You're listening to season ten of mobile suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of Sci-Fi mega franchise mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
This is episode 10.17, a royal audience, and we are your hosts. I'm Tom, and as far as you know, I am recording this whole podcast wearing a powdered wig for gravitas.
And I'm Nina, new to Victory Gundam and yet to be inducted into the Gundam secret society with the robes and swords and secret rituals. But I've submitted my application.
We'll get back to you.
Mobile suit Breakdown is made possible by our paying subscribers on Patreon. Thank you all, and special thanks to our newest patrons, canvas Wolfdoll, Zero Zero, tragic solitude, and bleh. Thank you for that. You keep MSB Genki. We had planned to have a guest on this week, but unfortunately they had to cancel at the last minute and we were not able to line up an alternate guest or research piece to fill that slot. So this episode is a bit shorter than usual. We did, however, make progress on a couple of research pieces we've been working on in the background, so look forward to those later in the season.
This week we're talking about victory, episode 17, teikoku no jo, or the Queen of the Empire. The episode was written and storyboarded by chief director Tomino under his Yokitani Minoru pseudonym. It was directed by Kase Mitsuko, with Nishimura Nobuyoshi as animation director. This is one of only two episodes in Victory written by Tomino, and the only episode directed by Kase. It seems silly for us to do a full recap for what is already a recap episode. Most of the runtime is taken up by clips from prior episodes. These are mostly focused on depicting key battles from the Zanskar perspective, the capture and reclamation of the Shako, the extermination of Uig, and the battles at Bohemia and Gibraltar. Where possible, they emphasize chronicles part in each. The framing narrative for this is a presentation by Lieutenant Commander Duker Ick and Prime Minister Fons Cagati to Queen Maria, pure Armonia of the Zanskar Empire. Apparently, the nominal purpose of this presentation is the development of a new ground weapon, the motorad rolling landships. This presentation is wrapped within a second frame, a Zanskar propaganda broadcast in which they express their intention to launch a preemptive strike against something called the United fleet gathering in the part of side two not yet ruled by Zanskar. The old man, polycule, featuring Gomez, watches the broadcast from the bridge of their ship Uso and the urchins do likewise, board the highland solar battery. As the broadcast nears its end, Maria herself takes the podium to express her love for the soldiers of Zanskar. She calls upon them to dedicate their lives to spreading the love of Zanskar and Maria ism to every corner of the earth sphere. Then her admiral issues the order to attack, and the broadcast closes.
This is an odd point in the series for there to be a recap episode. Aren't recap episodes often between Coors? Between seasons?
Intuitively, that sounds like it should be, right? But I'm wondering if that's actually true.
Or in a longer show, 50 episodes or whatever more towards the midpoint of the show, you'd think.
So. Tomino doesn't do recap episodes unless he absolutely has to. In fact, I know that this was not, like, planned in advance because. So when they are preparing, when they're doing the pre production for episodes, the materials, the storyboards, character designs, that kind of stuff, they're numbered with what episode they're supposed to be. After this episode, the next couple of episodes, their numbering has been, like, crossed out and adjusted to account for the insertion of this episode. A similar thing was done back in first gundam, I think, for the Kukuru's Doans episode because that was one that had been created with the intention that at some point when they needed a little bit of extra time, they could stick it in there. It was an episode crafted to fit various places in the narrative so that.
They could have a bit of breathing room in the production schedule.
Right. And this is, I think, the first true recap episode that we've encountered. But there was prelude to double Zeta, which is, like, kind of a recap episode. That was the true first episode of Double Zeta. And that was another case where the team did not have the episode ready. They needed something to go on tv in their time slot, and so they just sort of threw together this emergency public service announcement almost, and that one actually had some of the same features as this one. The, like, here's the machine hears its name spelled out on screen.
The likeliest reason to have made this recap episode here is some kind of production catastrophe that the regular episode was not going to be ready in time. But there's a lot of exposition and also a lot of what feels like attempting to clarify certain details about the show or solidify certain facts for the audience. Maybe a marketing executive runs in one day and is like, we've been polling all these kids, and, like, they don't know the names of the mobile suits from this show, or they don't know these important details about the show. How are they going to buy the kids or demand the toys when they can't even name the blah blah blah?
