Good morning everyone, I have now seen Project Hail Mary three times and my appetite is whetted for excellent storytelling. And boy oh boy did this week deliver! Let’s gooooooo
🚗 Welcome back, Keisha’s weird and creepy road trips! Don’t Tell Alice premiered this week with the first new episode of Alice Isn’t Dead since the live episode in 2019. WHAT a comeback. In some ways nothing seems to have changed—Keisha is still driven by curiosity and the urge to protect Alice above all else, but now the mysterious stranger who commissions Keisha insists that this cannot get back to Alice, and Keisha, in her curiosity, finds herself agreeing as she drives into whatever comes after America. Knowing the Night Vale Presents crew, this concept will come with a plate of neat and poignant commentary, and I, like Keisha, cannot resist driving on.
🌲 Happy Earth Day and Arbor Day from World Gone Wrong, and I gotta say…look, I know we all love trees, and the walking trees (especially the method of locomotion, jeez) is so cool, but a cult is a cult. Writer Bob Raymonda is very generous to the society of treehuggers in the Adirondacks. Then again, the real and present danger to national parks and wildlands in the US could very well make someone join a tree cult. Idk, mixed feelings about the implications, but still a really good episode.
🥪 Here comes @midnightburgr with another banger! Krok starts off this episode by saying, “You risked your life for a bit of agency,” and yes, Ava denies this, but isn’t that just the problem with Krok? A bit of agency is everything! Of course the dictator-god-villain of this season has no understanding of freedom. That’s what the diner is for, to bring freedom! Even to the maimed and genetically manipulated monster from Gloria’s very first adventure. I don’t know how the crew is going beat Krok, but I know they’ll do it. As Teta said, “Peace in our time, fuckheads,” and it’s both a fervent wish and a battlecry.
👑 And last of all, from the creators of @thesiltverses, Our Wars Have Ended have publicly posted their first two episodes. I listened to the first, and then I had to take a break because…like holy crap. I almost want to give just like, a list of elements that are presented to us, like a festering charcuterie—the world built on a corpse, the historian whose accent marks him as separate (and to no small effect, given that I think this is a story about colonialism), the ways in which some live in uneasy peace with dead masters and dead slaves and others spurn them and want them dead, the casualness with which their dead Duchess asks her people for a new body that she's happy to pay for—like The Silt Verses, and to some extent Eskew as well, Muna Hussen and Jon Ware are building a story on a society that treats people like things. I am entranced and obsessed. I can't wait for more.
Hey, you! Have a good week!
