Cranberry Sauce

References

• Almost Plausible: Break Maker
• The Mangler
• Almost Plausible: Post-it Notes
• Almost Plausible: Padlock
• Scooby Doo, Where Are You!
• Ley Line
• Taken
• Goldilocks and the Three Bears
• The Yogi Bear Show

Transcript

[Intro music begins]

[Thomas]
Well, I was going to say third night, maybe there’s an attempt at a murder but they get away somehow. So there’s some sort of damage, property damage that they can investigate and it’s like a bear didn’t do this.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
What did the bog witch, bog monster, marsh monster. What did the monster do that a bear can’t do?

[Emily]
New York Times crossword.

[Intro music]

[Thomas]
Hey there, story fans. Welcome to Almost Plausible, the podcast where we take ordinary objects and turn them into movies. It’s once again time for one of our favorite holidays here at Almost Plausible: Thanksgiving. I’m Thomas J. Brown, and ready to celebrate with me are Emily-

[Emily]
Hey, guys.

[Thomas]
And F. Paul Shepard.

[Shep]
Happy to be here.

[Thomas]
Today’s theme is Cranberry Sauce. Now, I didn’t used to like cranberry sauce because I don’t like the stuff from the can. But for the past couple of years, I’ve made my own cranberry sauce, and it is fantastic. How do the two of you feel about cranberry sauce, canned or otherwise?

[Emily]
I did not like it as a child because it was too tart and slightly bitter. And I love all forms of it jellied in the can when you slide it out and it’s still can-shaped. Or the goopy berry one. Or homemade.

[Thomas]
The goopy berry one.

[Shep]
Yep. The whole-berry one or the jelly one, I like them all.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yep.

[Shep]
I have made cranberry sauce from scratch, which I didn’t know that you could do. I thought those bags of cranberries at the store were, like, just for stringing up to decorate the Christmas tree.

[Emily]
Oh, yeah.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
I was like, “Oh, no, you can actually make cranberry sauce out of those.” And I did. And I was like, “Oh, this is amazing.” But it’s a lot of work.

[Emily]
It is.

[Thomas]
It’s not that much work.

[Shep]
Because my hand was crushed in the door. And it’s a lot of stirring for not having a good hand.

[Thomas]
It’s true. Well, don’t worry. I am the one who always makes it for our Thanksgiving party, so you can have mine.

[Emily]
I like the canned stuff.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Emily]
The jellied canned stuff because you can spread it like jelly on bread and use your turkey leftovers with mayonnaise and some stuffing and it’s delicious.

[Shep]
Yep. I like it because you can slice it and you get those discs of cranberry jelly.

[Emily]
Mhm.

[Thomas]
I wonder what we could do with those. Is there something we could make with those discs? Like bread them somehow or form something around them? I don’t know.

[Emily]
Well, you can deep fry anything, so sure.

[Thomas]
Right. That’s what I was thinking.

[Emily]
Actually, now I want to try deep-fried cranberry sauce.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
You know what it’s going to be? It’s just going to turn into like-

[Thomas]
Nothing.

[Emily]
Yeah, it’s just-

[Thomas]
It’ll just dissolve in the oil.

[Emily]
It’ll- Yeah, it’ll just. Well, I mean, even if you freeze it, it’ll just soak up into the batter.

[Thomas]
Right. Yeah.

[Shep]
Right. It’ll be cranberry-flavored batter, which also. I mean, that sounds fine.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah, that’s no problem with that.

[Thomas]
Well, I’ll pitch first in our cranberry sauce episode. I gotta say, this one was really hard. Yeah, boy, I had a lot of great ideas for cranberries, but for cranberry sauce? I only have one, and it’s recycling old properties. So we’re going to revisit the witch from our Bread Maker episode. The town where she lives in has a fall harvest festival, and this takes place in the days leading up to that festival. So there used to be a cranberry bog just outside of town, but a while back, the farmer died or moved away or whatever. But now the cranberry plants are just dying off. What no one realized is that the cranberry plants were keeping a bog monster trapped in the cursed ground of the bog. And now that those plants are dying, the monster is able to come out and terrorize the town. The witch and our characters from the Bread Maker episode must work together to defeat the monster. They eventually discover the truth about the cranberry plants, and the witch brews up a special batch of cranberry sauce, which has highly concentrated cranberry power to help them drive the monster back into the bog.

[Emily]
Okay. I love this so much, but this is one of those few times I get to be pedantic. Cranberries don’t grow in the bogs. That’s just how they harvest them. They actually grow low to the ground.

[Shep]
Yeah, that’s true. They flood it afterward to raise him up.

[Emily]
They flood it afterwards and then they pick it.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
Well, what’s it called is just a field? Cranberry fields. Is that what it is?

[Emily]
Yeah, it’s just a field that they flood with water.

[Thomas]
Well, all right. Imagine. I read my thing again, but said cranberry field.

[Emily]
Just let me have this. They’re called marshlands when they’re not filled.

[Thomas]
Ah. All right. Well, today I learned. Look, I knew they weren’t bogs when they were growing. I knew. It’s just they flood them. I didn’t think about what they were called apart from that. So. I guess a bog is a specific thing that they are not normally. Anyway, it’s a bog monster. It lives underneath the cranberry fields. The cranberries have magic powers. I don’t know why it’s allergic to cranberries. We don’t have to explain that.

[Emily]
No, no, we don’t.

[Shep]
What does the monster look like? It looks like a urinary tract infection.

[Thomas]
I think you just broke Emily. Oh, my God.

[Emily]
That’s so funny. Not a lot makes me laugh that hard.

[Thomas]
All right, well, that was my one pitch. So, Emily, let’s hear from you.

[Emily]
All right, so in keeping with witches, I have: Madeline is a young witch who just moved to town. And for her first Friendsgiving, she brings her grandmother’s cranberry sauce. Of course, it’s imbued with magic. The spell lets the recipient release their inhibitions and achieve their most genuine desires. Which for Andrew is to profess his love to the dinner’s hostess, Nadia. I’m really proud of that because I had names for everyone. So my second one is going to throw back to days of yore for us, and: we switch between the point of view of Solomon, a lonely, bitter incel who’s had it with society and decided to take his revenge on Thanksgiving and distributes cans of cranberry sauce laced with arsenic around the city. We switch that with Leon, a hardened detective who’s looking for the perpetrator of the Thanksgiving massacre.

[Thomas]
Why does he attack Thanksgiving?

[Shep]
He’s attacking Friendsgiving because he has no friends.

[Thomas]
Ah.

[Emily]
There you go.

[Thomas]
There you go.

[Emily]
Yeah, he’s just tired of hearing that “It’s Thanksgiving, not Friendsgiving. Like the war on Christmas.”

[Thomas]
Right. He’s a traditionalist.

