Den of Geek: Recent Episodes
Den of Geek
On this month’s episode of Blaster Canon, our Star Wars tie-in experts tackle news from San Diego Comic-Con. The biggest announcement: the comic ministries The Rise of Kylo Ren. We talk about why Charles Soule is the perfect writer for this tale of the dark side. And in what ways is Kylo Ren’s story particularly suited to comics? A The Rise of Skywalker prequel comic, Allegiance, was also announced. However, we’re tired of prequel comics that manage not to add anything to canon.
In other tie-in news, the first season of the animated TV show Resistance comes to home media—but only to DVD.
Our main topic this week is the novel Alphabet Squadron by Alexander Freed, the first in a trilogy. We talk about why military stories appeal to us, how Alphabet Squadron manages to be both slow and propulsive, and the complexity of the main character. Alphabet Squadron also gives us an opportunity to do an overview of the new continuity. It can be awkward when one piece of tie-in media needs to dance around the history of a character who might yet appear in another story. How does Hera Syndulla fare in this book, and how can Star Wars strike a balance between maintaining continuity and giving beloved characters cameos?
Thanks to listeners Mo and Richard for this discussion topic idea! The concept is we looked into the earlier acting history of stars of our favorite sci-fi and supernatural shows to see if they had ever been in genre television content before they were famous. For example, did you know that before Peter Dinklage was in Game of Thrones, he was in a science fiction one-season wonder called Threshold? We each share three examples as usual, and our listeners join in the game, and for the first time ever, none of our choices overlap, giving our audience their own unique contributions to the discussion. NOTE: This episode marks the end of season 4 - we'll be back in September!
Stranger Things clearly has no intention of resting on its laurels as season 3 has not only improved on its Halloween-themed predecessor; it has also returned to the horror elements that made the original run such a creepy 80's romp while refusing to back off on its nostalgic notes. It would have been a crime had our genre television podcast hosts not taken on this Netflix juggernaut once again.
This time around we're focusing on the first two episodes and the premise of the season as we've been doing in the past, mostly for those who either haven't started on Stranger Things 3 yet or are just a few episodes in. Don't worry, though! For those who have binged the whole thing, we're sharing our overall impressions and some of our favorite season 3 hightlights in our spoiler zone at the end.
As a follow-up to our May podcast in which we discussed Lost in Space, we talk to actor Mina Sundwall, who plays Penny Robinson in the Netflix series. With the recent announcement that the show would be getting a second season on the streaming service, we figured we'd speculate with Mina about the future of the Jupiter 2 and reflect on her character in season one.
We'll be sharing our full interview with William B. Davis, who plays the iconic cigarette-smoking villain on The X-Files, in our January podcast, coming soon, but since the season 11 premiere is January 3, we simply had to preview our discussion in the lead-up to the exciting return of The X-Files reboot.
We chose the juiciest five minutes from Davis' discussion of the new season and where his character may be headed in The X-Files season 11. Tune in to our next podcast for more details about this history of the character and Davis' journey as an actor.