It’s time for another new episode of The Flickcast. The pop culture podcast about stuff nerds love. This week it’s Episode 433: The Mind’s Eye.

On this week’s episode called, once again, The Mind’s Eye (you’ll get it), Chris and Joe dive into a slew of new and recurring topics such as the recent trailer for F9, Star Wars fandom, amazing shows like Ted Lasso, Mythic Quest and For All Mankind and Episode 5 of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. They also get a bit serious and talk about the current state of internet outrage, a bit of politics and something that will likely be pretty controversial: how cop show are dealing with real world events. 

We promise not to bring the “real world” into things too often. But sometimes it happens, so bear with us. Oh, this is another kinda long episode too, but you can’t blame Chris this time either. It’s all Joe’s fault again.

If you get a moment and feel like it/can do it, consider rating or reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts. Every rating and review helps. And if you’re really feeling it, consider supporting the show on Patreon.

Thanks for listening!

WARNING: This episode may contain discussions about COVID-19, mental health, quarantine and other real-world issues. We understand not everyone is in a place to talk about or hear discussions surrounding these issues. We completely understand. Please do what’s best for you. Stay safe everyone.

As always, if you have comments, questions, critiques, offers of sponsorship or whatever, feel free to hit us up in the comments, on Twitter, Instagram or, yes, even Facebook. Or shoot us an email. We don’t mind.

Opening and end music by Kevin MacLeod under Creative Commons License
Image: Disney / Marvel

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Giant robots fighting giant monsters. Guillermo Del Toro. Charlie Hunnam, Ron Perlman, Idris Elba and Charlie Day.

Giant frakking robots fighting giant frakking monsters! ‘Nuff said.

Enjoy the first trailer for Pacific Rim and be amazed.

• Alec Baldwin is very excited to be the first host of this season of SNL, so excited he felt the need to hump Bill Heder.

• Netflix had a pretty big week, between splitting off into 2 companies and pissing off their clientele. This song pretty much explains it all.

• What happens when the world’s biggest game of dodgeball starts on a football field? Complete pandemonium.

• One of the wrongest-yet-funniest comedies on TV started back up this week as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia returned to FX. In order to prep for the season, here is the blooper reel from last season.

A staple of the classic sitcom is that, by the end of the episode, everything has to return to normal. Within the 20-or-so minutes of each week’s installment, the characters are free to travel to Beijing, adopt a koala, or make a big sandwich so long as that somewhere around the 18-minute mark, the status quo is maintained. From the ‘50s and on up to the ‘80s there wasn’t anything wrong with having normal, decent people thrown into far-fetched situations and coming out relatively unaffected—or, if they did learn some life-altering lesson, they’d forget it by next week.

Then, along came Seinfeld in the ‘90s, which broke ground by calling BS on the idea that any normal person would function like that—that’s the behavior of a sociopath, and hence Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer, and Larry David’s “no learning, no hugging” rule. More than any other contemporary sitcom, Sunny lives by Seinfeld’s example.

It even goes a step further with its characters’ depravity (cheerfully paraded in ‘Dee Gives Birth’s opening when Dennis and Mac learn of Frank and Charlie’s naked, sewer-scouring hi-jinx), which is why this season’s running joke of everyone’s lack of concern regarding Dee’s pregnancy has worked so well—it threatens The Gang’s self-centered complacency. So, instead of facing the fact that Dee’s baby will force them to take responsibility for someone other than themselves, they chose to ignore it…maybe then it’d go away.

Not many people snynomize Neil Patrick Harris with video games. They do, however, consider him one of the greats when it comes to awards show hosts. Which is why Spike TV’s decision to hire him as the host of this Saturday’s Video Game Awards.

G4 may have their own version of the awards, but Spike’s show is considered the be-all, end-all of video game award shows. You can expect to see guests like the cast of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Guillermo Del Toro, Nathan Fillion, Chris Hemsworth, Olivia Munn, and a musical performance by My Chemical Romance.

