The long hiatus is over, at last the new and final season of “Alice Isn’t Dead” is here, and it is just as surreal and wonderfully eerie as its predecessors.
Night Vale Presents’ 2016 podcast has finally come to a conclusion.
The last episode of the final season, fittingly titled, “An Ending,” aired August of this year, and the novel adaptation is expected to premiere Oct. 30.
“Alice Isn’t Dead” is a thriller/mystery fiction podcast, created by the same company who produced “Welcome to Nightvale” and “Within the Wires,” Night Vale Presents.
The story is presented as the audio diary of an unnamed truck driver, voiced by Jasika Nicole, traveling cross-country looking for her wife, Alice, whom she had long presumed dead.
The story starts off strong and wonderfully strange.
The pilot takes the already frightening narrative of a creepy man following a woman to her car and subverts it into something much more sinister as the narrator begins to doubt that the man is a man at all.
Following the story is thrilling and mysterious as Praxis, The Thistle Man, and even the company whose truck she’s driving, Bay and Creek Shipping, all begin to follow her-metaphorically and literally-and as she slowly discovers along the ride that everything is not as it seems.
This podcast creates something unlike anything else in its field, it makes excellent use of its medium in a way that is rarely incorporated into narrative podcasts.
It is presented as a narrator talking into the CB radio in her semi-truck, sometimes speaking into it as an audio diary, and referring to the audience as ‘Alice’ as if she were leaving a message for the woman she is looking for.
The combination of this story happening somewhere in the forgotten parts of Middle America and the second person in which the narrator speaks to the audience creates an extremely immersive experience for the listener.
With lovable characters and an enrapturing plot, this story is definitely not like anything else out there and something very much worth taking the time to listen to.
The character building in this story is phenomenal with the narrator being someone the audience comes to love more-so than any other character.
Hearing her thoughts and apprehensions and seeing her vulnerable allows the audience to become invested in this character and makes the slap of hearing her suffer throughout the story that much more vicious and her victories all that more rewarding.
“Alice Isn’t Dead” has managed to keep the audience on its toes, adjusting the focus of the plot each season.
The first season centering around the conflict and the characters’ personalities, the second focusing on new characters and completing the journey, and now the third season will continue the pattern of not following any pattern, and focus on what happens to a story once the mystery is solved.
Fans loyal to the story will be excited to finally see the resolution to long unanswered questions, and new listeners will be happy in the knowledge that they don’t have to wait a year to get answers to these mysteries.
“Alice Isn’t Dead” is definitely in a class on its own, unlike any other podcasts in its field, and it creates a narrative that is just genuinely enjoyable to follow.