Out Of Time 26: Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, Bad Monkey, Black Doves, and more

Matt and Sean discuss Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, Bad Monkey, the game Warframe, Nosferatu, and Black Doves.

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 Hey everybody, normally you’re probably waiting for me to say, welcome to Trek in Time, but I’m not going to say that this time. This is not Trek in Time, this is Out of Time. What is Out of Time? Out of Time is our spinoff podcast in which we talk about things that don’t fit within the Trek in Time frame.

And this is normally only available to our direct supporters who supported us through the website. But we thought with the new year, we wanted to give everybody a new year’s treat. And we thought that this conversation that we had might be of interest to people. So we hope you enjoy this complimentary episode of Out of Time.

Hi everybody. Welcome to 2025 and welcome to Out of Time. This of course is the spinoff program from Trek in Time where Matt and I both start off by saying thank you for your support. The reason you are listening to the sound of my voice is because you are a direct supporter of our podcast. It wouldn’t happen without your help.

We appreciate it and we’d like to say thank you and we’d like to say, well, here’s a little bit of the other stuff that we’re watching. Not only are we watching Trek, we’re also watching other types of films, TV shows, sci fi, horror, fantasy, whatever catches our eye. And this is the program in which we talk about those things.

So Matt, do you want to start us off this time with what you’ve been watching so far in 2025? What do you want to share?

Yeah, this, this, this past holiday break took two weeks off and I didn’t spend as much time as I was hoping to, just to kind of veg out on the couch and watch TV and movies and play video games.

But I did get to a bunch of things I’d been meaning to get to. I had, the first thing I want to touch on is the new Star Wars show, Skeleton Crew. Um. Woof. I don’t know if you’ve seen anything about it. This is one of those things where. Disney, what are you doing, Disney? This does not have to be a Star Wars story.

I’m enjoying the show. Like the concept of the show is Goonies in space. That’s all it is. The creators of the show, Christopher Ford and John Watts, they have described this literally as we love the movie Goonies. And this is the show, this is Star Wars Goonies. They’ve described it like that, like in interviews and it comes through loud and clear, like the way the characters are drawn, like the way that the bad guys are, like, they’re bad but they’re not,

they’re not scary bad, they’re just kind of like, they’re lovably bad, and like, you know what I mean, like, there’s a lot of humor, and a lot of goofiness, and kids getting into hijinks, and realizing the world is scarier than they realize, and they’re above, they’re, you know, out of their element, and they’re kind of like, coming to terms with like, holy crap, what did we get ourselves into, it’s the Goonies!

And so from that perspective, I just, I like it, this show. I hate it as a Star Wars show, like Jude Law, he’s great. The whole basic concept is pirates exist in Star Wars. Like the music that plays has, it has that swashbuckliness piratey thing. There, the main robot has what is effectively a peg leg. And like, instead of a parrot, it’s missing an eye and a little creature keeps popping out of its little eye.

It’s like I don’t know what to say other than it is not Star Wars, like it does not feel like Star Wars. It has the trappings of Star Wars of like, oh, there’s an X Wing, oh, here’s a robot like we would typically see in Star Wars. It has those trappings, but beyond that, there’s nothing Star Wars about this.

Like it could have been just a sci fi show for kids that’s Goonies in space. They could have done that. Created their own universe. It’s I hate the fact that Disney is taking the Star Wars brand and just like slapping it on top of a thing like this. It makes me angry. But It’s a goofy fun show. I’m having fun watching it.

I’m still watching it. I’m all the way through it almost. It’s like, it’s kind of a goofy ride. It’s giving me a little bit of nostalgia for the Goonies. Uh, so it’s doing that a good job on that, but it makes me so angry that this is a Star Wars show.

Uh,

so that’s all I’m going to say about that. The main thing I want to talk about was, There’s a show called Bad Monkey that I finally wrapped watching, and I think it was on, was it Apple TV?

