Episode-by-episode discussion of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin — two friends, thirty years of making games together, and what it means to make something that matters. Each episode covers a stretch of the story, spoiler-free until the recap. Part of Books to Podcasts.
8 episodes listed below. All 23 are on Apple Podcasts, free, no signup.
Years on, Dov tells Sadie over brunch what the reader has been shouting for a hundred pages: on some level, she must have known. Now teaching Dov's old seminar at MIT, Sadie gets a visitor when Sam comes east, and the two of them finally talk about the station, the games, the grief, and the unpayable debt of being known since childhood. It closes with a handwritten game called Ludo Sextus and an open invitation: there is a Donkey Kong machine in her office, and old friends play free.
An entire section told as frontier-town dispatches from inside a game: a pregnant stranger named Emily B. Marks arrives in Friendship, builds a homestead, and slowly lets a town of pseudonyms give her a life again. We decode who Emily is, who the persistent Dr. Daedalus might be, and what it means to court someone in a world where nobody has to be themselves. It ends with a headstone and the best epitaph in the book.
Counterpart High: Senior Year ships, and Simon insists on the kind of party Marx would have thrown, a celebration with a ghost at its center. Sam packs up Sadie's office himself, box by box, and faces what her leaving means. Alone afterward, he locks his door, sharpens a pencil, and begins to sketch: a train arrives, frost on the ground, almost spring. Welcome, stranger.
The Master of the Revels expansion is months behind because its director has become unreachable: Sadie is deep in grief and new motherhood, and no one at Unfair dares say so out loud. Sam, advised by an imaginary Marx to go meet the baby, cannot make himself do it, so he keeps his distance and does what little she allows. It is the saddest version of their oldest problem: devotion without communication.
Grief begins with a memory: the first time Sam watched Marx die, as Banquo in a college Macbeth, dying spectacularly and loving every second. In the present, Sam keeps Unfair running on autopilot and stands before a bullet hole in a pillar, debating whether to patch it or leave the scar. We talk about how Zevin writes mourning as logistics, repetition, and unfinished conversations.
The boldest chapter in the novel: a second-person dreamscape in which Marx drifts over cow pastures, theater stages, Harvard dorms, and strawberry fields, replaying a life spent making other people's games possible. Zevin turns the NPC, the character who exists to serve the player, into a devastating argument that Marx was the hero all along. Bring tissues; we certainly needed them.
A single chapter, told largely in the stilted poetry of early text messages, covering the worst day in Unfair's history. Far from the office, Sadie and Sam can only read and reread Marx's texts as he tries to talk two armed intruders down. I love you, all ok, just kids, talking, TOH. We sit with what Tamer of Horses means, and what it costs to be the one who stays calm.
When San Francisco starts issuing marriage licenses, Mapleworld follows, and Mayor Mazer begins marrying same-sex couples in a game played by millions. The backlash is instant and ugly, moving from boycotts to threats that stop feeling virtual. The episode ends on one of the book's most quietly terrifying beats: unanswered phones at the office, Sadie sick in a bathroom, and Sam's face in the doorway.
We discuss it chapter by chapter, but nothing replaces reading it. This is an Amazon affiliate link — it costs you nothing extra and it helps pay for the show.
23 episodes in this show, 1,100+ across the whole network, and a new one every day.
More chapter-by-chapter shows: Normal People · Wuthering Heights
Educational commentary and review only — not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Gabrielle Zevin or the publisher. All discussion is transformative and used under Fair Use. No copyright infringement intended. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.