#the case of the greater gatsby episode 8

[man-down-in-hatchet-town]

Sheep Go To Heaven

Just to be clear, I ALWAYS listen to these episodes the day they drop. I'm just tragically busy and ADHD (also PULP WEEK asdfghiohwefgoiaje damn those fucking torpedoes) so it sometimes takes me a while to get to the actual re-listening and writing up my thoughts.

Anyway, spoilers for Episode 8 of The Case of the Greater Gatsby below the cut!

Well, guys, it took us eight episodes but we finally got some answers! We now know what's going on in Bixby's back room: a daily meet-up of Socialist creatives run by Dorothy Parker! Anyone who actually reads these will know that I had theories that turned out to be completely wrong, but who cares? Honestly I'm just relieved that "one of the last few good men in Hollywood" isn't into anything questionable, but is actually doing something very cool and decent indeed.

But it wouldn't be a complex 20+ episode murder mystery if our first real answer clicked everything into place. For the one question answered, other have sprung up like heads of a hydra. For one thing, what exactly is Mo's game here? Are the Socialists his main project, and Fitzgerald's death an inconvenient sideplot he now has to deal with (perhaps explaining part of why he's stayed private on the murder--he doesn't want anything so trivial to get in the way of his career-making Socialist Bust)? Or did he start with Fitzgerald, and work his way to the Socialists just as Fig and Ford have? That doesn't seem very likely, judging by how quickly he's moved. Or perhaps it's all one and the same, and he's investigating the murder as part of his anti-Socialist crackdown, and keeping it under the radar for some other reason (I imagine it's easier to investigate a murder if the perpetrator doesn't know anyone's looking for them). Or maybe, weeks after he's receded from our list of most suspicious figures, we're getting clues that Mo really is the murderer after all? Could his investigation into Bixby's back room have spun out of control and led to Fitzy's death? On a meta-level, making the murderer super suspicious at the start and then pointedly distracting and moving away from him is a really clever way of obscuring the solution from a genre-savvy audience.

Oh! A thought! Perhaps Mo's presence on the lot had nothing to do with Mel at all! Maybe he stopped by to speak with her as an excuse to get an eye on Darby and Leery, since they're both members of Bixby's Brigade...

(Regardless, Comrade Ford is about to get in Mo's way. I love Ford.)

But then we have The Grapes of Wrath angle. Last episode, we learned that all of the actors receiving death threats were connected with adaptions. This episode, however, we learned that two of the adaptions, The Grapes of Wrath and The Philadelphia Story, can be tied back to the Brigade. So which is it? Do all of the threatened films lead back to Dorothy Parker's lunch club? That seems unlikely... On the other hand, Barnaby Nightingale is not directly associated with any film adaption but IS connected to the Brigade, since they're getting advanced copies of the Nightingale Gazette. Is there more to their deal with Barnaby than meets the eye?

And there's the fact that F. Scott Fitzgerald, noted genius, wrote the absolute garbage-fire script for The Grapes of Wrath. We're living under capitalism, many professional writers have bad commercial they're not proud of, but there's something out-of-character about that particular career move that I can't quite ignore.

And not to mention the fact that Vivian lost out on the lead role in a film her lover wrote the script for...

In other news, Dorothy has pointed them in the direction of one of Fitzgerald's old enemies, Donald Ogden Stewart of The Philadelphia Story fame. While I think it's safe to assume that real historical figure Stewart won't be the bad guy, I'm interested to see if he'll be an important step on the way to cracking this case, or just another complete red herring soup for the cast to stick their faces in. And Zelda's come to town, which means we should finally be getting the wonderful Tessa Netting soon!

Now I'm off to listen to the next episode!

[bajablastflavoredsaxreed]

OK YALL THERES MORE

So shipwrecked comedy am i right?

i was listening to the case of the greater gatsby (phenomenal extension to the case of the gilded lily by the way) and out of the blue ERNEST HEMMINGWAY from EDGAR ALLAN POE’S MURDER MYSTERY INVITE ONLY CASUAL DINNER PARTY/GALA FOR FRIENDS POTLUCK shows up?! and no one is talking about this?! they just made poe party canon?

the implications are staggering. Dash Gunfire mentions magic 8-balls in an episode despite them not existing in the shows timeframe. Edgar allan poe could have an 8-ball. think about it. this makes ghosts canon in the gilded lily universe. GHOSTS. there is so much going on right now please help me

also extending/amending my previous TCB connections, i somehow totally managed to forget about flop stoppers. they mention detective dark offhandedly in an episode of wayward guide, making flop stoppers canon in whatever web we have going on

so in most TCB media (outside of their comedy sketches), we theoretically have werewolves, talking dogs, TIME TRAVEL, diagetic singing being semi-normalized, wildly inaccurate espionage and world politics and all the other wacky ass shit my brain has decided to have a vice grip on. oh my god

this one is a bit of stretch and i haven’t convinced myself that it is intentional or canon but my brain is forming all sorts of patterns so here we go

HMM? WHAT DID YOU SAY? BENJI? TALKS TO DOGS?

sounds like someone we might know

BENJI SCRAGTOWSKI. SCRAGS. MY MAN.

now with all of the more direct connections that exist this one might feel like less important but it really forms an infinitely interesting bridge

because nightmare time is a starkid thing. and starkid has significantly more explicitly stated lore than tcb does. IF this was intentional and not just me drawing lines that aren’t there, that would make scrags (and, by extension, the solve it squad) canon in at least one hatchetfeild timeline. and oh boy that would mean something for sure

if squad is canon, one could extrapolate that so are SAF, wayward guide, and flop stoppers. which is. so so much you could do with that.

the lords in black in the tcb universe. maybe spencer and graham’s time machine draws on the power of t’noy karaxis. why not. chimera probably has a portal to the black and white. wiley and owen probably hang out on weekends on account of singing evilly at curt mega on a staircase and having evil plans involving silicon and also both being joey richter and i don’t care that the timelines don’t match up because FLOP STOPPERS made TIME TRAVEL real so ANYTHING GOES

anyways if anything shipwrecked references tcb or sk or tcb or sk reference shipwrecked then we are talking like. tri-company musical theatre oriented extended universe. i might explode

OK OK OK OK OK OK

HEAR ME OUT

Spies are forever, The Wayward Guide for the Untrained Eye, and all of the Solve it Squad media take place in the same universe which somehow i am just now figuring out?

hmmmm sound familiar?

oh yup there it is

which means that chimera succeeded. curt mega did not in fact win and essentially shot the love of his life in the face for nothing. if you think about the implications

as for solve it squad…

apologies for the shitty autogenerated captions but? they just? namedropped a background scientist? from pay attention!? making? saf? canon? in the solve it squad?

one could extrapolate that bc saf is canon in both, sis and wayward are also canon to each other

which means that in all three of these. there are talking dogs, werewolves, evil information mining businesses. they talk about the New Democratic Republic of Old Socialist Prussian Sloviskia in the history books. mayberry exists. connor creek exists. scrags could meet up with artemis and paul and tell them about the mystery the gang just solved in their tiny town. instead of apple devices there is chimera. some people from saf are probably still alive. the implications. this is so important to me for no reason.