Ep 66 – The Imitation Game – Alan Turing, Oscar Bait and the Spy Subplot No One Asked For

In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we take on The Imitation Game (2014) and unpick all the ways it does Alan Turing dirty. With guest George (our usual SAS Rogue Heroes correspondent) taking on several sidequests with us this summer), we tackle the unnecessary spy plot, the myth of the lone genius, and why turning one of history’s most brilliant minds into a socially inept robot is just lazy, disrespectful writing. Sam did all the reading, Maartje Googled for one minute and George has actually been to Bletchley Park. All of us instantly agree: this movie is not it.

We talk queer erasure, posthumous pardons, codebreaking accuracy (or lack thereof), and Sam explains EXACTLY how Turing's codebreaking machine works ;).

This movie is Oscar bait biopic mayhem (it worked, I guess), and we have some strong thoughts. What are yours?

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💬 Join the conversation and leave a review x!

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
Welcome to Rosie the Reviewer. We're your host.
I'm Sam. And I'm Mark June.
And we like World War 2 media, and we want to talk about it.
Welcome back to Rosie the reviewer.
This week we're talking about The Imitation Game, which is a
film that came out in 2014. It was directed by Morton Tilden

(00:23):
and written by Graham Moore. With us today is George, who is
usually our SAS Rogue Heroes correspondent, but who wanted to
talk about something other than SAS and who, unlike both of us,
has been to Bletchley Park as itstands today.
Welcome, George. Hello, glad to be here.
So this movie is based on the 1983 biography Alan Turing, The
Enigma by Andrew Hodges. Are you sure?

(00:46):
Yeah, we have some thoughts on this, y'all.
It's a 660 page biography and I read it over the last couple
weeks and then had some strong thoughts and feelings about the
movie. But anyway, the movie received 8
Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and it
won for Best Adapted Screenplay somehow.
And it focuses on Alan Turing, who was a British mathematician,

(01:08):
code breaker and early computer scientists.
The film in particular focuses on his role in cracking the
German Enigma code during World War 2.
So what did you guys think of this movie?
Oh my goodness, what I would say.
Words can't express how much I don't like this movie, but that
would make it a really bad podcast.
So many words are going to express how much I do not like

(01:28):
this movie. It's bad.
I think this movie is a great work of fiction.
That's what I think about it. Like if it was a fictional story
but someone we did not know who didn't exist, who wasn't
portrayed an offensive race, andI would probably find this a
really exciting movie. I watched this movie 10 years

(01:50):
ago when it came out and I really liked it, but I did not
know anything about Ellen Turingnor did I look him up.
So not knowing anything, I quiteliked it.
And then I watched it again and did one minute of Googling and
that just made me very angry. Yeah, I saw this movie when it

(02:11):
came out as well, and I remembernot having strong feelings about
it. I think I just thought it was a
classic glossy Hollywood biopic,and I didn't do too much
research into it beyond that. And then I read the book, and I
didn't really remember very muchabout the movie.
And then I watched the movie andI was like, Oh my God.
I'm not even convinced they wanted to make a movie about
Alan Turing because they changedbasically everything except that

(02:34):
his name was Alan Turing and it takes place during World War 2.
I do wonder if it sort of hit different because I'm in the UK.
And so obviously he's been one of our quite famous historical
figures. And I think when the movie came
out, it was only maybe a year after the pardon.
I think the movie came out 2014,and he was pardoned officially
by Queen Elizabeth in 2013. So he'd been in the news.

(02:56):
And I remember at the time knowing that this film was going
to come out and going, looking at the trailers and thinking,
this is a film that I'm not going to watch.
It's going to be terrible. It's going to make me very
angry. And so I did not watch it for a
decade. So thank you very much for
having me watch this movie so I can talk about it with you and
setting my blood pressure skyrocketing.
You're welcome. I didn't realize you hadn't seen

(03:17):
it until I was live blogging it while I was watching.
And then it became clear and I was like, oh, you straight up
just gave this a miss, huh? On Peppers.
One of my biggest gripes with this movie is that it's full of
really good actors. This is a * studded movie and
these are serious actors that people generally I think take

(03:39):
seriously. If I were to start average movie
watcher watching this movie withgood actors in it that act
pretty good, like most of it's pretty good, I would think.
I bet this is a serious movie and I've put some talent to this
movie and I wouldn't look any further.
And that's the problem with thismovie.
It's all right. Yeah, it really does feel like

(04:01):
Oscar bait, like they've specifically made it for that
purpose. So they've modified things in a
way where I'm like, I don't really see how that contributes
to the story to make that up or,you know, completely change the
way real events happened. But I'm like, I don't know, just
me. You mean you don't want any
spies in your movie? Oh my God y'all the completely

(04:23):
unnecessary edition of a completely fabricated spy
related subplot. Oh my goodness, that makes me so
angry. I don't know if you want to go
through the plot first before I tell you why it makes me angry.
We just because otherwise I'll just start spewing vitriol right
now. So your thing let's.
Get into the plot. There's a few words that appear

(04:51):
on the screen of the most egregious lie I've ever heard,
which is based on a true story. And then we find out it's 1951,
we're in Manchester, England, and Alan Turing, as portrayed by
Benedict Cumberbatch, has an I'll fated interaction with
Detective Robert Nock, played byRory Kinnear, after a burglary
in his home. So we get introduced to Alan

(05:12):
Turing, who comes across as an irredeemable asshole and
completely antisocial, and this sort of interaction is going to
frame the movie because we'll see Detective Knock surface
again throughout. He's playing around with some
cyanide, which I thought was a bold choice for this opening

(05:33):
scene, knowing that he may or may not have something to do
with cyanide at the end of his life.
That's part of the reason why some people think his death may
have been an accident, because he was doing experiments with
cyanide in his home. So it's on purpose, well done,
and that's for actually seven that up maybe.
And so this movie follows entering in three parts of his

(05:55):
life. And the second one that we go to
is 1939. Britain has declared war in
Germany, as we know. So in 1939, we follow Alan Jury
as he makes his first visit to Bletchley Park and is there
interviewed by Commander Dennison, played by Charles
Dance. It's kind of like a job

(06:15):
interview. And he gets the job.
I think he gets like a trial job.
I don't even remember. I saw this yesterday.
It doesn't matter, because none of it's real.
We need the rest of the team that is going to be working
with, led by you, Alexander, played by Matthew Good, who we

(06:35):
like. I think we all like him, right?
I like him. We also need, for some reason,
and my success, chief Stupid Mingies, played by Mark Strong.
We also kind of like Mark Strong.
We don't know what he's doing here, but we like him.
And then we also get some other characters like fellow
codebreaker of John Guncross, who shouldn't be here, played by

(06:57):
Ellen Beach, Peter Hilton playedby Matthew Beard, Keith Furman
played by Elaine Goodman, and Charles Richard played by Jack
Dalton. And they have one job and it's
2. The German naval Enigma code
with I cannot say this amount ofpossible settings for the Enigma
machine. Yes you can.