I can’t remember where it was, but it’s from the showrunner, um, uh, what’s his name? Bill Lawrence, who did Ted Lasso. He’s done the show Shrinking, um, and Bad Monkey stars, uh, uh, what’s his name? Hang on. Vince Vaughn. Okay. So Bad Monkey stars Vince Vaughn. I don’t know about you, Sean, but I love Vince Vaughn being Vince Vaughn.

You know, the sarcastic, really fast, just one liners. He never takes anything too seriously, but he can turn the dime. Yeah, he can be very dramatic, and then suddenly he just drops a one liner that makes you laugh hysterically. So he’s constantly cutting the tension and just like, he’s a really good actor at that.

Like, he’s good at one thing. And he’s exceptional. And this show essentially is, uh, uh, Fletch. It’s basically Fletch. So he’s this cop that is so just like prickly and does his things his own way and hates working with people that he basically works himself out of a job. And then he kind of is brought in kind of like a P. I. to help on something with an old friend of his that’s on the force, and there’s this kind of weird thing that happens, and there’s this body that washes, they find an arm on shore, and his friend’s like, you know, my boss just wants this to go away, so we’re going to hire you just to like, go deliver this arm to Miami, because we don’t want to deal with it, we’ll give it to Miami, let them figure out what this is, and because he’s a cop, and he likes to figure out what’s going on, he basically ends up Getting wrapped up into this whole mess of an investigation and like he’s constantly, he’s like Chevy Chase.

He’s just like delivering one-liners. It is. An insanely funny show. It has lots of great action, great tension, a really interesting mystery they’re pulling apart. I think this show is phenomenal. It’s fantastic. And the reason I’m bringing it up, Sean, I’m telling you, Sean, you, not the other viewers, just you, you need to watch this.

I know you love Chevy Chase and Fletch. I know you love Fletch. Fletch is one of your favorite movies. I remember this. You will love Bad Monkey. It is squarely Squarely in that like, oh man, if you like Fletch, you will love Bad Monkey. Um, my wife wasn’t sure about this show and I watched the first episode and I was like, I don’t know, Sue, you, you, you gotta watch this.

And so I rewatched the first episode with her and she was like, oh, I’m in. And so the two of us just watched it together. She loved it. So this, this show is just so much fun. Vince Vaughn being Vince Vaughn, letting him do what he wants to do. I hope to God there is a season two of the show because it is that good.

It was just that much fun. So highly, highly recommend it. And the last thing I want to bring up is you and I played a lot of Destiny over the past decade. Um, and then Destiny kind of shit its pants. And, uh, one of our friends, Frank, uh, gave up on it way before we did, and then I gave up on it and you kept going and you kept pulling me and Frank back in when there’d be a new release and we’d come in and help you out a little bit and then both of Frank and I would go like, ah, peace out, I’m out again.

It, for me, the game just, like, It became so much, uh, rinse, wash, repeat on the same exact thing. Like every time they would release something new, it was like, this is not different from what we were doing before. There’s nothing new here. Nothing to keep me engaged. And the story was being told in a really weird way where it wasn’t pulling you in for the story as much as it should have been.

And so for me, I just got completely bored. I played, started playing Warframe, which is a game that’s been the same amount of time, but it was always like this. Third tier, kind of like low budget version of Destiny that’s kind of off on the side with a really weird art style. And I remember trying it when it came out and I was like, Oh, this is a weird art style.

I don’t know if I like this. And it feels kind of cheap. And then like a few years ago, I tried it again. And I was kind of like, for some reason, it didn’t catch me. I think it was like another game caught my eye. And I was like, start playing that. And I kind of forgot about it. Well, I started playing it over the holiday, Sean.

I am so deep into this right now. I can’t stop. It is Warframe. It took it obviously a long time to get to where it is from where it was. And it’s astonishing, it is freaking astonishing, everything that Destiny should be, Warframe already is. And it’s shocking to me that Destiny just drove themselves off a cliff, like Thelma and Louise, just like poosh, off a cliff, when they had a blueprint of how to do it from one of his biggest competitors, Warframe.

