Flutterby™! : Life with Althaar

One nice thing about walking to work is that I get a bit of time to enjoy podcasts. Lately I've been bouncing between music podcasts, like Strong Songs and Switched on Pop, and fiction, like Midnight Burger, Fawx and Stallion, The Amelia Project, Kingmaker Histories (Doesn't seem to have a clear "we own this" web presence), and... well... when I need more dick jokes in my life, Today's Lucky Winner. I'd caught up with those, Googled, and ran across a Reddit thread recommending Life with Althaar.

Setup was cute, low level maintenance guy, John B, is deployed by corporate to a space station, finds an ad for a room to let at a cheap price, turns out the catch is that his room mate is an annoyingly perky alien from a race that humans have a viscerally negative reaction to, but Althaar, the annoyingly perky alien, desperately wants to be friends with humans. And they have a neighbor who's kindly old lady plant species who occasionally makes dark comments about interplanetary domination.

Classic sitcom setup. A few funny episodes. Enjoying it, hearing the cast and producers get their sea legs. And then there's an episode in which the protagonist faces mortal peril, and it's an emotional kick in the gut.

And then it's funny, and then... it takes a dark and political turn and holy shit, this is powerful.

I posted a short rave on my blog, and one of the creators dropped by to warn me to stop at episode 30 until they can start creating new episodes again, because it's been on hiatus for a few years, but circumstances in the world mean it's important to them to continue.

Get past the intelligibility issues with Althaar on the first two episodes, that gets better. Some of the sound design uses a little too much stereo separation, headphones can be a little extreme. Yes, the episodes are long, but...

If you've needed a radio show that's an updated "Cabaret" for modern times, an inspiring tale of politics and resistance and what one cog in a machine can do, add this one to your podcast queue. And when they try to tell you that "nobody saw this coming", as they inevitably will, this is another example that we can point to.

Life with Althaar.

And in case it isn't clear, all of those other podcasts have positive recommendations from me and each deserves their own long review independently, but this one is kicking me in the gut, in an amazing way.