The Bicks Pod

Episode 2.5 - TOS Season 1 Watch Along - The City on the Edge of Forever

Friends of the podcast, welcome to something new from The Bicks. A watch along episode! Join us for a viewing of one of the most acclaimed Star Trek episodes of all time: The City on the Edge of Forever. As our first watch along, our apologies if it's a little rough, but we were just excited by the thought of plunging our voices into your eardrums as you watch an episode of Trek. So throw us on in the background and listen as we blabber about whatever comes to mind during one of our favourite episodes from TOS.
We look forward to more watch alongs in the future, and will probably be having semi-regular polls to help us decide which episodes to cover in our watch alongs on our Twitter, so follow us there and please do let us know if there's an episode you'd love to watch with us!
Notes and Recognitions:
Intro Music: Chasing Stars by AG Music
Outro Music: Idle Hands by The Impossibulls 

Episode 2: Star Trek The Original Series Season 1

...in which your stalwart Ensigns Aidan and Lindsay take you on a tour of Star Trek's very first blockbuster season. The one that started it all! Join us for a retrospective look at the origin of the series, the ups and downs of getting it on the air (with a little help from America's favourite redhead!), highlights and lowlights of the episodes and story arcs, as well as our...
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Bicks Log: Who is the best villain from The Original Series?
Notes and Recognitions:
Mea culpas: "The City on the Edge of Forever" was the second-last episode of the first season, not the last. Silly us!
Definitely check out The Center Seat docuseries about Star Trek -- narrated by Gates McFadden! -- which is available on Crave (in Canada) and Amazon Prime and Apple TV.
We cannot recommend Rowan J Coleman's Star Trek retrospective series highly enough -- you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.
Intro Music: Chasing Stars by AG Music
Outro Music: Idle Hands by The Impossibulls 

Episode 1 - Introductions

Earth date September 8, 2022. Happy Star Trek Day to one and all! To commemorate this once-a-year occasion, we'd like to welcome listeners both new and old to this podcast with a (re)introduction to The Bicks. After plumbing the depths of Mark Frost and David Lynch, then William Shakespeare, we're back to talk about Star Trek in all its many forms: the TV series, the films, the universe, and the fandom. This episode we go over our personal history and experiences with Trek, talk about what you can expect in our podcast, and what we may do a little differently compared to other podcasts. Join us for the first of many discussions to come!
Episode Sponsor: Holonovels R Us - Don't forget to use Promocode "BicksPod" to get your already free holonovels for more free!
Bicks Log: We decided to start off easy with a simple question that has not preoccupied anyone's thoughts at all on the internet: who is Star Trek's greatest captain?
Notes and Recognitions:
Intro Music: Chasing Stars by AG Music
Outro Music: Idle Hands by The Impossibulls 

Episode 73 - The Authorship Question

We've always appreciated the saying, "Save the Best for Last" and we followed it for this Shakespeare podcast. Nothing may draw more interest in the popular imagination of Shakespeare than whether or not he was actually the author of the works ascribed to him. So we wanted to send off our little podcast with a big topic: who was Shakespeare, if it wasn't Shakespeare?
Notes:
The Wikipedia master list of possible Shakespeare authorship candidates is... exhaustive.
If you wonder why we say "Apparently" the way we do...
And if you wonder why we say "To be fair" the way we do...
Abel Lefranc was more a historian than a writer, to be faaaaiiiiir...
The SCTV classic skit "The Adventures of Shake and Bake" is a nice parting gift from us to you - a bit of authorship question, a bit of pop culture, a bit of Canadiana. With love from Aidan and Lindsay.
Ancient Bickerings:
If Shakespeare wasn't the author of Shakespeare's works - who would you want it to be?

Episode 72 - The Tempest

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.”
In almost every way this play is Shakespeare's swan song, and a heartfelt goodbye to his time spent crafting entertainment and poetry for the people of London. Consequently, the play is very concerned with legacies, family, time, supremacy, and - perhaps most interestingly of all - colonialism. Despite being one of Shakespeare's shortest and most easily accessible plays, it manages to jam pack a whole lot of thought into the topics it does weave its magic on, so join us for a discussion about all things The Tempest in this, our final episode devoted to Shakespeare's work.
Notes:
Aidan incorrectly named the date the play was performed in front of King James - it was actually done on November 1, 1611.
He also incorrectly identified the date the play was put back into production - it was actually 1667, albeit under a different name with heavy adaptations.
Both Aidan and Lindsay highly recommend Barbra A. Mowat's A Modern Perspective essay (a standby of this series) for an interesting look at how Shakespeare combines time, family, and the other themes of The Tempest into a nice little package.
Ancient Bickerings:
If you were shipwrecked on an abandoned island and had to take 5 Shakespeare plays with you, does this one crack the list?