And Warframe is like a game within a game within a game within a game. I’m playing the game. Get into that loop. It has that fun destiny loop where you’re just playing it and you’re getting loving up a warframe. I tried a different warframe and there’s like 50 plus warframes that you can play in this game, Sean.

And each one has different abilities, and Destiny, they give you three. You have three choices, and for a decade, we had three choices, and then they would come out and say, oh, there’s some new abilities for those three choices, which we’re like, okay, that’s interesting. Warframe, 50 plus different Warframes that all play wildly different from each other.

With incredible, like, ways of, like, developing the tree of, like, what, how, what kind of bonuses and, and add ons you give to that character and the weapons, it is insane the variability that’s in there. And it’s not over, it’s, it’s actually not more complex than Destiny. You understand Destiny, you can understand Warframe.

It’s not some kind of like, oh my god, this. Tree is crazy. It’s just like these mods that you put on get different mods. You level up the mods. It’s really easy to understand and play. And I’m playing the game and maybe 10 hours into the game and I get to the section where, oh wait, I get these wing things that let me fly in space.

There’s a whole sequence of missions. I’m flying in space. I feel like I’m an X Wing star, you know what I mean? I’m flying and like, I’m just like in a suit. It’s like Gundam, like literally you’re doing Gundam in space. And I’m like, this is a radically different version of the game now. It’s completely different.

It opens up a whole different thing. And I’m still playing it, and I guess I’m only, I’m not that far away, but one of the YouTubers that you and I follow, AstroCross, he’s ahead of me in the game. And he just showed, I just saw him. Oh, he’s started playing that now. Oh, over the holidays, he’s been playing it eight to ten hours a day.

Oh, boy. Okay. I’ve been watching some of his livestreams. He’s a committed YouTuber.

I like him a lot. Yeah. And he is so far into it right now. He’s loving it. He is loving it. And in his live streams, he keeps saying, This is what we’ve been asking for in Destiny Forever. We’ve been asking this for Destiny Forever.

It’s really, yeah, it’s a game that’s been

lurking in the background. Yeah. And I’ve played it more recently than you had before you jumped in this holiday. I had played it eight months ago, nine months ago, and I had reached out to you and I was just like, we should try Warframe. Cause I think it, it was, I think it’s an option here.

And you, I think you were in the middle of like Diablo or something like that. You were doing something else. You’re like, I don’t have bandwidth for that right now. And What’s happened to me is after Destiny hit the wall, I not only checked out of Destiny, I don’t game anymore. I don’t do any online gaming.

Well, you do D& D. I’ve moved on to D& D where I find like the, the absolute limitless, like, The realm of my imagination is what I can do. So it’s like, I’m finding that more engaging and the creative aspect of it is more engaging. Whereas the passivity of a game where you’re sitting down and you just experience it with a controller doesn’t scratch the itch for me in the way it once did where now I’m like, I’m making stuff.

I’m making my own adventures and drawing maps and creating characters and I’m doing all that. So, and it’s, so it’s, it’s feeding that, but Warframe is a game that I would come back to gaming for. So it is one of those things that is on my, it is on my list. Yeah.

I’d recommend it because like there’s, you can deck out your ship, like in Destiny you have a ship, but you only see the outside of the ship.

Why it’s like you we have our own ship you can create a clan and then the clan you can create a clan Dojo, right you and your clan build out and it’s like an entire world that you build up It’s like it’s like almost like you have Minecraft inside of this game where you can kind of deck out your own dojo, and then you can deck out your own ship and Astrocross got through the section where now he has a Uh, a ship, I can’t, it’s called a reel something, but it’s basically like, it’s like a full blown starship where you have crew that are like your engineers and shit like that.

So it’s basically like, now it’s like Star Trek, like you’re, you’re, you’re in Warframe flying around on a Star Trek ship. And then you can get on your normal ship and go down to a planet. And then you can put on your Gundam thing, go fly around. It’s like, there are so many different aspects of this game.