Everyone is confused. You have to lay things out a little bit more explicitly. The repeated use of maps to show where things actually are. There's a lot of dialogue that has actually been changed even in the recap segments, and often they make more explicit things that were just implied before. Now, a lot of that is what I've called before. I'm firing my beams dialogue like, I guess the example that leaps immediately to mind is in the original sequence when Chronicle is attacking the league militaire factory and he's in the like, copter part of his zolo, and the boots are flying around independently. The boots are getting shot at by ground fire. And he goes in the original my boots. Now, in the recap, he actually says, my boots. Are they being attacked because they're flying too low?
I also see a lot of this exposition as the sort of conflicting impulses of catering to the long term fans who know a lot about the world of UC Gundam and trying to bring in a younger new group of fans. Things like explaining what the sides are and explaining where exactly Zanskar is and that it is far, far from the moon. These are things that probably longtime fans kind of just infer from the show. But a twelve year old kid who has never watched Gundam before is going to be confused. And obviously, one of the benefits of telling a story in a world youve already established, where youve already done a lot of the worldbuilding is you dont have to keep doing that worldbuilding over and over. Your longtime fans know whats up. The difficulty with a tv show versus, say, a book series is that it's highly unlikely someone is going to go back to the beginning and watch a show from at this point 14 years ago and a bunch of other shows that maybe they don't even have the ability to access so that they can understand this show.
This also reminds me a bit of the garma's funeral episode in first Gundam, where for the first time we pull the camera back and go to the homeland of the enemy to see. Here's their leadership, here's their ideology, here's a bunch of soldiers all chanting together.
That's a very interesting comparison because it highlights how Gundam very rarely shows us the lives of ordinary people going about like their day to day life in the enemy homeland. We see the war machine. We don't really see the sort of mobilization of everyday people or everyday people just trying to, like, get by in the midst of everything that's happening. Whether that's a conscious choice or simply a nod to the time restrictions involved in telling the story, I don't really know.
But it is a telling omission, because the ordinary lives of ordinary people are frequently shown for non combatants, neutrals, and people on the, you know, quote, good side.
And often a lot is done to humanize enemy soldiers. The omission of the enemy civilian population feels kind of telling.
It implies a nation captured by militarism, in this case, a kind of zealous, crusading religious fanaticism. But still, militarism, that'll give good texture to the recording. We are, in fact, recording in the middle of a thunderstorm. If you hear that the entanglement of Zanskar as an imperial force with Maria as both its nominal leader, at least the head of state, and also the head of this religion, Maria ism, their entanglement is made very clear in the chant rather than the old Sieg Zion. Now theyre saying Zanskar, Maria Maria Zanskar. She is the state and their mother and their God. And so the state is also mother and God for these holy children of Zanskar.
One of the league militaire guys, or possibly Gomez. I don't remember who exactly says it, but they talk about how Zanskar has managed to turn its citizens into soldiers with the threat of the guillotine. Is the implication that it's a conscription, that they will be executed if they do not serve? Or is it that the guillotine as a symbol has, like, inspired the populace to join the cause of Zanskar?
It's hard to know linguistically. The show has used the guillotine as a kind of metonymy for the imperial power and tyranny of Zanskar. But sometimes it also means, literally, the physical object of the guillotine. So when Marbet says, we're going to keep going until we've smashed the guillotine of Zanskar, she doesn't mean like a.
Particular guillotine or even all of them.
That would still not accomplish what she actually means here, which is that they want to destroy Zanskars tyrannical power. So which one they mean in this context is a little unclear, but I think, again, it harkens back to the French Revolution and the aftermath thereof and the rise of Napoleon. One of the defining characteristics of Napoleon's army is that, like the citizens of France as a whole were transformed into soldiers with the levee en masse in a way that no other european nation was doing at the time. And it made those armies much larger, much stronger in the field.
And even if there is no direct conscription, we know the guillotine was used extensively in the formation of the Zanskar empire within the colonies that it currently occupies. And so there is probably a degree to which a lot of ordinary people, seeking to demonstrate their commitment to the new regime and to keep themselves and their families safe from the purges, join the army because the direct threat doesn't have to be made. Tons of people have already been killed for resisting the regime change. New threats don't have to be made. At that point, everyone is probably still on tenterhooks, afraid that they will be subject to the next purge.
