Star Trek: Section 31, with Ben Harrison and Adam Pranica

Hey listeners, I won't waste much of your time.

I just wanted to let you know that the response to Flop TV Season 2 has been so overwhelming that we're keeping the shows available through mid-March so that folks who got their tickets later in the season have a little extra time to check out the shows before they go away.

And if anyone wants to go to theflophouse.simpletics.com at the last minute and squeeze in a binge watch, you can do that too.

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Okay, now the show.

On this episode, we discuss Star Trek Section 31, the least popular Star Trek movie since Star Trek C-section.

Hey, everyone, welcome to the Flop House.

I'm Dan McCoy.

I'm Stuart Wellington.

I'm Elliot Kalen.

And joining us, we have the hosts of the Greatest Generation and the Greatest Trek to Trek podcast.

Name yourselves.

I'm Ben Harrison.

I'm Adam Prannica.

That's right.

It is a max fun

crossover.

That's right.

It's time for one podcast to visit another podcast and act like it'll be like the time when Urkel turned up on Step by Step and it was like, what?

These are happening in the same universe?

This is insane.

Or it's like Star Trek Generations to keep

in the

Urkel shows up in fucking Star Trek Generations.

I mean, he changes uniform halfway through the movie, and it's never clear why.

Because he's cool.

Reginald Bell Johnson is also also in that movie.

Now, when they're on the subject of Star Trek crossovers, have you guys covered on your podcast the series of novels where the X-Men meet the characters from Star Trek or no?

I didn't know that there were novels of that.

I thought it was just comic books.

No, there's at least two or three novels

of the X-Men characters on the Enterprise.

I don't know if they're all on the Enterprise, but I assume so.

That's more fun than the Star Trek characters going to a school.

Do the bullies even waste their time with the kids who are holding that novel?

Like going in between classes?

They probably just skip them.

Yeah, life is doing what we would do.

I have always wondered if a phaser or Cyclops' plasma ray is more powerful, you know?

So like,

could Cyclops punch through the hull?

Could he vaporize a pot that is surrounding a bunch of mashed potatoes without...

vaporizing the mashed potatoes?

Guess what, Ben?

There's a series of novels that I think are going to answer those questions for you.

But also, similarly, isn't Cyclops able to sort of like, doesn't his visor, you know, allow him to be like, I'm going to set it to stun, essentially.

I'm not able to or that doesn't style.

It's just like

total blastify or open it.

No, he can't open it wider or less wide to affect the intensity of the beam.

That's true.

But also, he needs the power of the sun to build up his

optic blast.

So it's possible if he's on the Star Trek Enterprise that he's running out of power.

You know, there's no sunlight there that I know of, right?

I feel like they got to get Forge on this.

This seems like a perfect project for a guy.

No, no, no.

He's got some serious work to do on the Blackbird.

Okay.

So this is an X-Men podcast where we talk about X-Men stuff.

Will the Blackbird fit in the shuttle bay or do they have to like modify it with like folding wings?

Ben, I feel like there's a series of novels that are going to get podcasts.

So, okay.

To return to what we actually do on this podcast, which was a podcast where we watch a bad movie and then we talk about it.

This is a movie in quotes

in that it is movie length and it was advertised as a movie on the Paramount Plus streaming service.

Because it doesn't look like a movie or feel like

at least one movie star in it.

It does have one of the biggest movie stars in the world in it, but it's not really structured like a movie.

No, it's more like an abandoned series idea, perhaps.

It does very much feel like when they would, which it is, when they would create the pilot for a new tv show and then they had no interest in continuing in actually picking it up so they would show it on network tv as a special you know and those specials always ended with the promise of more adventures which would never happen

like when's the when's the rest of the adventures of the mulholland drive crew gonna happen

so So, Ben and Adam, you're a Star Trek expert.

Someone even say Star Trek Trek experts or sexperts.

Star Trek Section 31, this is, there are so many concepts in this movie, and I'll be in the summary today, but there's so many concepts in the movie I was not familiar with as a very amateur Trek knowing about her.

And so, for people who know it, well, were you watching this in understanding it better, or were you watching it in a greater sense of horror than I might?

Because I'm not as engaged in the series.

That's such a great

question.

And part of why I was excited to talk about this movie in particular with The Flophouse, because as somebody who's watched all of the ancillary material that leads up to to

the events of this film,

it is

hard for me to imagine what it is like coming to this with no context.

Well, I can tell you that when I saw the ads for it, I was like, huh.

So there's sort of a black ops thing within the world of Star Trek.

Doesn't that break the idea of Star Trek, this utopian Federation?

And then I learned that it is something that comes out of one of the series, although I guess they're sort of not officially part of the Federation.

The Federation just turns a blind eye to them.

This is all stuff that I learned after the fact by reading stuff online rather than experiencing it.

I definitely had to go to Wikipedia for quite a bit of explanation, but like I was not aware that Section 31 was a thing that pre-existed this movie, but the movie really takes it for granted that you know.

I mean, anytime you make a movie, that's what you want, right?

You want your audience to have to do a bunch of homework in order to get what you're trying to do.

I don't know if I've done this much homework for a mainstream piece of popular entertainment since I read Grant Morrison's like Death of Bruce Wayne miniseries or whatever it was, where he's referencing all these different old Batman stories.

And I was like, I shouldn't have to be looking up unreferenced materials

to understand what's going on in a Batman comic book.

I kind of felt like that with this, too.

When are they going to release the annotated Batman comic book?

Yeah, I shouldn't need annotations for this.

I knew Elliot was running our summary, and I texted him because also, I feel like you need to do research to have any any sympathy for like the main character who Elliot explained to me through his research has has a longer redemption arc on the series so maybe

you know you're it's easier to I might argue the more you know about the main character the less sympathy you could ever

have I feel like the most sympathetic thing that they did, which was smart, is they cast Michelle Yeo, an amazing movie star.

Yes,

one of the greatest movie stars in the world.

She killed a bunch of people.

I'd still, you know, I'm still right about it.

And looking at the making of this, it feels like this movie probably would not have happened if she had not won an Academy Award between the beginning of the development and the production of this movie, basically.

I think they probably would have, it was supposed to be a spin-off series starring her.

And I think they kind of, I think they were in the midst of dropping it when she won an Academy Award and they were like, oh,

now we need to make it.

Oh, is that what happened?

I assumed that the idea, that it was like, oh, we were going to make this series.

Oh, now we can't afford Michelle Yeo.

I mean, maybe there's a little bit of that too.

It can't be a series, but it can be a movie.

Well, Well, let's talk about it.

So Michelle Yeo, she's playing a character named Philippa Giorgio, which is, I don't know why, but I find it be a hilarious story.

Yeah.

Amari Hardwick puts a lot of emphasis.

He puts a lot of juice on that last syllable of Georgia.

He's like, George!

Every time.

And so let's, let's, I think, but rather than explain that character right off the bat, let's replicate the experience of me and Dan and Stewart watching this movie, but not knowing what's going on.

And you guys, Adam and Ben, please chime in when it feels like something needs explaining, which is all the time.

So we open with, so this, I will say, this was basically like a.

Are we going to be the Adam Kahnover of this episode?

They're like, well, actually.

Yes, very much so.

Thank you.

And I'll be like, I don't know why I have an issue with what he's doing.

Like, the things he's saying are true.

And this movie.

It started out as a, as, I believe, as development for a television series, much like Moana 2 started out as a moana television series and then became a movie instead also perfect film did moana also

episodic a bunch of yeah there's there's a genocide sequence and

yeah moana murdered her parents also

they had a coming exactly uh so the movie starts with text on screen i love it says fate who makes the sword dot dot dot does the forging in advance Aeschylus.

And I kind of get why this quote has to do with the rest of the movie, but I don't really fully understand it.

But it's okay.

It doesn't matter.

It's just part of Star Trek being the classy of the two space opera shows.

Because Star Wars, they're not going to start with an Aeschylus quote.

Instead, it's going to be like, fear not, Yoda.

And it'll be like, okay, well, that's a character from the West.

Well, I mean, they do start with words on the screen.

Is this an episode of the fucking wire?

Why are they getting one of the characters from the show's quotes?

One of the things that I always found weird about The Wire is to start it with a quote from an character in that episode.

But we start where it's the Terran Empire, which again was a thing I did not know what it is, but I guess it's some kind of alternate dimension where instead of the Federation, there's like a mean, bad empire that defeats things.

I kept imagining it in my head being like the Imperial Ratch from Ann Lackey's ancillary novels, which are a great series of novels.

And maybe so will.

Read those novels.

Read those instead.

So the Terran Empire.

The Terran Empire in TOS terms are Spock with Goatee.

So if you've ever seen Spock with Goatee.

So by TOS, you mean the original series.

Right.

So yeah, looking it up, I guess that's the mirror universe for the This is the mirror episode.

And everyone in it

has the same job, but they're really bad.

Everyone's the same, except they're evil and sexier, too, right?

Yeah, they're sexy.

And I'm not saying they're bad at their job.

They're good at their job, which is being bad.

I don't believe that a universe full of people being bad is going to be a functioning universe.

I assume that means the bad people in our universe are good in that universe.

That's my guess.

But since all the Star Trek characters are always good, I guess we never see

the bad versions of the alternate universe.

So we're in a rural village.

So Jeffrey Combs would have to play good guys all the time.

Exactly.

And he'd never wear makeup.

Makeup, where's him?

We're in a rural village.

There's a blacksmith, woman picking crops, all the stuff that tells us this is a rural place.

A woman shows up.

She's this young woman.

She's been away for two years as part of a sort of battle royale.

It's a hunger games.

It's a hunger games, except if the winner of the hunger games goes on to become the emperor, basically.

Which is a remarkably like organized succession plan for a universe as evil as the mirror universe.

Except it's also a terrible idea because the same skills that allow you to kill other people and survive, I assume, the wilderness or something, are not the same skills that are great for managing a galactic bureaucracy, understanding

trade attacks.

You know, TV hosts and billionaires.

Exactly.

Someone who's run a business, Steward.

Someone who understands how a business works.

Yeah, exactly.

None of the partners in law firms have gotten management degrees either, Elliot.

Yeah, Elliot.

Let's steer away from that.

And let me ask,

this just happens when there's like a power vacuum, right?

Though they're not like every year.

I assumed every time an emperor died, they did this.

I know, but that's what I'm saying.

When there's a vacuum, the emperor doesn't, it's not, it's not patrilineal or anything.

There's like a proctor that has enough power to run this two-year-long competition and then like find the person.

Is this what the Conclave is about?

I haven't seen the Conclave.

It is like Conclave, except there's more vaping in Conclave.

I would see that, Philippe, if I saw this one, it sounds like

she's come back.

