Calculator

References

• Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
• A Christmas Story
• Flash of Genius
• Varsity Blues
• Revenge of the Nerds
• Tall Story (Anthony Perkins reference)
• Law & Order
• Slumdog Millionaire

Transcript

[Intro music begins]

[Thomas]
He has to go to a state school in their town. He doesn’t get to go off somewhere to MIT or whatever.

[Emily]
Yeah, he’s going to go community college route.

[Thomas]
Right. Exactly. And so, he may be-

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
Which is the better route. I’m just saying. Just throwing that out there. Go community college first, get your AA, then go to four-year college, finish off.

[Emily]
Absolutely. Don’t waste your money at a four-year University, all four years. It’s not worth it.

[Shep]
Yup.

[Thomas]
Hard. Agree.

[Shep]
And there’s your tip for the day.

[Intro music]

[Thomas]
Hello and welcome to Almost Plausible. On this podcast, we make up stories, usually in the form of a movie plot where something unexpected takes a central or critical role in the story. For example, think of a calculator. How in the world would you write a story where a calculator was crucial to the plot? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to try to do today. Now, I keep saying we. So, I think some introductions are in order. I’m Thomas J. Brown, and I have a degree in filmmaking that I rarely get to make use of. I’ve always enjoyed screenwriting, especially when it’s collaborative. Thus, this podcast was born. Speaking of collaborators, I’m joined on this show by two longtime friends. First, let’s meet Emily.

[Emily]
Hi, I am Emily. I have a degree in creative writing and a passion for movies. These two guys have convinced me this podcast is a way to combine the two and still have fun.

[Thomas]
Joining Emily and I is F. Paul Shepard.

[Shep]
I’m F. Paul Shepard. I’m the other guy. You can call me Shep, but I won’t hear you. This is a podcast. I used to be an English teacher. Now I’m a freelance editor. Sometimes I record a podcast with these nerds.

[Thomas]
Welcome, Shep and Emily, I’m glad to have you both here. We’re going to start each episode with a brief pitch session where we take turns sharing the ideas we’ve come up with for each episode’s topic. As I mentioned before, on today’s show, we’re going to create a story where a calculator plays a central role. Emily, Shep, you’ve had a week to think about it. What have you come up with?

[Shep]
Well, obviously time travel is the number one, but that was done in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, where the time travel device was an Abacus, which is a kind of calculator. In a similar vein, obviously dimension hopping, but I didn’t want to go with any of those. So, picture a poor kid who wants that fancy Ti-80-whatever, Ti-8X graphing calculator that all the cool kids have. This is peak whenever those came out. ‘90s, early 2000s? I don’t know how time works. So, I guess like A Christmas Story, but with a calculator instead of a BB gun.

[Thomas]
So does the calculator shoot his eye out,

[Shep]
Well, I imagine that he doesn’t get the calculator. That’s the lowest low. It’s just not going to happen. I guess it’s not like Christmas Story because he doesn’t get the calculator because his family is poor. They can’t afford a graphing calculator.

[Thomas]
But it gets a Ti-34 instead, and that’s better than the regular adding machine he had before.

[Shep]
Well, I imagine that the cool kids are caught playing games on their calculators, and so all graphing calculators are banned, and now they’re in a world of hurt because they actually never learned the material.

[Thomas]
Because they’re too busy goofing off with their calculators.

[Emily]
Ha ha.

[Thomas]
Makes sense.

[Shep]
So, here’s the other idea. How about a calculator that can calculate anything, like things that you think of that are incalculable? This calculator can figure out. But what if it can calculate and then alter the odds of events happening.

[Thomas]
So, making them more or less likely to happen?

[Shep]
Making them more or less likely to happen.

[Thomas]
And is that something that you’re in control of as the person holding the calculator, or does it, it decides?

[Shep]
I don’t know. That’s a good question. If this is chosen for the- that’s the pitch.

[Thomas]
All right, I like those. Emily, what do you have for us?

[Emily]
I have mathletes known as the calculators are-

[Shep]
I like it already.

[Emily]
Are representing their school in the state championship. Their actual calculators are stolen the night before the final meet, and they have to figure out who’s behind the heist. A rival school, their school’s own jocks, or one of them is self-sabotaging the team.

[Shep]
It was an inside job.

[Thomas]
I really like this idea. I can see this being really funny.

[Emily]
Yeah. I thought it could be another fun teen romp movie, if you will.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Imagine all the math puns you could squeeze into it.

[Thomas]
Literally, the number of puns is infinite.

[Emily]
The second one I have takes a little turn. So, Lydia grows up in rural Idaho with not many kids around to play with, so she spends hours on her own playing with an old calculator her dad gave her. She develops a love for math and science, and her trusty calculator is her personal totem she takes through life. She gets into MIT and gets a job at NASA, and she only trusts to calculate her math on this calculator when the world is invaded by a threatening alien species.

[Shep]
Well, for the first part, I felt kind of called out, is this a personal attack or something?

[Emily]
Yeah. Your only friend growing up in the woods was your calculator.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
The only boobs he saw was on the calculator.

[Shep]
Still to this day.

[Emily]
And my final one is Rob is not a smart man, nor is he a wealthy man, but he is the only man in town with a calculator. And it’s tax season. That’s all I got.

