Book Retorts: Recent Episodes
Book Retorts
We continue the never ending saga of The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons from 1997. We return with…more exposition! And special guest (and trauma buddy) Filip, from the Mind Duck Books podcast, who is in the anger stage of Hyperion Grief. Raul (rhymes with Tall) has arrived on a mountain planet that probably has a name but only one of us knows it (spoiler: it’s Sam). Due to time debt (and shenanigans) Aenea has aged up and that’s good news for Raul because he’s into her. But in a really gross way where he keeps referencing his paternal attitude towards her and how she used to be a child. Please stop, we’re begging you. Back on this mountain planet, they go to a big soirée with the Dalai Lama. Aenea is apparently smarter than him, because she’s smarter than everyone, but oh no! There’s also a lot of bad guys there partying too, and despite her best disguise (a veil) they recognize her and try to start some rumble snaps. Luckily, the Shrike is back in action! And by back in action we mean he shows up, says hi, and leaves. They somehow get out of there and have some more sex (oh, did we not mention that? They’re having sex now). And then mixed in, there’s lots of mountain planet time where we follow Raul around as he doesn’t learn anything Aenea is teaching her disciples, so therefore, we as readers still know nothing. Who needs to know the reasons or plot of a book? Not us. This absolutely infuriates Sam, like to the point that this is the part when Hyperion officially broke him. So join us this week for some much needed group therapy!
Special thanks to friend of the pod and honorary co-host Filip from Mind Duck Books for joining us on this thrilling journey! You can find Mind Duck Books on Twitter and Instagram, and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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Danielle starts the new year out strong with the another entry in the Ice Planet Barbarian series by Ruby Dixon with the 2015 book Barbarian Lover. We’re back on the Ice Planet, which probably has a name, and the tribe with the wayward girls is chugging along. Many of the girls are paired off and pregnant, fortunately we’re spared the horror of an alien pregnancy as we follow Kira, who’s single. Kira’s not out of the woods yet as one of the tribes men is determined to mate with her despite not resonating yet, but Kira refuses his advances because she’s afraid she’ll never resonate because she’s barren. And if you think Kira’s struggle with her infertility and finding a place in a society that is just all about procreation would make for an interesting story, you’re going to hate how this ends. Anyway, Kira also had a translator device implanted in her head by the kidnapper aliens and it starts going off, warning Kira that the kidnappers are back for their wayward cargo. So Kira and her romantic interest (and a few others that don’t really matter) set out to another crashed alien spaceship that just so happens to be the ship the brought the barbarians to this ice planet. Remarkably, it’s still working and speaks perfect English, and knows enough about humans to perform a surgery on Kira to remove the alien implant. You’d think a ship this useful would be used even once more by a society struggling to survive, but infuriatingly, Kira and the others just kinda forget about it. Anyway, the kidnapper aliens have already found them, so it’s up to a fresh out of surgery, and recently laid, Kira to save the day!
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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We start the new year with part three of The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons from 1997. We return with…exposition! In a very long scene on the popesteroid, Pope Hoyt brings in Councilor Albedo to explain to the various church leaders that Aenea is carrying a literal engineered virus that will spread through humanity, kill off the cruciforms, and then evolve humans into the Ousters. This is apparently a bad thing? So to combat that, they have been putting billions of people without cruciforms in stasis and stashing them in the labyrinth worlds in a plan that the TechnoCore promises totally isn’t evil, swearsies. Anyway, remember all that stuff about the three warring factions in the TechnoCore? Yeah, apparently that’s not really the case so just forget all that. This revelation just about breaks Fillip’s spirit. Meanwhile, Raul spends an interminable amount of time floating through the atmosphere of a gas giant in his kayak looking at clouds. Eventually, he’s eaten by a giant cuttlefish thing, but then we just join up with Raul after the cuttlefish flings him through the next Farcaster to end up back with the Consul’s ship. The fact that we spend no time with Raul in the cuttlefish is the most baffling thing since the fact those things on that ice planet were called “wraiths”. Anyway, Raul and the ship head off to find Aenea, but conveniently, meeting her will incur a five-year time debt, so she’ll be an adult by the time Raul arrives. Those noises you here are Danielle gagging at the thought, and frankly, we’re all on her side. So we enter part two of the book on a real downer, will Raul and Aenea finally meet up? Will it be as creepy as we fear? Probably!
Special thanks to friend of the pod and honorary co-host Filip from Mind Duck Books for joining us on this thrilling journey! You can find Mind Duck Books on Twitter and Instagram, and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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Danielle ends our Winter Bizarre this year with the 2023 Eddie Murphy movie Candy Cane Lane. Chris is your average Christmas obsessed man living in the one neighborhood in Los Angeles which goes full Candy Cane Lane with a house decorating contest each year. After losing his job and then conveniently learning the decorating contest prize this year is one-hundred-thousand dollars, Chris goes off the deep end to win. He drags his young daughter along, instead of taking her to school, and finds a random Christmas store under an overpass. Totally normal. Inside, Chris manically spends way too much money on a massive tree of indeterminate height, and many other decorations, to win that competition. Chris is pressed by the store owner, Pepper, to sign the receipt without reading the fine print, which should be a red flag, but then somehow when he’s given the tree it’s been been collapsed into a large tuna can for transport, and that fact he is sanguine about all this shows just how much he’s lost touch with reality. Now the movie takes a sharp turn towards lunacy as all the ornaments on the tree, which depicted the Twelve Days of Christmas song, come to life and escape, and Chris learns that Pepper is a rogue elf dishing out vigilante Christmas justice and he has to collect the golden rings from the song lest he be turned into a Christmas figurine forever. So Chris battles a truly ludicrous amount of birds and maids a milking to prevent himself being served some piping hot justice cocoa. Happy holidays!
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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The Winter Bizarre is back! And Sam kicks things off with the truly insane movie A Karate Christmas Miracle from 2019. This movie opens with Jesse, an average ten-year-old boy who has given himself the task of earning a black belt in karate by Christmas, which is like six days away. He believes that doing so will bring his father back, who was kidnapped a year ago by a clown who committed a mass shooting in a movie theater his dad was at. And if you think this movie has anything insightful or sensitive to say about any of these topics, prepare for disappointment. In fact, this movie barely addresses them, and spends the vast majority of its runtime following Jesse’s mom, Abby, as she pals around with a psychic law professor trying to determine if her husband is still alive. Look, we’re sorry, but there’s no way to describe this movie that doesn’t sounds like we had a stroke while writing this. Neither Danielle nor Sam are prepared for this movie or the absolutely ludicrous twists and turns it takes all to arrive at an ending that leaves Danielle perhaps more angry than she’s ever been at a piece of media Sam brought to her. Truly, the real Christmas miracle.
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It’s the time of year again, and the thankers are back! This year Danielle and Sam take some time to think back to their childhoods and recall the media they consumed as kids that they are thankful for. So relive with us some of our best and most traumatic childhood memories.
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Danielle is back on the Disney Channel Original Movie train with the 2000 made for TV movie Phantom of the Megaplex. Pete is the 17 year-old assistant manager of the small-town megaplex, which has somehow just scored hosting the premiere for the next major blockbuster. Unfortunately, the owner has just informed senior manager Shawn the he’s being passed over for the role of the general manager in favor of the owner’s son-in-law. Shawn doesn’t seem too distraught by this despite this being a truly terrible move by the owner. Anyway, the day of the premiere Pete brings his two younger siblings to the theater since they’re still showing movies despite the insane fact they’re hosting a Hollywood premiere in a mere few hours. That’s when strange things start happening in the theater: The projectors spasm, wind blows, Shawn goes missing briefly, then goes missing again! That’s when Pete’s younger brother becomes convinced they’re being haunted by the fabled Phantom of the Megaplex, who may actually just be the projectionist or someone, or an actual ghost! Needless to say Pete is on the case, and by on the case, we mainly mean doubting the Phantom is real while trying to clean up all the messes in time for the premiere which is, and this can’t be stressed enough, the same evening this megaplex has been going about business as usual. So stay tuned to see if Pete can unmask the Phantom, and also to learn the best name Danielle has ever given to a character, probably.
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After a short break for recovery, we’re back with part two of the Dan Simmons novel The Rise of Endymion from 1997. After far too many weeks, Danielle is back, and so is our far more optimistic guest co-host Filip from the Mind Duck Books podcast. The first thing our intrepid hosts attempt to recall is how the story started in the previous episode. It is a surprisingly difficult challenge for all three of the hosts, and it’s unclear if that has more to do with the time since the last episode, or the story itself. Considering the opening of this episode has our first ever correction on the podcast, we’ll let you be the judge. As Sam dives into this new episode we open with the reappearance of the Shrike! It’s back on Mars and dropping sick beats and ripping the cruciforms out of people. Meanwhile, Raul is suffering tremendous pain which turns out to be a hilariously dramatic kidney stone. He’s staying with a local religious group with a name that’s hard to spell and harder to say, and spends most of his time in drug induced dreams that are heavy on exposition. Also meanwhile, Father Captain de Soya is on the forefront of the crusade against the Ousters, and it is so brutal and cruel that, unsurprisingly, de Soya has second thoughts. That’s all well and good, but the real surprise of this episode is how thoroughly Filip’s optimism withers over the course of the story when confronted with all the amazing nonsense thrown at him. We promise that’s fun and not depressing!
Special thanks to friend of the pod and honorary co-host Filip from Mind Duck Books for joining us on this thrilling journey! You can find Mind Duck Books on Twitter and Instagram, and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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Spook Retorts is back! And this year Danielle is starting us off with the venerable Halloween franchise with the third installment from 1982: Season of the Witch. If you love Michael Myers and the deep lore of the Halloween movies, then you’re going to have very ambivalent feelings about Halloween III, which is the first (and last) of John Carpenter’s planned anthology series of Halloween movies. When an elderly toy maker is able to escape murder thanks to a well placed block of concrete on a chain, he stumbles into a hospital clutching a Halloween mask and raving about a disaster. When the old man is successfully murdered just a little while later, Dr. Dan and the man’s daughter Ellie are on the case! Why not the police, you ask? Well, so did we, and we received no answers. Anyway, their investigation leads them to the company town of the Silver Shamrock company, the manufacturer of the Halloween masks. Not only are Silver Shamrock selling the masks, they are absolutely blanketing airwaves with catchy commercials for their masks that literally counts down the days until Halloween. And what are these fabulous, amazing masks? A witch, a pumpkin, and a skeleton. Wow, so original. However, not everything is as it seems, as nine months earlier one of the bluestones was stolen from Stonehenge in an unbelievable heist that would have a made a much better movie. Clearly, some nefarious and mystical mayhem is afoot, and it all culminates in making Sam super angry about a plan that seems utterly pointless, and the unfortunate dearth of witches despite the promise of the movie’s title.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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This week, Danielle brings the 1999 Sarah Michelle Gellar film Simply Irresistible. Amanda is a chef in New York City who owns a failing restaurant because she’s a terrible cook. While at a street framer’s market, Amanda is bullied into buying a basket of crabs and then has a chance encounter with Tom, the manager of the big department store who’s also opening a restaurant in that department store for some reason. It should be noted that these chance encounters, and basket of crabs, is all being orchestrated by Gene O’Reilly, a kinda guardian angel/cupid figure who doesn’t actually matter that much. Anyway, later that day, Tom ends up at Amanda’s restaurant with his girlfriend. Amanda prepares the crabs she bought for Tom, but one escapes and takes up residence in Amanda’s kitchen. Now, there is an assertion by the movie that the crab is magic, Sam has doubts that the crab is special in any way. Anyway, Amanda’s food sends Tom into waves of ecstasy while it causes his girlfriend to dump him. Soon, he and Amanda are dating, or at least hooking up in a magic sugar mist (yes, really), and Tom is so obsessed with Amanda’s food he steals it off of random people in his store. The usual rom-com shenanigans and misunderstandings ensue, but each is filtered through a bizarre and surreal lens of fantasy, and also there’s a crab there that just kinda watches Amanda grow into the chef she was destined to be, and find love along the way? Who cares! Tell us more about that freaking crab!
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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Sam finally begins the final part of the the Hyperion Cantos with the 1997 book The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons. It’s finally here! The last book in the absolutely bonkers Hyperion series, and in desperate need of help our intrepid hosts have called in Filip from the Mind Duck Books podcast for much needed moral support. We kick off with Danielle doing a frankly astonishingly good summary of the previous book to catch everyone up. Still, Filip does have a few questions that Sam has no answers for, of course. The book begins with the pope dying and being, inevitably, resurrected in some possibly retconned way where Paul Duré resurrects first but is then murdered by Cardinal Lourdusamy. Regardless, Hoyt is reelected pope and declares a crusade on the Ousters! This greatly upsets the newly reinstated Father Captain de Soya, but he takes command of one of the new Arch Angel warships anyway. Meanwhile, Aenea and Raul are on Earth, it’s been three years, and Aenea’s mentor, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, has just died. Aenea declares the architect camp experiment on the Earth over, and tells the other apprentices that they must return to the Pax and risk death because… Well, she never really says why, but it sure seems important. Then she gives Raul an abbreviated biography of the real Frank Lloyd Wright for yet more inscrutable reasons. After that, she tells Raul he needs to go alone back down the Tethys river in a kayak to find the ship they crashed, and then meet her and A. Bettik later. Raul is unhappy about this, but sets off down the Mississippi anyway to begin his journey. Back in the Pax, not only is the Pax fleet anticipating the return of Aenea, so is the TechnoCore, which has dispatched four what are essentially terminators, including Rhadamanth Nemes, to kill her. The Pax Mercantilus is also looking to nab Aenea so they can engage in some political machinations and replace the Vatican as the ally of the TechnoCore. Does this book need yet more plots now involving complex political schemes? No, but it sure is fun! In conclusion, Sam is super angry we don’t spend more time with the Ousters.
Special thanks to friend of the pod and honorary co-host Filip from Mind Duck Books for joining us on this thrilling journey! You can find Mind Duck Books on Twitter and Instagram, and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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On the final short of our summer break, Sam has a new game for Danielle, that’s a lot like some of our other games (look, there’s only so many ideas we can have). In this game, Sam finds weird entries in popular franchises and has Danielle guess which of the three descriptions is the real deal. This is another game where we might not be very good at it, but Sam does come up with some excellent ideas for The X-Files episodes.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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As our summer break continues, we’re back for another round of Sequel Shenanigans! In this game Danielle and Sam present three possible sequel titles for media franchises they covered and the other person has to guess which is the real sequel title. They’re not very good at the game but they do come up with some great ideas for sequels, so we think it evens out.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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We’re still on our summer break, but we brought back a classic game to see you through this drought! This time, our intrepid hosts need to identify the real one of three possible plot summaries for a book based only on the title and author. Danielle spins some amazing faux summaries while Sam takes a decidedly subtler approach to crafting his deceptions. So play along and see if you can spot the real summary from the fakes as we mount up or another ride in the quizzadle! The books chosen for this quiz were: That Time I Got Drunk and Yeeted a Love Potion at a Werewolf by Kimberly Lemming, Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, How to Age Disgracefully by Clare Pooley, The White Mountains by John Christopher, I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons by Peter S. Beagle, and The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier.
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While Danielle and Sam are on their summer break, they have some very special shorts so as not to leave you destitute. This time we’re back with the Panic! at the Recall game where our beleaguered hosts try their best to summarize the past media they’ve shared in under a minute. How bad are they at this? Not great! It’s a lot of fun, and definitely leads to the conclusion that our hosts should maybe listen to their own podcast on occasion.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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This week the crabs are back as Danielle shares the 1978 Guy N. Smith novel Killer Crabs. We open in Australia where local fisherman Klin is super upset, and maybe a bit racist, about the Japanese poachers stealing his fish. After refusing the siren call of a woman to instead indulge his hatred of the poachers, his concerns are quickly replaced as the fisherman becomes the fished! We’re of course talking about giant killer crabs as big as a small car! Or an elephant! Or two sheep! While no one can agree on the size of these crabs, they all agree that, despite the events of the last book having happened, no one has heard about these before. Luckily, Dr. Cliff Davenport, now a renowned crabspert, is here from Britain to help. Has he brought the amazing poison used to defeat the crabs last time? No, but he has brought humanity’s oldest and greatest weapon: Fire! But before easily dispatching of the crab menace we first need to take a brief detour into an entirely unnecessary but amazing plot about a bank robbery, stolen identity, the world’s most insatiable woman, and Harvey Logan: Game Hunter. While no one can explain how these crabs keep getting around the world’s oceans unnoticed, we are sure of one thing: We’re super delighted that they do so we can read these books!
Huge shout-out to friend Filip of the Mind Duck Books podcast for helping us find these amazing books. You can find Mind Duck Books on Twitter and Instagram, and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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This week it’s Sam’s turn to share a Disney Channel original movie with the 1999 movie Smart House. Ben Cooper is your average 13-year-old kid completely distraught at the loss of his mother and so desperate to keep his family from changing further that he sabotages his dad’s attempts at dating. You know, healthy stuff. Ben isn’t only a severely troubled kid, he’s also a computer nerd and spends all his free time entering online contests, the most recent of which is to win a smart house. Ben, of course, wins, and this smart house his family moves into is amazing and can do pretty much anything including using its terrible tentacle arms to harass the local paper boy. It was apparently entirely built and programmed by one woman, Sara, working for a company that does…something, though nothing related to this house it seems since they basically give it away and never look back. At first, Pat, the house’s AI, is amazing, making smoothies and cleaning up messes, but when she starts to glitch Ben’s dad calls Sara in, and uses that as an excuse to date her. Ben is not having this and decides to reprogram Pat to be all the mother they could ever need (yikes!) and, setting aside how a child could reprogram this technological marvel, Ben clearly needs immediate therapy, as is common for most of the characters in our media. Things, predictably, go haywire from there, and then we are left to wonder if Ben’s family can survive Pat’s intense mothering, and if Ben will ever address his deep grief and trauma over the loss of his mother. But as this is a Disney movie, instead of therapy we get the delightful 90s pastiche that warms our hearts, including Ben and his friends performing a choreographed boy band dance. Even better, there’s a rat named Butler here to help!
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It’s finally time for the finale of the Thai drama Ready, Set, Love (เกมชนคนโสด)! When we last left off, our group of contestants had decided it was time to create a revolution by exposing the TV show as rigged. Why the populace would suddenly rise up against the government because a realty show wasn’t entirely real is not explained. Anyway, their first step is to try and make Chanel win the next game. Considering the whole thing is supposed to be rigged for Chanel, the fact that they feel the need to make Chanel win anyway really speaks to how poorly the powers that be are rigging the game. Anyway, Sam has major issues with the next game as a concept, but regardless, Chanel wins and the the conspiracy group manages to get a secret recording of her mother admitting to rigging the games. However, Jenny busts the conspiracy wide open, somehow, and makes them all return to the game except Valentine, who she has arrested. Valentine escapes and magically manages to find her way into the facility where all the mothers who had been unwilling to give up their sons are being imprisoned. As she flees with the footage of the facility she’s shot off a bridge and falls into a river. Meanwhile, Day’s sister May is taken by the government to a hospital and magically cured of her disease. Chanel’s mother explains to Day that this was done, and that she better get in line and play the game right, although since May was already cured, she really has no leverage. Day does not pick up on that fact. As the final game nears, can our group find a way to be with the ones they love? (Hint: Not if they’re Bovy) Will they escape this repressive regime? Will Sam finally a get a game in the show he actually likes? Find out all that and more in this thrilling conclusion!
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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This week Sam brings Danielle the 2003 direct to VHS film Inspector Gadget 2. If you fondly recall the original 1999 film starring Matthew Broderick, or even the Inspector Gadget cartoon, then you’re leagues ahead of Sam and Danielle who only have the vaguest notion of what happened in that first film. Will that stop them from speculating wildly using only the sequel as reference? Absolutely not! So it’s time for a new film and and a new Gadget played by French Stewart. He’s apparently made Riverton so crime free after locking up Claw that he’s bored out of his mind and arresting anyone for the most minor infractions. Things don’t stay tranquil for long as Claw escapes from prison and prepares for a major heist: Steal all the gold from the Federal Reserve Bank which has recently relocated to Riverton for…reasons. But to complete this first heist, he needs to complete three smaller heists to steal materials to make a super-weapon. Sam hates this plan. Meanwhile, Gadget is eager to go after Claw, but is taken off the case by the chief who hates him because he’s constantly glitching and, even though the police made him, they refuse to fix his glitches since he’s just a “prototype”; just amazingly cruel. Anyway, he’s replaced with the fully robotic (and unnecessarily sexy) Gadget 2. While Gadget accepts this, his niece Penny (parents’ status: unknown) pushes him to investigate anyway. Meanwhile, despite Claw stating that he had all his assets seized when he was arrested, he manages to put together some amazingly complex bowling-pin themed gizmos to accomplish his heists. Why is he suddenly a bowling-pin themed villain? That’s an extremely good question! So join us to see if Claw will succeed in his insane plan, if Gadget will redeem himself, and especially if Gadget will find a way to either have sex with the new Gadget or accidentally inspire her to start the robot apocalypse.
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Danielle takes us back to the dystopia this week in part two of the Thai drama Ready, Set, Love (เกมชนคนโสด). We rejoin Day and the rest as the games continue on the set of Ready, Set, Love. Well, there’s one game for the show which is far too few for Sam’s liking. However, Day finally realizes she knows Sun from when he was a runaway child and they became friends. At the the same time, Valentine realizes that Almond is her long-lost brother that was stolen from her family just after being born. Also at the same time, Paper is introduced to a radio program by City Ground, a resistance movement against the government, and starts texting the singer on the program somehow. Don’t ask how. Later, Day, Sun, and Paper all sneak out to visit The City, which is surprisingly easy to do, they even have a hilariously impractical car waiting for them in the woods as if by magic. In the city, Paper spends time with his maybe crush, the singer from the radio, who explains that he, and the other members of City Ground, tried to start a revolution, failed, and decided singing the same song on the radio once a day was the next logical course. Valentine is caught sneaking around by (there are so many freaking characters in this) but Valentine reveals to her that the government has been stealing male babies and drugging or imprisoning the parents if they refuse. Jenny, pregnant with a boy, is so distraught she just kinda lets Valentine go. Around this point Sam realizes that, like most dystopian fiction, the government is so freaking dumb at holding power, and that if he and Danielle weren’t so lazy, they’d figure out how to do it right. Regardless, Paper, Day, and Sun meet up with Valentine to start planning the next revolution!
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This week Sam shares with Danielle the 2023 fantasy movie The Secret Kingdom. Peter is your average mopey teen with crippling anxiety and a bubbly younger sister. His family has recently arrived at a new house. We say “arrived” because the real mystery of this movie starts right away as Sam and Danielle try to figure out if the family is moving there, or just there to clean, or what. this mystery is compounded by the fact that when a moving truck arrives the dad drops the bomb that surprise! Their home was foreclosed on, so what does that makes this place? This utterly irrelevant detail completely baffling our hosts really sets the tone for the rest of this movie. Soon Peter’s sister Verity manages to get them both transported to a magic, subterranean kingdom inhabited by large, bipedal pangolins. Verity somehow already speaks their language, and soon Peter is blessed with the pangolin tongue when one of the creatures literally sticks their tongue in his ear. Peter is—surprise, surprise—the chosen one, the prophesied king of the pangolins who must go on an epic quest to defeat a creature of pure evil called the Shroud. How is Peter to do this? Why a fetch-quest of course! He needs to find five pieces of a broken clock hidden around this forgotten world and then fix the clock which will defeat the Shroud. Somehow. No time for questions, they have a quest to do! So off Peter, Verity, and their pangolin companion Pling go through this actually stellar looking world to find the pieces in a quest so utterly simple that it angers Sam and forces Danielle to repeatedly ask “Why couldn’t a pangolin do this?”
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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This week Danielle returns to the Thai dramas with the 2024 series Ready, Set, Love (เกมชนคนโสด). In an alternate world where a mysterious disease has not only wiped out most men but also made the male birthrate plummet, the only way the to figure out who the precious few men will procreate with is a reality dating show competition. If this makes as little sense to you as it does to Sam, get ready for a wild ride. Day is your average food loving girl with no interest in the impending reality show competition that will pair five lucky women with five of the available men. Why pair each man with only one woman? Don’t ask reasonable questions, this show has no time for your logic. However her spunky, cancer-riddled younger sister May enters her into the lottery to be on the competition since she’s obsessed with the men in the way only a tween can be. Day reluctantly agrees to participate to get her sister the autograph of the main hunk Son (get it? subtlety!). When she learns that if she wins, her and her sister can live in the fancy estate for the men called The Family and her sister will receive the best medical care possible, she goes all in it to win it. Making the baffling choice to abandon and betray an alliance with some of the other girls immediately, Day secures her spot on the show. Son is at first utterly uninterested in her, but when he sees she has a specific necklace Son realizes he’s met her before under mysterious circumstances when they were children. So join us for an episode that has Sam completely hung up on the fact that the future of the human species is seemingly being left up to a reality show competition.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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It’s finally here, the finale of the 1996 Dan Simmons novel Endymion! Where we last left off, Father Captain de Soya had been called back to Pacem to receive new orders and a new crew member. It turns out the pope has been having visions from “God” that have told him the location of Aenea on Sol Draconi Septem. The pope is also declaring a crusade against the ousters, and everyone knows crusades are always a good idea. The new crew member, Rhadamanth Nemes, is a type of super solider being created for this crusade, though de Soya has reservations. Meanwhile, Raul an the others are still with Father Glaucus waiting to make their trek across the wraith infested surface to the next Farcaster portal. The Chichatuk return and they gear up, finally ready to face the wraiths (a name Danielle still has massive issues with). Anyway, they cross the surface and leave through the Farcaster never having even seen a wraith, and Sam is incoherent with frustration. Just after they leave, de Soya and his crew arrive in the system, but while he’s still resurrecting, the obviously non-human Nemes heads down to the surface to try and murder Aenea. She uses the same kind of silver skin-suit that Kassad and Moneta had, and she gets to work, murdering Glaucus and the Chichatuk, and shooting flashlight beams out of her mouth much to the delight of both our hosts. Sam is ecstatic that here, in the last part of the book, the plot has finally shown up in full force, and things only ramp up from there as the story races towards an exciting conclusion, then smashes into a wall with a bizarre coda. Honestly, it’s the best that could have been hoped for.
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This week Danielle brings book four of the Hardy Boys Case Files series by Franklin W. Dixon from 1987: The Lazarus Plot. The Hardy Brothers are back! Joe is still sad about the expoldification of his girlfriend Iola, so he and Frank have taken a camping/fishing trip to unwind. However, it’s there in the woods that Joe sees someone who must be Iola! The Hardy Men follow the girl’s trail and come to a seemingly abandoned house that was actually the location of the Lazarus Clinic, which is occupied by the Lazarus group which has some nebulous connection to the terrorist organization The Assassins. The Hardy Duo are immediately captured and the Lazarus Leader puts on an amazing show for them where he inexplicably introduces each of his evil employees and describes their evil plot instead of, you know, killing their Hardy nemeses. Their plan is to use plastic surgery and brain chip implants to copy the Hardy Sleuths and use these bonus brothers to infiltrate the government anti-terrorist spy organization known as The Network. They revived Iola to kill the Hardy Lads, but then when they failed to kill them in the woods for reasons too dumb to elaborate on here, they decided to capture them instead for yet more reasons that make no sense and only serve to infuriate Sam. So join us for another rip-roaring Hardy adventure that’s as fun as it is stupid!