[Emily]
Yeah. Shep, how about you?

[Shep]
Well, in keeping with the theme of murder, there is a tragic death at a cranberry sauce plant. Was it just a terrible industrial accident or was it murder?

[Thomas]
Or is it even blood? Is it maybe just cranberry sauce? Have they checked that?

[Shep]
I mean, in the cranberry crusher machine, there are two legs sticking out, so.

[Thomas]
What is this, The Mangler? Okay, so which idea do we want to go with?

[Emily]
I like Thomas’s witch one, but I don’t think we should necessarily tie it back to Bread Maker because that would require me to remember Bread Maker.

[Thomas]
Well, I kind of went back and… And skimmed through the transcript, and there’s not a lot. Like, they never had names, so we can just make up names for them.

[Emily]
Oh, okay. I’m for that one.

[Shep]
Oh, wow, this was our 15th episode?

[Thomas]
Really?

[Shep]
That was a while ago.

[Thomas]
Yeah. I mean, this could be months or maybe a couple of years later. Maybe the witch is a little more, like, integrated into the community. People are chill about it now.

[Shep]
Weren’t they chill about it in this one?

[Emily]
Yeah, but they didn’t know she was a witch, right? That was part of it. They just- Oh, no, some people did.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Because the Christian mom was like, “She’s a witch.”

[Shep]
Right. But people also bought stuff from her, if I recall correctly.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah. Everyone bought it on the DL, and so maybe now they’re buying it out in the open.

[Shep]
Ah, maybe they have a shop.

[Thomas]
She has a shop in the town.

[Shep]
Yep. Yep.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
And that teenager who’s now in their early 20s, works in the shop.

[Thomas]
Right. Yeah. So I remember we had the witch and the runaway.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
We should name these characters now so that we can refer to them appropriately. We had the Christian mom and her daughter, and I think those were kind of like the four main characters.

[Shep]
Yep. Yep.

[Thomas]
So we need to bring them back.

[Emily]
Well, there was like the sheriff or the deputy too.

[Thomas]
Oh, that’s right. There was a sheriff. Oh, yeah. Was there a deputy that they liked?

[Shep]
See, if I had known we were going to do a sequel to Bread Maker, I would have listened to Bread Maker.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
Or at least read the transcript.

[Thomas]
You’d think, considering I was proposing a sequel to Bread Maker, I would have listened to Bread Maker, but no, I didn’t think about that. Well, if you’re listening to this episode now, stop, go back and listen to Bread Maker.

[Break]

[Thomas]
All right, so we’ve had a talk off recording because we had to do a whole bunch of looking stuff up. So here’s what we’ve come up with. We have the following characters:

There’s the witch, her name is Poppy.

There’s the runaway, who’s no longer a runaway. She now works for the witch. Her name is Iris.

The Christian mom, her name is Shannon.

The Christian mom’s daughter, her name is Violet. She is an apprentice witch apprenticing under Poppy and working with Iris at the store that Poppy now owns in town.

And then we have some law enforcement folk:

We have the old sheriff from our previous story. His name is Gary.

The deputy from our previous story. We were calling them cop. Was it old cop and trainee cop? Is that what we Were calling them. Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Yeah. Yes.

[Thomas]
So old cop, we’re going to call him sheriff in this one is Gary.

Trainee cop, who we’re calling deputy in this one. His name is Braden.

And we have decided that early in our story, our sheriff is killed by the bog monster. And so there will be an interim sheriff whose name is Warren. So these are the characters we’re going to start our, or have in our film, the main characters.

[Shep]
Okay. I just realized something. Warren doesn’t know about the witches.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah.

[Emily]
No, he doesn’t, because he’s new.

[Shep]
He’s the sheriff and he’s in charge. But Braden is like, “I gotta train this guy up.”

[Thomas]
Right, right.

[Shep]
Even though he’s the deputy, he’s gotta train the sheriff about magic and about the witches.

[Thomas]
So in Bread Maker, Poppy was making donuts for the old sheriff because he had bad knees. Is she doing something similar for the deputy? Is it just sort of like a… You know how you take a multivitamin just for your health? Does she have some sort of “for your health” type of donut that she makes for the police in the town?

[Emily]
Well, if she now owns more of a head shop, for lack of a better term, she could give him some sort of herbal things to help with his vision. Maybe he’s slightly nearsighted or maybe like to help with his memory.

[Thomas]
They don’t have coffee and donuts. They have tea, herbal tea and donuts.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Yeah. Yep.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
So that’s the first thing when the new sheriff rolls into town, he wants coffee. The deputy’s like, “Oh, no, we’ve got something better than coffee in this town.”

[Emily]
Yeah. Because even though she owns the head shop now, it’s more of like this crystal, earthy herbal shop.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
She still makes donuts and pastries.

[Thomas]
Sure. I mean, she still has the Bread Maker.

[Emily]
Poppy’s Pastries and Potions.

[Thomas]
There you go. What’s the inciting incident? How do we establish, okay, do we, the audience, need to know that it’s the cranberries at the start, or is that something we find out with our characters later on?

[Emily]
Do we need to actually see the sheriff be killed by the bog monster or can he…? Oh, I guess he can’t drown if it’s not a bog at the moment. Because I was thinking we could find him floating in the bog.

[Shep]
How does the monster kill people?

[Thomas]
That’s a good question. Well, what is it? Why is it killing people?

[Emily]
It’s a monster. That’s what they do.

[Shep]
Or it’s feeding. It needs something.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Does he steal your breath?

[Thomas]
Well, one idea could be that he’s just getting revenge. So perhaps a curse was placed on someone, or maybe someone was murdered and buried underneath the marshland.

[Emily]
I’m all for that.

[Shep]
Was it a bog witch?

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
It was the brother of the bog witch. And so the bog witch brought him back to life many, many years ago. And then somehow somebody figured out, another witch back then, a kind witch figured out, “Oh, we can hold him back with these cranberry plants.” And so for years, people have been farming cranberries in this marsh. And then, like I said, either the farmer died or moved away, and people just kind of didn’t know that anymore. Like, over the years, that was forgotten. And so the cranberry plants die off. And now the monster comes back seeking its revenge on the townspeople because he and his sister were ostracized to the bog.

[Emily]
It all checks out.

[Thomas]
I mean, I don’t know how much of that we need to reveal to the audience.

[Emily]
I mean later. Little snippets here and there as we get to it.

[Thomas]
I think we established in Bread Maker that, was it the Christian mom likes to do a lot of research, so maybe she goes to the library and finds that part of the town history-

[Emily]
Oh, yeah.

[Thomas]
Because it also makes her useful in this story, too.

[Emily]
Right. And I was going to say, is she a little more tolerant because she wants to maintain a relationship with her daughter or is she still full on…?