Not to harp endlessly on this, but a big part of the reason Napoleon was able to take power the way he did is because the reign of terror and the purges subsequent to it had killed pretty much everybody in France with any kind of strong political will or energy or scruples. By that point, the political system was exhausted. There had been too much bloodshed. All the robespierres and dantons had already been fed into the guillotine. Speaking of the Zanskar empires expansion and its colonies, this episode makes Zanskar seem quite a bit smaller than many of the previous factions in the UC. Smaller definitely than Zeon, because we are told here that they dont control all of side two. They control the colonies in side two, furthest from the moon. And it seems like this united fleet that theyre getting ready to fight is the other colonies inside, too, who don't want to be taken over and subjected to the guillotine. So it really is turning into, as Queen Maria says, a warring states period in space, lots of small empires and republics and kingdoms and whatever moon moon is theocracies, all scrabbling over a handful of colony cylinders.
She is a deeply curious figure. I'm really hoping we get to learn more about her as the show progresses. I'm fairly confident we will, because there are times in this episode when she seems like this guileless, innocent figurehead, and then there are times when she behaves in a way that I'm like, oh, no, she knows exactly what she's doing.
Okay, surely it's a little bit of both. I think she actually is being manipulated by her advisors by the way they control the information environment that she is allowed to live within.
Right. But any leader worth their salt, knows that everyone who reports to them will do that and tries to make up for that deficiency by having some other different advisors or other sources of information, or having a way to cobble together something approaching the real facts on the ground by getting different perspectives.
Ah, but how much salt do you think shes actually worth as a leader?
Perhaps I should have phrased that differently. What I mean is, somebody who wants to exercise power in their own right, somebody who actually wants to be a leader and not a figurehead, would be aware that they are probably not being told the absolute truth all the time by everybody, and would attempt to make up for that in some way.
When I saw her get up off of her throne and take two steps onto what turned out to be a moving platform that carried her in a stately fashion up to her podium where she could give her big address to the waiting soldiers, I became convinced that she was at least as a political figure, maybe not as a religious one, but at least as a political figure, a total figurehead. That ostentatious demonstration of inactivity that she doesn't walk, she just stands and is carried, feels metaphorical for her whole regime. And yes, she believes in peace and love and the heart of Maria, or whatever that is.
That's the thing, right? Like, on the one hand, she is being told all these classic propaganda lines, oh, the enemy isn't capable of understanding our beautiful principles, right? So like the othering of the enemy, they're almost subhuman, right? Like they can't understand our glorious way of life, which is obviously correct, and.
They'Re jealous of our success, and they're all plotting with each other to betray us.
And none of the shady stuff we do is wrong, because it's only to uncover the shady stuff that they're doing.
Oh my God. This is the like, throughout Duker's whole presentation, he keeps, like, lying to her or massaging the truth in various flattering ways or ways that are meant to absolve their own actions. And frequently, the visuals of the episode directly contradict what he says in a kind of who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes kind of way. But this reaches its apex when they start talking about chronicle getting on the shuttle, because they're like, the worst thing that the PCSt did. The worst thing of all is that they sent the white mobile suit into space on a PCST shuttle. And we know this because chronicle confirmed it by riding a shuttle into space before them. It's like going up to somebody on the street punching them in the face. And when they get back up and try to punch you, being like, see, your violent tendencies prove that I was right to make that preemptive strike.
She sort of seems to passively accept all of this stuff they're saying, which, you know, I hope there's some skepticism hidden beneath the gloss, but I don't know the bits that make me feel that maybe shes not a pure figurehead when she talks about the space colonies wanting independence, but that she wants to quell chaos and bring order. What the colonies want for themselves is irrelevant. It is of no importance. It couldnt possibly matter in the recent political climate. A lot of times you see people talk about this desire for a negative peace. People dont want conflict and they don't really care about pursuing justice or pursuing people's rights. They just want not conflict. Even if that means that poor conditions for certain people continue indefinitely. And then in her speech to her soldiers, it all sounds very nice initially, like, oh, the greatest honor is to those of you stained with oil. Those of you serving on the front line of this war were gonna keep the home fires burning for you. And then she gets to pledge to me your lives.
Thats all I ask.
Until the love of Zanskar envelops the world. And that is some supervillain speech nonsense is what that is.