It is wild to me that Destiny so shit its pants, like they didn’t have, it’s almost like they didn’t look at what was around. Like they weren’t looking at other games. They weren’t looking at the other play space of like, what are other people doing? They got so far up their own butts that they just didn’t realize it’s like, you could build out radically new things inside of Destiny that would engage the community in whole new ways.

And I know, I understand your point of D& D being like this complete unlock for, there’s, there’s no guardrails. You can do whatever you want. I would argue Warframe is almost to that level. Like I, as I’m playing it, I feel like I could do whatever I want. Like I, it’s like, there’s gonna, there’s not just one Warframe for me.

I’ve already played like three different Warframes I love and they all play completely different. And then the missions I go on are sometimes dynamically generated. So when you go do. It’s a planet and you go to the same exact thing. It gives you a slightly different experience. And then there’s the story elements that I’m finding really engaging and then these games within games within games where it’s like giving you different variety of what you can do.

And this is just me playing solo. Yeah. And it’s like, I can’t, I got to imagine like as soon as I start playing the competitive stuff or I start playing, like if you played it and you and I played together, it’s going to give us a completely different experience then. So it’s like, yeah, there’s so much about the game that I’m really impressed by.

So if you enjoy gaming. And you enjoyed games like Destiny, I’d highly recommend Warframe, especially considering it’s free to play.

You don’t have to pay a dime.

That’s the interesting thing about it, it’s the gaming model, they sell you Warframes for money. Yeah, as a means of getting, yeah, as a means of getting money, but it’s almost like, that’s a really cool model to say, like, you get this, if you want more, this path, which is much slower, or there’s this path where you can just like, get it.

And it’s not usery in the way of like, Mobile games where it’s like, Oh, you hit a wall where you can’t progress. I know that they don’t do that. It’s like, no, you can progress. It’s just going to take you a lot longer. And I like that. I like that giving you multiple doors. I really, I really appreciate that.

That is a game that I, I think I, I will dip my toe back in, but the thing for me, like I even went so far as to like, I canceled, uh, both Xbox and PlayStation services. Like, I don’t have accounts there so I’d have to reactivate. So it’s like, But that could happen, so don’t, uh, don’t doubt that I’m considering it.

As for me, the two things I wanted to talk about really quickly are one is a movie, one is a television show. The movie I want to discuss really quickly is Robert Eggers Nosferatu. This is the gothic horror film, which is a remake of the 1922 Nosferatu, one of the first horror films that like, it’s a recognizable image, uh, a recognizable villain, groundbreaking at the time, still considered one of the best films ever made.

And this updating of it, which includes Nicholas Holt and Lily Rose Depp are the main two characters in this, uh, young married couple, and she has this. psychic ability that has tied her inadvertently to Count Dracula. And the movie, the 2024 film is effectively Nosferatu and the original source material for Nosferatu, which is Bram Stoker’s Dracula, effectively wed together.

It comes together in a really fascinating way. The movie is visually capturing. Robert Eggers has an ability to mimic Older film styles in a way that makes you feel like you are watching something of that era without it feeling, without it losing what a contemporary film needs to have in order to keep your attention.

So there are sequences, scenes, dialogue, acting choices, and I thought that was the most fascinating part. The acting choices of the people in the film, including Willem Dafoe, who is incredible in this, presenting themselves as if they’re in a silent film. So there’s a little bit of an over delivery as if you are going to then cut to a black card where the dialogue is written out for you in text.

It has that feel. So it feels like an older film. It feels like that, but it’s still a contemporary film. It is visually new. The special effects, the use of things like shadow, light, dark, very noir, very, very stark contrasts, uh, Nicholas Holt as the, he’s not the hero. He’s the male protagonist. Lily Rose is more the hero of the film.