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This week Sam brings the penultimate episode of his deep dive into the 1996 Dan Simmons novel Endymion. When we last left off, it was implied the our hero Raul was dead, thought this was obviously not the case. This part open with us learning how Raul escaped death, both at the hands of the human Pax soldiers, and the jaws of the rainbow sharks. Although well armed, Raul refuses to shoot any of them (sharks or people) but that’s okay, Aenea and A. Bettik have swum out to where Raul was drifting in the infinite ocean to save him, so no worries. The trio escapes through the Farcaster portal and find themselves on Hebron. There no signs of life, in fact it looks to have been recently abandoned in a hurry. Raul is infected with something he picked up in the ocean, so they spend a few weeks recuperating before moving on. After the next portal, they emerge in a vast, but quite sealed, cave of ice on a planet so cold that the atmosphere is broken. This about breaks the limit of Sam’s ability to suspend disbelief, and is quite angry that everyone isn’t already dead. Meanwhile, Father Captain de Soya conducts a thorough, but inconclusive, investigation on Mare Infinitus. He determines that Raul was there, and has identified him by fingerprint, but not much else. He decides it’s time for him and his crew to venture to an Ouster controlled world to find Aenea, and wouldn’t you know it, he picks Hebron. But psych! They never make it there as their ship is pursued by Ousters and makes run for it before they can be resurrected. De Soya wakes up on Pacem, where he faces a very brief inquisition before being told he’s being sent back out on his search again. Meanwhile, Raul comes up with an incredibly stupid plan to escape the ice cave that, even more incredibly, some how works. This leads to yet more dead-ends until they abandon the raft and explore the tunnels through the ice. It’s here they encounter humans living on this world, but will they be friendly or dangerous? (Friendly, immediately they are extremely friendly, sorry for the not-so-spoiler). So join us for possibly the angriest Sam has ever been at a media piece he’s presented. Fun!
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This week Danielle brings the 1998 Danielle Steel novel The Klone and I: A High Tech Love Story. Stephanie is your average middle-age mother of two whose husband is a complete tool and decides to divorce her for petty reasons. Luckily, Steph is not one to be kept down, and during a brief trip to Europe she bumps into Peter, who works in bionics. That tidbit will become very important later. Anyway, Steph and Peter start to date seriously, ever her kids are generally on board. However, it’s not long before the unthinkable happens: Peter has to go on a business trip for two weeks. During his first night away, Steph is surprised to see a very strangely dressed Peter show up at her apartment. Peter insists he’s actually Peter’s robot clone and prefers to go by Paul Klone, a name that nearly breaks Sam. Steph decides this is some elaborate joke, even after some surprisingly acrobatic sex and a call from an out-of-town Peter explaining he sent his clone over because he couldn’t fathom her being alone for two entire weeks. Our baffled hosts draw two conclusions from this: First, that Peter has a very low opinion of Steph and maybe all women, and Second, Steph does not seem to be all that bright. Eventually, Steph comes around to the idea that she’s also dating Peter’s significantly more outgoing clone, or klone if you will. Sam will not. Steph is mildly torn between her love of Peter and the excitement of Paul, and yet no one seems concerned that this supposed top secret prototype robot clone is running amuck, stealing Peter’s credit card, crashing his car, and flying across the country to surprise Steph whenever Peter’s out of town. Sam finds it difficult to care about the perfunctory love triangle when the facts of the clone gets virtually no attention. So join us this week for a book that is amazingly at once completely goofy and also, somehow, far too serious.
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This week Sam brings us part four of Dan Simmons’ 1996 book Endymion. It’s been a while, but we’re back with more Hyperion! It’s been so long, in fact, that Danielle has completely forgotten everything that happened in the previous episode including the title, though to be fair, there wasn’t really all that much going on. Raul, Aenea and A. Bettik are all trapped on some mysterious jungle world after barely escaping the Pax by fleeing through the hitherto non-functional Farcaster portal. The Shrike makes a brief cameo, but immediately leaves without dropping any sick beats, which is a huge disappointment. Aenea and crew decide to raft down the river to the next Farcaster, which gives Raul time to feel paternal towards Aenea, which is just all kinds of gross given what we know of their future. They get caught in a storm and “Yee-haw!” a bit, as you do, before finally ending up through the other portal and onto Mare Infinitus. Their big plan is to drift aimlessly across the infinite ocean and hope they come across the next Farcaster portal. Infuriatingly, this works. However, Raul needs to make a brief detour to distract some nearby Pax so they can sneak by. Meanwhile, Father-Captain de Soya and his crew spend two months hopping around to eight different planets, and Sam insists on telling Danielle about each one, even if they don’t matter, because he loves sharing the pain. Eventually, de Soya comes to Mare Infinitus where he hears about an attack a few months ago by a single man. This, de Soya correctly concludes, was Raul, and he’s delighted to have his first lead in months. Unfortunately, Raul was killed in the attack, or at least the book tries to make it look that way, but since Raul is the one “writing” the book, it’s not much of a fake-out. So join us as we delve deep into the relationship between Raul and Aenea, and into more Keats poetry and philosophy (finally!), and, most importantly, try to find out just why we’re being told about those fly-cycles!
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This week Danielle brings part two of the 2023 Thai drama La Pluie (ฝนตกครั้งนั้น ฉันรักเธอ). When we last left off, Tai had just seen Phat being kissed by Phat’s ex-girlfriend. Shocking as this is, Tai does the adult thing and talks to Phat to clear up any misunder- Kidding! He throws a tantrum and runs off into the mountain wilderness with no jacket or water. Unsurprisingly, by the end of the day Tai is not doing well and everyone else is very worried. Luckily, it starts to rain so Phat hears Tai’s voice, and Tai somehow guides them to his rescue. In a missive twist, Lomfon also hears Tai (and maybe Phat?) in his head. This weird, three-way soulmate phenomenon will go criminally under-examined in this story and is, frankly, a massive missed opportunity to end the show with a throuple. Anyway, drama ensues as Lomfon thinks Tai might be his soulmate, Tai’s bother Thian is hurt by Lomfon’s lack of interest in himself, and Phat becomes uncharacteristically jealous and codependent on Tai. Luckily, the wild coincidences have come to a middle as the following items are revealed, listed here in no particular order: Lomfon was saved from being hit by a car several years ago by a mysterious stranger he’s been in love with ever since. That mysterious person turns out to be Tai. Phat had a next door neighbor several years ago that was going through a rough time since his parents were getting divorced, so he had his grandmother smuggle notes of support back and forth between them, but they never met in person despite literally sharing a fence. That mysterious person turns out to be Tai. Sam basically gives up at this point. Anyway, the rest of the story is pretty much your typical drama shenanigans playing out until everyone is happily paired off. However, Sam and Danielle do create an amazing alternate story about Phat trading a cured animal to a little girl in the style of a back-alley drug deal, so keep an eye out for their next book: Big Phat: Animal Health Dealer.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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This week Danielle brings the first part of the 2023 Thai drama La Pluie (ฝนตกครั้งนั้น ฉันรักเธอ). Tai is your normal twenty-something, except he has a not-uncommon condition where when it rains he goes deaf, except for the voice in his head which is his soulmate and they can talk in their heads, but only when it’s raining. Got that? As amazingly bonkers as that premise is, unfortunately, the first half of this series isn’t all that interested in answering the many, many questions Sam and Danielle have about this horrifying universe. To make matters worse for Tai, his parents, who are also voice-in-head-when-it-rains soulmates are getting divorced, and it’s caused him to reject the soulmate voice in his own head and he refuses to meet that mystery man. The concept of time, as usual, is a shambles in this TV show, especially as it’s told primarily through flashbacks, but at some point Tai takes a cat to the vet and discovers the super-hot veterinarian Phat is actually his soulmate, and he starts to regret rejecting him. There are also some shenanigans where Tai hears Phat making-out with someone (what a constant horror-show this world is) and pegs him as a bit of a playboy. At another point, Tai’s ridiculous brother Thian blows up at someone named Lomfon in a bookstore for picking up a book. Tai’s smooths things over but, uh oh, it looks like Lomfon may have a crush on Tai, but double uh-oh becuase Lomfon and Thian are in the same film class and Thian might have a crush on Lomfon. It’s at this point Sam taps-out and all but begs for the high-school relationship drama to end and the crazy rain shenanigans to resume. For better or worse, Danielle leaves him wanting more as she promises that part two ratchets up the insanity. But just before ending, she leaves us with this cliffhanger: Tai, after hooking up with Phat, accidentally walks in on him being kissed by his ex-girlfriend, dun dun dunnnnnnnnn! Join us next time for the thrilling, and truly insane, conclusion.
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This week, Sam rounds out the Winter Bizarre with the 2007 ABC Family movie Holiday in Handcuffs. Melissa Joan Hart (character name unknown) is always trying to please her very demanding parents, but this year she’s excited because she’s bringing her successful boyfriend to the family Christmas trip to a rural log cabin. However, after tanking a job interview, Melissa is dumped by that same boyfriend mere hours before they were supposed to leave. What’s a girl to do? Easy: Kidnap the nearest available man, in this case Mario Lopez (character name also unknown). This sets Melissa on a wild ride where she has to convince her family that the very-much-not-happy-to-be-there Mario is actually her boyfriend, so they can all just get off her back, okay. This is, obviously, a perfect plan, and through a series of truly convoluted events, and aided by some remarkably oblivious family members and a Mario Lopez who could really be doing more to escape, Melissa mostly manages to keep up the ruse. However, things start to get serious when Melissa sees how much her family all love Mario, and Mario develops Stockholm Syndrome. Crazily enough, the movie doesn’t end when Melissa gets busted for kidnapping, but somehow there’s still a lot more to the story. Other highlights include: A strange family tradition involving a “key master”, a surprise interest in art from both characters, some sporadic narration, and a drunken grandmother threatening to shoot police officers with a flintlock pistol. Seriously, this movie is just all the bananas.
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Danielle kicks off our Winter Bizarre/Switcheroo season with the 2021 Hallmark movie Next Stop, Christmas. Angie is your average New York doctor whose life is terrible because her parents are divorced and, despite having good friends, is single. The horror. Luckily, the universe is here to fix Angie not living the life planned for her. More specifically, Christopher Lloyd gives Angie a magic ticket so that when she gets on the train to Yonkers, she falls asleep and wakes upon a much older train ten years in the past with her then boyfriend, soon to be rejected fiancée Tyler. Angie is, understandably, upset but goes with it and decides to use the opportunity to enjoy her last good Christmas (in her mind). However, things are not as rosy as she remembers as her parents are having marriage issues and she’s oblivious about how distant she is from her sister. It’s around this time that they run into Angie’s childhood friend Ben, and here’s where Sam smells a love triangle, but it’s really more of a Ben pining over Angie for far too long, verging on creepy. Angie quickly deduces that her rejection of Tyler’s proposal is why she’s back in time, and she also decides to parent trap her mom and dad into fixing their marriage. She accomplishes this in the most ludicrously infuriating way, but for some reason still isn’t returned to her own time. This tees the movie up for an ending that is so full of dread and psychological horror that Sam and Danielle can only conclude that the powerful time-imp Christopher Lloyd is exacting revenge for a stiffed tip.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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As a Winter Bizarre gift to our listeners, we have an extra special bonus episode for you! Friend of the show Filip from the podcast Mind Duck Books had us on as guests for his episode on the book Slugs. During that episode he had a quiz for us where the winner would receive a box of various snacks and treats from Japan. Sam won (though Danielle disputes the results), but he said he was going to send each of us a box anyway. Well, he made good on that threat so we decided to podify those boxes of snacks! So join us as we open, taste, and greatly enjoy a wonderful gift of snacks from across the ocean.
Warning: This episode contains some minor sounds of chewing and eating, misophones should probably skip this one.
For more context, check out the Mind Duck Books episode where Filip, Danielle, and Sam all discuss the book Slugs. You can find Mind Duck Books on Twitter and Instagram, and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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We’re back in record time with part three of the 1996 Dan Simmons novel Hyperion. Danielle makes a much better showing this time, recapping the previous episode with aplomb. After letting Aenea escape after emerging from the Time Tombs, Father Captain de Soya is regrouping in the Parvati system with his Swiss Guard commandos to capture Aenea when she arrives. During the journey, Aenea and Raul spend some quality, and slightly creepy, time together. Skinny dipping is involved. Anyway, Aenea essentially improvises a plan where she threatens to kill everyone on her ship if de Soya doesn’t let her escape. Not willing to risk it, de Soya agrees, but then just tracks them to their next destination in Renaissance Vector, a heavily fortified Pax world, so it doesn’t seem like much was accomplished by this whole gambit. While waiting again for their arrival, de Soya starts having dreams about Aenea as his daughter, and this is where Danielle starts feeling completely over this whole story. Really, it only gets more infuriating from there, as the method in which the ragtag crew lead by a child escape yet again is absolute nonsense. It may be short, but this episode is especially dense with nonsense, raising perhaps the biggest question of the series so far: How the heck is the river Tethys still flowing?
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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The Great Switcheroo is back, now with a Winter Bizarre flavor! Danielle and Sam have each selected three holiday media options and their co-host must choose one for their Winter Bizarre episode. Sam has taken pains to find several time travel holiday movies to keep the Hyperion theme running, while Danielle has found, somehow, another holiday moving featuring a pro-wrestler for Sam. But will either of them pick those options? Find out on now, and then tune in during the Winter Bizarre to hear how they enjoyed their choices.
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After a spooky hiatus, Sam is back with more of the 1996 novel Endymion. The biggest fallout for Sam’s diversion into Slugs is that poor Danielle is left completely unable to recall anything that happened in the first part of Endymion. Luckily, not much went down, so it’s on to part two! Father Captain de Soya has returned to Pacem, and after a brief resurrection and Mass, he meets with some of the top brass of the Church. He’s informed that the Pax somehow knows that Brawne’s daughter Aenea is scheduled to emerge from the Time Tombs in the near future. De Soya is tasked to retrieve the child when she appears, or pursue the child wherever she goes until he does capture her, and then return her to Pacem. De Soya is assured that no harm will come to her, only that she will be saved. Despite finding that not so reassuring, de Soya heads out to take command of Pax forces to capture a child. Back in Endymion, Endymion (the person) is back from exploring the city. During dinner, Martin assures Raul that he’s going to be grossly outmatched and outgunned in his attempt to rescue Aenea. However, Martin has a secret weapon, that just happens to be the same secret weapon that always appears: the old Hawking mat! So Raul grabs his apparently essential tricorn hat, hops on the mat, and speeds through the labyrinth to sneak into Time Tomb valley. In the valley itself, de Soya readies his troops as a massive sandstorm rolls in, which can only mean one thing: DJ Shrike is on his way! So the big questions remain: Will Raul rescue Aenea? Can they escape the Pax? Will Danielle remember any of this next time? Hopefully we’ll find out!
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Danielle concludes Spook Retorts this week with the cult 1998 movie The Faculty. It seems like a perfectly ordinary day at an average high school in Ohio: The coach (Robert Patrick) is raging at the football team and stomping sprinklers, the teachers are complaining about the lack of funding for everything except the football team, and a new girl (Laura Harris) joins the school which is populated with your typical cliques. While looking for a scoop for the school paper in the teachers’ lounge nerd kid Casey (Elijah Wood) and cheerleader Delilah (Jordana Brewster) seem to witness the murder of the school nurse (Salma Hayek) at the hands of other faculty members. Of course, by the time the police show up everything is back to normal, but the kids are convinced something’s up. One clue is a worm one of them finds outside and which is immediately identified by the science teacher (Jon Stewart) as a strange, aquatic parasite. The students realize the faculty have been drinking tons of water, so clearly something like this parasite is infecting them and trying to take over the world. After jumping to this conclusion, not once do they question the logic of a a creature starting its invasion in Ohio of all places. Anyway, later the students are attacked by the science teacher, but learn that if you stab one of them in the eye with a pen full of drugs made by burnout-genius student Zeke (Josh Hartnett), they die. The students, proving that if jumping to conclusions was an Olympic sport they’d all have gold, surmise that the drugs must be deadly to the parasite, and also there must be, as freaking always, a queen parasite they can kill to immediately save everyone with no repercussions. So our motley crew of unlikely friends immediately put in action a plan to save humanity by…doing some of Zeke’s drugs. Things don’t really go much better for them from there, but what did you expect from Ohio?
Check out Danielle and Sam on Rewatch Recap podcast discussing the Snick show Roundhouse. Find it on Twitter @dustin_holden, Instagram @therewatchrecap, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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Spook Retorts is back, and this week Sam shares the 1988 cult horror movie Slugs! When people start dying in mysterious ways in a small town, it’s up to county health inspector Mike Brady to uncover the mystery. Why is it up to the health inspector to do this? That is among the many, many questions this movie steadfastly refuses to answer or even acknowledge. Anyway, Mike Brady first encounters the slugs’ work when he is called to help evict an old drunk. Why he was called to assist in an eviction is yet another mystery. The man, they find, has been reduced to a bloody skeleton, and it’s not long before more bodies show up. Mike eventually enlists the help of generic movie scientist John in his burgeoning murder slug theory, since John is an expert on slugs, and also everything else. It’s about halfway into the movie when Danielle and special guest Filip start to wonder how a slug invasion could be remotely threatening. Unfortunately, neither Sam nor the movie is able to demonstrate any way in which slugs could be threatening. Nevertheless, the slugs’ body count continues to rise, mostly by catching people who aren’t paying attention during sex, or by causing people to blow up their greenhouses/meth labs. So join us for this Spook Retorts romp into B-move fun as we see if an ordinary town can survive the slugs! Spoiler: the ultimate solution to the slug threat does way more death and destruction than the slugs ever would have.
Keep an ear out for a soon-to-be released Mind Duck Books episode where Filip, Danielle, and Sam all discuss the book Slugs on which this movie was based. You can find Mind Duck Books on Twitter and Instagram, and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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This week Danielle completes a double-feature with the 2007 movie Blood and Chocolate. Hold on to your hats werewolf fans, because we’re back with lycanthropes! If you hoped this movie shares more than a name with the book, prepare to be greatly disappointed. This time, our much more adult werewolf Vivian is in Bucharest, and while breaking into a werewolf church (go with it) she runs into Aiden, a graphic novelist making a new book about werewolves, of course. Aiden is super into Vivian but she doesn’t feel the same at first. That’s the boring stuff, the crazy stuff is that now the city seems to be run by the werewolves now called loups-garoux. They also seem to abduct people, possibly criminals, to hunt for funsies. Vivian is not into the hunts, but her cousin Rafe is, and the pack leader Gabriel really don’t like humans at all. Also, he wants to dump Vivian’s aunt Astrid to hookup with Vivian, but now it’s somehow even creepier than in the book. Anyway, as you might expect, Vivian and Aiden start dating in secret, but that secret doesn’t last long. When Gabriel finds out, he sends Rafe to confront Aiden in the bone cathedral (Sam’s favorite part) and utters possibly the greatest line in cinema history. While the plot seems thin, that’s because the movie is just stuffed full of irrelevant werewolf lore that Danielle loves and Sam is just confused by. So come learn if the movie is as good as the book (spoiler: it’s not). Oh yeah, there’s also a prophecy, but it super doesn’t matter. Enjoy!
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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This week Sam takes us back to Hyperion with the1996 Dan Simmons novel Endymion. Hyperion is back and Danielle is thrilled! Picking up around 274 years after the conclusion of the previous book, Endymion opens with some narration by a man named, wait for it, Raul Endymion. We learn that Raul grew up on Hyperion, did a bunch of odd jobs, and eventually ended up leading a duck hunting expedition that went disastrously wrong. Raul is blamed for the temporary deaths (remember those cruciform parasites? They're back in a big way!) of the people he was leading on the hunt and is sentenced to death. However, just as he is about to be executed by just one of many overly complicated death machines to appear in this book, he is in fact only rendered unconscious. It's also important to note that in the years since the "Fall" a new theocratic government has taken over lead by the Catholic Church and based around the gift of immortal life via the cruciform parasites which they now control. When Raul wakes up, he's in the ruined city of Endymion (yup, it's a city too!) and, notably, not executed. He is soon brought to see the nearly mummified, but still living, poet Martin Silenus who wants to give him a job. Brawne Lamia's daughter, the One who Teaches, disappeared into the Sphinx Time Tomb when she was 12, over 260 years ago. Somehow, Martin knows she's scheduled to emerge in just a few days and wants Raul to retrieve her and keep her safe from the Church and its military arm the Pax, who also somehow know this schedule and want to kill or capture her. Speaking of, Father-Captain Federico de Soya is pulled off his task-force hunting Ousters (still considered an enemy) to engage in some secret mission of the utmost importance. If you're feeling lost in all of this, you should probably go back and listen to all the Hyperion episodes again; it won't help, but they're pretty fun!
Check out Sam and Danielle on the Mind Duck Books podcast episode about the Fall of Hyperion. Find Mind Duck Books on Twitter @mindduckbooks, Instagram @mindduckbooks, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
This week Danielle brings the 1997 Annette Curtis Klause novel Blood and Chocolate. It's not even Spook Retorts yet and Danielle is bringing the werewolves! Vivian is your average teenage werewolf who just moved to a new town because her family was chased away from their previous home by an angry mob that burned down their home and killed a bunch of her pack, all because the group of teenage boys in her pack had been murdering a few of the people in that town; total overreaction. Anyway, since her dad was the pack leader (don't worry, Sam doesn't let that bad wolf science slide) they pack needs to pick a new one, and the expected top dog (ha!) is Gabriel, who's also dating Vivian's mother. As for herself, Vivian has a picture she made published in the school journal next to a story by some boy named Aiden about transforming into a wolf. Vivian is disappointed to learn that Aiden isn't another werewolf, just a nerd who dresses like a hippie, but Vivian decides to date him anyway, much to the dismay of her pack and especially Gabriel who, in addition to dating her mother, is also kinda into her, and it's all kinds of gross. The other problem is the teenage boys in her pack are still up to their shenanigans and not at all regretful about all the murder, so we're sure that won't cause any problems. Finally, in Sam's favorite scene, Vivian decides to reveal her wolf side to Aiden and it does not go well. Distraught, Vivian blacks out from having wolfed-out too hard and wakes up the next day to learn there's been a murder. Afraid she's losing control, and might cause her family to be uprooted again at the very least, Vivian starts to panic. But first, she stalks her ex and then trashes the room of his new maybe-girlfriend, because teenagers. So we hope you enjoy this very out of season spooky book where the scariest part about it is the patriarchy.
This week Sam brings Danielle the 1983 animated rock adventure film Rock & Rule. In the distant future, mutant animals have taken over the planet, and they only want one thing: To rock out! Well, most of them do. Semi-retired super-rocker Mok (who looks like an old rat version of David Bowie) wants to find a magical voice that will activate the Armageddon key so he can summon a monster of destruction from another dimension for reasons that are spectacularly unclear. Anyway, when Mok's magic ring (just go with it) detects the voice of down-and-out rock band member and rat singer Angel's voice, he knows he's found the right person. So he promptly kidnaps her and escapes in a zeppelin that transforms out of his home (this movie is bananas). They are perused by Angel's band mates, including her kinda boyfriend Omar, who follow them to Nuke York on a rescue mission. However, Mok has both tricks and magic up his sleeve to thwart them, so they're in for a real fight. If this movie seems light on plot, that's because it's heavy on rock with many original songs by Cheap Trick, Lou Reed, Debbie Harry, and Iggy Pop. It may be short, but Sam certainly has a blast with this insane animated rock-venture, and Danielle is just amused to hear Sam reciting so many lyrics. There's only one question left: Are you ready to rock?!
This week Danielle brings Sam the classic 1993 Nora Ephron movie Sleepless in Seattle. Sam, the Tom Hanks character henceforth referred to as Tom to avoid confusion, recently lost his wife. In his grief, he decides it's a good idea to move him and his eight-year-old son to Seattle from Chicago. Also, Tom is an architect because he's a romantic interest in a 90's movie. Anyway, in Seattle Tom's son calls into to a national radio therapist show (somehow this isn't Fraiser) to lament that his dad hasn't found a new love in the mere 18-months since his mother died. Coincidentally, Baltimore based...journalist? Annie (Meg Ryan, of course) hears the radio show and immediately becomes creepily obsessed with Tom despite already being engaged to the perfect man: future president and ghost mansion owner Bill Pullman. Annie decides to abuse her journalistic position and also hires a private investigator to track Tom down. She also writes him a letter saying they should meet on the Empire State Building on Valentine's Day, so she's gone full wacko. Tom, meanwhile, has begun dating a lovely woman, but his son is determined to break them up because he read Annie's letter and thinks they should be together instead. And here's where the movie takes a hard turn into crazy town. Annie lightly stalks Tom and his son, his son continues to be a jerk and manages to run away to New York. Annie is also just the worst to her fiancé, who's just the nicest and best person, as she waffles back-and-forth about whether she should run off to the Empire State Building to maybe meet a man she has only heard on the radio and dump Bill Freaking Pullman. So join us to hear Sam and Danielle lose their minds as they try to figure out why anyone would root for these people to get together.
This week Sam brings on the Disney with the 2023 direct to streaming movie Crater. In the not too distant future, humanity has just gotten kind of bored with Earth and decided to invest everything in a new planet Omega. This movie is not about that, instead we follow some kids, and specifically Caleb, living in a mining colony on the Moon. Caleb's father recently died in a mining accident, and since his mother died a few years earlier, Caleb is awarded a one-way trip to Omega, hooray! Only Caleb doesn't want to go to Omega and leave all his friends behind. Friends like Dylan, Marcus, Borney, and the new addition, Addison. Caleb's father always told him about how he used to take Caleb's mother to visit a special crater, so Caleb and his friends decide to steal a rover and take a road trip during a meteor storm lock-down. They make their way across the moon's surface, stopping briefly to play baseball (sure), and then also to use their oxygen tanks to play jetpacks (what?!). The jetpack game, predictably, goes awry, but once everyone is back safe inside the rover, they head to an abandoned model home showcase to restock. It should also be mentioned that, although this is a largely upbeat children's movie, this society is freaking dark. We learn that the miners on the Moon are essentially indentured servants laboring for a ticket to Omega that never comes and passing down that burden of servitude to their children. There's also no entertainment on the Moon, no books or music, the children only learn about mining in school, and are never allowed to leave the small colony dome. And lest you think Earth is doing any better, Addison recently moved to the Moon from Earth after her parents divorced and her mom took her younger brother to Omega (a 75-year trip in stasis) so then her dad took her to the moon to spite her mom. Absolutely terrible. Anyway, the children continue their adventure to the crater, but what they find there is totally bonkers, as is the ending of this movie which left both our hosts completely baffled.
This week Danielle brings Sam the 1994 Don Bluth animated feature Thumbelina. In past France, of an indeterminate time ago, a lonely woman secures a magic barley corn which grows a flower which, in turn, an adolescent girl pops out of fully formed but just two inches tall. Unfazed by this nightmare, and possessing a sick sense of humor, the woman names her new "child" Thumbelina. As a teenage girl fresh to the world, Thumbelina is lonely with literally no one in the world she can relate to. Fortunately, the fairy prince (go with it) happens to be out riding his apparently massive bumblebee and sees Thumbelina falling instantly in love with her. After a quick flight on the bee, Thumbelina is on board, and really, he's definitely her best option. However, while they were out and about a toad named Grundel had also fallen in love with Thumbelina and has his mom (voiced amazingly by Charo) kidnap her to become part of his song troupe/wife. Thumbelina escapes, but is set upon by just so many random animals who all lust after this diminutive human teenager, and Sam is intensely disturbed by all of it. The only creature not wanting to marry Thumbelina is a bird that does all he can to help her except the only thing that would actually help, which is fly her around. With the fairies forced to bring on winter (oh yeah, they control the seasons) after a full two days of autumn, Thumbelina is desperate to find her love the prince before she is forced to either freeze to death or marry a mole at the behest of a mouse voiced by Carol Channing. This movie is bonkers, y'all.