[Thomas]
That’s a good question, because I feel like after the events of Bread Maker, I feel like she’d be a lot more accepting because she was, she helped.

[Emily]
That’s right.

[Thomas]
But she did not want her daughter to go down this path. And now that her daughter has chosen to it, maybe there’s some new resentment coming from the mom.

[Emily]
Oh, yeah, she-

[Thomas]
And so-

[Emily]
She’s totally now still hates Poppy. Like they still have animosity.

[Thomas]
There’s, like, a renewed frustration with Poppy because Violet is apprenticing with her.

[Shep]
So looking back at what we said towards the end, we’re talking about whether this is softening the Christian woman’s viewpoints, but we’re like, oh, she’s a big old bitch, but she has a talent for magic. She’s in denial.

[Thomas]
Ah, that’s right.

[Shep]
She’s rebelling against her nature, and that’s why she went full-on religious anti witchcraft. But then at the end, she was there helping the main witch quell the magic, and she can feel that power. So we’re like, well, maybe she starts coming by, like, for bread or donuts. Not that she’s saying she’s interested in being a witch.

[Emily]
She’s just now more tolerant.

[Shep]
She just wants some bread. And they sell bread here. That’s it.

[Thomas]
So are we going to pull a fast one on the audience? Shannon is frustrated with Poppy because she didn’t want Violet to go down this path, and Violet has. So now we’re seeing that old tension flare up again. But really, she’s actually, like, not super actually upset. She has to be outwardly upset for appearances to everybody else, to the PTA and everything. But she’s reading the books and stuff that Violet’s bringing home. She’s doing her own little practicing magic because she knows she has this innate ability.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
So then later in the film, it turns out, “Actually, I’ve been practicing. I have a bunch of skills. I can help.”

[Shep]
I think that would be a good reveal. So at the end of the previous one, she doesn’t actually end up going to the shop. She ends up sending her daughter to the shop.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
See, we set it up perfectly.

[Shep]
Maintaining that fiction of distance.

[Thomas]
Yes.

[Shep]
But if her daughter is apprenticing and bringing home books or whatever, or scrolls or spells.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Right. She’s just going to read them to check.

[Thomas]
Or strange kitchen appliances.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Yeah. What is Violet’s vessel?

[Shep]
Blender.

[Emily]
Oh.

[Thomas]
Ah, yeah.

[Shep]
She makes margaritas.

[Thomas]
That’s good.

[Emily]
Magical margaritas.

[Shep]
Yep. I’m on board.

[Thomas]
Does Shannon have something that she has for herself at home?

[Shep]
Right. Some vessel that she has made for herself through her readings.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Because she likes to do that research.

[Thomas]
Right. She’s probably done a whole bunch of online research. She’s like a mail-order type of additional spell books that she has hidden in her room. “Don’t look at my bedside drawer!” I don’t know. Maybe later in the story when there’s some crucial tool that they need, turns out Shannon has that.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
That’s pretty coincidental. But.

[Shep]
Well, see, it’s gotta be. I think it would be something that a witch would never use, like a microwave. Something like, unrelated.

[Thomas]
Stick blender.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
That’s too close to. Well, actually, maybe that’s perfect for Violet, so. Because if part of Violet’s training is you have to imbue your item with your magic, then maybe Shannon can like, “Well, that’s a blender. This is a blender. It’s a different kind of blender, but I’m sure it’ll work.”

[Shep]
See, I like that now that I’m thinking about it more, because they, mother and daughter, both happen to imbue the same thing.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah.

[Shep]
And maybe that’s why Shannon chose the stick blender, because she’s learning from her daughter, really.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
And her daughter used the blender, and so she’s trying to keep it hidden and secret.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So she has like a stick blender in her room.

[Emily]
Yep. 100%. Because then that’s in her bedside drawer.

[Thomas]
Yep. Yep.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
There’s got to be that scene where Violet opens her bedside drawer and she sees the-

[Emily]
Just the top part of it. Yeah, yeah.

[Thomas]
Not the business end, the button end of it, and there’s the cord, and she’s like. And she picks it up by the cord, and it’s a stick blender. And she’s like-

[Emily]
Very confused-

[Thomas]
“Now I’m just confused. Like, what the hell?”

[Shep]
“What is my mom into?”

[Thomas]
Shannon grabs it. Right. “I learned it from you.” All right, what the hell is our story?

[Shep]
Oh, man, I have no idea.

[Thomas]
So how do we open up? We got to establish they’ve got the shop, things are good, everything’s happy. Because if Gary’s the first one killed. Oh, no, Gary should be the second one killed. He is investigating the first murder and as a result is killed.

[Shep]
Oh, right. Yep, yep, yep.

[Thomas]
So I think that we kind of need to figure out what those bog monster kills look like. Is it violent and bloody or is it just someone is gone and you don’t find that, you don’t ever see them again or-

[Emily]
Then. How do they know that Gary died? Gotta have a body.

[Thomas]
Yeah, so what do we want this movie to be rated? Is there blood or not? Because one of you mentioned previously about the idea of the bog monster stealing souls or breath or something like that.

[Emily]
Yeah. I had mentioned maybe he steals your breath.

[Thomas]
Right. And so there’s no blood, it’s just they’re dead. So you have the body and it’s not really violent looking. So we can keep that rating nice and low.

[Emily]
You want a bloody and disgusting. He claws at them and his innards are leaking out everywhere and the animals are coming and pecking at it and that’s how they find him.

[Thomas]
There’s a crow eating a donut out of his gut.

[Emily]
Oh, yeah.

[Shep]
No, I didn’t want any of that. I wanted the bog monster to waterlog people.

[Emily]
Oh, well, yeah, that makes sense.

[Shep]
You know, they bloat up. And that’s why the cranberries were working, because they’re astringent. They were drying the bog monster out.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Emily]
Sure.

[Thomas]
And so this is fall, when you would flood the marshland with water and make it into a bog. And so no one has flooded the field, but I don’t know, maybe it’s been rainy, the field is like kind of flooded. The ground is really wet. And so you do have kind of a boggy area. So if you wanted someone face down in the cranberry muck, bog spiders crawling all over them.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
Okay, so some person from the town is the first one dead. Gary’s investigating.

[Shep]
Why is the person out there? This is at the farm or this is near the farm.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Does the bog monster take people back to the farm? That’s where all the kids go. It’s some teenager.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Oh, because it’s an abandoned farm.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
That’s where the teenagers go and smoke and…

[Shep]
This is absolutely where the teenagers go to smoke and drink.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Have sex.

[Shep]
Well, if you have sex in a… In a horror movie, you die. That’s the rule.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So maybe it’s two people die, maybe it’s a couple that dies. But see, you’d want one person to run back and tell the sheriff.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
But would anybody who witnessed it tell the sheriff? Because they were all there smoking and drinking and they’re underage and…

[Emily]
No. They’re not… This, these kids aren’t stupid.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Emily]
They know that this problem can be solved by getting an adult.

