Dispatch Ajax! Podcast

This week we continue our Halloween celebration with a Horror legend! Wes Craven’s name gets tossed around in the background, but we wanted to actually put him in perspective. We stack him up against the heaviest hitters, argue through the horror director Mount Rushmore debate, and explain why Craven isn’t just a legend, he’s a repeat offender at reinventing the slasher genre. We walk from the bru...

We’re in Spooktober mode, and we’re planting our flag. For our continuing October Halloween exploration we bring you an often overlooked Horror movie series: Warlock. It's one of those franchises we keep waiting for people to rediscover, because the first film has everything genre fans claim they want: a confident supernatural villain, strange old-world witchcraft rules, and a time-travel cha...

In this classic Halloween episode we look back upon a near-forgotten Horror anthology TV series - Tales from the Darkside. We trace how Creepshow and the EC Comics tradition (Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror) set the blueprint, then get into the messy rights reality that forced Romero’s team to build something adjacent rather than literal. From there, we spotlight the October 1983 premiere “T...

In a scattered discussion, we break down the cult vampire film Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat. We talk through the movie’s best hook: a hidden vampire community that’s trying to go legit with sunscreen, public-facing small-town life, and a factory producing a synthetic blood substitute so vampires can stop feeding on humans. From there, the story splinters into factions and a quiet coup against D...

Star Trek turns 60 and somehow the big story is this: the pipeline is drying up, the creative direction feels scattered, and the one show still on the air is starting to lose us. We talk through Strange New Worlds season four and why the constant genre tribute approach starts to feel like “holodeck episodes all season” with none of the payoff. When every week becomes a parody or a pastiche, the sh...

In the classic monologue we go into some of the details we didin't get to in our previous NüTrek breakdowns. We jump back into the debate around Star Trek: Discovery and the bigger question behind every prequel choice, where does “updating the franchise” end and where does breaking continuity begin? When a show introduces capabilities that feel too advanced for its place on the timeline, it d...

In another installment of our series celebrating Star Trek's 60th anniversary we bring you a classic episode breaking down the fanchises' 4th wave. We spend real time on the infamous spore drive, the way instant travel wrecks stakes, and how Discovery ends up writing itself into a corner that later Trek has to tiptoe around. From there we jump to the Dilithium Burn and the far-future set...

In our ongoing celebration of Star Trek's 60th anniversary we revisit our commentary on Trek's 4th wave (as of last year). We dig into the real-world mechanics behind the J.J. Abrams era: studio splits, blockbuster incentives, and the creative team that helped steer the franchise toward speed, spectacle, and recognizable references. Then we get specific. We break down Star Trek 2009’s st...

To celebrate Star Trek's 60th Anniversary we thought we'd present a series of both old and new episodes that cover a wide swath of Trek topics. First up, an early show we did about the economics of the universe and how commerce works when you don't have money.  'Ever wonder how the economy of Star Trek works?  Well, we'll break down the complicated concept of Future Money...

Comic shops can feel welcoming and hostile at the same time, mostly because the language is a maze. We break that maze into simple, usable terms so you can walk in knowing what to ask for, what you’re looking at on the shelves, and how to avoid the classic awkward moments at the counter.

In a classic and timely episode on Artificial Intellegence we wrestle with the personhood problem. If a replicant can feel fear, build memories, form attachments, and fight to live, what exactly makes them “less than” besides a corporate definition, a programmed lifespan, or a society that needs someone to do the jobs humans don’t want? That question echoes into the real world, where legal systems...

In a classic - yet timely - episode we continue digging in to what we call Artificial Intellegence these days and what it's been throughout pop culture. We sort through the terms people blur together, like consciousness, sentience, and self-awareness, and lay out common indicators researchers look for, from internal world models to self-monitoring. 

An animal companion isn’t just cute, loyal, or marketable. The best ones force a moral choice, expose a character’s blind spot, or act like nature’s voice when humans get too comfortable with their own excuses. We dig into why animal companions in fantasy and science fiction keep landing so hard, and why the trope feels bigger than a sidekick.

While we're deal with some crazy life stuff we thought we'd revisit a rapidly changing topic in Artificial Intelligence. We walk through the foundations that make AI feel inevitable: formal reasoning, the Church Turing thesis, early neural network ideas, and the Turing test as our most famous shortcut for judging “intelligence.” Along the way, we hit the hype cycles and turning points, f...

Why do pets and animal companions in fiction feel so immediate, so universally legible, and so devastating when a story takes them away? We pull threads from everywhere, comic book pets like Krypto, the daemon companions of His Dark Materials, and the long mythic history of loyal animals that reveal a hero’s character. From Odysseus and Argus to the Mahabharata’s stray dog test, we track what sepa...

Bigfoot in space, Krampus as a demonic Christmas weapon, a clone of Alistair Crowley, reptilian Stalin, Satan pulling strings, and a title card that promises a fight that may never happen. That’s not a mad lib we wrote, it’s the kind of chaos you can trip over on Tubi when the autoplay algorithm decides you’re ready for BC Fourteen. We go beyond the handle, the pseudonyms, the surprisingly normal...

* Redownload if necessary* Greetings, fellow traveller. For our Sci-Fi Channel series finale we bring you Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, a short-lived but brilliant British parody show that never really got its due.  (Sorry we were a little late on this episode, but Jake and I both had some pretty serious life stuff happen. Trying to get back on track.) We break down what makes the mockumentary...

Max Headroom - a glitchy cyberpunk face that seemed like a novelty in the 1980s - somehow became a pop culture anchor through commercials, parodies, and wall-to-wall brand exposure. If you mostly remember New Coke or a weird talking head you saw on TV, you’re not alone and that’s part of the story.

We step away from our sci-fi channel mini-series for Pride Month to give slash fiction the spotlight it deserves, because it is not just “spicy fanfic.” It is a long-running tradition of readers and viewers naming queer subtext, building community around it, and creating stories where mainstream media stays silent.

In a break from our mini-series we’re taking a hard look at why UFO disclosure and UAP transparency keep feeling “right around the corner” while delivering almost nothing on which people can agree. Along the way we touch the viral political chatter, the shifting tone from outright denial to careful acknowledgment, and the way the internet turns every half-statement into proof of a hidden program.

In one of the last episodes of the series we take a hard look at Voyagers!, the 1982 time travel series that barrels from setup to action in seconds. If you’ve ever loved Quantum Leap, Doctor Who, Back to the Future style causality, or TVA style “sacred timeline” drama, this one is a missing link worth revisiting.

We’re continuing our Sci-Fi Channel origin series by digging into LEXX: a cult space opera about a cowardly non-hero, an undead assassin, a love-obsessed robot head, and a former love slave flying a living ship built to destroy planets. It’s silly, dark, occasionally bad, sometimes brilliant, and almost never safe.

 In our ongoing series we’re tracing Jerry Anderson’s strange, essential legacy and why early Sci Fi Channel programming kept looping Supercar, Stingray, and Space: 1999 into the brains of American kids who had no idea what they were watching, only that it felt like a secret door into another era of science fiction TV.

This is a preview of our ongoing series on the origins and programming of the Sci-Fi Channel. I promise we do actually talk about Gerry Anderson in this one. 

William Shatner's TekWar is a so-so cyberpunk cop story that somehow grew into novels, comics, trading cards, syndicated TV movies, a USA Network and Sci Fi Channel series, and a PC video game that many people still call one of the worst ever made. The real story is not the plot, it’s the momentum. We follow the money, the branding, and the era’s obsession with recognizable names to figure ou...