She's won the Battle Royale, this woman, Philippa, Philippa Giorgio, and only her and another combatant, a guy named San, they survived because they worked together, or San, as I would say it being from New Jersey.

They survived because they worked together.

One of them will become the new emperor.

There's just one final test, and Giorgio passes it by poisoning her family because she can have no ties if she's the emperor.

And this is shot with what I would call a lot of unnecessary style, a lot of like golden light, slow.

Describes the movie, Elliot.

There's a lot of like spin-around shots or like a lot of spin-around shots.

Like, is this a drone or is this a digital drone?

Like, what's going on here?

Yeah.

And as soon as she does that, a ton of troops beam down and they're like, you succeeded where Saiyan failed.

And now he has to serve you as a slave forever.

And she's the emperor now and she renounces their friendship and she takes a sword and puts it in a heating,

the coals of a hot brazier and then slaps it against his face to burn his scarred face.

Then the movie does something a little jarring, which is that as if this was a video game you were playing, it suddenly turns into a priority message addressed to you, explaining what happened to this character between that scene and this movie.

And they're like, priority message, section 31, Emperor Giorgio is from a parallel dimension.

She was brought to our dimension and joined section 31.

Then she disappeared.

She's been seen in Federation Space.

And I'm like, this is a lot.

This is a lot to subtly tell me.

Did this clear anything up for you guys as newbies to the franchise?

Not really.

So they're basically like, I guess they're telling us, is this her arc basically?

on the television show is like she comes over she was a genocidal mad woman she's she's hitler on a galactic scale but she comes over and kind of like does her time as a spy and that is a redemption thing like what happens basically yeah the so there are uh i think three seasons of uh the series star trek discovery where she is a character and uh when we first meet her we meet the prime universe version of her and she is the captain of the ship that sinequo martin green's character michael burnham is uh the first officer on and michael burnham has a whole redemption arc surrounding uh committing mutiny against philippa georgiau her beloved captain and then they go on a bunch of adventures that land them on the wrong side of the

divide between the two universes.

And they discover the horrifying truth that her beloved captain's doppelganger in the mirror universe is Space Hitler.

Spitler, yeah.

Right.

And so

they're the main character from the porn version, section 31,

SEX.

You know, this ain't Star Trek, colon.

You get it.

And then she joins them.

Like she goes on adventures with them.

Or

they're trying to stop her or what?

They have to stop this other captain

who is a mere universe person that's been

imitating.

He's an identity thief, essentially.

He's taken the identity of his prime universe counterpart.

And

so Philippe George is instrumental in

finishing the Federation's war with the Klingon Empire and resolving it in a way that makes the Klingons ripe to be made into allies

eventually.

But yeah, like

it's a lot to go through.

It sounds like for a series that has 13 episodes a season.

It is so fucking convoluted.

Elliot, to jump back a little bit, when you said, and now the movie does something jarring, I thought you were going to say it, it indicates that this is going to be your hero.

Well, that too.

A woman who kills her family and then goes on to be a genocidal maniac ruler.

Well, that's the thing.

When you see her do horrible things in the show, and then like somehow the show wants you to feel bad for her when they also do time travel, and they're like, you know, you can't jump to a universe and then travel in time.

That's really bad for you.

So you're going to have to travel back to your own time period at the very minimum.

That's the least, that's the slap of the wrist for sure.

That's the least we can do.

It does feel like, but they keep trying throughout the movie about how you killed billions.

Like you're you were a monster.

And it does, but then by the end, she's just part of the gang, spoiler.

And it does feel like if in the new Mission Impossible movie, they're like, you got a new recruit, Pol Pot.

And he's like, well, Pol Pot, I don't like you.

And by the end of it, Pol Pot is so cool and such a great fighter and so suave that there's even like sexual tension between Pol Pot and Ethan Hunt.

Like that's, that's what this movie feels like.

Pol Pot's a brunette, apparently.

It would be spelled

O-L-E

in that version.

I don't know if you're going to stab me in the back or bed me down, but that's kind of what I like about you, Pol Pot.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So

Section 31, I guess, is that the kind of black ops scene we were talking about.

And they have to...

find her and also stop a terrorist, and they have 24 hours to complete this mission.

And it was this moment, it felt like I was either watching, either it had turned into a video game that I was supposed to play, or I had stepped into a sequel that I I didn't, I was like, was there Star Trek section through Star Trek section 30?

Like, is it like it?

I've heard of info dumps, but usually they are like either this kind of thing is at the very beginning of the movie, or it is a character

saying admit it, you just wanted it to be scrolling at a weird angle away from you.

I would have loved it more.

If it was scrolling at a weird angle across a field of stars, I would have been like, this is how you tell a movie.

Like, this is a space opera.

I watch a lot of television.

My wife watches, basically, tries out every single new drama series, every comedy series.

She tries like, she loves it.

And so I end up watching a lot of pilots of things.

And this felt very much like a pilot in that it's like, there's so much information, so much backstory that's either implied or directly said.

And they're just like, they're like, don't worry about all this.

We're just going to keep talking and throw you right into the action.

Yeah.

So like, yeah, there is a feeling like, I don't know what the fuck is going on, but I'm maybe my brain has been like messed over by all watching all these all this bad television writing.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, the action that they throw you into is

largely theoretical is the problem.

Let's talk about the action that they throw you into because this is a real twisty-turny plot, guys.

There's a lot of ins and outs and betrayals.

So we go to a space club, a space nightclub that Giorgio runs on the edge of Federation Space.

She there is a lot of fun.

I do like the outfits.

I do like the outfits and the design of this space bar.

I think the design of the bar is cool.

It is.

Spacebar on my laptop.

Thank you.

Yeah, yeah.

It's rectangular.

Do you have to get that custom?

I did.

I did.

It fitted to my machine.

Yeah, it looks wider than normal.

Is it because of you have a thumb issue, or do you just like a nice wide bar?

I like a girthy space bar.

Let's get out of here.

Dan likes his space bars.

He brought the expression.

He got embarrassed.

I've never seen one ribbed like that, Dan.

That's for his pleasure.

That's my pleasure.

Dan likes to tiptoe to the edge of kink, and then Stuart likes to push him over.

So Giorgio's there under the name Madame Veronique Dufranc and it's like

it's just like it's a cool looking space bar

and the I have to assume because they imply at the end this would be their home base if this was a series that they would be at this space bar.

There's a there's a and someone wants to talk to her, a mystery man who appears to be a drug supplier named Alok Sahar, but she identifies him right away as a Section 31 agent.

She's already ID'd all the agents he has with him at the bar.

She does not want to help them, but he threatens to arrest her if she doesn't.

And she's like, I could kill you right now, but I'll do it.

Okay.

Like there's, there's very, it's going for a game of like, we're forced to work together, cat and mouse.

You don't want to do this and I don't want to do it.

But everyone is so easygoing.

They're so laid back throughout the entirety of the movie.

Well, they're very high at this point.

And we don't know how long this drug takes to wear off.

So it could be that they remain profoundly high for the rest of the experience that they have together.

Yeah.

I want to say about these characters that we meet, right?

Like and I'm about I'm about to run down them, but damn, say what you're going to say.

Yeah.

Well, you know, they're all sort of like in disguise because they're in the bar, but all of all but one of them mostly look how they normally look, except like one of the women has a

very different wig and makeup.

And I found it extremely confusing because when you're first introducing a character, you usually don't introduce them looking vastly different.

And then like later on in a different scene, I'm like, wait, that's the same lady, and then at the end of the movie, when they're back in the bar, she's back in the wig and makeup.

I'm like, back in that disguise.

Why did that happen?

If you are going to introduce a character in disguise, you should show them removing the disguise so that your brain processes.

I will say, to defend that character, that's Lieutenant Rachel Garrett, who's an uptight Starfleet officer when we meet her.

And I do like the idea that she's the only one who's like, I have to go all out with my disguise.

That's section 31, you know, by the book.

And she's played by the actress who played uh Abigail Hobbes.

Abigail Hobbes from Hannibal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was awesome.

Oh, yeah, okay, so let's meet her.

Remember Hannibal?

That's a good show.

What a great show.

Oh, man.

I love that show.

And you know what they didn't do?

They didn't do like then a spin-off movie about

like Jillian Anderson's like therapist or something.

I would have watched it, but it wouldn't have been very good.

They were like, that series reached the perfect ending beat, and then it was just done.

They said we told our story.

Anyway, let's meet the team.

Let's meet Alak's team.

Alok does does not have much personality.

He's just kind of like the very handsome.

He's very.

Mark Hardwick is very handsome.

He is, but he's just the tough leader of the team.

Let's meet his team.

There's Mel, a sexy Delton with seduction powers.

Don't get attached to Mel because she's not going to be in a lot of the money.

There's Zeph, who has body armor all over him, and he's kind of dumb.

And he's like,

I forget, is he in the bar in his body armor?

Like, he doesn't have a disguise.

He's just there in his body armor.

He just takes some of it off sometimes.

I mean, not to leap too far ahead, but when Zeph died, I was very, like i was sad when mel died very excited when zeph died because i'm like you had nothing going on you were just a guy with a a robo-suit guys i i'm saying this from somebody who has played in a lot of role-playing games there are too many accents in this movie there are a lot of including a a microbe that is inside a vulcan robot with an irish accent and i'm like is the microbe

irish too yeah like what is going on he's just irish so there's uh you're talking about Fuzz.

He's a tiny alien, which is what, a Ninokan or something like that?

He's an almost microscopic alien who is in a tiny little spaceship inside of a robot Vulcan body.

So, he presents as Vulcan for most of the movie.

But every now and then, they'll zoom in real close to his face inside his little micro spaceship, and he'll be just like, oh, I fight in Bagora.

Oh, like, like, oh, me, Vulcan body.

And it's like, your hands off me like you chose.

And whenever you're up close to him, it always feels weird and it's always daring.

I do appreciate that they got a rubber rubber suit together for the guy inside the thing, though.

It's not just like a bad CG thing.

That's true.

It's a physical object, yeah.

And then there's Quasi, played by the great Sam Richardson, who is a shapeshifter, who is also the guy.

He's also the really smart guy who can't make decisions.

You know, he gets overwhelmed by choices.

And of course, and I mentioned Lieutenant Rachel Garrett, uptight Starfleet officer who wants to do everything by the book.

How did she even end up with this group?

Well, maybe that's something we would dig into in future episodes.

Guys,

I've been watching a lot of episodes of Slow Horses lately because, you know, I'm getting older.

It's a great show, and I'm getting older.

You know, I'm becoming, I'm morphing into a dad.

I'm listening to a lot of Steely Daniels.

It's a good dad show.

It's due.

Yeah.

I'm an actual dad.