(07:19):
I believe in you. God it's 159,000,000 million
million possible settings. So basically it's a fact load of
settings that they can choose from and they have to break it
before the German humours can doall a shit load of damage to the
others. And basically the Germans reset

(07:39):
this setting every night of midnight, so if they don't fix
it in a day they got to start all our burden.
Have fun. Yeah, so Denniston actually
recruited Turing more or less off the back of a recommendation
based on his earlier work at Cambridge and mathematics,
including one of his big papers on computable numbers, which

(08:00):
came out in 1936. And that was the work that made
him a pioneer of computer science and introduced the
Turing machine to the world, which we'll hear a little bit
more about later. And Alan was actually already
working part time at the Britishgovernment's Code in Cipher
School at the onset of the war. So they definitely are inserting
some additional conflict betweenhim and Commander Denniston that

(08:21):
isn't necessarily true to life. And if I'm not mistaken, most of
the people that appear on his team in this scene we're not on
his team in real life. Yeah, I mean, for start,
Denison's family I think have complained about his portrayal
as generic baddie, which is understandable because I think
Charles Stance is wonderful and he's always a fantastic baddie,

(08:42):
but that's all he's doing here. But I don't know a lot about all
the people named here. But I do know that Peter Hilton
was not at Bletchley, I think, until 42.
And I do know that John Cancross, who we will discuss at
length, was in fact a translator, and he wasn't part
of Turing's team. And while he did work at
Bletchley, there is no evidence that they ever even met.

(09:05):
So we're already starting off a kind of wild, I guess.
There is a mention here in the scene, and I don't know if this
is right, but Denniston says that he's just turned down one
of the foremost and I'm wondering if there could be
talking at the time because I think he was around at that

(09:27):
time. He was considered for Bletchley
work and because who is not? He mentions that.
I also think they might have included that because it was
really some Polish cryptanalyststhat originally designed the
sort of prototype Enigma breaking machine.
And at the time they were already using mathematics to try

(09:47):
and establish patterns, but the English were still heavily
focused on using linguists. And so I felt like they kind of
threw that in to be like, the English are still approaching
this in kind of a not quite the right way.
And so they're recruiting Alan Turing, but this Denniston guy
thinks that when he mentions that he doesn't speak German or
anything, he's like, wow, how are you going to break the code?
Like he's not thinking about it in the mathematics sort of way.

(10:09):
Can I tell you one thing that does also help me about this
scene? And I promise I will find
something positive to say about this movie somewhere, But this
scene makes Bletchley Park look so scrappy, like they don't know
what they're doing. It belittles the huge amounts of
effort that has already gone into codes and ciphers and
setting this all up, that cheering came into.

(10:29):
It belittles the efforts of the people who ran all the
recruitment. Because what you've got is
cheering, turning up, saying, hey, I'm really good at puzzles
and you need me. That's it.
He's a lone genius and that's really not how Bletchley worked
and that's going to be a theme throughout the entire film and I
really dislike that. As much as I respect during, he

(10:50):
was not a lone genius. He was in a team of geniuses.
Yeah, Bletchley Park, it's an English country estate in Milton
Keynes, which was the center of Allied code breaking during the
war and playing over 9000 people.
And they did not just break the naval Enigma code there, they
also broke the German army code.There was quite a lot of
different little moving parts and bits and pieces that were
happening. Their work culminated in the

(11:11):
development of the world's firstprogrammable digital electronic
computer, which was created to break that high level German
army messages, and Turing's workcontributed to its design.
That's another thing you don't really see in the movie.
You look at the place that they're at when they go through
the gates and stuff and it's like there's no one there, Which
I think is one of your points, George.

(11:33):
There's so many people and you don't see any of them.
There are so many people, you don't see any of them.
I mean, there weren't quite thatmany right at the beginning, but
more than five guys in a Hut, really.
And I understand why you have tostreamline the main characters,
but it would have been a really nice to see a little bit more of
the the bustle of Bletchley. I think we see a little bit when
the women turn up, but that's it.

(11:54):
Yeah, well, and I think 75% of the people who worked at
Bletchley were women. Yeah, a lot of Wrens worked at
Bletchley, a lot of the ATS. There are a lot of people around
eventually. For our listeners, can you say
what runs are? It was the Royal Navy sort of
women's branch, and I can't remember exactly what the
acronym is. I think it's just Women's Royal
Navy, and that's why it became Ren, yeah.

(12:16):
Yeah. So in the movie, Turing can't
get funding for his new machine that he's building.
He's embarked on this solo project where he's gonna, all by
himself, build this decrypting machine.
And everyone thinks that he's a crazy person.
And so he goes over Denniston's head to Churchill himself, and
Churchill comes back and puts Turing in charge of everybody.

(12:39):
And Turing immediately fires Furman and Richards.
And this did not happen in real life.
In real life, Turing and severalother colleagues, including Hugh
Alexander, wrote to Churchill in1941 for more resources, which
were granted. His coworkers did not hate his
guts. Can we talk about the stupid
scene that is the eating lunch scene?

(13:00):
We're going out for lunch and then they make him seem like he
doesn't understand what that means.
He doesn't know how to communicate.
It's so terrible. It's just wild to me because in
the book that we have bits and pieces of Turing's
correspondence. And Hodges, who wrote the
biography, spoke with a bunch ofpeople who knew Alan Turing.

(13:21):
I mean, this book came out in 1983.
And so he was able to speak withquite a lot of people who worked
with Alan and who were friends with Alan.
And he was not just an inveterate asshole.
He had a good sense of humor. He had lots of the friends.
He could be abrasive and he could be very single minded and
if he was working with someone whose intelligence he didn't
think much of, he could be a little bit condescending.