The use of silence, the use of the performance of the Count, and I’m gonna, I’m gonna be a little spoilery for some people, I won’t be spoilery for some people, from just a casting perspective. I did not know Bill Skarsgård. was playing Nosferatu. I went into the movie knowing only it was Nosferatu. I literally went without having seen a trailer, without having read anything.

I was just like, oh, Nosferatu. Yeah, I bet that’ll be good. I loved Robert Eggers. Go into the theater, watch the movie. I spend parts of the movie like, who is playing the Count? How is this an unknown actor to me, but he’s clearly middle aged? How can I not know who this is? But you do. And then the movie ended and they start putting the names up on the screen and they go, Bill Skarsgård.

And I was like, who was Bill Skarsgård? And then suddenly I’m like, Oh my God, he is, as an actor, terrifying to me because he He’s not human. He, he can just disappear so, so completely into a role. He is just gone. And he plays this character that is, it plays with, uh, intimacy and power and the, the meaning of the relationship between him and Lily Rose’s character.

What is the dynamic there? What do they represent? As archetypes, who are they as people, it’s on all these different levels while being evocative of a film made in the early 1920s. I really, really dug this movie. This was a terrific thing to see in a theater. So if you have a chance to see it in a theater, I feel like the big screen It’s where it really thrives.

So I encourage people to see it in the movie theaters while they can. The other thing I want to talk about is a television show that’s on Netflix. It has already been renewed for a second season. It is the show Black Doves, which stars Keira Knightley, Ben Whishaw, and Sarah Lechenscher. It is a British production.

It’s created by Joe Barton, who has also written it. It is the story of a effectively an independent spy organization that plants the agents that are referred to as black doves, who it presents as women, the black doves are planted In roles in different levels of government or families, they gather information and then the organization sells it to the highest bidder and it is presented as we sell information to the highest bidder.

It doesn’t matter who that is. Sometimes we sell that information to governments that you would consider good. Sometimes bad. It’s the highest bidder. The network also employs. hired killers when it needs to, and it can clean up messes when things happen. So it’s effectively these are the bad guys. And Keira Knightley is one of these black doves.

She has been groomed so that she has years earlier, before the series begins, gotten to a relationship with a man who has a high level now in the British government. He is the minister of defense. She is his wife. And they have a family and they have a very happy family life, except they don’t because it’s built on a lie because she is a black dove and she is merely married to him to gather information.

What ends up happening to set the series off is she’s been having an affair and her affair partner is murdered. And she wants to find out why, what has happened. Why was he killed? And it’s the beginning of the chain of events of her digging into her lover, his past, who he was, and what he was accidentally embroiled in pulls the Black Dove organization into it.

And there is a high level political intrigue storyline about Looming war between major powers in the world and the Black Dove organization trying to profit from this. And then the various layers of personal turmoil between Keira Knightley, her lover, Keira Knightley, and her husband, whom she does love, but she loves in a different way from being herself, her children, the danger that she and her family are in now because of her lover, And her friendship, and it is a beautifully rendered friendship between her and Ben Whishaw.

And Ben Whishaw plays a trigger man. The show has a starkly cool presentation. It has the coolest soundtrack, which is a la Massive Attack. It is at turns harrowing in its violence and thriller aspects, there are sequences in this with gunfights that make you just like, Holy cow, I feel like I just watched Heat in an episode.

And at the same time, it has some of the funniest dialogue, funny setups, funny characters. There are two women assassins in the show that steal the show part way through the series, to the point where as I was watching and enjoying the series, I’m thinking like, they need another show. They need a spinoff about these two characters because they are bonkers funny.

The show hits different notes at different times to leave you satisfied in a number of different ways. It’s amusing and harrowing. It is intriguing and decipherable. It left me in the penultimate episode thinking, there is no way anybody in this comes out alive or allows for a second season. And then at the end of the final episode, I was like, Oh my God, they brilliantly set themselves up for a second season.

And it made complete sense. I loved this program. I watched it with my partner and my son. We started watching it before Christmas. We watched about half of it. And then the holidays happened. And then after the holidays, we came back and finished it off. I don’t do that all that often of being able to consume an entire season in that way.

