Audio Fiction I Love: The Final Death of The Amelia Project
This story begins with cocoa.
Not just any cocoa, no — this cocoa was specially ordered from the café Les Deux Magots in Paris. The Interviewer, played by Alan Burgon, has very high standards when it comes to his hot chocolate. The way his assistants, Joey and Salvatore (played by Gianluca Iumiento and Ravdeep Singh Bajwa), make it sounds divine.
INTERVIEWER:
(taking a sip) As pure as the angels and as hot as hell. (taking another sip) Ah… As divine as deity and as sweet as sin.
The Interviewer has many foibles, which you gradually learn over the course of the first season of this audio drama podcast: he also enjoys Maltesers, he blows bubbles to help him concentrate, he hates boredom, he needs to be stopped from reading German poetry and, most importantly, he believes there’s always time for a story. But what you don’t learn about him: his name, his age, the name of his employer or when or how he came to work for the death-faking agency. There are clues, of course, but to uncover the mysteries of the Amelia Project, you will need patience.
The first season of The Amelia Project lays out the formula for the show: each episode, someone arrives at the agency’s London office needing to disappear and explains their predicament to the Interviewer, who comes up with their falsified death, a deal is struck and celebrated over a glass of Veuve Clicquot (or another beverage, in some instances). That formula allows for people to enjoy a self-contained story — with some light foreshadowing here or there — and even turns itself on its head at times, as in the non-linear time-jumper ‘Melissa Menken’ or the phenomenal fourth-wall-breaker ‘Percy’. But just as you’ve adjusted to this formula, the second season tears it all up and transforms into an investigation into the Amelia Project, which culminates into a spy drama by the third season.
This is how the story stays fresh: reinvention. Just as the characters die and reappear as someone else, so too does the story. Over the course of the five seasons, The Amelia Project has spanned genres, continents and now centuries — perhaps even millenia. It’s a headache for the fans who want to keep a solid timeline.
INTERVIEWER:
This is a long story. It’s a story that stretches from Pyongyang to Celebration Florida, from the foothills of the Himalayas to Bournemouth Pier, from the Judaean Desert to Milton Keynes.
I don’t know how this story will end. As I’m drafting this section, I’m enjoying a hot chocolate, not from Les Deux Magots in Paris but from Monarch Cakes in Naarm (Melbourne), a café you’ll know from my review of Love and Luck is special in its own way. It’s been a few weeks since the second part of the fifth season came to an end. A third part is coming, but I don’t know when. I know it will be the final part, and the fifth season will be the last.
Thinking about the show’s ending leads me to remembering how I first encountered it, shortly after the end of the first season. I’m reminded how literally different the show is now than back then. Back then, when I first listened to the show, the first episode was different: not ‘Zale Indigo Ravenheart’ but ‘Elizabeth Barlow’.
If you’re only now listening to the show for the first time, listen to the episodes of the first season out of order. After ‘Prologue’, listen to ‘Elizabeth Barlow’, then ‘Zale Indigo Ravenheart’. It’s a better introduction to the show, as it was designed to be the first episode.
INTERVIEWER:
Congratulations.ELIZABETH:
What… what for?INTERVIEWER:
One in a million find our number. More than half hang up before the beep. We get back to about one in ten.
I remember howling with laughter when I first heard that episode. The Interviewer’s antics baffling his tightly wound client. Elizabeth’s way of coping with her husband’s infidelity and subsequent divorce by escalating to the extreme (Emerald Fennel could take a few pages out of her playbook). The ridiculous, over-the-top blow-it-out-of-proportions behaviour — poor Joey and Salvatore, honestly. But then, at the end of the episode, the laughter died in my throat at an instance of transphobia.
I don’t know what kept me listening after that. Maybe it was just that I couldn’t get to the Pause button. In any case, I must’ve calmed down when I didn’t hear any repeat instances of offending material.
You will not hear that transphobic ending anymore. Sometime ago, creators Philip Thorne and Øystein Ulsberg Brager took the episode down completely. Then they changed the order of episodes on the feed, and ‘Elizabeth Barlow’, complete with a new ending, became the third episode.
To all the listeners who said it was a bit iffy, but not offensive: no, it was transphobic. To all the listeners who quit listening because of that: absolutely valid.
I include this history of the show because not doing so would be dishonest. But also because it shows how the show can literally change for the better. Thorne and Brager listened to the criticism and acted on it. The Amelia Project is not without its faults — other than ‘Elizabeth Barlow’, I have a smaller bone to pick with ‘H’ — but I can see past that.