I've been reading the books of Slow Horses.

Wow, that's a real dad move.

So what I'm saying is that my brain is very wired into the idea of like...

like a ragtag team doing espionage shit.

And so I was obviously a little bit disappointed by what ensues.

But look,

there's not a lot of espionage.

Just setting the stage.

So, they want to stop a biological arms dealer with the hilarious name of Dada No, which is

baby.

Donna No, which every time they said it, I was like, they can't be the character's name.

You can't have a character named Dada No.

Charlene has repeated the name multiple times while we watch the movie.

Like, you might as well just give him a name from the movie Cats and just be like, silly name.

Yep.

We're after McCavity.

We're after Bombalerina.

Fun thing I found in my research was the writer in an interview with one of the Trek news outlets was like, yeah, we just loved the character Dotta No.

So we had all the episodes written for the series and we just were like, we got to get that guy into the movie.

There's almost no character there.

Like he's so incredibly like, I wonder in the writer's room, they must have had some bit about Dotta No that was really hilarious that does not translate to the

show.

So they want to stop Dota No.

He's got he's going to he's trying to pass off to a buyer some biology what they think is some kind of terrorist weapon.

And Ellak goes over their plan in detail, and we see them acting it out.

And then Philippa goes, nah, I don't like that plan.

We're going to do something else.

And I was like, oh, okay, so that was Filler, what I just saw.

Well, I mean, it does a very specific thing.

It is that classic thing of anytime you fully explain a plan, that is not what's going to happen.

Yes, it's going to be

art-oriented.

It also highlights what everybody's unique abilities are and why they should all have to use.

And it shows her like cutting the knot, being like, no, the reason you want me on the team is i have a much easier way of doing this i'm smarter than you guys uh but it's like a walter sobchick plan it's like i'm gonna grab him and beat it out of him yeah our plan is not intricate it's i'm gonna take advantage of the fact that i own this place to beat him up well and i own this magic device which and that device i actually thought was kind of one of the few cool ideas on the show

in the movie so instead she she goes up to data known she's as a hostess and then she uses her phase pods to she throws one at the weapon case and one at herself and now she has she is out of phase she's vibrating at a different wavelength or speed than the rest of reality.

I like that a lot.

That's very love craft.

Let's go find the goof section.

So if you make a little box thing

out of phase with reality, is it just gonna phase through the floor?

Nope, it lands on the floor as normal.

It does land on the floor like normal.

The thing inside it is also affected by the phase field, so it doesn't fall out of that.

It doesn't just

like the bar you own,

you've fitted the floor out with

a special

way.

Here's the thing.

Is it affected by the artificial gravity?

In which case, I guess it falls to the floor, but wouldn't it fall to the center of wherever the gravity is?

I mean, it should just hang in the air because it floats.

It shouldn't be affected by that gravity.

Yeah, we fixed it.

We fixed it.

Did I explain this in Star Trek World, guys?

Is this an amusement spark?

No, I think after this episode, we're probably going to stop talking about Star Trek in general.

Oh, wow.

Who shamed

I found this moment very hurtful personally because I had an ex-girlfriend tell me that we just didn't vibrate at the same frequency before breaking up.

So

that's sad.

That's sad.

So

then a phased,

a masked assassin who is phased at the right wavelength to steal that

pod or the thing, the box, comes in.

They have an action fight.

And I didn't enjoy this, but I did think it was funny of them to do the classic 80s Tango and Cash thing of the action fight caused them to burst through the wall of a room where two aliens are having sex with each other.

Which is in Tango and Cash, every action scene just about they bump into somebody who's having sex in another part of the room.

No, I'm not.

So fight, fight, fight.

In the fight, unfortunately, Mel gets vaporized.

Sorry, Mel, we hardly knew ye.

There goes the character who was all about seduction.

The master

that they like fight for a while on the stage, and everybody in the bar interprets it as like part of the show and they're like, yeah, this is great.

Like Ninja Turtles 2.

This is great.

Space vanilla ice comes out.

Phasing, phasing, rap, phasing, phasing.

That's what they should have done.

And she's called Georgio when she's in control.

The mask fighter gets away with the case and Giorgio is like, I thought I'd destroy this.

Sitting next to Vanilla Sherbet over here, and he's cooking up some rhymes.

He'll be dropping on us.

That's a reference to our Secret of the Ooze Flop TV show.

Yeah, we want to know the full story of vanilla sherbet.

Season two, episode six.

I'm sprinkling out Easter eggs for the true freaks out there.

Yeah.

So the true flop freaks.

So flop castle freaks like Giorgio.

Like Philippa Giorgio.

Speaking of, let's go to when she was in a castle.

I bet she has ripped off plenty of ding-dongs in her day.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, for sure.

There's a scene in the TV show where she eats a guy's threat ganglia, which are like an intimate body part that only get exposed when they experience fear.

So, yeah, I totally believe it.

See,

man, I gotta watch this show.

Oh, yeah.

It sounds amazing.

So, based on this movie, so they flash back to when she was in her own castle, when she was empress, and San gives her this object, and he's like, We made that weapon you asked for.

Then all your engineers killed themselves because they were so ashamed.

And it's like, so they couldn't kill themselves before they made the super weapon, but okay.

And he goes, You become a monster.

And he gives himself the same poison and seems to to die at her feet.

I mean, the argument, most likely, I don't want to jump ahead, but I would imagine San gave them the poison and killed them.

Oh, that's possible, too.

But again, he couldn't do that before they made the weapon.

No, he wants the weapon, though.

Except for the power.

But then why does he take it then?

He like fakes his own death.

Why does he bother faking his death and green?

It's three-dimensional chess, guys.

I can't explain it.

Yeah, but sometimes you just need to play tic-tac-toe.

You don't tick-tock-toe.

Tick-to-toe.

Yeah, tic-tac-toe is the new game that young people love, but it's Chinese, so we got to ban it.

And it's been banned.

And then like the Supreme Court upheld the ban, but it's still there for some reason.

We live in a world without law right now.

This is not a country of laws.

So this president was like, eh, I'll allow it.

And of course, he's king now, as he stated in a truth social post.

So there's nothing we can do about it.

Every time we bring it up, it just depresses me.

This is why I think we're here to provide a respite from people.

Oh, right, right, right.

Provide a respite.

So

Georgia wakes up handcuffed in a safe house with a lock.

Don't quite know why she's handcuffed, but okay she already agreed to work with them a little bit and they taunt each other for a little bit throw away the key all right tell me about it uh and she's like uh

you need to you need to trust me uh but she needs to know what you're not telling me about yourself and a lock is like i'm from the 20th century i was involved in the eugenics wars i was turned into a super soldier but i was but i was turned into an augmenter or whatever or augmented and now i'm here now and i guess he was frozen or something i don't yeah i mean i just i can i can piece it i can guess

it was like Khan.

con But it's like, you never see him do anything particularly.

I've read enough fucking Chris Claremont comics to know that I'm like, yeah, I'll just figure it out.

Yes, exactly.

He never does anything particularly augmented as far as hell.

Well, he punches really hard once or twice.

He plays Pokemon.

Everyone punches hard.

He's really good at Pokemon Go.

He's really good at Pokemon Go.

That's true.

We see that throughout the movie.

He's like, we got to catch that data no, but first I got to catch them all.

So they leave their hidden bunker.

They're on a hidden bunker safe house on the butt end of the universe.

And she explains that in her universe, she built a weapon called the God's End, which can incinerate an entire quadrant worth of planets.

And it's convenient enough to fit in a box.

And again, this is more evidence that she is bad and maybe is beyond redemption, that she is like, we've got to get that weapon I built.

I said to destroy it, but it was still your idea to have this quadrant burning weapon.

It's like a doomsday device.

I mean, it's less, you know, it was intended less as a weapon per se, as more like, hey, if you come kill me, then this whole

quadrant is like, is raised, you know, like everything's blown up.

You are ruler of nothing.

Yeah.

Yes.

A one quarter doomsday device.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Cause it's just a quadrant.

Exactly.

I mean, usually the threat is to the whole galaxy in these movies.

So it's nice to see it just like confined to one quarter of one galaxy.

I'm made for Paramount Plus budget.

You can't incinerate the whole galaxy.

You can only incinerate one fourth the galaxy.

I don't know.

Every single season of Star Trek Discovery would beg to differ.

Oh, yeah.

I mean,

Paramount Plus has sure incinerated those old daily show reruns, huh?

Source subject.

Source subject.

They need to save that room for new seasons of Ink Master and Ink Master All-Stars.

You got to put Tracker on there.

Dan, I have to understand.

Dan, that's not even his name.

That's what's so fucking crazy.

He should be Jack Tracker.

As Comedy Central sheds its husk and goes from being a cable network to being a free-floating spirit.

Will-the-wisp.

Yeah, Will-O-T-the-Wisp.

It can't hold on to a website anymore.

That would be bonkers.

I'm never going to get a box full of three-cent checks anymore from people clicking on those things.

You know,

I did really love going back and reliving the Bush administration via The Daily Show.

Yeah.

And I, so I have a book coming out later this year that's about joke writing.

It's called Joke Farming.

It's coming from

University of Chicago Press.

And I, for it, I was re-watching stuff that I had written for the Daily Show so I could use it as examples.

And then I was like, well, glad I finished the book before they pulled everything I worked on off the internet and made it inaccessible to me.

Man, thanks for that.

It exists question mark, question mark, question mark.

It exists on

data on beta tapes that are slowly being demagnetized by the process of entropy over time at the VM TV video library, which it now exists in a dumpster.

It's comforting.

Comforting.

Yeah.

It's a real data no.

It's gone the way of holding

programs.

Yeah.

Well, Dan, think of it this way.

Eventually the sun will explode, and everything humanity has created will go away.

What you worked on on the daily show, just that happened a little early.

So, actually, that's a good question.

At this point, did they drag Dad No along with them, uh, like he's Joe Peshied him, the lethal weapons?

They did exactly that.

The lethal weapon, Joe Pesci'd him.

Uh, and we learned that he's so we learned that uh, he's an augmenter and so forth.

They have the god's end.

There's a conversation between our crew about is it god's end or god's send, and it's the kind of uh kind of off-brand suicide squad-esque, uh, like Gardens Guardians of the Galaxy-esque banter that the movie every now and then jolts into like a car being driven by a teenager who doesn't yet know how to use a stick shift is

drastically switching gears at the wrong time.

I'm glad you brought this up because I feel like every review I read of this was talking about how much it wants to be a suicide squad style team.

