Dark Shadows:
The Tony & Cassandra Mysteries 1.3:
The Mystery
of Flight 493
written by
Alan Flanagan
Tony
Peterson should just give up on mass transportation, shouldn't he?
Funnily
enough, after making suck a big thing about the inspiration behind
the last two episodes, this one strikes me as being pretty much pure
Dark Shadows. Again I stress
that I've seen basically nothing of the original show and I know the
Burton movie is hardly representative but this episode deals with a
confined space and a lurking, unseen threat which has been the basis
of most of the audios I've heard from this series.
Today's
confined and not quite real environment is a domestic flight trapped
in a time loop. I'm not usually fond of time loop stories but a
recent episode of Star Trek: Discovery
convinced me they can be done well so I decided to give it a fair
hearing. Like the aforementioned Discoery
episode, The Mystery of Flight 493
dispenses with the total loss of memory when the time loop resets
relatively quickly. After all, its something that's obvious to the
listener and frustrating to sit through time and time again. Instead,
Flanagan uses the repetitions to slowly build an idea of who his
one-off characters are and what motives drive them, which is pretty
tight writing considering the brief period he has to write each
development into and the pre-set events that have to take place
around it all.
Not
to spoilt the conclusion but the other thing that makes me feel this
is the most Dark Shadows-esque
episode of the set so far is that the threat, when eventually
revealed, is not completely explained or defeated but rather
survived. There's always seemed to me a touch of Lovecraft about the
Dark Shadows universe
and this, perhaps more than any audio I've listened to so far,
carries that sense that the uncanny is not only there but impossible
to truly fight.
Honestly,
of the three stories in the set so far this is my favourite by a long
chalk and that's why this is a short one. Time loop stories, by
necessity, sacrifice having a lot of plot for their central gimmick
and I'm reluctant to discuss the actual important events of the story
(which are, naturally, loaded towards the conclusion) for fear of
spoiling what I genuinely think is a great little story.
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