Yes, Christmas is just around the corner. Not only do you get a brand new episode of The Flickcast this week but next week it’s Christmas and you get a visit from Santa, assuming you’re on the “good” list and not the “naughty” one. No judgements either way, though. You do you.

On this week’s show Chris and Joe are joined by guest Dave Caolo of the Home Work podcast and Table Top Hero to talk about working at home, ways to ensure mindfulness during these stressful times, Dungeons & Dragons and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. And yes, they also manage to talk about the recent Warner Bros./HBO Max announcement and some of the recent Star Wars and Marvel announcements and what they might all mean. 

The trio also offer a few last minute gift ideas for those of you who’ve waited to get that special someone in your life, well, something special. You know who you are. 

It was a lot of stuff to cover. In fact, they really didn’t have time get into all of it so on next week’s show Chris and Joe will go deeper into all the announcements, what next year in entertainment and pop culture might look like and some of their favorite things from 2020. Yes, 2020 wasn’t all bad. Look for that episode soon.

In the meantime, though, sit back and relax and enjoy this week’s episode of The Flickcast. It’s a good one.

Thanks for listening.

WARNING: This episode may contain discussions about COVID-19, mental health and quarantine. We understand not everyone is in a place to talk about or hear discussions surrounding these issues. 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.

Photo: Netflix

Opening and end music by Kevin MacLeod under Creative Commons License

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That’s right, it’s time for a brand new episode of The Flickcast. Yeah, we’re making ’em as fast as we can. Deal with it.

On this week’s episode Chris and Joe discuss the new Ghostbusters, Star Trek: Beyond, Stranger Things, the best stuff from Comic-Con in San Diego including trailers for Wonder Woman, Justice League and Doctor Strange. Plus, the usual more, more and more.

Picks this week include Chris’ pick of Star Trek: Beyond and Joe’s pick of, well, the same thing. Yes, they liked it.

As always, if you have comments, questions, critiques, offers of sponsorship, or whatever, feel free to hit us up in the comments, on Twitter, at Facebook, Google+ or shoot us an email.

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When I heard this week was a double episode I was surprised, and even more surprised to find it was the season finale.  It seems rare to have just a 13-episode season, especially for a network show.  And throwing the two episodes together seemed a little haphazard, but it actually worked really well. 

The first half was a basic episode, but left enough to want to watch one more.  And the ending of this season was so good and so unexpected, I was floored.  It’s not too often that my jaw drops during a TV show, but it did twice during the last few minutes.  Please keep in mind that this review covers two episodes, so it will be fairly lengthy.  But, enough preemptive reacting, let’s get to the meat and potatoes.

Brooks finds his way into Abbie’s house and tells her that Washington’s bible contains instructions on finding a map that can lead them to a way to stop Moloch.  Moloch cannot use the map, but wants to get it so they cannot use it.  If Abbie gives Brooks the bible, she will be spared and given a spot in Moloch’s clan.

In what could be called a bit of sci-fi synergy, original Robocop actor Peter Weller is reportedly joining the cast of J.J. Abrams upcoming sequel to Star Trek. While no other details are available at the moment as to what type or size of role Weller will be taking on in the film, you can be assured it will probably not be that of a robot or cyborg.

Of course, now that Weller is being cast in the film, speculation as to his role can begin in earnest, even without any “official” word. That’s just part of the fun. In addition to him most likely not being any sort of robot, bad or otherwise, It’s likely Weller will not play Kahn Noonian Singh — even if that role also doesn’t go to Benicio del Toro.

Weller will more likely take on a smaller yet pivotal role as a Starfleet officer or recognizable alien species who helps (or hinders) Kirk and company’s fight to destroy the greater evil threatening them and Earth. We have nothing to base that on of course, just spitballing here and trying to fill some column inches. That’s just how we roll. Who do you think Weller should play?

Paramount will release the Star Trek sequel May 17, 2013. Weller joins recently announced new cast members Alice Eve and del Toro and the returning Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Anton Yelchin, John Cho and Simon Pegg.

Great balls of tinsel, this third installment in the Harold & Kumar franchise starts off with a bang. The primary objective seems to be justifying its 3D incarnation, which it gets down to immediately, mostly by floating billows of marijuana cumulus and cirrus into the audience, as well as candy canes, Christmas ornaments, feces and other effluvia.