It was ‘Percy’ that had me hooked on the show. Not the World Audio Drama Day special — though that is certainly my favourite episode of the show and maybe of all shows I’ve listened to, ever — but the episode that appeared in the first season. What hooked me, in the end, was the simple question: ‘Do you come up with ideas, or do ideas come to you?’
How does inspiration work? When is art original, when is it derivative? Who is art for, its creator or its audience? What matters more, intention or messaging? Why is art capable of outliving its artist?
INTERVIEWER:
But Haruka is your character, shouldn’t you be in control?MAI-LINH:
Listen, I write her life once. But in the minds of my fans she lives 120 million times. I’m outnumbered.INTERVIEWER:
You’re saying an author isn’t the owner of their creation?MAI-LINH:
I’m saying it’s symbiosis.
The Amelia Project repeatedly asks these questions, but never answers them. Sometimes it’s through characters trying to outrun the horror they’ve created, Frankenstein-esque, like Granville T. Woods. Sometimes it’s characters rebelling against their creator (Frankenstein’s Monster-esque), like Siiri. Sometimes it’s characters so dedicated to their craft they’d die for it, like Luke Dougal.
Time and time again, the only answer is this: telling a story makes you a part of it. A good story will shape you, just as you shape it. A story has a life of its own. It can live on beyond its ending.
But even if a story lives on beyond its ending… There is, always, an ending.
VENERIO:
Once there was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to the market to buy provisions. A little while later the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, ‘Master, just now when I was at the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked straight at me and made a threatening gesture. Lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.’
The merchant lent the servant his horse, and the servant mounted it and dug his spurs in its flanks and went as fast as a horse could gallop. The merchant went down to the marketplace and there he saw Death standing in the crowd. He went up to Death and said, ‘Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?’
‘That was not a threatening gesture’, said Death, ‘it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him here in Bagdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight… (thunder rumbles outside) in Samarra.’INTERVIEWER:
(unimpressed) It’s a nice story. But the message is depressing.
The Amelia Project is about death. Faking death, escaping death, embracing death, mocking death… and now, facing death.
As I’m writing this, the final part of The Amelia Project is in production and due to be released this year. This article is scheduled to come out on the same day as a crossover with Midnight Burger, the zany sci-fi show by Joe Fisher. I look forward to listening to it. I’m sure I’ll be hearing more about the rest of the season as well.
I don’t know how this story will end, but I know there will be a death. A death that, if the finale of the fourth season is to be believed (I had to listen to The Lost Cat Podcast to cheer myself up after that one, an insane statement considering The Amelia Project is supposed to be comedy and The Lost Cat Podcast is horror), may not be avoided. The first and second parts of the season, for all their whimsy and epic scale, have been preparing for it. And with that last death, regardless of whose it may be or how permanent it is, the Amelia Project will be changed irrevocably.
Yet like the phoenix that symbolises the show and its eponymous organisation, I believe the show will live on. It will live on with every new listen and relisten. It will live on in the minds of the devout listeners who remember to take a photo every time they order hot chocolate. It will live on in the minds of the creators, who went from making The Amelia Project as a side project to full-time jobs as audio drama creators.
It’s easy to believe, in this world of remakes, reimaginings, adaptations, sequels and prequels that the show will live on by literally transforming itself into a spinoff, following one of the many threads that lie open to the showrunners. But I hope it doesn’t. Franchise fatigue has well and truly set in for all of us, and for all the hype, all most spinoffs have achieved is a cheapening of the original ending. Let a story end well. Let it die. Let it live on only in fan theories, fanfics and fanart.
I don’t know how this story will end, but I hope it ends with Veuve Clicquot. One final toast, for one final death. And as the characters raise their glasses, so too should the creators.
Crack open the champagne, Thorne and Brager. Here’s a toast to you, to Fredrik Baden and the incredible genre-traversing credits, to Anders Pedersen, to Maty Parzival, to Burgon, to Julia C. Thorne, to Julia Morizawa, to Hemi Yeroham, to Iumiento, to Bajwa, to Benjamin Noble, Torgny G. Aanderaa, Jordan Cobb, Erin King and the many, many talented storytellers who’ve worked on The Amelia Project. Here’s to a story that doesn’t always get it right, but is worth telling. Here’s to a story that will outlive you, hopefully, for many years.
Raise your glasses, your cups, your steaming mugs of hot chocolate. A toast, to the final death of The Amelia Project.
