Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Everyone loves Raiders of the Lost Ark. And everyone loves Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In fact, discussions of the original trilogy almost always devolve into arguments over which is the better film.¹

And then there’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

What to make of this one? This is the film that makes us uneasy, isn’t it? It was darker than Raiders and Raiders had Nazis looking for Jewish holy relics. But what that movie didn’t have was child slavery, orientalism, and a plot line featuring dudes getting their still-beating hearts ripped out of their chests. And bugs. Yeesh. Even Spielberg admitted the film was too dark, and said that he made Last Crusade as a way of apologizing for the film. Hell, even the name is trouble. You can’t really shorten it the way you do Raiders or Crusade. Is it Temple? Doom? I dunno. Neither seem to fit.

But we still kind of love it, right?² Maybe not as much as the other two in the trilogy, but it feels like the necessary connective tissue between its predecessor and successor. Perhaps it’s cliche, but maybe the way to think about Temple of Doom is as the middle child of the three. It’s not the forerunner of Raiders, nor is it the golden child of Crusade. Temple is darker. It goes looking for attention in the worst ways. It started smoking at the age of 12 behind the middle school bleachers. It’s probably going to jail eventually. It’s definitely doing a stint or two in rehab. But we can’t quite give up on it, despite its faults.³ Temple of Doom is part of the family and we love it just the same.

SIDEBAR- This of course leads us to the discussion of how to think about Crystal Skull (kinda awful) and Dial of Destiny (actually a lot of fun). The best I can reckon is that these two films are the stepsiblings you get after mom goes away on vacation with that guy she met in the bowling alley. They’re here now and you can’t deny them. They even get to eat with your grandparents at Thanksgiving. But they’re different somehow.

At its best, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom gives us peak Harrison Ford, an incredible side kick in Ke Huy Quan’s Short Round, John Williams spitting fire, and that bug scene which still creeps me out. Plus, the BRIDGE SCENE. Arguably the best action scene in the entire series.

Look fellas, we need to come to terms with the fact that none of us will ever be this handsome or this cool.

But I think the thing that draws me in most to the Indiana Jones franchise is the way it wrestles with fact versus faith, something that our guests and I talked a lot about in today’s podcast.

Speaking of which, since Temple of Doom is a prequel/sequel/whatever, I thought it was only fair that we invite back on the three amazing scholars who came on for the Raiders of the Lost Ark episode: Kate Sheppard, Julia Troche, and Leah Packard-Grams. Raiders is one of most listened-to episodes and I’m guessing that this might be the cast as well. And yes, they are absolutely going to do the entire series.

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About our guests

Dr. Kathleen Sheppard earned her PhD in History of Science from the University of Oklahoma in 2010. After a post-doctoral teaching fellowship at the American University in Cairo, she arrived at Missouri S&T in the fall of 2011. She teaches mainly survey courses on modern Western Civilizations, which is arguably one of the most important courses students in 21st century America can take. Her main focus is on the history of science from the ancient Near East to present day Europe, United States, and Latin America. She has taught courses on the history of European science and Latin American science, as well as a seminar on women in the history of science.

Sheppard’s research focuses on 19th and 20th century Egyptology and women in the field. Her first book was a scientific biography of Margaret Alice Murray, the first woman to become a university-trained Egyptologist in Britain (Lexington, 2013). Murray’s career spanned 70 years and over 40 publications. Sheppard is also the editor of a collection of letters between Caroline Ransom Williams, the first university-trained American Egyptologist, and James Breasted from the University of Chicago (Archaeopress, 2018). Sheppard’s monograph, Tea on the Terrace, is about hotels in Egypt as sites of knowledge creation in Egyptology during the discipline’s “Golden Age,” around 1880 to 1930.

Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age was published in July 2024. It has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and was a top 6 Reader’s Choice non-fiction book on Goodreads.

Dr. Julia Troche is and Egyptologist and Associate Professor of History. In 2022 she was awarded her university's highest teaching award followed by the Missouri Governor's Award for Education Excellence. She is committed to advocating for students, early career scholars, and contingent faculty, and fostering inclusive spaces for learning about the ancient world. She is dedicated to the university Public Affairs mission, evinced by her numerous Service-Learning courses, public lectures, and community engagements, such as co-curating with Bryan Brinkman and student input an exhibition of antiquities at the Springfield Art Museum (Ancient Artifacts Abroad, spring 2024).

Julia's areas of instruction and research include social history, religion, archaeology, digital humanities, and reception studies of antiquity. Julia received her PhD from Brown University's Department of in Egyptology & Assyriology in 2015, and her BA in History from UCLA in 2008. She serves as Committee Chair (2024-2027) for her field’s annual, international conference (the American Research Center in Egypt Annual Meeting) and as co-chair (2023-2026) for the Archaeology of Egypt sessions at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research.

Leah Packard-Grams is a doctoral candidate at the University of California Berkeley. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she is both a papyrologist and an archaeologist! She excavates at two sites in Egypt (NYU's Amheida excavations and UC Berkeley's el Hibeh excavations), and works regularly with the archives and collections in the Hearst Museum at UC Berkeley. Her primary interests include Greek and Demotic papyrology, the archaeology of Greco-Roman Egypt, and the materiality of ancient textual artifacts. She is passionate about diversifying the fields of Egyptology and Archaeology to include those accounts of people who have been historically oppressed.

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The Podcast

Alright, with all that said, you can find both the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom AND the Raiders of the Lost Ark episodes on Apple Podcasts or Spotify below. If you like them, don’t forget to subscribe.

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An apology

Lastly, I think y’all know by now that my substack got hit a few days ago by some sort of bot that kept spamming everyone. Folks, I am SO SORRY that happened. I’m frustrated because I created this space as a place where people could have a laugh and maybe learn something cool and feel like they are part of something. And of course, some jerk had to be a, well, jerk (this is why I wasn’t posting the last few days as I’ve been working to get this corrected. It turns out even my brother is more of a tech wiz than me). Anyway, I’m hoping it’s fixed, but if it keeps at it, I’m told you can right click the chat and exit the chat. I’m so sorry for that and I really do thank you for being patient with this. Oof.

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Finally, thank you all for being here. This substack is growing really, really fast now and that’s because y’all have been recommending the heck out of it. That really means so much to me. My work is free for everyone. But if you want to help support the mission here and help us grow, you can upgrade to a paid subscription below. (You do get some extra content and access to book giveaways and some other stuff too.) But regardless, thank you so much for being here and being part of all of this.

1. It’s Raiders.

2. I once dated someone who swore it was the best of the three but even then she was on her way to becoming an old cat lady at 35 so maybe that was a sign.

3. Yes, I was absolutely thinking about my brother went I wrote this paragraph.