[Thomas]
Because Gary’s chill.

[Emily]
Gary’s going to care more about the murder than the drugs.

[Thomas]
Right, the drinking maybe.

[Emily]
And they know it’s important to say, “Hey, adult, help us. We can’t figure out this situation.”

[Thomas]
Right. Yeah.

[Emily]
I want to educate teenagers into realizing it’s okay to say, “Hey, I can’t handle this. I need help.”

[Shep]
So it’s a movie with a message.

[Emily]
That’s right.

[Thomas]
So Gary goes out there. Now Gary’s not killed the same night, is he?

[Shep]
No.

[Thomas]
Is this bog monster a little bit like a spider where it’s like it grabs the person, it brings it back to the bog and it’s going to snack on the person later? So Gary removes the body and the bog monster is like, “You stole my food, I’m coming for you next.”

[Shep]
Oh, could be. Where is Gary killed? I guess I should ask. If he’s not killed at the bog, if he’s killed in town at his home, then it’s extra scary.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Well, yeah, that’s- I mean I imagine that everyone needs to be in danger and vigilant, but maybe this is too early to raise the stakes to that point.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
Because you’re right. Like if the bog monster can come into town and attack someone in their home, no home is safe now. Why would you sleep? How could you sleep? So we got to save that until maybe that’s the mid-second act turning point is someone is killed in their home and now it’s like, “Oh shit, everyone’s in trouble.” Or that could be the end of the second act as well. That could be the lowest low. Like, “Oh, no one’s safe.” No, I think that’s a good mid-second act turning point. And then the lowest low is the first thing they try doesn’t work. Ooh. Or they try something and the way they find out it doesn’t work is the bog monster comes into town and kills somebody in town. And so it’s like, “Oh, it didn’t work, and we’re all screwed.” I like that.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Okay, so just to recap, someone has died off-screen.

[Thomas]
Yeah. I mean, do they die off screen or is it like semi-off-screen where, like, we see the teenagers-

[Emily]
Partying and playing and having a good time and then-

[Thomas]
Right. And then there’s, like, one of them is attacked by something we don’t see, and all the other teenagers scatter and maybe they’ve seen the person be killed. We haven’t seen it, so I guess it’s off-screen in that respect. But it’s not like we’re just hearing about it. Like, “Oh, and by the way, this thing happened that you’re just now finding out about,” like, we were there when it happened. We just didn’t see it happen. Does that make sense?

[Shep]
Okay, so again, when is Gary killed? If he takes the body away, but is still killed by the bog monster, he has to go back out there for some reason.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Oh, maybe he needed a lab tech to come out to investigate the crime scene, you know, take samples or whatever. And that’s not something that they have in this town.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
The town is too small, so he couldn’t do it that day. He had a tech come out the next day, and he drives the tech out, and that’s when the bog monster attacks and kills him. The tech gets away. This is how the town finds out that Gary is dead. Or is that too much like the first scene with the teenagers? See, that’s why I thought that the first body is someone who died off-screen. And the teenagers didn’t see it. They found it, and they don’t know what caused the death. They didn’t see the monster. If they saw the monster and told the sheriff, he would go to the witches and say, “Hey, there is a monster.”

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
“This is kind of your deal.”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s an excellent point. Okay, I like that. So they’re dicking around at the farm. Two of them go off to be alone and stumble upon the body.

[Shep]
Right. Yes. That’s our opener.

[Thomas]
Okay. Yeah. So we go from that dark scene to the next morning. Poppy’s gets opened up.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
We see Iris and Violet are working there.

[Shep]
Yeah. We see our characters and how they’ve changed in the intervening three years since the previous movie.

[Thomas]
Yep. Gary comes in for his morning donut, and he kind of, he talks. “Oh, yeah, we got something out at the old farm.” Is the body. Is it someone from the town? Does he know? I mean, Gary would know everybody in town.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
So is this someone from the town or was this a transient?

[Emily]
Damn tourist.

[Thomas]
A tourist.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah, a tourist there for the fall festival. For the harvest festival.

[Shep]
Oh, it was the town drunk and he went out to the farm to drink in peace or whatever.

[Emily]
Because of all the tourists in town.

[Shep]
Right. Drove him out of town. He went somewhere else.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Ooh, that’s good. I like having the tourists there because now you have all these additional innocent people.

[Shep]
Right. And also suspects.

[Emily]
Oh, yeah. Because then you can get a really good red herring with some super nosy true crime blogger slash podcaster.

[Thomas]
Keeps leaving all these Post-it Notes around. All right, well, let’s take a break here, and when we come back, we’ll figure out the rest of the plot we have for our Cranberry Sauce themed bog monster murder mystery.

[Break]

[Thomas]
All right, we’re back. We have the foundation of our story. We have the very beginning. We know how it starts. So do we like this idea of Gary being killed in the lab tech’s presence? Now, this is a person who doesn’t know about the witches either, so he wouldn’t necessarily go to them.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
And he’s going to report that to… He’d have to report it to Braden, though, who does know about the witches.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
Yes, yes.

[Thomas]
So is this where they all start to get involved? Braden maybe is actually kind of running his own side investigation because the new sheriff isn’t going to believe it.

[Emily]
Well. And they haven’t gotten the new sheriff yet. And so in the meantime, he is working with Poppy.

[Thomas]
Oh, right. The new sheriff comes in and is like, “What are you doing?”

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
“Don’t involve civilians. Stop whatever you’re all doing.” And so he’s shutting down their investigation, which they, of course, ignore. So is Braden feeding details to Poppy and Violet and Iris?

[Shep]
Yes.

[Emily]
Of course.

[Shep]
I can’t remember. Did Braden date one of the girls?

[Emily]
No, because they would have been teenagers, as he was an adult man with an adult man’s job.

[Shep]
What I was thinking is that between the first movie and this movie, he did date Iris. Not Iris. Which one is the-

[Thomas]
Iris is the runaway and Violet’s the Christian daughter.

[Shep]
One of them. But they broke up. So there is an awkwardness between them. Because they are exes now. Or is that too much?

[Emily]
I’m okay with that.

[Thomas]
I feel like it should be Violet, because then it’s not one of the witches, the out-and-out witches dating a cop. And I feel like Shannon would love for her daughter to date a cop. She would think, “Oh, yeah, that’s great. Law and order.”

[Emily]
Very traditionalist.

[Thomas]
Very traditional.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Shannon still likes Braden and wishes they would get back together.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
And is.

[Thomas]
Oh, man. Maybe that’s why she’s studying magic. She’s trying to put a… A love spell together.

[Shep]
That’s so wrong.

[Thomas]
She read something about a Padlock that you can get to… It does seem like something Shannon would do, though. I agree.