(13:43):
But the way they've portrayed him in this movie, as someone
who's come here from another planet and doesn't understand
how people work is a very strange choice to me.
Yeah, I get the need for some kind of Arc, but they don't have
to make him a villain for him tohave an arc.
There's other ways to. Like you said, if he's abrasive,

(14:05):
show him being abrasive but don't make them hate him because
they didn't hate him. Right.
And I think as well, it's a veryHollywood implication of neuro
divergent. And it's a really clumsy one at
that, because they want to set up this guy who doesn't
understand any kind of social nuance whatsoever, which is not

(14:28):
at all what Turing was like. And if you equate that with
neuro divergent and then give him an arc about getting over
it, that's incredibly ableist. It's absolutely appalling and
I'm afraid that it's not Benedict Cumberbatch's fault.
It is definitely the writing, but it is something that his
portrayal leans very heavily. On there's a scene where he's

(14:50):
separating his carrots from his peas on his plate.
Real life Alan Turing was like alittle bit chaotic.
He was sort of like a chaos gremlin in some ways.
And I just don't think that it would remotely even occur to him
to notice whether his vegetableswere mixed together.
And there's another scene where he tells this very stilted, not
funny joke in a monotone, like he doesn't understand what humor

(15:13):
is. And like, again, I feel like,
like you were saying, George, they just took these various
stereotypical keynotes of neurodivergence and applied them
to Alan Turing. And he was not, as far as we
know, autistic. And if he was, these were
certainly not the traits that hedisplayed.
So. In 1928 we go back to the
younger Alan Turing where we seethe DM card splitting scene.

(15:38):
Young Alan Turing is played by aboy called Alex Lauder, who is
quite good I thought in his acting, but he is a terrible
time. Alan Turing is a terrible time
at boarding school, but he's introduced to cryptography by
his friend Christopher Markham, played by Jack Bannon.
I am interested to know some if you found out if any of that is

(15:58):
true. So he did get bullied at
boarding school, but so did everyone else.
It just seemed like that was sort of the culture of it.
And so there was at least one instance where he did get
crammed under some floorboards, but apparently that was quite
common and he wasn't necessarilysingled out for special
bullying. He didn't have a great time at
school, but I feel like most of us have been teenagers and and

(16:22):
can relate to that in some way. But he was friends with this
Christopher Morecombe kid and the vibe you get is that it's a
bit of unrequited love. Turing was very interested in
Christopher and Christopher was his friend, but you know, didn't
return. Perhaps that more than platonic
feeling. So yeah, true ish.

(16:43):
I guess I. Don't think we will be in there.
We're back in wartime. New candidate Joan Clark, played
by Keira Knightley, joins the team.
There's this whole scene that, again, didn't happen in real
life, where she gets recruited based on a crossword puzzle
that's put in the newspaper. And basically anyone who solved
the puzzle would be invited to work at Bletchley.
So there was an instance where they did put out a crossword

(17:05):
puzzle for that purpose, but it had nothing to do with John
Clark. And in fact, Alan Turing didn't
like crossword puzzles because he wasn't very good at them.
So anyway, a strange addition. But her family doesn't want her
working around men, so she doesn't come into work one day.
And Alan's mad about it, so he goes directly to her house and
he kind of helps her work it outwhere she can live with the

(17:26):
women who are working at Bletchley Park.
And then she'll still be a part of the team, but at least her
parents will be fine with this. There's also no evidence that
this ever happened in real life.It's just the addition of more
conflicts that, you know, didn'tactually occur.
And then they kind of after thatthey start to meet up after
hours and and swap information and he gets her ideas and that
kind of stuff. I will put that crossroad puzzle

(17:49):
that Blatchley pronounces the newspaper on the website because
it's quite fun. I don't know any of it.
Can't do it. I'm really bad at it, but it's
out there on the Internet so I will show it.
I mean I love the the the crossword puzzle anecdote.
I do find the reliance on it in this film really irritating
after a while. I wanted to set like a drinking
game every time they mentioned crossword puzzles, but I would

(18:11):
be on the floor I think by the end of this movie.
But I think the Joan scene whereshe gets recruited suffers from
almost similar to the scene in which Allens recruited in that
it actually is quite glittering of Joan and how she was
recruited in real life. Her academic analyzer, who's a
fellow named Gordon Welchman or Welchman at Cambridge, was the

(18:33):
one who recruited her and he wasalready working at Bletchley, I
believe, and brought her in because she was so very skilled
at mathematics. And they do mention that she had
a double first in maths from Cambridge in or studied at
Cambridge Women at the time not being able to get degrees, but
to have her just sort of come inlike, oh, I got this puzzle and
a letter. Can I come and sit with the

(18:54):
boys? It's UXOM.
Yeah, it's truly wild. Yeah, it's crazy.
What a choice. Just one thing I was going to
add. When they were first initially
working with these early versions of the Enigma breaking
machines, they didn't have very many of them.
They ended up having I think 200of them by the end in order to
more quickly and effectively crack codes.

(19:15):
But at the time they didn't havethat many.
So Allen invented this manual process called Bambarismus,
basically using conditional probability to determine rotor
positions that were more likely,and then they could reduce the
number of iterations that had tobe tested out by the machine and
that would make the process muchfaster to crack the codes.
And Joan was actually particularly good at this
process. So I had really had nothing to

(19:36):
do with her being good at crosswords.
And then when the four rotor Enigma machine was introduced in
1942, it was actually her that worked out that the Germans
hadn't changed the cipher from the three rotor machine, which
allowed the code to be broken. So she was quite an able code
breaker. In her own right.
I would like to apologize on behalf of my people because
apparently Enigma machine or a very early Enigma machine was

(19:59):
invented by Dutch people. So I'm very sorry that really
made that thing. So we go back to 1951, which
much I had is the wrong year, but not suspect.
Ellen is a spy. Sorry.
He brings up the latest rest of added Soviet fights former
members of the academic elite inBritain and he's trying to prove

(20:21):
that he's involved in some kind of.
Espionage scheme. But he's not, and he's never has
been, and he was also never accused of being so.
This scene is wild. No, it's weird.
It's like they didn't want to have a main character cop who
was like openly homophobic because, you know, when Alan
Turing was arrested, it was literally purely for homosexual

(20:43):
activities. It had nothing to do with any
espionage or any suspected espionage or anything like that.
And it's like the movie didn't want to be like, oh, this was a
shitty homophobic cop enforcing a shitty homophobic law, so
we're going to have him going after Alan Turing because he
thinks he might be a spy. I don't understand this either
because there is a scene where there's like 3 cops and one of

(21:05):
them is the make up but it's theother guy that says that.
It's disgusting. Just commit to the fact that
people were homophobic in their 40s and in the 50s.
It's not such a wild thing to portray because it was true.
Well, yeah. And I think it's particularly
egregious as because it almost undermines how badly Alan Turing

(21:27):
was treated that he has had to wait for decades to receive a
posthumous pardon for this activity.
And it none of it was based on any suspected espionage.
And in fact, we'll go into that further down as to why this is
becomes even worse later on in the film.
It was pure homophobia, systemicand institutional homophobia.

