normsherman wrote:y'all getting' soft on me.
Just playin. Message received.
They all gettin' soft on you. Seriouslike. I thought this episode was great; disturbing but awesome, and I don't believe the Drabblecast should shy away from material like this. Here's why.
The Holy Trinity of my podcast list is Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. And while Pseudopod puts out great horror, there's one thing that the Drabblecast can do that Pseudopod never do, and that's surprise people with a horror story. Because whatever happens on Pseudopod story, chances are excellent something is going to end badly for someone. But with the Drabblecast, you never know what's coming, and you can never make that assumption.
This story really could have gone anywhere at the beginning. Many Drabblecast episodes take a surreal humorous twist, and there was the potential for that here. There was also a potential for an ultra-dark satire or some kind of parody of sci-fi tropes for this story. But nope, it bypassed those exits on the literary highway, rolled the windows up, locked the doors and drove straight to hell, with the audience kicking and screaming in the backseat.
One of the great things about the Drabblecast is that the audience is never sure what kind of speculative fiction they're in for. Sometimes it's like Willy Wonka rowing scared children down a river made of chocolate. But occasionally it's like waking up in a darkened room to a video message explaining that you need to use the pocket knife on the table to cut someone's stomach open to get the key that will stop a bear trap from exploding your jaw.
And God bless exploding reverse bear jawtraps, because if we didn't get a few of these on the Drabblecast once in awhile, then the Drabblecast misses out on that potential for shocking people in that way. And that's detrimental to the whole show because, and I'll say it again, what's great about the Drabblecast is at the beginning of the story, the audience never quite knows how deep that rabbit hole goes, or where it leads.
