Transmissions from Colony One – Season 3 | 2015 | John W. Richter

I previously listened to seasons one and two and summarized my opinion of them as follows…

I give it a solid C. It does most everything right that it set out to do but I just didn’t care for it.

This third season is very different from the first two. First of all, the episodes are longer. Season one episodes averaged 9 minutes, most season two episodes are between 12 and 14 minutes but season three’s ten episodes are at least 23 minutes and go up to 40 minutes.

I took ALOT of notes/thoughts/jots on this show, so I’ll just paste them below rather than wordsmith a full writeup and, therefore, the following will be a bit disjointed.

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OK, that EVA scene in the first episode (starts about 8:45) is horrifying and chilling. Well acted, perfectly written – even the music and sound design. Just wow.

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This show got really good all of a sudden? Maybe it’s the longer episode running times – a more detailed story can be told. On the other hand, it’s not the story, per se, that’s got me hooked. It’s mainly the character interactions that kept me listening five episodes – half the season – in a single sitting. (Well, standing and working, but you know what I mean.)

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I still can’t imagine listening to this at a pace of less than a half hour every couple/few weeks.
Though, in all fairness, I’m not listening to any currently produced fictional podcast as they are released. I’m still catching up on all the great stuff released over the years that I was absent from modern audio theater. Therefore, I have the luxury of (and have therefore formed an addiction to) only binge listening entire shows.

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They need to abandon the found footage gimmick. It’s becoming unbelievable how much is caught on microphones. Or they should at least explain it better. But, once they add music, I can’t help but wonder why they don’t just started doing natural audio. Other than they’re kinda stick with the gimmick now. (Though, there is the rare breaks from it, like in episode ten in the command assignments scene.)

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It was episode six that I gave in and decided I probably love this. And want to start over again with season one when I finish.
Though, in eps seven and eight, I started to feel like certain inevitabilities were being artificially drawn out. Stretching credulity isn’t necessarily a crime, but, they’re kinda overdoing it. Plenty of drama, yes, but maybe at the expense of logic just to ensure the episodes hit their full running time and that they’d have a full ten episodes. Or maybe they had too many scenes they wanted to fit in at the cost of sensible storytelling.
As you can probably tell, it’s difficult to comment on this and remain spoiler-free.

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As of episode nine, I’ve noticed a pattern…
I have these chilling moments when I’m blown away and swearing this is a truly great show. But, then there’s other times I’m in disbelief at certain story and character choices or even just bored, asking myself what I ever saw in this show. And episode nine has some criminally credulity-stretching moments. Yet, I’m loving this episode. And how. I’m not even sure how I’ll rate this.

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So, there it is.
I’m gonna err on the side of enthusiasm and give this third season a B+ and I really want to listen to all three seasons again.

Transmissions from Colony One

Transmissions From Colony One is a radio drama set in the near-future of 2057. Twenty years prior, United States President Richard Thorpe (R-CO) announced the start of a “New Dawn,” a global attitude shift toward widespread space exploration. Technological advents such as fusion energy, worldwide high-speed railway systems, and internet speeds faster than ever envisioned laid the groundwork for an economic explosion, but it lacked a platform on which to occur. Thorpe gave the world an outlet for its immense wealth, asking people across the world to simply look up for humanity’s future.

In the twenty years since, the world has changed drastically. MECTI (Mars Exploration, Colonization and Terraformation Initiative) was established with the goal of starting a permanent human presence on Mars. This meant using fusion-propelled rocketry, the construction of a massive space elevator to make transportation from the surface of Earth to low orbit more cost and energy-efficient, and the creation of a mammoth space station that would dwarf today’s International Space Station. All of these things needed to be done in order for MECTI to work. Now, twenty years after the birth of MECTI, the first crew, MECTI-1, is about to land on the surface of Mars, in the flat expansive region of Amazonis Planitia. This will be the first manned mission to the surface of Mars, and the first of thousands of MECTI manned missions to the Red Planet.