[Emily]
Also, I like the idea because Violet and Braden would have been around each other.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Like, I’m assuming Braden’s from the town as well, and so they would have known each other for quite some time, and it would be natural that they are both one of the few young adults who’ve been there this entire time.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
Why wouldn’t they test the waters?

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
And it’s a small town. You gotta date everyone.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Exactly.

[Shep]
And he wouldn’t have known Iris because she was not from the town.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
This all checks out.

[Thomas]
All right, so we know how the story starts. So there’s that time in between finding out that Gary is killed and the new sheriff showing up. So what happens in that period of time? We’ve established that Brayden and the witches start their own little investigation.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Presumably, Gary’s funeral is during that time as well. Does the new sheriff show up in the middle of Gary’s funeral? Is that a little too Hollywood?

[Shep]
Oh, man.

[Emily]
The day after. Like, do we even need to see Gary’s funeral? Could it be, like-

[Thomas]
That’s true. We could just imply the funeral has happened.

[Emily]
And then he pulls into town.

[Shep]
Oh. He shows up the day before the funeral and tries to take Braden with them to go investigate stuff. And Braden’s like, “I have the day off. I’m going to a funeral.”

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Because he’s going to Gary’s funeral.

[Thomas]
Right. And is Warren like, “Crime doesn’t take a day off, son.”

[Shep]
Warren’s an asshole.

[Emily]
Why isn’t his name Steve then?

[Thomas]
We can change it.

[Shep]
No, no, no. We should change his behavior, not his name.

[Emily]
So, no, I think that’s a good thing, to have him come in and be like, “Hey, we need to go investigate this.” And Braden’s like, “I’m still finalizing some funeral plans, and I’ve got to do all these things for the funeral.”

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
And Warren just didn’t think about it.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
He’s just, like-

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
He’s used to having a larger force and not everything being so intimately connected in this way.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
So he kind of is, like, put out, but not, like, pissed off.

[Thomas]
And maybe even apoligize. He’s like, “I’m sorry, I didn’t even think of that.”

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
“You’re right.”

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
But I think it also will set that dynamic between them where Braden’s very, like, intimately involved in the community. And then we see that Warren’s a little more like, “We’ve gotta get the investigation going. We’ve gotta do it correctly. We’ve gotta get it done fast,” you know, kind of a thing.

[Thomas]
Well, and part of Warren’s style or training or whatever could be a greater aloofness or a greater distance from the community.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
He maybe views those close relationships as weakness. Or if you have that emotional connection, you won’t be unbiased. You know, anyone could be a criminal. Anyone could break the law. It’s not a good idea to have those kinds of connections.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
And Braden is like, “What are you talking about? It’s like the only reason those kids came and told us.” I don’t know. Maybe there’s a little friction there potentially.

[Emily]
Yeah. I think that’s a good idea to build the friction to show the difference between the two, to create that sort of opposition which creates a problem later.

[Thomas]
So does everyone bring Warren into the fold by the end of the film? Does he become a believer in the witches? I mean, he has to, right? The bog monster has to make an out-and-out appearance, and Warren’s like, “Oh?! It’s real?!”

[Emily]
Right, right.

[Thomas]
Does he try to do like a Scooby Doo moment where he’s, like, trying to take the mask off. He’s like, “It’s gotta be a guy in a suit. There aren’t bog monsters.” What does Warren think is going on? If it’s not a bog monster, what is it?

[Shep]
Wild animal.

[Thomas]
Yeah, it could be a hungry bear.

[Emily]
Did we decide it was a violent death?

[Thomas]
No, actually, I think we decided it wasn’t. It was like, a bloated body, but not bloody. Not like clawed up or anything.

[Shep]
Right. Just pulled him into the water.

[Emily]
Okay, so the bog monster drags you back to the bog and drowns you. Or it doesn’t actually leave the bog yet. Is it building strength to go leave the bog?

[Thomas]
Ah, yeah.

[Shep]
Okay. So maybe it is sucking the souls out and replacing it with water.

[Thomas]
Okay. Yeah, I like that.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So the interim sheriff doesn’t know what the tech saw for real.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
Just knows that Gary’s body appeared to be waterlogged.

[Emily]
Official cause of death was drowning.

[Shep]
Right. Even though his body was found on the road and not in the water, it’s like, “Well, maybe he fell in the water and drowned and some animal pulled him out.”

[Emily]
Yes.

[Shep]
“Some hungry bear pulled his body out but left it on the road.”

[Emily]
And that’s what she saw.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So he’s rationalizing all this stuff because it’s… A bog monster is impossible.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
So we know that’s not what happened. So we can only conclude from what we do know what could have happened. So Warren doesn’t believe it. Braden does believe the tech.

[Thomas]
Yes.

[Shep]
And goes to the witches, tells them the story that he heard from her.

[Emily]
Yeah. Because he’s confused. He believes her, but he’s confused because that’s never happened before. And so he goes kind of to Poppy, like, “Have you heard of this? What would this be?” And she’s like, “I’ve never heard of anything insane like that before.”

[Thomas]
Right. “It’s possible, but I don’t know what it could be.”

[Shep]
She wouldn’t say, I’ve never heard of that before. She’d say, there are too many possibilities.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
That could be a number of things.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
Is she secretly worried, though?

[Emily]
Well, I mean, she’s worried because her good friend Gary died. But I don’t think she’s worried because she has some foreknowledge of said monster.

[Thomas]
Sure.

[Emily]
Because that’s where Shannon’s going to come in, doing research to find this cursed land.

[Thomas]
We said at the end of Bread Maker, Shannon was not coming to the shop to get the bread. She was sending Violet.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Now that Violet works at Poppy’s Pastries and Potions, does Shannon come in to visit her daughter and therefore is in the shop when the bog monster is announced so that she can quietly go, “Hmm.” And go off and start doing her own research?

[Shep]
No, I think she’s still pretending to keep that distance. In fact, when she goes to pick up Violet after work to take her home, she parks outside and honks the horn and doesn’t go in.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
But Violet is in the shop. So she hears the story.

[Thomas]
Right. I mean, she would be part of the crew that’s discussing it.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
Right. Shannon hears about it later from Violet.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
In the meantime, I think Braden takes Poppy and maybe Iris out to the bog because Poppy wants to investigate and she wants to teach Iris.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Like this is a teachable moment.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
We’re gonna go and we’re gonna look for, you know, the ley of the land. L, E, Y.

[Thomas]
Right. They’re going to do some sort of incantation that lets them know the levels of magic in the area or something along those lines.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
They’re going to do their witchy investigation.

[Emily]
CSW.

[Shep]
Right. When does Warren show up? Does he show up while they’re out there investigating? Like, whoever is answering the phones at the sheriff’s office told him where Brayden was, which was out at the bog. And so he drives up and sees Brayden with two people investigating the scene.

