort of twist of the knife

and a necessary one.

But like, there's some big picture stuff

that maybe I can't fault him for.

And I feel cynical in general about politicians

and sort of their like altruism of their intentions.

But like, what is true is that he achieved a peace

Thank you. can't fault him for.
And I feel cynical in general about politicians and sort of their altruism of their intentions, but what is true is that he achieved a piece. And what is true is that a lot of people who bloodied their hands in pursuit of that piece felt like the piece he brokered was a concession and that they lost.
They won nothing. And that's the tragedy of this entire thing.

Was he essential to achieving that kind

of peace, perhaps?

Was that peace worth anything to

vast swaths of people? Clearly

not. On the terms that they wanted to

find some kind of resolution to this conflict.

And as far as his place in this

story, I think

Josh Vennett and Michael Colgan just do an exceptional job of playing Jerry as, for one, very consistent accent work across the time jump. I'm here for it.
I love the juggling of the older and younger cast in general. Very difficult to do.
I thought they basically nailed it on all fronts. I enjoyed all of the counterpart presentations and performances.
But Jerry is just being this incredibly opaque figure who you're never quite sure where he stands. You know that he is a political animal from the start.
He is the guy who picked up the bullhorn and started talking because there was a vacuum. And just by virtue of knowing what to say, ended up seizing a kind of power.
But you do get little glimpses at times just in the way that the show kind of characterizes him or shows him. Like, one of the few moments I think Jerry kind of allows himself some satisfaction is when he goes to visit the United States and is initially blocked and gets to tell the border agent, actually, the president has given me a special exception.
And it's like, there is. I'm like, oh, this is part of why this character and this person does this.
There is a status. There is a power.
And it's the exact thing that Brendan points out as far as why he feels so left behind by Jerry sailing off from the shore and leaving everyone else stranded. This is a guy who has created a career and gotten his book deal and found his relative fortune and made himself a historical figure while disavowing everything that he stood for before that and leaving behind everyone who was there.
And I just think that the way that that is constructed over the course of this show is so smart and so careful and so considered. And a lot of it is just like shot chaser kind of filmmaking, right? Like the cut of Jerry grabbing Brendan's hand in the hospital cut immediately to Brendan talking about why he hates this guy's guts.
I just, I think that's master stroke kind of stuff in terms of helping us understand who this character is and how the world around him views him. Something that Patrick Roddenkeith said to Chris Ryan is that like one of preoccupations across many of his articles or other things that he's worked on is his fascination with charisma.
This idea of charisma and how you can almost become high on your own supply of your own charisma. So when you take characters specifically like Brendan Hughes and Dollers Price, the two sort of like firebrand charismatic figures because jerry has his own sort of muted scholarly avuncular charisma and mary has her own like appeal but like in terms of like just like in your face hot young attractive charisma like brendan dollars are these figures to to have them be these two figures that we follow them through their Belfast project confessions, and then see these like broken versions of them as played by Maxine Peake and Tom von Lawler.
I just think that like, to your point on casting Nina gold, who I talk about all the time, she cast throne, she cast the crown, she cast like Star Wars sequels. She just goes to the British theater and casts all these incredible actors off the stage and elevates them on the screen.
It's amazing. The work she did to find people that both match but can give us just that sort of hollow echo of these are still charismatic people but just sort of like broken brittle versions of that same charisma is i think one of the like one of the genius aspects of the most genius aspects of the show and the shot that i think most perfectly encapsulates that is when you watch older brendan with his groceries walk back to the Divis Flats

under the mural of his younger self,

who is, and this is like a real thing that happened,

sort of plastered in Belfast

as this hero of the movement.

But like, who cares about him anymore?

Nobody, he's forgotten.

