Episode 10: Energize! It's Star Trek: The Original Series with Paul Cornell

Robby The Robot’s Waiting: The Sci-Fi Podcast

Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of Robby the Robot’s Waiting. Its hour-long mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new sci-fi and new conversations… to, er, boldly talk about classic Star Trek episode The Doomsday Machine? We’re joined by celebrated writer Paul Cornell to discuss one of the best pieces of 1960s TV, as Kirk and Spock challenge a deadly threat from another galaxy – and an obsessive officer within their own ranks.

Paul Cornell is an award-winning writer of novels, comics, short fiction and non-fiction, as well as a TV screenwriter for Doctor Who, Primeval and many other series. Paul’s final Lychford novella, Last Stand In Lychford, will be out on Tuesday 24 November. Then his new comic I Walk With Monsters #1 (published by The Vault) will be in stores and available for digital download on Wednesday 25 November.

A great philosopher once wrote that great art is never finished, only abandoned. Is that still the case in the digital age? We ask if creatives should leave their work alone once it’s been released to the world, or if they can keep “improving” their TV shows and movies indefinitely.

Here be daemons! We dust off our dark matter study notes as His Dark Materials returns to the BBC. Is season two as good as season one? Meanwhile, in the news, we wonder if George Lucas’s Star Wars sequels would have been better than Disney’s, talk new Fantastic Beasts casting, wonder what Wonder Woman 1984 coming to streaming could mean for cinema, celebrate the return of The Umbrella Academy and loads more.

And there’s all this plus My Little Transformer, Chris vs Chris, and Spike vs Angel in Robby The Robot’s Waiting, the podcast with a hull of solid neutronium.

Episode highlights:

1:20 – What we've been watching: His Dark Materials, Daleks, Raised By Wolves

14:45 – Which version of a movie or TV show are you watching? We discuss what it means for viewers that there is no longer a definitive version of anything, from Star Trek’s remastered effects to George Lucas and the infamous Greedo scene, to TV episodes that are dropped because of outdated and offensive content.

24:36 – Our special guest, writer Paul Cornell, chats about his latest publications, Last Stand In Lychford and I Walk With Monsters.

36:11 – Rewind: our regular rewatch segment takes us to the 23rd century, where Kirk and Spock face obsession, grief and mutually assured destruction in 1967’s The Doomsday Machine.

54:46 – News Round-Up: George Lucas’s Episodes 7, 8 and 9, Fantastic Beasts, Wonder Woman 1984, Thor: Love & Thunder, more Transformers, The Umbrella Academy and Spike v Angel.

The voices you will hear:

Richard Edwards: film and TV journalist and former editor of SFX magazine. https://twitter.com/RichDEdwards

Tanavi Patel: entertainment reporter for SFX and Digital Spy, panel moderator for MCM, FanExpo and more. https://twitter.com/tanavip

Dave Bradley: writer, gamer, book reviewer and another former editor of SFX magazine. https://twitter.com/BoxDaveB

SPECIAL GUEST! Author, screenwriter, comic creator and all-round science fiction legend Paul Cornell (https://twitter.com/Paul_Cornell). Read his latest blog here for more details of his new novella and comic: https://www.paulcornell.com/2020/11/the-complete-lychford/

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