[Thomas]
I like it.

[Shep]
So, does a smarter person borrow the calculator or does he rent it out or does he do the taxes?

[Emily]
He does the taxes.

[Shep]
Oh, boy.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
A movie with lots of paperwork, just what everyone loves.

[Shep]
Well, it could be funny because everybody has him do their taxes every year. And then one year the IRS comes in, and it’s like everybody in town is being audited because everybody’s taxes have been wrong for decades. And they’re like, “Rob, what did you do? What happened?” And he’s like, “I’m not a smart man.” “Well, you didn’t advertise that when you offered to do our taxes.”

[Emily]
“I didn’t offer to do them. You came to me because I’m the only one who has a calculator.”

[Shep]
All right, Thomas, what do you got?

[Thomas]
I have two pitches. My first one is that somehow the world’s first true artificial intelligence comes into being on a high schooler’s calculator.

[Shep]
Oh, sure. This is 1980s-

[Thomas]
Right. And it’s not a cool graphing calculator like you were talking about before, just a regular old scientific calculator. So how does the AI express that it exists, and how do they communicate with each other? What antics do they get up to?

[Shep]
If you’re asking, I can think of answers to several of these right away.

[Thomas]
Yeah, I felt like moving away from graphing calculator because that felt like it would be really easy for them to communicate. But maybe for the sake of a movie, you would need that. You could have a little animated face on the screen and stuff, and it would give more character to the character of the calculator.

[Emily]
Right?

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
And it would help move the story along faster, too. Like, how does he figure out there’s an AI on there? Because it tells him that.

[Emily]
Yeah. Otherwise, he has to learn code and decipher things-

[Thomas]
Yeah, there’d be a whole sequence of trying to figure out why it keeps giving them these weird numbers and realizing that they mean something and decoding them all.

[Emily]
Or could speak to him in binary. I mean, there’s ones and zeros on a calculator.

[Thomas]
It’s true.

[Emily]
We’re all going to find out very shortly that I was an English major, just so we know where this episode is headed.

[Thomas]
All right. So, my other idea is in the late 1960s or early 1970s, the protagonist of our film is a human calculator. He makes his living by showing off his amazing math skills, leading seminars to teach other people how to be able to quickly and accurately do mental math, and selling a book about his method. Mechanical calculators exist, but they are definitely not portable. And by the end of the 1960s, electronic calculators do exist, but they are also not portable, being both large and requiring AC power to run. As the 70s progress, portable calculators start becoming a thing, and the protagonist’s skill is less and less relevant. People quickly lose interest in his ability to quickly do math in his head. The development of calculators continues to move forward. They get smaller, lighter, cheaper, and much more common. As time goes on, the odds any random person owns a calculator increases. So, what does he do? How does he react?

[Shep]
Well, he calculates those odds, first of all. I like this one as well.

[Emily]
I do, too.

[Shep]
I have several books on quick mental math tips and tricks, so I’m definitely the audience for his books.

[Thomas]
This idea came about because I was trying to think of, like, a calculator, you have a picture in your head of what that is. So, I was like, well, let’s get away from that. What other kinds of calculators exist? Oh, human calculators. Okay, so-

[Shep]
Yeah, the calculator being the title of the movie, and it’s about him, the person.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
I like it because it’s got that feel of the one with, that movie about the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah.

[Emily]
I can see how you could see the decline of his mental state as calculators become more and more in our society. And he is less and less useful.

[Thomas]
Right. Yeah. And he’s just trying to hold on to that thing that’s been sustaining him for 30, 40 years.

[Emily]
Yeah. Because he had a desirable skill and it was amazing and it was awesome. And now this four-year-old out in the woods in Idaho can do it.

[Thomas]
Well, now that we’ve heard all the pitches, it’s time to pick one, develop it, and hopefully come up with a story that’s at least almost plausible.

[Shep]
I like all of these.

[Thomas]
Yeah, these are all pretty good.

[Emily]
Too clever.

[Shep]
Or our standards are low.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
We don’t have enough data.

[Thomas]
I like Emily’s mathletes one. I like my AI one.

[Emily]
I like the AI one that’s definitely got-

[Thomas]
I like the one about the kid who wants the fancy calculator and doesn’t get it, but then that ends up being a good thing. I’m a little worried that he doesn’t do enough to get to his outcome. Is he an active enough character in his story?

[Shep]
Yeah, the whole point is that he’s trying to get that calculator-

[Emily]
What are ways that he tries to get the calculator?

[Shep]
Entering contests, trying to get a part time job. But he’s in middle school, so who’s going to hire a middle schooler for anything?

[Thomas]
Right. He gets a paper route, but it’s only a couple of dollars a week.

[Emily]
Mows a lawn, it’s a dollar or two.

[Thomas]
What is the escalating conflict that he runs into?

[Shep]
The escalating conflict is that he’s the outcast. All of the cool kids have fancy calculators, and they pick on him because he’s a nerd. He must do all his calculations in his head.

[Emily]
He makes his graphs on paper.

[Thomas]
Like a sucker! If he starts out poor and nerdy and picked on, how does that get any stronger or worse for him throughout the film? Because otherwise it just feels like we’re seeing the same issue that he’s having the entire time and he’s just kind of doing the same stuff trying to get money.

