A really good listen - Case 63
Case 63. A Spotify original drama.
There are several reasons why no-one could be more surprised than me that I’m recommending this gripping 10-part podcast drama to you.
The first is that it’s a drama. That’s not, and please don’t judge me, a listening category I’ve ever been madly keen on. Although I do enjoy a documentary with dramatised elements, just in case you think I’m a complete heathen.
The second is those ten parts. Normally a time-commitment quantity that I’d shy away from.
And the last, and most surprising of all, is that it’s science fiction, which is a genre I’ve never had any interest in or enthusiasm for, for either listening, viewing or reading pleasure.
And yet Case 63 ranks right up there with the best podcast entertainment I’ve enjoyed in a long time. And there are several reasons for that too.
Taking that set of normally off-putting reservations in a slightly different order. None of the episodes is longer than 16 minutes, with the shortest being just over seven, so it’s easy to either fit them into a busy schedule, or, as I’d suggest you’ll find impossible not to do, binge them all in one wildly satisfying go.
Then there are the brilliantly acomplished actors who perform the almost entirely two-handed story (supporting characters get brief look-ins). Oscar-winner Juilanne Moore in her first dramatic audio role, plays psychiatrist Eliza Beatrice Knight, and it’s her treatment sessions with the man registered as Case 63 that form the framework of each episode. Oscar Issac co-stars as the patient she comes to know as Peter Roiter.
Julianne Moore as Eliza Knight and Oscar Issac as Peter Roiter in Case 63
As the series of initially routinely therapeutic sessions between the two unfolds, Peter increasingly frantically tries to convince Eliza that he has time travelled from the year 2062 in order to save the world from a pandemic that threatens to wipe it out, and that she plays a pivotal part in his mission to save humanity.
Initially we share Eliza’s carefully challenging scepticism, but as Peter describes a world 40 years in the future and lays out the unsettlingly plausible story about how the Covid 19 pandemic of 2020 has mutated into a planet-threatening crisis, he divulges enough information (like facts about Eliza it seems impossible for him to know), and twists that it starts to throw us, and Eliza, uncomfortably off balance.
The vacillating relationship between the two protagonists - at times calmly professional and co-operative, at others volatile, suspicious, provocative, frustrated, and even flirtatious - builds the narrative tension as the increasingly compelling story reaches a conclusion that is unexpected as it is startling. When you get there, I guarantee you’ll be pulling out your ear plugs, going “wait a minute? what???’ and plugging them right back in to listen to it all, all over again.
Case 63 is an original Spotify drama, adapted from a hit Chilean podcast, Caso 63, and since that show has aired three equally successful seasons, everything points to there being more of the English-language version. I do hope so.
You can listen to CASE 63 on Spotify and hear a short trailer for it HERE
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