He's like, the image of his youthful self is venerated, but himself is forgotten he's a guy who works at a construction site yeah right like he's and the movement has moved on and the movement in some ways at that point in the story is kind of like outlived its usefulness at least to a certain segment of the population who's trying to take this more political approach i think there is all kinds of stories wrapped up in here and i think one of the miracles of this show, and in particular, the back half of these episodes, is like, this is a bombing op that plays out like a spy story. It's a harrowing hunger strike that's like, really its own isolated tale.
You get the time jump as these people are trying to figure out what to do with their lives. And it's overall like a bridge between, as we've seen many times throughout

history for many different kinds of people, like what revolutions or revolutionary groups do when they either succeed or fail. Like how do you move on from something like that if you are involved in that kind of movement on either side of it? But what's interesting about the, like, not everyone, but plenty of people when they talk about the end of the troubles, I think particularly people who were active in the provisional IRA is that there was no winner.

Yeah. And how dissatisfying that is because even in your loss, you can have this sort of righteous, we'll fight again sort of attitude or something like that.
But when people are just telling you to shut it down and it's over without you achieving anything and without you being able to justify the blood that's on your hands when you were a teenager in your early 20s, starting

this, and you're like, this will all be

worth, these moral compromising

I am making, the way in which I am selling

my soul to this cause

will be worth it at the end for the freedom I am

bringing to my people, and then that's not

what happens. But people are telling

you you won, but you didn't win.

And it's no surprise in that respect

that Dollers as a character can't move on, right right that she is seeing ghosts around every corner that she has she's plagued by regret because what was it all for like why did i drive joe linsky to his death if this is where we're going to end up and helen on the other side of that does like makes this very impassioned case for how because of what happened to her like she she refuses to move from Belfast. Right.
Because what if her mother comes home? Right. And so you have these two women by the end of the story who just can't move on.
And I think the story kind of naturally segments into these two categories, right? There's the people who can put it away and there's the people who can't. And Jerry Adams, at least on the surface, can put it away.
He can move on. He can engage in a different kind of activism.
I think Marion on some level can put it away. She has the bit about what good is neurosis going to do at this point, basically.
But also, she's still mired in the cause. And she's the one who's still wanting to participate and still wanting to, if not take up arms, at least enable people who will, despite the fact that, as Dollers points out, she's too old for the shit, frankly.
But I think that's how Helen and Dollers kind of find themselves aligned in a way, is these are two people who are just like fixated on the past for very understandable reasons, right? If a member of your family disappears in the middle of the night and you never see them again and you never find their body, you never have a chance to grieve, you don't have a chance to process and move on or even understand what happened, how could you not be stuck in that moment in time? And to watch the people who disappeared your mother be celebrated in the political sphere or be in your church choir or whatever, you know, like there's no repercussions for these people and they are still your neighbors because Belfast is like, you know, a small place to live. What you're saying goes back to the scene that we identified in, I think it's episode two, Binge Drop, is the scene between Dollars and Brennan outside of the wake when they're talking about this idea of hesitation yes and that Marin from like the the moment they do that hospital job is someone who doesn't hesitate and we see that in the conclusion when we finally see and I'm going to talk about that about the actual pulling of the trigger for sure on she mcconville and then Jerry is someone who's just sort of like plowing forward, is able to sort of consign Kevin and Sheamus to death because that's just sort of like what the cause needs.
And Brendan and Dollars as characters who were both passionately dedicated to the cause, willing to put their own lives on the line time and time again for the cause, but conflicted from the start about putting anyone else's life on the line when it comes to that. Obviously they were involved in things that directly killed people.
So I'm not saying like, you know, their conscience were like clean or anything like that. But in terms of like their comrades at arms, they're like, I will put myself out here.
But it's it's and then for Jerry's main tactic to be, I will never put myself out there. I will put all these people between me.
And, you know, the actual explosion is so chilling in all of this. And I mean, it's no secret that he's one of the people who can sleep a little better at night because of that, right? The distance he has put between himself and the conflict to where other members of the IRA are kind of like openly wondering, has he ever pulled the trigger before? Right? Like, has he ever been on the front lines in that way? We know he's been arrested, but it's mostly when he's gotten pinched in some other situation.
Everyone is wondering like, to what extent was Jerry like actually tangibly involved in this? And this is where I think you get these really fascinating comparisons of like dollars and the actors in the bar. And these actors are like pushing her about her life and the things she's done and the kinds of regret she's had.
It's like, to them, these are very abstract ideas. And to her, it's like, this is my life.
This is extremely real for me. This is hard to talk about.
This is not just like an idea of a thing that I'm talking about in a bar. And I think when you look at the overall story, Jerry is someone who I think believes in the cause on a certain level, I'm sure, has a certain interest in Irish independence, but is a person who deals with the ideas of these things and not the realities of these things.
He's the person telling Dollers, get on the plane to fly to London. And Brendan is the one saying, you need to be in the car with the people.
it's no coincidence that i mean i think it's the name of the chapter of the book but it's no coincidence that they pulled this jerry conversion to this public figure into the episode

