Lesbian Lovers in a Lawless Land
# of Episodes (at time of listening): 32
Genre: Comedy / Fiction
Imagine this: It's the Apocalypse. Or life there-after I guess. The zombie outbreak has come and gone, and humanity is trying to make a comeback. Meanwhile, you yourself are in fact a zombie. One of the last remaining in a dying breed of creature. Not only are you a zombie, but you're conscious of this fact. On the outside, you're a shambling, fetid corpse. But on the inside, your mind is trapped inside this body. Thus is the premise of "Hannahpocalypse". Now that you know the story, on to my thoughts!
I think this show is fine. Not groundbreaking, not terrible, just fine. I think it has a great concept in dealing with human consciousness being trapped in a body they can barely control. I also appreciate how pro-lgbtq+ it is. However, I think overall execution is where the show failed to grab me.
From the get-go, I was struggling to get invested. There was an element of being "talked at" instead of "talked to". Characters would spend episodes doing what felt like exposition dumping the entire time; stating basic fleeting realizations or facts. Truth be told, once something passes the boat of hooking me, it tends to be difficult to get back on. For example, there are some antagonistic forces in play, but nothing felt genuinely threatening until Season 2 Episode 8. I made note of this specifically because this was the point where to me, it felt like things were finally starting to ramp up in excitement. The villainous force began to feel ominous and imposing, and events were coming together. The unfortunate part is that this doesn't take place until you're 3/4 of the way through the show.
Within the world-building of the story, there is a faction of robots alongside the humans and zombies. Unfortunately this concept feels a bit slept on & thrown to the side, as the robots barely feel relevant to anything that happens. Sure, there is a side character / companion robot that joins some of the characters later on in the story, but other than one episode of robotic fighting that I can recall, not much else is said or done with them. So for now, they just kind of exist in the background. Maybe more will happen with them in future episodes, who knows!
Another thing I wanted to make note of were the technical issues I came across. Unlike the many other podcasts that I've listened to, I had difficulty loading episodes for this show. Sometimes they simply wouldn't start & I'd need to download them to get them to play. On the flip side of this, I'd also have problems with episodes finishing. All recorded bits of audio would finish playing, but it would still say there was anywhere from 30 seconds, to 3 minutes remaining. Alongside this, the track would just auto-stop at whatever the aforementioned marker was, requiring manual input to proceed to the next episode. And just to mention one more thing: I noticed occasional clipping / editing errors (kind of like a scratched CD skipping) strangely enough mostly on the ad breaks. I genuinely have no idea what caused these problems. There's a chance it could have just been on my end, but no podcast before or after has incited this issue.
All in all, I think maybe this show just wasn't for me. I've read many other reviews, and people give it high praise with a positive outlook. As with anything I listen to or review, I will always encourage any reader to give the show a chance and experience it for themselves. What works for me might not work for others, and vice-versa. There's definitely an audience for this show, but unfortunately I think I'm not in that audience.
Other notes:
- There is a lot of meta / 4th wall breaking in this series. At first, it's a fun little bit. But as the series goes on, it starts to integrate with the actual plot, causing the story canon to become confusing.
- Season 1, Episode 12. I'm not sure what happened here, but I won't lie, this one was rough. The entire thing felt like a massive dialogue of "word vomit". On top of the muffled & mumbled delivery, I had no idea what was happening. Just a lot of words being said. Luckily, this was a filler episode so it didn't take away from the actual story. It just became background noise to me. I imagine it's how "The Peanuts" feel when adults talk.
- I really enjoyed the villain in the latter half of Season 2.