In the next two episodes of Gimlet Media’s podcast The Habitat, Lynn, the host, explores the first few months into the lives of the six crew members of the HI-SEAS experiment. Like expected, it is not the easy life for these people. And Lynn uses specific narrative techniques to vividly draw out the life in The Habitat for her listeners.
First of all, in order to create an effective way of organizing her episodes, she assigns a topic to each of her episodes and digs into specific happenings inside the dome that relate to the topic. In this way, Lynn is able to come up with a unique, compelling story in each of her episodes yet still be able link each of them with one common idea of looking at the effect confinement and isolation has on humans prior to sending humans to other planets like Mars.
Throughout the entire podcast (and not just this episode), Lynn utilizes the voice recordings the crew made for her podcast to create a consistent identity and to help depict her narrative instead of her just going on and on with her narration. Specifically for her second episode, Lynn focuses on how the crew adapts to their new year-long home and family. In describing the dome, which is critical for the audience to visualize and get a clear image of in order to empathize with the situation the crew members are put into, she uses various recordings made by various crew members. For example, she depicts how large the entire dome is with the recording a crew member made of walking across the diameter of the dome and counting the number of steps it takes to do that. Lynn lets us listen to the entire number of steps it takes for the crew member who counts out loud his steps as he takes each one from one all the way to thirty three. With each count, she combines it with a mysterious beat as well. This intensifies suspense and such emotion allows the listeners to engage with the story as it enhances the experience for the listeners with the combination of many different sensory descriptions. Then, she goes on depicting various daily activities these members do from eating only powdered, dry food, powdered turkey, powdered peaches, using a compositable toilet with no sewer system, to having 30 second ice cold showers that leave the members blue and red by the end of their shower. And Lynn focuses heavily on visual and auditory descriptions for all of these experiences to construct her narrative. She lets us listen to how a juicy peach sounds like biting into a cracker and describes how the powdered turkey when added and baked with water looks like brown mushy applesauce. Afterwards, she finishes the episode with the same recording of the steps one of the members took across the diameter of the dome with the same impounding beat. This ending was effective as it recaps the theme of the episode and hooks the audience to the next episode by giving an air of suspense. In such ways, Lynn builds her podcast narrative in a compelling, mystifying form. (527)