[Shep]
He wouldn’t start out being an outcast. Let’s say he was cool in elementary school. So, it’s his first year in middle school, and he was going from being the cool kid among his circle of friends to being the outcast because he’s different.

[Thomas]
It definitely seems like the kind of thing that kids would latch onto as, like, “Yup, this is the status symbol.” What do you guys think? Is there a particular one that you like?

[Shep]
I think I like the mathletes one the most. It just has the potential for-

[Emily]
Yeah. You can introduce a lot of different characters into that.

[Thomas]
And a lot of great situations. I mean, for me, that’s the one that’s standing out the strongest as well. So, I think we’ll go down that path.

[Emily]
The Calculators it is.

[Thomas]
So, we know they’re mathletes. What is this, like high school?

[Emily]
Yeah. We’ll do high school level, and I think the competition needs to be in their city or at their school like they’re hosting this year. That way you can bring in the jocks as potential antagonists.

[Thomas]
Right. You would need other people from their school, so it would have to be at their school. That makes sense. It would be really nice if it was somebody’s senior year. This is their last mathlete competition. It’s like a big deal for them. And this is really messing that up.

[Emily]
Yeah. That’s the stakes of, like, they actually need the calculators. I mean, they can do the math, but it takes longer, so they’re not going to get they’re not going to ring that bell fast enough.

[Thomas]
Right. Every other team is going to clean their clocks.

[Shep]
Oh, it was an inside job. It was obviously an inside job. It’s his last year. He’s leaving. He’s going to get this scholarship. He’s going to win this mathlete competition, get the scholarship, go off to college. His friend steals the calculators and hides them so that they will lose. So maybe he doesn’t win and doesn’t get the scholarship and doesn’t go off to college.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Maybe that’s one of the big prizes from the mathlete competition is a scholarship for everybody on the team or something like that. Is the friend a mathlete as well? Is he on the team or is he not on the team?

[Shep]
I figured that he was also on the team and takes part in the investigation.

[Thomas]
That’s good, because then he can try to throw everybody off the scent.

[Shep]
Do we know, does the audience know that it was him or is that revealed later?

[Emily]
I think it will be revealed later.

[Thomas]
I was thinking the same thing.

[Emily]
As a big surprise.

[Shep]
So, we don’t see him as they’re investigating, messing things up.

[Emily]
Not intentionally. I think you can do it in a way to where not every time, but some of the time something happens to where he’s clumsy.

[Thomas]
It would be great if it was one of those things where on a second viewing now that you know-

[Shep]
Oh, yeah.

[Thomas]
You sort of start to see little clues like, “Oh, yeah, that’s where he said to look at those, at the jocks,” or “Yeah, here’s where he accidentally spilled the water.”

[Shep]
Or he got the other person to do a thing that led to- because he’s really good at calculating what’s going to happen,

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
So why does he want his friend to stay? Besides wanting to continue the friendship? What’s keeping him there, that his friend going away is going to cause him pain?

[Thomas]
For him, it’s a lack of money. He has to go to a state school in their town. He doesn’t get to go off somewhere to MIT or whatever.

[Emily]
Yeah, he’s going to go community college route.

[Thomas]
Right. Exactly. And so, he maybe-

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
Which is the better route. I’m just saying. Just throwing that out there. Go community college first, get your AA, then go to a four-year college, finish off.

[Emily]
Absolutely. Don’t waste your money at a four-year university all four years. It’s not worth it.

[Shep]
Yup.

[Thomas]
Hard. Agree.

[Shep]
And there’s your tip for the day.

[Thomas]
What was I saying? It would be really nice if he had some sort of a backstory that made us understand why he was afraid of being alone or afraid of not knowing anybody.

[Emily]
He’s smart, obviously, he’s got the math skills, but he doesn’t have the money or the family background or the family support. So, he’s from a family of jocks or blue-collar workers that just don’t see the value of spending that kind of money to go off-

[Thomas]
Right. College is useless. Go to a vocational school.

[Emily]
Or not even that. Just like you don’t have to go off. You can start small and build your way up. They’ll support them in that way, but they can’t support them in, full-on, “You’re going to MIT, you’re going to Harvard” kind of style.

[Shep]
Right. Because they don’t see the value in it themselves. They can’t even imagine it.

[Emily]
Right?

[Thomas]
And the scholarship isn’t a full ride. It’ll help. So, he doesn’t mind losing that.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Because it’s not enough.

[Emily]
It’s not enough to get him anything more than maybe like a semester’s worth of books, which is a lot, but also not.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
And for the other guy, having this one more win is just that extra push on his resume to get into the big, big school.

[Shep]
Oh, how about, so the main character or the betrayer? I don’t know if he’s the main character. The betrayer is the one who joined the mathletes first and got his friend to join so that they could have this activity together. And his friend is just Aces at it. He’s team captain now. He’s that good. And it’s like this was his thing. And his friend is only doing it because his friend got him into it. He’s captain because he’s good at it, not because he’s into super math or whatever. He’s doing it to be with his friend. And so, this final mathletics competition was like, just the last thing that they could do together before he leaves. That’s why it’s important to him that they find the calculators, that they win, that they do well, because he thinks that’s what’s important to his friend. Who’s the one who stole the calculators.

