Hi, I'm Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, and this is a Slate spoiler special on Herald and Kumar, escape from Guantanamo Bay, which I saw last week, I believe, with John Swansberg, who's here with me in the studio. Hi, John.

Hi, great to be here. John is a culture editor at Slate, and we have both actually also boned up on the original Harold and Kumar, so we're going to have a whole stoner movie discussion here. I'm excited. Thanks a lot

for coming in. We're not stoned, I should say. Yeah, unfortunately, that would make it so much wittier,

but so much longer and more than we're going. So let's quickly break down the plot, or at least

sort of the setup to the plot, and then we can get into some of the stoner movie issues.

Harold and Kumar, escape from Guantanamo Bay, begins the day after, literally the morning after the first movie, the 2004, Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, ended, right?

Right. The first thing we see is Harold showering after his harrowing evening of searching for those burgers in the first movie, and also Kumar having a stomach ache from having eaten all of them.

Right. And then the long and gruesome scatological joke that begins the movie is actually

Kumar eliminating the very burgers that they scarf down at the end of Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.

So with this sort of poop joke, the movie begins, the bang, and the two boys are off to Amsterdam,

we discover, to chase down the woman that Harold is in love with, who lives in their building,

who, as we learned at the end of the prior movie, is on her way to Amsterdam for a trip.

So they've suddenly decided to buy these tickets and make this trip.

Oh, we have to get in Kumar's love interest, too.

On the way through the airport, he meets up, Kumar meets up with his own love interest,

thus setting up that the love of his life is about to marry this very preppy and loathsome.

Yeah, preppy loathsome jerk whose father has tied to the Bush administration is some muck- muck in the administration. Right. So we've already sort of, that does become an important plot point. So we've

already sort of set up that, you know, Harold and Kumar are these guys who loat this,

this preppy Bush stooge, right? Right. Or at least Kumar does. Harold is sort of, I think he

actually helped Harold get his job as a number crunching accountant or whatever he is. And if you haven't seen the original, we should set out that Harold is sort of the square

of the two.

He's a Korean-American guy who has a good job as an investment banker or some kind.

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