title It's no coincidence that, I mean, I think it's the name of the chapter of the book, but it's no coincidence that they pulled this Jerry conversion to this public figure into the episode titled Theater People. Because this is theater for him in a certain way and in a way that it wasn't ever for something like Dollars.
But I mean, it was like there was costume and excitement and all that sort of stuff. But like at the heart of it, it wasn't about that for her.

And I love the scene where, because I told you off pod, I was like, did you know the Dollar's Price married Stephen, the actor Stephen Ray? And you and Kai and I were talking about that off pod last week. And like, before I realized sort of how it was going to be treated on the show.
And I mentioned the movie that I first saw,

Stephen Ray in was The Crying Game,

which is he plays an IRA gunman in that movie.

And what I didn't realize is that Miranda,

the actress Miranda Richardson plays an IRA associate

with like short, bright red hair in a way that is like

clearly kind of based on dollar's price. So they didn't bring the crying

game into it. They did this play version of it in the show.
But this idea of the romanticization of the movement and how unreal it feels for so many people who are just watching it from afar, And the crisis that that she has in that moment where where they're not this this actress who is shallow not like totally villainous but like just ask these questions in a way she doesn't understand their impact this idea that dollar's price had a moral code that she didn't she claims and and the book backs her up that she never used her sexuality I mean, perhaps other than flashing her knee at a border crossing guard, like never honeypot seduced someone to their death. That she never, she believed that they were fighting a war and so she never wanted to kill like a British soldier out of uniform, like off duty or something like that.
It's like, we are fighting a war. So if they die, they die with their uniform on.
And that's what she firmly believed. And so the implication that she was like a seductress and all that sort of stuff like that.
She's like, that's not what I did. You know, I was like leading, you know, big bombing, like, you know, projects in London.
Project is a stupid word, in London, like, I found that scene incredible, her breakdown in the alleyway, incredible. And that's the last time we see young Dollars, right? Is that breakdown in the alleyway afterwards is really incredible.
Well, it's also a refutation of the sort of more judgmental telling of this kind of story, one way or the other, right?

Like there's a version of this story where Dollars is a woman with a haircut, seducing soldiers, like reduced to a single character trait and extrapolated into something that like wasn't even exactly true, at least based on her telling. There's a version of that you could do for every aspect of this story, every dimension of this period in history.

Or you can try to understand these people in the way that Say Nothing,

the book and Say Nothing, the series does. And I think largely...
of this story, every dimension of this period in history, or you can try to understand these people

in the way that Say Nothing, the book, and Say

Nothing, the series does, and I think largely

does so, at least in the series form that I can account for

very successfully.

Spending time with her in this way and

understanding how that would sit

with you when you are a person

of a kind of principle, if not one that everyone

agrees with, and you're being

portrayed as a seductress in a stage play for narrative convenience. Yeah

Um

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah of a kind of principle, if not one that everyone agrees with, and you're being portrayed as like a seductress in a stage play for narrative convenience. There's lots of adaptations that work that way.
And I don't think they're the ones we generally appreciate. I want to talk to you about Maren and how she's used in this story because something that you identified in our first episode is like, we had not seen the older version of her.
And so there's this narrative tension. If you haven't done any like Wikipedia Googling outside of watching the show of like, does she survive? And the show knowingly constructs a few scenarios, like at the end of the hunger strike or, uh, them sort of like being potentially like rumbled on the ferry on the way over to London where it's like Maren, not

Dollars, but Maren is in

what seems like mortal peril

and the show is holding back

from you the information that she survives

to adulthood and actually outlives

Brandon and Dollars.

How does that work for you?