[Emily]
Oh, and he wants to get the scholarship to help pay for those books because it’s not a lot of money, but it’s a little bit and it’s going to help his friend.

[Shep]
Oh, I don’t think he cares about the scholarship at all. He’s literally just doing it because his friend is a mathlete. So, the friend stealing the calculators so that they lose, so that he wouldn’t get the scholarship, so that he wouldn’t leave, that wouldn’t affect anything at all because he was never doing it for the scholarship. That never mattered.

[Thomas]
You were asking before who’s the main character? I think the guy who’s the team captain is the main character, but it’s not his story. It’s the friend who stole the calculators’ story. He’s the one who has the big change at the end.

[Emily]
Yes. I like it when movies do that. When you’re like, this is the main character. But really…

[Thomas]
Let’s talk about some of the other characters we meet. Obviously, there are the jocks. What are they like?

[Shep]
They’re jocks.

[Thomas]
Okay, moving on.

[Shep]
They like sports-

[Emily]
Yeah. Have you seen the movie Varsity Blues? That’s them.

[Thomas]
Are they like, Revenge of the Nerds type jocks where it’s just over the top jerks, or is it a little more realistic?

[Shep]
Either way.

[Emily]
I think it’s a little more realistic. I think they’re unintentionally assholes. They don’t get this mathlete thing that’s happening at the school. They’re like, what the hell? And they’re like busy preparing for something for themselves.

[Thomas]
So, the mathlete competition is the same weekend as some big game that they’re all participating in or some big sporting event that they’re all participating in. I think that gets a good convergence of those two events and kind of brings everybody together at the school.

[Shep]
Okay.

[Emily]
So, pick a sport. Random sport. Doesn’t matter. We don’t care. It’s a sport.

[Thomas]
I mean, football is the standard choice. We could do basketball,

[Emily]
You don’t see enough basketball, high school basketball in movies. It’s always football. I think we should stay away from-

[Thomas]
Lacrosse.

[Emily]
Lacrosse is a good one. I was thinking wrestling.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah, wrestling. Because of the whole Greek aspect, there’s a nice shared lineage of both of their- Oh. And so, in the end, they work together. Maybe. I don’t know.

[Shep]
I figured that the jocks would work with other jocks from other schools against the nerds.

[Thomas]
Possibly.

[Shep]
Possibly.

[Emily]
Yeah, we can do that.

[Thomas]
In fact, I like the idea that the nerds go to the jocks to try to solicit their help using what I just said. Like, hey, we have this shared background in both of our interests, and it’s this really rousing speech that just doesn’t work.

[Shep]
It makes logical sense.

[Thomas]
Right. Who else do we meet? Are we going to get a tour of all the typical clubs? There’s the drama kids and the cool kids and the skater kids. Yeah.

[Shep]
The band kids.

[Emily]
Yeah. You’re going to see all your little cliques and groups.

[Shep]
Are those cliques still in existence?

[Thomas]
I was just going to say, I haven’t been in high school in a while, I don’t know how it works now.

[Emily]
I don’t know.

[Thomas]
Well, I guess another good question is who is our target audience? Because if it’s people our age, then it doesn’t matter. This is how it works in our brains,

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Especially if it’s set in the 80s. Perfect.

[Emily]
Yeah, we set it in the 80s or 90s.

[Shep]
Yes. It’s got to be pre cell phones.

[Thomas]
True. Yeah.

[Emily]
Let’s do 90s so we can get a sweet soundtrack involved.

[Thomas]
There you go.

[Shep]
I would say 80s for the same reason.

[Emily]
Yeah, you can’t go wrong music-wise. Either one.

[Thomas]
So late 80s/early 90s is what we’re looking at. Probably early 90s, because you sort of get that bleed over at the beginning of the decade.

[Emily]
There we go. Yeah. And then there’s Hammer Pants. So, we’re going to see all the little groups and cliques. Definitely a very dramatic all black drama team doing their acting exercises awkwardly in the hallway.

[Thomas]
In the 30s, Orson Wells put on a version of Macbeth with an all black cast, which was revolutionary at the time. So, I feel like this would be if we had an all black drama team, it would be a nice little nod to film history with Orson Wells having played such a big role in it.

[Emily]
That would be kind of cool.

[Shep]
Yeah, but anyone who doesn’t know that history is going to watch and go “Why is the drama club only letting black people in?”

[Emily]
There can be one token white person.

[Shep]
Is he called Token?

[Thomas]
The guy who steals the calculators. We’ve got to give names to these people. How does he steal the calculators?

[Emily]
Trevor.

[Thomas]
Trevor. Okay, what a Trevor thing to do.

[Emily]
Such a Trevor thing. So, the night before he’s got to go and steal them, are they being stored somewhere so they’re not being messed with?

[Shep]
Oh, yeah. They’re locked away.

[Thomas]
Yeah, there’s a rule about the- that they have to be these special calculators, these regulation calculators that have been checked. Oh, yeah. Because if they were graphing calculators, they would check to see what software is installed, and they don’t want to do that the day of the competition because it takes so long. So, they do it the day before, but all the calculators stay locked up at the school.

