HeyJaredSuperhero Ethics
Exploring ethical questions from Superhero movies and TV shows, sci-fi, and everything else geeks love!
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 10
- Latest publication
- Sep 8, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 7, 2026
Latest episodes
The Odyssey: Myth on Film (opens the original)
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Would you cheer for a hero who tricks a Cyclops but never sleeps with a witch? Classics professor Adam Kemezis joins Matthew Fox to dig into how Christopher Nolan's Odyssey reshapes Homer's most cunning warrior for a modern audience, and what gets lost when three thousand years of moral complexity gets smoothed down to relatable and redeemable. Kemezis, who teaches Greek and Roman mythology at the University of Alberta, and Fox work through why the movie's Odysseus loses his cunning and his affa
Dolly Parton and 9 to 5 (opens the original)
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Dolly Parton let the world underestimate her for fifty years, then spent that underestimation as leverage every single time. Days after her death, comedian and "Make Me a Nerd" host Mandy Kaplan joins host Matthew Fox to talk about what she meant to them, using the workplace revenge fantasy "9 to 5" as the way in. They cover the movie, the songs that came out of it, and the choices Parton made with the fortune she built. Kaplan explains why she spent seventh grade being called "Dolly Parton" aga
Lanterns and the Ethics of Adaptation (opens the original)
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“Lanterns” so far is more cop drama than cosmic weirdness, and comic book historian Jessica Plummer isn’t convinced the trade was worth it. She joins Matthew Fox to dig into the first two episodes of HBO Max’s new John Stewart and Hal Jordan series, working through what an adaptation owes its source material and where reinterpretation turns into replacement. They get into the show’s stripped-down approach to Green constructs, John Stewart’s rewritten comics backstory, and why the human sheriff m
Avatar Aang: Did We Need This? (opens the original)
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Should a beloved story get a sequel twenty years later, and does anyone actually want it? Matthew Fox and Paul Hoppe take on Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, the new Avatar Studios movie picking up with a grown-up Team Avatar, and neither host walked away loving it. They dig into what makes a "midquel" so hard to pull off, why aging up characters from a beloved kids' show is trickier than it looks, and who a movie like this is actually made for. Paul frames it as a simple question: who was this
Sunk Cost Fallacy (opens the original)
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Thanos says he “had to” sacrifice Gamora. Vader tells Luke it’s too late to turn back. Professional poker player Paul Hoppe joins Matthew Fox to dig into the sunk cost fallacy, the bias that convinces us that because we’ve already paid a price, we have to keep paying it, and to test that idea against real poker hands as much as comic book ones. They trace “don’t throw good money after bad” out of the casino and into relationships people stay in too long, then out further still, into the Pentagon
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