This being Harold & Kumar, the racial and religious slurs and gross-out humor come just as thick and fast. It’s enough to offend nearly every affinity group on the planet, and disgust anyone who’s left. If you thought that scene in A Christmas Story with the tongue stuck on the pole was horrible, this movie has got a frozen treat for you.

Seven years have elapsed since Harold and Kumar’s misadventures in Guantanamo Bay, during which the two once-BFFs have gone their separate ways. Harold has returned to his former rule-following, high-achieving ways, while Kumar has been expelled from his medical studies for failing a drug test and descended into a slovenly life of perpetual stonerdom.

Between films like Piranha 3D and Sharknigh 3D, studios have touched on the lameness of the 3D craze, but until now, we haven’t seen it taken to the level of ridicule that it truly deserves with the first trailer for A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.

The film picks right up where the last film left…only 6 years later. Here’s the official synopsis (as if you need it).

After years of growing apart, Harold Lee and Kumar Patel have replaced each other with new friends and are preparing for their respective Yuletide celebrations. But when a mysterious package mistakenly arrives at Kumar’s door on Christmas Eve, his attempt to redirect it to Harold’s house ends with the “high grade” contents — and Harold’s father-in-law’s prize Christmas tree — going up in smoke.

With his in-laws out of the house for the day, Harold decides to cover his tracks, rather than come clean. Reluctantly embarking on another ill-advised journey with Kumar through New York City, their search for the perfect replacement tree takes them.

Expect to see all of your favorite friends return, even Neil Patrick Harris, who was killed in the last film (don’t worry-they explain that). Loaded with dirty humor and digs on modern cinematic crazes, you can expect to see A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas in theaters on November 4th.

This is the last episode of ABC’s FlashForward we will see until March. Yeah, until MARCH. Can’t say I’m happy about that. Well, at least this episode went out on a bang.

We open on the mystery woman (Shoreh Aghdashloo), who informed Demetri Noh (John Cho) that he will be assassinated. She’s sitting at her desk, her own Mosaic chart laid out on the glass spread like a spider-web with a picture of  Cho with the number value: A561984. She is watching the classic A Christmas Carol.

A plane lands in Hong Kong, on it Benford (Joseph Fiennes) and Cho get off, discussing their plan to track down Aghdashloo.  They twice ignore calls from Wedeck (Courtney B. Vance) only to be met by someone with “Kid N Play” hair, who calls himself Marshall Vogel from the Hong Kong FBI office. Vogel tells the Dynamic Duo to get out.

Fiennes picks up his phone walking away to only get into an argument with Vance about going to Hong Kong. He gets into this argument so that if anyone goes down for disobeying orders it’s him [Fiennes] because Noh needs to keep his gun on him if he’s going to live past March 15.

Vance breaks one of his televisions only to have another one where a press conference is on at National Linear Project [NLAP] as it’s called, where a stooge announces Simcoe (Jack Davenport) who will address the crowd on the experiments he and Monaghan were doing on the day of the black out.  It gets hairy quick when this happens.

In this sequence, Davenport claims responsibility for the blackout and literally raises hell, saying their experiment was to reproduce the energies created by the Big Bang and may have contributed to the cause of the blackout. Total bedlam occurs when he says this: shots are fired, dogs and casts living together, mass hysteria!

Whoops, somehow my DVR didn’t record last week’s episode and I missed it. But Agent Al Gough (Lee Thompson Young) kills himself to stop his particular future from happening. His future being he kills a single mother in an accident and he also wants to prove that you can change things by choosing to do so.

Regardless, this week’s episode has Simon (Dominic Monaghan) and Lloyd Simcoe (Jack Davenport) play a poker game, and whatever-his-name is Benford’s Sponsor finds his formerly dead daughter still alive.

While on vacation for their anniversary the Benfords (Joseph Fiennes and the wax model known as Sonya Walger) are playing around in some house on the beach, before Fiennes gets a call asking him to come in. The reason being is someone caught some video footage of a mugging and the people doing the mugging had a triple star tattoo that Fiennes recognizes as one of the guys trying to kill him on April 29.

Investigating, it looks like the people in the mugging take a case from the muggee before shooting this victim. The witness, who took the video, is now being hunted by the muggers who kill her roommate. Nothing really comes of this besides some more of the usual questions “is this going to come true/isn’t this/are we powerless to stop it?” It’s starting to get annoying.

