Homecoming
© 2016 Gimlet Media
Bleak and alluring radio theater about the security policy of the future (or the present?).
It all started on a dusty treadmill in the basement of the City Administration's office complex, where one dark February afternoon I turned on the first episode of a newly released radio drama, hoping to be if not sucked then brought into a fictional universe that would make me forget the world around me, more specifically forget to look at the treadmill's display that kept track of my slow progression. With small steps I listened my way into Homecoming, and suddenly it all took off and it was spring and I ran around in a nearby park and tried to enjoy the last ten minutes of the last Homecoming episode, without interrupting myself by glancing down at my podcast app hastily counting down towards the end.
Homecoming consists of fictitious, secret audio recordings of everyday dialogue and phone conversations, put together into 6 episodes. The characters in the conversations are in different ways related to the U.S. military-industrial complex, more specifically a new and innovative project about which we as listeners gradually get more information. The voices we hear are shrill, desperate and frustrated, because they have been caught up in a web that they themselves can only glimpse a small part of, and they mostly argue, defend or threaten one another. Through the podcast's soundscape of background noise, distorted telephone connections and feeding microphones, clear visual images of cafés, dining rooms, nursing homes, and meeting rooms emerge, and make this otherwise dark and tense universe accessible and strangely welcoming - especially after the first few episodes of the podcast where the plot only slowly unfolds and voices and names of the characters are quite difficult to discern.
The lines in Homecoming are sometimes delivered in a way that resembles a more traditional, overdramatized radio play, which momentarily snaps you out of the illusion of listening to actual real-life recordings. But apart from this, the podcast lives up to its self-announced ambition to create a naturalistic mockumentary experience. (This ambition is revealed to the listeners at the end of each episode throughout Season 1, where the screenwriter and actors engage in a behind-the-scenes session, a marketing concept that falls somewhere between the moderately interesting and the self-gloryfing).
Homecoming should be heard chronologically from episode 1 of Season 1, and the episodes are 20-30 minutes long. It's definitely worth giving it a try until episode 4, if you're not immediately hooked. As a dedicated fan, I was also very content with Season 2 of the podcast.
En podcast-tjekliste til revolutionen