Antimatter Pod

Anika and Liz take their podiums to discuss Star Trek: Starfleet Academy's "Vox In Excelso". But there's not much debate to be had, because we agree it's very good!  Liz, a former debate kid, has a lot of feelings about this episode (and also about how debate bros have ruined the fine art of having a structured argument) We don't need Star Trek: United because we already have SFA Caleb is critical...

Anika and Liz are not sports people, but they're willing to watch from the sidelines as we discuss Star Trek: Starfleet Academy's "Vitus Reflux", including... No stakes! Only shenanigans! It's a Gen Z "Take Me Out To The Holosuite"! The War College kids are facing obsolescence and acting out, but their strategy, with overtones of hazing and sexuality, is also evidence of why the War College is bei...

Anika and Liz step through the 32nd century arches that give them new outfits and sprawl in their chairs to discuss the first two episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. And we like it a whoooooole lot.  "I think I just quoted Joe Biden. I did not mean to." Character beats - Caleb can handle himself, but in a crisis, he's an engineer; Jay-Den and Sam are simply too pure and we love them; Darem a...

Anika and Liz don their snazziest outfits and beam down to Vulcan for the most miserable wedding we've covered yet. It's Star Trek: Enterprise's "Home"! In which T'Pol marries some dude, while Archer goes rock climbing and Phlox encounters the spectre of xenophobia on Earth.  Is it possible that Tuvok is the only person in the history of Vulcan who ended up happy in his arranged marriage?  It's im...

Anika and Liz attend a four-day Klingon bachelor party -- where the feats of strength include somehow NOT developing a time machine to go back to 1997 and fight the entire DS9 writers room for Jadzia's honour.  Yes, our wedding series has brought us to Star Trek: Deep Space 9's "You Are Cordially Invited", and we have ... questions. Concerns. Loud protests. And that's just Anika's cats! Both this...

Come on a journey with us. A story of true love, as we watch Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Data's Day", one of the great romances of all time.  We speak, of course, of the relationship between Admiral Mendak and Subcommander Selok.  Also Miles and Keiko get married.  This is the third episode in our wedding series, and the first marriage between two enthusiastically consenting adults But is it...

We continue our wedding series with Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Haven" -- in which Deanna Troi's arranged marriage is interrupted by the arrival of an AIDS allegory. It's … rough. It's rough.  Note: Liz says two completely inaccurate things with absolute confidence: first she claims that Wyatt is the only guest star with a costume change (false, that is Lwaxana) and then she claims that he's...

It's wedding season! Anika and Liz are looking at some of Star Trek's key wedding episodes, beginning with the one that launched season 2 of The Original Series and rewrote a lot of people's brain chemistry: "Amok Time". And in typical "Antimatter Pod does it Antimatter Pod's way" fashion, we're gonna talk about ... how great it is for the Spock/Chapel ship.  Why we're doing a wedding series: we l...

Noted Doctor Who podcasters Anika and Liz settle in to watch a very bad Steven Moffat pastiche.  Yes, it's time for the season 3 finale of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and spoilers, turning into a statue might be preferable to this. It turns out Marie's whole arc has been about becoming tradwife statuary The weird Christian subtext of the season intensifies, not in a good way The racial dynamics...

Anika and Liz get sucked into a wormhole and trapped on a moon orbiting a gas giant, which is actually pretty standard when you're adults with jobs trying to organise a board game night. We're discussing Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 3, episode 9, "Terrarium", an episode which comes so close to being good before it snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.  "We're going to give you the sto...

With heavy hearts, Anika and Liz discuss "Four and a Half Vulcans", the worst episode of Star Trek's streaming era, and possibly one of the top five worst episodes of Star Trek ever. So that's fun.  Liz keeps returning to the question, "Is this worse than 'Code of Honor'?" "I understand that this is meant to be funny."  Genetics and hair don't work like that "I felt disrespected as a viewer." The...

It's documentary time! Anika and Liz look straight into the camera and share their feelings about Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' "What Is Starfleet?", including... We have complicated feelings about this episode! It interrogates the documentary as a form of propaganda, but also interrogates the Federation in bad faith?  SNW is not equipped to deal with Israel/Palestine or Ukraine/Russia through al...

Anika and Liz battle an ancient and unbeatable enemy: grimdark anti-morality in Star Trek. We're discussing Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' "The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail", an episode with all the ingredients of Star Trek except its soul... This feels like a backdoor pilot for a series which has been around for nearly 60 years Why are we spending so much time developing James Kirk instead of the regu...