Does that feel like manipulative

to you at all? Or like how do you feel about

that construction of the show? I feel honestly I have no problem with it whatsoever. I didnulative to you at all? Or like, how do you feel about that construction of the show?

I feel honestly, I have no problem with it whatsoever.

I didn't feel manipulated at all.

I felt like there were a lot of interesting twists

and turns and reveals in that way.

And getting to see the older Marion

was honestly like a bit of a relief for me.

Like we get to go through the time jump

with all of these characters we've spent time with.

I think it works because ultimately

the interview structure of the show, of the Belfast project, at a certain point, becomes the story, right? Like, this is not just a framing device. Like, this is an item of agency that is ultimately leading to plot development, right? Like, the information revealed in those interviews is instrumental to the telling of Say Nothing.
And because that is true, the two voices on the tape are who they are, at least the two that we are familiar with for the story. Clearly, lots of other people spoke for the Belfast Project, revealed their stories, told their truths.
Marion was not one of them. And so the tension of Dollars and Brendan being the primary voices that we hear on tape and see as they're giving their interviews.
And also the very clear and obvious sense that Dollars is withholding information. And who is she protecting? About who pulled the trigger? Who was on the gun team that ultimately killed Gene McConville? Like who was involved in these situations? Like you can feel her being cagey in a way that feels true to certainly a sister protecting a sister.
Although there were moments in the story where I was like, is she protecting Brendan? Is she protecting someone else? Are there other people she's trying to look out for? But I think ultimately this show being, in a lot of ways, a show about sisterhood and a show about women, if you want to extrapolate to Helen and women on kind of like opposite sides of circumstance. But the Dollars and Marion relationship is so critical to the way the story is structured and told that I didn't feel tricked or deceived at all by the fact that ultimately we're going to get some twists and turns.
We're going to get some reveals. But like everything felt so emotionally satisfying with the way that those two characters were interacting.
I agree with you. Like I both noticed it watching because I did know that she survived.
So I both noticed every time they they were trying to get the audience to wonder if she was going to survive but I didn't resent it or feel I don't feel like the show is cheapening any of that because these are all things that happened and it's true that Maren did seem like she was going to not make it through that hunger strike and stuff like that. Those are all true things that happened.

There are two sort of big things that first the show does and also the book does about sort of making a decision about what happened that is not necessarily fully bolstered by evidence. And I want to get your read on both of them.
Patrick Rodden Keefe has talked about how the McConville kids, many of whom, you know, spoke to Michael did, Helen did, I think, stuff like that, were dissatisfied with his book because his book presents evidence that their mother was an informant and evidence that she wasn't, but it does not come down as hard on she wasn't the way that the kids wanted it to. Where do you feel like the show lands with that? With like, whether or not she was or wasn't behind that sheet, say, or taking money or whatever it is.
I think the show is fairly clear that it probably was not her who was informing. That seems to be the way the story is told on screen.
I agree. I think the show is taking the tack that the kids would want it to take which is that you know especially with the like i own a pair of red slippers like are you guys you guys really played fast and loose in this woman's life we don't see like according to dollars and a lot of other people she confessed we don't see that confession you know we just see her being like tormented right before she's put in the car so that's like that's a choice the show makes to sort of paint her as less ambiguously innocent or not the way the book does um the other thing is the identity of who pulled the trigger because um this is something that in his from all the in all the interviews that i watched promoting this book, Patrick Radden Keefe was like, I think I solved this.
I believe I have solved this murder. That this is not a known thing and that he believes he put this together based on two bits of sort of accidental evidence.
One is that either Doller said this or someone heard her say something that this is something sisters did together or something like that. And then someone else independent of that said, whoever killed Gene McConville, later Jerry Adams tried to hire her as a driver.
And then he found out from someone else that he tried to hire Maren as a driver. And she said, no, that would be too boring.
So these are like the bits of evidence that he put together to be like, I believe that Maren Price is the person who pulled the trigger on Jim Conville. But there's no one on tape saying that.
And Maren, as we add the disclaimers to the show, Maren to this day denies that he tried to get her comment for the book. She didn't, but she gave a comment after the book came out.
So he has accused her of this murder based on these pieces of evidence that he has pulled from various interviews. And that's sort of like kind of a pro an exciting, sexy PR promise of this book of I have solved the G McConville murder.
The show just shows it to us and presents it as fact.