This week we meet Dominic Monaghan’s character of Simon, but we do not get anything more than a  tease on how he and Simco killed 20 million people in their experiment with the blackout. So that mystery is extended, but at least we know who is responsible and how they got it. Also, Mark (Joseph Fiennes) meets the man who will replace him in the bed of his wife (Sonya Walger), and she finds out that Mark was drinking in his flash forward. All this and more in another innocuous episode of Flash Forward.

We open on a train ride coming from somewhere and going to Los Angeles. Here we have Monaghan’s character seducing a woman by explaining quantum physics, achieving something in three minutes the Big Bang Theory has been trying to do for however long that show has been on.

Following the last episode, Agent Janis Hawk survives her gun fight, but in having been wounded in her pelvis will never be allowed to bear children. So, this raises the question of how she will be pregnant come April 29, 2010.

The over coming thread throughout this episode is now that we know the future: will it actually happen? It seems like this episode seems to suggest no, not exactly. With Janis now not being able to give birth, and Simco’s super weird kid trailing the Benford’s super weird kid to their house, causing Simco and Olivia to finally realize their flash forwards was kind of ridiculous but creepy-cool. Creepy cool in a way that The Shining is creepy cool and those two kids are straight up creepy, with their chant over that doll of the Benford’s kid.

With the departure of Marc Guggenheim, this leaves me a little dismayed with FlashForward and last night’s episode was a bit of departure and not that good. It did, however, expand on some characters, rather than just focusing on Fiennes and Cho. We spent time getting to know Courtney B. Vance’s character of Stanford Wedeck, who is Head of the FBI LA office, and Christine Wood’s character Janis Stark.

We open on Fiennes, Cho, Vance and guest star Barry Henley as Agent Vreede, walking out of some building.  Fiennes and Vance are talking and Vance says something about not telling anybody anything about his [Fiennes] flash forward or they are”d.o.a.” Fiennes is on the phone with Janis Hawk telling her something about funding.  Getting into a car, they are immediately set upon by a black SUV and hit with a Rocket Propelled Grenade blowing up the car, seemingly killing all four inside.

Cut back 39 hours, and the four of them are in a basement taking a lie detector test. Apparently they are in Washington, D.C for a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on what the various  agencies are finding on the black out case, and they have to take the test for the hearing.  After the test, Fiennes talks with his sponsor who tells him to go to AA meeting which Sophia Walger overhears the sponsor talking about while he fixes some stuff around the house.  He’s apparently helping them out around the house while Fiennes is away doing document support for Vance in DC.

This week’s episode opens on the day of the FlashForward in a park, with some weird-ass Bjork playing over the background. In this opening you witness everyone pass out, some planes explode and a bus drive into a pond.  In the bus, the blacked out people are drowning except for one guy who rescues a blonde.

And now this guy, Ned, is at the hospital being interviewed for some internal bruising by Dr. Olivia Benford and her resident surgeon Bryce who before the blackout was trying to kill himself. Bryce asks what Ned saw in his flash forward which was seeing himself as a black man, which is pretty strange considering Ned is about as white as Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock.

Cut to back at the Benford house where Joseph Fiennes does some Dad-humor with an egg that I didn’t really understand and Olivia makes a crack about him not exactly being the Shakespeare of Dad-humor. Considering his role as Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love, this was a little cringe-worthy.

As a new feature here on The Flickcast, Dave Press, who normally does our comic book recommendations, will be doing recaps of some of our favorite TV shows. Enjoy — Ed

The new Lost clone brought to us by Batman Begins writer David S. Goyer and Star Trek Deep Space Nine creator Brannon Braga is actually better than Lost. Which is really not hard to do. You know the premise: the entire planet blacks out for 137 seconds and everyone sees their individual futures for the date of April 29, 2010.

Joseph Fiennes, Shakespeare himself from the Oscar winning Best Picture Shakespeare in Love, leads a team of FBI agents that includes Seth McFarlane and “New Sulu” John Cho, to investigate the blackouts.

The first episode starts with Fiennes and his team encountering their blackouts. Fiennes, in his blackout, sees his board  in his office with various random and completely ridiculous names and numbers and pictures creating a mosaic of clues. As of the first episode his character is a recovering alcoholic, and as he drinks in his flash forward, his office is being invaded by Dead Presidents with machine guns and laser sights. Spooky.

Fiennes’s wife, played by Sonya Walger, sees herself with another man, which disturbs her and causes tenson between her and her husband. John Cho’s character doesn’t see anything, which frightens him to the point of thinking that he won’t be alive on April 29.