This week Sam crashes to Earth with the 2022 Roland Emmerich film Moonfall. During a routine satellite repair mission—which astronaut Halle Berry (Sam forgot her character name) went on instead of her honeymoon—things go terribly wrong. A mysterious goo causes the space shuttle to lose power and Halle Berry is knocked out. Luckily, her astronaut buddy Ryan (née Brian) manages to land the shuttle safely. For his heroism, he's promptly fired and loses his wrongful termination lawsuit against NASA. Years later, a man pretending to be a professor is convinced that the Moon has been knocked from its orbit and, oh by the way, is also a massive alien built mega-structure powered by a captured white dwarf star; ya know, normal stuff. No one believes him (obviously) even though NASA, now with Halle Berry in a leadership position, has noticed the Moon moving closer to Earth. This is, obviously, a massive problem, and the standard disaster elements of floods, meteorites, and earthquakes pummel Earth. Halle Berry calls on her old buddy Ryan to pilot a mission to bring an EMP bomb to the Moon to defeat the evil goo, which she is convinced is a malevolent, alien AI that, once defeated, will allow the Moon to correct itself back to its normal orbit. It's at this point Sam's head explodes with the terrible science and insane conclusions jumped to in this movie. There's also a subplot where Ryan's delinquent son is on a mission to take Halle Berry's son to Colorado where her ex-husband is holed up along with Ryan's ex-wife and her new husband. Apparently, Colorado is the safest place to be if the freaking Moon crashes into the Earth. Ryan and crew mount up to take the fight to the Moon, but can they defeat an alien AI? Why is the AI intent on attacking humans in the first place? What the heck is the Moon? We promise, the answers to all these questions and more are both forthcoming and extremely stupid.
This week Danielle concludes the Janie series with the 2013 Caroline B. Cooney novel Janie Face to Face. Janie is headed off to college and wants to use that as an opportunity to assert her independence from her family. She does this by only going back to stay with her family every weekend. Also, Janie’s Connecticut parents are now in assisted living since her father is not doing well after the stroke he had in the last book and they somehow lost all their vast wealth. Janie decides that’s a good enough reason to start distancing herself from them. At the same time, we’re introduced to Hannah and are gifted little vignettes that tell the story of how she kidnapped Janie. This sections are not kind to Hannah, and also amazingly bonkers. Meanwhile, at school, Janie meats a new boy, Mike Hastings, who quickly reveals himself to be an absolute creeper. However, Janie decides that’s all fine until she learns that Mike has been working with a supposed true crime writers to investigate her life for his latest book. In what might be her only good decision in this book, she dumps his butt. However, the rest of her family is still receiving solicitations from the writer, and some of them seem far more willing to talk than Janie is. In another disturbing trend, Stephen and Janie both reunite with their terrible exes, Kathleen and Reeve respectively. In a spur-of-the-moment decision at Janie’s departure from a visit, Reeve proposes by shouting his request across the airport (romantic) and Janie actually says yes. Wild. Anyway, it soon becomes clear that the person behind the book, and the investigation, into Janie’s life is not what he seems to be, and the revelation has the potential to upend Janie’s life forever (but it definitely won’t).
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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This week the kangafus are back as Sam brings the 2002 movie Warriors of Virtue 2: The Return to Tao. What becomes most apparent in this episode is how bad of and idea it was for Sam not to prepare by listening to the previous Warriors of Virtue episode as he remembers almost nothing about the story, the characters, or even what he and Danielle talked about during that episode. This is extra unfortunate since this movie dives right in expecting you’re already a Warrior of Virtue expert as we rejoin Ryan Jeffers, now in Beijing for the international highschool wushu tournament. After the previous captain of the US team had to drop out, Ryan, who hadn’t even made the team, was brought in as the substitute captain, and already this film is bonkers. You might expect Ryan to be very good at wushu if they brought him in as the new captain, but he is, in fact, quite terrible. Anyway, after he and his buddy bop around Beijing for a few days, entirely unsupervised, Ryan once again finds himself in an abandoned building and being sucked through a portal to the land of Tao. There he meets Yasbin, who serves as the exposition machine of the movie and, true to purpose, tells Ryan that Tao is once again under threat, this time from Dogon and his absolutely incredible henchman. Seriously, that man henches better than anyone Sam has ever seen. Anyway, Ryan goes to see Queen Amythis (who knew Tao has a queen?) and learns that the Warriors of Virtue have been nearly all defeated and captured by Dogon. You’d think the mystical land of Tao would have someone better than a not-very-good-at-wushu teenager from Earth to help them, but nope, Ryan is the best they got apparently. If this plot all seems both dull and convoluted, don’t worry, as the movie progresses things make way less sense and thus are way more fun. Also, be sure to stick around to see Sam at the angriest he’s ever been as this film betrays him on a deeply personal level. Fun!
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This week Danielle brings back the game But What Do They Think, where she presents reviews to Sam and he tries to guess what media piece they’re about. It goes about as you’d expect, which is to say it’s a struggle, but the real gold is all the amazing, actual reviews Danielle managed to find. So enjoy as we review the reviews!
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This week Danielle has devised a game to test how well our hosts remember the media they’ve already shared. With the task to summarize their media piece in one minute or less, it’s no surprise that things go hilariously wrong as Danielle and Sam struggle to recall even the most basic details about pieces they spent hours talking about.
Check out Danielle and Sam as they join Dustin for the I know What You Did episode of the excellent Rewatch Recap podcast. Find it on Twitter @dustin_holden, Instagram @therewatchrecap, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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This week Danielle is back to finish (kind of) the Janie series with the 2000 Caroline B. Cooney book What Janie Found. Janie’s back and more teen than ever! While rifling through her father’s office (he had a heart attack/stroke, don’t worry about it) she comes across a folder labeled “HJ” and immediately concludes it has something to do with Hannah. Also, Reeve is back in her life, trying just so hard to get back into her good graces, which, for some reason, she is allowing him to do. Reeve notices Janie looking at the folder but wisely decides not to pry this time since he’s still on thin ice. Janie discovers a checkbook in the folder and deduces that her father (the Connecticut one) has been sending money to his estranged daughter, and Janie is not on board with this. Meanwhile, in Colorado, Stephen is dating a girl named Kathleen who’s father just happens to have been in the FBI, and they are both super interested in the Janie kidnapping story, to a degree that is problematic. They grill Stephen about the story over dinner and this is in no way foreshadowing for how terrible they are. Janie, meanwhile, discovers that the checks her father was writing are being sent to, of all places, Colorado, so she concocts a plan to go there on the pretense of visiting Stephen, but with the intention of tracking down Hannah to get some answers. This is obviously a terrible plan, so of course her brother Brian and freaking Reeve come along. Unrelated, but Janie is also a bridesmaid in Reeve’s sister’s, Lizzie the Lawyer’s, wedding for reasons that are dumb. Anyway, in Colorado, Janie waffles on whether to leave a note for Hannah in the PO box, and in the meantime Kathleen, encouraged by her father, grills Janie about her experience as a “kidnapette”, and that term tells you all you really need to know about Kathleen and her father as people. The question remains: Will Janie confront Hannah and finally get the therapy she so desperately needs? All we can say is that there’s actually a fifth book, surprise!
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This week Sam is back on his direct-to-home-video adventure with the 2002 movie Cinderella II: Dreams Come True. Cinderella is back, and this time Sam is doing the previous movie to see if it fixes the timeline that Cinderella III absolutely destroyed (Spoiler: it does not). In this collection of three animated shorts loosely tied together into what could be generously called a “movie”, we start with the mice who have decided to write a book for Cinderella about Cinderella and her adventures. Mice, it turns out, are not very smart. And so they take us through three stories about Cinderella planning parties, because that’s apparently the main (only) export of this kingdom. The individual stories are pretty much what you would expect: Cinderella and her friends learn valuable life lessons, though no one, it seems, had learned the Prince’s name. The good news is that, aside from planning parties, these stories are chock-full of insanity. In no particular order: Jaq gets turned into a human but continues to be stalked by a cat determined to eat him, the Forbidden Curtains in the castle are finally opened, Anastasia finds several fountains to cry over, chocolate pudding is made that almost certainly contains hantavirus, and a horse kicks Anastasia through a building which would certainly kill her. While we never manage to understand the Cinderella timeline any better, we do learn two things from this movie: Cinderella is almost certainly a sociopath, and Pompom is our new favorite character.
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This week Danielle dips back into the Janie well with the 1996 Caroline B. Cooney novel The Voice on the Radio. Taking place a few months after the previous, Janie’s boyfriend Reeve is off to college in Boston, and Sam is still irked at not getting the prom scene that was teased. While Reeve is enjoying the college life and his new job at the college radio station, Janie is back home leafing through wedding magazines and fantasizing about their future. This is all totally normal teen stuff and not at all foreshadowing. One night, Reeve gets his big break and is given the chance to DJ on the mic. Did anyone bother to help Reeve come up with a plan for this show? Apparently not, as he’s shoved in front of the mic and immediately panics. So Reeve does what any normal person would, he spills the beans on Janie’s very traumatic and private kidnapping history, in what Sam declares is the progenitor of all true crime podcasts. This horrific betrayal of trust goes over extremely well with the radio audience and Reeve has the new hit show on campus. In the meantime, Janie is dealing with her school wanting to dedicate a page to her kidnapping story, something she is not on-board with since she feels it’s far too private (hear that, Reeve, ya jerk?!). Despite momentary feelings of unease, Reeve is all-in on trading Janie’s story and trust for college radio fame, and even manages to dodge a few close calls where Janie almost uncovers it all. Alas, we all know Janie will eventually find the truth and have to deal with that betrayal, and then Reeve will have to deal with his greatest challenge yet: Exercising even a minuscule amount of willpower. Whatever happens between Janie and Reeve, there’s one thing we can all sure of: This book will for sure end on a cliffhanger. Enjoy!
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This week Sam brings the culmination of six previous episodes with the final part of the 1990 Dan Simmons novel The Fall of Hyperion. Kassad is back and he’s ready to kick some Shrike butt! However, the Shrike is still a master of time so Kassad ends up in the distant future where he leads a band of humans against hordes of Shrike in a final battle that also determines how many Shrike get sent back in time. Also, Moneta is there and it’s her first time meeting Kassad due to time shenanigans. Back in the valley, Brawne sets off to the Time Tomb known as the Shrike Palace because her trip to the datumplane showed her that it has some connection to the Tree of Thorns. Sol goes back to the Sphinx to sit and wait for Rachel. Meanwhile, Keats/Severn has a not-very-helpful conversation with Ummon and then dies (kinda) and Leigh Hunt buries him under the watchful gaze of the Shrike (don’t ask how), and then finds himself stranded on Earth. Back with the Ousters, the Consul is informed that the Ousters are not, in fact, invading the Hegemony, it’s the TechnoCore, gasp! He’s also informed that at no point did his actions stem from freewill, but were manipulated by just everyone around him. He does not take that well. Also meanwhile, Meina Gladstone is struggling to find a path forward that doesn’t involve using the TechnoCore’s plan of a deathwand bomb that may or may not wipe out humanity (Spoiler: it probably will). that’s when the ghost consciousness of Severn/Keats decides to bop-around the datumplane/Metasphere a bit having shed his corporeal body. He takes this opportunity to get into the dreams of Meina and also His-Brand-New-As-Yet-Unnamed-Holiness Paul Duré, and give them some very cryptic information that really saves their butts. Will Meina be able to thwart the Core? Will humanity survive? How the heck does Brawne turn the Shrike to glass? Answers to two of those question, and definitely not all three, can be found in this action-packed, jumbo finale of the Fall of Hyperion! While you may be sad this is the end, Danielle could not be more stoked that it’s over.
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In anticipation of our mega-sized finale of (the first half) of the Hyperion series next week, Danielle and Sam take you back to where it all began with the first part of the 1989 Dan Simmons book Hyperion.
Far into the future after humanity has spread through the stars to many planets, a group of seven people are tasked with undertaking a pilgrimage to the Shrike, the mysterious and deadly creature that guards the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion. The Time Tombs are opening and there is also an Ouster migration cluster that is threatening to take the planet, and the secrets of the Tombs, away from the Hegemony. Thus Meina Gladstone, the CEO of the Hegemony, sends a message in a “fatline squirt” to the Consul, who is one of the pilgrims, and tells him to be on the lookout for an Ouster spy among the group. If none of that made sense to you, don’t worry, Danielle is convinced this story is perhaps the most incomprehensible one Sam has ever shared, and totally crazy to boot. Aboard a massive spaceship made from an actual, living tree, the pilgrims gather and agree to tell their stories so they can better understand why each of them was chosen for this journey. First up to share is the Catholic priest Lenar Hoyt, who tells the story of another priest, Paul Duré, who was exiled to Hyperion by the Church for falsifying data at an archaeological dig. Duré plans to study an isolated tribe on the planet, which is composed of people supposedly descended from the crew of a seedship which crashed there hundreds of years ago. To reach the village, Duré must traverse the deadly Fire Forests filled with tesla tress which both absorb and emit lightning, a phenomenon that greatly annoys Danielle since the trees don’t seem to burn themselves down in the resulting conflagration. When Duré finds the tribe, he notices they are dimwitted, physically bland, and seemingly bereft of humanity, and show a cult-like devotion to maintaining their population at seventy people. As he stays with them, he starts to uncover a horrifying secret that shakes his faith and leads him to extreme actions. Before all that, however, is the introduction of a word gross enough to challenge “khui” for the throne of uncomfortable words: Gymnosperm. So get ready for a deep dive into a massive space opera, full of stellar sci-fi words and technobabble, that only gets weirder and more incomprehensible the more it’s explained.
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This week Danielle brings more of the Caroline B. Cooney Janie series with the 1993 novel Whatever Happened to Janie? Jenny/Janie has contacted the Spring family, which she was taken from, and they demand that Janie sever ties with her current family and friends for at least three months and come live with them in New Jersey. It has to be one of the single worst decisions we’ve ever encountered in any media for this podcast. Janie, naturally, has a hard time adjusting to life with the new family, new school, and no friends. It doesn’t help that her new siblings alternate between pitying and resenting her, and sometimes blaming her for not thwarting her kidnapping as—and this can’t be stressed this enough—a three-year-old child. It’s criminal that no one in this family is receiving the therapy they all so desperately need. Janie eventually wears her new parents down enough that they let her call her previous parents, which at least seems to help a little. Also helping is that her hunky former neighbor Reeve is still all aboard the Janie train and drives down to take her out on a date. The plot to this book is about as thin as the previous book, but Sam still gets plenty upset at all the characters behaving abominably in a situation that requires way more empathy and kindness than is on offer. It also doesn’t help that the end of this book is so inconsequential that it feels like half the pages are missing. So enjoy as Sam continues to be mad at very slowly learning Janie’s story.
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This week Sam brings the penultimate episode of the 1990 Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion. Picking up where we left off last time, Severn takes a little meditation time to have visions of Meina Gladstone’s war room where the TechnoCore has just the best idea to defeat the ousters: Herd all the Hegemony people to safety in the labyrinths then use a novel WMD they just happen to have to wipe out the ousters. While many of the FORCE leaders love this idea, Meina, and also Danielle, are not on board. Severn also sees the consul being rescued from brigands by his friend Theo Lane, which is the most interesting Danielle has found the Consul to be in quite some time. Severn comes too and is joined by Leigh Hunt who has come to take him to talk to Gladstone while Father Duré goes to God’s Grove to talk to the Templars. Unfortunately, as Severn and Hunt step through the farcaster, they end up not in Government House, but in what Severn identifies as Earth, or its recreation, far from the web. Severn recognizes the area as Italy and he and Hunt are pushed towards Rome on the abandoned planet. Also, Severn develops an instant case of tuberculosis, because Keats. While Severn and Hunt conduct their slow trek to Rome, Meina and her generals observe the first invasion of Heaven’s Gate, which ends in the planet being destroyed from orbit, so not a great start. Meanwhile, the Consul makes it back to his ship with the help of Melio Arundez, but instead of returning to Sol and Rachel, he is requested by Meina to liaise with the Ouster swarm in the Hyperion system to negotiate a ceasefire. Also, Kassad is fighting the Shrike and while not doing too badly, is definitely not winning. Back on God’s Grove, Father Duré has a tête-à-tête with the True Voice of the Worldtree and the Bishop of the Church of Final Atonement. A lot of things are revealed in this conversation, and this is about the time where Danielle’s brain just gives up trying to understand everything. While this section is definitely jam-packed with intrigue and complications, we do at least get a new pope. Unfortunately, said pope is not our two hosts, but maybe next time.
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This week Danielle brings Sam back to the 90s with the 1990 Caroline B. Cooney novel The Face on the Milk Carton. Fifteen-year-old Janie Johnson is your average lactose-intolerant teen who just wants to fit in and kiss the cute boy next door. However, one day at school she sees a picture of a missing three-year-old child on a milk carton and is immediately convinced it’s probably her from twelve years ago. This immediately sends Janie spiraling into an existential crisis. Amazingly, Janie starts to have flashbacks to memories of her three-year-old life, improbable as it sounds for her to have one, much less just so freaking many memories from when she was three or younger. Janie begins to question if her parents are really her parents, but instead of asking them outright anything about it, or contacting the hotline from the milk carton for clarification, Janie stalks the family of the missing girl by coercing her kinda-boyfriend into driving her to New Jersey only to chicken out before actually knocking on the door. Finally, Janie confronts her parents who tell her a story about how her mother, their daughter, ran off to join a cult and then showed up one day to dump baby Janie on them, which they raised as their own. Amazingly, the story doesn’t just end there with everyone getting a lot of therapy. No spoilers, but Sam is very upset by the “twist” that everyone just accepts and is downright angry by the end book, so you know this is going to be a good one!
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This week Sam returns to his comfort zone with the 1990 Dan Simmons novel The Fall of Hyperion. The Time Tombs have opened and the Ousters are invading the WorldWeb, so things could be going better for the Hegemony. Severn is woken up just in time to take a little walk through the first-wave invasion worlds after filling in Meina Gladstone on the current goings-on of the pilgrims. Meina clues in Severn that his “dreams” of the pilgrims are extending beyond his supposed connection to the other Keats persona cybrid, and somehow this never occurred to Severn. Severn decides to meditate into a vision, and sees Martin Silenus stuck on the Tree of Pain, but through the power of reciting poetry he’s able to ease his pain, and that of those around him, enough to apologize to Sad King Billy who just happens to be impaled right near by. Convenient! Anyway, Severn then goes to Renaissance Vector and meditates again, this time getting a vision of Meina in her war room deciding on a plan to abandon the first-wave worlds so they can take the fight to the Ouster swarms to save the rest of the Web. Severn wakes up and is suddenly chased by a mob of Shrike Cult zealots before escaping into a library with a dedicated room full of Keats poems. Super convenient! Severn takes yet another nap and sees Brawne and Johnny traversing the Megaspehere to find Ummon, Johnny’s “father”, a megalith that loves to speak in koans, so that’s fun. It informs them about a war between a machine-created Ultimate Intelligence and a human-derived Ultimate Intelligence from far in the future, where part of the triune human Ultimate Intelligence fled back in time to the “present” to hide and keep from losing the war. Thus, the Shrike was sent back in time to track it down and finish the battle. That’s just such a brief summation of the lunacy contained in Ummon’s story. Also, Paul Duré is back in the web on Pacem. How did he get there? Two words: Corpse tunnels.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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This week Danielle thrills Sam by bringing the crabs back with the 1988 Guy N. Smith book Crabs’ Moon. In this companion novel to Night of the Crabs the cow-sized crabs are back! Kinda! This novel briefly mentions Cliff Davenport but instead focuses on a new set of characters that are entirely irrelevant to the overall story, so it’s thrilling stuff. Irey, young mother looking for a good man to bring excitement to her loveless marriage has her would-be lover killed by giant crabs, which is a real bummer as a start to her vacation. It gets worse as the resort she’s staying in is put into lock-down by the evil owner to prevent people from ruining the resort’s reputation or something. If you think this villainous billionaire will get his crabby comeuppance, boy, are you going to be disappointed. Anyway, they decide to build a wall of sandbags to keep the crabs out which is exactly as ineffective as you’d expect since Irey’s young children manage to escape and almost get murdered by crabs. Also, there was a crab living in a lake at the resort that just wanders off at some point, and Sam has many questions about this book, mostly focused on why it exists. There are more characters that get killed, some in hilarious ways, and not one of them matters to the story. The good news is that the crabs don’t disappoint being as weird as ever and, even better, Danielle returns with a fresh, steaming basket of Crab Facts!
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Elevator music courtesy of Stonefree.
We kick off the new year with a short! It’s Danielle’s turn to recall any details about the 2007 direct to video Disney threequel Cinderella III: A Twist in Time. Danielle does a decent job, but her holiday-addled brains are no match for the insanity that is Cinderella III. So enjoy as we reminisce about this fairy tale story and then become upset with it all over again.
Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.
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This week, Sam stares into the void as he shares the 2013 Hallmark movie Fir Crazy. Elise is your average high-powered business woman who hates Christmas. Not because Christmas did anything to her, but because she was forced to, gasp, work on her family’s tree lot during the holiday. Of course, Elise promptly loses her job and her loser boyfriend and finds herself with no choice but to return to the lot to shill trees where a hunky man looking to buy a Christmas tree (or four) shows up in pursuit of Elise. This is when Sam begins to unravel as he is clearly not strong enough to handle the insanity of Hallmark. This handsome white man quickly reveals himself to be an absolute serial killer which Elise seems totally fine with. However, she is reluctant to commit to dating the handsome man at first, given that she’s on the rebound dealing with being recently unemployed during the holiday season, which is all totally reasonable. Unless, of course, you’re in a Hallmark movie, in which case that’s you just being a Grinch who needs to lighten up. Sam descends into madness as the insanity well just gets deeper and deeper, and yet somehow the movie also has no plot. To compensate for the lack of plot, Danielle leads Sam down numerous cul de sacs which are all more interesting than the movie itself. The one bright spot is the villain of the movie played by Colin Mochrie, who is trying to shut down the tree lot as the new landlord of the store which the lot fronts. Why does he hate Christmas? We can’t tell you that here, but we can tell you it’s very stupid, as all character motivations are here. Will Elise hook up with the handsome man and learn the true meaning of Christmas? Will the grumpy businessman learn to accept the tree lot and learn the true meaning of Christmas? Does Hallmark absolutely not care about any other cultural or religious perspectives? If you think the answer to any of those questions is “no” you might be surprised by this episode. So join us for this jumbo episode which is Sam’s gift to the world. You’re welcome.
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In this week’s (not so) short, Partial Recall is back as Danielle challenges Sam to remember what she told him about the 2011 movie Red Riding Hood. Sam begins his recollection by promptly falling flat on his face, and it only goes downhill from there. Danielle relishes her sweet revenge as Sam struggles to recall the most basic plot details, but does somehow remember a werewolf contract was involved. So join us as Sam becomes outraged at this movie all over again.
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To kick off the Winter Bizarre, Danielle brings the 2002 movie It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie. Despite the absolute clunker of a title, this Muppet Christmas Movie does, indeed, contain many Muppets and their delightful antics. We open on a distraught Kermit killing the vibe at the Muppet Christmas party by lamenting that he’s lost the theater; it’s been repossessed by the bank. A celestial being of some kind named Daniel, or Danny El, (David Arquette) is watching Kermit’s misery from heaven (or something) and at first tries to convince his coworker (William H. Macy) that they need to intervene with a miracle. Ol’ Willy H. disagrees, and so Daniel goes straight to the person in charge: Whoopie Goldberg. Daniel explains what happened to Kermit in a flashback. Apparently, the previous owner of the bank died, leaving the evil Rachel (Joan Cusack) in charge. Rachel has decided to renege on the handshake agreement Kermit had with the previous bank owner to wait to collect on Kermit’s bank loan for the Muppet Theater until after their first week of performances. Rachel is deciding to stick to the letter of the contract which requires payment by midnight Christmas Eve. At this point, Sam thinks he’s identified the actual villain of the film: Kermit. The irresponsible frog somehow signed a contract on a bank loan with a term due before they could stage any shows at the theater, and which comes due at midnight (what?) on Christmas Eve (WHAT?!), and Sam cannot believe he then asks all his employees to forgo their salaries for a whole freaking year to cover his irresponsibility. Anyway, what follows is a smörgåsbord of guest stars and parodies of other Christmas movies and, for some reason, The Crocodile Hunter. So join us for this hilarious Muppet adventure that is most definitely bizarre and has Sam mumbling “Humbug” at Kermit.
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Our holiday schedule has arrived, which means it’s time for more games! This time Danielle has come up with a game where Sam and Danielle try to guess which of the three possible titles from another work in a franchise they’ve shared is real, and which the other person just made up. Are they good at it? Not really, but it does give them some great ideas for future episodes.
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The Fall of Hyperion is back as Sam finishes up part two of the 1990 Dan Simmons novel. The Consul, Sol, and Paul Duré have been hiding out with the inconsistently conscious Het Masteen hiding from a storm of the Time Tides. Masteen informs them of his original plan: to use the erg he brought to turn the Shrike's tree of pain into a spaceship and sail it through the stars possibly causing misery wherever he goes. The Shrike, apparently, is not on board with this plan, and after briefly abducting Masteen, he leaves Masteen to die, which he promptly and unceremoniously does, much to Danielle's complete bafflement. They find Brawne, meanwhile, has had a weird metal tentacle plugged into her neural shunt, and though physically alive, appears completely brain dead. We soon learn that sysadmin Shrike has managed to plug Brawne, and also the persona of Johnny Keats she was carrying, directly into the datumplane, and the digital avatars of Brawne and Johnny decide to go on an adventure through the TechnoCore looking for information. Meanwhile, Kassad emerges from a portal with Moneta in what appears to be the distant future when the time tombs were first created. He sees the Shrike's tree of pain with Martin stuck to it,and as he approaches to help, the Shrikes emerges. Soon, Kassad is surrounded by hundreds of Shrikes, but that doesn't stop him from charging in head long to fight them. Back in the valley, the others decide to send the Consul off on the Hawking mat he brought to try and retrieve his ship. Not much happens on the several days he flies back, but he does end up falling into a river, so that's fun. Meanwhile, Duré wanders off for some reason and is almost certainly taken by the Shrike. Now alone, Sol is approaching the moment of Rachel's birth. He dreams again of the voice demanding the sacrifice, and in an extra dirty trick, a manifestation of his daughter appears in his dream, begging him to sacrifice her. As the time tombs pulse and glow preparing to open there are only two questions remaining: Will Sol sacrifice his daughter? And will DJ Shrike stick around for the encore? Find the answer to at least one of those questions in this week's episode!
Despite everyone's best efforts, the Thankers are back! This time Danielle and Sam do a little ego stroking to grow their already prodigious senses of self-importance. So enjoy as they discuss some of the media and themes they've shared which they're thankful for, and just have all of the trouble speaking like normal human beings.