And the thing is,

I don't want to lay blame at any particular person's feet who's behind this section 31 movie but like what it is missing is like james gunn uh uh leavens that with uh emotions i mean if anything he like ladles on the emotions extra thick to sort of uh make it make up for the fact that everything else is quippy and when it yeah he's got a he like kills a bunch of baby animals yeah but anyway so yeah yeah yeah not my favorite but one of those but uh and when it's quippy though it is also quippy in a way that is specific to the characters whereas everyone here just sort of generally is like well we're in the middle of a quadrant killing situation but i'm gonna make a joke at any point that i can you know so that like it's like there's no they don't have a dumb guy just have it like they should have made the the fucking robot suit guy like just a dumb guy who says like one word thing

he's pretty he's pretty dumb but he's not super dumb he's not hilariously dumb that's he doesn't he doesn't get enough screen time to do anything dumb enough to like

crystallize what his character even is, I think.

Australian?

Is that?

No, no, he's Irish.

No, he's wait, the guy, wait, which guy, wait, which guy in a suit are you talking about?

The one with the mech suit.

The wispy guy.

No, not the little guy.

But he's like a wise cracker.

But then they're all wisecrackers, you know.

I think that's...

Yeah,

but if they had made that character really dumb, then I would be like, why is he in the super secret covert spy organization?

If he's

got a a suit like they don't take the suit away from just kill him and take this if you're a

strong guy no the idea is that he bonded with this suit that's more powerful than he is and so he's valuable because they need him because he's

oh i wish they had done something with that i think that's like uh i just made that up but i'm

i feel like i've read that story a million times like i buy like i buy that uh they so they uh basically like bio booster armor gyver right there so they realize they're like oh dada no must be from the mirror universe and they're like should we trust her I don't know if we should trust her.

This goes on throughout the movie.

They're constantly like, I don't know if I would, at any moment, you might slit our throats.

I don't know if we should trust you.

And she's like, yeah, or maybe I will do that.

But it never, it doesn't lead to anything, you know.

They interrogate Dada No.

He's suddenly, before he was not a wise cracker.

Now he's a wise cracker too.

She's like, I am Empress Giorgio, the da-da-da of this, the president of this, the count of this.

And he goes, do you get fries with that?

And it's like, I guess that is like, sounds like a joke, but it doesn't.

It's like, it's, it's like if you picked up like, like a piece of wax fruit and took a bite out of it, and you'd be like, oh, well, this is not real food.

Like, it's, it's such a weird response, but it also means that in the Star Trek universe, they have restaurants that serve fries.

So much of the fucking quips in this shit, I'm like, okay, wait, what?

Wait, is this like, do they live in the 20th century?

Are they all on social media?

Are they all on Twitter?

What's going on?

If there's one thing I know about Star Trek is that it's constantly referencing 20th century pop culture.

They're like, oh, it's like that book that, you know, or that.

Yeah, Yeah, yeah.

I guess that's true.

Everything is momentum.

I guess that's not true.

They'll just toss in one extra book and be like, and that was, of course, from Grethon the Destroyer, his famous book of wisdom.

And like, okay, well, they added one science fiction-y one in there.

Zen and the art of, I don't know, batlef creations.

Yeah, well, they're always chasing that.

They're always chasing that moment when about Hamlet in the original Klingon, which is like, which is a genuinely funny joke.

But Adam, can you tell us, are French fries canon in Universal Star Trek?

I mean, a replicator replicator could probably make them, right?

Not that I've ever seen.

I mean,

it's so weird to have someone as funny as Sam Richardson in a movie deliver dialogue like this.

Like, I'm glad he's more in context because if he weren't, I think you'd just see his soul die

standing on this soundstage.

It just doesn't seem right.

That being said, I feel like he comes out of it the best.

Like, he's able to modulate it.

Like,

he does what he can with it.

He's a pro.

Yeah.

But it also helps that, like, you're, we're bringing our good, our good feelings towards him from his other work.

So, like, there's definitely,

if someone I had never known before was playing that part, I would not have the same affection.

I mean, that's why you hire a star with a particular attachment, you know, is that with that particular feel.

But this is probably the whole time.

And I'll never get on Fuzz's level because of his great hatred of Sven Neugrak.

Exactly.

Thank you.

Thank you for mentioning that.

Now I'm going to have to get into it.

Anyway, so

all of his work, his many credits, we're all familiar with them uh so they uh so uh so uh aloc and and philippagiorgio uh they both take turns and also so his name is aloc he's from the 20th century is aloc what is that a uh is that a real like name because it sounds like a star trek thing a real name

is that a real name is is a question you could ask every episode you're watching star or of any any object or person yeah you'd be like what a word i know that like when you have a character named quasi and it's like oh there

that character is a shapeshifter.

So, like, I get it.

He's Quasi.

And there's a character named Fuzz because he's tiny.

And then you have a character named Rachel Garrett.

Like, Rachel Garrett is clearly a modern human name as opposed to Fuzz or Quasi.

And also, it's not like a thing she does.

She doesn't Rachel Garrett.

I don't know that.

Maybe she lives in a garret.

Maybe in the series, she's always got concertina wire around guys' necks.

Yeah, yeah.

And she can cut hair, but only in one style.

Only one particular character.

Style will sweep the galaxy.

Yes, of course.

what i'm sure what i'm sure you guys don't realize is that rachel garrett is a character from star trek the next generation she was captain of the enterprise c

which they encountered coming through an accidental rift in time and they had to send back to their certain doom so she has like a very tragic end after

uh after this like uh but like i guess like pretty tragic maybe maybe like two decades in the future of this character oh i didn't know that so it's a little bit like anytime a spider-man movie introduces gwen stacy and you're like oh

like where are you going with this character this isn't gonna end well i'm assuming that future rachel garrett who's now the captain has in like every once in a while will stare longingly at the mannequin head in her quarters that has that wig on it and makeup and shit yeah yeah uh her character they try for an arc with her and it it feels so we'll get to it but it feels so incredibly unearned and strange uh but the so uh they're they're taking turns beating up dottano to get information he goes i found that there's a passageway when there's an ion storm in this part of the galaxy it creates a passageway between our universe and the terran empire universe and he's and he implies that their group has a mole then there's an explosion on the ship knocks them out the ship crashes on the surface the planet dotted no dies everyone else is fine they're totally okay i don't know how they got out of the ship but they not a scratch on them teleported Did they teleport?

Is that what happened?

It's called beaming down, guys.

Oh, they beamed down?

Okay.

Sorry, they they beamed down, yeah.

And they're like, which one of us is the mole?

One of us is the mole.

And they've got only four hours to get the godsend before the Terran Empire shows up through that Ion Storm passageway.

Oh, no.

Time to split up into mission teams.

One team, we're going to get a derelict garbage ship.

That's our new ship.

The other team, we're going to go repair the transmitting antenna so we can let the Federation know.

But both of these things are missing one piece that makes them work.

Oh, no.

It's not the hit television show One Piece that makes them work.

But they're each missing one pieces of technology or manga, but yeah.

That's true.

That's true.

That's a very good point.

So and it starts to seem at first that Zeph is the mole, the guy in the armor suit, maybe he sabotaged them.

He disappears.

They go searching for him.

And along the way, A-loc and Giorgio have a talk about their motives and their need for redemption.

So that's good that they got that out.

They find Zeph dead.

Oh no, he's dead on the ground.

And all the evidence points to Lieutenant Garrett.

So they handcuff her, but she says, I didn't do it.

I didn't do it.

Until they tap into the video footage from his armor suit, and it shows him angrily using his own suit to kill himself.

Yeah.

Was there a clear moment?

Was there any moment where you guys didn't assume it was the little guy piloting his mech suit?

No, of course not.

Of course not.

There was no moment at which

I thought it was this character, the woman, Abigail Hobbs, who did it.

And then once they.

Which is what Hannibal used

to great effect.

It's true.

It's true.

But then once the video shows him beating himself up in the mech suit, I was so mad at the characters in the movie taking so long to be like, how is this possible?

What could have gotten inside the suit?

Who on our team lives in a robot suit and pilots a robot suit and a huge amount of time?

Earlier, about being able to go into people's bodies and control their mechanical parts.

There's even a lingering shot of fuzz that's like four seconds too long before this incident that should have tipped you right off, right?

I mean, that's another way this feels like a TV show instead of a movie, where I feel like in a movie, there's not always, but there's generally a greater assumption or a slightly greater assumption of intelligence on the part of the audience, whereas a TV show, they constantly are telling you everything.

They all

folding laundry at the same time.

Exactly.

Exactly.

You're looking at TikTok-toe and you're not really paying attention.

Foot kink TikTok.

In general,

the normal TikTok.

Yeah, it's just like OnlyFoots, which is not that different from OnlyFans.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they find the footage and Giorgio then, like a brilliant detective, only it would take the cunning, devious mind of Filippa Giorgio to understand this, goes through things that we heard, said, and saw done in the episode, flashback montage style, and realizes it was fuzz.

He set his Vulcan robo body on autopilot so he could go into Zeph's suit and control it and pull off mole stuff using Zeph's body.

And he...

uh takes control of Zeph's exoskeleton and attacks them so he can escape on a rocket sled going through a tunnel.

They follow on another rocket sled.

By the way, this is

amazing.

To be honest, this is my favorite part of the whole movie is when they're on the rocket sleds, just because it's like everything's moving at least.

It's not characters standing around talking about what they're going to do, which I know is a big Star Trek thing.

I'm sorry, Ban Adam.

I know the main thing with Star Trek is characters having kind of conferences and ad hoc little meetings.

If an episode doesn't have four or five meetings in it,

I am completely disappointed.

No criticism you have of this film will hurt my feelings.

I mean, the thing is, all of those

episodes centered around meetings are more interesting than this film.

That's true.

Because, I mean, again, like, Conclave is a movie that's like all meetings, and it's super awesome.

My discussion is

fucking great.

So exciting.

Yes.

Have you guys ever seen the movie?

Have you ever seen the movie Hunger?

McQueen movie about

the hunger strikes in Ireland.

And there's one scene where two characters are sitting at a table talking to each other,

just in one shot, in the dark for like 20 minutes.

And it's amazing.

It's such a tense, great dramatic scene because the acting and the writing.

And this movie is full of action, but it's all, you know, sound of fury signifying nothing.

It's very boring.

So rocket sled fight, laser fight.

Garrett frees herself.

Fight, fight, fight, fight.

Anyway, Alec gets knocked off the shed.

Quasi saves him by transforming into a big goopy web, which maybe is his real form.

I kind of like that.

I kind of like that bit.

And Philippa and Fuzz, they end up on a sled hovering high above the planet.

Philippa stabs his robot body and he staggers forward as if he's going to die, which I thought was very funny because it's like a robotic body.

Like it's not stab it all you want.

He's a little guy who's right who's hiding inside of it.

Stab

part.

