After a two-week hiatus due to vacationing, resting, and traveling, Taking It Down, the pop culture podcast from The Alabama Take network, is back to first briefly discuss Halloween and Halloween songs (3:43). Then it's an equally brief and broad talk about the new Taylor Swift album (5:02). It's important that we discuss our disdain for the botched She-Hulk ending, which was good with merely one aspect, but horrible with much more (6:28).

After that, the hosts discuss plenty of news from the first two episodes of this season's The Challenge, which is subtitled Ride or Dies. (You can also read a weekly column on The Alabama Take site every Thursday afternoon.)

After a short news break, the gang does as deep of a dive as they've ever done and this one is on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power from Amazon Prime with two actual Tolkien scholars (31:14)!

Listen on the this site with the player above or in any podcast app by searching for Taking It Down.