[Thomas]
Maybe he assumes that Braden is in the middle of questioning them.

[Shep]
Yes. Or maybe he thinks they might be techs and work for the department.

[Thomas]
Hmm. Yeah. They could be explaining, “Oh, yeah-” He’s asking, “Oh, what-” you know, “what evidence have we gathered so far?” And they’re saying, “Oh, well, we did this incantation and we revealed it.” And he’s like, “What?” He thinks it’s all, you know, woo woo mumbo jumbo stuff that’s not doing anything.

[Shep]
Would they tell him that? Because he’s an outsider.

[Thomas]
Right. Who literally just walked up for the first time.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
And she had lived in secret for quite some time.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Right. Open secret, but still a secret.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
I wonder if maybe then he shouldn’t show up right then.

[Shep]
Oh, he’s already at the sheriff’s office.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So when Braden comes back with them in his car, they go into the office to discuss it, and Warren is waiting there.

[Thomas]
Does Braden come up with an excuse to send them away without Warren suspecting, or do they have to come clean? Because I think it’s a good point that no one would just volunteer that they’re witches to this outsider.

[Emily]
Not yet.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
And Warren could completely misread the situation. He could think that Braden’s goofing off and flirting with Poppy or Iris.

[Shep]
Right. He’s spending time with civilians instead of doing his job.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Yeah, he’s out taking these gals on a joyride to impress them.

[Thomas]
It’s all part of his touchy-feely community outreach.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Stop it.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Do police work.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Maybe he does overhear them. Just a snippet of a conversation that lets him know that Braden has told them more than he should have told somebody outside of the investigation.

[Thomas]
Sure. They could be walking in, talking about it, or talking about having just been down by the bog. And he’s like, “You contaminating my crime scene with civilians?”

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Or something like that. Along those lines. So Braden gets a dressing down from Warren.

[Emily]
And Braden tries to explain that Poppy has a special set of skills that could be useful.

[Thomas]
Yeah. And then Warren’s like, “What are they?” And he’s like, “Uhhh…”

[Emily]
“Have you tried the scones?”

[Thomas]
Yeah, right there’s like the dirty gross old drip coffee pot in the police station. He’s like, “You really shouldn’t drink that, I’ll bring you a tea.” In fact, I think maybe the next day he just brings one for Warren.

[Shep]
Right. He used to bring one for Gary.

[Thomas]
Right. No, Gary would bring the tea for both of them. And now he’s trying to take on that role.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Because like you said, he’s got a teach him. He’s like, “This is what we do.” So he’s like, “Ah, I can show him what we do.”

[Emily]
Okay, so Warren is gruff and grumpy about Braden getting help from the witches, not knowing that they’re witches. So their investigations kind of cross paths and butt heads a little bit, but nothing too much at first. And then we get another murder?

[Thomas]
Well, I was going to say third night, maybe there’s an attempt at a murder but they get away somehow. So there’s some sort of damage, property damage that they can investigate and it’s like a bear didn’t do this.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
What did the bog witch, bog monster, marsh monster. What did the monster do that a bear can’t do?

[Emily]
New York Times crossword.

[Thomas]
Well, I mean maybe it’s not so much that a bear can’t do, but wouldn’t do so wouldn’t leave mud and vines and whatever behind. Like how dirty is this bear? Or maybe it’s just super incredibly destructive in a way that a bear is not likely to be.

[Shep]
Or what if it’s not destructive in a way that a bear would be?

[Thomas]
Ah.

[Shep]
So it’s chasing after someone, or it’s, it’s hunting someone, and they’re inside, but there’s a little gap. There’s- Maybe they have a doggy door or something.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
And so because it’s liquid, it just kind of slithers in through this small hole in a way that a bear couldn’t.

[Thomas]
Right. So it’s clear because of the mud and everything that that’s how it’s gotten in.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
But a bear couldn’t do that.

[Shep]
Yep. Right.

[Thomas]
It couldn’t do that and be big enough to drag Gary’s body out of the bog or whatever. Yeah.

[Shep]
Right. So it’s not a bear.

[Thomas]
So he’s getting conflicting evidence.

[Shep]
Right. And… And Warren originally was like, “You gotta eliminate the impossible.”

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
And it’s like, “Well, it’s impossible for it to be a bear. So.”

[Thomas]
“Well maybe there are two bears.” “Sure. There’s a big bear and a small bear and they’re out here.” Right.

[Shep]
One is just right to fit through the doggy door.

[Thomas]
Yeah, yeah, they’re trying to get picnic baskets. I think that’s good then that it gets into somebody’s house. So do they escape or is there another murder right there?

[Shep]
They gotta escape.

[Emily]
I vote for more murder.

[Thomas]
Because that could be the mid-second act turning point, right there, is the third murder and now it’s happened inside of someone’s home.

[Shep]
If there are still no witnesses, other than the tech, who has left, what is Warren investigating? He’s got no one to interview. Maybe he’s going after the kids, the teenagers, from the very beginning. But they don’t know anything. And no one’s going to talk to him. He’s an outsider.

[Thomas]
Right. Well Shannon would probably talk to him, but.

[Emily]
Shannon does talk to him because she’s got her own third investigation going on.

[Shep]
Oh ho.

[Thomas]
It’s true.

[Shep]
Shannon has investigated and discovered the history of the bog and what happened to those siblings and is trying to tell the sheriff about it. And he’s like, “What is. What are you talking about? Something that happened 200 years ago. Well, how is that relevant to what’s happening right now? Are you insane?”

[Thomas]
“God, you sound like those women who work down at the potion place.”

[Shep]
Right. She wants to tell the sheriff because she would have told Gary.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
And she doesn’t want to associate with the witches. The interim sheriff is not listening to her. She has the answer, she thinks.

[Emily]
Does she finally tell her daughter?

[Thomas]
Her helping has to happen in the third act.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
And she’s got to come into the shop.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
That’s a big step for her, is the witches reach a dead end and don’t know what to do next. And then you hear the door chime and it’s Shannon.

[Thomas]
With her stick blender.

[Shep]
She doesn’t have the stick blender yet.

[Thomas]
No, I know.

[Shep]
She’s got the book that she found at the library. So then you have an exposition dump where she explains to the witches what happened.

[Thomas]
Right. She comes in, “I know what’s going on.”

[Shep]
Yes. This is where they do their first attempt to stop it.

[Thomas]
Yes.

[Shep]
With salt or something.

[Thomas]
Right. They need a desiccant.

[Shep]
Right. They’re going to dry it out with salt so they get, I don’t know, a big bag of rock salt or something and put a line between the bog and the town.

[Thomas]
Do they start draining the bog as well?

[Shep]
Oh, maybe.

[Emily]
Maybe they’re working on it.

