Glenn Weldon

I used to teach.

Walter, you teach now.

I know firsthand what happens to books when they go from being read for pleasure to being taught.

And that's nobody's fault.

Everybody has good intentions.

But my memory of this book is as this thing that you're talking about this show being, a very high-handed didactic moral lesson.

And I did go back and read that book for this episode because it's been decades.

And I still hate it.

I still find it interesting.

incredibly kind of hilariously manipulative and ham fisted and all those allegorical elements.

I mean, my teachers didn't make them up right there in there because this book wants to deliver a message, which is it's right.

But I don't got to sit still for a lecture.

I'm not a ninth grade anymore.

So what I liked about this when I did like it.

and, you know, it's still the source material, so there's a bar there, was that when I felt the pedantic qualities and the characters fall away and the characters were kind of allowed to just be characters, I almost forgot that I was strapped into this ride and I knew where I was headed.

And those moments, I think just because of the source material, they never had anything to do with the characters of Ralph or Jack, right?

The people on either end of the moral spectrum.

They always came...

From Piggy and Simon, the performances of David McKenna as Piggy and Ike Talbot as Simon, there is in those performances, there's a real naturalism, something kind of unforced and organic and real that I felt the rest of the story.

And it's particularly those two characters of Ralph and Jack, the two leaders kind of just stick thin.