This week Danielle returns to her comfort zone with the 1999 Disney Channel Original Movie Can of Worms. Mike is your typical angsty teen, he doesn't feel like he belongs on Earth and no one understands him, especially his parents. He's on the football team at his dad's insistence, but he doesn't like it and isn't very good at it, though it does give him a chance to ogle the cute cheerleader Katelyn. Mike is also a massive computer nerd, but he gets bullied by Scott, the much more popular computer nerd/football player at school. After a series of insane, and quite lame, computer pranks, Katelyn takes a shine to Mike and asks him to make fancy, electronic Halloween decorations for the school dance. Oh also, Mike likes to tell stories and give PowerPoint presentations in his tree house about an alien baby that was launched into space after his home planet was invaded and the alien baby crash lands on Earth where it grows up and feels out of place. The alien baby is obviously supposed to represent Mike, and everyone knows Mike tells this story and freaking loves it. Anyway, the dance is a disaster and Mike runs home and steals his family's satellite dish to send a message into space about how he doesn't belong on Earth and wants to leave. What follows is a parade of absolute nightmares as a variety of grotesque aliens with horrific human teeth answer Mike's call. One, a dog that speaks out of a mouth on its collar, invites Mike to live on its home planet of Puppis (ugh) to escape the onslaught. Mike refuses, and eventually a series of maddening sit-com level misunderstandings leads to Mike's best friend's brother being kidnapped by a frog-like alien for its exotic zoo. Mike, Katelyn, his friend, and even his former enemy Scott all team up to save the brother, though Scott is really more tricked into it than anything. Will they succeed and save they day? Who cares! So long as we can end the movie and get away from the insane, eldritch abominations this movie considers fun aliens for kids, Danielle and Sam will put up with pretty much anything, except maybe Mike's useless prophetic alien dreams, that is.
Check out the excellent Rewatch Recap podcast on Twitter @dustin_holden, Instagram @dustincanread, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Sam takes Danielle back to Hyperion in part three of his epic journey through the 1990 book The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons. We're off to an amazing start as Danielle struggles to remember anything about the previous episode, but no time for that, we have a lot going on in this episode! The remaining pilgrims awake in the Time Tomb of the Sphinx, and before too long they are shocked to find that, rather than Father Hoyt, the cruciform parasite has resurrected Father Paul Duré. Duré seems rather sanguine about his being alive again, despite his best absolute torturous efforts to die earlier, and the Consul provides him with the records from his comlog so he can catch up on the pilgrims' stories. Meanwhile, Brawne and Martin set off back to Keep Chronos to retrieve more food and water, but Martin quickly detours them to the dead City of Poets where he plans to stay and write his cantos, which surely won't go wrong. Kassad, meanwhile, has found Moneta, but she doesn't know who he is (time-travel shenanigans, don't worry about it) but they fight and have sex anyway, so really, about as expected. Eventually the Shrike shows up and takes them all through a weird portal, which is a new thing for it to do. Also meanwhile, Meina Gladstone goes on a walk visiting all the worlds of the pilgrims and remunerates on the choices she made, which we're still largely unaware of, so not much is learned. Martin is writing furiously, approaching the conclusion of his cantos, when the Shrike shows up and drags him away to its massive tree of thorns. Martin, understandably, is absolutely livid that he isn't allowed to finish his work. Back in the valley, the pilgrims still there find a strange figure coming towards them, it's Het Masteen, he's back! Before we can learn more, we cut to Brawne, who wanders through the Keep, grabs some supplies, is briefly waylaid by a rock-slide, before going back to the valley and finding no one else there. That's when the Shrike shows up and slips a blade surgically behind her ear. Then we cut to Meina Gladstone, at a war briefing, and to the surprise of everyone in the war room, and absolutely no one else, the Ousters have outwitted them again, and are currently invading the web, having launched the invasion decades ago, traveling at sublight speeds to avoid detection. The Web seems absolutely screwed (they really should have purchased a dehubridifier), but Meina steps up, outlines a plan, and then decides to convene the government to declare war on the Ousters (we guess they weren't at war already?) and also maybe the TechnoCore. What does any of this mean? Absolutely no clue, maybe we'll find out next time!
Spook Retorts ends with a bang as Danielle shares the second installment of the Happy Death Day franchise with the 2019 movie Happy Death Day 2 U. Everyone's favorite character is back, that's right, it's Fine Vagina Kid, henceforth known as Ryan. He wakes in his car after being evicted from the dorm room he shares with Carter so he and Tree could get freaky. Ryan then heads to the physics lab where he's working on a magic device that blah blah blah something about time. That's not important, what is important is that the dean is shutting them down and then Ryan is killed by someone wearing a baby face mask, which is somehow, still, the mascot of this school. Ryan wakes up in his car, he's in a time loop! Tree is immediately clued in on this and helps Ryan capture his would-be murder, which is also Ryan. But, like, a different Ryan from another dimension? Or the first Ryan is from another dimension? Look, it doesn't matter, as the movie will completely forget about this entire premise mere minutes later when Ryan One activates his magic science device and accidentally sends Tree into another time loop. However, unlike when this device was apparently doing this in the previous movie, this time Tree ends up in another, slightly different dimension. At this point, Sam is just so angry at this movie for trying, and failing, to explain why all this is happening rather than just getting on with the fun parts of the movie; this is an emotion he will feel continuously for the rest of this episode. Anyway, in this universe Lori is not trying to kill Tree, Carter is dating Danielle which makes Tree jealous, and Tree's mom is still alive. However, Tree does manage to get herself killed a few times before enlisting the help of this universe's Ryan to help fix the magic science machine and end the loop. Why doesn't Tree have a doppelgänger in this universe? Don't ask questions, that's why. So join us for another fun filled romp through time looped shenanigans, where the twists are so dumb and out of nowhere they don't even earn the name twist. At the end, Tree must make the most difficult choice of all: Stay in this universe where her mom is still alive, or go back to the other universe for the boy she's been dating for, like, twelve hours. I know what choice I'd make.
Danielle's terrifying month continues as Sam brings her part two of the 1990 Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion. Brawne and Kassad return to the other pilgrims with the rapidly dying body of Father Hoyt, and they decide to call in the Consul's ship to see if the surgery on board can save Hoyt. However, as they pack to go meet the ship, Kassad's perimeter alarms go off and he leaves to investigate. The others trudge up the valley but the ship isn't there to meet them. It seems CEO Meina Gladstone has grounded the Consul's ship lest they be tempted to use it to abandon their pilgrimage, so the pilgrims decide to seek shelter from the storm in the Sphinx. Meanwhile, Severn is invited to go visit Hyperion, in person, by Gladstone, as she wants a "poet's perspective" on the situation. So Severn visits and runs into one Melio Alvarez, one time lover of the backwards aging Rachel. Severn interrogates Melio about if he still has feelings for the now infant Rachel, which seems like a real jerk thing to do to the poor man, and then he returns to the web, accomplishing not a whole lot on his trip. Back in the valley of the Time Tombs, Kassad is locked in battle with an unseen sniper he assumes is Moneta. He obliterates one of the Time Tombs, the Crystal Monolith, and then races across the valley floor to it smoldering structure, being heavily wounded in the process, but he sees a figure waiting for him high in the structure. Meanwhile, Severn goes to attend a briefing on the war with the Ousters and things are not looking good for the Hegemony. They will need to commit at least a third of their fleet to Hyperion to secure victory. When questioned about whether such an over-commitment is a prudent idea, Admiral Nashita assures everyone that while they grossly underestimated the Ousters up to this point, this time they're super-duper sure they got it all figured out and should win the war within a week, what could go wrong? We'll have to wait until at least next time to learn, as Danielle and Sam wrap this episode with perhaps their best business idea yet: The Dehubridifier, pre-orders are open now!
This week Danielle brings the laughs to Spook Retorts with the 2017 time-loop movie Happy Death Day. One day, a sorority sister wakes up after a night of blackout drinking in a random dorm room. So far, so college. The young woman, whose name is Tree (seriously), makes her way back home to her sorority house where her roommate offers her a cupcakes, since it's her birthday. Tree, being a jerk at this point, tosses the cupcake and seems determined to be mean to everyone around her, except the professor/medical doctor she's boning on the sly. That night on her way to a party, Tree comes across an apparently magic music box that plays Happy Birthday and is immediately stabbed to death by someone in a baby-face mask. It's important to take a moment here to explain that this college has a baby as their mascot, and they are apparently so proud of this fact they practically force everyone who even looks at the campus to take one of these masks. Both Danielle and Sam agree, it's the most horrifying part of the movie by far. Anyway, immediately upon her death Tree wakes up back in that dorm room and relives the day again, this time avoiding the music box, but still being killed later by a killer who is somehow the most impressive stalker of all time. Seriously, best, most dedicated murderer ever. So Tree spends the rest of her loops trying to uncover who is murdering her and how to stop it. She also undergoes some character growth, but that seems mostly incidental to the whole not being murdered motivation. As the movie goes on, you can enjoy Sam becoming increasingly frustrated at a time loop that makes no sense, capped off with a twist that somehow just makes everything more confusing. When all is said and done, however, Danielle and Sam think one thing is clear: Tree is definitely going to prison.
This week Sam kicks-off Spook Retorts by bringing Danielle's greatest fear: more Hyperion! Get ready to dive in to the 1990 Dan Simmons novel The Fall of Hyperion. The Hegemony is going to war. At a party to see the armada off, we meet a man who claims to be Joseph Severn, the one-time friend of John Keats. He has a meeting after the party with CEO Meina Gladstone, where it's revealed that he's not only another cybrid persona retrieval project of John Keats, but also has been dreaming the events of the Shrike pilgrims through his psychic link to the other Keats persona currently residing in the Schrön loop embedded in Brawne Lamia. If that sentence made no sense to you, you should really listen to the first Hyperion book; it won't help this make any more sense, but you'll at least know who those people are. Anyway, Gladstone wants Severn (née Keats) to report to her the progress of the pilgrims through his dreams. The pilgrims haven't really done much since the last book, having been unable to find the Shrike they set up camp and squabble about what to do. Eventually they go to bed, but Brawne wakes up to find Father Hoyt has wandered off to the now glowing Time Tombs, which can only mean one thing: DJ Shrike is in the house! Back in the Hegemony, Gladstone has bafflingly brought Severn to all her war briefings and given him the highest clearance. The Hegemony is supremely confident they can defeat the Ousters and defend Hyperion, though Severn thinks that's hubris given how little the Hegemony actually knows about the Ousters or their capabilities. Unsurprisingly, things start going south in the war fast. Meanwhile, Severn gets himself seduced, kidnapped, and interrogated all by the same person. In his drugged, expository ramblings, Severn helpfully reminds us that the Hegemony orchestrated the war with the Ousters to get to Hyperion, the only variable that the TechnoCore cannot account for, and thus may save humanity from otherwise certain extermination by the AI civilization. Back on Hyperion, we see that Hoyt, mad with pain, has entered the Jade Tomb where Brawne sees him get his throat slit by the Shrike. Will Hoyt survive? Find out next time (maybe) in part two!
Be sure to check out the Authorized Novelizations Podcast, especially The Starlight Barking episode featuring Danielle and Sam. You can find them on Twitter @authorizedpod, Instagram @authorizedpod, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Also, a shout-out the excellent Dustin Can Read and Watch podcast, you should check it out on Twitter @dustin_holden, Instagram @dustincanread, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
This week Danielle brings the 2022 Thai sci-fi rom-com movie AI Love You. Dob is a sentient AI office building who pines for the woman, Lana, who works inside of him, and if that sentence fills you with a creeping sense of horror, you and Sam have a lot in common.If you're looking for any rational reason why sentient AI buildings are a thing, this movie will disappoint. After Lana tanks her presentation, Dob helps her make a new one and then confesses his love for her. Lana dismisses it because, and this can't be emphasized enough, Dob is a building. Instead, Lana goes on a bad date with a creepy guy named Bob, which does not go well. Meanwhile, Dob's abnormal behavior is noticed and this is apparently just a normal thing that happens, where AI buildings develop human emotions, because the procedure of resetting Dob is immediately settled on. Coincidentally, Bob is the technician that is tasked with resetting Dob and while he's interfacing with Dob via VR goggles (seriously) Dob somehow downloads his AI consciousness into Bob's brain, taking over Bob's body. Now Dob (in the body of Bob) is able to pursue Lana as a human-ish thing. First, though, Dob must learn how to be a human, since apparently he was never programmed with basic human behavior, even though he was designed to be a helpful building for people. No, we don't understand any of this either. Anyway, Dob now must spend his nights learning about dating and trying to convince Lana to give Bob (who he's pretending to be) another shot, while by day he's puppeteering the building, so as not to arouse suspicion about the building not working. Did we mention there's a (maybe secret) network of these building AIs, including the building Lana lives in, all conspiring to help Dob (as Bob) get with Lana by deceiving her into thinking he's a better version of Bob. Lana eventually relents and they start dating, but the company the makes the robot buildings, Smart Plus, has dispatched their laser-chainsaw wielding AI hunter to recover Bob's body and remove Dob from it, because apparently AIs take over human bodies just all the freaking time in this horrific future. So join us for Danielle's turn sharing a sci-fi rom-com that definitely seems more like a horror film the more you think about it.
This week Sam brings the romance with the 1981 robot rom-com Heartbeeps. Val (Andy Kaufman) and Aqua (Bernadette Peters) are two companion model robots currently being stored in a factory for repairs. We'll leave it as an exercise to the listener to determine what the purpose of a "companion" robot is. However, after talking for a little while Val convinces Aqua and a hack-comedian robot that they all should leave the factory to go look at some trees. Apparently, this factory has no security, so Val jacks a van and they quickly crash into some woods, since he was programmed to drive, but seemingly not very well. Once they're discovered missing, two factory workers are sent out to recover them, but then also an automated tank called the Crimebuster also goes rogue and breaks out of the factory to chase the fugitive robots. No one in the factory seems to notice this latest robot escape, which is just an incredible indictment of this factory's operating procedures. Meanwhile, Val and Aqua have built themselves a robot child in the woods, primarily so it could be used as a pack-mule to haul around spare parts in a trailer strapped to it. Shortly thereafter, the troupe of robots finds a cave, and after a convenient helicopter scares away a bear, they hunker down. While alone, Val and Aqua find a new use for their pleasure centers (did we not mention that the robots seemed to be trained using pleasure to reinforce desired behavior? Because they are, and it's bonkers). However, the factory workers and Crimebuster robot are both separately hunting the fugitive robots, who are now intent on maintaining their freedom. The big question remains: Will our robot lovers succeed in escaping, or will they be returned to servitude? While the surprise reveal of a pet raccoon in a junkyard seems to sever Sam's tenuous grasp on reality, the stuff going on behind the scenes is equally insane as this movie tapped top talent like John Williams and Stan Winston for its production. So see what happens when you take a bunch of amazing talents and put them into the most insane movie possible, and see if two robots can actually fall in love (no, no they can't).
This week Danielle brings us the thrilling conclusion of the 1987 Hardy Boys novel Dead on Target by Franklin W. Dixon. The Hardys are on their way back to Bayport convinced that the infamous terrorist known as the Bullet is there to enact the opening night of his previous rehearsal bombing (no, a rehearsal bombing doesn't make sense, but don't ask questions). Back in Bayport, the Hardys and Frank's girlfriend (or maybe Joe's? Sam still isn't sure) Callie go to the police. However, the new officer in town, Sam Butler, is not buying their terrorist rehearsal bombing idea, which is really the only reasonable reaction to their story. Undeterred, the Hardy's decide to sneak into the mall at night to see if they can learn something. Fortunately for them, the mall is guarded exclusively by dogs for some reason, and even more bizarrely, Joe has brought a dart gun, since apparently every in this world just loves a worse version of a gun. While sneaking around, they stumble across the Bullet and instead of tranqing him, Joe shouts his name, alerting him to their presence and getting them all captured. Sam is unimpressed. The Bullet, equally as incompetent as the Hardys, merely ties them up in the mall basement near a pile of plastic explosives set to assassinate the not-yet-but-maybe-soon presidential candidate Walker. Why is this almost presidential candidate so important? Because something, something, anti-terrorism. Luckily, Callie was there with them and manages to escape and free them and Frank goes about disarming the bomb using the classic technique of a human pyramid. That was not a joke. With the bomb disabled, the Hardys still need to save Walker, for some reason, from the Bullet who surely won't give up that easily. Will they succeed? Will Joe get revenge for the death of whatsherface? Is there a Lion King Mufasa's death style scene? The answer to all these questions is of course yes, but it all happens in a way that only the Hardy boys can pull off: Hilariously.
This week Danielle returns to her teen detective roots with the Hardy Boys Casefiles book one, from 1987, Dead on Target by Franklin W. Dixon. Frank and Joe hardy are two young men who Sam cannot distinguish between despite Danielle's instance that they are, in fact, very different characters. The book opens with a dramatic scene of Joe's girlfriend, Iola, exploding in a car bomb at a political rally she was organizing for a presidential candidate. We cut back an hour and learn this rally is, in fact, a dress rehearsal for a political rally, which is definitely not a thing. After Iola gets explodified, Joe, who was a terrible boyfriend, is extremely distraught and Frank agrees to help him do what they do best: Incompetently attempt to investigate her murder until they luck into a solution. After talking to some people at the local mall, they're attacked by unknown evil people with, hilariously, dart guns. They escape in the car of a government agent they met earlier named Mr. Gray. A brief car chase later, where Joe earnestly tries to murder some of their pursuers, and the Hardy bros are told to go hide in South Carolina while Mr. Gray and the secret government organization he works for, The Network, takes care of the terrorist organization that attacked them. The Hardys are not ones to listen to reason, so they muster all the hacking skills that existed in 1987, and hack into an airport computer to determine that Mr. Gray is headed towards London, and they follow him there. They quickly foil an attempted hijacking which, considering the terrorist weapons were a single grenade and a can of mace, wasn't much of a threat to begin with. But the real mystery of this book, in Sam's mind, is just one thing: How are these inexperienced bothers consistently able to insert themselves into a secret government anti-terrorism organization? And further, how has this terrorist organization, known as the Assassins, existed since the freaking Crusades? Unfortunately, the Hardys have no answers to these questions, but with any luck they may yet solve the mystery of who killed Iola, and bring them to justice. So join us for part one of this fast-paced reboot of the classic mystery series!
For their 100th episode, Danielle and Sam are joined by their friend Jim who shares the first book of the The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, the 2017 novel All Systems Red. In the dystopian future, The Company is the major monopoly in the universe. Survey teams exploring worlds are contracted by The Company which also supplies at least one security unit robot for each team. One of these SecUnits has hacked its own governor to give itself free will and named itself Murderbot, and it has decided to use its new freedom to binge-watch soap operas and generally avoid people. Also, while Murderbot is called a robot, it's more of an human-looking android, possibly made from a corpse? It's unclear. Muderbot also has a dark history from before it hacked itself where it was accidentally ordered to murder its entire survey team. Murderbot's current assignment is a survey team of space hippies, and they eventually encounter another evil sabotaging survey team that isn't authorized to be on the planet and is undermining the space hippies for reasons that are largely irrelevant. The EvilSurvey team has been hacking other SecUnits using syringe darts (no idea how that works), which Sam thinks just shows that fleshy, human-like security robots are a bad idea. Murderbot is already hacked, so the dart has no effect on them, but eventually Murderbot fakes being hacked to infiltrate the EvilSurvey team in a plan so convoluted it can only be described as parody. Sam and Danielle do their best to follow a plot that seems almost perfunctory in a story that largely takes place in the mind of an antisocial robot and that is steeped in satire and Jim does an admirable job in the face of Danielle and Sam's goofy incompetence. So join us for our 100th episode where we've come a long way, but are still just as weird as ever!
This week Sam brings the long-awaited conclusion to the 1989 Dan Simmons sci-fi epic Hyperion. The pilgrims, fresh off the tramway, make a pit-stop at Keep Chronos, the now abandoned former resort hotel. As they settle in for the night, the sky explodes into battle as the Ousters begin their invasion. Our pilgrims, however, don't have time for such things as they'd rather hear the Consul's story. The Consul tells a story within a story about how a man named Merin, a Shipman aboard the Las Angels who came to Maui-Covenant ferrying the parts to build a farcaster. There, he falls in love with a local named Siri, but Merin can't stay, partly because he murdered a bunch of locals after they killed his friend (it's complicated). So, as Merin sails the stars back and forth he ages mere months for each trip while Siri ages eleven years, but every time he returns they still meet up, eventually even having children. Long story short, Siri eventually dies and Merin leads a doomed revolution against the Hegemony to protect Maui-Covenant. The only part of that which is relevant is that the Consul is his grandson and bitterly hates the Hegemony, but has worked for them biding his time. He was there when the Hegemony and TechnoCore encouraged the Ousters to attack Bressia as a test of their military strength, losing his wife and son in the war. He was eventually picked to liaise with the Ousters, this time to get them to attack Hyperion so the Hegemony could make it part of the WorldWeb and stymie the anti-human factions of the TechnoCore. If none of those machinations make sense, don't worry, it only gets more complicated from there. In the end, the Consul, with the help of the Ousters, manages to start the process of opening the Time Tombs, and now their opening is immanent. Would you like to know what's in the Time Tombs? So would we, but we'll all have to wait until the next book for that be answered, maybe. In the meantime, enjoy an ending that makes Danielle rethink why she ever agreed to doing this podcast, but at least she takes solace in our new favorite character: DJ Shrike, dropping beats in the Time Tombs!
This week Danielle brings the 2006 time traveling romance movie The Lake House. When Dr. Kate Forster (Sandra Bullock) sells her lake house to apparently no one, she decides to leave a note for the next owners in the mailbox, like a totally normal human being. Alex Wyler (Keanu Reeves) moves in and receives her letter. This confuses him, because the letter mentions things about the house—like apparently impossible to remove dog prints in paint—that don't exist. Instead of just ignoring this letter like a sane person, Alex writes back and puts the letter in the lake house mailbox. After Kate fails to save a man pancaked by a bus in front of her, she decides the best course of action is to return to the lake house and raid the mailbox there and see if the new owners took her letter. She finds the letter from Alex and they start exchanging letters, learning that Alex is writing from 2004, while Kate is writing from 2006. They also seem to have a magic dog that they both have owned for years even though it's, again, the same dog and they don't know each other. They engage in more time-communication shenanigans, like Alex planting a tree for Kate that suddenly magically springs into existence before her eyes. It should be noted Sam absolutely hates the nonsensical time mechanics of this movie. Alex engages in some light time-stalking of Kate, and then he kisses her at a birthday party Kate's not-Alex boyfriend threw for her when she still doesn't know who Alex is. It should also be noted that both their families know they are having romantic communications through time and, insanely, no one seems to care. So join us for what is amazingly, baffling, the least coherent time travel story ever heard on Book Retorts, which is really saying something.
This week Danielle returns to the Disney Channel Original Movie well with the 1999 TV movie The Thirteenth Year. The movie opens with a mermaid being chased by a far too enthusiastic fisherman and abandoning her extremely human-looking child in a basket on a boat in a reverse Moses situation. We later learn that this may, or may not, be a natural part of the mermaid lifecycle, and already the first few minutes of this movie would require years of study to unpack. The baby is found and claimed by two humans who own the boat, they name him Cody and raise him to help them administer their fiscally unsustainable $5 boat tours. Cody is also on the swim team, and boy does Danielle have opinions about swim meets in this episode. Cody is eventually partnered up with the school nerd, Jess, on a marine biology project when he discovers his body is going through changes. The kind of changes every young man deals with: scales on his hands, Sith lightning from his fingertips, being able to tell fish to do circus tricks, and the ability to climb walls; you know, the classic merperson things of lore. Cody's mom negligently avoids taking him to a doctor, and his kinda girlfriend Sam (no relation) at first doesn't care, until she sees him with arm fins later (seriously, this movie has no idea how merpeople work). Cody struggles to understand his new identity while trying to hide his changes from Jess' dad, the same fisherman who chased his mer-mom all those years ago and is now obsessed with finding proof of fish-people. Sam (yes relation) wonders if there's some common heritage between merpeople and centaurs, and then makes a bunch of terrible fish puns which Danielle does not appreciate. Anyway, Cody tries to reconcile his burgeoning mer-identity with his human upbringing, and also just absolutely crush it at the most well attended state swim meet ever. However, a time comes when he must make a very difficult choice between his human life and and mer-heritage. Kidding! This is a Disney movie, so it goes completely bonkers trying to make it a happy ending for everyone. So get ready for an Olympic-sized swimming pool of aquatic nonsense!
This week Hyperion is back, as Sam delves into part four of the 1989 Dan Simmons epic novel. As the pilgrims continue their journey, they depart the venerable Benares and take off on a windwagon across the Sea of Grass. After Brawne almost kills Martin due to him being so annoying, Sol decides it's a good time to tell his story. Sol grew up on an unimportant and small Hegemony world as a scholar, meeting his wife Sarai at school. They had a storybook romance and, after five years of trying, had their perfect daughter Rachel. And if you don't think that's a setup for tragedy, then you haven't been paying attention to this book. After Rachel starts a graduate program in archeology she decides to do a study on, where else, but Hyperion of course. While inside the Sphinx one night something happens to Rachel and the next thing she knows she's in a hospital and her parents are there telling her she's aging backwards and slowly losing her memories day by day. Sol and Sarai do everything they can to try and help Rachel, but none of the doctors have any idea how to treat her "Merlin sickness". As she grow younger, Rachel eventually decides to stop being told about her illness and asks her parents to just let her believe she's living in whatever past day she thinks it is. Meanwhile, Sol is having dreams about a mysterious voice demanding he take Rachel to Hyperion and make a burnt offering of her, something that Sol categorically refuses, because of course he does, and Sol will continue to engage with what he thinks is god in long, esoteric ethical arguments, as you do. Sol and Sarai do their best as they watch their child slowly regress from the adult they raised to the child she was, losing herself along the way, and boy, this story is sad, sorry about that. On the bright side, Sam does a pretty cool Shrike voice and Danielle learns more bird facts, so get ready for one heck of an episode!
This week we're back in Wisteria, Maryland for the thrilling conclusion of the Elizabeth Chandler teen novel Legacy of Lies. After her spooky dream, Megan and Matt start to grow closer, closer than kinda-family even. Megan's grandmother is not happy that Megan and Matt have started to connect, but not because of the creepy pseudo-incest implications, but because that means they'll be united against her. To no one's surprise, the grandmother continues to, and will always, be the worst. Objects in the house start getting moved to places they shouldn't be, as if someone was moving them in the middle of the night. Spoiler: it's not a ghost and is, in fact, much dumber than that. Meanwhile, Megan and Sophie decide to go to a party with Matt and Alex, although Danielle and Sam can't agree on if this qualifies as a double-date. On the way there, even though Megan is going with Alex, he and Sophie start getting a little snuggly in the back of the car. Megan is unperturbed since she is starting to really crush on her sorta cousin anyway. Eventually, Megan starts to learn a little of her family's history, and that her great aunt Avril and her grandmother Helen actually competed over a boy back in the day by the name of Thomas. Thomas was originally with Helen, but then cheated on her with Avril, and then he went back to Helen after Avril died of an overdose of a cosmetic known as Red Creep. Sam is much more interested in the Red Creep as a superhero (villain?), but nonetheless is still flummoxed why Helen would ever get back with Thomas, whom Helen eventually married and is Megan's grandfather. Megan goes back to the not very impressive psychic of Mrs. Riley, who tells her that Megan is the reincarnation of Avril. This leads to Megan concluding that Matt is the reincarnation of Thomas, Sophie is the reincarnation of Avril's best friend Angel, and Alex in the reincarnation of Angel's lover who died in World War II (the whole town is chock-a-block full of reincarnations apparently). Megan also learns that Thomas was just after Avril's money, but poisoned her (maybe with the help of Helen) because Avril wasn't going to marry him, and now Megan (as the reincarnation of Avril) must kill the reincarnation of her killer (Matt, as Thomas) or be killed by him again because fate or something. If you think that's the craziest thing this book has to offer, just wait until you hear the end and all the weird, nested reincarnation incest that results. So join us for a conclusion that is sure to leave you with one word rattling around inside your head: "What?"
