Five years of Moderate Fantasy Violence! Happy birthday to this podcast on this very day, and to celebrate the world’s continuous improvement since they started in February 2016, Nick and Alastair dig into their personal vaults to bring out some real classics: Alan Moore’s character-redefining run on Swamp Thing and Alfred Hitchcock’s cinema classic North by Northwest.
But first, slightly more currently, Nick’s finally watched the second season of His Dark Materials, while Alastair’s up to the third run of Disenchantment. Both shows which got a pasting last time they appeared here – have things improved?
And then it’s back to the eighties, before either of our heroes were born, for Nick’s recommendation: the opening eight issues of Swamp Thing (9:47) by Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette and John Totleben, including the classic Anatomy Lesson issue and a lot of relatable plant material.
Finally, reaching even further back to 1959, Alastair suggests North by Northwest (27:55), Alfred Hitchcock’s influential suspense movie featuring Cary Grant, a beautiful suit and apparently no symbolism whatsoever.
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This fortnight, Nick and Alastair return to the blasted hellscape of 2020 to cover some leftover cultural scraps: last superhero movie standing The New Mutants and spinoff scifi sitcom Star Trek: Lower Decks.
Lastly, they’ve also watched the whole first season of Star Trek: Lower Decks (25:04). How much fanwank is too much? Is this a comedy, a drama or… something else? All this and more! (Also, mild spoilers for moments in later episodes, be warned.)
This fortnight, Nick and Alastair finish up Star Trek: Discovery season 3 and keep mopping up last year’s movies with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
Lastly, it’s time to check out Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (38:21), a film on Netflix based (very obviously) on a play by August Wilson and featuring the last ever performance by Chadwick Boseman.
Only one week into 2021 (unlike 
At last, it’s then time to dive into that hot retrospective material, with some analysis of the year in film (19:46), complete with Nick and Alastair each counting down their top five releases and agreeing on a unified MFV top 3 (plus the inevitable worst one), before turning to do the same for TV (47:38).
And lastly, it’s Euphoria: Trouble Don’t Last Always (37:02), a seasonal episode of the stare-into-the-void teen drama, which turns out to be… not quite as big a bummer as Nick expected. (But still a bit bleak at times.)
This fortnight, Nick and Alastair engage with the zeitgeist, in the form of adorable Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian and well-reviewed new graphic novel Redfork.
Lastly, Nick and Alastair check out Redfork (25:28), a new graphic novel from TKO Studios by Alex Paknadel and Nil Vendrell, and learn that coal might be even worse for their health than they even suspected.
This fortnight, Nick and Alastair root themselves to the sofa for short sweet binges on Amazon’s Truth Seekers and Netflix’s Blood of Zeus.
Lastly, they travel back in time to sample the Blood of Zeus (23:29), a new show from the studio behind Castlevania which they will surely enjoy just as much.
Lastly, time for another crack at The Boys (26:21) after 
Lastly this spooky season, they float on down to Lovecraft Country (31:25) season 1, with lots of general chat about specific episodes, although surprisingly not giving away the ending.
This fortnight, Nick and Alastair take a break from talking about the devil all the time to talk about The Devil All The Time, plus the opening issue of Department of Truth.
And lastly, they’ve also read Department of Truth #1 (24:13), a new series from Image Comics by James Tynion IV, Martin Simmonds and Aditya Bidikar about conspiracy theories and the dawning horror of their reality.
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