Like, I'm inclined to believe that it's true.

I think, Redkenkaif is a very rigorous journalist. I don't think that he would make this accusation.
But what he said is he's like, it's a thing I can assert in a book that would not hold up in a legal case. We do not have evidence on a legal basis.
No one could prosecute Maren Price for this. There isn't enough evidence for that.
There is enough evidence that I felt comfortable putting it in this book. So where do you sit with that, Rob? So this is where these various ideas kind of come together in terms of these changes or these kind of assumptions that are presented differently on screen.
It's like, who gets to play with circumstantial evidence? Who gets to extrapolate based off of the bits that they know and the dots on the chart and draw a line between them? Because clearly, with the way the show treats Gene McConville's case, there's the big looming question of like, but how do you really know that she was the person behind the sheet just because of some slippers? Like, how can you be sure? And it's a lot of hearsay and it's a lot of gossip. And we see Jerry, when he's being interrogated the police being like, how do you know this isn't just Doller's opinion when I never talked to her about that thing? And so to do it in a journalistic effort, to me, for one in the show, there is the clear like off the record conversation between Doller's and is it Mackers? Is that the interview with Mackers? There's-the-record conversation.
They're like, I have no idea if that conversation happened in reality or not. I would guess that maybe Patrick Raddenkief has a better idea if it did.
And that's the kind of thing you can't say. Dollar's price confirmed this off the record, at least journalistically speaking.
But you can go out on a limb with this other information that you have and try to extrapolate it another way and try to create the image and recreate the idea of what actually happened based on the information you do have that is above board. You see that like knowing that that's where they're going to land and you go back to like the hospital job and you watch Maren take the gun and pull the trigger like you can sort of see the through line they constructed in this show.
I will say the one piece of the through line I felt like I was missing was if Pat is going to be there at the end, I think I needed more Pat. I really agree.
That was like a weird little... Because he was the leader of the unknowns.
It was so easy to sort of seed him in to the London job or other things, you know what I mean? And they just didn't. Especially when the they're like the choice they make is like it's unfair to make Pat do this and I'm like who's Pat to you yeah why do you care why is what is what is this I really agree not to like Tuesday morning quarterback a really exquisitely done show there's a part of me that almost wishes we had gotten a sort of like Rashomon version of events where we see like a number of different possibilities and we don't know exactly who it was given that it's like a little speculative like slightly speculative Patrick might not agree that it's speculative but like it's slightly speculative but like I wouldn't mind living in the ambiguity of that you know what I mean I completely with you.
I also have to say Tuesday morning quarterback is the most

Joanna Robinson sports expression I've ever heard.