Well, or religious leader speech.
Or any leader with that desire to conquer the entire world.
It's happened before, I think Maria's best analogs, and she signals this herself with the reference to the Sengoku jidai, are the warring States period rulers of Japan and China for their respective warring states periods. She is an emperor. She has both religious significance and also political significance. Except that her political power is almost entirely on paper and she's just being managed by her ministers just like the impotent emperors of those warring states periods. This also positions earth in a really interesting way. It makes earth, like Kyoto, like the capital. Once it was very important both politically and religiously, but now it's fallen into decay, disrepair. The government, the central government no longer has the interest or the power to maintain it. And so it just becomes this kind of like wasteland to be fought over by the different competing factions.
As the central authority in an empire loses power, the first places they lose control of are those farthest away. Because of the difficulty of travel, difficulty of communication. It is very hard to maintain any semblance of control over a place like that.
You know, that's a good point. We don't actually know where the federation's headquarters is at this point. But that line about Zanskar being the colonies furthest from the moon kind of implies that the federation is based on the moon.
I would also readily believe that if the federation isn't based on the moon the moon is still such a long established bastion of power for them and has interests strongly aligned with the federation itself that even if it's not the capital, it's still, like a center of power, culture and control. I assume her last name is meant to be, like harmony. Maria, pure harmonia. Yeah, Maria, pure harmony. Constantly comparing her to a mother. Ooh, creepy thought just now.
Go on.
Is there kind of a Trinity going on with her and the state and the guillotine?
Hmm.
That Zanskar is the overarching thing. Maria is the loving motherly figure and the guillotine is the fatherly punishing figure.
Could be. Could be. Though if they're really doing the trinity, you would expect Maria to have a child. And I don't think chronicle as her younger brother quite fits the role. Feels like there's an absence there in the story.
Could the state be her child or, like, could be the state and population?
She does the people. I mean, in her speech, she is the all mother, the omnimator.
They refer to her as our mother, Queen Maria.
And she says to all of the soldiers, I love you. You are the ones I love most. I will keep a warm, safe place for you at home. It is the weaponization of those affectionate maternal feelings to create an empire which.
Again, not an uncommon trope to refer to the motherland or fatherland, the land that nurtured you and gave birth to you and what you owe that place as this sort of, er, parental figure.
She makes me kind of think of himiko, the ancient japanese semi mythical empress figure who was said to also be like a shaman with powerful magic. And I happen to know that Tomino has a longstanding interest in Himiko and has been wanting to make a show about her for a while and is maybe currently in the process of doing that. So it wouldn't surprise me if Himiko was a major inspiration for Maria. Pure armonia.
There's also historically a lot of overlap between political and religious roles for japanese emperors and empresses and other monarchies as well. But particularly in Japan, at times when an emperor's political power waned, often their religious significance stayed the same or even grew. And with her, a lot of that's reflected by duker needing to wear this special ceremonial outfit to even be in.
Her presence with his silly little powdered.
Wig, all the guys in robes and.
Wigs with swords, the royal guard, presumably.
Or all her nobles, all her highest ranking military officers or something like that. The one other thing I noticed, and I don't know if it is meant to convey anything special or if it was just a design decision made because they thought it looked cool, but three different senior officials who appear in this episode on the Zanskar side have something wrong with one of their eyes. One of them wears a monocle. One of them has what looks like a, like electronic implant or modification over one eye. And it's very brief, but Materman, the admiral or general for whom the fleet has been named, also appears to have some scarring or damage over one eye. That can just be a cool design choice. The like scar over one eye is a long tradition in anime character design, but I did wonder if it was meant to convey that all of these men, or most of these men are veterans and have perhaps been in war before and been hurt in war before, which potentially tells us something about what's been going on in this part of the sort of human sphere of space over the past couple generations.
Things have not been quiet since the events of f 91. Speaking of f 91, I think there are a few things in victory that were sort of intended for f 91 or its follow ups, and then when those were canceled in favor of victory, those ideas got imported. And one of those is this religious aspect, because although it wasn't actually in f 91, the planning documents for that did have a whole side storyline about one of the cousins of the Rona family who was going to be a religious figure similar to Maria Armonia, and who was going to use that religion to spread cosmo Babylonia's influence throughout the earth sphere. That seems to be a hang up for Tomino.
