Just had to pause in the middle of the episode and write this thing…
EDIT - Okay, listened to more of the episode; it’s being another of my favorites, even though I don’t love the source material (ie I think most of the shipping is kinda dumb, but to borrow a phrase from the episode, “I love the way C&A love the shipping”, even though I don’t much love the shipping myself). I wrote a letter which was intended for this episode…sort of…and I’m very curious whether they’ll be brave enough to include it.
The reason I had to stop and comment again is that we’re in the letter about Atlanteans and Cavemen. I could say a lot of things here, but I obviously shouldn’t say those things, and that’s the point. Because what destroyed Atlantis? Xxxhul’ish. And what is Xxxhul’ish? The incarnation of forbidden knowledge. That includes forbidden carnal knowledge. In other words, my headcanon is that when the first writer of the first comic book to depict the downfall of Atlantis, with some stone tablet showing a tentacle beast rising from the deep, that writer’s original intention was literally that there would be Atlantean and Caveman, let’s just say “mingling”, and that THIS was what led to Atlantis’s downfall, that he intended Xxxhul’ish as no more than a metaphor (he was probably a little bit on the racist side, much as Lovecraft was, and similarly used horror monsters as metaphors for miscegenation and chaos and other things he was afraid of). All of which a later creative team threw out, instead treating Xxxhulish as a literal giant monster, much the way most readers of Lovecraft treat Cthulhu as a literal giant monster, when the point of the Cthulhu-type entities Lovecraft wrote about was for them to be metaphors. (Cthulhu himself was the most famous of the lot specifically because, of the major Mythos beings, he’s the only one that actually physically appears in the described action of one of Lovecraft’s stories. We meet the Son of Yog-Sothoth, but not Yog-Sothoth itself, and ditto for Shubby and Nyarlathotep and Azathoth and Hastur, so Cthulhu ended up being the “face” of Lovecraft’s universe, because he actually HAD a face described in the text and none of the others did. But even though HPL chose to make Cthulhu have a full onstage appearance, the point of the story isn’t “there’s a monster in the South Pacific, let’s go kill it”, but “there are monsters out there which you can’t even THINK about without being destroyed by the knowledge of them”; thusly, treating Cthulhu as if it’s just a kaiju is kind of missing the original literary point, and thus I’m arguing that Xxx’hulish is the same pattern happening here.)