[Emily]
True. In the math teacher’s-

[Thomas]
Classroom or wherever. So, he breaks into the school, hides in the bathroom after everyone’s gone. How does he get in?

[Emily]
His sister is in one of the other groups who has to be there after hours for something.

[Thomas]
His sister’s a cheerleader, and they’re preparing for the big game the next day. So, of course, all the sports kids are there late.

[Emily]
Because they’re allowed to do what they want and nobody pays attention to him. They don’t care. He’s her ride. That’s the only reason he’s there. She’s the popular sweet freshman on the cheer squad, and he is her chauffeur. So, while he’s waiting for her to finish up, putting up another flyer, he sneaks off and uses his sweet lock picking skills?

[Thomas]
He knows the janitor. He’s friends with the janitor,

[Shep]
That tracks.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
And he makes up a story, “Oh, I left something in there,” or “I have to get in there to prepare.” Oh, yeah. The janitor knows he’s on the math team. So he says, “Oh, I have to get in there to get something ready.” And the janitor says, “Oh, yeah, okay, sure.” And lets him in. Is this a premeditated crime or something he does in that moment because he realizes he has that access?

[Shep]
That’s a good question. I was originally thinking premeditated, but imagine that he goes into that room for some other reason. He left his math book or whatever in there and he realizes that the locked door isn’t closed all the way.

[Thomas]
Maybe it was just in the classroom, which the teacher locked, thinking, “No student has access to this. It’ll be fine.” They’re in a box on his desk or something. And he does go in there for a legitimate reason. And while he’s in there, he sees the box of calculators.

[Shep]
So that will be evidence at some point. “I was in there at 8:00 and they were still there. So it happened sometime after that.”

[Emily]
Because why would he lie?

[Thomas]
Yeah, he’s on the team. “I don’t want to lose. I want to win.”

[Emily]
So, you have to have somebody else coming by around the same time that he does that so we can throw a suspicion on one of the athletes.

[Shep]
Or one of the band geeks-

[Thomas]
Or the cheerleaders, they were all there much later.

[Shep]
So, they don’t discover it till morning. That gives him the largest window to get rid of it. What does he even do with it? He just takes it to his car, puts in his trunk. Because who’s going to search his trunk?

[Thomas]
And why would they?

[Shep]
And why would they?

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
So, as they’re going around investigating, he’s driving them as the chauffeur. The calculators are with them the whole time.

[Emily]
The whole time.

[Thomas]
I like that. Are they accidentally discovered toward the end of the film? How does he get found out?

[Emily]
I was going to say, his sister should probably be like, “I left a pom-pom in your trunk. I need to get it out, dude.” And he’s like, “No, you don’t. Just get a new one.”

[Shep]
We’ve got to like this guy, though. So, he’s got to have a change of heart and reveal that he has the calculators and confess.

[Emily]
How about before his friend gets pummeled by the sports team because he’s convinced it’s got to be the one guy who hates them the most and they’re going to get into fisticuffs over it?

[Shep]
Yeah, I like that. Something is going to happen and the only way that he can stop it is to confess that it was him and not someone else.

[Thomas]
Yeah, there’s a long-standing grudge between our main character and the captain of the wrestling team, for whatever reason. So, he’s blaming the wrestling team guy, and he’s just convinced it must be him. He’s the only person who would do this to me.

[Emily]
Right?

[Shep]
He was at the school, he had opportunity, he had motive, and he made a joke or something because he found out that the calculators were missing before they did and said something like, “Good luck on that math competition.”

[Thomas]
Maybe he makes some comment the day before that, once you know, the calculators are gone, it’s like, “Wait a minute. He said he was going to ruin things for us.”

[Emily]
Sure hate it if your competition didn’t work out.

[Thomas]
What else do we need to figure out for this story?

[Shep]
I mean, lots of things. How much of the pitch do you want? Because we haven’t laid out what the clues are, what the red herrings that they followed before they got to whatever.

[Emily]
Yeah. How did they interact with the other groups? I think you got to have one red herring where it’s like, it should be like a jump shot, kind of, “Well, I saw Trisha from Drama Club walking down doing something, and she’s always had it out for me because I didn’t want to be Pippin in last year’s musical.”

[Thomas]
Is that how we get time with all the different groups? Each person on the math team says, “Oh, well, I saw this person from this other group.” And so, they go around to the different groups to investigate?

[Emily]
I think each of them should have a beef with one of the other groups, like, really random. And one of them should just be, like, super awkward and weird if like, “We went on a date, and it was terrible.”

[Thomas]
Not even that. Just: “We went on a date.” “And?” “That’s it.” “I don’t understand.”

[Emily]
“Well, obviously, she hates me.”

[Shep]
Or “He’s doing this to get attention.”

[Thomas]
Or maybe they went on a date and he didn’t call her afterward to schedule a second date. And so she assumes the worst. And it’s just that he’s an awkward teenager who doesn’t know how to ask out girls properly.

[Emily]
He’s just sure of himself. Like, “I’m so sexy and suave. She’s pissed I did not call her.”

[Shep]
Sexy and suave on the math team.

[Thomas]
He’s the little dog, right? I think his should be debunked first.

[Emily]
Yes. And she should be in the band.

[Thomas]
He’s like, “Guys, I got it. No, guys, trust me.”

