Musings of a Babylon Lurker

Leviathan Chronicles – Audio play, season 1

Sunday, October 10th, 2010 | audio play, scifi, technology | No Comments

During travels between Netherlands an Denmark I have been listening to an audio play titled  ”The Leviathan Chronicles” by Christof Laputka , a story of immortals living among us. Throw in some deep sea and air travel and some ancient legends of how the immortals came into being, and you got the sense of the story

The first “season”, 25 episodes is out now and I listened to those, with several meta eposides in there.

The story is intended to consist of 2 seasons of 25 episodes each. Since the production of the first season took longer than planned, the show will not be released until all of the second season has been produced.

My first impression is that the production values are quite good, and the story plot is flowing rather well, as seen in the first season. If (when) the second season arrives I plan to follow it, yeah I am curious enough.

I did find the theme music somewhat intrusive, but it does fit the story to a large extent. One thing I noticed : The extensive use of a narrator is not too bad, but a few things did pull me out of the story.

The first is that I found the narrator, at least for me, speaks at the same break-neck speed all the time, even when the narration is more on the descriptive side, or scenes with less action. Why not relax a bit when the story warrant a calmer tempo ?

Second, I found that for an audio play there was too much narration and too little dialogue.

The two first are minor niggles compared to the third one :

In this example the action is just ramping up, you hear heavy footfalls – attackers on the way . . . then the narration suddenly goes into description mode, describing the attackers in place of continuing the action . . . The story completely lost its momentum for me.

Now the main complaints are done, I found the chcracters rather believable in the context of the story, and the story seems to be rather consistent in its progress. Likewise the acting was mostly good, though I found the narrator/narration the weakest link in the story.

Since this was a podcast play with comments from the writer, I will have to say that I found that he was talking too long and with too many repetitions after the main episodes, and in particular in some of the meta episodes. But that is my personal matter.

I will rate this to 7/10 on the Lurker’s scale.

Tags: Leviathan Chronicles, scifi. audio play