Put on your stillsuit and prepare your sand compactor. We’re venturing out into the uncharted deserts of Arrakis with “Dune,” Denis Villeneuve’s cinematic take on the oft-filmed Frank Herbert novel. We do some comparing and contrasting with David Lynch’s version, question whether this adaptation is for fans for for people who know nothing about “Dune”, and basically stare at a bunch of big spaceships hanging in the air. Denis Villeneuve knows what we like.

Buy those bongos and make it a 30-piece drum set, because legendary one-season wonder “Freaks and Geeks” is finally available to stream. This is an amazing show with a fantastic cast about a bunch of geeks and burnouts in Michigan in the early 1980s. It’s a sweet and funny and awkward and painful story about growing up and trying to figure out who you are, while everyone else in the world wants to label you and make sure you never forget your label. We discuss our favorite ancillary characters, the richness of the world of “Freaks and Geeks”, and how upon rewatching the show 20 years later, we have gained even more appreciation for Mr. and Mrs. Weir.

Just in time for Halloween, our mega-sized Old Movie Club meets up in a spooky haunted house to discuss two horror-comedies that honor their source material more than you might think — it’s 1948’s “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” and 1974’s “Young Frankenstein.” We learn that werewolves can fly, quoting film dialogue on the playground can be cruel, and in the end it turns out that none of us are the doctor—we’re the monster.

We return to “Ted Lasso” to discuss the second season of the Apple TV+ comedy-become-dramedy, with an increased view into mental health, questions of relationship power dynamics, the power of Rom-Communism and Holiday Specials, and much more.

[The original version had two minutes of weird audio at 18:30. You can press “forward 30 seconds” four times, or delete the file and re-download.]

Our Book Club reconvenes to discuss two final 2021 Best Novel nominees, “Harrow the Ninth” and “The Relentless Moon.” We also discuss all the Hugo Award nominees for short fiction, rank the books, and recommend some books we’ve been reading lately!

Old Movie Club likes to watch… old movies. And these are old movies about the price and perils of watching (and listening). We view the Hitchcock classic “Rear Window” and visit the smelly, greasy, fuzzy ’70s film for “The Conversation.” Also, we call back to the Summer of Spielberg with a discussion of how Francis Ford Coppola’s career making art films like “The Conversation” was derailed by fantastic commercial success.

In this flash episode we discuss the head-scratching news from two of our favorite franchises, as the prodigal showrunners have returned! First it’s the news that Russell T Davies, who brought “Doctor Who” back in 2005, is reuniting with his producers from that era to produce and write the show. Then came the announcement that J. Michael Straczynski has been contracted with The CW to write a pilot for a rebooted “Babylon 5.” Can you go home again? Will they play the hits or strike out in new directions? Just a reminder, nobody is going to delete your favorite old episodes—not even the BBC.

Get out your bus ticket and get ready to go live on the Internet, because it’s time to talk “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” Marvel returns exclusively to theaters, and so do we, as we discuss Tony Leung, the dangers of deferred maintenance on articulated buses, hanging a lantern on a dragon, and the emotional weight of a single arrow.

Arr, matey! Not only be it days from the equinox, but it be International Talk Like a Pirate Day. What better time to wrap up the Summer of Spielberg with “Hook,” a (misguided?) Peter Pan sequel starring Robin Williams as Peter, Dustin Hoffman as Captain Hook, and Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell, all gallivanting around a very crowded and overlit stage-set version of Neverland. We discuss the movie’s appeal to early-nineties kids, Spielberg’s commercial sensibility as a director, and the film’s many misguided creative decisions.

As we prepare to exit the Summer of Spielberg, things have taken a bit of a turn. We’ve taken out our surgical tools to diagnose just what went wrong with “Ready Player One,” in which a director who is much more interested in movies than video games and who himself deeply influenced 80s culture is put in charge of a too-faithful adaptation of a book about video games and 80s culture. We spent a lot of our time imagining a much better movie that could have been made instead of this one.