(21:49):
The way the movie frames the burglary even is odd because
they make some comments about how the burglary was reported by
the neighbor and oh, supposedly nothing was stolen and oh,
there's weird vibes. That is not what happened in
real life. What happened in real life was
that Alan Turing was sleeping with a guy casually.

(22:10):
The guy told his buddy that Allen had a bunch of shit that's
worth being stolen in his house.And so the buddy came and robbed
Allen's house and Allen reportedit to the police.
And then of course the cops put two and two together and figured
out how Allen and the robber were connected to one another.
And then Allen got arrested for quote UN quote homosexual
activities. Really the stance they take on

(22:30):
it in the film, they make it into this whole thing that it's
not. So Hugh Alexander and the other
code Breakers have a knock down drag out with Turing over his
work on the decryption machine because they're spending hours
and hours every day trying to crack the codes manually.
And they think his machine is foolish and they have a whole

(22:51):
scrap about it. But as we kind of said earlier,
there was an early version of the machine that tested
different letter combinations that was actually invented by
Polish cryptanalyst prior to thewar, which was able to
successfully break early German codes.
So it was not a matter of Turinginventing this machine from the
ground up. He kind of had a prototype to
work with. And then as the Enigma code
became more complex, that's whenTuring sort of improved on the

(23:12):
prototype. He designed a machine that
operated on a different strategy, but it operated much
more quickly and effectively than the original machine.
And they called it the bomb because it ticked like 1.
And he did not build it himself,he simply designed it and there
ended up being over 200 bombs built, which I feel like is not
the impression that you get fromthe movie either.
Quick explain exactly how a bombworks.

(23:39):
No. No, I couldn't either when I
went to Bletchley. There is a whole beautiful video
installation describing exactly how it works with visual aids.
I watched it through several times and every time I thought
I've got this and then 5 secondslater like no I don't understand
at all. Yeah, well, there's diagrams in
the book that I feel like made asuper simplified version that I

(24:03):
sort of understood. I'm like, well, I understand it
enough to be getting on with andthen I just moved on with my
life. Another thing that changed for
the movie that I do understand when it comes to the bomb is the
fact that it takes much slower in the movie.
In real life, they were pretty damn fast in real life.

(24:23):
But I guess if you're making a movie and you're making a thing
go really fast and people are like, why is it not working?
Whereas if you make it sick really slowly, you're going to
get the feeling of it taking a lot of time a bit more.
Don't make your audience have a migraine for looking at the way
a machine works on your screen. That too, they also made it

(24:46):
bigger than it would have been in real life.
I think they made it like this huge installation.
I think it would have been smaller because there were also
many more of them and they made it kind of look cinematic and
pretty and a lot of things that would have been on the inside
were put on the outside for the movie just so we can see what is
going on a bit more, which I I understand movie making

(25:08):
sometimes does that and it does look pretty.
The props are good and the costumes are great, and that's
one of the things I liked about this movie too.
Yeah, I guess we could say the simplified version is that if I
wanted to send in a message through Enigma, it looks kind of
like a typewriter. So I would type it in and these
little lights would come on where the letters did not

(25:30):
correspond to what I was actually typing in.
So that's how they would get encrypted.
And then when you'd get the message on the other end, if you
had your Enigma machine set up in the exact same settings as
mine and you put in my gobbledygook message, then the
lights would light up with the ordinary English version.
And so you needed to know what the exact settings were on a
given day in order to be able todecrypt the machine.

(25:51):
And so the bomb could go throughand test a lot of different
settings at once. That's kind of how it works.
That was really good. I like that.
That's all I got. In another scene where Denniston
is the villain, he rushes in andregisters office and blatantly
tells him that he's under suspicion of being a spy, and at

(26:12):
this point John decides to help turn out by explaining to him
how humans work. John is a lady and ladies know
how to social works and men don't.
Yeah, men are stupid. I just feel like there's just no
nuance in it. In order for him to be a
misunderstood genius, he has to be an asshole.
And then there's just no, like, it just doesn't really give real

(26:34):
life Alan Turing very much credit.
Huh? So it's 1941.
The team are now all working together on Turing's decryption
machine. They've come around.
He's named it Christopher after his first love, which of course,
it didn't happen in real life. I believe the first bomb machine
that they built was called Victory.

(26:54):
But anyway, it's not fast enough.
It's not breaking the codes as quickly as they need it to.
And Denniston flips out and he'slike, your machine's not doing
the thing that you said it woulddo, and he's going to fire
Turing. But everyone else comes in and
is like, no, if you fire Alan, you have to fire us too.
And they managed to get an extramonth to work on the machine.
And obviously, it probably goes without saying that none of this

(27:16):
happened either. I think sometimes go without
saying. Yeah, none of this happened for
pretty much the entire movie. They borrow some names and
places and then make up everything else.
Remind me again why I like this movie?
Even if it was a fictional movieand none of those actually
existed, Why I like this movie? Why does this always happen to

(27:38):
me? I can enjoy something in the
moment when I'm watching it, it's fun.
And then the second I start doing any research or talking to
any of you guys, I hate it. Like why does it happen to me?
That's always the unfortunate thing, man.
It's like, you know how there's just like so many movies that I
used to like more before I knew anything about the history of

(28:00):
like racism or sexism or like any of those things.
And then it was just ignorance was bliss.
And now I watch movies and I'm like, I hate this.
You can't go back. We have talked about this
before. Historical accuracy doesn't
always matter as much when it's serving the story.
And I feel like the lack of historical accuracy here isn't

(28:20):
even serving the story. It's not serving the characters
either, so it becomes entirely pointless.
That's the thing. They're not streamlining the
story to make it easier to understand.
They're not amalgamating a couple of characters just to,
you know, make it easier for theaudience.
It's like they're throwing in a bunch of stuff that never
happened. For what?
For what? Yes, maybe that should be the

(28:41):
Teflon of this movie. Why?
So we are back in 1951, still the wrong year.
Knock and the police figure out that Turing has been picking up
men for sex. No proof of that whatsoever that
this ever happened to him. I think Knock believes that
something more is the food because he doesn't want to be

(29:01):
homophobic. They have a little conversation
and it's the conversation about scan machines.
Think so this is where the titlecomes in because Ellen Turing
discusses with NOC The ImitationGame.
What is The Imitation Game? I'm going to say this in a
concise way. It basically answers the

(29:21):
question am I human or am IA machine by asking questions.
Yeah, if I were in a room and then in another room there was a
person and then in another room there was a computer, and I was
trying to figure out which of them was human.
And I was asking them all these questions.
If the computer could convince me that it was the human one,

(29:43):
then it would pass the quote, UNquote Turing test.
They obviously chose it as the title for this movie because
they're like, he's a robotic manwho has computer Android
feelings, and he feels like he'splaying The Imitation Game all
the time, trying to pretend thathe's human.
Well, increasing pressure from her parents forces Joan to
consider quitting her work at Bletchley Park.

