Unwell, a Midwestern Gothic, season one
Good news, we have a new podcast to be obsessed with.
Unwell, a Midwestern Gothic was released in February 2019. The latest episode was released earlier this month. Today we’re going to be looking at season one.
We start with Lily Harper, a young woman with a difficult relationship with her mother, Dot. When Dot breaks her ankle, Lily reluctantly agrees to stay with her until she gets better.
Dot Harper runs a boarding house in a tiny town called Mt Absalom in Ohio. It’s been in her family for generations. Lily stayed there during the summers when she was a kid. But she hardly considers this place her home.
Shockingly, she’s not happy to be there.
The boarding house has just one resident, a historian named Abby who is there to research small towns. There is also Wes, Dot’s teenage assistant who runs ghost tours and seems weirdly attached to the house. Eventually, the crew is joined by an astronomer named Rudy.
Most of the episodes aren’t jam-packed with horror content, I’ll be honest with you. Much of the story revolves around the characters living together in this strange little town.
And this would be enough story by itself, though maybe not a horror story. Just listening to these characters bicker amongst each other is frankly entertaining. I love Abby’s rules for small talk in the morning. Lily’s fear of spoiled food, which leads her to do some infuriating things, is hilarious.
However, in each episode, there are one or two moments that at the very least raise significant questions. If not the hairs on my arm. There are incriminating phone calls made by the town librarian. Howls in the night when there should be no wolves. A door in the basement that is and is not there, depending on who’s looking for it. Soon, we realize that one of the residents of the boarding house is not who we thought they were.
While all of this is going on, Lily and Dot are dealing with a very real-world terror. Dot is showing signs of dementia.
I loved every character in this season. I loved Dot, who is funny and strong and has no filter. I loved Lily, who loves her mom despite their painful past. I loved Wes and his ghost tours of a house that he loves. I loved Rudy, who has such a passion for, well, just about everything but wolves.
Abby (pronouns they/them) was probably my favorite character. They are insistent on their boundaries, passionate, and funny as hell. They also had no problem breaking into the library and stealing microfiche when the need arose.
Unwell feels cozy. It manages to be both character-driven and events driven. When nothing scary is happening, it’s a story about a family dealing with a sad diagnosis. It’s easy to get lost in that. So when the radiator starts talking to Abby, or Wes forgets where he lives, or the wolves start to howl, it takes the listener as much by surprise as the characters.
So I was doubly surprised when the last few minutes of the season sounded like the writers from Old Gods of Appalachia took over. It was a shocking scene full of fire and screaming. So much screaming.
The first season of Unwell left us with more questions than answers. Why has Mt Absalom twice tried to take possession of Dot’s boardinghouse? What is Hazel, the librarian hiding? Why did we hear wolves in the night? What is up with the creepy diner and its otherworldly staff? What is wrong with Wes? And why is an entire town so in love with celery?
Fortunately, we won’t have long to wait for answers. Seasons one through four are available now on the Unwell website, as well as most major podcast platforms. And, season five just started this month.
I’ll be marathoning the next three seasons as fast as I can, and breaking them down here over the next few weeks. I hope that you’ll be joining me.
(4 / 5)
I just wanted to post a brief shoutout to Linda Gould of the Kaidenkai to say thank you for including my Around the Campfire story. Feel free to follow this link and give it a listen. I especially love how Ed’s voice is conveyed. You really feel as if you are on the camping trip with everyone.
Around the Campfire sets the tone for the month of August wherein authors are invited to participate in telling tales as part of a whole campfire series, kind of like it did here originally on Haunted MTL in 2022.
I am among the authors who read their own works as well, with The Fur Coat. You can listen to my own reading on the Kaidenkai here. You can also read along with the original as posted here to Haunted MTL in 2020.
We have reached the last episode of the podcast, Dolores Roach. No, this really is the end. There are no more episodes unless they’re hidden away on some Patreon page I don’t have access to.
The reason I’m being clear upfront about this is because, after you listen to this episode, the fact that there are no more episodes is going to be both confusing and infuriating.
The story
This episode begins with Dolores in a tunnel, being chased down by a train. She barely manages to escape, jumping onto a subway platform and then boarding the train that almost hit her.
Dolores is in a state of panic. She just escaped the tunnels. She just saw Mother Cleats killed. Now, she’s on a subway train, surrounded by people she doesn’t know. And she is a mess. She hasn’t showered since going down in the tunnel, after all. She probably doesn’t smell great.
Dolores rides the train to Coney Island and gets off. She walks to the ocean and gets in the water to wash herself. And when she comes out, she’s recognized by an old friend, Georgie.
And it is then that we realize that it’s been Georgie she’s been telling this whole story to.
Seeing the state Dolores is in, Georgie insists that she come home with her. She gets Dolores some clothes and something to eat and makes her tell her everything that happened down in the tunnels.
And then, Georgie’s son comes home. A seventeen-year-old son who looks exactly like Dominic.
That’s where the story ends.
What worked
I had a hard time finding much to like about this finale. If it hadn’t been the last episode it would have been great, but it was.