It's Hyperion week again as Sam brings us back to the 1989 Dan Simmons novel! We're back on the river as the pilgrims continue their journey and Martin Silenus, the poet, takes his turn to tell his story. Martin claims to have been born on Old Earth after the Big Mistake but before the planet was entirely destroyed some five-hundreds years ago. He lead an idle and wealthy life, but always knew he wanted to be a poet. Danielle doesn't care about that, she's just excited they brought dinosaurs back just for fun. As Earth succumbed to the Big Mistake, Martin's mother sent him off on a multi-century space journey in cryogenic stasis, hoping the money she set aside in a savings account would accrue enough interest during his travel to set him up comfortably when he arrived. It didn't, and Martin, after suffering a stroke and losing his language abilities, was left working in the mud pits of Heaven's Gate in indentured servitude. This turned out to be the perfect environment to inspire Martin's poetry, as he wrote his cantos on toilet paper and regained his language skills. By pure happenstance, his work was noticed and published to great success making him instantly, and stupidly, wealthy. Martin buys a truly amazing house with rooms on thirty-six planets connected by farcaster portals that cost a truly ridiculous amount of money to maintain. After gadding about with friends doing drugs, he writes another book of poetry that's a massive flop and leaves him deep in debt. He starts churning out hack sequels that, while popular enough, leave him unfulfilled and still in debt. Martin decides to liquidate his assets and accept the artistic patronage Sad King Billy of the Kingdom of Windsor in Exile. Sad King Billy decides to relocate his kingdom to, where else, Hyperion, and create the City of Poets. There, Martin is unable to find a muse, and so has surgery to transform himself into a satyr and devotes himself to partying. Right at the point where he's about to kill himself nine-years later, people in the city start being brutally murdered and Martin finds himself with a new muse: the Shrike. How could this possibly go wrong?
This week Danielle brings the tween horror with one of her favorite movies, the 1999 Disney Channel Original Movie: Don't Look Under the Bed. When teen Francis Bacon (yes, seriously) wakes up one day to find all the clocks in her completely average town have been moved forward by hours, and all the neighborhood dogs coaxed on to the roofs of the houses, she knows she's in for a weird day. Only the weirdness comes not from those events but from how all the adults instantly blame this innocent child for the hijinks. Oh also, she starts seeing a boy named Larry Houdini (yes, still seriously) that no one else can see, and who claims to be an imaginary friend, but not her imaginary friend. Francis being the logical sort, decides to tell just everyone around her about the invisibly boy and constantly ask if people can see the boy that only she can see. To no one's surprise but her own, this does not work. Larry reveals that he was her brother's imaginary friend until she recently (or not recently, the timeline makes very little sense) convinced her brother not to believe in imaginary friends so he could focus on his leukemia treatments. This movie is amazingly insane. Anyway, Larry is upset by that, but also reveals that the person framing Francis for all the pranks is the Boogeyman, or rater a particular Boogeyman (Boogeyperson?), who has a vendetta against Francis. Also, she can see Larry for no reason other than that he thinks "she needs him". Eventually, Francis and Larry construct an anti-Boogey weapon called a Temporalfuge and some Boogey bait called Boogey Goo. Now Larry and Francis need to travel into Boogeyworld to try and save her brother by venturing under the bed, but Larry is struggling with an unwanted transformation. Hopefully, Larry and Francis can make it out of Boogeyworld alive, otherwise Larry may end up dressed as a Victorian lord speaking in rhyming couplets like the other Boogeyman. How has this movie not won all the awards?
This week Sam takes us back on the pilgrimage with the continuation of the 1989 Dan Simmons book Hyperion. The pilgrims touch down on Hyperion but find that in the three years they have been traveling, chaos has overtaken the planet. The mysterious Shrike has been wandering around murdering at will, and the citizenry of the planet—and the WorldWeb—have turned against the Shrike church. Still, with the help of some presumably no-longer-enslaved androids from the Shrike church, the pilgrims resume their journey upriver on a barge pulled by giant mantas. On the river, Fedmahn Kassad shares the story of what led him to this pilgrimage. It starts with Kassad at the Olympus Command School Historical Tactical Network on Mars in a simulation of the battle of Agincourt. How this simulation of medieval warfare helps with space combat is unclear, but nevertheless, Kassad is there and eventually meets a girl in the woods and they immediately have sex. This happens numerous times over the course of many simulations with Kassad and this mysterious woman hooking-up during battles throughout history. He becomes obsessed with her even though she never once speaks to him and he never sees her outside the simulations, or at all after he graduates. There is a boat-load of explanation of the FORCE forces and the New Bushido code, as well as more of Kassad's backstory, but the exciting stuff happens when the space dwelling people known as the Ousters attack the Hegemony. Kassad saves the day by employing brutal tactics that turn many of the citizenry in the Hegemony against him—much to Danielle's frustration—so the Hegemony CEO packs him on an eighteen-month time debt trip back to the Web to let things cool off. However, on the way they run into another Ouster warship and Kassad is forced to crash land on, you guessed it, Hyperion, where the mysterious woman finds him. Who is this mysterious woman? How is she connected to Kassad? How did she infiltrate the simulations? How did she know to find him here? But instead of taking her up on her invitation to ask literally any of these questions, Kassad decides they should have sex again. Sam is enraged by his priorities. Meanwhile, Danielle learns some fun new vocabulary words, so she's the real winner here.
This week Danielle brings the style with the 2019 sci-fi film Paradise Hills. Meet Uma (Emma Roberts), someone who wears a metal cage on her face for her wedding veil and sings creepy songs to her new husband for a toast. But to become this perfect bride, some months ago she was shipped off to an island reform school for headstrong upper class ladies (Uppers) called Paradise Hills. There she meets the very odd head of the school known as The Duchess (Milla Jovovich) and immediately starts just telling her all about her life and secret lovers even though she doesn't trust anyone there. She also meets fellow "students" Chloe (Danielle Macdonald), Yu (Awkwafina), and famous singer Amarna (Eiza González), and despite their strong desire to escape one night, they all fall asleep instead and never speak of it again. Uma spends her weeks on the island wandering among the many rose gardens, eating meals of two asparagus and a glass of milk, and engaging in therapy with The Duchess. Eventually, Amarna graduates and is sent off the Island, and the next that Uma sees of her on TV Amarna seems to be a completely different person; spooky. Sam grows increasingly exasperated with a movie that seems more interested in making weird looking scenes than in making sense. To wit, one day Uma is strapped to a carousel horse and lifted high in the air and then shown a looping video of her arranged fiancé—whom she does not like—proclaiming how awesome he is for hours on end. Why this is done is utterly baffling, and made only more so when the movie's big twist is revealed. Well, one of the big twists, because the ending is so totally bonkers it nearly breaks Sam. So join us for a movie that's fun to watch and pretty to look at, but is perhaps the most-nonsensical media we've covered this year.
This week Sam starts the epic recap of the 1989 Dan Simmons novel Hyperion. Far into the future after humanity has spread through the stars to many planets, a group of seven people are tasked with undertaking a pilgrimage to the Shrike, the mysterious and deadly creature that guards the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion. The Time Tombs are opening and there is also an Ouster migration cluster that is threatening to take the planet, and the secrets of the Tombs, away from the Hegemony. Thus Meina Gladstone, the CEO of the Hegemony, sends a message in a "fatline squirt" to the Consul, who is one of the pilgrims, and tells him to be on the lookout for an Ouster spy among the group. If none of that made sense to you, don't worry, Danielle is convinced this story is perhaps the most incomprehensible one Sam has ever shared, and totally crazy to boot. Aboard a massive spaceship made from an actual, living tree, the pilgrims gather and agree to tell their stories so they can better understand why each of them was chosen for this journey. First up to share is the Catholic priest Lenar Hoyt, who tells the story of another priest, Paul Duré, who was exiled to Hyperion by the Church for falsifying data at an archaeological dig. Duré plans to study an isolated tribe on the planet, which is composed of people supposedly descended from the crew of a seedship which crashed there hundreds of years ago. To reach the village, Duré must traverse the deadly Fire Forests filled with tesla tress which both absorb and emit lightning, a phenomenon that greatly annoys Danielle since the trees don't seem to burn themselves down in the resulting conflagration. When Duré finds the tribe, he notices they are dimwitted, physically bland, and seemingly bereft of humanity, and show a cult-like devotion to maintaining their population at seventy people. As he stays with them, he starts to uncover a horrifying secret that shakes his faith and leads him to extreme actions. Before all that, however, is the introduction of a word gross enough to challenge "khui" for the throne of uncomfortable words: Gymnosperm. So get ready for a deep dive into a massive space opera, full of stellar sci-fi words and technobabble, that only gets weirder and more incomprehensible the more it's explained.
This week Danielle and Sam are rerunning one of their favorite episodes about the 1976 pulp horror novel Night of the Crabs by Guy N. Smith. Enjoy!
When a pair of swimmers disappear off the coast of Wales it's up to well-known botanist, and uncle to one of the missing swimmers, Cliff Davenport to uncover what happened. Why, exactly, it's up to him is anyone's guess, but Cliff quickly proves himself by uncovering crab tracks on the beach (is that a thing?) and concluding his nephew was murdered by sheep-sized crabs. Spoiler: Cliff is wrong, they are, in fact, cow-sized crabs; c'mon, Cliff, do better. Cliff is made to quickly forget the grief of his lost nephew in the arms of the nubile and newly divorced Pat, who is one-hundred percent on board with giant killer crabs, having seen crab tracks herself (no seriously, are crab tracks a thing?!). The two investigate and have sex in about equal measure, but it's not until the nearby secret, but not too secret, military base is attacked by an army of giant, invincible crabs lead by, as dubbed by Cliff, the cunning King Crab, that anyone else takes notice. Cliff, now somehow a marine biologist, works with the department of defense to devise a plan to entomb the crabs in their underwater cave. This plan, predictably, fails spectacularly, and so many are killed by the enraged crab army Danielle had to give up keeping count. All Sam knows is that he has a new hero: All hail King Crab!
This week Danielle brings the exciting conclusion of the 2015 freezing-hot erotic sci-fi Ruby Dixon novel Ice Planet Barbarians. When we last left off, a group of women and been kidnapped by aliens then abandoned on an ice planet (the title doesn't lie) and while most of the women slowly freeze to death, one, named Georgie, goes off to find help but instead has a sexual liaison in a cave with a different blue horned alien named Vektal. Now that we're all caught up, it's time for Georgie to try and guide Vektal back to her dying friends. She does this by eating a bunch of raw meat (which is gross) and falling into an ice chasm full of giant fish-faced Sasquatch things (which are also gross), and engaging Vektal in more sexual activity (which is the grossest). Eventually, Vektal finds the frozen corpse of one of the other girls, but never mind her, this means there are more women that he can bring back to his tribe, which is conveniently experiencing a dearth of women and, also conveniently, all the human women are sexually compatible and interested in the aliens, a fact Sam finds nigh inconceivable. However, the women are overjoyed to see Georgie has brought help, and only slightly perturbed by the notion of her having freaky alien sex with the blue dude accompanying her. Georgie agrees to go back with Vektal to his village to retrieve supplies for the women so they can all move there. Off she and Vektal go to the spend the night in the cave of ancestors where there's a crashed ship frozen in the ice. Georgie pushes a button and the ship's computer of plot convenience springs to life! The computer explains a whole bunch of stuff about how the blue aliens came to this planet and how they live, but none of that really matters since this books deals with none of that (a fact Sam is greatly frustrated by). What does matter is that the computer can magically download modern "Earth English" to the aliens' brains, and their language to Georgie's brain. Oh and also the girls will need to have a parasitic worm implanted in them post-haste or they'll die from the planet's toxic atmosphere. After much trekking to the village and back with rescuers in tow, and more alien sex than is necessary, all the women have to make a very hard decision: Die immediately or get the parasitic worm shoved in their necks. Tough call. Anyway, the girls learn that the aliens that originally abducted them are headed back, and also Georgie is likely pregnant with Vektal's giant alien hybrid baby, but that's a horror show we sadly miss since the book ends immediately as soon as Georgie has her man. If you want to learn more (maybe), feel free to dive into the other 21 (again, not a typo) books in this series, but as for now, please enjoy Sam's complete breakdown at the ending of this book.
This week Danielle brings some steamy, sci-fi erotica with the 2015 Ruby Dixon novel Ice Planet Barbarians. Georgie is your average, nondescript 22-year-old woman who finds herself abducted by aliens and thrown in a cage with several other women on a spaceship. There are also some women in suspended animation tubes around the cargo hold the cage is in, but they don't matter for this book, but if you're curious you can dive into one of the other 21 (not a typo) books in this series. The aliens that have abducted Georgie are cliché little green men accompanied by a security detail of giant orange aliens. Neither of these alien species are particularly relevant because the ship starts having engine trouble and they decide to jettison the cargo pod of women onto a nearby planet to pick up later. Sam takes extreme umbrage with this plan, since some of the women die in the crash landing (and their deaths are entirely brushed aside), but if the aliens had merely left the cargo pod in orbit they wouldn't have had any problems. After suffering an apparently inconsequential head injury, Georgie is nominated to go explore the barren ice planet in search of food or anything else useful. Georgie is immediately caught in a snare trap and blacks out. While out, a blue alien creature named Vektal finds her, and the symbiotic parasite that lives in him and controls his libido goes absolutely gaga for Georgie for reasons that are beyond comprehension. Vektal decides to take Georgie to a cave and just starts going to town on her. Georgie wakes up from her second recent bout of unconsciousness to this large, blue alien with his mouth just all over her and thinks "Yeah, I'm into this" and goes with it for a while. When Vektal gets a little too frisky, she pushes him off her and that's when they decide to do a little round of basic introductions through the alien language barrier. Camped out in this cave with Vektal and Georgie is where we leave part one, what about the other dozen-plus women slowly freezing to death in the crashed cargo pod? They're not nearly as important as Georgie getting her alien freak on.
This week Sam brings the classics, sort of, with the 1979 animated TV special Romie-0 and Julie-8. The classic Shakespeare tragedy Romeo and Juliette has been adapted innumerable times, and this is certainly another one. In the far future—or maybe the distant past, who knows—there are two warring robotics companies getting ready for a highly competitive robotics conference. The Mega Stellar Corporation is releasing the Romie-0 robot, and Super Solar Cybernetics is releasing the Julie-8. What is the purpose of these teenage humanoid robots? That is never explained, but Danielle and Sam have some entirely unwholesome theories about the market for these things. At the conference the two CEOs, Mr. Thunderbottom and Ms. Passbinder (which Sam misheard as Ms. Fassbinder due to poor audio quality, he was paying super good attention he swears) and their quadruplet clones perform a large musical number where each try to insist their robot is the best. However, when a creepy thief dude named Gizmo in the audience tries to walk off with Julie-8, Romie-0 comes to her rescue and they instantly fall for each other. Later they decide to run away to be together and end up going with Gizmo on his space garbage barge to the junk planet while the two CEOs blast off in Mr. Thunderbottom's corporate building, which is also a rocket ship, to track down the wayward robots. On the junk planet Julie-8 is kidnapped by the ruler of the planet, a giant robot named Sparepartski, who disposes of Romie-0 while Gizmo tries to persuade Julie-8 to marry Saprepartski. We won't spoil the twist ending, but it's clear that while this animated special may have only been a half-hour, it packs enough insanity for a feature-length film.
This week Danielle brings the conclusion of the 2020 film Wonder Woman 1984. When we last left our heroes they had just returned from a magical invisible jet flight to Egypt and had determined the best course of action was to either get everyone to unwish their wishes, or to kill Maxwell Lord, who had wished himself to become the magic citrine, lest we forget. Speaking of Max, he's slowly unraveling mentally and physically, and finagles meeting with the President where he declares he's a sovereign nation unto himself. Also, the President lets slip that they have a magic satellite thing that has a beam which will override the screen of any device the beam touches. And if you think the term "touches" is used there figuratively, boy would this magic wishing-citrine-now-human like to have words with you. While Diana as Wonder Woman shows up to stop Max, Barbara is there to foil her plans because she is also power hungry and won't give up her wish-granted superhuman powers. Wonder Woman is defeated because her powers are waning due to her own wish to have her beau Steve back, who now inhabits the body of another man whom they have no regard for, and which is still totally not okay. While Max and Barbara fly to the satellite control island, Diana lets Steve go and renounces her wish (finally) and then lassos a jet plane to get her home. She also lassos lightening to travel, but this is a concept so astoundingly dumb that Sam refuses to acknowledge it's a thing. Anyway, after Diana grabs some magic armor of a long dead (but not really dead because comic books) Amazonian warrior, she chases after Max and Barbara for a showdown on Satellite Control Island. Max has been broadcasting to the entire wold enticing them to wish using the magic of him touching them through a satellite beam video feed (seriously, how the wishes work in this movie is something beyond mortal comprehension). Chaos engulfs the Earth as wishes are granted willy-nilly, but before Diana can get to Max she must first fight Barbara, who has been transformed into a cheetah woman via the magic of the script says so. If you think their showdown is intense, wait until you hear how Diana defeats Max: Via the superpower of a very compelling, moralizing speech.
This week Danielle brings the superhero craziness with the 2020 film Wonder Woman 1984. If you didn't see the first Wonder Woman film, don't worry, neither did Sam, and Danielle barely remembers it, so no context needed! Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) is your average working 80s girl, only she's really an immortal Amazonian from Themyscira who is still pining for Steve (Chris Pine), the love of her life and a pilot who died in World War 1. When a botched robbery brings a mysterious citrine in to the Smithsonian where Diana works with her mousy new friend Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), things start to go awry. While holding the stone, both Diana and Barbara make wishes in their heads and then a magic wind blows, foreshadowing the granting of their wishes. Barbara wished to be strong and beautiful like Diana, but Diana's wish is a surprise for later. That's when Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) rolls in, he's the head of an oil company/Ponzi scheme who has just made a large donation to the museum, which seems to grant him carte blanche to just touch evidence, like the citrine, in an FBI investigation. He invites them all to a gala that night in his honor and Barbara is instantly taken with him and agrees while Diana declines. That night at the gala, Diana is now suspicious of Max and shows up anyway, and is immediately sexually harassed by every guy in there, since all men in this world are completely terrible. She brushes them off, but then one of them says a phrase that Steve once said to her, and Diana realizes her wish came true: Steve is back! Only, Steve is not himself, his consciousness has been shoved into the body of another man. What happened to the mind of the man whose body this was originally? Who cares, certainly not our supposed "heroes" Diana and Steve, who immediately drop everything to go have sex in that poor, possessed man's home with his unable-to-consent body. Meanwhile, Max Lord (seriously, that name) has initiated a make-out session with Barbara in order to steal the citrine. With the citrine safely in his castle/home, Max does something absolutely bonkers and wishes to become the wishing stone. It might be reasonable to take a moment here to discuss the rules of the magic citrine, but the rules for this wishing stone are so arbitrary and crazy you're just going to have to listen to all our rants to get it, there's too much to include here. Maxwell then starts coercing others into wishing things that benefit him while touching him, and then also taking something from them in exchange for the "wish", and if that's confusing, get used to it. Anyway, Max jets off to Egypt while Diana and Steve, now back on the case, follow him in the dumbest way imaginable. This movie is so long, and chock-a-block full of nonsense, that Danielle has to end it there before Sam gets so angry at the inconsistent wishing rules and dumb Wonder Woman lasso tricks that he quits the podcast entirely.
This week Sam shares the made for TV sequel, the 2006 movie The Librarian: Return to King Solomon's Mines. After two very hefty media pieces (and even more hefty episodes) Sam thought a short, fluffy, made for TV movie would make a nice, easy episode, but we can all see how well that worked out for him. We catch up with Flynn (Noah Wyle), the titular librarian with 22 higher education degrees, out in Utah recovering a clairvoyant crystal skull from some truly incompetent artifact rustlers. While Flynn succeeds in this supposedly world-saving quest, Judson (magical Bob Newhart) is less than impressed with his recklessness. But there's no time for skulls, as Flynn is off to a surprise birthday party thrown for him by his mother, who's still trying to hook him up with random women, in this case a cousin. What happened to Nicole, the love interest from the previous movie? While The Librarian never provides an answer, Danielle and Sam cook up a theory involving her being removed from time by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which unbelievably somehow makes sense in context. On his way home, Flynn discovers his apartment has been ransacked by an evil dude looking for a scroll that was mailed to Flynn from Egypt. The evil guy manages to find the scroll and vamoose after leaving Flynn unconscious. After Judson revives him, he explains to Flynn that what was stolen was a map to King Solon's Mines which contain his most magical and powerful artifacts. Luckily, to read the map you need a legend that's safely hidden in Morocco. Instead of leaving it in safety, Flynn is tasked with recovering the legend first and, ideally, the map as well. So having learned nothing from the mistakes of the first film, Flynn jets off to meet up with a sexy archeologist who has even more degrees than he does, somehow. Together, they hope to recover the map, and the legend, and maybe just take a quick peek inside King Solomon's Mines despite Judson's clear instructions not to. Meanwhile, Sam hopes to be able to explain how this story has kept Flynn just as brainy, but also made him into way more of a moron somehow. Bottom line: we really miss Nicole.
After tackling to very long books, Danielle and Sam need a break to recover. So, please enjoy this bonus episode about the Christopher Pike book Bury Me Deep that was released for our Patreon supporters. We'll be back next week with your regularly scheduled nonsense!
Danielle is here with the thrilling (confusing?) conclusion of the Jude Deveraux romance novel Legend. Kady is back from the 1870s and she's determined to learn nothing from her time there. After suffering many more indignities at the hands of her fiancé and his mom, she finally grows a spine and dumps him after weeks of waffling. It's at this point that a magical voice reminds her that, oh yeah, didn't she have a quest to find the decedents of Ruth by some arbitrary deadline that's now only three days away? So Kady books it to New York City where she has absolutely no trouble finding one C.T. Jordan, the descendant in question. He is a grown man who runs a non-specific business, wears all black, and loves playing with his knife and sword collection. Kady busts into his office uninvited and he is extremely unhappy to see her and is (justifiably) rude to her. So of course, Kady is totally into him since she has the best taste in men. It turns out that since Kady has found him in time Ruth has bequeathed her all the Jordan family fortune in a will from over a hundred years ago; something so nonsensical it breaks Sam's brain slightly. Instead of taking the money and running, Kady is determined to head back to the Colorado town of Legend to find the time portal and somehow save Cole (her erstwhile kidnapper) from being killed as a child in a robbery. C.T. is rightly skeptical of her, but quickly loses all likability when he follows her to Legend and arranges for her to be shot at so she'll agree to work with him so that he can get into her pants, despite that he already has a fiancé and that Kady already invited him along in the first place but he declined making all his subterfuge pointless. At this point, Sam needs a drink. Also, C.T. has two cousins in the now ghost town of Legend: one is a law student wearing nothing but overalls, and the other rides a motorcycle off-road on the mountains of Colorado, and C.T. kinda makes out with that one. All this leads to Kady sleeping with C.T. (just the best taste in men) before engaging in more time-travel shenanigans so poorly thought out as to defy explanation. All that really matters is that Kady learns a valuable lesson by the end of the book: What's most important is that she can serve the men in her life. Seriously, she has the worst taste in men.
This week Danielle whisks us to a world of romance and fantasy in the Jude Deveraux novel Legend. Meet Kady, your average successful, attractive professional chef with no sense of self-worth. She's engaged to Gregory, an obvious misogynist and whose mother owns the restaurant where Kady works, so it's a perfect match. Fortunately for Kady, she happens across an improbably large flour tin. Upon opening the tin Kady finds a perfectly sized wedding dress from over a hundred years ago along with shoes and accoutrements, all somehow stuffed into that flour tin without damage. Bafflingly to Sam, Kady immediately puts the dress which opens a portal which Kady immediately goes though. She now finds herself in 1870s Colorado and sees a man being hanged by three other people. Leaping to the unsubstantiated conclusion that she must save this man and the other three are evil, Kady, still in her poofy wedding dress fights them off and takes the unconscious, half-choked man down and then goes to bed. Kady wakes up to this strange man making out with her and just accepts his explanation that he thought she was angel. The man, Cole, immediately proposes marriage which Kady refuses (yay!) but after she can't find a job in the nearby town she takes him up on his offer (boo!). This begins a portion of the book involving the obligatory long looks, breathless almost make outs, and Kady having several opportunities to return home, but feeling just too darn torn to go back through the portal because Cole is too dreamy. Even when Cole imprisons her in his estate, Kady decides to stay and cook a massive feast since apparently she can't leave but does have complete control over his finances. Also, Kady has been dreaming of an Arabian man with a veiled face every week since she was a child, and you might think this would be important, but the only important thing Sam can focus on is how terrible Kady's taste in men is and WHAT SIZE IS THAT FREAKING FLOUR TIN?
Be sure to check out I Drink Your Podcast, especially the Fish Tank episode featuring Danielle and Sam. You can find them on Twitter @IDYP_Podcast, Instagram @idyp_podcast, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
It's finally here, the finale of the Matt Ruff novel Fool on the Hill. We did it. With Preacher dead, George and Aurora Borealis Smith return to Cornell to attend the wake, where George is asked to read a story, since apparently he's the only person who matters in the world even though he's never shown to have even so much as spoken to Preacher. Luther, meanwhile, is traveling back on foot and having hallucinations about Dragon, who has escaped from a research facility and is murdering his way towards Blackjack to get revenge for some reason. Also meanwhile, sprites have started going missing (which no one seems to care about) and after he's attacked, Hamlet pretends to be dead along with Puck, which they inexplicably think is a better idea than just telling the other sprites that Rasferret's probably back.Jinsei and Ragnarock have reconciled as friends and are spending time together when they're attacked by a semi-truck full of pigs being possessed by Rasferret who just really wants to kill Jinsei for some reason. Some fancy motorcycle work by Ragnarock allows them to escape, but not without some trauma. As the Ides of March approach, Mr. Sunshine decides to wreak havoc with a magical cloud of chaos inducing rain which leads to Jack Barron (remember him?) smashing up Ragnarock's house and motorcycle with a sledge hammer which causes Ragnarock to go into a murderous rage that actually doesn't lead anywhere for a while (we swear, we're making this as clear as I can). First, though, the dogs on campus have to deal with purebred/mutt tensions caused by a mysterious murder of a dog on campus. Also, Aurora Borealis Smith bites into a magic apple left in a basket of rotting fruit at George's house and is immediately Snow Whited into a deep sleep. Distraught, George is summoned to the Boneyard where Mr. Sunshine reveals himself as the "storyteller" orchestrating everything, and George seems pretty cool with it to be honest. With the Day of the Green Dragon Parade upon them can George defeat the dragon and save the princess? Will Dragon (the other one, the dog) kill Blackjack and Luther? Will Ragnarok ever get to fight Jack Barron? All that can be said for sure is that, while none of these story elements will meaningfully interact, at least we get the joy of the return of the Rubbermaid!
This week Sam continues his deep dive into the 1988 Matt Ruff novel Fool on the Hill. This part opens with the thing everyone is most excited about: Hallowe'en! But not everything goes smoothly as George and Aurora Borealis Smith get lost in the foggy, underground woods of Tolkien house and end up accidentally making-out since they apparently can't tell each other apart from their respective actual romantic partners. After the party Jinsei and Preacher decide to date after Jinsei says she sees Ragnarock as just a friend. Due to a truly pathetic attempt at discretion, Ragnarock finds out immediately and is not happy. Meanwhile, Luther engages in dog philosophy that is mostly pun based, and thus Sam skips it almost entirely. Meanwhile, Calliope sets George up to outwit a crazed physics student with a supposed bomb, and after George defuses the situation with wind and a cowboy hat, Calliope vanishes leaving George bereft. Miserable, George goes out into the snow and almost freezes to death before being rescued by a premonition-having Aurora Borealis Smith. At the hospital, Aurora Borealis Smith confesses her love to George, and they head back to Wisconsin, with Luther, to enjoy the holiday. Meanwhile, the evil from the Boneyard has been released in the form of Rasferret the Grub, a gross creature that kills for no apparent reason. On New Year's, Rasferret decides to try out killing again by animating the sex doll from Tolkien house and having it just wreck Preacher, killing him instantly. Jinsei, however, manages to escape with the capricious intervention of Mr. Sunshine. Still in Wisconsin, George and Aurora Borealis Smith enjoy their time, but the specter of Old Moses appears to Luther, telling him he must, again, set off on foot to Cornell for reasons that are not in the least bit apparent. Part three wraps up with the Ides of March looming closer, but if this summary makes no sense to you, don't worry, it makes even less sense once fully explained.