One final note, because Tom always loves this kind of thing. Some very real looking maps are part of Eek's presentation, and one of them spells it woog w o o w I g as opposed to uig u.
W I g. But then when they do the flashback, when they show the scene of the subway tunnels underneath the city, the sign which used to say Wuig or Uwig in the original, now says Praha, which is a little odd. Strange thing to change, huh?
Curious.
And then the maps allow us to identify some of the other locations. Largaine, which is written as Ragane. Two words is right smack dab on top of where Munich is now. And then Colin, where the secret league militaire factory is based. That's actually just a real place. Colon is there now. It's always a bit odd when they change most of the names, but not all of them.
And very funny to see the name of a place written one way on the screen and then a different way in the subtitles over that same screen.
The UiG section of Dukr's little recap is really eerie to watch as hes.
Talking about how, oh, we let the civilians flee, so civilian deaths were minimized. As we watch a bunch of civilians being gunned down in the street and.
Pan slowly across a river choked with corpses. And then the sequence where hes like, actually we needed to raze the city to the ground because there were secret factories built into the tunnels underneath the city, when, of course, we know that they weren't there, the factory was somewhere else. We know that there was no league military activity in the tunnels because UsO and Katsujina used them to escape. And he says that they warned the civilians and gave them the opportunity to flee. And we also know that's not true because when the attack started, only Katajina knew about it and it was only because Uso had told her that they were coming. So it's just one lie after another, and it casts doubt on everything Duker says. And not only is it eerily similar to the kinds of justifications that weve heard in this past year from government mouthpieces defending the obliteration of civilian infrastructure that should be sacrosanct, like hospitals in Gaza. But look, my entire adult life I have been hearing these kinds of claims from blithely credulous press secretaries and other lesser flacks about chemical weapons laboratories in Iraq or supervillain lair esque fortresses hidden inside mountains in Afghanistan. Its uncanny hearing them in a 30 year old anime coming out of the mouth of a character wearing a powdered wig, who also says things like, by reviving the motorcycles of the old century and the medieval tradition of biking, ive become unstoppable. Sigh anyway, a big part of why he gets away with this, I think, is because hes telling flattering lies, like how he always puts the best possible gloss on every one of chronicles missteps.
Oh, yeah, he wants to make Chronicle look good to the sister, or perhaps to court favor with her by talking about her brother in a favorable light. Ah. We were able to make these highly helpful modifications thanks to him recovering this mobile suit that shouldn't have been lost in the first place.
Right.
The only reason he lost that fight is he wasn't accustomed to gravity yet? Yeah, I really hope she's not gullible enough to take all of that at face value, but it's hard to say yet. And maybe she is the one that really got me though was when he's talking about Pharah at RT Gibraltar and about Pharah's actions as justified that Pharah was trying to protect the neutrality of this PCST facility. Then why did your own people put her to death? Dude, are you just hoping that the queen never finds out about that or someone will be able to justify it as oh well, she had the right motivations but because of her failures she deserved death.
Like it's the kind of lie he can get away with telling because everybody there wants to believe it. And like the league militaire has done some shady stuff. I'm not saying they haven't. It probably was against international law to paint those PCs markings on those troop transports. But like what Zanskar is doing to manipulate the facts strains credulity. And a reasonable person ought to have some questions about that.
All governments use propaganda to help kind of unify public opinion around their ends or to influence international opinion about what they're trying to do. Or you know, propaganda is a useful tool. Every government uses it, businesses use it. Any command structure of any kind is going to use it to some degree. There is something, I think, particularly dangerous and unsettling about governments that do this believing their own propaganda. For them, it's not a tool that they are knowingly using to achieve a particular end, it's what they believe wholeheartedly, 100%. That to me is extra scary.
Yeah, hanging over all of this is the question. Does Duker actually believe this? Does he have personal knowledge or was he just told these things by somebody else? And he believes it because believing it is the path of least resistance for him. Theres a kind of useful idiocy that a person in his position might cultivate.
I think hes being a useful idiot when he talks about this mega weapon that is an entire battleship on two wheels like a motorcycle, the motorad and how in the lie that has fueled the military industrial complex and the arms race for our entire lives. Ah, with a big enough weapon we will never have to fight until they.