I know it's Monday morning quarterback, but it's literally

Tuesday when we're recording this, so I

know what the real phrase is. Okay, okay,

okay. I withdraw.
I withdraw,

Your Honor. Alright, what else do you want

to point out from these episodes

we haven't talked about? I don't want

to gloss over the Hunger

Strike episode. Yes.
Primarily a Dollers episode because we stay with her basically the whole way through it. I think what it portrays is awful to watch in terms of the force feeding.
The conversations that are able to emerge out of that, I think, are fascinating. And who has the right to die under what circumstances? And their mom going on the radio and pleading for the dignity of their own willingness to die is just such a heartbreaking idea and a heartbreaking thing.
And I think watching Dollars and Marion go through that process to the point where, yes, these people blew up bombs in London. I would understand why people would call that terrorism.
Sometimes terrorists are just like two sisters holding hands in a prison yard withering away in a hunger strike and it's hard to not feel for people under those circumstances it's hard not to feel for these people when it's like Dohler's listening to her sister sob through the pipes in the sink the casting on the show as we've alluded to has been really exceptional Lola Petticrew as the younger Dohars, I think just did an amazing job all series long. If I can spotlight one little moment, it's the way that Dollars kind of like flutters with relief and dignity when they finally bring back the food tray.
It's like a micro moment across her eyes and her face. It's like, that's what seals an episode like that.
In addition to all the conversations between the sisters and in addition to all of the ideas that are exchanged between, you know, her and Dr. Mansuri as far as like, how should this work? Is this ethical? Why are you participating in this? That's just an, again, episode of television that has a lot on its mind and a lot in its heart.
And I think it's really, really well done. I really agree.
And I think this is a much more like obvious the Emmy reel moment. But when she is pleading with her sister, I go first.
Oh, my God. That is just absolutely devastating.
And obviously, the makeup work they did on the girls to make them look amiciated. And it's just sort of like, yeah, you're struck by how young they are.
Yeah. And also, on the one hand, hearing their mother, Chrissy, know died and they couldn't go to her funeral like hearing her on the radio advocating for them is on the one hand uplifting and then also just like twisted because like in any other version of this world you would want her their parents to be begging with them like right not to hurt themselves you know but that's not the house that they were in.
And that's not the culture that... That's not the brew that produced people like the Price sisters who were able to be so committed to their cause because they were weaned on this idea that this is the right path, the righteous path.
I just think there's so many moments in that episode that really stopped me in my tracks. And that was certainly one of them, like hearing their mom on the radio, understanding how their lives came to this point.
And like the glory that Dollars seemed to think was awaiting her in a prison sentence and then the reality of living it and certainly the reality of like having a tube shoved down her throat and force-fed egg and powder mixture every day it's like it's legitimately just awful the dialogue to me is a lot of what makes that episode work like there's a version of that episode that is obviously heavy but so overwrought and so like absolutely the characters would become so minimized over time by their circumstances that they would become unrecognizable to us that they were there wouldn't be a lot of like drive for the episode of television to work and granted like that's a horrible thing to have to say when you're talking about a historical event like this but like if you're going to portray it on screen it needs to work as a product on screen and i think part of the reason it does is you get all these amazing character moments between the sisters. Like you get Dollars talking about, I think in like a perfect bridge moment between the young Dollars that we know and the kind of fraction of a person, as you alluded to, that she ultimately becomes.
Right. Where she's talking about how like the thing she regrets most is that she can't attend her own funeral,

which is a very young dollars sentence to say.

Yeah.

But then when she explains why,

it's like that she wouldn't have the opportunity

to stand in a crowd and weep for them.

And that she's like,

it really does feel like the death of their girlhood

in those moments in that prison

in a lot of different ways

to the point when they get out,

it's just like, what do we even do now?

How are we supposed to live a life? How involved are we supposed to be in any of this anymore? It's perfectly understandable why those characters and those people would be so like dislodged from anything that they knew or anything they understood. Cause like they've lost all this time.
They've had this harrowing experience. I just, I was really impressed by that episode.
The decision to include the figure of Dr. Mansuri, who I think is at least somewhat show invented.
We both cannot recommend the film Hunger enough, but if you don't feel like you can sit, it's a tough sit. So if you don't feel like you can sit through the whole film, you can certainly find on YouTube the scene between Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands and Liam Cunningham of Game of Thrones fame as the priest who he has this, I think it's a one-er.
It's a long one-take-around-a-table conversation that they have about you have this compassionate figure in talking to this person as a human, not as a political figure, not as this, that, or the other thing. And then these philosophical ideas of what is right, who is allowed to die, all this sort of stuff like that is sort of encapsulated that.
So I think this is a, to have a compassionate figure there who nonetheless is complicit in this horrible treatment of that. Without a doubt.
The complicity is undeniable. I love this show.
Anything else you want to say about this show before we go? Would you say that was the standout episode for you, the Do No Harm episode? It's hard. I had great moments with all of these episodes, I think especially over the back half.
First, as energizing and propulsive as the first four episodes are. The payoffs are really intense and I think really profound in a lot of these.
For as little time as we spent with the McConvilles, I wasn't sure how that narrative was going to sit with me when they did come back. But seeing them interact in that trailer next to the parking lot that's being excavated really hit for me.
Asking about the pin? The pin, the swelling music as they're all standing next to this crater while this bulldozer is pulling up dirt only to realize that it's a bunch of dog bones just completely wiped me out. Again, I'm not sure what the perfect balance is in terms of the McConville story versus the Prices, versus Jerry Adams, versus Brendan Hughes.
How you balance all these things is very delicate, clearly. But what they did worked for me.
And so, yeah, maybe there's another version of the show that's even more McConville-based or another version of this story that's strictly anchored from their perspective. But for the minimal screen time that they had uh especially as adult adult versions of those kids the mcconville kids i thought they really knocked it out of the park i can't tell if it's just like me feeling this is all so abrupt because of the binge aspect of it it's only nine episodes often we get like 10 episodes if we're going to get more than like six or eight uh do i i think i want 12 episodes of this show and that's like just like my greedy heart talking but like i just want even more time with these performers and even more of the story fleshed out i can really uh enthusiastically recommend the book uh to people i think it's a it's even if you know exactly what like what it's a really, I think, fascinating, uh, fleshing out of the story with a lot more historical context.
If you want to get even angrier at Margaret Thatcher, have I got a recommendation for you? It's a, it's say nothing. Rob, when are we coming back to this feed? We taught, we just had a meeting about it and I confess that I'm not sure.

