Purely Academic with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman

To do the long reign of the Fourth Doctor justice, we’re sticking with Tom Baker again this month, jumping ahead to 1979, his penultimate season, for one of the greatest Doctor Who stories ever mounted: “City of Death,” credited to the pseudonym ‘David Agnew,’ but which was mainly written by then-script editor and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy writer Douglas Adams. One of the great humorists of...

In the second of three podcasts this week, we continue our in-depth retrospective of the Steven Moffat era of Doctor Who, which will be coming to a close on Christmas day with the final Peter Capaldi adventure, “Twice Upon a Time.” This conversation was so large, we decided to split it into two parts. On today’s episode, we count down all 39 Doctor Who stories written by Steven Moffat, from “The E...

In the first of three podcasts this week – yes, we’re crazy – we discuss a week’s worth of movie and gaming news, including all the announcements out of the Game Awards, before diving into a long-promised topic: Our in-depth retrospective of the Steven Moffat era of Doctor Who, which will be coming to a close on Christmas day with the final Peter Capaldi adventure, “Twice Upon a Time.” This conver...

We kick off the last month of this very busy year with a grab-bag style episode in which we review three games, discuss some recent news, swap Thanksgiving stories, and go off on a very long Doctor Who tangent. Before diving into our main topics, we talk about some recent movies and Sean shares his thoughts on recent episode of Dragon Ball Super, while we both gush over the new Avengers: Infinity...

It’s time for another monthly bonus episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, episodes where we will be discussing serials from classic Doctor Who history. Today, we enter perhaps the most iconic era of Doctor Who, meeting the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, for one of his era’s quintessential Gothic Horror stories, “The Brain of Morbius.” Written by Robert Holmes, perha...

The headline topic this week is DC’s disastrously boring Justice League movie, an incomprehensible, empty shell of a movie we spend over an hour of today’s show discussing in spoiler-rich detail. Suffice it to say, the film feels like the nail in the coffin for DC’s ‘shared universe’ film plans, which we’ve been covering on the show for years. But we also discuss two of the week’s big game release...

In the second episode of the week, we offer a slate of reviews for recent games, giving final thoughts on Wolfenstein II and Super Mario Odyssey, while Sean waxes poetic about the magic of Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Future Tone on the PS4 and Jonathan discusses the hollow shell of Sonic Forces. But for the main event, we dive into Thor Ragnarok, one of the very best Marvel films to date, devoting...

It’s the first episode of a two-podcast week, as some unforeseen craziness in Sean’s life left us taking last week off. So we’ve split this week’s topics into two episodes. First, in today’s podcast, we cover two weeks’ worth of news, from PlayStation’s big event in Paris, to Universal bailing on their Dark Universe after just one movie, to Amazon potentially making a Lord of the Rings series, to...

This week saw some of the biggest video game releases of the year, and we review two of them on today’s show, with Jonathan diving into the wonders of Super Mario Odyssey and Sean throwing hatchets at Nazi heads with Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Both reviews are more or less spoiler-free, unless you want to go in completely cold. Before those big topics, though, we also cover a week’s worth o...

Today, we dive into the incredible and singular run of the Third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, with the wild, wacky, and wonderful 1971 serial “The Daemons,” by Barry Letts and Robert Sloman (writing under the joint pseudonym “Guy Leopold”). The last serial in the season that introduced Roger Delgado’s iconic Master, and featured him in every one of the year’s stories, “The Daemons” closes Season 8 on an a...

We have two game reviews and a big piece of gaming news on this week’s show, as we await a flood of film and game releases over the next few weeks. First, we talk a silly Star Wars title reveal and an amazing second trailer for Black Panther, before diving into EA’s closure of Visceral and the ‘redevelopment’ of their long-in-the-making Star Wars game, all of which is perhaps one of the most surpr...

After a week off, we have a whole lot of stuff to cover, from a bevy of interesting movie trailers – including Justice League and Star Wars: The Last Jedi – to Sean’s experiences with the Star Wars Battlefront II beta, to the horrific revelations about Hollywood mogul and serial sex predator Harvey Weinstein (like all parts of our lives these days, there’s a lot of tonal whiplash to this episode)....