[Shep]
The equipment would still be at the farm.

[Emily]
But rusty and old because it has been-

[Shep]
It’s been years.

[Emily]
Or at least missing oil and the gas is bad.

[Shep]
Right, right, right.

[Emily]
It will work. We just got to do these, like, five steps.

[Shep]
Maintenance steps.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Right. It keeps retreating back to the bog, so they, they want to drain the fields so it has no place to retreat. And what do they think is going to happen? It’s going to just dry up?

[Emily]
Well, they don’t know yet, right?

[Shep]
They don’t know.

[Thomas]
I mean that could be their hypothesis. You have to dry it.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
The bog hasn’t flooded before. This is the first year the bog has flooded.

[Emily]
Since the farm went under.

[Thomas]
Maybe there was like a… Because there would probably be like a river that they would have diverted from or something like that to flood. And so maybe there’s like a gate, a sluice gate that was wood and it like rotted away and broke and so the field flooded that way. So you can’t just open the gate on the other side and drain it because you’re just going to keep having water.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
You have to stop that diversion from the river. So they have to sandbag it or whatever on the one end and open the gate on the other end. And-

[Emily]
Is there another gate, or do they just use machinery?

[Thomas]
I don’t know. How does it work in real life? I assume there’s another gate, but I don’t know.

[Emily]
I don’t know either, because I know that they flood it, and then the good berries float to the top, and then they vacuum them up.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
That’s as far as I know about cranberry harvest.

[Shep]
Okay. Ignore real life because most people don’t know how it works anyway.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
It’s true.

[Shep]
And I’d say maybe ignore the gates because maybe that’s how it would work in real life. But is that interesting to watch?

[Emily]
No.

[Shep]
And also, it’s a lot of stuff to sandbag a thing and close it up and if it just filled up with the weather over time, and all they gotta do is maintain this pump and turn it on. It’s something they could start and then flee if the monster attacks.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
Okay. Yeah.

[Emily]
That makes sense.

[Shep]
So visually, it would be fun to watch them trying to maintain that and get the pump going just in the nick of time and get out of there thinking the monster is still there and it’s gonna drain the swamp and the monster will dry up and the problem is solved and they go back to town. But of course, the twist is the monster just follows them to town, and now it’s in town killing people. Where does it go? It’s, maybe the town has a fountain or something, and so it has taken residence there.

[Thomas]
Oh, there’s got to be, like, a duck pond. So it’s like, a little mucky anyway.

[Shep]
Yeah. You want that muck!

[Thomas]
I like that it’s moved from the bog into town. That’s- So that’s the lowest low.

[Shep]
Yes. They didn’t solve it. They made it much worse.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
And it sort of echoes Bread Maker a little bit that, like, the girls in the first one, they created this, like, really horrible problem. Things just get worse.

[Shep]
Yep. So now maybe is when they realized they got to make the special cranberry sauce. What did you say they do?

[Thomas]
Yeah. I mean, just the idea is that it concentrates the cranberry power.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Although if it’s the astringency, then-

[Emily]
Oh, that’s why they need the blenders.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
Yes, There you go.

[Shep]
Good, Emily.

[Emily]
I thought you did that on purpose. And I was slow.

[Thomas]
No, Blender was just the first thing that came to mind. And…

[Emily]
Yeah, because if they’re gonna make cranberry sauce, they need an immersion blender.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Oh, there’s gotta be a scene where she jams the immersion blender in the bog monster’s face and, like-

[Emily]
Oh, yeah, totally.

[Thomas]
(Bog monster blender noises) It doesn’t work. I mean, the bog monster not harmed by it, but it’s a great scene.

[Shep]
I mean, maybe it takes out one of its eyes.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
So for the rest of the movie, it’s- It has one glowing red eye and then the black nothing in the other eye.

[Thomas]
Yeah, yeah.

[Shep]
So it comes to town. It’s murdering people in town. We’ll have to leave those details to the writer or something.

[Thomas]
Right. They’d probably evacuate the tourists and stuff.

[Shep]
Oh, I forgot. There’s all the tourists.

[Thomas]
Right. Oh, and of course, they’ve been trying to keep this as quiet as they can because this is like the one big time of year that all the shops make all their money because this is, like the big tourist season for this town.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
They’re trying to balance, like, safety and income.

[Shep]
Is there a fall harvest parade or something?

[Thomas]
Of course.

[Emily]
Oh, obviously.

[Thomas]
Yeah, definitely. Oh, no. Gary was supposed to be the parade marshal. So now they have a tribute float.

[Shep]
Oh, they wanted Warren to ride in the car, and he’s like, no, because that’s too much like community outreach.

[Thomas]
“I’m busy. I’m investigating murders in your town.”

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
“Don’t you want me working?”

[Shep]
Okay. So the monster is maybe rampaging near the duck pond, and they’re trying to, the witches, are trying to get it sorted before it gets to a more populated area where the parade is going. So you have this time limit, basically.

[Thomas]
Oh, sure. And as it’s gaining power, it’s coming out longer hours, a wider area.

[Shep]
Right. As it’s murdering people and growing stronger from those consumed souls.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So they figure out what it’s doing. They figure out what they have to do to stop it. How do they make Shannon reveal that she is practicing witchcraft?

[Thomas]
Yeah. Is there a moment where they’re all sort of at risk and Shannon does something and it’s sort of a magical thing and they all look at her like, “Wait a minute.”

[Emily]
Yeah, that could work.

[Thomas]
So she reveals on her own, sort of, incidentally, as a result of this.

[Shep]
So the scene I’m picturing is the witches are trying to salt the bog monster.

[Thomas]
Trying to assault the bog monster?

[Shep]
Yeah. And it’s not working. It’s already in town at this point. And Shannon- How- Why would Shannon show up?

[Thomas]
Oh, I think they’re all together for some reason.

[Shep]
Oh, I was picturing that the witches went to the duck pond, and for some reason, maybe Shannon followed them.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
Well, she’s worried about her daughter.

[Shep]
She’s worried about her daughter. Yeah, exactly. So she goes to the duck pond. She sees the bog monster. It’s real. And maybe she’s trying to use the power of Christ to compel it. She throws holy water on it. It does nothing. And it’s like, maybe it turns to her like she’s on the other side of the duck pond from the witches because she didn’t come with them. She came separately. And it’s going to attack her daughter. So she tries to distract it, and she does successfully distract it, but now it’s coming for her. She tries holy water. That does nothing. And so she’s like, “Fine, fuck it.” And then she does a spell.

[Thomas]
Is that where she uses the immersion blender?

[Shep]
I don’t know if this is where she uses the immersion blender. Although this. If this is the reveal… It’s tough. It’s tough.