There's a part of me that would have loved if it was, if like she was like, yeah, I can, you might be really small, but I know how to stab you.

Yeah.

And Fuzz reveals that San is alive.

He faked his death and he's going to take the godsend to the Terran Empire.

And Fuzz beams out in his full robo body.

The second non-thrilling reveal of the film.

You mean, oh, that character that otherwise would have no reason that we keep talking about him.

Yes.

He's still alive.

Great.

The character who only exists in flashbacks, but we're supposed to have invested real emotion into their relationship at this point.

On Sans' ship, now he has Fuzz and the Godsend.

He's counting down to when the Ion Storm will allow the Terrans to come through and use the Godsend to invade Federation space.

Oh, no, this isn't just one quadrant that's in trouble.

It's the entire Federation and it's only up to our ragtag team of

not spies exactly like ragtag team of ruffians, I guess.

It's getting smaller all the time.

It's getting raggier and taggier this team.

Yeah.

I just

gotta say, like, is this around, this is around 20 minutes from the end, right?

Where we're at.

I remember very specifically, like, this movie's 90 minutes.

It doesn't

feel short in the sense that like, oh, that time flew by, but it felt short to me in terms of like story structure because right about this time, I'm like, okay, well, things are finally just like gearing up.

Like things are kicking into, and I paused and I'm like, there's 20 minutes left.

So they're right before the climax and then it's going to be out.

But again, it feels like we are watching the pilot of a TV show, you know, in which case, okay, let's rush to an inconclusive ending and then we'll continue the adventures.

But it's not a pilot to your TV show.

It's a movie.

So they've got to wrap it all up.

And it's, there's, they really are.

They still leave it pretty open.

They do, but, but the sand story, like I could see a version of this where at the end of the pilot, they have not gotten the, the pilot ends with the reveal that this guy, San, is still alive.

And then the next episode is reinvesting us in that character.

And they're chasing after him or whatever.

You know, I don't know how serialized this is.

And then there's like a bottle episode where San is like, I don't know, in school or like working in a diner, and that's the whole episode.

And you're like, exactly, because they ran out of money.

Our fuzz is inside a bottle.

And this is the start of an actual bottle episode.

And the start of season two is just a montage of things that happened in the previous season.

And then at the end, you're like, well, I guess that was beautiful, but like, what was it to watch?

That is a good video installation piece.

It is not a good episode of television.

It's not a good episode of episode.

Maybe it's just a different type of television than you're used to, Elliot.

Yeah, one that's not about story.

Yeah.

I mean, it takes it.

No, there's nothing very impressive about taking the previously on that usually runs before a TV show and stretching it out for the entirety of the episode.

Conceptually, it works pretty well when you consider that that we're talking about a restaurant that went from like a local hole-in-the-wall greasy spoon and turned it into this like fine dining spot.

So they're just taking all that and repackaging it into something that you don't quite want.

But isn't that the job of the recap podcasts of the world?

Like, why is the TV show itself

taking that from us?

That's a good point.

Once again, Big Hollywood moving in and taking away the podcaster's whole raison de tre.

But you can see why an episode like that isn't quite outstanding comedy of the year, the same way the previous hilarious season was.

It was funnier.

The comedy category, that's a whole nother conversation.

It is a half hour long, for anyone who doesn't know what we're talking about.

We're talking about LeBer,

the television show

about a chef who it started out seeming that the show was going to be about a chef who realizes he needs to leave the world of fine dining in order to recapture his soul.

But by season two decided, actually, we love hanging out with famous chefs.

So it is about fine dining and how great it is.

And that's where the soul of food is, not in your hole in the wall places, run by families.

No, no, no, no, in fine dining.

Anyway, so Alak reveals to the others that he was the one who took the pieces of the old derelict ship and the transmitter antenna because he didn't want the mole to escape or transmit or whatever.

So they take off, they replace the parts, they take off after San in a garbage ship.

Its only weapon is a tractor beam.

What are they going to do?

Oh no.

Sand starts shooting shooting proton torpedoes at them.

Their shields are down.

Every Star Trek thing I've ever seen, the shields are always at critical percentages at a certain point.

And I can't wait till they finally make those better shields.

It seems like they really need them.

That's how the ships come off the lot.

Just how they are.

Look, I'd love to give you the

better shield, but that's just how they make them.

We've got to get Forge on that.

Do you think Forge is a Star Trek character?

I think apparently they've met each other.

Because there's Geordie LaForge, who is the Star Trek character, but he's not like an engineer.

Forge and Jordi LaForge get together.

It should turn out that Jordi LaForge is a descendant of Forge of the X-Men.

Forge and Philippa Giorgio.

Forge, Giorgio, LaForge.

I mean, that's the team up that we have.

Forge and Philippa Giorgio, and Jordi LaForge is fudge.

That's the

shop together.

That sounds delicious.

That sounds great.

So Ion Storms attacking them.

It's hurting the ships.

Lots of ships bumping around.

Explosions, explosions.

People pretending that they're being rocked as the camera shakes.

Classic.

Philippa talks to Garrett and she goes, you need to stay calm.

You love chaos.

Chaos is your favorite thing.

I can see inside you're really a chaos dirty girl.

You love it.

And that unlocks something in Garrett where for the rest of the movie, she's just going, chaos.

I love it.

Chaos, chaos, chaos.

And it's like.

I wanted to believe that she had somehow used some sort of genocidal mind trick persuasion to break

Garrett's mind and make her this way.

But I think it is supposed to be that they've like uncovered the bad girl underneath her book, you know, her by the book facade.

Yeah, she's dedicated herself to the ruinous powers of chaos.

But she's just bonking around yelling chaos in this kind of sub, like the worst version of Harley Quinn, you know, way of doing it.

Yeah, she is the kind of character that just like says what her

characteristics are out loud.

Like when you first meet her, she's like, I like being orderly and nice.

And then they're like, that's all going to change because characters change in this kind of thing.

Yeah.

You need an arc.

So speaking of that.

And it also doesn't make sense that there's like a part of the ship where they keep garbage because they explain that the ship just drags the garbage around outside of itself in space.

So why would you also have a hold full of garbage?

Yeah.

Maybe that's

the person who owned it.

You found

one wrong part of this movie.

Yeah, that should be on the goof section.

Yeah, yeah.

Why don't we beam over to the goof section?

Yeah, this is a flawless movie other than that.

That misunderstanding of how a tractor beam garbage scow works.

And uh, there's uh, Philip and Philippa and A-Loc, they beam onto Sans ship.

Everybody's fucking beaming.

Like Willie Beaman from anything.

Yeah, and does

he will.

Yeah, yeah.

And Willie Loman, unfortunately, he is a low man.

Yeah, that's true.

See,

it always works.

We're seeing the hidden rules of the galaxy right now.

Yeah, Willie Shakespeare.

There is some spear shaking in some of those plays.

Yeah.

The history ones, mostly.

And so

not as much in the romances

or as futuristic stories.

That's true.

The Shakespeare story is set in the Star Trek universe.

They don't usually have spears in this.

Section 31.

I mean,

in that respect, Willie Wheaton?

I don't know.

Is that like some kind of cultivation

situation?

Is he grinding it to make bread?

What else are you going to do with it?

So there's fighting.

They pair off to fight.

The godsend gets triggered.

Oh, no.

Fuzz flies out of his Vulcan body and his tiny little ship to kill the others.

And I guess he like cuts off the tractor beam or something.

To be honest, I was not really.

I didn't care that much about the Magnation Series.

Fight, fight, fight, lots of fighting.

And Philippa is like, San, you can be good.

You can do it.

But that doesn't hold any weight with him.

Meanwhile, in the garbage, and this is why they need garbage on this scow, Garrett finds a talking doll toy that runs on Terranium, a very dangerous fuel source.

It's explosive, and now she can turn it into a bomb that very ironically is talking about let's be friends and all that stuff,

which again is kind of sub kind of suicide squad type type thing.

Yeah, guardians of the galaxy, suicide squad type stuff.

I didn't see Megan.

Is this a Megan?

This little thing?

Yeah, it's a lot like, it's a Megan, yeah.

It's kind of Megan-y, yeah.

It is kind of Megan-y.

Terranium, is that a thing that comes up in other Star Trek stuff, or they just make that up?

I never heard of it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, it's outlawed in the galaxy for in the Federation for a reason.

That's why you never heard of it, I guess.

Yeah.

No Terranium, no Megans.

Both bands.

I mean, Data's kind of a big Megan, right?

He kind of is.

He's a Megan.

Have you seen him dance?

Terrible.

I've seen Brent Spiner dance, but I've never seen Data dance.

There's a whole episode of Star Trek the Next Generation where the doctor character teaches Data to dance, and it's terrifying.

The way Megan's dancing is also terrifying.

But terrifying because you're like, that looks awesome.

I wish I could dance like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they're all fighting.

Quasi, he has trouble making decisions.

We know that.

He has to choose between two buttons.

One of them will open the cargo bay and one of them will self-destruct the garbage ship.

Might self-destruct the garbage ship.

And Garrett helps him just make a choice.

Thankfully, he picks the right button.

A-lock defeats the autopilot Fuzzbot, but then he gets

bot escapes.

Fuzz has escaped, but he gets blown up in his ship by this toy weapon doll that flies into him.

San is about to kill Philippa and she kills him instead, but she feels bad about it and they reconcile a little and they declare their love for each other.

And it's a you guys were really moved by this moment when you were watching it, right?

I found

it baffling that the show/slash movie thought that we would be invested in this romance between two murderers who have not shared the screen together in this form until this moment.

I do kind of like that he dies because she like kicks his sword and it accidentally cuts his throat.

I think that's kind of funny.

I mean, it's, it's the closest thing I feel like to the kind of thing you would have seen in an old-fashioned Michelle Yo movie, like a Yes, Madam or something like that, where like there's lots of clever fight choreography and stuff like that.

And so

the bad guys are all dead, wonderful.

And the, I'm amazed, I'm always amazed, though, I should say, there are other movies that in the same general runtime can really make you feel for the characters and feel their relationships and feel what they feel for each other.

But this one one just doesn't, it just can't pull it off in the same way.

And that's the magic of the movies: I guess some movies can pull off, and some can't.

Anyway, long story short, uh, they fly Sans' ship into the Ion Gateway and then set off the godsend.

Take that, Terran Empire.

You're the ones whose quadrant got vaporized.

What a bunch of heroes.

They beam to the garbage ship at the last moment.

The passageway collapses.

The Federation space is safe.

And three weeks later, Philippa is back at her club and she has accepted the offer to join them in Section 31.

And they've done

a different cool outfit, which is a different great outfit.

And

Fuzz's wife, Wisp, joins them.

That's right.