[Shep]
So, they each say who they think did it and they’re going to investigate and they investigate his first, which is like an immediate jump cut. She’s like, “EW. No.”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
She’s like, “You thought that was a date?”

[Shep]
“It was a group activity. There are six of us.”

[Thomas]
The truth comes out. It wasn’t even a date.

[Emily]
It was a group movie outing.

[Thomas]
That is great.

[Shep]
“It was… we just all happened to be at the roller rink together at the same time. We didn’t come together.”

[Thomas]
And they skated next to each other for one song, coincidentally. That would be really- And he’s there like, “No, that’s not what happened.”

[Shep]
So that’s after his telling the version of events, “We went on this date-“

[Thomas]
Oh, totally. Yeah. He makes himself sound great.

[Shep]
“It was great, but I just wasn’t feeling it.”

[Thomas]
Yeah, I love it. This seems like a great time to take a quick break. So, we’ll figure out some more of these when we come back.

[Break]

[Thomas]
All right, we are back. So far, we have met our mathletes. We have met the jocks, the drama kids, and the band. It sounds like we want that girl to be in the band.

[Emily]
Yes.

[Shep]
Sure.

[Thomas]
How many mathletes are there?

[Shep]
How many mathletes are in a mathletes team?

[Thomas]
If only there were a way to find out this information.

[Emily]
Five. I don’t know. It’s got to be, like, five to seven, right?

[Thomas]
Shep, are we finding anything?

[Shep]
Teams of various size? That doesn’t help. I found one thing that said eight,

[Emily]
Okay, let’s do it.

[Shep]
But eight is too many to fit in Trevor’s car. So, I think five is the- Instead of looking it up, I should have thought “They’re going to be driving around in the car.”

[Thomas]
They make the little guy sit in the middle in the back.

[Emily]
Yeah. The little one.

[Thomas]
Yeah, exactly.

[Shep]
No, he demands he gets to sit in front.

[Emily]
So, he’s the one in front, and the big lumbering, like, shy guy is in the middle. Like, the seven-foot-two guy who should be on the basketball team but has no athletic skill.

[Shep]
He’s probably got great athletic skills and he got bullied by the little guy to be on the math team instead.

[Emily]
He’s Anthony Perkins. That is a reference. Like, three people in the world will get. I’m going to leave it at that.

[Thomas]
So, what other groups do we meet? The skaters, the punks? Are they the same?

[Shep]
Are there still skaters and punks?

[Thomas]
I mean, if it’s the early 90s, there would definitely be skaters.

[Shep]
Oh, that’s right. I forgot. It’s set in the past.

[Emily]
Why would they be at the school?

[Shep]
Yeah, the school activities I could understand. The drama club, the band, the cheerleaders.

[Thomas]
They’re not at the school. So, they’re at the skate park, of course, because it’s Saturday when they discover the calculators are stolen.

[Emily]
Okay, so why would they have been at the school the night before to be a suspect?

[Thomas]
Yes, that’s a good question.

[Shep]
How many groups do we need? Well, we need five, because there are five-

[Thomas]
We need five. Yeah.

[Shep]
The perpetrator, Trevor, whatever his group is, that’s the last group and that’s when they’re sure that it’s them and he knows they’re innocent. So, like, the pressure is on him to confess and stop this.

[Emily]
It should be another nerd group.

[Shep]
The chess club.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Why does nobody investigate the other team or one of the other? Presumably there are multiple mathlete teams. Or is this the final? The big final?

[Emily]
I think it’s the big final, and there’s only one other school they’re going up against.

[Thomas]
So, I think Trevor would point to them. I don’t know how they did it, but it makes the most sense.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
He doesn’t have to prove anything beyond that.

[Shep]
Right, because in his mind he’s thinking, “Well, that’ll be the end of it. We can’t possibly do anything.”

[Thomas]
Right. It’s the most logical conclusion to come to in his mind, and everyone will probably just agree. And-

[Shep]
We’ll skip this mathlete competition and go out for pizza and just hang out.

[Thomas]
So those are the five groups then.

[Shep]
What are the five groups?

[Thomas]
So, we have the skaters.

[Shep]
Do we have the skaters?

[Thomas]
Do we have the skaters? Because we never figured out why they were at the school.

[Emily]
Yeah. Why were they there to break in? Why would they have been there to break in?

[Shep]
Right, because Trevor says, “Oh, I was there at 8:00 and they were still there.” But that establishes that it’s 8:00 at night at the school. So, it’s just the groups that are at the school. Drama club. Wrestlers, cheerleaders, band. Those are the four school groups.

[Thomas]
So, the movie starts Friday morningish, mid-morning, we see some hallway action, that sort of stuff. Right. One of the skaters gets the skateboard taken away. It has a really distinctive image on it or something like that. The next day, when they’re at the skate park-

[Emily]
So, he broke into the school to get his skateboard.

[Thomas]
He definitely broke into the school for sure. So maybe Trevor. No, it’s not Trevor. Somebody else must have seen him. And somehow, they see- He says, “No, of course it wasn’t me.” “But you broke in, like, your skateboard. We also your skateboard get taken away, and now you have it.” And we’d still have to establish them there, though.