However, I did like the shift in perspective that takes place when it’s revealed that Dolores has been telling this whole story to Georgie this season. Because of course, up until now, it’s felt like she was talking to us and only us.
What didn’t work
This episode had a lot of problems. For one thing, I didn’t trust Georgie from the start. And that distrust just got worse the more we saw of her. She’s a true crime writer who just happens to find Dolores when she comes out of the tunnels after two months. No, Dolores isn’t buying it and neither am I. And inviting a woman you have reason to believe is dangerous into your home is stupid. No one in their right mind would have done that. No parent would have allowed Dolores within the same block as their child. The whole thing was unbelievable.
But that complaint pales to the largest issue I have for this season finale. For this episode that is, as far as I can tell, a series finale.
I say that because I cannot find another episode listed anywhere. If I were to have just listened to this episode without knowing that, I would have assumed this was just a mid-season twist.
Because that’s what this feels like, a mid-season twist. It answers nothing. It wraps up nothing. It gives us no satisfaction at all. And that is more than frustrating. It is infuriating. It ruins any joy we might have gotten from the rest of the season.
The ending of Dolores Roach was, in short, not an ending. It stopped in the middle of the story, there’s just no way around it. And this episode came out in October of 2019, almost five years ago! I know that podcasts are rather notorious for having long periods between seasons. Mine is no exception, season three of AA will likely not see the light of day until 2025 at the earliest. But after five years I think we can all safely assume that we’re not getting any more episodes. And so Dolores is always going to be in limbo. We are never going to know whether or not Georgie was telling her the truth. We’ll never know what happened to Ginger or Ephraim. We’ll never know what Dolores does, standing in her old friend’s house with what appears to be Dominic’s seventeen-year-old son standing in front of her.
We will never know, because the show is taking an entirely different turn. And so, I’m afraid I have to add Dolores Roach to the same infamous list as Lime Town or The Black Tapes. This podcast was great until they decided to just not end it.
If you’ve waited this long to see if you should listen to Dolores Roach, here’s my advice. Listen to season one, it had a reliable and satisfying ending. But season two should be left in obscurity where all half-finished stories belong.
(1 / 5)
If you’re a fan of my work, please check out my latest story, Nova, on Paper Beats World. New chapters every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
We’ve reached not only the second to last episode of this Dolores Roach season but the series as a whole. If you’ll recall, last episode we were riding the high of a great new villain. We had an unexpected and shocking story arc.
Now, after listening to this second-to-last episode, that high is gone. And we are left with disappointment, lamenting what might have been.
The story
We begin our story with Dolores being shown to her new home. The home she’s to share with Ephraim is considerably smaller than the home they were sharing before.
Ephraim is thrilled. He’s read Mother Cleats’ treatment and is all in.
This doesn’t make sense to Dolores. To her, this place seems like a downgrade. But for Ephraim, it’s a chance to belong. A chance to feel safe, to not fear hunger or violence.
Dolores has no illusions of being safe from that, though. And she’s not thrilled with being drafted as the Chain’s new killer and cook.
She tries to get Ephraim to run with her. Even prison would be better than what she’s facing. But he doesn’t intend to go anywhere.
Next, Dolores tries to get Ginger to go with her. She points out that having a baby in a tunnel instead of a hospital is probably not her ideal birth plan. But Ginger has some sort of strange fit and screams at her.
Dolores is lost, unsure how she’ll ever fight her way through all of these people to get out of the tunnels. But at the last moment, she gets unexpected help from a very unexpected source.
What worked
Let me begin by saying that it’s honestly hard to say that anything worked in this episode. Which isn’t to say that it was bad. The acting was as wonderful as it’s been the whole series. The sound editing was wonderful.
But everything that did work suffered from the pacing. We’ll discuss that more later.
This episode was full of sudden yet inevitable betrayals that I love. I don’t want to ruin the fun for you. But it’s safe to say that no one is on good terms with anyone at the end of this. At least, the people still alive.
I also appreciated the setup for a pivotal death. Early in the season, Ephraim told us that the middle rail was certain death to touch. I think we all knew that this was going to come up eventually. That we would, sooner or later, see someone’s eyes melt out of their sockets. And yes, I’m pleased to say that did happen.
What didn’t work
If the podcast Dolores Roach has a flaw it is in its pacing. And that flaw came very much to light in this episode. Because this should have been at least two episodes.
It was not as fun to see the ending of this episode as it would have been if there had been more build-up. An important character betrayal didn’t mean as much as if there had been more of a build-up.
Overall, this story would have felt so much richer if there had been more room to breathe and experience them. It was as if we were to be served a wonderful meal. And instead of savoring it, we shoveled it down without truly tasting it. And that’s a shame. This seemed like a delicious story. I wish we could have tasted more of it.
Even though there should be more, there is only one episode left of Dolores Roach. And I don’t know how to feel about that. They’ve done everything they set up to do already. So, what’s left for Dolores now? That’s the only question we have left to answer.
(3 / 5)
If you’re a fan of my work, please check out my latest story, Nova, on Paper Beats World. New chapters every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.