(30:04):
And Alan doesn't want her to go because they have made Joan into
the central emotional support inAllana's life, which I'm not
sure was super realistic. But anyways, he doesn't want her
to go, so he proposes to her andthey have a big engagement
party. And that's where Karen Cross
learns that Turing is gay. Like Alan just kind of admits it

(30:25):
to him. And he's like, maybe don't tell
anyone about that, but this willbe relevant later That Karen
Cross knows that Alan is gay. What is Karen Cross's
nationality, George? Oh my God, John.
Karen Cross was Scottish in reallife.
What Alan Leach is doing, I don't know.

(30:46):
Alan Leach is an Irish actor, amI correct?
Alan Leach is an Irish actor. You may have seen him as Branson
in Downton Abbey, and he is herewith a beautifully wandering
accent to play John Cancross. I don't get it, but fun.
It's not supposed to be here anymore, so why do I care?
You're not supposed to be here. Yeah, I think in real life, Alan

(31:06):
and Jones relationship was a bitlike he did love her in a way,
not in a romantic way necessarily, but they were
pretty close friends and he enjoyed that he could quote UN
quote talk to her like a man. So I think he often felt when he
was speaking with women that he maybe didn't know like the right
social cues necessarily, or, youknow, they don't want to talk
about the things that he wanted to talk about.
And he didn't feel that same wayabout Joan.

(31:28):
And then they did get engaged and he met her parents and it
was like a whole thing. And then he eventually admitted
to her that he had, quote UN quote, homosexual tendencies.
And she was like, that's fine, don't worry about it.
And he eventually broke things off with her just because I
think he knew that over the longterm, I was probably not going
to go super well between them. But he becomes a sort of central
figure in his life in this movie.

(31:49):
And I don't really think that itwas that way.
They kept in touch after Bletchley but they were not
super tight or anything. Yeah, it feels in this film like
they're trying to make a big olddoomed love story.
And I don't get the vibe that itwas that for either one of them.
Like, they liked each other an awful lot, but that was it.
And I suppose when you're in such a strange and forced
proximity environment like Bletchley, your emotions are

(32:12):
going to be weird and heightenedanyway.
Yeah, I can. I can see them sort of having
come to a mutual realization that this isn't going to happen.
And I think that's what did happen.
I think this is one of the few things in the movie that I did
not mind that much. I thought they were kind of
connecting our intellectual level.
I feel like the movie didn't do that bad of a job with that

(32:34):
specific aspect. Like with everything else, yes,
but I didn't have this specific thing.
She surfaces again later, right?Like, she visits him after he's
had his whole run with the law. And, you know, they have this
big, acrimonious breakup. And my issue with her being this
central emotional figure in his life is that Alan Turing did
have relationships with men, andthey just did not depict that in

(32:56):
this movie. Like you wouldn't know that he
was gay unless they had this little scene where he admitted
it to Karen Cross. It just seems like an
interesting choice to me where he's basically walking around
like this man who has no sexual interest when in fact we know
that real Alan Turing was almostopenly gay as much as you could
be openly gay at that time. Like he really didn't hide it.
They could have done both right.They could have shown him having

(33:19):
relations with none, which he did, and then also finding a
partner in jail that he could speak with on a different level
from other women. Like they could have coexisted.
But you're right that they kind of take the easy way out by not
giving him any male relationships.
So they're having an engagement party, and during this party

(33:42):
they overhear a conversation between, I can see George
already just cringing between this other lady that works at
Blachley. And she's telling one of the
other guys, you Alexander, that her German on the other end of
her code machine is talking about his girlfriend and naming
his girlfriend and his carded messengers.

(34:04):
And that's how they figure out that there are repeated words
within the code, and they can use those to break the code or
at least to limit the amount of settings that they have to
check. So they make this big discovery.
And I do think this moment was really quite tense, the moment
that followed. But again, this lady who works

(34:25):
on Plattsbury, who's going to besmart as fuck because she works
in Plattsbury, just makes an offhand comment about this
German's girlfriend as if that'sall she cares about.
Well, and also they were all sworn to secrecy and she's just
going to like risk her job to like tell an entire bar about
secret intelligence? Probably not.

(34:45):
Yeah, I feel like the different huts that they worked in, they
didn't even communicate with each other in general, right?
They weren't allowed to, like you said.
Yeah, this is also a pretty massive oversimplification of
how they broke the Enigma code. They realized pretty much
immediately that there was goingto be repeated words based on,
you know, the weather report andstuff like that, but that was
just sort of 1 little square of the puzzle.

(35:08):
And I can understand wanting to put in a dramatic moment to have
that sort of aha moment, but to then give one of the two female
characters in the movie, the first one is like, Oh my
goodness, I've solved this puzzle and now I'm a code
breaker. And the second is, oh, I've got
this bit of information because I love my German Co worker on
the other side and he's got a girlfriend and somebody else

(35:30):
takes that to to mean like this genius breakthrough.
It's demeaning. It's incredibly demeaning.
Yeah, brutal. Like I said, I did like the
moment that follows when they'reall racing back to that
accounted message and then they put the 7th into Christopher and
then it works. And I can imagine from that

(35:52):
scene the feeling what it must have been like when they did
discover that they knew how to break cards.
I also think it was not just onemoment like this either.
They would break it like for a few days at a time and then they
would lose it again and then they would break like part of
it. And then after they had quote UN
quote broken the code and they pretty much could read all of

(36:13):
the encrypted messages, then theGermans added another rotor.
So there was like 6 months of dark period in 1942 where they
had to crack the code again. Yeah, this is what we talked
about in our ex company episodestoo.
But then they've cracked the code and they're super happy
about it for 2 seconds and then they realize, oh shit, we can't

(36:34):
actually do much of anything because if we stop any sort of
attack then the Germans will know that we've broken their
Enigma. And then what?
Then we have to start all over again because they will add
another router or they will change machinery.
They decode a bunch of messages and they can see where all the
ships are. And Peter's brother is on one of