[Thomas]
I think one of the things we sort of established in Bread Maker is that this is how they use their spells. They have their attenuated vessel or whatever, their appliance, and so it’s like that’s part of what makes the magic work is the magical bread maker, the magical instant pot, that sort of thing. So she has her magical immersion blender.

[Shep]
Okay. Is it a battery-powered immersion blender?

[Emily]
Can be.

[Thomas]
Or not, if it’s magic.

[Shep]
I mean, if it’s not. If it’s. What does it plug into?

[Emily]
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. But in Bread Maker, don’t they do something, like, outside in the town square? They’re not, like, in the shop, are they?

[Thomas]
I don’t remember.

[Shep]
I don’t.

[Emily]
With the bread maker.

[Shep]
I haven’t listened to Bread Maker in two and a half years.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
You’re asking questions the audiences aren’t going to care about because they’re so enthralled in this story.

[Shep]
Anyway. If it’s a battery-powered immersion blender, there’s no problem.

[Thomas]
Right. It can be.

[Shep]
Right. Why does she have it with her in her car? Don’t worry about it.

[Thomas]
Reach out to Cuisinart.

[Emily]
There you go.

[Thomas]
“Hey, we want to feature a battery-powered blender. Hand blender.”

[Shep]
Right. Get those sponsorships.

[Thomas]
Yep.

[Emily]
My immersion blender is Cuisinart, and I love it.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
That’s why we do more appliances in this one to get more sponsorships to make the sequel bigger.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Hey, Hamilton Beach. Our DMs are open.

[Shep]
Yep. He says that as a joke, but he’s not joking.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
I’m not.

[Shep]
So Shannon is revealed to be a witch, and they have to flee from the bog monster.

[Emily]
Mhm.

[Shep]
They have to flee the area because they can’t stop it with what they have.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
And she tells them the story, the exposition about the cranberries, maybe it’s in two parts. So she “Here’s what happened to the siblings earlier, and this is why they didn’t show up again for 200 years. Because of the cranberries. Because cranberries have this property to them. It’s helpful.”

[Thomas]
Is this all part of her initial research or is this two separate?

[Shep]
I think. It’s two separate things.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Okay, that was what I was going to say. That makes no sense because why wouldn’t you just bring that up at the beginning?

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
So.

[Emily]
She’d show up and be like, “It’s this dude, and we just throw cranberries at him. Problem solved.”

[Shep]
Right. So they need to make a special cranberry sauce that’s extra imbued with this magical property.

[Emily]
Does she find a recipe in her research for a very special one, or do they just make a special one between the four of them.

[Thomas]
I think that’s what Poppy’s going to be for, because Poppy’s not really doing anything so far.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
It’s like we kind of need everyone. So Shannon and Violet blend up the cranberries. Iris cooks it in her instant pot, and it’s Poppy’s recipe. So the four of them together. And part of the reason they need that is to protect themselves and to attack the bog monster. But they need to drive it back to the bog and back into the ground. Are they killing it or are they just trapping it again? I think that’s a good question, too.

[Emily]
Can you ever really kill a bog monster?

[Shep]
Yes. With cranberry sauce.

[Thomas]
They can release its soul.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Okay. Okay.

[Shep]
There you go.

[Emily]
So, yeah, they drive it back to the bog where they trap it so they have the opportunity to release its soul.

[Shep]
I say, don’t go back to the bog.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
It’s in town surrounded with cranberry sauce.

[Thomas]
Warren’s got to be there for some reason.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Emily]
Well, because the people are fleeing the parade and screaming in abject horror of this bog monster that he can now see with his own eyes.

[Shep]
I see. If it gets to the parade, then it ruins the tourism business.

[Emily]
That’s true.

[Shep]
That makes it harder to do the third movie.

[Thomas]
Right. With the magical waffle maker.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
So. Oh, well, he’s not at the parade.

[Shep]
Right. Maybe he gets a call that there’s a disturbance and goes out to deal with it, and this is what it is.

[Emily]
Yeah. Because there’s four crazy ladies running around with appliances making all kinds of noise.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
There’s got to be somebody who’s like, “Hey, Halloween’s over” to the bog monster because they think it’s some guy in a costume.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Emily]
Good joke.

[Thomas]
Do we have our story? I know we’re missing- Our second act is pretty weak, but I think, like, overall, we have the outline of what happens. Right?

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Emily]
I think even with it being a little weak, it is more like filler stuff that we’re missing. I think we hit the beats that we need.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Yeah, I agree.

[Shep]
We know what happens. We just need, you know, a problem for the writers is coming up with more stuff for the witches to do.

[Thomas]
Yes.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
And in particular for Warren. What is his investigation looks like? Because I do want, we do have to have him be busy the whole time. Even if he’s not making progress, he needs to feel like he’s getting somewhere.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
And I think that’s definitely one thing we’ve identified. Where we need a lot more fleshing out is what is he doing? What is he investigating? What is the evidence he thinks he’s following, so.

[Shep]
Right. Oh. Like I said, he interviews the teenagers from the beginning.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
And they know about the witches because the whole town knows about the witches. So they’re like- They don’t want to say it because he’s an outsider and he wouldn’t believe them anyway, but they’re like, “Hey, maybe go talk to Poppy and find out what she thinks you should do.” And he’s like, “Why would I do that? She’s a civilian.”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
“You guys are all crazy. Is this a cult? That… Is this the whole town a cult?”

[Thomas]
Maybe he puts together, like, a posse of hunters to go hunt the bear.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Oh. He puts together a posse of people to go hunt the bear, all of whom are from the town who know it’s not a bear.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah.

[Shep]
So why do they go? Well, it’s a day out and they get to drink beer.

[Thomas]
Yeah, yeah.

[Emily]
Nice walk in the woods.

[Shep]
Yeah. Yep.

[Thomas]
They probably all get little protection charms from Poppy before they go out.

[Shep]
Oh, yes. Yeah. Which Warren asks about. Like, “What is this? Are you guys all in the same lodge?”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Like, “What is this little stick man thing you have in your pocket?”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
They all have tea, and he’s like, “Doesn’t anyone drink coffee in this town?”

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
That’s great.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
Well, we’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s show about Cranberry Sauce. Were we as busy as a cranberry merchant at Thanksgiving? Which is apparently a saying.

[Emily]
What?

[Thomas]
I’ve never heard of it. I don’t know. I was looking up cranberry-related idioms and that one came up and I guess it makes sense.

[Shep]
I have never heard that before.

[Thomas]
Or did we get bogged down in the details? Let us know by leaving a comment on our website, reaching out on social media, or sending us an email. Links to all of those can be found at AlmostPlausible.com. Every year, Emily, Shep, and I give thanks that you’ll join us for the next episode of Almost Plausible.

[Outro music]

[Shep]
I’m looking it up on the free dictionary. “As busy as a cranberry merchant at Thanksgiving”. It’s the first idiom.