[Emily]
Yeah. Oh, he’s gotta hide- He’s got to be hiding something.

[Shep]
They’re all hiding something. That’s what makes it. I’ve seen Law and Order. I know how this goes. Everyone’s got something sketchy about them. So, some reason that they’re being investigated or that they won’t cooperate with the investigation. This all would be over in five minutes if everyone just spoke up and said the truth. But they won’t because it’s high school and everyone’s awkward anyway.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Were there other mathletes at the school?

[Shep]
Why would they be at the school the night before?

[Emily]
No. The only mathlete that was there is Trevor because he’s his sister chauffeur.

[Thomas]
Because I was thinking if somebody saw the skaters hanging out in the parking lot in front of the school, they could see them and think, “Well, that’s kind of weird.” And then the next day it’s like, “Wait, why would they be there? Now I know why they were here. They were breaking into the school.”

[Shep]
Well, Trevor’s sister could say that.

[Thomas]
Why is she part of the investigation?

[Shep]
Maybe not, but maybe she’s in one of the groups that they’re investigating.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
“You know who you should be checking? You should be checking the skaters. We didn’t leave until 9:30 and they were still here.”

[Thomas]
And then everyone’s like, “Wait, why were they even there in the first place?” So yeah, they check with the skaters. He has his skateboard. Clearly, he broke in.

[Emily]
And you assume it’s only just to get the skateboard but really one of them is dating like one of the cheerleaders or something. Like the girl skaters dating a wrestler or something.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah, all the groups are- There’s a lot more crossover than they will admit to.

[Emily]
Yeah,

[Thomas]
I like that.

[Shep]
I’d like it if there’s just tons of crossover that comes out at the end when everyone’s confessing.

[Emily]
I agree. That’s perfect.

[Thomas]
I think during the confessions, the little guy needs to say something that just totally bombs. Like, he wants to be part of this so badly, and he just says something stupid. And everyone’s like, what?

[Shep]
So, it doesn’t turn out that she actually liked him and was too nervous to say anything. So, it’s not that kind of twist. He just gets dumped on. He’s the guy that just can’t catch a break.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
It would be funny if he assumes that she’s going to say that. Like, everyone’s confessing. And he’s like, “Don’t you have anything you want to say about us?” She’s like, “What? No.” So what is the big moment? Why does he confess? How do we get to that point?

[Shep]
Well, it’s escalating and escalating and the team is getting more desperate.

[Thomas]
There’s literally a ticking clock. They’ve got to get the calculators back before the tournament starts.

[Shep]
Yes, which is great that they’re in the car because they’re already there. It can work out. No permanent damage is done. I think that they’re going to beat up a guy. They know that it’s him. It has to be him. They’ve eliminated all other suspects. “When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever’s left, however improbable, must be the truth.” So, it must be Greg. It’s got to be Greg. “Let’s take these bats from the baseball team and let’s just go break his arms until he confesses and then tells us where those calculators are.” I’m imagining the little guy saying that.

[Thomas]
Oh, my gosh.

[Emily]
He’s really gets really dark.

[Shep]
Well, also he pushes the big guy around and so if he says we’re going to go, the big guy picks up the bat like he is going to go. He doesn’t want to, but he will.

[Thomas]
I wonder if it should just be the main guy. And Trevor can see where it’s going. The main guy just can’t let it go. It has to be Greg.

[Shep]
But the main guy doesn’t care that much about it. If he doesn’t care about anything other than hanging out with his friend which he’s got to do all Saturday.

[Thomas]
That’s a good point. So maybe that’s what it is then. It’s not that there’s a big fight. Trevor is feeling guilty or I don’t know, what’s our main character’s name. Let’s give him a name. Hero. No.

[Shep]
Protagonist.

[Thomas]
Yeah, exactly. Mark?

[Shep]
That’s a very-

[Thomas]
Steve?

[Emily]
I thought Steve but I was like Steve is such a Steve.

[Shep]
Steve is a little guy.

[Emily]
Oh, yeah, he’s definitely a Steve.

[Shep]
He’s a Steve.

[Thomas]
Sam.

[Emily]
There you go. I like Sam. That’s a good name.

[Thomas]
Okay, so Sam and Trevor are hanging out. It’s kind of later in the day, the… Mathlympics? What do they do? What’s it called?

[Shep]
Sure, whatever. We know what you’re talking about.

[Emily]
The finals.

[Thomas]
The tournament is about to start. 30 minutes or something. 20 minutes. It’s getting really close. They’ve all kind of just given up.

[Thomas]
And Trevor and Sam are sitting off to the side away from everybody else, and Trevor is saying to Sam, “Oh, really sorry we couldn’t figure this out. I know how much this meant to you.” And he goes, “This doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t care about this. I only joined the team to hang out with you. And we just spent the whole day hanging out together. It was actually kind of fun going around investigating.”

[Emily]
“I don’t even care if we find ’em.”

[Thomas]
Yeah. So, Trevor feels bad.

[Emily]
Meanwhile, you see Steve and Todd just like getting the crap beat out of them.

[Shep]
So, if it didn’t matter to Sam, why does Trevor-

[Thomas]
It matters to everybody else.

[Shep]
It matters to everyone else.

