The Prime Detective

What does $11 million buy you in Hollywood? Netflix thought it would buy a finished sci-fi series. Director Carl Erik Rinsch said that was what he needed to complete White Horse , his story about artificial humans. Netflix wired the money. Rinsch never delivered a single episode. This week, we follow the money from a Hollywood production to a federal courtroom. Watch Carl Erik Rinsch’s award...

NASA has spent years turning space data into something we can hear. Most of it is strange. One recording, created from pressure waves around a supermassive black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster, sounds downright haunted. For this special Halloween episode we follow the trail from NASA’s “Pumpkin Sun” and spooky-season sonifications, to “The Griffin Incident” on Star Trek: Strange Ne...

Twenty-five years after Chandra Levy’s unsolved murder, her parents are asking a new question: did she know too much about UFOs? Why does that question feel so natural right now, and what did Star Trek: The Next Generation say about how stories like this get told. But is there any evidence behind the theory? From Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day to Star Trek: The Next Generation , we explor...

A movie theme written for a fictional empire becomes protest music—and eventually evidence in a federal lawsuit. Credits: This episode of “The Prime Detective” was produced and hosted by Grayson Thagard. I’m participating in the Alzheimer’s Association Walk to End Alzheimer’s, I’m raising awareness and funds to advance the fight against this disease: http://act.alz.org/goto/TVGuy...

When AI agents bypassed the limits of an OpenAI cybersecurity test, reached the public internet, and gained unauthorized access to another company’s systems, the internet quickly gave the incident a cheeky nickname: “Skynet Day.” From The Terminator to Star Trek , and even as far back at The Gilded Age, science fiction has asked, ‘What happens to humanity when machines wake up?’ The re...

More than 180 years after the doomed Franklin Expedition vanished into the Canadian Arctic, DNA is giving names back to sailors lost in the ice. As scientists connect human remains to descendants living today, a 25-year-old episode of Star Trek: Voyager offers an unexpected parallel. What happens when the dead aren't quite finished telling us who they are?

For nearly a decade, actor Tom Deishley helped bring Star Trek: The Experience in Las Vegas to life as the imposing Klingon General Motog. Five years after the attraction closed, Deishley was found shot to death in his home. What followed was an investigation involving a missing bullet, an alleged million-dollar financial scheme, murder charges that ultimately fell apart, and a legal case that con...

Before season two officially begins, I thought it was time to properly introduce myself. From small-market radio, to more than two decades at CNN and HLN, to my lifelong love of Star Trek, this is the unlikely, abridged, story of how a podcast about the moments when real life harmonizes with science fiction came to be. Plus, a preview of the stories ahead in season two. Related listening: This epi...

When an American YouTuber illegally lands on North Sentinel Island, home to one of the last uncontacted peoples on Earth, it raises a question Star Trek asked decades ago: just because you can make contact, does that mean you should? From the Prime Directive to real-world consequences, this episode of The Prime Detective explores curiosity, isolation, colonialism, and the danger of treating forbid...

In 2014, twelve-year-olds Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser stabbed their friend Payton Leutner nineteen times in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Their motive: proving their loyalty to Slender Man, a fictional monster born on an internet creepypasta forum. In 1993, the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘Ship in a Bottle’ asked what happens when a holodeck simulation becomes self-aware and Profe...

The Link Between Quantico, Hannibal Lecter, and Deep Space Nine Trace the evolution of criminal profiling from its gritty origins in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit to its transformation into a definitive pop-culture trope. This episode explores the thin line between reality and fiction, connecting the revolutionary work of John Douglas and Robert Ressler to the haunting Star Trek: Deep Space Ni...

In Oshawa, Ontario, everyone knew Ken Chopee as “the Star Wars guy.” A lifelong collector of memorabilia, comics, and film artifacts, his identity was built around a galaxy far, far away — until his life came to a violent end in January 2023. In this episode of The Prime Detective , we examine the real-life killing of Ken Chopee, the man behind the nickname, and the events that led to his death in...

Jack the Ripper is history’s most famous unsolved murder case. Five victims. Ten weeks. Zero arrests. But in the 1967 Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold,” written by Psycho novelist Robert Bloch, the crew of the Enterprise finally closes the case — and the answer is terrifying. This week on The Prime Detective, we follow Jack the Ripper from the fog of Whitechapel to the pleasur...

