strange trails (podcast)
Strange Trails
horror. 10 episodes. minor spoilers below.Finn Mitchell and his best friend Omari Mason travel to a rural town in West Virginia to investigate folklore about a serial killer there known as the Shadow Man.
Listened to this mostly at the gym! An interesting experience.
The first few episodes were so intriguing! They leaned heavily into the small town folklore aspect with the character of the Shadow Man and previous unsolved murders. The investigation coming from outsiders (hosts/narrators) really added to the vibes, especially as they conducted interviews and got stonewalled by the community. Like: sure, we possibly have a serial killer running around for decades (!), but how dare you come here and stick your nose in it!
It was around... halfway through, maybe? that my happiness and eagerness to listen to it kind of took a dive...
A subplot about drug overdoses was introduced. Writers tried for a little bit to make it stick to the Shadow Man plot, but gave up completely. And! one of the character interviews made it incredibly obvious what was going on. That subplot was also somehow tied to systemic racism, since we didn't have enough going on. While I appreciated some of the hard conversations that came from that, it really didn't fit at all with what had been established earlier.
I'm not sure if they were trying, in some way, to show that evil comes in many forms? Some of them mundane and from people you expect to be "good" and "moral". I don't know, but it personally didn't work. Even more so with the Shadow Man reveal, ugh.
There was a switcharoo from supernatural to realism to supernatural as the episodes progressed. The real background of the Shadow Man came from a huge info dump (1 single character interview) that confirmed what he really was. And then his destruction came about in the last episode for maybe 10 minutes total. It was so underwhelming.
I expected some fun folklore fuckery and got this instead. The final recorded scene was also so abrupt to the point I had to go check if my internet hadn't gone to hell when it all went silent. Boooo.