You can check out the full awards show live on Saturday, December 11th at 8pm ET/ 5pm PST. Here’s the full press release announcing the new host.

New York, NY, December 6, 2010 – Acclaimed television, film, stage and video game star Neil Patrick Harris has been handed over the controller and will host Spike TV’s 2010 “Video Game Awards.”  Broadcasting in over 175 territories worldwide from Los Angeles, the “VGAs” will celebrate the best in gaming on Saturday, December 11 at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT.

I never would have thought that I’d see Tom Sizemore make a cameo in Sunny, but he seems like a perfect fit among The Gang, playing Byron, the married trucker with a penchant for male prostitutes (“Treat me like a mailbox: Just shove anything you want in there”) who picks up Charlie and Dennis when they get titularly stranded in the woods.

That’s just one of the many highlights in an episode where The Gang heads to Atlantic City for an animal rights convention Frank endows simply so he can show up in a leather coat and tell off the activists—and so Mac can meet his idol Chase Utley (and on a lesser note for Dee to meet and seduce Ryan Howard, despite Frank’s observation that she’s “pregnant as shit”).

However, Frank doesn’t want to cough up any change for the “toll jockeys,” so he’s taking the backroads, and a chance encounter with a squirrel ends up totaling the vehicle. Frank, Mac, and Dee stay behind to scrounge up some food while Charlie and Dennis foot it for a ride, which takes us back to Tom Sizemore’s trucker.

Charlie and Dennis is one of my favorite pairings; Charlie’s bizarre host of talents and willingness to do almost anything and Dennis’ serial-killer charm make them ideal con men, and there’s a nice recognition of that dynamic when Charlie poses as Frank to deliver a speech to the animal-lovers (complete with him “making it rain” dolla bills, “FOR THE RATS!”). And Dennis takes up the role of Mac so he can drink heavily with Utley and Howard.

I enjoyed the uncharacteristically upbeat plotline with Charlie and Dennis (Charlie winning $15,000 at roulette and spending the bulk of it on a private jet for he and Dennis is a nice little reward for poor Charlie), but the best lines, as usual, belong to Frank, who goes into Elmer Fudd mode when he stalks wabbit—and then gets caught in its stare and concludes that its stolen his soul.

There isn’t too much for Dee and Mac to do, but overall the episode doesn’t have any dead spots—Utley and Howard don’t offer too much, but their nonplussed-to-creeped-out reactions to Charlie and Dennis is funny enough on its own, and Sizemore finds the right note of menace and perversity that I hope (though doubt) he’ll return.

Not the best episode, but solid all the way.

It’s now safe to say that Sunny has reached that stage of confidence in their characters that a show like Eastbound & Down has (or maybe I’m looking for a substitute now that that season has ended…withdrawals?). They’re different shows, of course, and Sunny’s always known its strength is in the bizarre dynamic of the group, but I think it plays safe for the most part, and whenever it takes chances it does so with the situation, so that by the end everyone remains unchanged—hey, they have a great show on a cable network; if it ain’t broke…

I have no doubt that The Gang will stay the same after “Charlie Kelly: King of the Rats,” yeah, but it played with some character development, and the results were sweet. The setup is that Charlie is in the midst of a philosophical crisis after wiping out several generations of rats in the basement, so The Gang decides to toss the poor bastard a bone (it is, as Frank notes, his birthday) and throw a surprise party.

Frank compiles a list of things Charlie might like, based on his recent pal-ing around with This Guy Duncan from Under the Bridge, who’s into “this whole Hawaiian underground shit.” Dee’s not interested, that is, until Frank lays out the day’s plan, which involves his trip to the spa (thanks to these coupons I got in the mail) with Charlie while the rest of The Gang outfits the bar in whatever regalia “underground Hawaiian shit” entails.

