This week on Science Faction, we tackle the important questions: Is bread actually good? Can a Disney Channel movie sneak science fiction past Steven? Can Star Trek: Strange New Worlds finally make Ben stop complaining? And, most importantly, how did a movie about sheep detectives turn out to be legitimately great?

Then, in Future or Now, things get a little more serious as Devon brings us a massive Kelvin wave moving toward California, while Ben explores a fake version of Windows 11 that leads us into a much bigger question: why are we still using computers basically the same way we have for decades?

Real Life

We begin, naturally, with bread.

Ben is against it. Devon, who apparently becomes increasingly French whenever bread is involved, is very much in favor of it. Steven loves sourdough and becomes increasingly concerned about what exactly Ben considers the staple crops of his diet.

Devon settles the matter with perhaps the strongest argument anyone can make: fresh French bread is amazing, and he will eat all of it.

From there, Steven has two movies to discuss, neither of which would normally be considered science fiction. Or would they?

First up is Big City Greens: Spacecation, which gets a thumbs-up from Steven. It’s a Big City Greens adventure that sends the family into space, which certainly sounds suspiciously like science fiction. There’s also a familiar name in the writing credits: Mike Trapp.

Then there’s The Love Hypothesis. If you’ve listened to Steven talk about romantic comedies before, you probably already know where this conversation is headed. If you don’t, well…he’s going to tell you.

Meanwhile, Ben has reached the end of another season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which raises an important question: is there a limit to how long Ben can complain about Star Trek?

Season four is over, and somehow the show may have accidentally made a good Star Trek episode. That sends us into a bigger discussion about what some fans want from the franchise: an aspirational future where science, discovery, truth, and people working together matter more than enormous space armadas and the latest galaxy-ending artificial intelligence.

Could this finally make Ben stop complaining about Star Trek?

Maybe for five minutes.

But the biggest surprise of Ben’s week was The Sheep Detectives.

And apparently it was EPIC.

Ben calls it a genuinely smart movie and, perhaps most impressively, says it succeeds where Cars 2 failed. Beneath the absurd premise of sheep solving a mystery, there’s a story dealing with grief and trauma that worked far better than Ben expected.

Ben recommends it. Strongly.

Future or Now

Devon brings us something considerably larger than sheep detectives: a slow-moving, planetary-scale Kelvin wave heading toward California.

The Guardian: Concern mounts over planetary-scale Kelvin wave heading for California

The enormous mass of warm water is moving across the Pacific and could affect sea levels along the California coast, with changes potentially approaching a foot in some areas.

That leads us into a conversation about what these enormous ocean systems actually mean when they finally reach land—and, for Devon, a much more personal connection involving his son and the devastating flooding in Texas.

Then Ben takes us somewhere considerably sillier.

Definitely Not Windows is exactly what it sounds like: a parody of Windows 11 that gives us an excuse to complain about modern operating systems.

But the joke leads into a much more interesting question.

Why do computers still work like this?

Windows, icons, folders, desktops, applications—we’ve been iterating on essentially the same basic ideas for decades. Ben brings in Scott Jenson’s exploration of what could come next and asks whether we’re really going to use the same desktop UX forever.

Scott Jenson: Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?

If artificial intelligence changes how we interact with computers, maybe the future isn’t simply an AI assistant sitting inside the same old operating system. Maybe the entire idea of what an operating system looks like—and how we tell a computer what we want—needs to change.

So this week we’ve got bread, romantic comedies, surprisingly good Star Trek, emotionally complicated sheep, planetary waves, fake Windows, and the possible death of the desktop.

You know. Science Faction.