Anika and Liz beam down to a nice planet where nothing bad happens and everyone leaves with the same amount of eyeballs they started with. WAIT, NO, we're discussing Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' "Through the Lens of Time"... This once again felt like several unrelated episodes smushed together Like season 5 of Discovery, this video game is on easy mode La'an is completely out of character in thi...

Anika and Liz are here, and we hunger for braincells! Unfortunately, before we can celebrate our favourite episode of the season so far, we have to talk about the Spock/La'an of it all... When Anika said she shipped Spock/La'an, she didn't mean in canon! "I want to slut shame Spock, and not in an ironic way." At this point it's gonna look pretty bad if Spock DOESN'T hook up with Uhura This episode...

Anika and Liz go on a nice road trip to pick some flowers, and nothing bad happens to anyone.  Okay, fine, we are discussing Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3, episode 3, "Shuttle to Kenfori", including... First of all, WHAT IS HAPPENING ON REBECCA ROMIJN'S HEAD Season 3 has a recurring motif where a woman states explicitly what she wants, and her romantic partner decides to do the opposite B...

Anika and Liz put on their cutest wedding outfits and settle in to discuss episode 2 of Strange New Worlds' third season: "Wedding Bell Blues". Liz is gonna try not to talk about Pike. Anika is going to do her best not to implode. It's fun!  This episode was engineered in a lab to target Anika personally Is this a mean-spirited commentary on shippers?  We did not need a second sequel to "The Q and...

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is back, baby! Anika and Liz fight off some Gorn and settle in to discuss the premiere!  (We did not realise, when we recorded, that "Hegemony" part 2 would be dropping along with "Wedding Bell Blues", so we're only discussing that first episode now.) This is certainly an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Is Chris Pike the human embodiment of a Democratic Party...

Anika and Liz let their hair down, and as it tumbles over their shoulders in perfect beach waves identical to the hair of every other woman on television in the 2020s, they return to their discussion of hair and hair styling in Star Trek... Liz has a theory about why Janeway's early hair was … like that. And we're sorry, but it does involve Margaret Thatcher and Madeleine Albright Enterprise: the...

Anika and Liz put their hair up and settle in to discuss the most pressing topic of our time -- hairstyles in Star Trek.  We talked for so long that we wound up splitting this into a two-parter, which is PEAK Antimatter Pod, but in this first half, we discuss... Janice Rand, Marie Antoinette and Sabrina Carpenter Pavel Chekov, The Monkees and appealing to girls WASP beauty standards, "professional...

Anika and Liz put on their least comfortable lounging clothes and settle in to discuss Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 6, episode 22, "Suspicions". Why is Beverly Crusher hosting an astrophysics conference? And other questions that will forever go unanswered However, this episode, which makes no sense in the context of TNG, makes a LOT of sense in the context of Star Trek: Picard, and its t...

It's our 200th episode! A victory for quantity over quality and our small, chill audience of friends! To celebrate, Anika and Liz are talking about Star Trek: Open A Channel - A Woman's Trek, Nana Visitor's book about women in Star Trek.  Open A Channel is much more substantial than just girl power feminism. How Lucille Ball was erased from Star Trek's narrative The throughline of mentorship We ge...

Anika and Liz don their sparkliest shirts and biggest earrings, and sit down to watch Star Trek: Of Gods And Men, a fan film starring Nichelle Nichols, Alan Ruck, Walter Koenig and more. You can watch it here , or -- in a much smaller window -- watch an unauthorised HD remaster .  We're in our Alan Ruck era, but we were not prepared for the unbelievable hotness of Garrett Wang, or the SURPRISE LIB...

Liz takes a deep dive into Usenet archives and tells Anika about fandom's earliest discussions of Star Trek: Deep Space 9! (Please note, we are still having audio problems -- despite literally nothing changing in our set ups, Liz's feed is echoing on Anika's channel. This means Anika had to be muted for a lot of the time. At this point we may have to get two tin cans and a really big ball of strin...

Anika and Liz apply a normal amount of hair gel and step into a grim alternate universe to discuss Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Yesterday's Enterprise", including... Is this TNG's best episode? It could be! This story turns on Picard absolutely trusting the word of a Black woman Rachel Garrett was Liz's very first female starship captain The original premise for this episode is FULLY BONKERS...