Allow me to impart a story to you, dear reader. Back when this program was getting started, I attended a conference in Dubai for exciting young creatives at the bleeding edge of innovation in the field of podcasts. After the guards realized my credentials were fake and threw me out the third floor window, I was wandering the city in despair when I stumbled upon a homeless man, sitting beneath a bridge in a pile of trash, but bearing a delighted grin on his face. “How can you be so happy sitting down here with all this garbage?” I asked. The man raised a mysterious eyebrow, dug his hand into his pocket, and produced a battered DVD case. Closer inspection revealed it to be a copy of a movie called The Dark Knight. “The Dark Knight?” I said, incredulous. “What does that mean? Why doesn’t someone just turn up the lights? And how big are your pockets anyway?” But when I looked up, the man had vanished. After I smuggled myself to Canada in a cello case on a luxury cruise line and snuck past the pack of moose in camouflage that they had guarding the border for some reason, I made my way home, where I popped the movie in, and then I knew why the man had been so happy having so little. For his sole possession had not only been just what I needed to concoct a bloated, farcical, and obviously apocryphal story for the description of an upcoming podcast episode, it had been an absolute masterpiece of a movie. Directed by the inimitable Christopher Nolan and released in 2008 to instant acclaim, The Dark Knight is the pinnacle of comic book movies: dark, intense, thought-provoking, and boasting a villain who represents such a perfect marriage of brilliance in design, writing, and performance that it is impossible to leave without feeling like you’ve seen something truly special. Now Elliot and Nathan will take turns gushing about it like the squealing fanboys Nathan is at heart, and that’s not even including the recommendation and banter sections that were THIS CLOSE to getting us a sponsorship deal before I got thrown out that window. Next time I’ll get it, for now let’s get to the episode already! And here. We. Go!
