Episode 175. To conclude our Shametember series, time travel nerd Kyle needed to watch Rian Johnson's 2012 film Looper. Joe works as a "looper," a hitman who only kills bodies sent back to him from criminals thirty years in the future. When his own future self arrives, Old Joe explains that the future has been taken over by a tyrannical genius and he's there to kill the child who will grow up to be this terror. Young Joe has to predict his older self's movements and protect a child who is innocent -- but still dangerous.

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Episode 174. Shametember is back! This is the chance for each of us to clear a movie off the "list of shame" of things we should've seen by now. Melissa named famous sequels she hadn't watched yet after seeing the first movies in those franchises, and this week we watched Aliens! This 1986 follow up to Alien sees Ripley awakening from her Nostromo escape pod a staggering 57 years in the future. She learns that Earth has already started a colony on a planet she knows is dangerous, and the xenomorphs have started attacking its citizens. She accompanies a squad of space marines to destroy the aliens and attempt to save the colony's last survivor.

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Episode 173. Alan and Ignacio are on the show this week to talk about The Digimon Movie. We watched the dubbed American release from the year 2000, and the three original Japanese mini-movies that were edited together to make this American version. We see the digidestined kids throughout their young lives as they encounter their first Digimon egg, try to stop a Digimon virus from destroying the internet and setting off nuclear bombs, and help an American boy whose own Digimon has turned to the dark side.

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Episode 172. Join us for a Review Show first, as we read the prose novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Photojournalist Will Navidson and his family move into a new house, and soon discover a seemingly unending dark hallway that opens up where there was no door before. Will films every step of his exploration into the house, which is eventually edited into the documentary The Navidson Record. House of Leaves is a book with an interesting structure: academic articles were written about the movie, a man named Zampano wrote a book about the movie and the articles, and a listless young man named Johnny Truant finds Zampano's notes after his death and edits the disorganized manuscript together, interjecting with his own footnotes along the way.

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Episode 171. We watched the 2021 Netflix sci-fi drama movie Stowaway. Three astronauts are on a two-year mission to Mars. They've just left Earth hours ago when a stowaway falls out of a compartment in the ship -- a launch engineer who hit his head, fell unconscious, and was accidentally sealed into the ship before takeoff. They can't turn back. A resupply ship can't reach them. It's a race against time for this team to figure out how their limited resources could possibly sustain an extra life.

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Episode 170. We listened to both seasons of the audio drama Passenger List, written and directed by John Scott Dryden and Lauren Shippen, and starring Kelly Marie Tran. It's been six months since Atlantic Flight 702 disappeared when traveling from London to New York City. The airlines declared that the missing plane was brought down by a bird strike, but college student Kaitlin Le refuses to accept this explanation. She knows her twin brother Conor is still alive and suspects that the airline and maybe even the US government is hiding something. To the detriment of everything else in her life, she's dedicated to pursuing every possible answer to find the truth.

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Episode 169. Kyle is back on the podcast with Melissa to talk about the romance manga Princess Jellyfish by Akiko Higashimura. Tsukimi is a young woman obsessed with jellyfish who lives in an apartment building only for otaku women, with no men allowed. When a friendly girl helps Tsukimi bring her very own jellyfish home from the pet store, she's intimidated by the stranger's beauty and fashion sense -- until she discovers this is a fashion-fanatic boy who loves wearing dresses. Her new friend Kuranosuke has to hide his identity from the other women of the apartment so they don't kick him out, which is the last thing he wants now that he's falling for Tsukimi.

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Episode 168. Friend of the show and brother of the co-host Jams Wilkinson is here to talk about the webcomic turned graphic novel series Check Please! by Ngozi Ukazu. Eric "Bitty" Bittle is a freshman on his university hockey team, looking to show off his figure skating skills, feed these hockey bros some real home-cooked meals, and gain the confidence to come out as gay. He finds a welcoming team, and a special connection with the captain Jack Zimmerman, who is trying to figure out his love life and his promising NHL career.

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Episode 167. Friend of the show Jacq is back to talk about Maniac, the 2018 Netflix limited series from Cary Joji Fukunaga and Patrick Somerville. Owen and Annie, two lonely New Yorkers with their own unique traumas, enroll in an experimental psychiatric drug trial. They experience hallucinations where they're living wildly different lives but they're always connected to each other, an impossible mental bond that puzzles the scientists running the trial. Can Owen and Annie learn to support each other and move past their pain together, and can these scientists stop a glitching computer from destroying all of their test subjects?

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Episode 166. Guest co-captain Audrey Stolze joins Melissa for a discussion on the graphic novel Folklords, from Matt Kindt and Matt Smith. Ansel is a teenage boy living in a medieval fantasy village who sees visions of our modern urban life. He's the only person in town wearing a suit and tie and using a handmade lighter instead of a torch. All kids his age must choose a quest, and Ansel wants to find the mythic Folklords, the forces controlling his world, to learn where his visions come from and if he really fits in here.

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