Mission to Zyxx

“Mission to Zyxx” is everything you love about “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and the entire “Star Wars” saga wrapped in one, but it’s also “The Orville,” “StarCraft” and “FarScape” too.
And it’s all improvised.

“Mission to Zyxx” is a weekly podcast, currently one episode away from their season 3 finale, and every single episode is a charm. The seasons all have a different over-arching plot line, but every episodes boils down to the same general premise:
Unofficial leader Pleck Decksetter (Alden Ford) is a clueless Tellurian (read: human) from a backwater farming planet with little going for it, Dar (Allie Kokesh) is a gigantic alien creature who drinks sand and constantly tries to get laid, C-53 (Jeremy Bent) is a sarcastic know-it-all protocol droid who rarely uses his vast data stores to actually be helpful, and The Bargarean Jade (Moujan Zolfaghari) is a washed-up Holo actor who is far more concerned with reanimating her dead career than she is about the crew or their missions.
Each episode starts with the permanently confounded lird (lizard+bird) Nermut Bundaloy (Seth Lind) calling from his base of operations to the rest of the crew to brief them on their weekly mission, whereupon they travel to some new planet in the Zyxx Quadrant to deal with whatever bizarre adventure awaits them there.
However, their combined incompetence means that every single mission they take on is an utter failure. It’s never the same characters’ fault, or the same reason twice - the cast find new ways for their characters to screw it up, only ever giving the crew the vaguest sense of success when the stakes are at the absolute minimum.

The cast have a basic outline of where they want each episode to go so they can make a cohesive season, but otherwise they just turn on the microphones and start riffing. They’ve got an incredible ability to constantly play off each other, making jokes at each others’ character’s expense. Possibly the most impressive thing they do is off-the-cuff references to items and events from previous episodes. It’s always contextually relevant and never feels shoehorned in. And, because I’ve been able to binge a majority of the show over the last six months, I’ve been able to catch those references as they happen, which makes the narrative feel so very organic.

They’ve parodied everything from the Jedi Knights to the Borg, the Zerg to the DeathStar, Clone Troopers to Q, AI to government bureaucracy, and it never feels stale. No matter how many episodes I listen to, even compressing their three years of work into six months, it’s constantly novel and entertaining. They take some tropes too far on purpose - starting at funny, working their way to unfunny, then plowing ahead to the point of sheer ridiculousness where it becomes funny again; they don’t shy away from it. There’s a clear sense of self-awareness that accompanies the show at all times - which you’d hope for, as it’s an improvised podcast - and that helps them from ever getting too serious. They’ve never broken the 4th Wall for the sake of story progression, but there are plenty of times when you can hear the actors giggling in the background. You’d think that it would take away from the immersion, but somehow it helps bring you in - you can tell the cast is having as much fun making the show as you are listening to it.

Being an audio-only media, there’s nothing for you to see, but they do edit in sound effects after they’ve riffed their way through an episode: doors opening, footsteps, blaster rifles, etc.; everything you’d expect to hear from a radio show.
There’s even an opening crawl, narrated to us, and adjusted per each seasons’ theme, with dedicated narrations for special episodes not following Pleck and crew. It’s a bit like Picard’s opening monolog, with much of the same gravitas.
Well, as much gravitas as you can have when you include the clause “and meet weird bug creatures and stuff.”

While I could easily qualify everything in this show as “my favorite part” (and thus why I’m talking about a podcast on my movie review site), my absolute favorite part are the devastatingly stupid CLINTs. The Clone Light Infantry Nomadic Troopers appear every couple episodes to attempt to thwart our heroes, constantly trying to one-up each other on completely irrelevant details and generally screwing up even the most basic of tasks. They’re all voiced by Winston Noel, who never fails to give them something new to fail at.

The episodes are only about 40 minutes long, so they’re perfect for you to listen to during a workout or commute. And, at 20 episodes per season for three seasons, you’ve got plenty to listen to.
If you are, or ever were, a fan of the shows I listed at the top, you owe it to yourself to listen to this.
I’ve found a couple different improvised sci-fi podcasts, but this one absolutely takes the cake.
It’s available for free from your favorite podcast app/source.

Seriously. Go listen.