Episode 71 - Shakespeare Apocrypha

The incomparably funny and poignant comedian Hannah Gadsby said it best: “This adoration of the artist as a lone genius is quite misled, I think, because they are very much a part of their time and their community.”
Sometimes we all need a community. Whether it’s because our own expertise has fallen short or because two heads are better than one, no one among us can say that we are perfectly capable of living life without the help of our friends.
Not even William Shakespeare.
Join us as we examine Shakespeare's Apocrypha, a series of plays, poems, and other writings variously attributed to the Bard as well as a whole host of other Tudor/Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. It's a veritable who's-who of the extended theatre community to which Shakespeare undoubtedly would have belonged in late 16th/early 17th century London, which leads us to question: just how many people had a hand in writing the Shakespearean canon? Along the way, we'll explain some of the handwriting analysis and stylometry results that recent researchers have used to point to their favoured candidates for the authorship of this collection of works. 
It's a jam-packed episode. We hope you'll enjoy!
Notes:
Folio, Quarto, and Octavo bookmaking techniques, as depicted on Wikipedia:
Full text of The Shakespeare Apocrypha by C.F. Tucker Brooke
Full text of William Shakespeare A Study Of Facts And Problems Vol I by E.K. Chambers
Shakespeare's Collaborators - shakespeare.org
New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition
Example of Secretary Handwriting in Hand D, purportedly Shakespeare's own handwriting, in the play The Booke of Sir Thomas More:
YouTube clip of a one-man play by Keir Cutler about Shakespeare and the authorship question
All available text of The Booke of Sir Thomas More, courtesy of The British Library
"Shakespeare By The Numbers: What Stylometrics Can and Can't Tell Us" - a book review by Ramon Jimenez for the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship
"The Stylometric Debate Over Authorship" - Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship
"Stylometry and the Shakespearean Clinic" and "Response to Criticisms on Stylometry" by David Kathman and Terry Ross
Dr. Michael Delahoyde's analysis of Two Noble Kinsmen
Petr Plechac's stylometric analysis of Henry VIII
Ancient Bickerings: Which play would you most like to revise alongside Shakespeare?

Episode 70 - Cymbeline

Another problem/romance play, Cymbeline is noteworthy most of all for its intricate, multi-layered plot, and one of the bard's most noteworthy heroines in Imogen. Unlike the famous tragedies or better known comedies (but very much like his other later plays), this one is marked by the refusal to commit to any grand sweeping statement of the human condition beyond, maybe, "It's complicated." Join us as we explore the plot, characters, and themes of this late Shakespearean play!
Notes:
Lorenna McKennitt's Cymbeline is quite pretty and Lindsay's origin story for why she loves this play so much.
Lindsay referenced a Public Theater NY discussion about Cymbeline and Imogen.
Why?
Ancient Bickerings:
Which one of the many, many liars in the play, is the most dastardly?

Episode 57 - Shakespeare‘s Families

Much like many of our modern stories, Shakespeare used the family as the core of many of his tales, so we dove into the many vagaries of families in Shakespeare's plays to see what made them tick. What was the family "supposed" to look like in Elizabethan times, and how did Shakespeare play with that idea? Which plays feature the most damaged families, and which ones, if any, feature the happy variety? Join us for a glance at the wide variety of familial creations in the Shakespeare ouvre.
Notes:
Aidan was thinking of this little snippet of Back to the Future 2, for his speech about the lord of the manor, which is set in 2015 but is still vaguely futuristic (hence why he confused it with Fifth Element, set in the 23rd century, totally understandable of course).
To Aidan's utter amazement, there's actually a more involved back story to the famous "Abed has a subplot that doesn't get any screentime" bit from Community. Watch the whole story unravel on YouTube at your convenience.
It was Nora Ephron and it was in the DVD commentary of When Harry Met Sally. But Shakespeare is most definitely not writing in the tradition of Woody Allen. Still, Lindsay thinks the statement holds. Here is the quote (and the full link to the BBC article for which it was transcribed):
 “There are two traditions of romantic comedy, the Christian tradition and the Jewish tradition. In the Christian tradition, there is a genuine obstacle. In the Jewish tradition pioneered by Woody Allen, the basic obstacle is the neurosis of the male character.”
Ancient Bickerings:
Due to ongoing worries about heat exhaustion, we kept our Ancient Bickerings topic nice and simple: if you had to become a member of one of Shakespeare's families, which one would it be?