OK, so from the name alone, you can see that Fathom or Derelict doesn’t have a big, slick marketing team behind it. Who changes the name of a podcast between seasons, and then in the most astonishingly confusing move, starts referring to the first season as “a prequel” to the second? Well, J. Barton Mitchell it would seem, the polymath behind this stunning piece of audio sci-fi, who is somehow writing, producing, directing and editing every episode.
However, listening to either season, you’d have no way of knowing this wasn’t coming from some enormous production company. It is a sonic masterpiece, with vast amounts of its extensive story told purely through incredible sound design, whether set at the bottom of the sea or in the midst of outer space.
Fathom, which is not a “prequel” but just the first season (I was so confused when I tried to figure out how to begin listening to this show, so trust me, start here), is the tale of a team of scientists and engineers on a huge underwater research laboratory built next to a vast, inexplicable artifact known colloquially as the Vault. We’re a fair way in the future here, humanity having spread across the galaxy, but this whole season is entirely set on Earth, at the bottom of the ocean.
The Vault is weird, and Dr. Eva Graff (Elizabeth Laidlaw), who heads up the team of researchers, is hearing voices. Whispers. However, no one has yet figured out how to get the Vault open, and the private company funding the whole endeavor, Maas-Dorian, is about to pull the plug. It’s just about then that an awful lot starts going very, very wrong.
Like Solar, a lot of Fathom is about the relationship between various characters in its closed environment and a sentient AI. It’s also about an unrelenting series of astonishing disasters, as huge numbers of the cast and crew are facing ever-growing dangers, an awful lot of death, and even giant spider-like warbots of their own creation. And, in a more personal way, it’s a program about the turmoil of being a parent and the permanence of loss.
In season two, the show—now called Derelict—jumps from under the sea to the far reaches of space, with a mostly new core cast on a mission to recover a colossally large ship for Maas-Dorian that’s been mysteriously abandoned during its mission. As you might imagine, this very quickly becomes about learning the hard way what’s behind it all and…look, it’s almost impossible to explain the actual plot of Derelict without giving away huge parts of Fathom.
It’s safe to ambiguously say this is once more a story about human and AI relationships, as well as character arcs driven by the effects of parenting. As much as it might sound like the two seasons are disparate, they are linked in fantastic ways that it’d be ruinous to explain. But what also ties them together is that sound design.
I just can’t celebrate it enough. There are minutes at a time in some episodes that are just soundscapes, extraordinary aural storytelling of gargantuan disaster, entire buildings or spaceships collapsing around characters, and terrifying enemies skittering or crashing around.
A consequence of this immaculate audio production is the release schedule. However, right now you’ve got 15 episodes to listen to, each at least an hour long, with Derelict’s episodes reaching as long as an one hour 45. This means it can be months between episodes, given the incredible amount of work that goes into making a movie-length audio drama of such scale, seemingly mostly by one guy (along with a fabulous cast of smaller-name actors). Season one was 10 episodes long, and season two has six episodes out so far since it began in…2023. So it’s hard to know when a new episode is due, although episode six was October 2024, meaning on average, we can hope for February? Maybe? Admittedly, it was six months between episodes five and six, although that does seem to be unusual.
This show is also listener funded, with a premium option for those who want to back it. Or, if not, it’s all entirely free (with ads) on any podcast app. Please, grab this. It’s a fantastic story, made utterly incredible with its mindblowing audio effects.
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