They have a different person inside the Vulcan robot body because they had a duplicate, I guess.

And they get a call from their boss, Control, who has another mission for them.

And their boss is Jamie Lee Curtis.

Speaking of the bear and cameos, it's Jamie Lee Curtis.

Yeah, yeah.

Speaking of movies that Michelle Yeo won Oscars for and

movies that she is about to win Oscars for.

Even though I guess this probably isn't eligible because it didn't screen in theater.

No, this is not eligible for an Oscar, also for quality reasons.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So wait a minute.

Jamie Lee Curtis was in Yes, Madam, and won an Academy Award for fight choreography.

Yeah, exactly.

She was in the

which trio?

What's the trio?

Why am I forgetting the name?

Heroic Trio?

The Heroic Trio.

Thank you.

Yeah, she's in the Heroic Trio.

She's in Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars.

And so the, and so they're off on their next mission, and the entire space nightclub flies off to go on a space night.

I thought it was pretty cool.

But I love the idea of it's like, look, we're spies, remember?

So let's take our huge nightclub with us as we go on this espionage mission.

I also love the idea, though, that they're like,

I'm going to go out for a drink or two after work to this cool space nightclub.

And then after a couple of drinks, you're like, where the fuck am I?

We're in a completely different sector of space.

But that's, and so it's set up.

It's now future adventures for section 31 in the Star Trek universe.

So, Ben Adam, what else can we expect to see from these characters in their section 31 adventures and misadventures?

The next planet that they're going to is a horrible place.

Like, it has a reputation in the Star Trek universe that is not good.

And it's not fun or funny.

So, it's,

you know, it's just more of the same.

Like, hey, look, these genocidal maniacs are just going to go have a romp in another nightmare place and we're all going to love it.

I think the thing that doesn't quite come through in the summary is just how often they remind you that Michelle Yeo's character is a genocidal monster.

And they seem to think it makes her seem like a badass, like that she's a tough, badass wild card you can't trust, but it just makes her seem like a villain.

And so it's very, it's very, it's, it's just a very strange, it's like if even her genocides aren't by the rules.

It's like if in every Superman movie after Man of Steel, they kept going, remember all those people you killed when you were fighting Zod?

Like to build up Superman and make him more heroic?

I guess they kind of do in some ways because they kill people.

You know, Superman kills people in those movies, right?

Just, just, there's that, there's that scene in Batman vs.

Superman where Superman is waiting behind a guy at the bank in line and he just reaches over and snaps his neck so that he doesn't have to wait anymore and walks out to the teller.

Yeah,

they brought him in for one day.

Yeah.

Do some punch-up.

Uh,

so let's uh, let's do our final judgments: whether this is a good, bad movie, a bad, bad movie, or a movie you kind of liked.

I'm just going to quickly start by saying when I saw the promos for this, I was like, oh man, like, you know, it's a Michelle Yeo-centric

Star Trek thing with Sam Richardson in it.

I like all of those things.

I'm going to, you know, I can't imagine I won't have at least a baseline of fun watching this.

And

the movie

showed me the error of my ways it uh

because it i i this is bad bad i had a really good time talking about it with you guys but you didn't have that good a time talking about it with

it feels like

i said this on letterbox actually it feels like it's made up of spare parts from other science fiction things but weirdly none of those things are star trek like it both is

just sort of generic and it doesn't feel like part of the universe it's in even if it makes reference to various star trek things throughout.

As kind of an as a Star Trek outsider, I feel like that's been one of the criticisms that's been levied at Star Trek for the last few years, with obviously some exceptions, but is that

there's like an identity problem and that they are trying to be something that they're not.

They're trying to be Star Wars or trying to be something else.

And or in this case, like Guardians of the Galaxy.

And yeah, it doesn't quite work.

And the

camera movements are really disorienting, and I do not care for them.

And yeah, it's all the dialogue is the most like written by AI,

quippy bullshit.

Like the sort of thing that it felt like somebody was like, they fed in a bunch of episodes of fucking Buffy to like a chat GPT, and they're like, okay, give us some zinc.

Why you had to insult Buffy?

I'm just saying that if, like, I feel like Joss Whedon is the like grandfather of this type of like yes, and him specifically, I'm not going to defend as a

person.

I don't know.

But that's that series was

Buffy is responsible for a vampire genocide, right?

Yes.

What is the main story of Buffy?

I think that you start to wade into difficulty.

Yeah, you start to wade into difficult waters anytime you take a fantasy or science fiction thing that is against an entire race of creature, and you start to really think about what that means when you give personalities to characters and things like that.

But I'm also going to say, unsurprisingly, Bad Bad is just a really boring movie.

It's just very boring.

And I'm not super well versed in a lot of Star Trek stuff.

It's a franchise that I've always wanted to be into more than I'm actually into it for its own reasons.

But I would have loved for this to have been, for me to have trouble with it for those reasons rather than the trouble I did have with it, which was for it being kind of boring and

kind of uninspired.

And I like some of the costumes.

I mean, I will say, like, whoever did like the production work on it,

it looks really good, especially for what's essentially a TV movie.

It does look like money was put into it.

The costumes are really cool.

I don't think, I don't feel like any of the performances are like necessarily bad performances.

They're just kind of like not given much to do, you know?

But it does feel wrong-headed in some way.

If it's going to fail, it should fail on Star Trek's terms rather than on.

I mean, while watching it, if you had said, oh, actually,

that's like a Star Wars Disney Plus movie that they accidentally put Star Trek words into, I'd be like, yeah, I still don't like it, but it it feels more like that.

Yeah, yeah.

But what do you guys think?

Now, I'm ready for your full-throated defense of Star Trek section.

I,

well, Ben and I reviewed this film on our hit new Star Trek show, Greatest Trek,

about a month ago.

And I typically, like, when I know I'm going to guest on another show, I will like do the work of watching the thing once or twice because I watch the thing once or twice when I do my own show and it's so bad bad I couldn't watch the movie again before doing Flophouse with you guys.

My body rejected it.

So I didn't.

And like Dan read his letterbox review.

Here's mine.

Paramount CBS.

I have this amazing ingredient that everyone loves, but I need to use it before it expires.

And then marinates it in battery acid and cooks it for five years.

Why aren't you eating?

Why doesn't anyone like it?

This is how they've wasted Michelle Yeo.

So my review is in script form.

And now, Ben, having heard all three of us rag on it, I'm ready again for your full-throated defense of Star Trek Section 31.

This movie is solid as Sears, gentlemen, and let me tell you why.

No, I mean, I think that

what everyone has said summarizes it really well.

Like, I think that, like, from a production standpoint, it looks like great for a TV movie.

Uh,

the, like, the costumes, Gersha Phillips is the costume designer on Star Trek Discovery as well, and, uh, is just, like, an incredible talent who's done, I mean, like, her other thing this year so far is the new Captain America movie.

Like, she's like a megawatt talent that Star Trek is incredibly lucky to have.

Dan, I haven't seen that yet.

I can't say that I really noticed them, but

they didn't look bad.

I remember the red Hulk costume looks good.

It's mostly just pants.

All the good pants in Section 31 look healthy and nourished.

So catering probably did a great job.

Catering was a good thing.

They're happy to have the catering company.

Everyone's in the movie.

They didn't get lost.

So all the TAs that were walking around the parking lot to the sack, they did great.

Oh, they didn't have go-karts for this one.

Maybe for Michelle Yeo.

Nobody else got go-karts, yeah.

I did re-watch the movie today to prepare.

Cool.

Somebody's got time to do it.

Is it the third time I've seen Section 31?

I think I may have seen Section 31 more than anyone on planet Earth.

He's going to get an email

from Paramount Plus.

They're like, sir, are you sick?

Are you sharing their accounts to re-watch yourself?

Is there something wrong with your app?

You know, you can watch other things.

Section 31 swag.

The only

services support department that will reach out to you proactively.

The watching of Star Trek Section 31 multiple times, it triggers our Is Jigsaw keeping you prisoner protocol?

Please just blink three times.

We'll see you through the TV camera.

If you guys saw the recent M.

Night Shyamalan film Trap, I'm the guy in the basement that he keeps looking at on the video stream on his phone.

Oh, the butcher.

Yeah.

One thing I thought about this time that hadn't occurred to me yet was the fleeting nature of life.

The lady that played young George O did an amazing job doing Michelle Yeo's accent.

And I was like, wow, like she is doing a really like a really solid Michelle Yeo without it being like an impression of Michelle Yeo.

Like, I believe that this person grew up to be that person.

And like, that is such a small little thing thing for me to like have my fingernails on.

And like,

that's a good thing about this.

But I love this kindness, Ben, because I feel like we normally don't want to be too mean here, even as we're laughing about bad movies.

And I like that you're highlighting, you know, the sweet inside the ocean of sour.

Ben is the hang in there poster.

of

bad movie watching

i wish this was good bad you know like if if i think that that's the thing that star trek and all other franchises fuck up is like if you have all of the ingredients but you don't have a great idea go for good bad don't go for don't go for good with no idea you know like like make it corny and and silly and fun like star trek being corny is the fucking briar patch we love that that's like That's part of the brand.

Embrace it, you know?

Yeah.

Like hire actual comedy writers to come in and

write bits for Sam Richardson to do.

Like don't leave it to

a writer that does like kind of

overcooked dramatic sci-fi series and has never written a movie before.

Yeah.

You know, like, and that's not to like dick on the writer specifically.

I think that like the writer is one of the many places

where

this movie fails.

But yeah, it's like,

it's so heartbreaking to see so many uh great ingredients get cooked in battery acid yeah it is it's always too bad when uh something that is that has it has it has lasted for a very long time for a specific reason they're like this has to be cool now and I feel like one of the one of the really great decisions in the Marvel movies for instance was not being like Captain America has to be cool now but instead being like let's have him be the character that he is and we'll just find the things about that that are impressive rather than okay well guess what?

He's kind of a badass, you know, like he's not really about America, he's about partying.

The last audible line in this movie as we like fade away and watch all the ships go to warp is a Yomama joke.

And it's just like that's right.

That is so like that, that like is the crux of what is wrong with this movie, I think.

Because in the utopian world of Star Trek, people respect their mothers and respect other people's mothers.

Gene Rodney would never have stood for this going

under the Star Trek.

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Hey, this is Dan recording a little after the fact, recording alone.

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and before i return you to the belly of our star trek show

i do have a jumbo trom jumbotrom jesus jumbotron jumbotron

this message is for joe mellow last name not withheld it's from katie And it says, and for this, I will change my weirdly aggressive tone of voice to something something more appropriate for this very sweet message.

Katie says to Joe, happy birthday to a wonderful husband and father.

Thank you for working so hard for us.

Thanks for helping us all through this rough patch.

