This one was a hard one to listen to. The brutality of war and occupation was very present in this story, and brilliantly done. I particularly liked the way that - as Alasadair (sp?) pointed out - the story drifted back and forth between allegory and straight-up narrative. It was interesting, how on the one hand I felt for the main character and the indignities and violations he and his family suffered at the hands of the Women, while at the same time I could see the broken bones of the cruelty and rigidity of his people's culture poking up around the edges. I could root for him, despite the fairly awful things he sometimes said and thought, because he was a victim of so much, and his pain was so obvious, but it was nice and complicated.
For me, this story brought up a couple of other thoughts that my fellow Escapists might find interesting.
The first is that I enjoyed how this story talked about the real personal side of grief and pain and frustration, and how these feelings can create (or at least prepare the ground for) thoughts that we think of as bigoted. After listening to this story, I somehow found myself thinking about all the people in real world America who might, for example, say terrible things about Latinos, but do it in part because our broken economic system has trapped them in long-term unemployment. Their circumstances don't excuse their actions, but I wonder if we wouldn't find ourselves feeling sympathetic to their plight - the same way we are sympathetic to the POV character's in this story - if we could hear their world as the story they tell themselves.
Second, I have always been fascinated by the experience of people who watch the world change around them, leaving them behind. There's a certain tragedy to transformation, even when it leads to a world with more justice. That's not true in this world, where it seems like the changes are just going to bring about a different sort of brutality and oppression... but it's interesting nevertheless.
I did find one serious flaw in the story: compassion fatigue. About 15 minutes from the end of the episode - right after he was raped - I had the opportunity to sit in my car and hear out the rest of the tale, or go upstairs and have to wait until the next morning. Normally, I'd do the former, but I was just... so... sick of hearing about the endless parade of injustices and violations heaped on this poor bastard. I don't think that this is a flaw of the subject matter, but rather a flaw of pacing. When your story is this grim, you've got to either sprinkle in some points of light, or you've got to wrap it up just a little bit faster.
That's my 2¢ anyway. Maybe I've got limited compassion energy because I just finished up spending five years working in inner city schools, and my compassion muscles need a little while to recover. I still felt like the story should have been a little lighter, sprinkled with the occasional break from the grimness, or a little shorter.