(36:55):
the ships. And it's like if we use this
knowledge that we have, we can stop this ship from sinking and
we can save my brother. And it's another piece of
conflict that wasn't there in real life.
I can understand them wanting togive cheering and his team a
scene where they had to decide whether or not to act on the

(37:15):
intelligence that they got because this was something that
the Allies had to to grapple with.
When do we act on information sothat we won't tip off the Axis
forces that we know about their attacks?
And there were potentially scenarios where they had to let
things happen that they could have prevented, but they had a
lot of different tactics to makeit look like they received their

(37:39):
information in a different way. So I think one of the ones which
was for convoys is that they would send out a reconnaissance
plane that they would make sure that this plane was noticed by
the Germans. So the Germans would go.
That's why they they knew where we were at that time.
And so they wouldn't risk the broken messages.
But we, I think, which is something that I believe Turing

(38:01):
and Joan have to tell the head of MI 6 later in this movie, is
that they need to do something like that.
So well done cheering for winning the war again.
Yeah. I mean, yeah.
And I mean, it would not have been up to and Co to decide
whether to use the intelligence.Like that decision was way out
of their pay grade. As you say, He goes to the head

(38:21):
of MI 6. And he's like, I'm going to
design this statistical model sowe can have these attacks and
we'll choose which ones will cause the most damage, but it
will also help us save the most lives.
And it's like this is not real. What it what it is with biopics
about genius people, but they always have to bring up the God

(38:41):
complex. Like you can't be God, you're
not God. And they always have to bring
that up. And this I tried to keep that
stupid stereotype of genius as having a God complex.
Isn't every single movie about agenius?
It is. It's it's genius.
By the numbers, it's completely insufferable.
Well, Turing discovers that Karen Cross is the Soviet spy

(39:04):
who's been in their midst this whole time, but Karen Cross
threatens to out him. And then there's this truly
terrible thing that the movie does where they have Alan sort
of stall for a while before he goes to Minji's and tells him
that Karen Cross is a Soviet spy.
And real life Alan Turing would never have done that, would

(39:27):
never have put national securityat risk just to prevent himself
from being outed, because he wasbasically out anyway.
And he did take his oath of secrecy of Bletchley very
seriously. So I just did not like that they
implied that he would just let aspy slide if he knew about one,
just for this reason. And then he goes home to his

(39:47):
house, and Minji's is there, andhe says that he's got Joan in
jail for supposedly possessing decrypted intercepts, but it's
just sort of a trick. And so Allen admits that Karen
crosses the spy in order to protect Joan.
And then it turns out that Minji's already.
He knew that Karen Cross was theSoviet spy and he was using him

(40:08):
to feed misinformation to the Soviets.
I don't know, it's all thing. It's rude to the memory of
voluntary to first of all make him not say it in the first
place, and then second of all tobelieve that he would be as
clueless as to then accidentallytell him you would have just

(40:30):
told him. By the way, it's just a stupid
movie choice that once again, very unnecessary because I don't
even really know what purpose itserves.
I don't think anyone knew that Karen Cross was a spy before he
got outed in. Like I think it was 1951.
Like during the war, nobody knewthat Karen Cross was a Soviet
spy. There's no evidence of that.

(40:50):
No, not at all. And I think even in 51, he was
sort of investigated by association, but he wasn't
formally outed. But I think that came later, I
think in the early 60s. If I recall, he wasn't even then
publicly outed to the world until decades after that.
Because I think MI 6 knew but MI6 obviously kept that close to

(41:11):
the chest. Another thing that I don't like
about this is that if you are going to include Karen Cross,
who wasn't with em during duringthis time or at all.
But if you're going to include him, at least make it so that
the audience who's not from the UK can have some understanding
of who the fuck he is. Because I think most people have

(41:34):
no idea who the Cambridge Five are.
Unless you really like spies, which I.
Do so I know exactly who the Cambridge.
We do. OK, time for George to explain
everyone who the Cambridge Five are.
The Cambridge five yeah in in a very short pricey.
I'm not mad that the Cambridge 5have attention on them.
They are very fascinating firing.
I'm a mad that they have attention on them in this movie

(41:55):
where they did not have to be. The Cambridge Five were a group
of young men who all went to Cambridge University.
So I believe all of them were members of this elite social
group called the Apostles. And it was out of this sort of
academic ground that the Soviet Union recruited quite a few
spies. And so they're all very highly

(42:15):
educated young men. There was Anthony Blunt, there
was Guy Burgess, There's Donald McClain.
And that's Kim Philby. And probably Kim Philby is the
most famous of the spies. He certainly has the most books
written about him. And John Cancross was associated
with this ring, but he wouldn't be officially named as one of
the Cambridge 5 until years and years later.

(42:36):
So even after I believe he was outed as a spy, he wasn't
necessarily known as one of the Cambridge spy ring, as it were.
And they do name drop Burgess and McLean in this film.
And I do think that maybe the reason they changed the burglary
to be 1951 is to associate that directly with the year that
Burgess and McLean defected to the Soviet Union.

(42:58):
That became public knowledge in June 1951.
So it makes sort of sense that if you've got a detective
character who is has got that inhis head and then you've got
somebody he's looking at who seems to be mysterious and is
also from this academic background that he will have
associated the two things. That's the only explanation I
can think of as to why they change it to 1951.

(43:20):
But yes, that's who the Cambridge Five are.
And John Cancross is part of that ring.
As pertains to the social context and what happened to
Alan Turing, the discovery of the spies made the look pretty
bad. And there had been this sense, I
think, before that if you had gone to a good school and if you
were of a certain social class, they didn't really need to look
into your background that much in Britain.

