This is MJ. I'm an author. I'm an artist. I'm an analyzer. Find all my work at MJMunoz.com.
Join me as I analyze a thrilling
Red Panda Adventures episode 5, The Devil's Dew featuring bloody contracts, bespoke torment, and
mastering a master.
For those of you who don't know, Red Panda is an audio drama series inspired by The Shadow and Other Pulp Heroes written and directed by
Greg Taylor, but I'll tell you all about that in a minute.
Red Panda Adventures number 5, The Devil's Dew, originally aired December 10th, 2005.
It was written and directed by Greg Taylor, and this is from season 1, which is 12 episodes long.
The great, wonderful, super awesome, gets me hyped synopsis for this episode is as follows.
Someone's been collecting old debts and leaving a trail of corpses in his wake,
but the city's most feared gang leader isn't going gentle into that good night, and he's found himself an unlikely ally.
But will the Red Panda learn that not even he can stop payment of The Devil's Dew?
Those are so wonderful. Anyway, I don't have much to say about this episode. It was a good episode. I liked it.
There was some interesting stuff in it, but not too much to dwell on. It was kind of straightforward and very simple in a lot of ways.
There was a like Abbott and Costello gag, which I actually think Kit said that in the beginning of these two goons who work for
Sclerally the Mob Boss who
wants his guys, his employees, his associates to find a certain masked menace, or masked man, I should say.
Anyway, they do that by one of them sticking up the other guy, which is kind of funny.
I guess it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek playing with the genre and playing with the
fact that the superhero or the hero always arrives when somebody's in trouble.
So if you have two bad guys looking for a good guy, you can make one of them be in trouble,
pretend, by the other one and it'll all work out. It'll draw the attention of the heroes like a mothets to a flame.
Anyway, so I like that we had Dueling Hypnotists that
We had the scared Mob Boss and then that in Kit's delusion of
Bliss that she was laying down looking up the red panda and I wonder what that delusion could have been referring to.
But since this is a, you know, I guess a
G-rated show to PG rated show, I won't say, but everybody who knows knows. But anyway.
So the idea of these Dueling Hypnotists is really cool.
I like that Red Panda learned hypnotism and it's not a power that only he has and we get to see that,
you know, not the first episode, but you know five episodes in he's dealing with somebody else who has great hypnotic powers and
the shared
understanding and shared history and the fact that they're both master hypnotists in their own rights.
It makes it an interesting battle, makes an interesting duel and like Red Panda brings up the idea of
that it's easier to suggest somebody to suggest or it's easier to
set a hypnotic suggestion to somebody when they're already predisposed to believe that. So a great illustration of that was that when
Nick Diablos went to go hit
Sclerale, the room was dark and the chair was turned away so that when Diablos entered the room, he
was looking at the back of the chair and he told Sclerale to turn around and
it
I
guess it sounded exactly like Sclerale. It was Christopher Mott who plays the voice of you know,
Jack Justice or Black Jack Justice and does a bunch of voices here on Red Panda Adventures, but
you know in the story it was because
Red Panda was using a hypnotic suggestion to I guess disguise his voice as Sclerale's and
Diablos believed that and
that makes sense that he'd be able to because it was something that he wanted to believe.
So if you want something to believe, if you want to believe in something even if you know it's not true, you can be more easily
suggested or hypnotized into believing that and then perceiving that which is pretty cool.
I did like that a lot. Let me see. So
yeah, it was cool that Sclerale went to Red Panda for assistance and that he
offered to turn himself in and then by the end of the episode we learned that he was not actually sincere in that he was trying to flee,
but at least he you know tried his best.
So I think that's pretty cool and I just like that he was so scared of
Diablos that he went and turned around and he was like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna go and turn around and he was like,
Diablos, that he went and turned to you know,
somebody who he could count on to thwart this guy's plan because he's been so effective at thwarting so much of the mob business
before and maybe it was even an enemy of my enemies my friend type thing where he thought well
maybe these two will kill each other and I'll be free from them somehow especially since he was looking to flee the country anyway.
I think I thought that was a fun detail and then yeah, I won't talk about Kit's delusion of bliss, but uh,
it's kind of funny. So if you didn't get it by this point and listening to the show Kit is
romantically interested in Red Panda and we'll leave it at that.
Something I think was odd was that the first guy to die, he was in a locked room.