[Thomas]
They’re all together. And Sam and Trevor are not off on their own. And then everyone’s together and they’re feeling really down because as far as they’re concerned, that’s it. Time’s up. It’s over.

[Shep]
Why are they giving up at this point if they’re still 30 minutes before the competition?

[Emily]
They’ve exhausted their leads.

[Thomas]
Yeah, exactly.

[Shep]
Okay, so they’re all together.

[Thomas]
So, they’re all together, and each one is sort of lamenting what they’re going to lose or saying why this was important to them. And so, Trevor is feeling guiltier and guiltier, and then Sam says his piece about, “Oh, it never mattered to me, actually. I just wanted to hang out with you guys.” And Trevor decides to do the right thing.

[Shep]
See, I think that it starts with Sam saying that and the other one is going “No, it matters!”

[Emily]
Yeah, “We need the scholarship. We need the recognition to put on our applications. We still got a whole other year before we get out of this place. You’re set. We’re not.” And Trevor sees that he’s not just winning something for him. He’s hurting other people.

[Thomas]
Yeah. I don’t think he thought about the consequences of his actions. Beyond-

[Shep]
Right? Because it was spur of the moment.

[Thomas]
Right and beyond, “Sam and I will get to stay together.” So, I thought of a problem.

[Shep]
Oh, good. Let’s fix it. All script writing is solving problems.

[Thomas]
So, he takes the calculators away from their locked area. So now they’re dirty again. So, it doesn’t matter if they have the calculators or not. They’re not considered clean. In fact, this looks even worse for them because a member of their team took the calculators, probably to load some cheating software onto them.

[Shep]
That’s great. So, they recover the calculators in time. But it’s not in time.

[Thomas]
That’s the final biggest thing. Like, you can’t use a calculator, you can still try to do it, but you can’t use a calculator. And of course, they’re going to try because. Why not?

[Shep]
What’s the movie where the guy happened to know all the answers to the trivia based on his experiences? So, the things that they did during the day allow them to solve all the problems without the calculators.

[Thomas]
Wow. That would be remarkably coincidental.

[Shep]
Yeah. Do you want your happy Hollywood ending or not?

[Emily]
I was going to say it sounds like the end of a ’90s movie to me.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Do they win or not?

[Emily]
We have a fifth character we haven’t talked about either. Maybe that fifth character, a girl, obviously, because you got to have a token girl.

[Thomas]
Obviously, yeah.

[Emily]
She can save the team because she’s been quiet this whole time. She’s just there hanging out with the boys.

[Shep]
Who did she suspect, though? She suspected one of the wrestlers just because she wanted to meet him?

[Thomas]
I think that we were always going to have one person who we don’t see their-. Actually, it’s two of them aren’t real, or two of the people in the club-

[Emily]
Aren’t real.

[Thomas]
Yeah, they’re just fake people. They’re just mannequins there to fill seats. No, what I’m trying to say is that there are two people who don’t have a genuine suspicion that we see in the film anyway. What’s the short guy’s name? Scott?

[Emily]
They’re Steve-

[Thomas]
Steve. Steve. Yeah. So, Steve doesn’t count because it was never real.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
And the girl’s we don’t get because we don’t really need another one. And maybe she can serve a different purpose.

[Emily]
Because she just egged on accusing the wrestlers so she could meet the wrestlers and give them their numbers.

[Thomas]
I think she’s just been quiet the whole time. Maybe the entire time she’s trying to tell them that the calculators don’t matter.

[Emily]
It doesn’t matter because it’s-

[Thomas]
Yeah, she knows the rules really well or something. And there’s something maybe she knows some rule or has some idea where she can try to convince the other team that they can’t use calculators or that they shouldn’t use calculators because it’s like, “How good will that win feel if you absolutely fucking destroy us because you have calculators and we don’t? Wouldn’t it feel so much better to win on an even playing field?”

[Shep]
No. She got us all like “We’re so confident we’re not even going to use the fancy calculators. They’re not even scientific. They just do addition and multiplication and subtraction. That’s how confident we are that we’re going to beat you because look how weak you are. You need those fancy you need those fancy tools.”

[Thomas]
So, she basically taunts them down to their level so they give up their graphing calculators and use scientific calculators as well. Is that what you’re saying?

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah, that works for me. I do want at the end for her to make out with the captain of the other team. I want her to be a horny mathlete.

[Thomas]
Have we figured out our whole story? Are there any missing pieces that we need to-

[Shep]
There are details…

[Thomas]
Sure.

[Shep]
But I think we’ve hit the major parts. We’ve got the beats.

[Emily]
I think we’ve got a solid beginning to end.

[Thomas]
Well, that’s our story about a calculator. If this movie were in theaters, would you go see it? You can let us know via email or social media. We’re on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Discord. You can search for us on each of those sites or just follow the links on our website: AlmostPlausible.com Take a moment right now to subscribe to the podcast if you haven’t already. That way you’ll never miss an episode. Just search for Almost Plausible wherever you regularly listen to podcasts and if you enjoyed this podcast, please tell other people about it. Your recommendation really is the best way to support the show. Thank you for listening and thank you to Emily and Shep for going on this adventure with me. We’ll see you next week for another episode of Almost Plausible.

[Shep]
Bye.

[Emily]
Bye, guys.