Yeah, I'm looking over my notes right now.

I'm trying to remember what the actual date is.

I don't think we are coming.

I don't think we'll be here next week.

No.

Just Thanksgiving week.

But we will have stuff for you the week after that.

Right?

I believe so.

That sounds like a thing that we can promise and do.

Here are some things on our radar we can say. The agency, speaking of Michael Fassbender, big fave.
Black Doves, a Netflix show. It's coming out in December.
And then we've got some year-end stuff and potentially some crossover stuff on the horizon as well. So that's sort of what we're looking at for the rest of the year.
You can reach us at any of the emails that we've given out. Oh yeah, we didn't even really talk about our week nonbankheist at gmail.com which not a lot of nonbankheists is happening anymore in this show by the end no we got a few emails from people thank you so much but I think again the binge nature of this has made it less of like a listener involved thing but we did get someone emailing us their say nothing thoughts to Arstime the Pope so just so you know all of these emails are still monitored.
You can email us at any of them if you have thoughts about what you want us to cover for the rest of the year. Thoughts about the agency or Black Doves when you get around to watching them.
Yeah. I did have an email thought while watching these episodes.
It gets pretty dark pretty quickly and pretty bleak pretty quickly, but the first episode, kind of like the London job situation, there's a moment where they're calling in the bomb locations and threat to, I guess, the operator, effectively, to give them the license plates and where these cars are located in a phone booth in London. And there's a bunch of flyers on the window of this booth, Joe.
Did you clock any of these? No. This is what they say.
Play and pain. Medical slash dom slash bondage slash golden showers.
Join me for ultimate sin. And I thought join me for ultimate sin at gmail.com might have been a good one for us once upon a time.
Also, sub exclamation point, 20-year-old beauty wants to please you. Domination, spanking, water sports,

oral pleasure, massage.

Find you a show that can do both, right?

Or I guess all of these things and more.

That can be every version that it wants to be.

That can put these flyers on a phone booth wall.

Really tremendous stuff from Say Nothing.

You're in the US.

I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving week.

Dare we recommend some crab rangoon

to supplement your turkey dinners?

No, no, no.

I don't think... I mean, I feel like that's ideally leftover season.
I just want to go on the record about this right now. Seafood integrated into Thanksgiving dinner.

I can't support it.

I don't think you should support it.

Like the idea of a seafood-based stuffing, absolutely not.

Now, if you have a dietary restriction,

if you're trying to like pescaterine.

Yeah, my sister's pescaterine.

So there was always like sushi or crab or something for her at Thanksgiving.

That's totally fair.

But if everything is fair game

and you're just pulling seafood into this for absolutely no reason, simply no. Sure.
We dare not get into all of the people on this podcast's Thanksgiving meal thoughts. But on that note, love to Kai Grady, our tremendous producer who has the oddest food thoughts you've ever heard in your life.
Thanks to Justin Sales for his work on the feed in general.

Thanks to Ron Mahoney for being the best.

Thanks to everyone who made this great show.

And we will see you in December, I guess.

Bye.