Brimstone Valley Mall delivers demonic delights
Last updated on September 4th, 2020
Last August I was typing like my life depended on it, attempting to live-tweet one of the final panels in Podcast Movement’s inaugural audio fiction track. During the final moments Whisperforge’s Kristen DiMercurio, known to most as Dr. Grissom in Ars Paradoxica, casually announced her first podcast as a writer and showrunner would be a show about some demons working in a mall in 1999.
I, and many others, were immediately charmed by the idea. One delightfully Angelfire-esque promo website, a successful $8,000 IndieGoGo campaign, and a calendar year later that show’s first season has wrapped with a two-part finale. Now that all of Brimstone Valley Mall is out, it’s time to step back and take stock of what DiMercurio and her crew brought to the Whisperforge family.
Spoiler alert: it’s fun.
At the risk of sounding like a boring English teacher I can’t help but praise BVM for its compact nature. The premise itself could be the engine that powers a semi-infinite loosely-written audio fiction series that runs for triple-digit episodes, occasional moments of actual plot swelling near the season finales before falling back into a comfortable background hum of fun tropes and plots referencing pop culture.
BVM occasionally stops to smell the roses of meta-jokes and parody, but rarely loses that consistent thread of progress. The ticking clock of consequences and motivations stops for nobody. Every character is clearly defined and carves out a distinct voice in a sea of demon names that can sound dangerously similar at times. The writing is then bolstered with a strong cast of actors that even manage to bring a sense of 1999 to their performances. Elliot Gindi’s performance as Misroch reaches such wonderful heights of uptight scheming the alternate universe 1999 animated series version of Brimstone Valley Mall would’ve had to cast Rob Paulsen to get anywhere close.
While the cast is jam-packed with winners, the shining star for me on both a character and performance level is dear, sweet Asmoraius. Mark Wolf Roberts delivers an unabashedly flirty lust demon that frequently embraces the fact the show’s already marked Explicit on iTunes for language. It’s a rare sight in larger indie audio fiction series to embrace overtly sexual characters/situations outside the confines of being An Erotica Podcast, BVM has taken a similar path taken by network neighbor Caravan. The show never strays over the line into outright sex-foley-is-used-in-a-scene territory (à la Dreamboy or Starship Aleria). Asmoraius simply brings the steamy energy to every scene he drifts through. to make scenes as gay and steamy as possible.
The sound design work of Jeffrey Nils Gardner and Jared Paul pays off like a slot machine throughout season one. Not only are the set pieces amazing (the arcade and carousel in the opening first two episodes alone are enough to get one’s attention), they survive impact with the enemy of all audio drama: garbage speakers. I’ve played BVM through everything from my $50 bluetooth earbuds to the speakers of a work van that’ve been worn down from years of fart rock and competing against tire noise. Somehow though all this BVM remained listen-able for a vast majority of scenes. Every few scenes I encounter a sublime moment of someone skilled in their craft absolutely, shamelessly flexing on me. Those more complex scenes in BVM play out like magic tricks: cool to the average passer-by, absolutely captivating to anyone who knows their EQ from a hole in the ground.
Given the show stars a cast of demons with a modernized take on the classic flanged-to-hell-and-back Demon Voice, there’s quite a few moments where the audio can get a little muddled. I’ve listened to one particular scene in the finale where a demon voice is projected through speakers on a stage twice through my “good” headphones and I’ve yet to figure out what’s being said save for context clues. It’s an issue that normally isn’t too big of a deal with audio drama as transcripts become de facto requirements on podcast websites, but it’s still an issue I bumped into.
Which leads to the bigger issue: Brimstone Valley Mall, as of this writing, hasn’t updated episodes on the website to include transcripts beyond the initial two episodes that dropped on launch day in 2019. Both of those transcripts are excellent, including some excellent descriptions of SFX and . They’re true transcripts with full descriptions, not phoned-in copy/paste jobs from the original scripts.
It’s a fixable problem, but an unfortunate oversight to have happened in the first place in a show where character voices frequently take on intense distortion. I can see the lack of transcripts being a significant issue for folks with more auditory processing issues than myself. There’s also a handful of other odd omissions and bits that beg to be buffed out, including a lack of press kit, a typo in a crew member’s name, and no direct push to follow to the show’s excellent Twitter account.
In the canon itself BVM stays on-point save for one odd dalliance. The B plot of the episode in question is a Serial parody in which Asmoraius interviews a handful of people who are, in reality, podcasters playing demonic versions of themselves (save for one playing an actual character from their own that serves as a wink at it being canonical with BVM). The segment feels like it takes up about ten minutes of the 22 minute runtime and serves as comic relief for the joke-light A plot. From a structural standpoint I get the purpose it serves, but the specific combination of a Serial parody in 2020 with a glut of tongue-in-cheek cameos coats the scenes in Bonus Episode Energy. The overall package feels like a piece of extra-canonical content one usually finds in a bonus upload or siloed on a Patreon account.
It’s not inherently bad, to be clear. The scenes are cheesy as the quesadilla I made this morning for sure, but not without their moments. Even with those moments, though, I could never shake the feeling I was listening to something one step over the line into self-aware humor. And that’s saying something for the amount of times BVM punches through the damp cardboard that comprises its fourth wall. Just know that if the idea of such a scene feels like a sticking point the payoff is well worth your patience.
BVM has such a nerdy, passionate crew they took the time to score ad reads with 500 year-old music written on a person’s butt in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. There’s a lot of care taken with this show that carries through into the manic goblin energy directed through its Twitter presence. It’s a fun show to follow both in-universe and in the meta. As a package season one is a satisfying comedic romp, warts and all. I cannot wait for what fun quirks the show’s next round of crowdfunding will bring along with whatever season two might look like after, well, that whole finale. A wonderful audio drama adventure full of 90s nostalgia projected through a crew of delightfully evil characters. It’s a hell of a good time.
Update: Brimstone Valley Mall has since updated their website to include full transcripts for every episode.
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