Ok, I realize I’m a little late to the party, and that no one has been eagerly watching the posts to find out what some random guy thinks of Marley and Cratchit, but I just can’t help but comment. I thought this was one of the best stories I’ve heard on EP. And I was DREADING listening to it. I work for a professional theatre company, and we have staged A Christmas Carol every single year for 35 years. When this episode came out, I had just experienced Dickens’s story about 16 times in 20 days. That’s why I had to wait until February before I could contemplate listening to it without wanting to defenestrate myself [just when I thought I’d never have an excuse to work that word into a conversation!]. Plus, though I love Christmas, I’m not really a big fan of Christmas stories. They’re just too hokey for me.
But I was blown away by how well this story worked (and it had nothing to do with Christmas, other than its association with Dickens’s tale). At first I was getting hung up on the inconsistencies with the original story, but I just had to put myself in the mindset of listening to an alternate version of the lives of these characters, not something that could actually fit with the original. So I enjoyed it. But then lo and behold, every single one of the seeming inconsistencies began to merge and fit with the original, until by the end they all tied in perfectly! And the narration was spot on too! This was about as flawless as an episode gets, if you ask me.