Before this episode was released, the author sent its cover image to a couple of people close to him, along with the following note: “They get put on a ship to fly to the cosmic microwave background, but it’s going to take thousands of inbreeding generations. But, they are already inbred, so whatever.” This was not sent as a spoiler, exactly. It was more like an attempt to explain why Prince Harry and Meghan Markle appear to be floating in low gravity while strange aliens investigate them with a level of tactile curiosity that would probably be unwelcome under most terrestrial conditions. Somewhere along the way, Andromeda also enters the calculations. We gave the traveler 130 years because that was about the outer limit we were willing to grant a human lifespan while still being able to say someone might survive the trip. Probably they wouldn’t. And even if they did, they’d have to spend those 130 years travelling at roughly 99.99999987% of the speed of light—about 0.4 metres per second shy of light speed—while roughly 2.5 million years passed back home. So this did not exactly rescue the practicality of the plan. The recipients of this note may or may not listen to the episode. One of them almost certainly will not, because that would require my partner to become interested in what I make, and we should not suddenly start pretending we are living in a fantasy world. Still, the note was sent. The image was admired. And honestly, it deserves admiration. It is a fantastic image. It suggests exile, absurdity, cosmic indifference, marital endurance, interspecies boundary confusion, monarchy-adjacent reproduction, black-hole-level melodrama, and at least one future Netflix opportunity. It says many things. What it does not do is tell you, in any reliable way, what this episode is actually about. That part is harder to explain. At some point, apparently, Brian Eno gets dragged into it. Raymond Scott is already there. John Cage turns up. So does the Road Runner. There is a coyote somewhere nearby. And eventually a song acquires the title: **Babies Still on Fire (Don't Throw Them in the Water, They're Like Gremlins)** Which, now that I look at it, may be as good an explanation of the problem as anything else. Putting out the fire may create more babies. So perhaps we should put it out with gasoline. Hi, David Bowie. No. You don’t need to come inside. Trying to stop the recursion may create another recursion. Explaining why that happens may become part of the thing you were trying to explain. So instead, you get the image, the note that accompanied it, the title of a song that probably should not require this much explanation, and this assurance: you may be surprised by what the episode itself has to say. And if you think you understand what it is saying— give it a minute. Also, at one point the Three Tenors accidentally mispronounce themselves. Something like “The Three Teenors.” That was intentional, just like everything else in this episode.