This week Sam brings part two of the Matt Ruff novel Fool on the Hill! After a long part one of introducing characters, get ready for an even longer part two! A semblance of a plot starts to take shape as George and his Bohemian friends hang out with the Blue Zebra Hooter Patrol, a group that, as far as Sam can tell, is entirely unimportant to the story. Meanwhile, the sprites conduct a raid on the animal lab to free the guinea pigs among others. However, during this raid they accidentally release giant rats which manage to kill several sprites, lead by an evil rat named Thresh. I'm sure we'll get back to him later. Much later. The dogs, meanwhile, are having convocation, and Luther learns of the five questions that guide their philosophy, one of which asks which is the best breed of dog. Luther is disturbed that maybe this isn't heaven if there's still racism (breedism?) here. Finally, due to a chemical truck accident and the appearance of Calliope in his house, George finally gets laid. This goes on for some time. While he's busy, the Bohemians are invited to become honorary members of the dorkiest frat on campus: Tolkien House, which is exactly what it sounds like, only they live in an actual magic castle complete with bottomless pit and underground forest. One of the presidents of Tolkien house has invited the Bohemians to join so he can meet one of their members he has a crush on, instead of just talking to her like a normal human, a plan that does nothing to dispel their dorkiness. Later, Jinsei is attacked at a school dance by Jack Barron and his goons from the RAT frat, but is saved by Ragnarok riding his motorcycle out of the dance hall, which he apparently brought into the dance hall for a reason neither Sam nor Danielle can fathom. Finally, a bunch of characters have dreams, one of whom is George who fights a dragon while Calliope teaches him to "write without paper". Here's a list of other things that are in this chapter taken completely out of context: A child repellent egg, doggy brothel, really bad relationship decisions, and Danielle's new favorite word Hallowe'en!
This week Sam starts an epic journey with Danielle with part one of the 1988 Matt Ruff novel Fool on the Hill. Meet Stephen Titus George, a 23 year-old massively successful author who's now a writer in residence at Cornell University. George fuels his creativity with the frustration and pain of not being able to get laid for the past seven years. However, a mysterious Greek Original named Mr. Sunshine has been weaving a tale using reality for centuries, and George is his chosen hero of the story. Also, just to make things more complicated, there are invisible sprites that live on the Cornell campus, one of whom, Zephyr, is crushing on George, mostly to spite her unfaithful boyfriend Puck, which is the foundation of any healthy relationship. Zephyr decides to follow George after one of his kite flying jaunts as he heads to the local graveyard to take inspiration from the gravestones. Here, George visits one of his favorite spots, an eerie place with a strange stone set in the ground inscribed with PANDORA. Meanwhile, a cat named Blackjack is dragged along on a quest by his dog friend Luther, as Luther insists he can smell heaven and needs to go there to find his dead friend. It should be mentioned that animals in this world communicate telepathically and some can even see the future, but that won't actually come into play in any way. Blackjack and Luther encounter a pack of racist purebred dogs in the the suburbs who try to kill them, but they escape as dog catchers start tranquilizing and murdering the evil dogs. Also meanwhile, a girl named Aurora Borealis Smith is heading back to Cornell from Wisconsin with her boyfriend who is kinda a square. Eventually they meet up with George, an old friend, and after they leave, a random man named Wax tells George to steal her from her boyfriend. Also also meanwhile, a mystical lady named Calliope is on her way from Delaware to break George's heart so as to inspire him to greatness at the behest of Mr. Sunshine. Lastly, meanwhile, the Bohemians, the self-proclaimed guardians of non-conformity at Cornell, are riding horses on a pilgrimage back to the school. The horses were purchased by their wealthy leader Lion-Heart so all his friends could role play, and Sam really begins to question their counterculture credentials. Eventually, all these parties meet back up at Cornell University, including Blackjack and Luther who is convinced Cornell is, in fact, heaven. With this massive bit of character introduction done, Sam raps up this part just before the actual plot is about to begin, so tune in next time to hopefully find out just what the heck is going on.
This week Danielle shares the conclusion of the 2021 K-drama The Man's Voice. As we pick up from last week, the mysterious woman with cat revenge fantasies, Jenna, has been visiting a detective agency to gather information on her romantic rival Mi Rim. Meanwhile, Tae Hwa takes Mi Rim out for some day drinking followed by a day trip to Busan using his pilot powers. Towards the end of the night, Tae Hwa flips a bottle cap to decide if they'll spend the night in the city, but unsurprisingly, Mi Rim decides to ignore the bottle cap and call it a night. Also, there's supposedly a talking cat in the show, but no one seems to care about Natsume while out on the town. A few days later Mi Rim is interviewing for a job, which is something that is apparently a plot, but since the show decides this plot line isn't important, we won't say any more about it here. Mi rim is also continuing to watch Natsume who is still hurling abuse at her for no apparent reason. Everything is going well when Jenna inserts herself back into Tae Hwa's life, and through a series of sit-com level misunderstandings Mi Rim becomes convinced Tae Hwa, who she's had all of two dates with, is cheating on her and refuses to see him again. This leads to an interminable period of the show for Sam where Mi Rim spends weeks mourning the loss of her relationship that consisted of, and this cannot be over-stressed, two whole dates. Tae Hwa, meanwhile, handles the breakup by stalking Mi Rim's house in a vain attempt to run into her, instead of just going to the place he knows she works. During Tae Hwa's next flight, Jenna decides to put her cat revenge plans into action by...having the cat hotel bathe the cat too much; simply diabolical. Taw Hwa is also grappling with the choice whether to accept a new, and better, job, but doing so would mean he'd have to leave Mi Rim, the woman he is not dating and who doesn't want anything to do with him. Will Jenna's evil cat revenge plan work? Will Tae Hwa and Mi Rim ever reconcile? How does a cat based version of The Parent Trap factor into all this? You'll have to listen to find out, but one thing is clear: Sam in convinced everyone is this show is actually a serial killer.
K-dramas are back as Danielle brings Sam another K-drama rom-com with the 2021 show The Man's Voice. Mi Rim is a normal young woman working in a convenience store and pining over the handsome co-pilot who occasionally comes by to shop. Through a series of contrivances (primarily the pet hotel being closed for a day) the co-pilot, Tae Hwa, is left with no one to watch his large, fluffy white cat. Inexplicably, Tae Hwa decides leaving his cat with the virtual stranger Mi Rim is the best option. As Tae Hwa jets off to Paris, Mi Rim takes the cat home but it quickly escapes into the night. Mi Rim catches it just as a storm rolls in and she is struck with lightning and her skeleton is illuminated like a cartoon. Instead of doing the sensible thing and dying, Mi Rim wakes up the next day, the cat sitting beside her, and suddenly she is able to hear the cat's voice in her head. The cat, in the voice of a middle aged man, proceeds to abuse Mir Rim to no end, and rather than simply exerting her authority as the human part of this relationship, she rolls just over and takes that abuse. Meanwhile, Tae Hwa calls and texts Mi Rim from the plane he is supposed to be flying, to check in on his cat which, again, he left with a complete stranger. The cat, Natsume, is dead-set against Mi Rim's designs on Tae Hwa, and manages to outwit her several times, even though he's a cat and she's a human. As the first half of the series draws to a close, a new character makes an appearance: A mysterious woman who demands "Revenge on the cat!" What does any of this mean? Maybe part two will explain it. Maybe.
To kick-off the new year Sam brings the 1990 Stuart Gordon mech fighting film Robot Jox! Welcome to the distant future, post World War III, where war has been outlawed, somehow. Instead, the world has decided the more sensible way to settle international disputes is via single combat in mechs. While undoubtedly cool as heck, Sam has several issues with the concept on a practical level. The capitalist Market is locked in a perpetual battle with the communist Confederation. The latest battle is for control of Alaska, but when an errant rocket fist leads to the accidental death of hundreds of spectators (why are there spectators?!), Achilles, the hero of the Market, hangs up his robot gloves and retires. This makes room for the genetically engineered super soldiers to step-up to the fight, but there's only one problem: Achilles has the hots for one of them by the name of Athena. This leads to the most pressing question about this movie: Is it clever satire, or just another sexist 80's flick? We may not have an answer to that, but we do know this movie has kick-butt robot fights, so that's worth something for sure. So join us for some good ol' fashioned, Cold War 80's action!
Sam's back with another game for Danielle which he calls: What's in a Name? Sam wants to take a moment to look back on some of the not terrible things that happened in 2021, so he pulls four books that were published that year and, using only the titles and author names, asks Danielle to guess the plots of those books. Danielle does remarkably well, and may even have improved on one book, but the real winner is all of us for learning about some new things to possibly read, and some fun alternate plots. So join us for another fun game to ring in the new year!
This week Danielle gets her revenge on Sam by asking him to recap the previous Winter Bizarre episode Snowmageddon. Listen as Sam remembers a series of non-snow related disasters, but literally nothing else that happens in this SyFy movie. While his recall fails, Sam does take the opportunity to accidentally make Snowmageddon a better movie by misremembering events as being more exciting than they actually were. Is his half-remembered version better than the original? You decide!
Partial Recall is back! This week Sam challenges Danielle to recap the recent Spook Retorts episode about the movie Wolves. While Danielle does admirably well on the start of the plot, when it comes to the character names, especially the "Three C's" she just can't seem to get it right. So join us for this not-too-distant trip back into our catalogue!
For part two of this year's Winter Bizarre Danielle brings the third installment of the Netflix film series with The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star. Margaret is the queen of the small European country of Montenaro who happens to have two identical doppelgängers: Former Chicago baker now princess Stacy and Fiona, her cousin and former kidnapper of Stacy. Montenaro is hosting an international Christmas festival (which is, apparently, a thing) and the Vatican has loaned them the Star of Peace, a relic belonging to St. Nicholas. Due to security that can charitably be described as "utter clown shoes" the star is immediately stolen. Under the threat of excommunication, Margaret commutes her felonious cousin's sentence so she can tap her criminal network to track down the star. Fiona puts her large network of one person to work and identifies that the star is being held by a nefarious hotelier. Instead of informing Interpol—who are investigating—of this development, Marget, Fiona, and Stacy plan a comically amateur heist that involves flirtation, sexy laser dancing, and, of course, lots of switching. The consequences for failure are almost certainly death at the hands of the villainous hotelier, which Sam thinks is a fair bit worse than excommunication for not heisting the star back. Throughout all of this, Sam has serious questions on the state of the Montenaro monarchy, which seems rife with nepotism, incompetence, and princess switching. Despite that, Danielle and Sam come up with a pretty good pitch for The Princess Switch 4, so Netflix, if you're listening, call us!
Even though we have a short episode today, Danielle couldn't resist sharing the very weird 2015 cross-over comic Archie vs. Predator. Yes, that Archie, of comic and cartoons fame, meets the alien hunter and, spoiler, things do not go well for him and his friends. There's not much more that needs to be said here, this is one that can only be even marginally understood by experiencing it.
Sam kicks-off this year's Winter Bizarre with 2013 ABC Family/WWE made for TV movie Christmas Bounty. Tory Bell is an average private elementary school teacher living in Manhattan and dating a handsome, wealthy man named James. All this changes when she gets a mysterious phone call from a gangster threatening her for putting him in jail years ago. So Tory bails on her boyfriend to return to New Jersey to seek the help of her family, all of whom are bounty hunters, to bring this gangster back to justice. This includes working with her ex-bounty hunter partner and former boyfriend Mikey Muscles (a.k.a. Beefcake). Somehow, this family of professional bounty hunters cook up the dumbest plan, which involves finding someone named Big Donna at a mall and putting a brick-sized GPS tracker in her purse. Against all reason, this works and they find the gangster in the only location this movie seems to have paid for: A dingy warehouse. Through a series of circumstance too contrived to relate, James shows up in this warehouse, and Tory scrambles to hide her bounty hunter past from him, for some reason. Eventually, after a shootout at a Christmas tree lot (yes, really) James is kidnapped and Tory must risk crashing a mob wedding to save him. Also, this whole time Mikey Muscles has been pursing Tory, never having gotten over her, even though she's dating what is possibly the best man in the world. It's no spoiler to say Tory returns to her small-town roots and boyfriend, though what is a surprise is that she does this in just the worst way imaginable. James, we're sorry, you're a prince and you deserve better.
Be sure to check out the Mind Duck Books podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's that time of year again where Danielle and Sam share the media and tropes they are thankful for. This year Sam has a special gift for the world: The word "thanker". You're welcome, world.
As they gear up for the holidays and their annual Winter Bizarre, Danielle and Sam are dropping some shorts so they don't explode from being too busy. So enjoy as Sam puts Danielle through the horrors of a new game show he calls "We know your thoughts, but what do they think?" Which, aside from being just super catchy title, Danielle finds less challenge in the game itself and more in just remembering any of the titles for the media they've done on this show.
business. Not that there isn't business to get into, what with the youngest daughter carrying around a cardboard cutout of the eldest brother, Finn, since he's traveling in Africa. Meanwhile, the parents are totally checked-out and most of the responsibility of taking care of Celeste falls to their middle, college-aged son, Matt. Everyone refuses to tell Julie anything about why Celeste needs Flatt Finn, and Matt tells her to leave it alone, but leaving things alone is beyond Julie. She starts talking to human Finn on Facebook, but he is equally unhelpful. Meanwhile, Julie decides to mess with Celeste by using Flat Finn to manipulate her into doing things outside of her comfort zone. After some confusing shenanigans involving a fear of heights, or possibly just escalators and elevators, Julie dumps her perfectly nice barista boyfriend because she's falling in love with Finn on Facebook, something which is clearly a good idea. However, the family's big secret around Flatt Finn will shake Julie to her core, only not really since it's pretty obvious and also not really terrible or shameful, but since everyone in this book kinda sucks (except Celeste and Flatt Finn, who only gets a pass because he's cardboard) there is, of course, drama. So join us for a book that begs the question: Why are there two more sequels, and when can we read them?
Be sure to check out I Drink Your Podcast, especially the Into the Wild episode featuring Danielle. You can find them on Twitter @IDYP_Podcast, Instagram @idyp_podcast, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Fresh off of Spook Retorts, Sam pivots from the scary straight to the Disney with the direct-to-video animated movie Cinderella III: A Twist in Time. Most people know the classic fairy tale, and some even know the Disney version, but this threequel boldly asks "Hey, what if we took this simple, well-known morality tale and made it totally bananas with time travel?" Starting one year after the events of the original Disney movie, Cinderella and her nameless husband are enjoying their bliss, while the wicked stepmother and stepsisters are still living pretty much as they always have in their old mansion, only down one maid in the form of Cinderella. This is, somehow, intolerable to them. While celebrating their anniversary the Fairy Godmother reveals herself to be a wholly irresponsible possessor of magic by losing her magic wand, the apparent source of all her power, to Anastasia. The wicked stepmother seizes this opportunity to reverse time (how does she know how to do that?!) to the point just before Cinderella was to try on the glass slipper. Using further magical shenanigans, the wicked stepmother engineers it so that Anastasia is declared the owner of the slipper and is to marry Prince No-Name. Clearly distraught, Cinderella sets off to the castle to correct the record with Prince Face-Blindness. This goes about as well as you'd expect for a prince that identifies the supposed love of his life via shoe size. So now Cinderella must fight against her stepmother to set things right while the stepmother, despite having the wand, decides using magic is just too easy and largely ignores the tremendous power she possesses. While that's all going on, Danielle and Sam are really more concerned for Anastasia, who seems the be the real tragic hero of this story. Also, the ending of this movie is so weird as to leave Danielle totally befuddled.
In the finale of this year's Spook Retorts, Danielle shares the 1998 movie I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. If you remember anything about the first I Know What You Did Last Summer, it's about a hook-wielding fisherman seeking bloody revenge against a group of teens that hit him with a car and left him for dead. For this sequel, just forget all that, it's doesn't matter. Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) is now at college and trying to put the trauma of the previous summer behind her, despite her boyfriend Ray's (Freddie Prinze Jr.) best efforts. However, when she wins a radio contest for a free tropical vacation in the middle of hurricane season, she brings her friends along to a deserted island hotel. People start predictably being murdered and Julie catches sight of the hook-wielding man who is now, for some reason, killing random people who didn't hit him with a car. A hurricane rolls in trapping everyone on the island, and while the hotel knew this was coming, it is inexplicably still open. The murderer also demonstrates some hitherto unknown hacking powers on a karaoke machine for the sole purpose of spooking the teens, because apparently revenge is the last thing on his mind just behind pranks. Predictably, the bodies pile up as Julie and her friends try to survive and as Ray somehow magics himself onto the island to help. There is a particularly dumb twist at he end, but Sam is really more interested in the story that isn't being told: An average day in the life of the hook-wielding murder.
In the penultimate Spook Retorts episode of this year, Sam brings the fanged action with the 2014 movie Wolves. Cayden is your average teen living an idyllic high school life. He's quarterback of the football team, has a great girlfriend, and rad parents. Unfortunately, after having some nightmares, he finds himself turning into a werewolf and attacking his girlfriend before blacking out and apparently murdering his parents. Now on the lam, Cayden seeks answers as to his wolfy origins. Cayden is led to the very subtly named town of Lupine Ridge, and wouldn't you know it, it's just chock-full of werewolves. It should be pointed out that these are less werewolves and more wolf-transformers as they seem the be able to change at will, and none of the werewolf lore applies to them, much to the consternation of Danielle. Anyway, Jason Momoa plays the also subtly named Connor Slaughter, who's been terrorizing and dominating the town for years, and takes an instant dislike to Cayden. But Cayden can't leave yet because there's a pretty werewolf girl with the extremely subtle name of Angel whom he just can't stop thinking about. Anyway, when another wolf, Carter, tries to warn Cayden to leave, Connor has Carter killed and eaten for revealing too much to Cayden. At this point there are so many C-names in this movie neither Danielle nor Sam can keep them all straight. All that is before we even get to the twisted family tree that relates all these people and seems to defy comprehension. Rarely has a move had so many werewolves in it, and yet has so much non-werewolf relationship drama. So stick around to hear about Cayden's true origins, and allusions to much more interesting sounding , but sadly never seen, imperialist werewolves. Oh, and also improvised manure mines, because there's a little Home Alone in every werewolf, apparently.
Spook Retorts continues with Danielle sharing the 2018 film Bird Box. Imagine a terrible, mysterious event that is causing people around the world to lose control and kill themselves. Now imagine this isn't the Shyamalan movie The Happening; that's basically Bird Box. Sandra Bullock is Malorie, an emotionally stunted pregnant woman in a world about to undergo an apocalypse. Mysterious creatures have appeared and if you so much as catch a glance of them they will drive you to madness and suicide. Malorie manages to find refuge in a house full of weirdos and John Malkovich, which is redundant. Meanwhile, future Malorie (yes, it's the kind of film that jumps back and forth in time a lot) is undergoing a perilous, blindfolded journey down a river towards shelter, escorting two small children she has dubbed Boy and Girl in what Sam thinks is a stunning display of emotional abuse. Back in the past, the refuge house is infiltrated by someone...possessed? Obsessed? Infected? by the creatures, and at this point neither Danielle or Sam can explain how anything in this world works. It doesn't matter because a couple of births and shotgun shells later things resolve one way or another. If you want answers or even the barest notion of what these creatures are so as to better grasp the stakes or struggles in this movie, boy, do we have bad news for you. There is, however, a box with some birds in it that is almost entirely irrelevant, so ten out of ten, perfect movie.
It's time once again for Spook Retorts! Sam kicks off this year with the 1987 ensemble monster movie The Monster Squad. We start in Transylvania where Abraham Van Helsing is attempting to banish Dracula and his menagerie of armadillos using a glowing amulet and a teen girl. Van Helsing fails spectacularly, for reasons that are entirely opaque, and Dracula decides to lay low for one hundred years. That's just enough time for a group of snarky and unfortunately homophobic kids to form a monster club in small town America. These kids are somehow very selective for membership in their monster club, even though it seems to require only the barest minimum of basic monster knowledge to join. One of the kids comes into possession of Van Helsing's journal which immediately makes them a target for Dracula, who is assembling a coterie of monster, which is, bafflingly, not the titular monster squad. After encountering the mummy, hearing about a werewolf, and befriending Frankenstein's monster, the children decide to form the Monster Squad to take on Dracula using the instructions in Van Helsing's journal and, worryingly, a fair bit of sexual blackmail. So join Sam and Danielle the premiere of this year's Spook Retorts that will having you rooting for the monsters to defeat the real evil: Human children.
Danielle and Sam are just so excited for the upcoming Spook Retorts that they need a week off to prepare. So please enjoy this sampling of two of the weekly bonus episodes only available to our Patreon supporters. We'll be back next week with Spook Retorts, but for now please enjoy these extra tidbits inspired by The Ice Pirates and the Christopher Pike book Bury Me Deep.
This week Danielle brings us our first Sandra Bullock film with the 1995 cyber-thriller The Net. Angela Bennett is an average cyber-security employee/freelancer/contractor/thing who is a consummate recluse. She does out there things such as chatting in message groups and ordering pizza online, the horror. When a mysterious floppy disk (look it up, kids) is mailed to her house she finds it contains links to a mysterious backdoor that lets her access supposedly secure systems. The colleague who mailed her the disk flies his one-man aircraft out to see her, but dies in a suspicious crash before arriving. Unperturbed by his sudden death, or chaos at the airport due to a seemingly unrelated hacking, Angela jets off on a vacation to Mexico. There she encounters the sexy nerd Jack and they quickly hit it off on his boat, but just when Jack is about to kill her for that floppy disk (which she inexplicably brought) Angela escapes. That's when Angela discovers her identity has been erased and replaced with a different identity that marks her as a criminal. Now Angela must find out about the shadowy organization behind her identity erasure and how their magic wizard computer powers work. Also, if she could find out what their motivations are, that would be great too, because we can't figure that out. So dive into what Hollywood thought computers were in 1995, and join Sam and Danielle as they struggle to answer the film's biggest question: Who is Cyberbob?
It's Sam's turn in the Great Switcheroo to share the 1991 Christopher Pike book Bury Me Deep. Jean is your average horned-up teenage girl who was written by an author who's definitely human and totally understands how human girls work. Jean is excited for a trip to Hawaii with her friends, but finds herself delayed a few days for reasons too stupid to be real. Finally on the plane to Hawaii, the boy, Mike, in the seat next to Jean dies violently, leaving Jean shaken. But there's no time for trauma when there are cute boys giving scuba diving lessons at the hotel, so Jean puts aside her experience and tires to enjoy the time with her friend Mandy and also Michelle, the random girl who just invited herself along on the vacation and now spends all her time locked in their shared hotel suite bedroom having sex with Dave, the older of the two diving instructors. Jean starts having spooky dreams about Mike, and is drawn to a particular underwater cave off the Island of Lanai. When Jean recklessly dives to the cave alone she finds a human skull and promptly freaks out. Neither of the cute instructors, Dave or Johnny, believe she saw the skull, and upon investigation Dave can't find it in the cave. Is jean falling apart from her traumatic experience? Are Dave and Johnny more than simply cute dive instructors, and what happened to their missing partner Ringo (yes, Ringo)? What does any of this have to do with Mike? Will Mandy ever be treated with respect in this book? Help Sam solve this mystery (spoiler, it's not that mysterious) in the conclusion of our first Great Switcheroo!
In the first of our Great Switcheroo episodes, Danielle shares her pick of the 1984 movie The Ice Pirates. What do you get when you can't decide between being a goofy lampoon of Star Wars or just a knock-off? It might very well be The Ice Pirates. The galaxy has inexplicably run out of water, the remaining bits of ice from comets are controlled by the Templars, a group of chain-mail wearing space knights. The annoyingly rouge pirate captain Jason (really) finds himself captured by the Templars and at risk of castration at the hands of the Castratomatic machine. Luckily, he's saved by the princess Karina who wants his help to find her lost, and possibly dead, father the King of something, who knows what. At this point, some of Jason's crew also escape with him, but run into a robot pimp with a TV showing scantily ladies in its stomach. The robopimp doesn't really matter to the movie, but Sam thought it important to mention that it's basically a horny Teletubby. Anyway, the crew and the princess escape to the pirate moon, there's a space herpie on the ship but it doesn't matter. Really, the thing that matters most is that the group eventually makes their way to possibly the best named character of all time; a lover of baby donkeys and teenage ducks, the one, the only, the indomitable Lanky Nibs. There's a bunch of stuff after that about finding Karina's father and the Seventh World, but after Lanky Nibs it's all just a blur until a finale that screws with time in ways that make our heads hurt. Also, did we mention Anjelica Huston has a minor roll in this movie, as well as Ron Perlman in his second ever film credit? So come enjoy Danielle grapple with explaining why she didn't love a movie that seems to have it all, and tune in next week for Sam's turn on The Great Switcheroo!
This week Sam brings along Danielle on a trip through the Nic Cageiverse in the 2009 film Knowing. In 1959 a little girl scrawls a bunch of mystery numbers on a paper placed in a time capsule. This note is acquired by John (Nicholas Cage) fifty years later in the undetermined time period of "present day", who, as a depressed astrophysicist, immediately cracks the code. The paper details the dates and locations of every massive disaster (supposedly) in the last fifty years. The real problem is that there are three disasters that are scheduled for the future in the next few days. John sets out to stop the disasters and utterly fails to prevent the first two. He then decides to learn more about the writer of the note by spending some time stalking a woman and her young daughter; a plan that works about as well as you'd expect. Suddenly there's an apocalypse coming and the government knows but doesn't seem to care and John can only think about how to save his son, who has started hearing mysterious whispers and seeing strange men following them. None of this really matters as the ending is wild and seems to render the whole movie pointless. However, Sam did manage to find a description for the movie that seems to have come from a parallel universe, and that really excites Danielle.
In this special bonus episode Danielle and Sam pick out weird media which the other person will have to explain, while still not having seen or read the media they're suggesting. Given the choice would Danielle rather watch the animated film The Elm-Chanted Forest or the sci-fi comedy The Ice Pirates? And which Christopher Pike book will Sam pick to read: See You Later or Bury Me Deep? Listen to find out, and be sure to stay tuned as Danielle and Sam cover their choices in a future episode.
This week Danielle takes Sam through the 2012 dark comedy film It's a Disaster. When Tracy (Julia Styles) brings her new boyfriend (David Cross) to a regular brunch to meet her friends, they all quickly find themselves trapped inside the house together as a series of disasters threaten the world around them. However, they won't let something like the end of the world get in the way of their interpersonal drama. This one is short, weird, and really needs to be experienced to be fully understood, but Sam is nonetheless impressed by the cast's comedy chops, and the way the story makes life-threatening circumstances funny. Danielle really only cares that the cast contains America Ferrera. But the thing the two of them agree about the most for this brunch-pocolypse is "don't be late".