With Blade Runner 2049 on the horizon, it’s finally time to revisit one of our favorite films of all times by diving deep with Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner. This is a movie we have both loved for a very long time, and one we’ve wanted to do a podcast about for years, so this episode is a long time coming. It’s a movie that gives us plenty to talk about, but we still find time to share some...

Today, we dive into one of the most iconic Doctor Who stories ever told, “The Tomb of the Cybermen,” by Kit Peddler and Gerry Davis, from 1967. The most infamous Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) story, “Tomb of the Cybermen” is chilling, wickedly intelligent, surprisingly brutal, and deeply atmospheric, a testament to the show’s ingenuity and creativity, and certainly one of the most thrilling ta...

It’s the grab-bag to end all grab-bags and a real emotional roller coaster on this week’s very loose podcast. The biggest topic this week is something more serious than we usually tackle, and that is the wave of racism in the gaming community (highlighted by PewDiePie’s behavior earlier this month) and sexism in the film scene (the scandal involving Devin Faraci, Tim League, Harry Knowles, and mor...

We’re back after a week off and returning to our old Monday timeslot with a jam-packed episode. After Sean gives some final thoughts on Yakuza Kiwami and we speculate about the possibility of the It cinematic universe, we cover a week-and-a-half worth of news, including the passing of acting legend Harry Dean Stanton, some big movie announcements, and a Nintendo Direct presentation with some very...

This Sunday, David Lynch’s masterful Twin Peaks: The Return came to an end on Showtime, with Parts 17 and 18, and as one of our favorite things we have ever talked about in six years of this podcast, we had a lot to say on the perfect and provocative ending. As in, almost three hours worth of things to say. But if you don’t watch Twin Peaks, fear not! There’s another hour of content at the top of...

We have two awesome topics to talk about this week, and that’s on top of an opening hour where we give impressions of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle for Nintendo Switch, give an update on the SNES Classic Preorder Debacle, and reflect on the state of Valve after the reveal of the ultimately unused Half-Life 2 Episode 3 plot synopsis. Those main topics are a spoiler-filled review of Uncharted: The...

It’s time for the first in a series of monthly bonus episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, episodes where we will be discussing serials from classic Doctor Who history. Today, we dive into the 6th Doctor Who story ever told, “The Aztecs,” by John Lucarotti. Emblematic of the ‘pure’ historical stories of the First Doctor (William Hartnell) era, devoid of any sci...

It’s a diverse slate of topics this week as talk movies, games, TV, and so much more. First, Jonathan talks Steven Soderbergh’s wonderful new Logan Lucky and counts down his favorite 5 films of the 2017 summer movie season. Then we move on to discussing the Great Super NES Classic Pre-Order Debacle of 2017, and break down how Nintendo so thoroughly, insultingly botched a launch they should have ha...

It’s a game review extravaganza on this week’s show, as we give a short pre-review of the wonderful Sonic Mania (full thoughts coming next week!), Jonathan gives his take on the outstanding and harrowing Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice from Ninja Theory, and we both dive into a belated spoiler-filled discussion of Nier: Automata, the game Jonathan foolishly complained about last week. We also, of cou...

In this week’s packed episode, we cover a bunch of interesting news, including the announcement of three new Persona spin-off games, while Sean helps Jonathan work through his issues with the first ~15 hours of Nier Automata, and we answer a listener question in our first Patreon Q&A segment. And for our main topics, we review Tacoma, the new game from indie developer Fullbright (of Gone Home...

In our second podcast of the week, we clean up some odds and ends by talking about a bunch of recent news – including Nintendo shenanigans, Persona announcements, and more – Jonathan shares some thoughts on the ongoing 7th season of Game of Thrones, and we preview some of the games we’ll be talking about throughout the month of August, including Sonic Mania and Uncharted The Lost Legacy. And for o...

For our milestone 200th episode, we revisit the podcast’s very first topic and take a look forward to the future of the show. With 200 episodes in our rearview mirror, we have decided to expand, and as we explain on the show, this week we are launching a Patreon page – www.patreon.com/weeklystuffpodcast - where listeners can help us make the show bigger and better than ever before, as we expand to...

It’s a surprisingly jam-packed episode this week, as we get to talk about a slew of movies, games, and TV. First up is a boatload of news, movie trailers, and more out of San Diego Comic-Con, including more DC shenanigans and an incredible look at Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok. Then we talk some recent movies, with Jonathan reviewing Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Sean catching up on the recent Planet...