V.

Every wilderness gets a monster.

New York simply had to build the wilderness first.

Next time on The New Monsters, we're leaving Manhattan for the expanding suburbs of Northern Virginia, where another uniquely American monster emerged from a very different landscape.

This time, our historical backdrop isn't the sewer.

It's the suburbs.

We followed the transformation of Fairfax County from rural Virginia into the sprawling bedroom community surrounding Washington, D.C., where forests were cleared, highways appeared, and old country roads suddenly ended beside subdivisions.

Then in October 1970, police began receiving reports about a man dressed in a rabbit costume.

He allegedly threatened people with an axe.

Slothrop is taking a turn for the majorly worse.

Well, I mean, and what was our critique of Benny Profane as a character in V? It's that he didn't change enough over the course of the novel.

Here, Thomas Pynchon is finally giving us a character who goes from point A to point B.

Um-

It's been a while-

... series of sequences seem to have come up much earlier in the book.

It's been a while since Pirate Printus was like, "They call it the V2, but sometimes the A4." [laughs]

Yeah.

Yeah, but he said that you can't really bear that condition for long.

I feel like that reminded me a bit of Stencil back in V.

If you would have taken away his conspiracy, he would have just fallen apart.

Well, he kind of did, and then he found a conspiracy again because he didn't want to live without it.

And that is clearly the worst option.

It's got to be some guiding hand.

I felt like this little dig at the plot, though, felt very, like, we've been watching a good amount of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I feel like that show is very self-referential at times, where they, like, acknowledge the fact that they've fought, like, this ridiculous set of monsters, or there's been, like, a 12th apocalypse that they've dealt with, and I felt like Slothrip sort of had that moment here.

Yeah.