Commuting means more podcast time!
Breathing Space: a SCI-FI Western
Just like the title says. Ride your ship to the Belt and wrangle a string of asteroids. But watch out for rustlers... Much like the universes of The Expanse and Firefly. No FTL. No Time Travel. No magic weapons. Great characters and storytelling, though. And one of the best podcast theme songs ever.
Ain't got no place to go to.
Ain't got nothin' to sell.
But my stars will never leave me even when I'm dragged to hell.
I was born under a blue sky
And I'll die out in the black.
When I'm dead don't no one morn me
Cuz my debts will drag me back.
And the director is a guy named Scott Paladin, who also acts in the series. With a name like that, what's not to like?
Solar
A joint private-public mission to the Sun. Disaster strikes in the form of a Coronal Mass Ejection which, among other more serious things, knocks the ship's A.I.'s chronometer out of whack. So the episodes come out of order. Lots of skullduggery and intrigue. Heavily produced. Helen Hunt plays a major role.
The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity and Mortality
You are a visitor in a strange museum equipped with an audio guide that explains the exhibits and tells stories about them. It starts as an anthology, but soon you'll start to wonder: where are the other guests? Where are the employees? What's with this glitchy audio guide? And who the hell am I anyway? First season is done in second person, with the next two seasons told in third person.
The Patron Saint of Suicides
Haven is a survivor of a brutal massacre on a BART train during which the shooters wore Lucha Libre masks. After five years, she still meets regularly with a group for PTSD therapy and support. She also frequents the Golden Gate Bridge at night, talking people out of jumping. And she's talked a lot of people out of jumping.
When police investigate a suicide by train and find a discarded Lucha Libre mask in the bushes, they begin to look for connections between the massacre and the suicide.
No horror. No sci-fi. Just a straight up who done it thriller. Noir adjacent.
Leaving Corvat
Terminally bored fast-food hamburger flipper steals his boss's car to escape stultifying small desert town. Turns out his boss can turn into a giant crow to chase him down on the fly. And it gets weirder. I'm only 4 episodes in, and it keeps getting weirder and weirder. I'm hooked.