Frank calls Dee out on her cynicism, explaining that a surprise party is one of life’s best gifts, but that odd bit of selflessness on Frank’s part goes ignored until Dennis, caught up in charitable frenzy, suggests Dee go with Charlie. It works, and Dee surreptitiously invites Charlie to a Spa Day (not a “Spaghetti Day,” as he interprets it). I’m not going to do justice to this by dryly summarizing it, so from here on, I’ll just summarize the summary and note a few highlights:

The amazing thing is that the further anyone distances themselves from The Gang, the more like an actual human being they appear. Dee seems to be, sort of, doing pretty well as a substitute drama teacher, despite her own glaring lack of talent, and Charlie, well, was born to be a janitor, and, with his eidetic memory, ingratiates himself to the students. He even takes a young Juggalo (leave it to Sunny to make an ICP reference—is this 1998?) under his wing to teach him…uh…whatever it is he has to teach.

And Dee is showing a surprising amount of commitment to her duties as teacher, even though there is a distinct lack of understanding the allowances granted to a substitute and, indeed, the art budget, neither of which permit a field trip to New York.

And the rest of The Gang (Frank, Mac, and Dennis) is discussing their fan film of Lethal Weapon 5, specifically whether going in blackface to portray Danny Glover is morally superior to playing him as a white guy. Frank stubbornly insists on blackface, noting that Laurence Olivier played Othello, and, you can guess where it goes from there.

The group has existed in their own isolation for so long, it makes you wonder why they would often go so far out of their way to exclude Dee from any of the activities, since it’s not likely that they’d find anyone else to replace her. And seeing as how the most recent entrants seem to be Charlie and then Frank, the screening process is aimed at scraping the absolute dregs of humanity. God help them if they find anyone worse than Frank.

But they couldn’t have always been that bad, right? Earlier in life Dennis, Dee, and even Mac were perhaps semi-decent people, with a higher-class group of friends and shared equally semi-decent goals for the future. And that’s what The Gang Gets a New Member explores.

Opening a time capsule the four buried 10 years earlier, The Gang relives some of their glory days before they became misanthropic alcoholics, discovering some long-forgotten relics, which include a laserdisc of The Cider House Rules; a note from the younger Dee that includes a million-dollar check made out to her high-school drama teacher (made out, that is, under the assumption that her future self was by now a famous actress); and some photos of the old days when the fourth-and-a-half member (I assume Dee only counts for one-half a member), Schmitty (guest star Jason Sudeikis).

Ah the Halloween special, long-honored tradition among sitcoms, when everyone—writers, directors, actors—can go hog wild and abandon the show’s official canon, tossing them into movie parody, having the cast pursue some horrific monster, or even killing them altogether.

Roseanne comes to mind as having some of the best Halloween Specials (one favorite had Roseanne and Dan competing at the annual Lanford costume party and introduced with the great line, “Well, it wouldn’t be Halloween unless the Conners overdid it”); The Simpsons Halloween specials are pretty much the only episodes I watch anymore (I suspect I’m not the only one); and who doesn’t look forward to seeing what everyone will wear on The Office? (Incidentally, this week’s episode takes the cake with Angela’s Sexy Nurse outfit—yikes!)

And now we have Sunny’s inaugural Halloween episode, “Who Got Dee Pregnant?” And it’s no schumlp. In fact, it even adds a new twist with theRashomon-esque story.

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. The episode opens with Frank, Mac, Charlie, and Dennis discussing their plans to spend the night in an eerie mansion/warehouse/swamp/insert any Scooby-Doo-inspired location here before taking a quick break to mock Sweet Dee’s recent sandwich binge only to find that she is, in fact, pregnant, and…you ready for this? One of them is the father (OoooOoo!). Even before it’s out of the gate, Sunny gets points for hinting that it’s going down the usual cheesy fantasy route most sitcoms use for their Halloween Specials before taking an abrupt turn to something truly horrific: unwanted pregnancy.