Purely Academic with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman

With E3 2018 just around the corner, we check in on what we’re expecting from all the major players – Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft, and Bethesda – before next week’s big show. This has been one of the leakiest E3’s ever, but there’s a lot left to speculate about in what seems like it’s going to be an eventful convention. We also review the new Persona Dancing games from Japan – Persona 3...

After just 5 months, Star Wars is back in theaters with Ron Howard’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, and we have complicated feelings about it! We both like the film to varying degrees, but what both its content and tepid box-office performance say about the current state and confusing future of the franchise gives us an awful lot to talk about. We also discuss the Japanese releases of Persona 3: Dancing...

This month, we reach the end of our journey through Doctor Who history – for now, at least – by diving into the audio adventures of the series’ least well-known but paradoxically most prolific Doctor: Paul McGann, the 8th Doctor, who debuted in a poorly-received TV film in 1996, but went on to star in a broad swath on ancillary material up to and beyond the show’s return to BBC in 2005. For this e...

This week, we got another major superhero film in Deadpool 2, a surprisingly excellent sequel that is funnier, zanier, and weirdly more heartfelt than the first film, fueled by great performances and excellent direction from David Leitch. We talk about the film in depth, and before that, cover a few recent pieces of news, including a spate of E3 leaks and rumors like Nintendo’s strange potential P...

This week, we return to a galaxy far, far away for our next in-depth Star Wars discussion, and after going through all three prequels in previous episodes, we finally arrive at the film that started it all: Star Wars, also known as Episode IV: A New Hope. Unlike the prequels, this film neither demands nor requires a critical reevaluation – it’s great, it’s always been great, and most people who ha...

After giving general spoiler-free impressions last week, we dive deep with the new God of War, discussing the story, characters, themes, and gameplay in a wide-ranging discussion that reveals just how much this game has to offer, intellectually, emotionally, and as a major technical achievement. Jonathan also talks about his recent experiences playing through all of the Donkey Kong Country games,...

Marvel’s biggest movie yet has landed in theaters, and we have a lot to say about the surprisingly great Avengers: Infinity War, a movie that has no right working, and yet somehow works amazingly well on so many levels. The biggest film event of the year would be enough to fill one podcast, of course – and we give the film the same spoiler-filled, in-depth discussion we always do with these movies...

We have quite the grab bag for you on the show this week, as we discuss topics as wide-ranging as the passing of beloved Japanese director Isao Takahata, a true pioneer of the medium, to something as silly as Sean ranking all the Spider-Man games he has ever played to celebrate the release date announcement of Insomniac’s Spider-Man PS4 game. Jonathan also talks about his adventures re-watching Yu...

After revisiting the first two Star Wars Prequels earlier this year, we finally reach the third and final film in the controversial trilogy, and once again give it a thorough critical reevaluation. Revenge of the Sith is a great Star Wars movie, a bleak but rousing trilogy capper with a surprising amount of political resonance today, and it gives us a ton to dive into as we complete our project of...

This month, our journey through classic Doctor Who reaches a culmination point, as we drop in on the original series’ excellent final creative push, with the run of Sylvester McCoy’s wonderful Seventh Doctor and his delightfully loony antepenultimate story “Ghost Light.” One of the strangest, densest, and most compelling Doctor Who stories ever told, “Ghost Light” sees every member of the creative...

It’s a loose, fun, freewheelin’ grab-bag style episode on the show this week, as we talk about a whole host of recent movies, games, and TV shows. Jonathan reviews Ava DuVernay’s very good (and very undervalued) A Wrinkle in Time and the mostly disappointing Tomb Raider adaptation, which leads to a great discussion about the 25-year-history of video game adaptations failing spectacularly in Hollyw...

A month after its US release and on the heels of its international debut on Netflix, we finally get around to talking about Alex Garland's Annihilation, a sci-fi journey that is gorgeously strange, evocative, frustrating, and undeniably fascinating to talk about. This is a prerecorded episode we saved for a rainy day, so we hope you'll excuse the belated nature of this discussion (we'll be back ne...

