Peak Viewing

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is perhaps best described as a mess. Shatner’s only time in the director’s seat produced a Star Trek film with strange tone, questionable villain writing, hasty visual effects, and some fantastic science fiction ideas. It ultimately left us with more questions than answers. Why does this light jokey tone feel so much worse than last week? Why is Sybok’s whole deal revealed so late? Who thought it was a good idea to have Kirk free solo El Capitan? And what does god need with a spaceship?

If you were three movies deep into the Star Trek series and getting annoyed at how self-serious it was, then Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home should hit you like a cold lemonade on a hot summer day. This light and airy time travel romp with space whales is more a comedy than anything else. We discuss how to get into the right headspace to enjoy this lighter tone, how we think the transporter works, the incredible behind the scenes stories of this movie’s most iconic sounds, and why we’re dreading next week’s sequel.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock is unfortunately not very good! An emphasis on bringing back Spock means that the other subplots have to a take the backseat, and as a result nothing of consequence or importance really happens in this movie until the last five minutes. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a good podcast dissecting this one as we discuss how we would improve this screenplay, Klingon women, toe dexterity, and of course, a Vulcan case of blue balls.

Ask any Star Trek fan what the best Star Trek movie is, and a lot of them will tell you it’s The Wrath of Khan. Like most Star Trek stories, it’s a mishmash of ideas: you’ve got a villain-of-the-week from the original series, Kirk’s inability to confront failure and death, a powerful device that can create (and eat) planets, all wrapped up in a distinctly naval theme with a strong Moby Dick metaphor. It’s a lot, and it’s mostly pretty good! We dig into all this, plus our pitch for a Yoda family movie, why Henry has critic brain even if he doesn’t want it, and the conundrum of telling ordinary stories in an extraordinary setting.

This miniseries we’re boldly going where no podcast has gone before! Wait, actually there are a lot of Star Trek podcasts… Well then, we’re going somewhere we’ve never gone before, and that’s 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture! While this film might have more in common with slow cinema than it does with the Kelvin timeline films we’re used to, there’s still plenty to enjoy with it’s heavy themes and (albeit touched up) visual effects. We get into all that plus our personal history with Star Trek, the many revisions to the Enterprise design, and what William Shatner has been up to lately.

In 2026, Peak Viewing covered The Bride!… on a DARE. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sophomore film felt like a nice coda to the Frankenstein series we did last year, so we added it to the slate. Having now seen it, do we still want to do an episode? We would prefer not to. The film itself is kind of a headache inducing beautiful mess, but that doesn’t mean we can’t discuss everything to do with the often remarkable visuals, what we think this movie is trying to communicate, and how relatable cinephile Frankenstein is.

It’s been a long miniseries, but the day is finally here: we’re becoming made men. Not in the Italian mafia or anything, just men who made a podcast about Goodfellas! We’re finally discussing what is arguably the crowning achievement of Scorsese’s career, and the most enduring and enjoyable gangster movie of all time. That Copacobana shot? We got it! The duality of glorifying and condemning the organized crime lifestyle? It’s here! Fun and terrifying anecdotes from the book Wiseguy? Samuel has them! All that, plus our (frankly pretty bad) Scorsese rankings.

This Last Temptation of Christ is arguably Scorsese’s most controversial film (at least at the time of release). This passion project that was years in the making is less about retelling the Gospels and more about struggling with the eternal conflict between spirit and flesh. As two non-believers, we were pretty impressed! We discuss why this interpretation of Jesus Christ is one of the most compelling we’ve seen, why reading the book this is based on before watching may not be a good idea (not a Bible joke by the way, this is actually based on a book), and make about a half dozen comparisons to contemporary films.

The Color of Money delivers on a lot of fronts: hot young Tom Cruise, old (but still hot) Paul Newman, and enough great pool shots to fill the two hour runtime. Still, it’s perhaps an outlier in this miniseries, in the sense that it’s the least “like” a Martin Scorsese movie. Also, did Marty Supreme and Top Gun: Maverick both rip off this movie? Did Scorsese have other things on his mind while making this? Does this compare favorably as a sequel to the stone-cold classic The Hustler? How is this all connected to first person shooters?

For the second week in a row Scorsese is leaning into his more humorous side, this time with the thriller parody After Hours. We found this convoluted plot needed quite a bit of buy-in, but once you do there is plenty of fun to be had. As we sprint around the winding streets of SoHo, we discuss potential titles for a follow-up film, revisiting the Star Wars sequels, the archaic concept of having no “cash” on you, how well this movie would work as an adventure game, and Henry fundamentally not understanding the math Samuel does in his head.