Fauxthentic History

Fauxthentic History treats pop culture the way a history podcast treats the real past. Holly Frey and Bryan Young pick a subject from a fictional universe and narrate it as settled record: origins, turning points, key figures, aftermath. Nobody winks at the premise for long. The Weeping Angels are introduced as a race of quantum-locked humanoids that look like carved statues, and the hosts pass along the Doctor's verdict that they are the only psychopaths in the universe to kill you nicely. The account then goes through their run-ins with the Doctor, including the tenth incarnation, remembered for his trench coat, Converse shoes and flip of hair, and his companion, the nurse Martha Jones. Recorded live at FanX Salt Lake City, that episode ends with practical advice: don't blink. The Death Star gets the same treatment on a bigger scale. Its story reaches back to ancient Sith times and an old fixation on weapons that could destroy whole planets. It then follows the defectors and informants who helped expose the station, among them Galen Erso and the cargo pilot Bodhi Rook, until the superweapon is finally destroyed. The hosts add a historian's footnote: none of this stopped the Empire from building another. The show keeps coming back to Star Wars. One episode goes through the Rebel Alliance's starfighters alphabetically by era, stopping to admire the B-wing's looks alongside the record of Blade Squadron at Endor. Another, recorded live at Star Wars Celebration, brings in a guest billed as a biographer of Queen Amidala and her handmaidens. That conversation is about sources: the guest says fashion coverage is the easiest record to trace, even though it mostly ignored that her clothing was blaster-proof and her headpieces easy to ditch in a hurry. That attention to evidence is what keeps the show from sounding like a plot recap. The Spirited Away episode on Yubaba and Zeniba is framed as a history mystery, since everything known about them comes from a little girl who traveled to the spirit realm and came back. It follows Chihiro through the bathhouse, from pulling garbage out of a river spirit to befriending a guest that handed out gold and then started eating the staff. An episode on the chronosynclastic infundibulum turns to a war between Mars and Earth and a soldier named Unk, whose memory was wiped again and again, and who learned the truth about his life from a letter he had written to himself. It signs off in the same in-world voice, reporting no updates yet from the Arthur C. Clarke since its launch. The humor comes as asides. The record shop owners stranded in the 1890s get a sympathetic riff, and a hopeful one: they might have enjoyed the phonograph in its infancy. The best first listen is the Weeping Angels episode, which shows the whole method at once: a definition, a run of case histories, a joke or two and a safety instruction to finish.