Listen Up: Archive 81

Another week, another podcast.  I am definitely doing more than my resolution rules.  Go me?

The rules as I laid them out originally for 2018:

• I will listen to twelve spec fic-oriented podcasts, one per month.  Done that! As of this point I have listened to or sampled The Bright Sessions, Lauren Proves Magic is Real, Steal the Stars, The Haven Chronicles, Lime Town, The Bridge, Archive 81, The Message, the Black Tapes, Wolf 359, Mabel, and Kakos Industries.
• For each podcast, I will listen to a minimum of five episodes per podcast before I either give up or add it to my entertainment cycle.

The amendment to the rules:

• I am not going to hold myself to listening to five episodes of any one podcast. I may listen to five first episodes of five different podcasts. Or I may listen to three from a new one. Or I may backtrack and listen to further episodes from a podcast I’d tried before.

I started this resolution because podcasts were a new form of entertainment for me and one I wanted to learn to like. I have learned. Now I have a new addiction.

I picked Archive 81 up partly because someone mentioned it as one worth listening to, and partly because the cast of The Bridge kept mentioning it as worthwhile as well.

I can’t find an official premise that’s actually informative.

The official one from the website reads: Archive 81 is a found footage horror podcast about ritual, stories, and sound.

Spoilers, eventually

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That’s not really helpful. It gets the “horror” across, but it’s not really a lot to go on.

So here’s my cobbled-together premise: A young man is hired to digitize a collection of tapes in a strange, isolated bunker, and steps into a mystery about a peculiar apartment building, its equally peculiar residents, and a monstrous conspiracy.

I listened to the first “season” and while I didn’t hate it, I won’t be continuing on.

While individual episodes were often interesting, exploring the weirdness lurking in the Visser apartment building–people with bizarre abilities, an evil cult spearheaded by a man named Samuel who might be a demon, and so forth–there were a lot of things that made me shrug them off.

The general format of this podcast is that we check in with Dan, being recorded by his mysterious boss’ mysterious company, while he tells us what he’s up to.  Then he plays one of the tapes that he’s being paid to digitize, so we hear what he hears–in this case, the recorded interviews conducted by one Melody Pendras as she talks to the Visser residents, and uncovers terrible things. Then Dan comments on the recordings, and tries to figure out what Melody stumbled into.  He doesn’t listen to them in any particular order, so the podcast has a bit of a jigsaw puzzle feel to it.

Not a bad format, except Dan talks so freaking fast that it’s just annoying. Especially in comparison. And his actions kind of make me side-eye him, no matter how many excuses the writers pile on.  You’re listening to strange tapes that seem to be (negatively and dangerously) affecting you in your bunker and you fail to quit?  You find out your boss is taping your every call and spying on you, and you let him talk you back around?  Lots of red flags and Dan just stays with the job.

Also irksome, this horror podcast goes for a lot of random screams and muffled shrieking and gory sounds. Not really my thing while I’m driving down the road.

BIG SPOILERS from this point on.

There’s a weird conceit here that just didn’t work for me. Dan is our narrator, our protagonist, and apparently he’s also missing.  So each podcast episode begins and ends with his best friend Mark reminding the listener that he’s playing these tapes to let the world know about his missing friend Dan, and encouraging people to help him find him. But… all those “help me locate my friend by liking the podcast on Facebook, etc.” speeches at the end just rang really false.

There’s a careful line to tread when you’re trying to pitch fiction as reality, and this went wrong. Each time I heard it, Mark’s plea broke me out of the mood that Dan’s narrative had set.  It’s weird, but I found this “save my friend” pitch much more disruptive to my suspension of disbelief than an overt advertising of the podcast would be.

I think with Archive 81, part of the problem with Mark pleading for help is that a podcast seems like an ineffective way to get the word out about his missing friend: what happened to calling the police?

Also, it feels weirdly self-serving on his friend Mark’s part. Like someone who’s milking a tragedy for his own benefit.

But most of all, the fake “save my friend” didn’t work for me, because it broke the suspension of disbelief. How did Mark even get his hands on these recordings of Dan in the bunker?

We don’t find out that answer until the final episode of the first season when Dan, while being attacked in a bunker where the power keeps cutting out, somehow manages to (presumably) email/upload the digital files to his friend.

And Mark doesn’t wake up to find Mr. Davenport (Dan’s mysterious and dangerous boss) on his porch, smiling like an evil Agent Coulson. We get a few mentions that someone’s trying to stop the podcast, unless we help him keep it on the air!

Which also doesn’t work because by this point, we’ve seen exactly how effective Mr. Davenport’s association is. It’s hard to imagine a single podcaster providing Mr. Davenport the slightest bit of difficulty.  Nope, by this world’s logic, Mark should just vanish the way Dan did.

I kept thinking this whole podcast would make so much more sense if it was just us–the audience– listening to Melody’s tapes, following her story arc as she explored the truths and dark purpose of the Visser building.

Or, the narrative frame could easily have been centered on the mysterious agency represented by Mr. Davenport. I have no idea why this agency has to hire some random flunky to do this digitizing job. There are all sorts of indications that Davenport’s already listened to the tapes. So presumably, there’s something specific about the act of digitizing them that creates the cataclysmic end scenario–which seems to involve bringing a demon that may or may not have destroyed the Visser building into the bunker so that he may or may not attack Dan?  In the end, I’m just not sure why this mysterious, always unnamed agency, is doing anything they’re doing.

Also, the writers killed the pet rat.

I can see why a lot of people like it, though. There are a lot of interesting bits and pieces hurled about, tempting me to go on. I liked the residents of the Visser–the man who couldn’t be recorded, Jesse the runner, who retrieves strange items for other residents–and the clues that Dan and Mark uncover about the Visser building and the Vos Corporation who owned it.

The sound mixing is good. The sound effects are really good (even if too hard on my nerves). The characters are decently-drawn—Dan, Melody, Jesse, Chris the drug dealer–minus the plausibility issues of Dan keeping the job instead of running away.

My favorite character was probably Mr. Davenport for his blandly evil ways. Evil Agent Coulson, I tell you. Or for those of you out there with a yen for old television: Sheriff Lucas Buck of American Gothic.

I thought there were some really interesting stuff here but it was kind of undercut by the scattered nature of the podcast.  Dan listens to the tapes in any old order so it’s hard to make a cohesive storyline out of them. Puzzle pieces, and within the first season, we don’t get enough of them to see what the big picture might be. Oh, there was a song that everyone heard. Oh, there was some deal struck with some demonic-style entity that wanted to play with humanity. Oh, the humans who live in this building change in really fascinating ways. Oh, maybe this strange building draws strange people to it. Oh, here’s a museum of weird, ominous stuff.

Because Dan never really understood what he was listening to, I didn’t either. I think I would really have loved more of the Visser building; I would have loved to have Dan in a better position to investigate himself; and I would have liked Samuel, as a villain, to be better led-up to.  Overall, the first season just felt rushed.

Between the time I started listening to the podcast, and the time I prepped this, their website, which was solid to begin with, improved and added transcripts!  I love the option of transcripts: it’s not that I rush ahead and cheat. But when I’m looking back, it’s super helpful to have them available.  Or when a pivotal moment is somehow unclear to me, it’s excellent to be able to look up what just happened.

From what I understand, this series only gets deeper and weirder, so even though it didn’t work for me, I’m urging others to give it a try.