Smoking and Drinking in Space!

Smoking and Drinking in Space! is a long-running sci-fi review show with the feel of two genre fans talking after a screening while the notes are still scattered. The format is simple, but the conversation is not tidy. Recent episodes move across Project Hail Mary, Fallout season two, John Carpenter’s The Thing, and Star Trek: Picard, using each title as an excuse to argue through craft, canon, character logic, and whatever joke lands in the moment. It is blunt. The show does not treat science fiction as sacred text, even when the speakers clearly care about the details. Project Hail Mary prompts discussion of practical effects, Rocky’s physical performance, set design, puppet motion, and whether weightlessness feels convincing. Fallout brings out a different kind of attention. The speakers compare the show’s New Vegas material with game memory, weighing Mr. House, Securitrons, Yes Man, cold fusion, Vault-Tec, RobCo, Maximus, Thaddeus, Cooper, Barb, the ghoul, Dogmeat, and the season’s sprint toward its finale. The lore talk can get granular fast. It also keeps getting punctured by food noises, mock introductions, and jokes that undercut any attempt at solemnity. The Thing episode shows the same habit from another angle, focusing on paranoia, 1980s texture, gore, smoking, performance style, and how the movie sits beside Blade Runner as a product of its moment. The archive reaches into Star Trek as well, with Picard giving the show a franchise thread that matches its taxonomy without limiting its range. Its rhythm is closer to a recurring table conversation than a polished review segment. One speaker will make a claim, another will challenge the memory behind it, and the episode finds energy in that back-and-forth. The show is at its best when a tiny production detail or canon wrinkle becomes worth chasing for several minutes. It is not gentle criticism. It is not clean-room analysis. It is fan scrutiny with rough edges, inside jokes, and a willingness to let a tangent become the point for a while. For listeners who enjoy sci-fi talk that treats puppets, vault politics, alien paranoia, and franchise continuity as equally discussable, it has a durable, lived-in charm.