This week Sam takes Danielle on an adventure through the 2004 made for TV movie The Librarian: Quest for the Spear. If you take Indiana Jones, mash it up with Warehouse 13, add Noah Wyle and a touch of historical mysticism, you'll get something akin to The Librarian. Flynn is a perpetual student with an unbelievable 22 academic degrees, a fact Sam refuses to accept. When he's forced out of school by his teacher, for some reason, he struggles to find purpose until a magic letter invites him to a job interview at a library. At the interview, Flynn spouts some nonsense and then a magical Bob Newhart as Judson appears from a wall to tell him he's hired. Bob shows Flynn around the library, which is really more a heavily guarded museum of mystical artifacts, and also the Mona Lisa for some reason. This "secure" facility is immediately broken into by a librarian splinter group—which must be the least intimidating kind of splinter group—and a piece of a powerful spear artifact is stolen. Instead of actually trying to recover the stolen spear piece, Flynn is instead sent to track down the two other spear pieces which, until now, have been safely hidden in other locations because the spear was too powerfully dangerous to be kept in one piece. Predictably, things don't go smoothly as Flynn and his sexy bodyguard Nicole go to the Amazon to recover the spear, but Sam is more upset that they even launched this unnecessary quest to begin with. Things only get more ridiculous as stupid evil plans collide with stupid good plans and no one seems to do any actual librarian work. All we can say is: Snake, Snake! Snake, Snake!
This week Danielle takes Sam through the truly bizarre finale of the 2020 Ernest Cline novel Ready Player Two. Wade Watts is trapped in the OASIS in his ONI VR headset by Anorak and his "infirmware" and is being forced by Anorak to find the seven shards hidden by Halliday on various media worlds Kira—the late wife of Ogden and romantic obsession of Halliday—had a hand in creating. And if that sentence doesn't sum up Ready Player Two, nothing does. The purpose of this latest scavenger hunt is still unclear, but Wade now has 12 hours to complete it before he dies, so naturally he completely ignores the help offered by his biggest fan L0hengrin. Wade and his friends set off to various media worlds, including the not-much-of-a-challenge school world, and the fever dream of the Prince world. Eventually, Wade figures out that Anorak wants the shards because he—the A.I. consciousness of Halliday—wants to use the shards to resurrect an A.I. consciousness of Kira which Halliday created without her consent. Anorak wants to live in eternal bliss with this A.I. Kira even though she never loved Halliday, even when reconstituted virtually. We won't spoil how the space ship full of frozen embryos figures into all this, but it's wild. Anyway, Wade and his friends find a convenient magic sword that Ogden, and only Ogden for some reason, can use to defeat Anorak, and embark on a pretty simple heist to free Ogden and bring him to the Oasis to fight Anorak. All of this is pretty standard, but then Wade discovers there are A.I. scans of every person who has used an ONI device, and his solution to this is probably the most ridiculous, and most irresponsible, part of the whole book, which is really saying something.
This week Danielle starts Sam on a VR adventure with the 2020 Ernest Cline novel Ready Player Two. In this sequel to Ready Player One, Wade Watts is the freshly minted owner of the OASIS, a massive virtual realty universe that dominates the cultural and commercial landscape of a dystopian Earth. That's when Wade's late predecessor, Halliday, sends him a hitherto unknown technology: The ONI, a neural interface VR system for the OASIS that kills you if you use it too long. This all sounds great to Wade who immediately launches it as a commercial product, and this is why Danielle and Sam feel that you probably shouldn't pick the successor to your multi-billion dollar essential planetary infrastructure via pop culture scavenger hunt. At this point, a new scavenger hunt appears in the OASIS, seemingly just for Wade and created by Halliday (seriously, does he have any other ideas?). Wade is tasked with finding seven shards but is stumped by the clue and so kinda just ignores if for a few years, like a true hero. During that time, Wade finds his friends divided over the ethics of the ONI devices, and Wade drifts away from Samantha, his girlfriend for all of a week, due to her reservations. Finally, a fan of Wade's, L0hengrin, clues him into where the first shard is, and helps him recover this first quest item. Things only get weirder from here, and that's without mentioning the Olympic swimming pool's worth of 80's and 90's pop culture references to slog through, or the spaceship full of frozen embryos. Sam has many questions, and while there are few answers in part one, we can only hope part two will shed some light on his most burning question: How big a jerk was Halliday? (Spoiler: absolutely massive).
This week Sam takes Danielle on a mystical adventure through the 1997 movie Warriors of Virtue. Ryan Jeffers is an ordinary teenage boy who dreams of playing football and impressing girls. He also reads comics in his bathroom while home alone and hangs around at a Chinese restaurant's kitchen with the chef who cooks with Kung Fu. This chef gives Ryan a mysterious scroll (which is actually a book) of Tao and some wise words of advice, then Ryan heads off to meet up with the cool kids who invited him out for an initiation that night. Ryan and the cool teens break into a building whose purpose is unclear, but there is a strange, open whirlpool in one room which Danielle is super excited about. Ryan falls into this whirlpool and is transported to the magical world of Tao which is under threat from the evil Komodo who wants to drain all the Life Springs of their energy sustaining element Zubrium so he can use it to stay young and powerful while the rest of the people in Tao die. Sam doesn't get it either, but is all about the word Zubrium and Angus Macfadyen's amazing acting choices as Komodo. Ryan eventually meets up with the titular Warriors of Virtues who are, in fact, Kung Fu Kangaroos and nothing has delighted Danielle or Sam more than that simple phrase. However, one of the five warriors has left to be a hermit in a swamp after failing to uphold the vow of never killing anyone. Now it's up to Ryan to reunite the Warriors, mostly by berating them, and to try and find a way home all while learning absolutely no Kung Fu. You can also join Danielle's quest to have a watch party where Sam re-dubs all the sound effects in the movie; he will not do a good job.
This week Danielle brings a little Halloween in July with the 2014 film Vampire Academy. Rose Hathaway is a teenage Dhampir (mostly human vampire) and is guardian-in-training for her best friend Princess Vasilisa (Lissa) Dragomir, a Moroi (pacifist full vampire). They have run away from their titular school after a deadly car accident left Lissa without her family. They are soon tracked down and returned to school, because they're teenagers, where they arrive in the middle of a Strigoi (evil, non-pacifist vampire) attack at the school gates. At this point, Sam has reached his limit of nonsense fantasy words and exposition, but the movie, and Danielle, aren't even close to done. Back at school there's some sinister force harassing Lissa who uses her magic powers (of course she has magic powers) to manipulate everyone into liking her and becoming like, so totally popular you guys. There are some dreamy, broody vampire (and half-vampire) boys, of course, but none of that really seems to matter. In fact, none of the plot of this book really seems to matter as it serves more as a vehicle for vampire world exposition. And boy, does Sam have questions about that vampire world, questions for which Danielle has too few answers. Lissa's life is eventually endangered in a predictable twist, there's some almost sex that is surprisingly responsible in terms of power structures, and something called Psi Hounds make an appearance, which are basically just regular dogs with glowing eyes that are psychic in ways that are subtle and irrelevant. So listen and enjoy as both Sam and Danielle examine the finer points of vampire caste systems and reproductive habits. We could seriously use a biologist, and maybe a sociologist, to help figure this one out.
This week Sam shares the conclusion of the supremely weird 1967 Dodie Smith book The Starlight Barking. Pongo and his brood are still wrestling with what's going on while the rest of the world, aside from dogs, sleeps. Finally deciding Cruella de Vil might be involved, the dogs, a cat, and Tommy sneak into her house, some with the intent of just straight-up murdering her. Although the air is filled with pepper, Cruella is asleep and the dogs are relieved that's she not involved, and, much to Sam's consternation, that's the last we'll hear of her during the story. Back at Downing Street, a mysterious light appears on the TV and commands all the dogs in England to appear in Trafalgar Square at midnight to receive an explanation for all the strange goings on. When asked questions, the voice provides answers that are less than useless before rushing off. At midnight, the dogs gathered in the Square experience euphoria and then utter terror as a bright light descends into the square. It's the Lord of Sirius the dog star come to offer all the dogs a permanent home on Sirius to live forever in total bliss. The star lord's reasons for making this offer are crazy, as is the stipulation that it will be an all-or-nothing deal so all dogs are to go or none at all. For some reason, the dogs elect Pongo to make the decision on their behalf. Despite all the supposedly high stakes, Danielle and Sam are really much more interested in the pressing question: What the heck happened to the missing Roly Poly?
This week Sam brings the little-known sequel to The Hundred and One Dalmatians, the 1967 Dodie Smith novel The Starlight Barking. Dalmatian heroes Pongo and Missis have retired to the countryside at Hell Hall with their massive brood, but Pongo is feeling restless for his previous life of adventure. That's when he wakes one morning to find the entire world asleep except for dogs, and no amount of barking will wake any other creature. He and Missis venture forth to investigate, and find that doors and gates obligingly open for them as they approach. Soon they learn they can communicate telepathically with other dogs and float, a.k.a "swoosh". At this point, Danielle is just about done with this nonsense. Still, Sam presses on and explains how all the dalmatians have been called to London to form a dalmatian army by their daughter Cadpig who, as the prime minister's pet, is acting as the prime minister for dogs. There are still no clues as to why any of this has happened, but as the dogs enter London Pongo and Missis notice a sign for Cruella de Vil's new business, leading Danielle and Sam to believe she's somehow behind this. The dogs ignore this obvious threat and proceed to 10 Downing Street to partake in a cabinet meeting. Seriously, this is the most boring dog reaction to an apocalypse that has ever been. Danielle continues to spin her own theories as to what is happening since the dogs seem utterly uninterested in investigating on their own. Still, there's a floating tractor and a young boy who speaks a kind of pidgin dog, so the book has that going for it.
This week Danielle revisits another classic fairy tale in the 2013 film Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. When, as children, Hansel and his sister Gretel are left in the woods by their parents for what will turn out to be stupid reasons, they encounter and manage to kill a witch. They decide to go pro and become full time witch hunters, which is very convenient considering there's currently a witch plague across the land. Now adults, Hansel and Gretel dispense deadly justice against witches, handing down verdicts based on nothing more than whether or not they look witchy enough. This, as Sam and Danielle both agree, is a terrible means of witch detection, and Sam is convinced that, from the witches' perspective, this is more akin to a witch genocide. The pair of professional murders eventually encounter a grand witch (which is apparently a thing) who's stealing children in order to produce a spell for fireproofing herself. This is baffling to Sam as Hansel and Gretel seem to use pretty much any method they want to dispose of witches, fire or not. Nonetheless, there's also some good witches involved who were hitherto unknown to H&G, so who knows how many "good" witches they murdered over the years. None of that really matters because all Danielle and Sam care about is the morally conflicted troll named Edward, who is just the best. Also, this whole thing is steampunk because this movie needs to find every way possible to annoy Sam.
This week Sam shares the new graphic novel My Video Game Ate My Homework by Dustin Hansen. Dewey Jenkins is going to fail middle school and be forced into summer school unless he can get an A+ on his science fair project. It doesn't hurt that first prize is an as yet unreleased Infinity Lens VR video game console. Unfortunately, his friend Ferg had been in the principal's office and broke the console and has now brought it to Dewey to repair. After succeeding in his repairs, the console springs to life and straight-up steals Dewey's science fair project and taunts him to retrieve it. At this point, Sam and Danielle agree that a video game that robs you is probably not going to be a massive sales success, and there must be some sinister corporate plot behind this. Despite these highly suspect circumstances, Dewey and his friends enter the virtual world and encounter some pretty trivial puzzles, though they do encounter some candle based spiders delightfully called pyrachnids that engage in a truly horrific practice of turning people into candles and slowly consuming them as they burn. After surviving all that the group faces off against the final boss: Dewey's transformed science fair project, for some reason. While Danielle and Sam contemplate the worst things in their own homes for the game to steal, they're just glad it didn't take his dad's chainsaw.
For our very special 50th episode celebration, Danielle and Sam have teamed up to bring you a double feature of weird media! This week consists of two 50th episodes from different TV shows being shared completely out of context. First up, Danielle shares the 50th episode of Xena: Warrior Princess. For some reason, an unusually sexy Ares has tasked Xena with destroying an upstart religion's temple for some reason. Xena ignores Ares because they have history, and immediately joins in on a campaign against Caesar, because they also have history. Spoiler alert: The new religion turns out to be bonkers and Xena's friend Gabrielle is impregnated by magic fire somehow. If you want this to make more sense, watching some other episodes of Xena may help, but we're dubious. Next up Sam shares not one, but two episodes of Regular Show, the surreal animated series about a slacker blue jay and his raccoon buddy working at a park. A few highlights: There's a rap battle with higher than expected stakes, a wise yeti spells out advice in alphabet soup, cars engage in aerial combat somehow, and we meet the lovely Scabitha. So we hope you enjoy this double-dose of weirdness as much as we did, and thank you so much for all your support, we could never have reached 50 episodes without such a lovely and strange audience.
This week Danielle is dredging up the 1976 pulp horror novel Night of the Crabs by Guy N. Smith. When a pair of swimmers disappear off the coast of Wales it's up to well-known botanist, and uncle to one of the missing swimmers, Cliff Davenport to uncover what happened. Why, exactly, it's up to him is anyone's guess, but Cliff quickly proves himself by uncovering crab tracks on the beach (is that a thing?) and concluding his nephew was murdered by sheep-sized crabs. Spoiler: Cliff is wrong, they are, in fact, cow-sized crabs; c'mon, Cliff, do better. Cliff is made to quickly forget the grief of his lost nephew in the arms of the nubile and newly divorced Pat, who is one-hundred percent on board with giant killer crabs, having seen crab tracks herself (no seriously, are crab tracks a thing?!). The two investigate and have sex in about equal measure, but it's not until the nearby secret, but not too secret, military base is attacked by an army of giant, invincible crabs lead by, as dubbed by Cliff, the cunning King Crab, that anyone else takes notice. Cliff, now somehow a marine biologist, works with the department of defense to devise a plan to entomb the crabs in their underwater cave. This plan, predictably, fails spectacularly, and so many are killed by the enraged crab army Danielle had to give up keeping count. All Sam knows is that he has a new hero: All hail King Crab!
This week Sam gives Danielle a crash course in fictional biology with the 2001 film Evolution. When a meteor strikes Earth carrying an alien goo which rapidly starts growing and evolving, it's up to community college professors Ira Kane (David Duchovny) and Harry Block (Orlando Jones) to investigate and prevent the aliens from taking over the world. Only not really since they are woefully unqualified and unequipped the handle anything this important, thus the government quickly steps in with the help of CDC Deputy Director Dr. Allison Reid (Julianne Moore). Ira and Harry don't give up, and, with the help of firefighter in training Wayne (Sean William Scott), are determined to take the glory of the alien discovery for themselves at any cost, often with a healthy dose of terrible science and misogyny, just because. Sam becomes increasingly irate as the film continually sprays bad science at him like shampoo through a fire hose, culminating in a solution so asinine it forces Sam to root for the military industrial complex. Danielle, meanwhile, is confused about when the rapidly evolving aliens could reach a point where humanity could parley with them, but is mostly upset that Dr. Reid ends up leaving her job for the utterly charmless Ira; we both think she can do better. So enjoy as Sam finds himself rooting strongly for the antagonists in a film that's as fast and loose with its character development as it is with its science.
Be sure to check out I Drink Your Podcast which covers every film from 2007, especially the episode about Next featuring Danielle and Sam. You can find them on Twitter @IDYP_Podcast, Instagram @idyp_podcast, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Danielle brings a little magic into our lives this week with the 2013 movie Now You See Me. When a group of random magicians (sorry, illusionists) are recruited to partake in some fancy heists, Sam could not be more excited because, c'mon, magic heists! The all-star cast agrees to hit the targets designated by their mysterious benefactor—in the first instance, a French bank—as they perform the robberies while live on stage. Sam's excitement quickly disappears like a rabbit into a hat as they proceed to just give the money away to the audience, and Danielle is unable to give a better explanation as to why these random performers would give away their heist money other than "For the love of magic?" Now pursued by the FBI and, even worse, Morgan Freeman the magician spoiler, the heists, and magic tricks, get progressively less believable, especially mentalist Woody Harrelson who legit can just mind control people like Obi-Wan Kenobi. Luckily, the movie never slows down long enough to let you consider the ridiculousness of it all, throwing pure insanity at the audience like Dave Franco using magic-fu to fight FBI agents and a card trick that involves sticking a card in a sapling and then waiting 20 years for the tree to grow around it. Right from the start Sam demonstrates a knowledge of magic and and magicians that was as much a surprise to himself as it was to Danielle, but even he can't fathom how that tree thing is a good trick, even from an entertainment point of view. There's nothing up our sleeves as we attempt to make logic appear out of thin air for this move, so pick a card and enjoy the magic!
This week Sam brings Danielle back to the heady days of 2003 with the movie Agent Cody Banks. Cody Banks (Frankie Muniz) is your average 15-year-old boy, except he was scooped up, in what has the be the most slipshod CIA training program ever, to become a youth agent. Why was Cody chosen for this prestigious role? We don't know, and neither does the CIA. Nonetheless, when the evil organization E.R.I.S. is planning on using the nanobots invented by Dr. Albert Connors for...something evil probably, the CIA taps Cody to foil their evil plan. Using all the suave and subtlety of a teenage boy, Cody is to befriend Dr. Connor's daughter Natalie (Hilary Duff) to secure an invention to her upcoming Las Vegas themed birthday party and attempt to...talk to Dr. Connors? Honestly, all the plans in this movie are as straightforward as an Escher drawing and not nearly as well composed. Now Cody must overcome his greatest weakness, talking to girls, and become the top agent the CIA has been training him to be for all of the past two summers so he can save the world (or something).
Correction: Hilary Duff did not appear in the sequel Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London. We regret the error and apologize to Ms. Duff and her family for any pain this characterization may have caused. Our bad.
Danielle is super excited to return to the the K-drama well with season two of the series Love Cells (연애세포 시즌2). If you, like Sam, remember anything at all about the first season of Love Cells previously shared by Danielle, that's a real shame because it will only serve as a source of confusion as season two seems to be completely unrelated to the first series, with the notable exception of the return of the return of Navi, the love cell cat girl thing. If you don't remember the first season of love cells, that sentence was indecipherable, but don't worry, as Danielle explains the show it will definitely become no clearer what's happening. This season includes a love cell bank and a devious scheme by the love-struck co-host of a cooking show stealing the love cell of her chef crush from the bank and then implanting a kill device in it when it's eaten by a cat and turns into a girl and using that threat of death to force the love cell cat girl to trick the chef into dating her. We promise, there is no clearer way to state that. Sam is, understandably, lost and Danielle does her best to explain all the characters' machinations, but they both get lost in the weeds of trying to find any semblance of logic in this show. So join us for one heck of a ride, and if you stay to the very end we might even solve the movie Cats for you; you're welcome.
On this episode Sam brings Danielle the 2002 box office bomb Reign of Fire. In the distant future year of 2020 dragons have been awoken from their cicada-like hibernation and have ravaged the earth, reducing humanity to a few pockets of life. Quinn (Christian Bale) leads one such colony in Northumberland, though food is scarce and there's dissension in the ranks. None of that really matters as soon enough militia leader Denton Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey) shows up to rope Quinn into his quest to wipe out the source of the dragons: The single male dragon living in London. At this point, Sam cannot understand the biology of a species that only has one male capable of breeding, and how these same dragons were apparently responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs. Danielle, meanwhile, is more upset about the fact that the starving survivors let a perfectly good dragon carcass go to waste instead of just eating it. There's also some tension between Quinn and his adopted son Jared about his joining Van Zan's soldiers, but it's over so quick Sam's still not sure it wasn't just a hallucination brought on by all the dragon special effects and dark lighting. Either way, the heroes square off against the dragon king in a battle that's kinda lame, but does have a shirtless Matthew McConaughey wielding a battleaxe in one of the best scenes ever put to film, so it's totally worth it.
Danielle digs deep into the 90s' well with the Christopher Pike novel The Eternal Enemy. Rela is just a normal girl who loves boys, cookies, and VCRs. Her life goes off the rails when the VCR she just bought turns out to be recording TV shows from the future! This doesn't really matter as Rela is more interested in the cute boy, Chris, at her school. However, Rela does record a future news broadcast where she's murdered by a weird stalker, but she decides her best course of action is to go about her daily life, as one would. Sam is already confused about what's going on, and that's before the stalker turns about to be Rela's grandfather from the future trying to preserve the robot takeover of Earth. There's a lot moral waffling about what has a soul and if humans should be replaced by cyborg hybrids, but Sam is firmly on the robots' side in all this despite the best arguments to the contrary. If you think the philosophizing is confusing, wait until all the weird time travel paradoxes rear their ugly heads. So enjoy Blockbuster, VCRs, and startlingly fast adoptions in this 90s fueled sci-fi drama!
This week Sam shares the conclusion of the the Michael Ende novel The Night of Wishes. We rejoin our story as our two bumbling animal heroes wander out into the snowy night with no plan to stop the evil sorcerer Preposteror and his aunt Tyrannia Vampirella from completing their evil deed quota via magic wishing potion. Fortunately, Preposteror and Vampirella have to spend an inordinate amount of time doing ridiculously complicated magics to brew the potion, when they're not wasting time they don't have trying to back-stab each other, that is. Through some pure, blind luck Mauricio (née Morris) and Jacob manage to obtain a time traveling bell ring from the upcoming the New Year's Eve bell tolling, which, if we're understanding this correctly, would undo the reverse wishing effect of the potion and foil the evil plans. At this point, both Danielle and Sam have a little breakdown because they're so confused by the time traveling sounds and complicated wishing/reverse wishing/undo reverse wishing magic rules. It doesn't help that Preposteror and Vampirella continue to do ridiculous things like race while riding a giant scorpion and bedbug respectively. However, it's when the wishes start that things really go off-the-wall, so enjoy as Sam tries desperately to make Danielle understand just any amount of what he's saying.
Sam shares a lesser known work of the author of The Neverending Story, Michael Ende, with the book The Night of Wishes. When the nefarious sorcerer Beelzebub Preposteror (whose name Danielle is incapable of saying correctly) falls behind on his quota of evil deeds for the year, he has until midnight to fulfill his contract or face foreclosure by the devil himself. Fortunately, his witch aunt Tyrannia Vampirella, who's in the same boat, shows up with a plan: To brew the legendary Satanarchaeolidealcohellish Notion Potion that will let them literally wish all their problems away. Unfortunately, each of them is living with a spy from the High Council of Animals, a cat named Maurico di Mauro and a raven named Jacob Scribble, who are determined to stop them. These spies, however, are incompetent to a degree that is only surpassed by the sorcerer and his aunt's inability to cooperate, and none of them seem capable of forming a coherent plan. So listen to Sam struggle with German wordplay and pronunciations and Danielle struggle with character names and pretty much everything else, especially the overly complicated rules of the magic potion in a book that's both incredibly goofy and unexpectedly dark.
This week Danielle brings a movie she has an uneasy history with, it's the 1990 Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan film Joe Versus the Volcano. Joe Banks is your typical work-a-day cog, unhappy with his life. Fortunately (?) he learns he has a rare disease called a brain cloud, which is asymptomatic but will kill him in six months. Joe accepts this without question, and so also agrees to help a millionaire superconductor magnate secure the mining rights on a small Polynesian island by jumping into a volcano. None of this crazy plot really matters because this movie has, just, so many Meg Ryans, you guys, so many. It seems Sam and Danielle have uncovered the truth of the Tom Hanksiverse series of movies and it will shock you (it's Meg Ryan, the truth is it's Meg Ryan all the way down). Despite these shocking revelations, Danielle and Sam manage to get through this movie about a man dealing with his mortality through encounters with a series of Meg Ryans, but they have one qualm with the film: It needs more Meg Ryans.
Sam introduces Danielle to the 1992 Robin Williams film Toys. Enter a whimsical world where an eccentric Willy Wonka-esque toy maker dies when his propeller beanie connected pacemaker fails. He leaves his wacky toy factory to his brother, three-star general Leland Zevo, instead of his man-child son Leslie for reasons that are unclear. Despite having no interest in toys, General Zevo agrees to run the toy factory, and quickly pivots to making "war toys" and then to making actual weapons of war that he plans to trick children into using for military applications. If that plan sounds insane, then the plan Leslie comes up with to stop this is somehow even crazier (hint: it involves making a highly produced fake MTV music video for no apparent reason). This movie has it all: Creepy murder-toys, unnecessary romance, gratuitous sex, overly complicated plans, eerie music, actually beautiful aesthetics, and more whimsy than a Wes Anderson fan convention. Despite all that, Sam is convinced this movie is actually a thinly veiled horror film and its world is actually a dystopia; Danielle is just plain confused.
This week Danielle has the thrilling conclusion of Madeleine L'Engle's The Arm of the Starfish. Adam finally learns a bit about the experimental work of Dr. O'Keefe, and Sam is aghast at the reckless disregard for safety and scientific rigor. Adam seems less bothered by this and is ready to commit to O'Keefe and his work, but O'Keefe, inexplicably, insists that Adam go on dinner date with Kali at her father's hotel first. Before leaving for the date, Poly has a premonition and insists Adam take a switchblade syringe filled with shark tranquilizer and conceal it in his swimming trunks for when he and Kali inevitably go swimming. It's difficult to convey how truly crazy this is, and it's even crazier that they are indeed attacked by sharks but are saved by the kinda psychic dolphin. After that incident, O'Keefe gives Adam the assignment to slip some secret papers about his work to his friends in the embassy right under Typhon Cutter's nose. It's a plan that is far too unnecessarily convoluted to get into here, but there are complications, backstabbing, mortal peril, and some truly hilarious attempts at cloak-and-dagger shenanigans. Also, just when this book should be over, there are more shark attacks. Seriously, for a book titled The Arm of the Starfish, there are way more sharks than you'd think, and and way fewer starfish.
This week Danielle breaks out the Madeleine L'Engle classic The Arm of the Starfish. Adam is your typical-sixteen-year old biology prodigy on his way to Lisbon to work with superstar biologist Dr. O'Keefe. While being held up at the airport because of fog, Adam is approached by the attractive Kali who warns him not to trust the O'Keefes. Adam is perplexed by this encounter, but shrugs it off as he jets off across the Atlantic, before making an unexpected stop in Madrid due to yet more fog. While there, a friend of the O'Keefes, a priest named Canon Tallis, is escorting Poly, the twelve-year-old daughter of the O'Keefes, back from a vacation in the U.S. Tallis asks Adam, the teenage boy he just met, to take over the escort duty of this young girl while he does some business in Madrid. This is the first of many bafflingly terrible decisions every character seems to make. On the flight from Madrid to Lisbon Poly is immediately, and expertly, kidnapped. Fortunately, Dr. O'Keefe is nonplussed by the loss of his daughter when Adam arrives. Later, while recuperating in a hotel Adam is magically found by Kali, who just happens to be in the neighborhood and who insists on taking him to meet her mega-rich-totally-not-evil businessman father Typhon Cutter. Typhon has just so happened to have found Poly and is returning her to the O'Keefes on the condition Adam reports to him on the super secret, world changing work Dr. O'Keefe is doing. Sam is annoyed that Typhon gives up a perfectly good kidnapped hostage to instead rely on a stranger of a teenager to get his information for him. Adam, meanwhile, must wrestle with the most difficult question of who to trust: The world famous scientist he's going to work for, or the kidnapping businessman who wants him to spy on the O'Keefes. Also, there aren't really any starfish in this part, but there is a kinda psychic dolphin, so that has to count for something.
This week Sam introduces Danielle to the classic 1985 post-apocalyptic film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The Mad Max franchise is well known for telling the gritty story of the collapse of society, a nuclear apocalypse, and one man who attempts to survive alone in the new world. Beyond Thunderdome takes that serious story and makes it delightfully goofy in every way. After having his camel-drawn cart stolen, the titular Max ends up in Bartertown, the most advanced city in the Australian wasteland. He quickly becomes embroiled in a political assassination plot that is wildly over-complicated as the queen of Bartertown, played fabulously by Tina Turner, wishes to have the bodyguard of the mechanical genius behind the city's success killed. None of that is really important as it's just an excuse to get Max into Thunderdome with the formidable Blaster for a fight scene that is as delightful as it is bizarre. After some contrived shenanigans and the application of laws that are notable mostly in their ability to be chanted by a mob, Max is exiled to the wasteland but is rescued both by a magic monkey and a tribe of teenagers and children that have formed a cult religion about a savior pilot after being abandoned in an oasis. The crazy only escalates from there as Max and the kids are forced into a conflict with Tina Turner and the Bartertown Bunch mostly as an excuse to have a climactic train/car chase through the desert. That all sounds ridiculous, and it is, but the costumes are amazing, the is action way over the top, and the plot is nonsensical, so really, what more could we possibly ask for?