And thanks for introducing me to the flop house.

From your loving wife, Katie.

That is

very, very sweet.

Thank you to both of you for listening.

Thank you for doing this message.

Keep on, keep it on,

even though this ad break will stop keeping on right now.

Hey,

let's move on to letters from listeners.

Why not?

This first letter is from Patrick, last name withheld.

Who writes?

Patrick Dempsey, step-by-step.

No, that's not Patrick.

No, that's Patrick.

What's the Patrick from Step by Step?

I do not know.

Let's spend time on it.

Patrick Dunkey?

Is that a matron?

Patrick Dunkey.

Patrick Dempsey.

Is that man from Atlantis?

Yeah, Patrick.

Yes, Dan, from from Man from Atlantis.

You wouldn't remember him from the sitcom he was on for years.

Do you remember him from Man from Atlantis?

Yeah, exactly.

Well, the sitcom was sort of like the most bland fuzz of a sitcom, whereas Man from Atlantis is a weird show.

Yeah, it's true.

It's from Atlantis.

Anyway, a man, a plan, a drowned society, Atlantis.

Does that mean it works?

It works.

It works.

There's a palindrome.

Both doys.

Don't, don't.

Don't check out the, don't check it out.

Patrick Last Name Withheld writes:

You may have seen wonderful quotes from Michael Rooker about the poor state of audiences' attention spans after the underperformance of Kevin Coster's Magnum Opus, Horizon Part 1, Chapter 1, based on the novel Push by Sapphire, or whatever it's called.

His old man yells at cloud approaches, silly, but I kind of admire his defense of the project, even if that defense is the same short attention span argument I've been hearing since MTV or since D.W.

Griffith called widescreen only good for funerals and snakes.

But

imagine if you're making a movie called Snake Funeral, though.

Oh, boy.

You want the widest screen.

Yeah.

We've got to get these motherfucking snakes out this motherfucking grave.

Yeah, you need a really wide screen, but it needs to be kind of short to

get it out.

Do you listen to the Snake Funeral album?

Did you?

My fucking favorite album.

That does sound like something you love.

I imagine how Samuel Jackson is giving the eulogy and he goes, I'm tired of not having these motherfucking snakes in my motherfucking life.

And then he bursts into tears.

When you go to a snake mortuary, it's just a bunch of tube mailers

of different construction.

Pewdie Herman is there holding them at arm's length.

Put them in a pneumatic tube to send them over to the graveyard.

Yeah.

Anyway, Patrick writes,

but as all of us head into our mid or late 40s, I'm sure we all find ourselves trending towards the grumpy old man when it comes to modern media digestion.

So my question is this.

When was the first first time you remember having a grumpy old man opinion about a movie?

And I was thinking that I really jumped on the grumpy old man early because

it was about the movie Grumpy Old Man, right?

Yeah.

It was a similar year.

It was the sequel and he was like, they're not grumpier.

They're the same amount of grumpy as the first time.

You promised an increased amount of grumpiness.

With inflation, I paid more to see less grumpiness.

My grumpy dollar is giving me, it's paying me less now.

No, let me explain basic economics.

That's going to be so fucking cool, right?

He's like the teenage ticket taker at the theater.

Let me explain basic economics to you, young man.

No, I, Space Jam, when Space Jam came out, I was like, these are not the loony tunes I know and love.

That's cool.

This is a cynical way to, you know, put basketball star Michael Jordan with some cartoon characters and have them act totally off model.

You know, again, so

what happened to the pure, the pure Bugs Looney Tunes movies of yesteryear, like Quackbusters and Fantastic Island?

I wonder how similar.

Fantastic Island fucking rocks.

I wonder how similar all of our answers are going to be to something like that.

Like the thing I grew up with is no longer the thing that I'm seeing because my example was going to be the Transformers movie, Michael Bay's movie from 2007.

I came away from that feeling very grandpa for the same reason.

Yeah, the real ones masturbated to the the the hot cartoon robot transformer guys exactly they didn't need a megan fox no yeah yeah uh yeah no i mean i felt like uh when they cast girls as ghostbusters

no no no no no no no no no i have i have a slightly different one which is i'm sure i've had that same reaction before and i've tried to let go of it of like this isn't the way I did things.

But I think the one where I felt it the most strong was when I went to see Guardians Guardians of the Galaxy, speaking of movies that really want to be Guardians of the Galaxy, when I went to see the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, which was trying so hard to be Guardians of the Galaxy.

And my reaction to so much of it was like, why all the swearing?

Why do they have to keep swearing at this?

That's actually a pretty old man of God.

I found myself legitimately offended in a way I didn't expect when at the end, Star Lord goes, we're the Guardians of the Galaxy, you bitch.

I was like, I don't like it.

Like, I kind of shivered and shuddered.

And I was like, I don't like that.

I don't like it.

So I think that was

such a nice boy.

And I think it's because by that point, it's just like to show some respect to other people, you know?

I think it was by that point that I was a dad.

And so I was like, oh, at some point, I know kids are seeing this movie.

And at some point, kids are going to see it.

And whereas in the past, I might have been like, yeah, who cares if kids are going to see it?

Like, they need to grow up.

It's, it's fine.

I was like, I don't know.

And then I remember.

Not long after that walking by a toy store in the window, they had the Guardians toys.

The Guardians of the Galaxy are here, bitch.

It was the talking doll that just just says, bitch, bitch, bitch.

But seeing that all the accessories that they came with were just guns.

And it was another one of those moments where I'm like, ooh, I don't like this.

I don't like that.

When I was a kid, I loved toy guns.

But like the idea that, oh, I don't want my kids playing with something or it's just guns.

So I think that was, I think that's when I felt like an old man, gruffly old man.

To talk about what you said, though, before, like,

I've gotten to a point, I think, mostly where I'm not.

Like, oh, this isn't the way that I liked it.

Because, you know, why are you going to do something if you don't have like a spin on it?

we already have the old thing yeah but I do find it easier to feel that way when we've had like a good movie version of something like we didn't have like a good movie version of Louisiana so I'm like what what the fuck is this whereas like with uh my beloved Sherlock Holmes like there's been so many Sherlock Holmes things I'm like yeah do whatever the fuck you want with that property like yeah

like how I I can't I can't be offended by like a wrong-headed Shakespeare production because it's like don't worry you're gonna see thousands more of this play

You know, whereas if there's a bad, if there's a bad production of like Steven Sonheim's specific overtures, I'm like, I may never see this again.

When are they going to revive this show?

That's sort of, I mean, like in the, in, in our Star Trek corner of the media scape, like, that's kind of, that's kind of how it feels like now, where, you know, there are specific versions of Star Trek that are very close to my heart.

And I think over the years, I have learned to like not get that, that bent out of shape about it when they do one that doesn't quite fit what I love about the thing I love because it's like, I mean, like there are 17 different TV shows that are called Star Trek now and, you know, 25 movies.

And it's like, okay, some of them are going to be like perfect for me and others aren't.

And who gives a shit when they aren't?

You know, I don't, I don't like own the Paramount Corporation.

I don't get to call the shots.

But if you did,

then you'd probably, you'd, you'd probably put something other than Section 31 on the app to watch over and over again.

Yeah.

Okay.

Let's

move on to the next letter.

So we can.

There's another letter.

This is from Teresa Last Name Withheld.

Who writes subject live-action cartoon characters.

Hi, Floppers.

Wait a minute.

Hold on.

Okay.

Explain.

Read the letter, Dan, because that phrase doesn't make any sense to me.

Hi, Floppers.

I mean, Jim Carrey's kind of a live-action cartoon character.

He totally is.

Stuart, you know, some people don't have the bravery to say shit like that.

You're welcome.

You're welcome.

I had a strange dream that involved Elliot disclosing that he had been cast to voice the character of Tweety Bird in a Looney Tunes live-action movie.

I'll do it.

Miss casting, but I'll do it.

Chris Pratt was not part of this ensemble for once.

It made me wonder two things.

So that Garfield's not one of the fucking Looney Tunes, apparently?

Stuart, I hate to break it to you.

Mario isn't one of the loony tunes now?

Again, Stuart, I hate to see you.

Did you break it to you?

It made me wonder two things.

One, would Elliot even make a good tweety bird?

I say yes.

And two,

okay.

Two, what cartoon characters would Dan, Stewart, and Elliot appropriately voice in their live action adaptations?

Teresa, the last name with Held.

And I, you know, have to say that, you know, not originally a cartoon, but probably best known as a cartoon.

Of course, Eeyore.

Of course, for me, Eeyore would be what I would choose.

Yeah,

you're totally an Eeyore.

Yeah, I can see that.

Yeah.

Wait, are we doing like any cartoon character forever all of time?

It was not.

Loody Tunes was the door into the game.

I'm Captain Caveman.

I'm Captain Caveman, then, guys.

You know, this is.

I'm a little hairy guy with a club surrounded by babes.

Yep, that's me.

Yep, that's you.

All right.

And the club is technological, like you can open it up and there's high-tech stuff inside of it.

I don't understand that shit.

I'm just a caveman, dude.

Good point.

I am a captain, though.

So respect my rank, please i guess thank you for your service on the scenes

you can perform weddings i guess when we're on your boat

or ship i'm sorry sir yeah you've never seen that in the show but it was it was a delay most of the episodes were about captain caveman performing wedding ceremonies it's the happy privilege of cavemen everywhere

and so i think i think i'm gonna pick one that might be a little uh out of the ordinary because i feel like i don't have a i don't have a voice in my head for it already but for preexisting but i'm gonna say felix the cat i think i could do a real good felix the cat if he was like like he was in the old old cartoons where he's just he's just a you know he's just stirring up just doing wacky stuff he's a real annoying for a second i thought he was talking about fritz the cat i'm like i don't think that's appropriate for elliot

so i'll see i'll also yeah i'll be fritz the cat because you know me i'm all about that like that kind of the like the scummier side of the alternative 60s 70s lifestyle does felix talk though like i feel like in word balloons in the really old cartoons maybe i think they're i I think they did some later ones where you talked, but yeah.

Uh, and this, of course, our guests are welcome to jump in if you also wait.

I'm gonna do one more.

Also, Popeye's nephews or children.

I don't remember how they were related, but those three, those three Popeye kids from the kind of 50s Popeye cartoons.

I could do that.

That'd be amazing.

Yeah.

So, yeah, what do you guys think?

What cartoon character should you be, Ben and Adam?

Oh, man, we get to choose two.

Yeah, join the fun.

Fuck.

Jump in the pool.

I was just sitting here enjoying listening to one of my favorite podcasts, The Vlad House, not thinking about what my answer would be.

I'm going to participate in the show we're guesting on and say my favorite cartoon growing up was The Real Ghostbusters.

