There are certain hard and fast facts to deal with. Christmas simply is when and where it is; Christmas season surrounds it in some more subjective but necessarily limited ways. Christmas season may begin for some people after Halloween, and for others after Thanksgiving, but it ends before the new year begins for everyone and cannot just begin whenever a person needs or wants it to. Anyway, this is what I would have told you before we had Defector's own Sabrina Imbler on the podcast this week. Now I am not so sure.
I am getting ahead of myself, but only a little bit. Readers know Sabrina for their stories on creatures great and small and their (often dispiriting) interactions with humanity, and it would have been doing a disservice to our listeners not to begin in the natural world. And so we did, sort of. It is a testament to the power of our brand, and I guess also to Defector's comradeship, that an episode featuring one of the very best science writers working quickly became and more or less remained one of the sillier episodes in recent memory. Drew's initial foray into nature-related questions began with undersea hotels and quickly progressed to him conflating those futuristic and maybe-imaginary venues with Blofeld-style supervillain living situations. A conversation about the presumably widely shared dream of staying in a hotel with an airlock led to me explaining much of the plot of Event Horizon (I was asked) and giving my honest assessment of it as a film. This led, naturally, to getting Sabrina on the record on the Space Vs. Ocean question, and weighing in on whether humanity is or is not going to Mars. It is not selling any of the above short to point out that the question "what large animal would it be cool to shrink down and have as a pet" was easily the most rigorous and science-adjacent part of this chunk of the show, and it included both Drew advocating for Safe Bears and Sabrina saying the words, "I would love to squeeze a seal."
From there, we hit a hard pivot to Christmas. This was occasioned in part due to Sabrina's new recurring feature on Netflix's holiday movies, which began last week with the thrilling Imbler/Ratto/Redford triple-bylined celebration of the tentatively horny Hot Frosty. Sabrina, it turns out, is as much of a sicko for Netflix's Christmas movies as I am for Hallmark's, give or take having a sporadic podcast about them, and we spent some time talkin' tropes and the differences in terroir and ambient peppermint levels between Christmas movies originating from various regions of the uncanny valley. I did my best not to get too into the weeds here, if only because Candace Cameron Bure's filmography is an incredibly embarrassing thing to get pedantic about, and mostly failed, but Sabrina is every bit as much an expert/maniac about Netflix's Christmas canon, and so we had a nice conversation about Lacey Chabert's place in both film universes, Christmas Villains and Christmas Angels in both networks' films, and Netflix's attempt to make an authentically Italian Christmas movie, starring beloved weird little guy Skyler Gisondo, of all people, in The Feast Of The Seven Fishes.
All of which was great for me—I got to do a lot of my favorite dumb things during this episode, which will surely delight...well, I enjoyed it. But more interesting, I think, was our conversation about Sabrina's Christmas approach, which is notably liberated from traditional norms and which began early this year due to election circumstances and will continue for as long as they deem necessary. This struck me as bold, bracing, and totally justified. Lord knows there are enough movies out there to watch.
And that, after a brief conversation about Defector's shared experience watching dolphins caper about in Atlantic City, brought us to the Funbag. A question about the first big battle scene in a movie more or less outkicked our film history knowledge, and so we just talk about neat ones that we'd enjoyed instead—Sabs shouts out A Bug's Life, Drew Paths Of Glory, I do Chimes At Midnight, which pretty much covers the entire sweep of film history. A question about how often washing our hands has saved us from serious illness led Sabs to talk about the ambient poop experience that comes with living with cats, me to discuss my (disgusting) pet turtle, and Drew to note that he didn't start washing his hands regularly until he got married. From Drew's gnarly hands to a drop of turtle-tank water on my lip to a snowman's implied dong, it was the natural world in all its glory. Not bad for an hour.
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