In the last four episodes of Gimlet Media’s podcast The Habitat, the host Lynn wraps up her podcast about the HI-SEAS experiment and what happens to the six crew mates afterwards. As with her previous episodes, she comes up with creative ways to lead her audience on all the way to the final episode.
Likewise said in the previous blog post about The Habitat, Lynn’s use of a specific topic for each of her episode proves to be helpful up until her last podcast. This style of podcasting organizes her story and brings a way for her listeners to be able to follow easily with what she has to say. For example, she has topics about how the crew “gets warm and fuzzy” and how the crew “gets pissed” which are all one episode long. Then, with each, she concludes her episode by showing how the topic about such interactions between the crew members comes back to the idea of the purpose and meaning behind this experiment.
Also, one noticeable aspect of all her episodes is the use of Lynn’s music segments in her pieces. In happy moments, she uses bubbly, floaty music which give an air of floating around, and in unhappy events, she uses dark, mystifying outer space music which give a feeling of destitute not at Earth, but in space, and in Mars. This utilization of music selections draw the listener’s emotions into the story and lock it in there so that they would be pulled into listening to the entire piece.
Moreover, Lynn makes ties and connections real strong between her episodes so that it triggers the audience’s memories and creates a consistent identity throughout her series. For example, she goes deep into how the crew members paired off and that there seemed to be some relationships and romance going on between them in a previous episode. Then, in the last episode, she comes back to this same topic and follows up with what had really happened between these crew members with real face-to-face interviews or recordings of phone calls they had about whether or not the recordings made inside the Habitat was what seemed like a romantic relationship to anyone listening or just a friendly relationship. This has an effect of reminding the audience to keep up with listening so that they don’t’ miss information that they probably were curious about too. Another example was where Shay, the crew doctor, was the most disliked out the of entire crew, which was mentioned in the episode where the crew “gets pissed” and is followed up in the last episode with an interview of if Shay knew if she was disliked by all the crew members and how she felt about it. In this way, Lynn’s podcast shows strong cohesiveness throughout the entire podcast series, and she brings it to a close with a strong ending of how the crew members had returned to their previous lives and how there was a trial two of the exact same experiment being repeated at the moment, ending with an air of surprise.. (513)
I believe generally this is a good podcast to listen to in terms as a series. I feel in comparison to the one I listened to this week, “the Disappeared”, the podcast Escape is better constructed and especially the narrator seems to have much more experience or guidance with making a podcast. As you stated that each episode is strongly connected to help the audience remain tied to the story along with each episode is a great example of the opposite from what my podcast did. My podcast perhaps has the same tone and style for all its episode but it most certainly does not continue the story. In each episode it states the summary of the problem, and gives an idea of the relation to the narrator but other than that it is basically a different episode everytime. I think it is really amazing how in the podcast you listened to states that the crew both in the same episode will have warm fuzzy feelings and also in the same episode will be mad at eachother. This happens to remind me of my younger brother, as he misses me tremendously as I am away from home and in school, but on the other hand as well, every time I go visit him we hang out for a day and then is completely sick of me. I think another really cool point you discuss is the fact about the crew member who was disliked by all other members, the way how the narrator built this up in the first episode but simply continues to build upon it through the episodes. So it acts more like a T.V series where the audience learns about these characters but the audience also grows alongside with such characters, which is quite amazing to see and I bet to listen to as well.
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