The Incomparable Mothership

Bonus episode! Here’s an edited fourth installment of our Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Our heroes have made it inside a strange desert temple and have mostly not died… yet. But the night is young and the basins in this temple are full of an unknown magical fluid, so anything could happen!

Take the red pill and enter “The Matrix,” 1999’s influential sci-fi/action classic. Why does Morpheus talk like a fortune cookie? Is Keanu’s woodenness an asset or detriment? Was skeuomorphism the fall of man? And if we accept that living things can be used as batteries, why wouldn’t the machines just use cows? Grad students, we are about to blow your minds. Whoa.

It’s time for the second Incomparable Film Festival! We pick 35 films that we think are worth seeing, in fantasy draft format. From horror to comedy to drama to sci-fi to kung-fu, we’ve got just about every genre covered. Don’t miss the exciting Lightning Round, and stay tuned when it’s all over for our expert post-draft analysis! [This episode was originally two episodes, 158 and 159. It’s been rejoined into a single, double-length episode.]

An entire comic book about Hawkeye, the lesser Marvel superhero with a bow and arrow? Okay… this looks bad. But seriously, bro, this is one of the very best comics being published today. We cover the first two trade-paperback editions of Fraction and Aja’s series, including Lucky the Pizza Dog, 50 Shades of Purple, and how hooking up a laserdisc player is similar to defusing a bomb. Hop on board and join us—we’re great at boats.

Special guest star Philip Michaels gives us an old-movie education with two caper movies from the 1950s, “The Lavender Hill Mob” and “The Killing.” One’s funny, one’s not, but both teach us that crime doesn’t pay! Plus young Stanley Kubrick, funnyman Alec Guinness, the second-greatest fight scene Steve has ever seen, and a guest appearance by General Eisenhower.

A boy with no name travels to the end of the lane and discovers how a pond can be an ocean in Neil Gaiman’s brief and wonderful novel “The Ocean at the End of the Lane.” Also Dan explains Jason’s perfect vacation, there’s lots of talk about cats, why David has issues with Old Yeller, and we talk about other Neil Gaiman works that we like.

Do you like stories, love, and life? Then even if you’re not a regular comic book reader, you should read “Saga,” by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. (Unless naked robot sex disturbs you, in which case you shouldn’t.) We cover the horns and the wings, bad connections on the interstellar cellphone network, seahorse agents, super space high school, a frog with a banjo, the wisdom of hiring a ghost as your babysitter, and much more.

Load your shotgun, put on your clear plastic suit, and climb into that suspiciously humming box! We’re here to talk about three very different time-travel movies: “12 Monkeys,” “Looper,” and “Primer.” Is “Crazy Brad Pitt” a thing? If you met a younger version of yourself, would you fight or cuddle? Why is the apocalypse like Philadelphia? Also something about a Weeble in a time machine, we didn’t really understand that part.

Live! From San Diego County! It’s a podcast where Jason Snell, Steve Lutz, and Greg Knauss drink beer and talk about Comic-Con, a glut of too much good media, the pros and cons of wearing costumes, Adventure Time, Glenn’s health scare, and much more. It’s slightly tipsy and more than slightly rambling, but we hope you’ll crack a beverage of your own and join us for this cocktail party.

Put on your red shirt, renew your blogging license, and swallow some alien bacteria! It’s time for our annual read of the five Hugo Award nominees for best novel. We liked some of them, we hated some of them, but we talked about all of them! But beware: The diabolical eyes of the Centers for Disease Control are watching us all.