Discover long stick technology and manage to turn one of these onto its side.
Because I do think he actually believes that when he says it.
Mm hmm.
However, I think in his presentation to the queen, he is knowingly lying to her.
I like to believe that he also knows the Motorads are a bad idea he just, like, he needed military funding to develop his motorcycles. And the only way he was gonna get it is if he convinced them that those small motorcycles were a prototype for this big motorcycle.
He also mentions that the big motorcycle, huge, enormous, immense motorcycle, was someone else's idea. To which he added, you know, some refinements or provided some help.
I'm curious about that.
Well, but. So it could be that some military official had this cockamamie idea and Dukker knew that if he helped this person out and sucked up to them by being like, yeah, that's a great idea, let's do it. That he could get more funding for his own motorcycle mobile suits or that it would be good for him politically. He has the feeling of, like, an old, experienced operator who, he's a military man through and through. He's never gonna be a politician, but he knows he needs to play politics a little bit just to, like, survive the situation in which he has found himself.
I think it's Fawn's cagati that he says is the guy who came up with this idea originally. Given their respective appearances in the show so far, I'm just imagining Dukkur and Kagati hanging out together, smoking weed. And Kageti is like, you know, it would be cool. What if. Okay, hear me out. Battleships on land. And Duker's like, dude, they should be motorcycles. And that is the extent of their, like, collaboration on this project.
I'm just getting flashes of arrested development where that one girlfriend, Michael has, where she's like, oh, building houses isn't that hard. It's finding the land. She's like, maybe you should build land. There's no land on the ocean.
I think there was a Superman movie about that. Dukkr's presence here raises an important question. Okay, maybe it's not that important. Duker's appearance here raises a relatively trivial question, which is, how did he get here? Cause last episode we saw him making that desperate marine attack with Renda de Paloma on Earth. And the whole point of the arty Gibraltar arc is that it's actually really hard to get from earth to space. They needed arty Gibraltar to be able to do it. So how did he get here? How did he get here so quickly?
Don't worry about it.
Is this a Purutu situation? How many Dooker eeks are there?
Does he have a motorcycle battleship that can take off from the ocean?
He rode his motorcycle up. The masked driver.
The most epic motorcycle jump of all time. Next time on episode 10.18 Spider Webs we research and discuss episode 18 of Victory Gundam and the mascot with its mask on. What do you do when you like a girl? The oxygen consumption rates of children, infants and dogs. I'm walking in the spider whale, the Rick Harrow suppressing fire, the Griffin treatment, spring loaded pauldrons, no gods, no masters, no Jin Jahanam, and oh, the suspense. Please listen to it.
Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded, and produced by us, Tom and Nina, in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unceded land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is Wasp by Mischa Dioxin. The closing music is long way home by spinning ratio. The recap music is slow by Lloyd Rogers. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the lenape people, and more in the show notes on our website, gundampodcast.com. if you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email hostsundompodcast.com or look for links to our social media accounts on our website. And if you would like to support the show, please share us with your friends. Leave a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts or support us financially@gundumpodcast.com. patreon. You can find links and more ways to help out@gundampodcast.com. support thank you for listening. The Gundam fandom has been corrupted by wrong opinions. Wrong opinions. Like podcat co host Tigress should be allowed to present her own research segments. No, she shouldn't. She only wants to talk about where Kat Camille got that fish she's always waving around. And she has terrible recording technique. She just keeps trying to lick the microphone. Cursed to think of the thing. I want to say the perfect line only after we've finished recording.
So I realized I didn't actually copy your outro bits into my list.
I'll get my notebook.
It's on top of the box. Poof. Also, his name is Fons. We have a le Fons.
Perhaps a future version of Alphonse. But yes, he is the fonz. Kagati. It's actually Kagachi in Japanese. In older english materials, you'll often see him referred to as kagachi.
Your handwriting is particularly your handwriting today. Should we end there?
There's so much more to say.
Is there?
I don't know.
I'm done, probably. No, come on. You were the one being like, nothing happens this episode.
But I do. Hello, tigress. I do actually have one more thing I want to say. It's about Duker. See, I think it's Fawn. Oh, hello.
That was our kitty co host. She says we've been recording too long.
Go listen to my new audio drama@lydiadisappears.com.