Author Topic: PseudoPod 756: To Witness  (Read 973 times)

Bdoomed

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on: May 09, 2021, 07:04:06 AM
PseudoPod 756: To Witness

Author: Luciano Marano
Narrator: Julian Bane
Host: Alasdair Stuart
Audio Producer: Chelsea Davis

PseudoPod 756: To Witness is a PseudoPod original.



Show Notes
Though the author is a professional photojournalist and has covered many car crashes, all characters, events, and organizations depicted in this story are fictional.
Bad Samaritan (YouTube link)
Don’t Breathe (YouTube link)
Nightcrawler (YouTube link)
Savageland (YouTube link)



Wesley had beaten the cops. It happened sometimes, but not often. So he quickly pulled onto the shoulder, leaving his car running and the door open, grabbed his camera off the passenger seat and leapt out, determined to make the most of his good fortune.

The drivers looked to actually still be inside their vehicles this time.

He needed this. The supposedly epic car fire his editor had ordered him all the way out to Port Orchard to shoot had been a bust, nothing but a torrent of smelly smoke pouring from under the hood of an old VW van in a diner parking lot and some geriatric hippie telling annoyed firefighters, “It’s never done anything like that before!”




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« Last Edit: May 13, 2021, 04:26:27 AM by Bdoomed »

I'd like to hear my options, so I could weigh them, what do you say?
Five pounds?  Six pounds? Seven pounds?


Scattercat

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Reply #1 on: June 21, 2021, 10:41:15 AM
This one took me on a rollercoaster.  "Oh, neat, like 'Nightcrawler!"  Then, I will admit, I almost turned it off when the "escape mental patients" showed up.  I am not a fan of crazy=evil as a trope.  But I also trust Psuedopod, so I kept with it, and hooray, monsters.  And so all is well with the world. 

I just wish that some of Wesley's musings at the start of the story had tied more strongly back into this whole "mother of monsters, ultimate darkness" that shows up at the end.  She was cool and deserved more foreshadowing. 

The motif of the asylum and the title reminded me of Outlast, a video game which greatly disappointed me in a sort of reverse enthusiasm curve to the one described above.  I went into (watching a playthrough of) it expecting it to be crazy=evil, but then the middle gives it a twist where the asylum has a story about a monster that, like Slenderman, thrives on being known, and to me this was a perfect explanation for a survival-horror game protagonist; you have to learn about the monster, but then you have to survive, if just barely, to tell the world and thus spread the curse.  And as the protag is a journalist, it all fit perfectly.  (Then they wimped out and went back to "No, it was actually just crazy murderers all along, but they were being experimented on by evil doctors so gosh what is morality anyway?") 



JDuckworth

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Reply #2 on: August 29, 2021, 03:12:15 PM
Listened to this one while driving with my fiancee. She's a journalist and she really thought this one lost all believability when the MC was trying to take gory photos of a car wreck for his newspaper. "No newspaper would publish anything like that" according to her, and I suspected the same, given the fact I can't recall ever seeing such photography published by any reputable site or paper (maybe the MC works for a grimy tabloid?). Gory photos of war-wounded children in Syria? Sure. But photos of highway carnage? Nope.

Wasn't a huge fan of the use of the "escaped mental patients" trope myself, even though to the story's credit there's the extra dimension of
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
. Didn't think the pair being obese and anorexic was necessary either.