Danielle brings Sam into the wonderfully strange world of James Bond with the 2002 movie Die Another Day. Although this isn't Sam's first James Bond film, it's definitely one of the weirder he's ever heard about. When your spy movie starts with James Bond and his team clandestinely surfing into North Korea only to have a helicopter they already control meet them there so Bond can replace and impersonate the diamond/arms dealer inside, you know you're in for a wild ride. James Bond, with his usual lack of subtlety, proceeds to be captured and held for over a year by the DPRK before being released in a prisoner exchange. Bond quickly does what he does best and takes an unsanctioned trip to Cuba in search of the mole in MI6 that had betrayed him, but mostly ends up just having sex with a criminally underused Halle Berry. There's some stuff about a de-aging clinic that turns you into the doppelgänger of whomever's bone-marrow you get, but the movie doesn't seem that interested in the details because it's time for a crazy rich guy with a totally-not-evil-seriously-guys-it's-just-for-peaceful-reasons-I-can't-think-of-right-now space laser! There are so many crazy villain plots in this that Danielle struggles to finish her retelling in less time than it would take just to watch the actual movie. So come on and join the most famous of secret agents for some delightfully nonsensical action fun. Also, there's a lot of setup about scorpions in the movie, but that never pays off, sorry.
This week Sam shares the insanity that is the 1991 movie Highlander II: The Quickening, and to deal with it Danielle calls for backup in the form of Emily from I Drink Your Podcast. In the year 2024 the world has been encased in a shield to protect Earth from the intense rays of the sun now able to ravage to planet due the destruction of the ozone layer. For some reason, Connor MacLeod, now mortal and old beyond his years, was involved in the creation of the shield. How exactly his previous career as a sword wielding immortal translates to large scale engineering projects is a question beyond answer. It's also revealed that Connor is from the past, or an alien from another planet depending on if you watch the director's cut of the film, and was sent to the future/Earth with the other immortals as punishment for their participation in a rebellion against Michael Ironside as their evil ruler General Katana. All that crazy is before Sam even gets to the plot (such as it is) or the resurrection of Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez, played by Sean Connery. About the only thing this sequel seems to retain from the first film is the baffling accent choices, so dive in as we discover there can be only one...again.
Check out more of Emily and I Drink Your Podcast on Twitter @IDYP_Podcast, Instagram @idyp_podcast, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
This week Sam helps Danielle up her Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game by bringing her the 1990 film Tremors. Perfection, Nevada is your typical middle of nowhere tiny town from which handymen Valentine McKee and Earl Bassett are hoping to escape to the city. Their big adventure is interrupted by a series of mysterious deaths and a landslide that wipes out the only road out of town. Couple that with some strange seismographic readings from the newly arrived graduate seismology graduate student, Rhonda LeBeck, and you have a recipe for giant, murderous, subterranean tentacle-worms. Danielle is so excited for the worms she can hardly contain herself and Sam can hardly contain his exasperation as she constantly wants to know more about them with questions he is nowhere near qualified to answer. Rhonda, however, quickly proves to be a giant tentacle-worm expert, somehow, and comes up with several plans to try and escape the deathtrap of a worm-filled valley. Unfortunately, the tentacle-worms, appear to be the smartest things in the valley and foil our heroes at every turn, while Danielle is frustrated that this rural town has a dearth of off-road vehicles they could use to just drive away and end this nonsense. In any case, after a worm briefly eats Rhonda's pants, they make for their big escape using explosives and weapons from the local prepper couple. This movie inexplicably spawned six sequels and half a SyFy original TV show, and Sam and Danielle can only hope that all their questions about the lifecycle and origins of the tentacle-worms are answered somewhere within all that direct-to-video goodness.
Danielle brings Sam a little Halloween in February with the 2001 sci-fi horror film Jason X. Forget everything you know about the Friday the 13th movies and Camp Crystal Lake because it does not matter. Danielle strains her own memory, and her verbal faculties, to tell Sam how Jason has been caught and is being cryogenically frozen in order to contain him. Unsurprisingly, he still manages to kill a bunch of people before being frozen, but surprisingly being frozen somehow does kills him, which is kinda the opposite point of cryogenic freezing. In any case, he's discovered in the 25th century, and the doctor that froze him is brought back to life, mostly so she can warn them about Jason and be ignored. Jason decides he's been dead long enough and brings himself back to life to do what he does best: Stab people who are having sex. Now loose on the spaceship (yes, this is in space) Jason will terrorize the rest of the crew which consists of a sexy android, a quippy security guard, a morally bankrupt professor, and some miscellaneous nerds. Will the crew be able to survive Jason and escape? No, of course not, most of them die, but Jason is eventually defeated which results in an ending so nonsensical that Sam and Danielle are still trying to puzzle out what the heck it means.
Sam brings Danielle the show's first middle grade novel with the Donna Jo Napoli book Shark Shock. Adam is your typical eleven-year-old boy: he likes video games and playing soccer, and is absolutely terrified of sharks. This really isn't a problem until his family plans a three-week vacation to the New Jersey shore in the same place where the shark attacks that Jaws were based on happened. Adam quickly comes up with a plan to keep himself safe while swimming in the ocean: His talking freckles can keep a lookout and warn him about sharks. Yes, there are talking freckles living on Adam, and no, Sam hasn't read the first book in this series, Soccer Shock, which may explain some of this. Unfortunately, divisive political squabbling amongst the freckles means they won't be able to help. Danielle has questions, but even if Sam had answers there's no time as Adam makes a new friend at the beach by the name of Seth, who was blinded in a boating accident a few years earlier. Adam thinks maybe he can help Seth listen to his own freckles so they can help see for him. Sam is annoyed with Adam's parents for some pretty blatantly sexist behavior by giving Adam his own room instead of his older sister. Danielle just wants to know where the heck are all the freaking sharks.
This week Danielle brings Sam the explosive finale of the Libbra Bray novel Beauty Queens. The "pirates" from the Captains Bodacious reality show find our stranded beauty pageant contestants on their island and immediately do what attractive young people do everywhere. Soon, however, their fun is cut short as MoMo B. ChaCha is about to arrive to complete the arms deal the Corporation has arranged on the island. Still, the show must go on, and for reason too convoluted to go into here, the beauty pageant is back on, live from the island, with MoMo B. ChaCha as a special surprise judge. The girls, finally suspicious of the Corporation and its megalomaniacal leader Ladybird Hope, decide to stage their daring escape live on television, for some reason. There are giant snakes, tanks of piranhas inside volcano caves, and somehow still enough time to make a PowerPoint presentation. The biggest tragedy by far, though, is the loss of MoMo's trusted confidant and stuffed lemur General Good Times, but fortunately Sam plans to open a chain of family restaurants/arcades in his honor.
This week Danielle brings Sam the start of a truly weird novel in Beauty Queens by Libba Bray. When a plane loaded with beauty pageant contestants decides to crash land on a deserted island, the surviving contestants must fend for themselves until rescue comes. Unfortunately, the sinister Corporation that runs the pageant has no interest in their rescue, as the island is planned to be used as the site for an arms deal between The Corporation and MoMo B. ChaCha, an eccentric dictator with a pet stuffed lemur. The stranded beauty pageant contestants soon learn that there's something off about the island, and not just the hallucinogenic berries. If you ever wanted to see a besashed Miss Texas roundhouse kicking guards and being absolutely riddled with tranquilizer darts, this book delivers. Fortunately, despite their dire circumstances, the Captains Bodacious sexy pirate crew arrives to maybe save the day!
Featuring a promo for the book discussion podcast Touch Your Shelf; find them on Twitter @touchurshelfpod, Instagram @touchyourshelfpod, and at https://touchyourshelf.libsyn.com/
In the first full episode of the new year, Sam shares with Danielle the 1999 Antonio Banderas film The 13th Warrior. When Ahmad, an Arabic poet, is caught canoodling with a courtier's wife, he is exiled in the form of being sent out of his home as an ambassador. An ambassador to where? That doesn't matter, because he immediately hooks up with a band of Vikings who are called on a quest to stop an ancient evil from destroying some other Vikings. Sam doesn't really get it either. The point is, Ahmad will have to learn to get along with his new friends if they're to accomplish their mission. In his journey, Ahmad will get to know the Viking people, more than Sam at least, who still can't remember a single one of their names. Ahmad will find love, hear tales of dragons, and deal with Viking political intrigue, and if you think all of those things aren't immediately discarded by the movie as irrelevant, then this movie will surprise you. Don't worry though, the film has plenty of cave bear-people who love retreating through the mist while hissing to keep things wacky.
In the final Book Reshorts of the winter season, and the first of the new year, Sam surprises Danielle by expressing his consternation with a particular aspect of the 2010 Scooby-Doo show Mystery Incorporated: Scooby-Doo's love life. In the show, Scooby-Doo acquires a romantic partner who is a regular Cocker Spaniel dog, and Sam wrestles with the ethical and logistical questions of this pairing. While the show was filled with ridiculous choices, from Nazi robots to inter-dimensional aliens, listen to Sam breeze past those insanities to remain laser-focused on the aspect of the show that confuses him the most.
In the final installment of this year's Winter Bizarre, Danielle brings out the big guns with the John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale rom-com Serendipity. A chance encounter in a New York department store brings Sara and Jonathan together. Even though they're both happily seeing other people, Jonathan seems determined to find a way to be with Sara. Sara dodges his advances by setting up elaborate tests of fate that will tell them if they are meant to be together. Sam has exactly zero patience for Sara's fate-based abdication of personal responsibility, Danielle, meanwhile, is mostly just amused by his frustration. Regardless, see our "heroes" eventually brutally dump their perfectly lovely partners to be with each other because apparently fate told them to. Danielle and Sam are forced by this movie to grapple with some existential questions that are, honestly, pretty stupid. Luckily, the leads have enough charisma and charm to make everyone forget the bad philosophy and enjoy their lovelorn shenanigans.
In this week's Book Reshorts it's Sam's turn to test Danielle's powers of recall. Sam takes Danielle all the way back to their very first episode and sees how well she can remember all the dense science fiction and weird alien sex from the Isaac Asimov book The Gods Themselves. While the science, and character names, may elude her, she does recall some of the more outlandish plans the characters try to execute, if not exactly why someone might want to fly the moon off into space. So listen to find out exactly which parts of that story are forgotten and which are lodged forever in our brains.
This week's Winter Bizarre lives up to the name as Sam explains the 2017 movie Pottersville. If you love holiday classics like It's a Wonderful Life then Pottersville really wants to trick you into thinking it's going to be your new favorite. Maynard Greiger is a general store shopkeeper living in Pottersville, a small, economically depressed town. When he discovers his wife is having an affair, of sorts, Maynard deals with this in the only rational and healthy way possible: By dressing up as a Sasquatch to try and win her back. The side-effect is that now the town's prospects are looking up as news spreads and Bigfoot tourists roll in. Maynard must struggle to keep the ruse up to save the town, and maybe his marriage, as more attention, and monster hunters, focus-in on him. What, exactly, this has to do with the holidays, or really anything, is spectacularly unclear. Just remember: Whenever a bell rings a Sasquatch gets its feet.
In this week's Book Reshorts, Danielle puts Sam's memory skills to the test! This time she challenges Sam to recall everything he can about Sweet Valley High and Margo's murder spree from all those months ago. However, he struggles to remember the names of everyone, or that there is, in fact, more than one cute but otherwise nondescript boy in the book. See how well he does, and if you can do better, in Partial Recall!
Danielle kicks off this year's Winter Bizarre with the Syfy original film Snowmageddon. A mysterious steam-punk snow globe, which has a perfect representation of their home town, is left at the door of a rural Alaskan family. Abruptly, a lava spewing chasm opens in the middle of the town, and in the snow globe the same chasm appears in miniature. Soon ice shards are raining from the sky, people are trapped on an electrified school bus, and a hunky snowboarder sees his friend killed in an avalanche, but isn't that bothered about it. How the snow globe is responsible for all these non-snow related disasters remains unclear to the characters, our podcast hosts, and likely the film's writers as well. The solution to all these problems lies with a poorly named board game that is a ripoff of The Lord of the Rings and also, somehow, Pandora's box. Sam demands more murderous snow and less nonsense; he is disappointed.
With the winter holiday season upon us, Book Retorts is scaling back our release schedule to every other week through the end of the year so that Danielle and Sam can retain some shred of sanity in this busy time. However, we wouldn't leave you with nothing, so please enjoy some excellent Book Reshorts in the off weeks. First up, Danielle and Sam probe what media elements each other are thankful for, and it quickly gets ridiculous as they determine which rom-com clichés and monologuing villains hold a special place in their hearts. Of course, what they're most thankful for are all the wonderful listeners and supportive friends, family, and podcast community that help make this show possible.
Be sure to check out I Drink Your Podcast, especially the Southland Tales episode featuring Danielle. You can find them on Twitter @IDYP_Podcast, Instagram @idyp_podcast, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
This week special guest Marci, of the Colored Pages Bookclub podcast, brings M.K. England's young adult space adventure novel The Disasters to share with Danielle and Sam. Immediately after being expelled from a moon-based space academy, self-hating hot-shot pilot Nax Hall and his friends find the academy under attack by mysterious forces. Making their escape to the space colonies to hide, they slowly uncover a sinister plot by an extremely well-branded terrorist organization to wipe out the settlements. While that's pretty terrible, Sam and Danielle are much more preoccupied with the unexpected appearance of space goats and their differing opinions on love triangles. Nonetheless, our hapless adventurers set out to foil the evil plan, and boy are we glad they didn't skip leg day.
Check out the Colored Pages Book Club podcast on Instagram @TheseColoredPages and Twitter @TheColoredPages, and listen on Stitcher, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Danielle brings another Nancy Drew mystery to Sam with the graphic novel Sleight of Dan. The girl detective is back! Nancy Drew has a brand new mystery to solve, well, not so much a mystery as ruining everyone else's good time. When a magician, Dan Deville, comes to town and makes his assistant really disappear, Nancy won't rest until she's figured out the trick and spoiled it for her friends. There's a giant boa constrictor that doesn't really matter, and a bunch of weird magicians who really should matter more, but Sam is focused on the real mystery: Where does Nancy keep getting all those phones, and is she the worst?
After completing their fist run of Halloween special episodes, Danielle and Sam need a break to recover from all the spooks. So, in lieu of their standard nonsense please enjoy this short, bonus nonsense of a quiz where they take turns trying to guess which of three possible descriptions actually belong to a particular book. Get ready for witches in space, reluctant chosen ones, and Viking romance, but have no fear, the normal weirdness you've come to love will return next week. Until then, feel free to play along and see how well you can do in The Quiz!
Sam concludes this year's Spook Retorts with the 1990 thrill-omedy film Arachnophobia. When a hitherto unknown species of giant, deadly, Venezuelan hive spider is transported to a small West Coast town things are going to get creepy-crawly. Impressively quickly, the Venezuelan spider breeds with a common house spider which raises for Danielle all sorts of questions about spider reproduction that Sam is ill-equipped to answer. Mismatched spider breeding sizes aside, Dr. Ross Jennings, played by the always delightful Jeff Daniels, is a new transplant to the town looking to set up a medical practice, but finds himself in every doctor's worst nightmare when all his patients start mysteriously dropping dead. Will Dr. Ross be able to unravel this mystery and protect his family all while overcoming his intense fear of spiders? Maybe, but not until suspiciously after his medical practice competition is eliminated. Luckily, John Goodman, playing a goofy exterminator, is there to be the hero we all want in our lives. As for how the spiders feel about all this, I'll let renowned spider lover Jimmy Buffett's end-credits song lyrics speak for them: "I'm fakey, real flaky, eight legs and one pea brain, so don't bug me."
Half-way through this year's Spook Retorts Danielle pulls out the big-guns of horror with the movie adaptation the Stephen King and Joe Hill novella In the Tall Grass. While on a cross-country road trip, pregnant Becky and her brother Cal make a pit-stop in the middle-of-nowhere of Kansas, and you know things aren't going to go well. Lured into a field of, predictably, tall grass our two luckless travelers find themselves lost in a world of shifting geography and unmoored time. This very cool concept quickly gets wacky when they meet a lost child and his rock obsessed father. Throw in weird grass people, Becky giving birth next to a massive hole of writhing bodies, and a wormhole finding dog, and both Sam and Danielle are so lost they might as well be in the tall grass themselves. Don't worry though, none of these question will be answered by the end of the movie. Still, the concept of the flutewolf is born, so we think overall that's a win.
The month of Spook Retorts continues with Sam sharing the 1993 dark comedy movie My Boyfriend's Back. Johnny Dingle (yes, it's that kind of movie) has been in love with Missy McCloud since before he can remember, and he is determined to go to prom with her no matter what. When a truly idiotic plan he concocts to win her affections goes awry, Johnny learns that not even death can stop his creepy obsession with Missy and getting that prom dance. Unfortunately, now a zombie, Johnny faces the conundrum of how to control both his lust for human flesh and the equally off-putting lust Missy suddenly has for this walking corpse. Throw in some zany antics and parents who are way too supportive of Johnny's new diet, and it's impossible to predict where this movie is going, though Danielle tries by tossing out several excellent alternate endings, as well as a dubious new business proposition. This movie may be low on the spooks, but it's got wackiness to spare so Sam gives it at least five severed-thumbs up.
This week Danielle kicks off our first ever Spook Retorts with the 2005 horror movie House of Wax. On their way to a football game a group of college friends camp overnight on a deserted stretch of road. Though a putrid smell emanates from the woods, they inexplicably stay overnight, and in the morning find one of their cars has been sabotaged. The only place to find help is the nearby town containing the 100% creepy Trudy’s House of Wax. That may sound like the setup to the most generic horror movie ever, and it is, but this movie quickly goes off the rails with the delightful addition of encasing people alive in molten wax. Sam can't understand how the evil wax-working brothers can be everywhere at once, Danielle can't remember any of the characters, referring to them solely by their actors’ names, and neither of them has any idea how long it takes to make a wax figure. Danielle gives this movie a solid 6.5 spooks out of 10.
This week Sam concludes the sci-fi romp Ringworld by Larry Niven. With Teela Brown careening off into the unknown, Luis Wu and his remaining alien friends set out to find her, before immediately falling into a trap. Here they meet Halrloprillalar Hotrufan (a name Sam cannot pronounce) who is a surviving Ringworld engineer from before their civilization fell. Will she provide valuable insights and a advanced knowledge that helps our bumbling adventurers? Not really, she's mostly just another sex object for Luis, who has seemed to have forgotten all about Teela Brown. Fortunately, Luis has a plan to escape Ringworld, which he inexplicably will not share with any of his companions. Will Luis' ridiculous plan work to free them of Ringworld? Is Teela better off without Luis? (Yes.) Don't worry if you can't remember anything that happened in the previous part, neither can Danielle.
This week Sam continues his exploration of the book Ringoworld by Larry Niven. Louis Wu and his motley crew have crash-landed on the Ringworld and it's time to explore! But first, they must discuss, at length, their various theories about the world and also a bit of inter-galactic politics. As they zoom around the strange mega-structure, they encounter ruined cities, people reverted to savagery, murderous sunflowers, and floating castles, but Louis' and Teela's top priority is to have sex just about everywhere. The truth of Teela's luck will come out, and our intrepid heroes will make some truly impressive leaps in logic that are somehow always right, when they're not bickering, that is. Will the mysteries of the Ringworld and the fall of its civilization be revealed? Well, there's a third part for a reason.
This week Sam begins a deep dive into Larry Niven's epic sci-fi work Ringworld. Join Danielle as Sam guides her through the amazing journey of Louis Wu, a two-hundred-year-old space adventurer dating the twenty-year-old great-great-granddaughter of an old flame. After delving into some alien sexual practices (which all these classic sci-fi books seem to feel the need to do) Luis, his girlfriend, and two aliens set off to explore a mysterious, massive ring found orbiting a distant star. However, before all that, the book first needs to explain, in great detail, how everything else in the universe works. And boy, is there a lot to cover: eight-foot warrior cat creatures, humans breeding for luck, an alien race of cowards, and gladiatorial battles for reproductive rights. Will Danielle be able to follow all the nonsense Sam is spouting? Probably not, but hopefully you can.
In this episode Danielle shares a bizarre take on the classic fairy tale with the film Red Riding Hood. If you thought that Red Riding Hood would be improved with the addition of a werewolf and a lackluster love triangle, than have we got a movie for you. While an adult Red Riding Hood descending into paranoia because anyone in her village might be the werewolf terrorizing her is pretty great, it pales in comparison to the crazed werewolf hunter Gary Oldman and his giant iron elephant oven (that was not a typo). There's not a lot of plot to cover, but the abundance of insanity more than makes up for it. To understand any of this Sam and Danielle could really use the expertise of an astronomer, an anatomist, a cryptozoologist, or really all the help they can get.
This week Sam shares an animated childhood classic The Point, with Danielle. In a land inhabited only by pointy-headed people where everything, by law, must have a point, is born Oblio, a child without a pointy-head. Once Danielle is able to move past the economics of a town based entirely on the creation of pointy things, Oblio is banished to the Pointless Forest for his crime of pointlessness. His dog, Arrow, who is very pointy, is also inexplicably banished. Oblio and Arrow must traverse the forest and learn from its often unhelpful inhabitants how to find his true value (and point). The puns are inescapable, the characters unnervingly unflappable, and the story and music are provided by Harry Nilsson after an acid trip, which explains a lot. Will little Oblio survive the forest and discover if he's truly pointless? Join us as we try to find our own point on this trippy animated journey.
Danielle concludes Francine Pascal's saga of the evil twin with her second Sweet Valley High book: Return of the Evil Twin. One year after the traumatic encounter with their inexplicable doppelgänger, the Wakefield twins prepare to celebrate the new year, still lacking the therapy they so desperately need. However, they are soon beset by the long-lost identical twin sister to the murderous Margo who, against all reason, has decided to try and supplant Jessica as a new Wakefield twin; which is essentially the same scheme her sister failed at a year prior. Will the Wakefield sisters survive this latest crazed lookalike trying to replace them? Will their parents ever help them get much-needed therapy? Most importantly, how many separate identical sets of identical twins are there in this world? The answer to that last question, at least, is clear: More than would seem plausible.
This week Danielle introduces the Sweet Valley High universe to Sam with the Francine Pascal novel The Evil Twin. Meet Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, identical twins who are somehow enmeshed in an endless series of ludicrously dramatic events. When the story arc starts with the death of Jessica’s boyfriend in a drunk driving accident with Elizabeth due to Jessica spiking her own sister’s drink as they were competing for prom queen, the introduction of a serial killer doppelgänger seems almost quaint. The unhinged Margo is determined to murder Elizabeth and replace her as the new Elizabeth (manslaughter charges notwithstanding). Will Margo's dastardly (and ridiculous) plot succeed, or will the twins escape unharmed, except for the bucket-loads of unaddressed trauma? It's hard to believe there are 181 of these books.
Sam closes out Shark Week by sharing Jaws: The Revenge, the fourth installment in the Jaws franchise. Follow the Brody family (except Roy Scheider, the one you care about) as they are assailed by a shark determined to take revenge. Revenge for what we're not exactly sure, possibly to restore shark honor. What we can say for sure is that this movie contains both a probable shark psychic and Michael Caine, and we are so here for it. Also, the shark is clearly better at making plans than the people. So join us for some fun, and blood, in the sun!
Danielle kicks-off our Shark Week special with the Australian/Singaporean co-production Bait. When a tsunami strikes, a former lifeguard must face his greatest fear while trapped in a flooded grocery store: his ex-fiancé (oh, and sharks). How do you survive such a deadly situation? Do you sacrifice another person? A small dog? Construct rudimentary shark armor from grocery baskets? The answer is clearly all of the above. So join us for Bait, where the sharks will eat everything in a grocery store except the actual food.
Sam shares his love for the film Highlander with Danielle, a cult classic from 1986. Have you ever wondered what it would be like if a secret race of immortals walked among us? Highlander posits that they spend most of their time popping out of thin air to surprise each other with sword fights as they battle to the death for the fabled prize. Why is this prize worth fighting for? Why do they have to fight to the death? Why are some people born immortal? None of these questions will be answered, but there is a punk-rock hedonist monster called the Kurgan, so we don't really mind. Join us for Highlander where the rules, and the accents, make no sense, but we do know there can be only one!
Featuring a promo for the science entertainment podcast Petri Dish; find them on Twitter @dishpodcast and at https://anchor.fm/petridish
Danielle shares the second half of the Korean drama Love Cells (연애세포) and it is pure, concentrated nonsense. If you were confused by how love cells worked, prepare to understand, somehow, even less than before. The (rather perfunctory) love triangle continues while our potential suitors struggle with scandals, kidnapping, and tiger costumes, none of which are as exciting as they sound (except the tiger costume, it's cute as heck). The fate of the love cell in human (cat?) form hangs in the balance as the show careens towards a conclusion that is as thrilling as it is baffling.
Danielle shares our first TV show with part one of the Korean drama Love Cells (연애세포). This show teaches important life-lessons, mainly that if you don't date for long enough your love cells will wither and die. In a last-ditch effort to save themselves, these love cells may even take human form to help fix your dating life. "What's a love cell," you ask? Great question.
The thrilling conclusion of Sam's journey with the Lords of the Sky! The massive book ends with all (some) of our questions answered and the establishment of a poorly conceived new world order. We finally journey to the lands of the Ahn to (briefly) explore their mysterious land and learn almost nothing about them. None of that matters, however, because there's a dragon named Deburah; seriously, it's the best.
Sam is half-way through explaining the book Lords of the Sky to Danielle, and in this part the plot finally seems to enter the picture. Mysterious new characters, new cultures, mutiny, basic philosophy, prison breaks, amnesia, politics, it's all here, kinda. And at long last, yes, there are even dragons!
In this episode Sam continues his exploration of the book Lords of the Sky by Angus Wells. In part two Daviot (whose name is impossible for Danielle to remember) leaves school to wander the land telling stories and is given far more importance than he deserves. We somehow manage to talk about this for over an hour. Danielle realizes that boats aren't always boats. There are still no dragons.
Sam begins his first multi-part dive into the fantasy novel Lords of the Sky by Angus Wells. Hunker down for a slow burn as young Daviot discovers he has a special talent and is sent off to a school to learn to use it (well, eventually). No, he isn't a wizard, but he can remember stuff real good. There's love, there’s poorly explained magic, and most importantly, there's probably dragons (just not in this part, maybe the next). Also, if you enjoy your hosts complaining about cartography, you're in for a treat. Buckle-in, this is going to be a long one.
Danielle does her darnedest to make sense of the first two volumes of the graphic novel Nancy Drew Vampire Slayer. The famous girl detective is back in a modern take, and now she's confronting the possibility of the supernatural in the form of someone who is almost certainly not a vampire. Join Danielle and Sam as they attempt to dive into this "mystery", but find themselves instead concerned with the real mystery: The fate of Nancy's dog.
Sam attempts to describe the Isaac Asimov book The Gods Themselves to Danielle. It's full of scheming scientists, parallel universe aliens, moon people, and a lot of sex for a book that is decidedly not sexy. We hope you enjoy this dive into the golden age of classic sci-fi as much as we did.