And I loved doing it that way. This is a series that benefits from sit down and watch it start to finish as much as you can. You’ll get through it. It is fantastic. And I saw an aspect of Kiera Knightley, whom I always liked as an actress, but I’d never seen her in anything like this. And as I’m watching this and she’s in fight sequences that are like out of Taken, I was like, she can do this.

This is amazing. She’s terrific in this. It made me wish for her to, like, it puts her on the list of when they decide to make a female James Bond, she needs to be in the discussion. This is, it’s that exciting. I enjoyed it that much,

so I’m so glad. I’m so glad you put this on your list. Because I almost put it on mine.

I, I binged this show over the holidays too. Phenomenal. This, this, this, it’s stylish. Like you brought up. It’s very stylish. It’s got like a dash of Guy Ritchie. So, like, it’s got a little bit of that panache where the action and the sequences are hyper stylized a little bit. Where, not like the slow mo Guy Ritchie stuff, but like, it’s not 100 percent realistic.

When shit is going down, it’s a little hyper realistic. It’s like a little, um, exaggerated in a just the right amount. So, it’s not over the top. It’s not completely unrealistic, but it’s definitely, ehhh, that stuff wouldn’t actually happen that way. It’s definitely choreographed. It’s very choreographed, but it’s, like I said, it’s stylish.

It’s perfect. And this show is taught and I’m with you in the penultimate episode. I was like, there’s no fricking way to get out of this. No way. Everybody’s gonna be dead. Everybody’s gonna be dead. And then when it wrapped up, I was like, they’re brilliant. Like they, they, they did a wonderful job weaving that and creating tension and Keira Knightley is fantastic.

And I love the trigger man. Um, I thought he was Yeah. The relationship between them. The fact that this is all about bad guys, it’s a bad organization, but the two leads, the Trigger Man and Keira Knightley’s character, you really care for them, and both of them want out. Like, neither of them want to be doing this.

They want to get, like, They realize that they’re in a bad place. They got, they got played. They got manipulated to do what they’re doing and they want to get the hell out, but they can’t. They’re trapped and it’s heart wrenching. So there’s like the drama aspect of it. Like, Oh man, you think he’s about to get out of it?

And then he gets like twisted right back in and he realizes he’ll never have happiness. And it’s just like, Oh, you poor guy. It’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s so

good. I thought it was beautifully rendered. Like the two of them are just like, it’s they’re, they’re Han Solo and Chewbacca to each other. There’s a platonic love they have for each other.

There’s a platonic love there where at one point he comes back and she’s like, why did you come back? And he’s like, cause you asked. Like, there’s no hesitation there. And they both take turns of saying to the other one, like, you don’t need to ask me, please. You do not need to say the word, please. You just need to tell me what you need.

And I am there. And I loved the, the colliding of worlds. I won’t say what it was, but the colliding of worlds between her happy facade and who she really is. When it collides, it’s, I’m not talking about an explosive moment. I’m talking about a very quiet scene, but the way it is rendered, I actually felt incredibly moved.

I was just like, this is some powerful storytelling, so I’m really, really excited about it. Excited to see what they do with the second season. This feels like a ripe world the creators come up with. And it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a good five seasons solid storytelling that are going to come out of this.

It really felt like that to me. I agree. So everybody, We hope you enjoy checking out some of the things we’ve talked about. And as always, we hope you’re enjoying our regular podcast. Jump into the comments on the podcast and let us know if you’ve seen any of the things that we’ve talked about here. And if you have any suggestions, don’t hesitate to share them in the comments of any episode that we have.

We’d love to hear from everybody. We, again, your support makes all of this possible and all these conversations that Matt and I would have normally, we enjoy having them and inviting you to join in as well. So please jump in the comments, let us know. With that, we look forward to seeing you more in 2025.

I hope your entry into the new year has been safe and happy, and we look forward to talking to you soon. Bye bye.

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