Episode Details

Chris Paul and Burning Bright close out the trilogy with Francis Ford Coppola's much maligned 1990 finale The Godfather Part III, now known as The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. Starring Al Pacino, Andy Garcia, Diane Keaton, and George Hamilton, the film tracks Michael's failed attempt to leave the criminal world by going legitimate through a foundation and a Vatican real estate deal, while his nephew Vincent (Sonny's bastard son) rises as the next generational vessel for the family's worldly pursuits.

The guys argue this one gets a bad rap and is actually a fitting close to the saga's core thesis, which is that you cannot reform a system from inside the system. They dig into the Vatican as a higher mafia than even Capitol Hill, foundations and philanthropy as the next evolution of the illusion of legitimacy, the Sicilian vendetta as an example of how honor cultures decay into rule sets when the original meaning is forgotten, and Michael's spiritual confusion when he confesses to Cardinal Lamberto and still believes worldly steps can undo damnation.

From there they go big picture on systems as self perpetuating organisms, the bag man problem and why this many people can't be in on it is a nonsense argument, NGOs as criminal shielding structures, and whether bringing back a monarchy with a real value bloodline would actually be more honest than the bureaucratic illusion we live under.