Oceans 11 (Part 2)

I touched on this on my last write-up, but while I think that Oceans 11 will make for great finished episodes, they are a loooot of work to edit. What gets missed is how much logistics and planning goes into pulling off these episodes. Frankly I couldn't have done it without someone who would get as obsessive as I knew Jon would. But in the room, it was constantly needing to look at the plan and consider options and worry about the kinds of little details that make the plan possible to pull off, but that make bad radio. Cutting all that planning while keeping the episode coherent and listenable is a big challenge. I need to give my editors (Chris Lang and Kieran Ganon) a big shoutout for the good job they did, and I've been doing a whole second pass at these episodes after they're done. These were bad episodes to try to release when I wanted to up the output level because of quarantine. (Plus the campaign that I'm currently working on is requiring a lot of my time. Can't wait to share it with you.) But I'll note it's been less than two weeks since the last episode, so this is actually upped output. Go us!

But I think once the edit is done, these have been really good episodes so far. At least, I'm enjoying them.

The thing I really appreciate about Jon's plan is that it's not a single straightforward plan. It's a set of cascading modular mini-plans which can be adjusted and modified on the fly as circumstances change or people fail rolls. It is ludicrously complex. But it actually is a viable approach to movie-style heists. The plans in actual heist movies could never work. They require too many things to go right. But maybe we're thinking about them wrong? Maybe in the movie they actually had flowcharts worth of contingencies, and we only see one of those event-paths play out on screen. Maybe we're not giving the movies enough credit. I actually think this headcanon works pretty well for some heist movies (and distinctly doesn't work for others.)

This distinction reminds me of two movie outside the heist genre that provide a perfect example of this comparison: Captain America Civil War, and Batman V Superman. At first glance, both movies have similar puppet masters pulling strings behind the scenes to drive the heroes apart. At second glance, both suffer from overly elaborate evil schemes: The bad guys plans rely on too much coincidence and convenience, and couldn't possibly have been the most reliable way to achieve their goals.  Under a close inspection, the movies are actually very different: Civil War's villain Baron Zemo's plan starts to make sense if you think of him having a general goal, but not a precise master plan, pushing things the way he wanted, but then reacting and improvising as circumstances as they changed. Jon's flowchart approach could well be a good headcanon for how Baron Zemo was building his evil scheme. Batman V. Superman's Luthor's scheme seems to me to fare worse under close inspection. The villain's scheme isn't just over-elaborate, it literally just doesn't make sense. Unfortunately the flow-chart head canon does not work in all cases.