(43:42):
And then it turned out there were all these Soviet spies in
everyone's midst, and it made them look pretty bad to the
Americans. This is, you know, sort of
during the early Cold War, right?
And so the British decided that they needed to really tighten up
their security protocols and tryand root out spies and prevent
this from happening again. And one of the fallouts from
that was that there was this dramatically increased
discrimination against LGBTQ public servants and candidates

(44:04):
for government work because theyfelt that if you were a queer
person, then you were more susceptible to blackmail.
And this is the whole kind of social background of this
environment where Alan Turing gets arrested for these
homosexual quote UN quote activities.
And it kind of just makes me extra mad that they've thrown in
this subplot where he's thought to be a spy because so many real

(44:29):
gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender public servants and
members of the military were actually rooted out and lost
their jobs and lost everything because it was thought that they
couldn't do their jobs because they might be a spy or they
might be susceptible to blackmail.
Joan and Ellen break up after hetries to convince her that she's
got to leave blushly because he's bad news and he wants her

(44:52):
to be sick but and she's like don't be stupid I'm going to
start so they both start. They have this huge, dramatic
fight, and she slaps him. It's a whole thing that, you
know, was not remotely how it happened in real life.
Yeah. So the war comes to an end and
all evidence of the work undertaken at Blushly Park is
destroyed so that no one will ever know that Enigma was

(45:15):
broken, which lasted for like a few decades.
And then everyone knew Enigma had been broken.
But at the time they were like, well, you know, there could be
another war. It's better if no one ever finds
out that we broke this code. I don't know.
I thought it was really interesting.
In the Turing biography, they talked a lot about how the
Germans could have made Enigma truly uncrackable, but they were

(45:36):
hugely arrogant about how good it was.
And so there was a lot of littlethings they could have done to
make their codes much harder to break.
And they didn't do it because they trusted so heavily in the
machinery. And so this whole thing where
they're like, yeah, we don't want anyone to know that we
broke Enigma. It's like, yeah, because you
could make the Enigma code much harder to crack if you knew that

(45:58):
other people were able to crack it.
No, I don't like the scene. Back in 1928, young Ellen is
kind of waiting for his friend Christopher after they've parted
ways for a summer break or two weeks.
They're writing code to each other at this point.
It's quite cute. They're writing code, and
they're doing all sorts of cute things.

(46:19):
And Ellen's like, ready to say Ilove you to this guy.
And then he doesn't return because he's dead.
And the principal of the Berlin School just drops it on him.
And then he's like, I don't really care.
I'm not really that bothered. Like he doesn't know how to
steal, which once again, I thinkis not true.

(46:39):
And also, I think he had some warning in real life that this
friend was going to die. So Christopher Morcom had
contracted bogoline tuberculosiswhen he was young from drinking
infected milk. So he was sick the whole time.
Alan knew him, But I don't thinkthat Alan had the sense that
this was going to be like an imminently fatal thing.

(47:00):
Like, I don't think the headmaster dropped it on him
quite like that, but I do think the death was a pretty
devastating shock. He kept up a correspondence for
many years with Christopher Morcom's mother and his brother,
and he went on holiday with the family and all that kind of
stuff. So it really did leave a lasting
hole in his life, I would say. Yeah.
So it's 1951, Turing. Well, 1952, as we know, Turing

(47:22):
is convicted for his relationship with the man, and
he is chemically castrated. There was this whole weird
scientific thing at the time where they were like some people
were like, well, instead of throwing gay people in jail
where we all know they belong, what if we treated them like
they had a mental illness and that was supposed to be better
somehow? I think what happened in real
life was that he had to undergo this chemical castration for a

(47:44):
year. So I think for the first nine
months he took pills regularly. And then the last three months
they put an implant in his leg. And he actually had to go and
personally get the implant removed because they told him
they're like, yeah, they'll onlylast for three months.
And he's like, that seems like bullshit, I'm going to go get it
removed. And so the thing that I really
enjoyed was that while he had this chemical castration going

(48:07):
on, he was still going on trips to Norway and Greece and other
places and sleeping with random dudes.
So I'm like, congratulations, well done, Alan Turing, for just
completely being like, I don't give a shit.
I'm going to keep doing what I want anyways.
But in the movie, he's not responding quite as cheerfully,
quite as keep Calm and carry on his real life.

(48:28):
Alan Turing, he's in really bad shape.
And Joan visits him one more time.
And they have this whole conversation that I quite
frankly watched at like 2 1/2 times the speed because I was
like, I'm ready for this movie to be done.
The movie does eventually end, thankfully for all of us and we
get as we do in most well put 2 movies, we get event card.

(48:48):
It's like an overlay on you see them burning all the papers and
it says After a year of government mandated human
authority, Alan Turin committed suicide on June 7th, 1954.
He was 41 years old. Between 1885 and 1967, although

(49:08):
approximately 49,000 homosexual men were convicted of growth in
these since he on the British law In 2013, Queen Elizabeth the
second granted during a posthumous royal pardon honoring
his unprecedented achievements. Historians estimate that
breaking Enigma shortened the war by more than two years,

(49:32):
saving over 14,000,000 lives. It remained a government held
secret for more than 50 years. Turin's work inspired
generations of research into what scientists called jewelry
exchange. Today we call them computers.
George, you have any thoughts onhim being the inventor of the
computer? Yeah, I'm just going to read out
what I said, which is Charles Babbage would like a word about

(49:53):
the implication that Turing invented computers.
I think he can lay claim to that.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's also now some dispute
over whether or not Turing really did die by suicide
because as we discussed earlier,he was doing some experiments
this side night in his home and he could be a little absent
minded. And the inquest into his death
was not particularly thorough. And he had completed his year of

(50:15):
chemical castration 14 months before his death.
And he really did seem to put had a brave face on it.
I mean, he, you know, he wasn't having the best time while it
was happening. But I feel like the movie makes
it seem like this happened to him and it was just world ending
and so he ended his life. I'm not sure that was the vibe
in real life. I just think it's really sad to

(50:36):
be 41 and to think there's no place for me in the world.
Which I mean I can understand why he would feel that way, but
such a sad world to be living inat the time.
Especially after what you've meant to a country that then
kicked you while you were already done.
It was like, fuck you, you don'tmatter anymore because you're

(50:58):
homosexual. Well, yeah, I think that's one
of the real tragedies of this, this film being so bad.
And by inventing the espionage plot is that the real life
horrors that happened to Alan Turing were big and hard and sad
enough and tragic enough to havebeen given the attention without
inventing this whole other thingfor him to be dealing with.

(51:20):
And I think it's very disrespectful that we don't give
space to that. For sure, Now that I think about
it, it's even crazier to me thatwe don't really see anything of
him having relationships with men.
They just completely wiped that out of the movie except where he
says it to Karen Cross at one point, which is necessary for
this dumb spy subplot. And then he gets chemically
castrated for a crime, quote UN quote that we like never see him

(51:43):
engage in. It's just so weird to me.
If you want to make that such a big part of the movie, then I
feel like you should show him having the fullness and the
richness and the extent of relationships that he did have
with men. Well, I have some notes because

(52:05):
Turing did break the Enigma code, but he did other stuff
too. Well, he did help break the
Enigma code. We'll say he designed this
machine called the Automatic Computing Engine in 1945.
Basically there was this sort ofarms race between the British
and the Americans, except it wasa race to see who could build
the 1st better computer, I suppose.
And so this was an early Britishelectronics serial store

(52:26):
program, computer design. Although unfortunately he sort
of got hamstrung in his work by people who didn't really see his
vision. So his design never was fully
realized and he eventually quit the project.
And in 1950 he published this paper called Computing Machinery
and Intelligence, wherein he indeed considered the question
of whether machines could think.And so this is also considered

(52:48):
quite a Seminole work in computer science.
And then he did this thing that he sometimes did where he got
tired of working in a particularframework and he moved on.
So he started doing experiments on morphogenesis.
He was always curious about patterns that repeat in nature.
Quite a few people who knew him would comment on, he would show
them how pine cones have these repeating circular patterns.