It's a grab-bag style episode this week, as offer topics ranging from serious and topical to silly and only tangentially topical. Sean and Jonathan both talk about great recent indie games, including Into the Breach and Celeste, recap the Oscars and this week's Nintendo Direct news, and cover some various odds and ends. We then have a serious talk about the absurdity of 'violence in video games' s...

The turbulent 1980s for Doctor Who reached its lowest and most fraught period during the reign of Sixth Doctor Colin Baker, when the BBC's antagonism towards the show was at its most intense and the then 22-year-old series was even temporarily cancelled between Baker's first and second seasons. In the midst of much behind-the-scenes chaos, the show's on-screen quality wavered more than ever, despi...

With Black Panther continuing its stunning box-office run and dominating pop culture conversations, we thought this might be a good week to look back at the 10-year history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that brought us to this point, the journey that began way back in May of 2008 with the original Iron Man. We talk about what it's been like to follow (and, for this podcast, cover) 10 years of t...

It's the movie sensation that's gripping the nation: Ryan Coogler's Black Panther is finally here, and it's one of the best, most artistically accomplished, and most culturally significant superhero films ever made. We give it our usual in-depth treatment, diving into everything that makes this film such a thoroughly special, rewarding entry in Marvel's ever-expanding cinematic canon. We also catc...

This week, we return to a galaxy far, far away for our second critical conversation about the infamous Star Wars prequels, this time diving deep with Episode II - Attack of the Clones. Perhaps the most maligned and dismissed of the Star Wars films, Attack of the Clones is, like The Phantom Menace before it, a much better film than its reputation would assert, a 'grown-up' Star Wars movie full of c...

On today's show, we review of two of January's plethora of video game releases, diving into the fighting game that's quickly taken the gaming world by storm, Dragon Ball FighterZ, and chatting about the sequel to 2016's Game of the Year, Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Hacker's Memory. These are two very different games that are sort of difficult to play on top of each other, but they've made for a ri...

This week on the show, we've recorded the first in a series of conversations about three of the most ubiquitously discussed, ridiculed, and meme-ified films in the modern pop culture landscape: The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy. For all the attention these films have gotten over the years, how much genuine critical engagement - something deeper than just "LOL JAR JAR!" - have they truly been...

It’s time for another monthly bonus episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, where we will be discussing serials from classic Doctor Who history. After two wonderful months spent chronicling the adventures of the Fourth Doctor, we jump ahead to the strange reign of the Fifth, played by Peter Davison, and the rocky tenure of producer John Nathan Turner. Kinda, the...

It’s a grab-bag style episode this week, as we cover a week’s worth of news items, including Thursday’s Nintendo Direct announcements, Sean reviews the beta for upcoming fighting game Dragon Ball FighterZ, and Jonathan talks about finally catching up on Pokken Tournament DX for Nintendo Switch. And for our main topic, we preview what’s to come in 2018 in terms of video games, looking at the confir...

For our first show back in the new year, we clear the deck with hours of holiday stories, reviews, and chats about games old and new we’ve been playing over the break. Sean talks about his Christmas at sea, with a mini-rant about a library on a cruise ship, while Jonathan reviews some Blu-rays he received as presents, including Twin Peaks: The Return and the new Doctor Who: Shada reconstruction. S...

In this special New Year's Eve bonus episode, co-host Jonathan Lack counts down his picks for the Top 10 Films of 2017, and talks a bit about each of them. You can read the written version of this at www.jonathanlack.com. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel! Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in iTunes! Follow Jonathan Lack on Twitter! Follow Sean Chapman on Twitter! Read Jonathan Lack’s movie...

In our final episode of 2017, we look back on a truly special year in video games (albeit a rather horrible year for the world at large) by counting down the Top 10 Games of the Year, with each host presenting their own list. It was a year defined by amazing exclusives, resurgent franchises, and a renaissance for Japanese developers, with the majority of games on both lists coming from Japan. For...

For the third December in a row, we’ve got a big new Star Wars movie to talk about, and for the first time we agree: The Last Jedi is the real deal, a genuine, beautifully made Star Wars movie with a hell of a lot of meat on its bones. Before our big review, though, we cover a few different topics, including the week’s major news that Disney is buying Fox. We head on over to Sean’s Beta Corner for...