And I think I would want to be one of the voices to

like Vankman or something.

I could pull that off, right?

Do we have to be animal cartoons?

Is that the same thing?

They just said cartoon characters, right?

Captain Caveman.

Well, I guess he's the link between man and animal.

Metaphorically.

That's going to be my answer.

Okay.

Do you remember the television cartoon Exo Squad?

Did anybody catch this cartoon?

I remember the name, but I can't say I've ever watched it.

I really liked the toys because they were like, it was like little robot suits that you get like little G.I.

Joe and you stick him in his robot suit and then he's, you know, can shoot, you know, spring-loaded missiles and things.

And

I think the show was about how they had to build these robot suits to defend them against their genetically engineered slave race that had risen up to uh i think you're right wow love this okay it really ages well

yeah concepts that wasn't interrogated that much did every episode conclude with like a diary entry being read and like xo xo

squad

yeah uh these were squad goals to me back in the day uh but mostly because i wanted a cool robot suit so maybe i'll uh maybe we'll we'll do kind of like

a re-examination of the concept through reboot.

So it'll be an exosquad where it's like, man, like, are we the baddies is kind of the, is, is kind of the premise.

And

I get to have a robot suit.

Yeah, maybe the one who doesn't care when he realizes he may be a baddie because, you know, the price of eggs is lower for him if he kills all the slaves.

Or higher.

I don't really give a shit.

As long as I got this suit.

Yeah.

Um, let's uh tie everything up with our final segment: uh, recommendations of movies you might have uh a better time watching than section 31.

Impossible.

Uh, I'm gonna pull an Elliott, I'm gonna uh recommend a movie from the 30s.

Dan, hey, hands off, I'm married.

I could, he could do it, he's pretty charming.

Um, yeah, that's true, he could pull me, you know,

Dan, you don't pull me anytime.

Thanks.

Um, wow, uh,

what a turnaround,

Yeah, you really didn't seem like you needed much convincing.

This is a movie that's on.

It's a woman's prerogative to change your minds, Daniel.

This is

on Criterion right now.

I've enjoyed a few movies in the Claudette Colbert collection.

There's one directed by Ernst Lubitsch called Bluebeard's Eighth Wife.

And what struck me about this is how many old comedies are

at heart very kinky.

Like they're,

it's barely, barely, barely under the surface.

Like, the

main sort of plot of this is that Claudette Colbert

marries this very wealthy man and learns that she's to be his eighth wife, and she doesn't want to be divorced like all of the other wives.

And she goes about sort of insinuating herself deeper into his heart

by,

I mean, it is heavily implied essentially by like not fucking him at all and then making him feel like he's being cuckolded.

And so

she's bratting her way into his

heart and loins.

And

it's very funny, though, and light as

30s comedies are.

And it's in 85 minutes, a wonderful length for a film to be less than a section 31.

So

I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Stuart?

Okay, I'm going to recommend.

I'm also going to dip deep into the archives of old-timey movies.

I'm going to recommend a movie from 1989.

Wow.

I know.

Careful.

Get on your readers, grandpas.

I'm recommending Troop Beverly Hills starring Shelly Long, a movie that I remember seeing in the theater and being like, I love this movie when I was a child, and I had not seen it since.

And then I watched it recently.

And you know what, guys?

I still love this movie.

It is probably one of the only comedies out there that is a snobs versus slobs comedy, and you are rooting for the snobs.

It's about a group of effectively Girl Scouts in Beverly Hills who are mistreated because they are rich and like kooky, whereas the other, you know, the other Girl Scouts who are from other parts of L.A.,

you know, actually like know how to do wilderness stuff.

Shelly Long plays the

Shelly Long plays a woman who is going through the process of divorcing Craig T.

Nelson, which has got to be a challenge because, I mean, he was coach.

And Shelly Long is so fucking funny and hot, and her, like, outfits are great.

The costumes in this movie are incredible.

And the way that, like, they use the costumes to, like, tell the story is so funny.

And it has so many, like, like, famous.

LA people from the time.

Like, you got your Robin Leach

and whatnot.

Yeah, it's great.

Two thumbs up.

Troop Beverly Hills, just as as good as it was back then.

Yeah,

check it out.

I think you'll find, Stuart, that it's a Carla Guggino movie.

It has a very young Carla Guggino in it, which is pretty fun.

All right.

Elliot?

Sure, I'll go next.

I would like to recommend a movie that it's kind of like, it's kind of like Troop Beverly Hills.

It's called Chilly Scenes of Winter.

Anyway,

it's from 1979.

This is a, it's listed as romantic comedy, but it's more of a more of a romantic drama with funny moments.

It's written and directed by Joan Micklin Silver, who also made like Crossing Delancey and Hester Street, and I've just been on a tear of hers lately.

And stars John Hurd and Mary Beth Hurt.

And it's about John Hurd is a guy who has just ended or had an affair end on him.

He was having an affair with a married woman and he fell in love with her and she ended it and he cannot shake her from his head.

And it starts out seeming like it's going to be like a kind of wry romantic comedy about this guy who like maybe he has to find someone new to get over her or maybe he's going to win her back.

And it as the movie pretty

fairly early on but especially as it keeps going the movie makes clear he has an a not fully sane or stable obsession with her and I would describe the character as like high-functioning Travis Bickel like

he's going into madness but nobody is noticing as opposed to Travis Bickel where it's obvious to everybody

and

I really liked it it felt like one of these movies that was kind of

not going as far as it could potentially, but was diving into emotional territory that I'm not used to seeing in a movie.

And I thought it was really, really good.

And I just like Joan McLund Silver's movies a lot.

So I would recommend it.

I would say

find, there's the version that I also saw on Criterion Collection.

It's called Chilly Scenes of Winter.

It was originally released with a happy ending as Head Over Heels.

And so if you find a version of it that's called Head Over Heels, that is not exactly the same movie.

Find the one that's called Chilly Scenes of Winter.

And also, I'll point out there's a John Hurd's character's mother, who is a kind of aging woman who's kind of losing her grip on reality, is played by Hollywood noir great Gloria Graham.

And there's something exciting about seeing Gloria Graham at this kind of different stage in her career, but still playing a character who is like an intensely wounded woman who's trying for a glamour that she can't quite attain because of that wounding.

So it was nice the way that this movie played into the rest of her filmography.

So that's Chilly Scenes of Winter, Dan.

I'm just going to go around the Zoom as I see it and say, Adam, do you have something to recommend?

I do.

I've I've been on kind of a Damian Chiselle kick lately, and one of the films that I missed was Babylon, and I watched that for the first time very recently.

And let me just say that if you watch, I may have to interrupt this recommendation.

I'm not sure.

Anyway, continue talking.

That's fine.

If you watch one film that begins with 500 gallons of elephant shit dumping onto a character in the first two minutes of the film, make it Babylon.

I was.

Oh, it's weird.

Ellie didn't like that movie.

i was i was surprised by this film throughout and i thought i thought the chances of being like truly surprised by a modern film were like that wasn't gonna happen but i love the movie i loved the experience watching it uh at three hours and 10 minutes it felt shorter than section 31 to me wow it just absolutely zoomed uh i thought it was a delight I know it's not for everyone, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Ben, to jump in so Elliot doesn't.

So I want to start jumping and talking about how one of those, not for everyone's, is me.

Yeah, I don't know if my recommendation is for everyone, but I just was on the Criterion app last weekend and randomly watched a movie called Down with Love, which is a

2003 rom-com starring Renee Zellwiger and Ewan McGregor.

And that makes it sound incredibly basic in a way that it just isn't.

It's like a weird pastiche of

a much older kind of film, like a, you know, like a Rock Hudson

Doris Day Tony Randall film specifically, and

has a lot of fun, like, celebrating the aesthetics of that while kind of roasting it at the same time.

And,

you know, like

the thing I love about the rom-coms of that era are that the...

the characters are on such even footing in terms of their their like power on the screen.

The women are

just as capable and fast-talking and interesting as the men.

And

this definitely has that, but

kind of fucks with your expectations of

what they're going to want and when and for what reasons all the way through.

And so it's a little bit of a mess, but

I popped like a two and a half milligram jazz gummy and ate my dinner and uh no drank a glass of wine and and just enjoyed the hell out of it it's it's so fun and it's it's candy colored and paint and reed you know he like he made that and he may bring it on back in the day i'm like this guy's you know going places and then you know marvel snapped him up years later to for the ant-man series uh wow

yeah

yeah uh so uh yeah strong recommendation uh it's on the criterion channel app right now that's that's five very classy recommendations

Equally classy.

Adam and Ben, before we let you go, what would you like to plug?

Oh, you know, if

you like hearing people talk about good Star Trek things, we do it all the time on our two podcasts right here on the Maximum Fun Network, the greatest generation and greatest track.

And yeah,

I think that's all we've got to plug, really.

Nice and easy.

Speaking of the Maximum Fun Network, go over to maximumfun.org, check out all the great podcasts over there.

As this drops, we're gearing up for the Max Fun Drive.

We got a bunch of stuff in store for that

and some fun surprises and pitches to make to you.

We're not going to make surprises to you.

That doesn't make sense.

But anyway, you know what I'm trying to say.

So look at.

Not really.

I'm saying, look at the Max Fun Network if you like

good podcasts.

Stuart, we've got to talk about putting Dan in a home.

Lovely network.

Thank you to producer Aladol Smith, who we're going to be sending five different audio tracks to the slam together.

And who knows how many surprises that we've made.

Yeah, I'm going to be like Jared Leto during the Joker.

It was a suicide squad movie, but yeah.

He was playing the Joker.

Again, Stuart, all the signs are here.

We've got to take the keys away from Dan.

Okay, well, before I drive us further, authorized, drive off the rails?

Is that a thing that happened?

Oh, boy.

I mean, they drive off the train rails in Groundhog Day and we'll see.

And so I'll pretend you're talking about that, but I'll know that really it's time to,

you know, again, to move.

He was calling me his brother John.

Thanks, Dan.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening.

I've been Dan McCoy.

I'm Stuart Wellington.

I'm a very concerned Elliot Kalen, and we've been joined by Adam Tranica.

Thank you for being here.

Bye.

On this episode, we discuss Star Trek Section 31.

Kazimi Kiwa Straight Face.

Just the name of the movie.

The idea it exists.

You want to try one more time?

I'll have a dumb joke that's the same.

The obvious joke, but

on this episode, we discuss Star Trek Section 31.

Dan, I haven't seen Star Trek Section, Star Trek Section 2, or any of the movies through

Star Trek Section 30.

Sorry, my mouth was so horrified at the hacky joke I was doing that it tried to stop it from happening.

I mean, it'll be great for the end of the episode.

Yep.

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