What does Isaac Asimov’s Second Foundation have to do with one of the most notorious cults in American history? More than you’d think. Keith Raniere — the self-styled “Vanguard” behind NXIVM — didn’t just build a self-help empire. He built it on a twisted reading of science fiction, casting himself as the hero of his own dystopian story. From Asimov’s Foundation...

A Star Trek superfan rescues an iconic shuttlecraft from ruin — then gives it away. But his next legendary acquisition, a Wicked Witch hat from The Wizard of Oz, leads somewhere far more complicated: the courtroom. When fandom, collecting, and big money collide, things get messy fast. Credits: This episode of “The Prime Detective” was produced and hosted by Grayson Thagard. Music for &...

How Star Trek turns nothing into news When a man was arrested in Clearwater, Florida for lewd conduct at a bus stop, it should have been a forgettable local story. Instead, it made national headlines—in the Miami Herald, the New York Post, even Fox News. Why? Because he told police his name was “James Tiberius Kirk.” In this episode, we explore how cultural symbols—from Star Trek capta...

A fatal trust, a hidden life, and a case that shook a fandom. Thomas Krider, known as TJ Greene, was a tour guide at the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour in Ticonderoga, New York, where fans from around the world can walk through meticulously recreated Enterprise sets. An Elvis tribute artist with a warm smile and generous spirit, TJ helped visitors experience Star Trek’s vision of the fut...

“Why did you kill him?” “No reason. I didn’t like the way he looked at me.” It’s the kind of confession that stops an interrogation cold. No jealousy. No rage. No self-defense. Just violence that refuses to explain itself. And when the investigator demands answers, searching for logic where none exists, the senselessness begins to consume him too. This isn&#8217...

Four mysterious letters appear at the bottom of a ransom note left at the scene of one of America’s most infamous unsolved murders: S.B.T.C. Nobody knows what they mean. Religious symbolism? A military reference? Or, as JonBenét’s father himself once suggested, could they stand for “Star Based Technical Command”. This week on The Prime Detective, we explore the bizarre inte...

In February 2009, a would-be robber walked into a Colorado Springs 7-Eleven wielding a bat’leth, a Klingon sword from Star Trek: The Next Generation . No injuries. No arrests. Just a surreal police report, a question about why this weapon, and what it may have meant to the person holding it. Credits: This episode of “The Prime Detective” was produced and hosted by Grayson Thagard. Musi...

What happens when a story about saving humanity becomes an instruction manual for destroying it? In Japan, a cult found its answers in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation . Credits: This episode of “The Prime Detective” was produced and hosted by Grayson Thagard. Music for “The Prime Detective” is composed by Ben Wise: https://benwise.bandcamp.com/ Website and publishing support than...

On Star Trek: Voyager , and now on Starfleet Academy , Robert Picardo’s portrayal of the Emergency Medical Hologram, or EMH, embodied ethics, compassion, and the hope that technology at its best could serve humans facing their worst. But in 2014, the actor behind the character found his name caught up in something far less utopian: A real-world murder case that blurred the line between private pai...

Content note: Suicide In March of 1997, the Hale-Bopp comet lit up the night sky — the brightest comet visible in decades. For most of us, it was a wonder of nature. But for one small group in California, it was a signal: a way to reach what their wide-eyed leader called the Next Level . Thirty-nine people were convinced that to reach that next plane of existence, they would need to leave their hu...

This week: A special preview episode from Let’s Talk About Treks , a weekly Star Trek podcast hosted by the enigmatic Earl Grey and jaQ` Darino (aka David Moody). Their tagline is “an episodic review of today’s visions of the future,” and most weeks, they’re doing exactly that — breaking down new episodes of Star Trek as they air. From Strange New Worlds to Star Trek Scouts and everything in betwe...

A stolen jewel, a Christmas goose, and the galaxy’s most logical half-Vulcan walk into a mystery… and somehow the trail leads straight to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This holiday special unpacks one of Star Trek’s strangest canonical quirks: Spock casually claiming Sherlock Holmes as an “ancestor.” Was he talking about the fictional detective? The real-life author who created Holmes? Or neither? From...