He tormented or you know Diablos cast him into the shadow realm where he'd be tormented forever, you know in his mind
he did that to him. By the way, if you don't know what that is, that's that's kind of funny. Anyway, um,
the uh, the idea that he
was able to infiltrate the room that he was able to you know conceal himself that he was able to
do all these different things. I buy and I accept.
But the fact that he was able to get out of the room with it locked
doesn't really make sense to me unless he mind controlled his that particular victim to
to lock the door behind him and then
that was it, you know, and then he let him fall into his catatonic state, but that doesn't really make sense.
That's not what was suggested or said at all, but it could be the case. It's just uh, it deepens the horror and the terror of the
of the incident and it makes the power
of the devil that Nick Diablos supposedly had even more terrifying because how is he able to get you know, he got in
he got into the room when it was locked and he got out with it being locked so that adds to the air of mystery and his supernatural
powers to help you know, help everybody continue to believe in the hypnotic suggestion.
Moving on.
So yeah, Nick Diablos is a master hypnotist of some sort. We don't know where he learned this. He's known
this technique and this this wow, well, that's really interesting. I hadn't thought about that. He's had this
ability for
over 20 years. So probably 23 years or maybe 22.
And it
that means that however long Red Panda has been active, which doesn't seem to be more than a handful of years, that Nick Diablos has been active for
decade a decade or more. Well almost almost two decades more than him.
So this guy could have been a hypnotist for 25 years and it's no wonder he was so
I know I guess he'd lost himself to his power and what he could do and you know, taking his
like he could have just let it go and had profited off of these people and
you know, he makes the joke that the hours are pretty good when you're a parasite as opposed to doing something else with your powers, but
he could have just dropped it and yet his greed and his avarice and his
I don't know his refusal to do anything else with his powers and
just to like take the win and go and cut his losses
ultimately led to his falling into a deep sleep.
He's ultimately led to him falling into his own torment
under Red Panda, but he Diablos had a good reason to believe that he would be able to best Red Panda, which is that he
how's your kung fu?
He had been doing the hypnotism stuff for maybe 10-15 more years than Red Panda very easily and
that's that's pretty darn impressive.
So and that also kind of raises the threat of Diablos because look at how much more experienced he is with this stuff
than Red Panda is and I mean
yeah, there's no indication that Red Panda has been doing this for 10 years, so
even he's been a master hypnotist for double the time that uh that Red Panda has been and that's that's pretty impressive.
So
yeah, that's
pretty impressive and then just I think his playing is cool.
Obviously it's bad and it's wrong to extort people like that, but boosting these people's confidence belief in themselves and like using their like
just basically giving them like a big pep talk and then extorting them for that. That's pretty clever planning.
It's good work if you can get it and more work, but good work.
And uh last note, I just think it's interesting that 22 years is the length that
supposedly in at least this Red Panda universe if not in the real world is the length of time that a hypnotic suggestion can work and uh
and uh, I'm not gonna look into it and research it to find out if that's true or not because I'm sure the claims are
dewey's either way, but it's just an interesting
idea and it does show how studied Red Panda is at whoever he learned hypnotism from
either taught him that or because he's so interested in diversifying his knowledge and uh
making sure that he knows as much as he can about things so that he can be prepared for everything.
You know like a Batman type character
uh that he would have researched and discovered that truth about uh the efficacy and the length of time
uh that hypnosis has worked for people. So anyway, once again, that was really cool great detail and uh
I don't know just it's a good show lots of fun
not much more to say about this episode because like I said it was pretty good and
pretty interesting and lots of fun. I mean there wasn't really much to complain about and there weren't too many uh
uh extra things to delve into so with that
I'm going to go ahead and get out of here before I do I'm going to suggest that you go over to
MJMunoz.com and check out all the other stuff I have there. I have a podcast page
linked uh in the show notes that will take you to all my other podcasts if you want to discover what I'm working on besides
uh the Red Panda reports and uh my coverage of Red Panda Adventures and uh, yeah
I have pulp inspired heroes that I'm working on
uh in my own superhero universe and
before I get to those I'm going to finish writing my uh children's picture books
inspired by stuff like Godzilla and
I guess you could say like Power Rangers and Digimon and things like that
so I've got a wide set of interests and I continue to work on them all because it makes me happy and I'm hoping to turn
um
turn myself into a full-time storyteller
with these things so anyway, I encourage you to check all that out and
That's all I have to say for now. This is MJ signing out
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