yeah, sure. mild spoilers under the cut @kata4a

brief summary: TMA is a horror podcast with five seasons that starts with episodic monster-of-the-week stuff and eventually widens out into a unified plot.

the most straightforward thing i can say about TMA is that the execution on the micro-level is very good - individual horror concepts are great, the characters tend to be pretty well-written, some individual episodes really shine. on a macro level, though, the show has several tendencies that make it a lot worse.

season 1-2 are mostly one-shot horror stories which are almost universally good to great, and season 3 marks the major transition to more of a plot focus. at this point the horror takes a backseat, since once you understand more of what's going on, everything is less scary.

in this way, the worldbuilding is kind of a blessing and a curse - things follow well-defined rules, kinda, but scary things having rules makes them less scary. conversely, the setting is very well-put-together, to the extent that if you pay enough attention, you can conceivably figure out plot-critical elements prior to them being explained to you. i liked this a lot.

i also really liked how clever some of it is. many people just end up completely fucked, regardless of what they do, but there's several great examples of humans doing clever things to fight the supernatural and winning.

one classic one from the first few episodes is a guy who has a fucked up coffin locked with a skeleton key, and he finds himself waking up in the middle of the night holding the key, having slept-walked toward the coffin.

locking the key away doesn't work (he just finds it again or it magically returns to him) so instead, he freezes it inside a block of ice. the cold wakes him up before the key melts and is usable.

i wouldn't say this type of thing is central to the show, but it comes up a fair amount and it was one of my favorite parts.

but on a macro level the show feels very flawed. it has a consistent tendency, starting in season 1 straight through to season 5, of killing off interesting characters that i like and centering boring characters that i don't. there are lots of phenomenal characters, which will leave you baffled about why certain specific ones got so much airtime.

there's also a reliance in s4 and especially s5 on a certain romantic relationship carrying the podcast, and uh. it is not interesting enough to justify center stage, let me tell you that.

i also have highly specific gripes about the finale, which (without completely spoiling the show) are intertwined with the above issues and left me feeling like the tone of the finale and its actual content were extremely disjoint.

all seasons have great moments that i think about a lot, but having listened to all of it, my impression of the show as a whole is as a work that is less than the sum of its parts.

alright, major spoilers for the entirety of the podcast, everybody

@kata4a

So one of the major plot points of the podcast is that some individuals with connection to the supernatural could, in theory, perform a ritual that would bring about the apocalypse but also give them godlike power. Season 3 was dedicated to stopping a specific group from doing this.

At the end of season 4, in one of the best episodes of the podcast, the major, overarching bad guy wins. He turns the world into a nightmare hellscape in exchange for power. Part of me wishes the podcast had just ended there - if it had, I would probably like it more.

And then, season 5. Season 5 actually had a lot of great moments - resolution of a lot of character arcs, more info about some of my favorite subplots, and a return to form in writing some phenomenally good horror. But the overall plot is not great, which is a real fucking bummer of a quality in a final season.

Issue #1: the main bad guy, who carried huge portions of the show with his incredible charisma? He's in the show for like, one more scene, an incredible anticlimax. Turns out instead of becoming god, he just got wireheaded to a bunch of fear heroin. He's having a great time, but immortal and omnipotent? Hardly.

The main character literally just yanks him out of his seat of power and mercs him. It's not even hard! And he lived in the real world for like, several centuries! Starting the apocalypse quite literally reduced his life expectancy, when his main motivation is supposed to be immortality (which he basically already had).

So was the brilliant architect of all this destruction just a huge dumbass? Yeah, sorta, but he was also being manipulated in this lame, poorly-developed "man behind the man" kind of way. Overall, huge waste of a great character.

Issue #2: One Good Character Remains. Everyone left is annoying except the main protagonist.

Issue #3: The resolution of it all is that they have a choice. Turns out multiverse theory is real, but all this horrible supernatural stuff is just confined to their universe. They have a choice - they can save their world by letting the fucked up supernatural stuff out into the rest of the infinite universe.

The main character immediately takes the obviously correct approach of saying no fucking way. He points out that since they feed off humanity and humanity is basically dying out, they have a chance to permanently kill off the eldritch abominations torturing them by starving them out.

Everyone else disagrees with him. It's framed as this great moral debate, but like, do the math! Take one for the broader multiverse!

Anyway, he gets overruled and they do the thing that fucks over the rest of the universe. And maybe he could've stopped it, except he changed his mind. Because of his boring relationship and #gaylove, or whatever.

It's a "the eldritch abominations win over humanity, decisively, because humanity is selfish" ending, except it's framed as some morally ambiguous thing instead of by far the worst outcome.

I think when the show grappled with morality, it usually did a decent job, but the ending made me want to rip my hair out.