Exploring Humanity Through Sci-Fi

This archival episode reaches all the way back to 1996 for a rare and insightful conversation with Anthony Daniels, the iconic performer behind C‑3PO. At the time, Daniels had just wrapped his work on the Return of the Jedi radio drama, once again lending his unmistakable voice and personality to the galaxy’s most anxious protocol droid.

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In this episode, we sit down with legendary comic book artist Alitha Martinez to explore her latest work on OMNI, a graphic novel from Humanoids that blends science fiction, social commentary, and kinetic storytelling. With over two decades in the industry, Alitha brings a wealth of experience and insight to the conversation — from her early days as an assistant to Joe Quesada at Marvel Comics in the 1990s to her groundbreaking contributions across major franchises.

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I explore Lab Rat, a taut near‑future sci‑fi thriller where a group of scientists find themselves locked in a room with a chilling revelation: one of them is an AI in disguise — and it has been lying to them. With no way out until they uncover the truth, paranoia rises, alliances fracture, and the line between human and machine blurs in unsettling ways.

Tony sits down with the filmmaker to unpack the film’s provocative concept, its claustrophobic tension, and the creative journey that led to Lab Rat being selected to premiere on Dust, one of the most influential platforms for boundary‑pushing sci‑fi storytelling.

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🌀 Becoming a Cyclops, Surviving the Heat, and Stepping Into Legends
In this episode, Tony connects over Zoom with actor Aleks Paunovic, whose towering physicality and grounded emotional presence have made him a standout across genre television. Most recently, he brings the iconic Polyphemus to life in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, delivering a performance that’s equal parts monstrous, tragic, and unexpectedly human.

🔍 What We Dive Into

👁️ Transforming into Polyphemus The prosthetics, the costume, and the artistry behind creating a believable cyclops on screen.

🔥 Heat, endurance, and on‑set challenges How extreme weather conditions shaped the shoot and tested his stamina.

🎭 Finding character beneath the creature Aleks’ approach to performance when his face is partially obscured by makeup.

🥊 His time on Reacher 

🐐 Stepping into The Greatest Why the Muhammad Ali story resonates with him and what audiences can expect from the new series.

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⚖️ When the Judge Is an Algorithm: Exploring Mercy
In this episode of Byte, Tony dives into Mercy, the provocative new Amazon MGM Studios (who provided the audio) thriller that imagines a justice system run not by humans, but by an AI judge — a machine empowered to weigh evidence, determine guilt, and deliver sentences with cold precision.

The film raises a question that feels less like science fiction and more like tomorrow’s headline: If you remove the human element from justice, do you also remove compassion, fairness… and mercy?

Through conversations with the cast and creative team, this episode unpacks the film’s tension between efficiency and empathy, certainty and conscience, and the unsettling possibility that “just the facts” may not be enough to define justice.

🎙️ Featured Interviews
Chris Pratt
Anabelle Wallis
Kali Reis — Actor
Charles Roven
Marco van Belle — Writer
Timur Bekmambetov — Director
🧠 Tony’s Take
Mercy imagines a future where the courts run flawlessly — no bias, no fatigue, no human error. But perfection comes at a cost. When you remove the human element, you risk losing the very qualities that make justice meaningful: compassion, context, and the ability to see a person rather than a dataset.

It’s a future worth thinking about, because it’s closer than we’d like to admit.