(53:09):
And he was very interested in like, how do things decide how
to grow and how can we apply, you know, logical mathematical
processes to that? And so that's kind of what he
was working on towards the end of his life.
Makes me wonder what is he been alive today?
What would he think of where computers have ended up going?
Does a computer have intelligence kind of speak?

(53:31):
Those questions are very relevant today, so it would have
been so interesting to have him still alive today.
Yeah, for sure. And just lastly, there was a
petition that was launched alongside this movie and the
campaign featured Benedict Cumberbatch, Stephen Fry and
Turing's great niece Rachel Barnes.
And this petition sort of snowballed into this movement
that eventually resulted in the Policing and Crime Act of 2017,

(53:54):
which granted amnesty to men whowere convicted under anti-gay
legislation in England and Wales.
So Turing was pardoned in 2013, and then four years later, all
of the 49,000 men who had been charged under these laws were
granted amnesty. And does at least one but.
Let's not forget this was less than a decade ago that this

(54:15):
happened. This was long.
I know it's sad, yeah. Truly, and the only reason why
it even came up was because AlanTuring was a fucking war hero
who saved millions of lives. And that was the only reason why
you didn't even became a thing that we think and talk about.
All these people who had their lives completely derailed by
just being born gay and getting caught.

(54:45):
Dare I ask, do we want to rate this movie?
And what out of maybe unnecessary spice subplots out
of 10? Perfect.
How many unnecessary spice subplots out of 10 would you
rate this movie, George? Well it was absolutely 1 hole
unnecessary spice subplot out of10 because it had one and it

(55:08):
shouldn't have done. But if I wanted to rate it as
anything else it was, it would be.
Please don't ever make me watch this movie again out of 10.
Thank you. Nailed it.
I feel like you really got the spirit of our rating system.
What about you, Mark? I wouldn't admit before research
and before watching the movie The second time I was going to
rate it an 8 1/2 for being a decent movie and it's gone down.

(55:33):
If it already made it for unnecessary spice supplies out
of them because I think they getme entertained.
It wasn't slowly. Acting was pretty good.
So it gets a fur. Like I'll give it a fur for the
great number of good actors in this, but nothing else.
How about you? The thing is that I think that

(55:55):
if you don't know anything aboutEllen Turing and you don't care
to know anything about Ellen Turing, you'll probably think
this movie is fine. You know, it looks nice.
The acting is pretty good. I think the script is kind of
clunky in places, but not irredeemably terrible, except
that it's purporting to be a movie about Alan Turing, and
it's just not really a very goodmovie about Alan Turing.

(56:16):
And yeah, I didn't totally despise this movie before I read
the book. And then I read the book, and I
just sort of felt like, do the people who make this movie even
like Alan Turing? He's just, He's another
character that sort of reminded me of people who were perhaps a
bit difficult to know by people around them.
Like we've talked about Lee Miller before and MO Berg, where
they were sort of hard to know or people only felt like they

(56:40):
maybe knew a portion of their personality.
And I just have seen so many biopics at this point that I
just really missed the mark on getting the vibe of those people
right. And yeah, I mean, I don't know
what the answer is because I'm not a filmmaker, but yeah, I
think that if you have the patience to go through a 660
page book by a professor of mathematics who really wants you
to understand the mathematics, you should definitely check out

(57:01):
the book. You don't need to watch the
movie. And so I'm going to give it 5
unnecessary spy subplots out of 10.
How did you read it Higher than I did?
I don't think in a vacuum it's airredeemable film.
I just don't think it's a good movie.
But Alan Turing. Yeah, fair.
I'm going to move on and ask youboth if you're reading on his

(57:24):
pen, and I'll start with you, George.
Am I reading anything? I know that I wasn't supposed to
come on here and talk about the SAS, but I will say that I am
reading a book about Operation Bull Basket, which is an SAS
operation after the drop, after D-Day.
Well, I really feel like the people do expect you to talk
about the SAS so. I mean, if we ever do get a

(57:47):
Season 3, we need you to know all this.
Absolutely. I do have a different closing
remark as well, which is to urgeanyone who has seen this film or
hasn't seen this film and just wants to find out anything about
Alan Turing who can to visit Bletchley Park.
Because what they've done is they've got the mansion open
with a lot of exhibitions insideit about how it was set up

(58:10):
during the time. They've recreated a bunch of the
huts that were in use of the time and it's fantastic
Walkthrough. Turing's office is one of the
things that you can walk througheven when you sit in the park
bit outside next to the pond. They have a beautiful audioscape
in the trees with speakers giving you like the sounds of
conversations and things. So it's a really interesting,

(58:31):
really immersive visit. You do really get a sense of
what it was like to be at that park.
That sounds awesome. Cool.
What are you reading, Sam? I have started Red Tail,
Captured Red Tail, Free Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airmen and POW by
Alexander Jefferson because we are going to talk about Masters
of the Air very soon. Guess who will?

(58:53):
George is going to become our Jack of all trades
correspondence. I'm looking forward to it.
Ask me what I'm reading. What are you reading?
I'm reading three books at the same time.
It's kind of confusing. One of them is Dutch.
In English, it's called to Go with the red Hair.
It's about a Dutch spy and not spy a resistance lady.

(59:14):
See, this is what happens when you put unnecessary spy small
plots into movies. And the other book I'm reading
is about Martha Gellhorn, but I think I talked about it on our
last podcast, so let's skip that.
And then the third one I've started reading is another book
about the same Dutch resistance lady.

(59:35):
I've got three books about the same person.
I'm inside. There's also a movie, so we can
watch the movie if you can find a subtitled version of it
somewhere that's not touch I'll.Follow along.
Well, thank you George for beingon our pod once again.
Thank you for having me back, I love it here.

(59:55):
And thank you so much everybody else for listening.
You can find us wherever you getyour podcasts.
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though we do sometimes hate on movies.
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(01:00:18):
See you next week. Bye.