I kept track of all of the podcasts I started and completed this year (totaling 25!) and in honor of having done that and keeping myself accountable here are my favorites and what I wrote mostly immediately after finishing them!
The Phone Booth: Fuuuuck the worldbuilding is so good and heartbreaking. What if you went to bed 14 and woke up omniscient. What if you were eating dinner with your family and your sister exploded into an 8 foot tall werewolf and she went mad from the pain and lost her humanity but was still once a person. What if you were two people in love and then your consciousness expanded and hungered for more and more and you took a whole city. It’s unfinished with a final season mapped out but no word on whether it will ever be produced.
The Attic Monologues: waaaaah I loved this SO much. I can’t wait for s3 in the summer!! (December me here - I’ve been tossing around the idea of relistening to s1&2 before starting 3 and so I haven’t started it yet) I think the characters all feel very real and lived in and I feel for them so hard. The almosts between the friends to almost-lovers hit me hard and honestly the episodes where they FIGHT are so well done. (Brief synopsis because my review didn’t really give one - Nyx Ryland is a university student who discovers a box of strange monologues in their attic with no indication of how they got there. The monologues are dreamlike and hold more power over Nyx than just the allure of performance. We begin to experience a creeping horror as the plot unfurls, paper and ink is not just that, and our supporting cast may be in danger, or they might be the danger themselves)
The Pasithea Powder: What else could I ask for? There were aliens, there were nonbinary and trans people, there were gay women, the romance is good, the plot is good if a little predictable but it earns its big moments, you feel people’s loss when they die, the war is really felt and Pasithea and its knockoff are really cool and well conceived, the main voice actresses are great, amen. (Brief synopsis because again, I didn’t really do that - we meet Captain Sophie Green and her former friend Jane Gonzalez after the war between their planet and its sister planet. Sophie is a young war hero, on tour with a delegation from her sister planet to improve relations. Jane is imprisoned for her crimes during the war effort, a young scientist who helped invent and distribute Pasithea Powder, a drug with memory-altering properties. The drug is eradicated and Jane and her fellow scientists imprisoned or executed - or so it is believed, until Sophie spots one walking free on a different world, and has no choice but to reach out to her estranged friend for help.)
Metropolis (episodes 1-11): GOD. This fucked!! All of the voice actors were great, the worldbuilding ruled, the plot is not unguessable but it’s so well built that the payoff in episode 11 (all that’s out for now) is so damn good, I can’t wait to see how they wrap it up. (Brief synopsis - Metropolis is a shining beacon, a neon utopia, amongst a world struggling with post-war poverty. Word only gets to the rest of the people about its wonders - diamond-swallowing as recreation, robots waiting on every citizen hand and foot - through reporters from other nations that are hand-selected to join Metropolis’s “sheep pen” to send word home. One such reporter is sports writer Stanley Bronfels, ace reporter Nan Kanally’s best friend. When Stanley disappears, Nan takes it upon herself to discover the secrets of Metropolis… or find oblivion herself.)
Second Star to the Left: AHHHHH. Very well done & well acted. Capitalism In Space being fucked and awful is of course one of my favorite genres. What if you were a kid and you and your friends went to scout school to become scouts for new settlement planets and there was a good chance a third of you would die or be stranded or would never see another human face, what if everything they gave you was falling apart and they never meant to give you any support, what if you shared a dream with another kid to be amongst the stars and he died before he got to go so you go, you go even though you’re not sure, and all you have is a robot and a voice in your ear and the hope that it will all be alright, that you won’t see your parents or your sister ever again but you hope for a better tomorrow, you hope.
