#uncontrolled

Seeing as how this is only the first season of Un(con)trolled, and a rather short one at that at only eight episodes, I find myself with the usual problem where I feel as though I'm only seeing bones of the operation, the outline of a much bigger project.

We're only just setting the scene, we've just barely even touched the frosting on what could be a very rich and layered cake, we are at the very very start of what could be a long race with the finish line far beyond our reach.

It is something that simply all first seasons must do, and yet reaching the end of Un(con)trolled's first season still left me feeling a bit hollow.

And if this is truly just the beginning and Un(con)trolled is gearing up to be this full-fledged, edge of your seat online sleuthing tale of espionage and moral ambiguity...well, I definitely think we could have started things off with more of a bang.

It's oddly difficult for me to piece together an opinion on Un(con)trolled because what I have to review feels like but a fragment of a fragment. And though some of those pieces have their bright spots, I've had to plunge my hand into some rather jagged bits to find them.

All the good and juicy bits will be out some time in the near future and this stretch of eight episodes, while it does accomplish the goal of establishing some sort of norm and its central conflict, doesn't really grab me or compel me to go much deeper into the mystery on a sheer account of its vagueness and the only truly meaningful parts feeling so haphazardly thrown in by quite literally the last few minutes.

Un(con)trolled does accomplish its goal of giving us the setting and introducing its characters simply because it has to and yet I feel like I've been invited to a housewarming where the paint is still wet and the couch is still covered in plastic.

There's this vague sense of incompleteness that hovers over the entire operation that I simply cannot shake and upon relistening to episodes to get the grander scope of the entire story with more context, I still found myself very distracted by this.

This is also felt on a technical aspect. I feel Un(con)trolled would definitely benefit from some more background music during transitionary scenes. Due to the relative silence that lingers behind most of the conversations, a scene transition can be hard to follow and the ads will hit you like a jump scare. I thought my Spotify Premium had suddenly expired on me out of the blue as some sort of practical joke.

Pair that with the fact that most episodes can range from six to eight minutes long and a decent duration of the runtime gets outright cannibalized right before your eyes (ears?) the second an advertisement shows up and eats up a decent two or so minutes.

But this is just business in the podcast industry and perhaps I’ve just gotten used to ads being read off by the voice actors at this point or being completely ad-free as opposed to just having commercials suddenly spliced into the beginning and end of an episode.

I'm no audio mixing expert but I do feel there are ways to go about ad placement so much more smoothly and frankly I don't think it would bother me this much if they were intercut much more naturally, perhaps into a longer, meatier episode so that it doesn't feel like the all around runtime was being held hostage.

In fact, I think the show being longer would have helped in a lot of ways.

Do you mean the episodes or the season itself, Podcake?

Both, actually.

Un(con)trolled in its short runtime has such an ambitious idea crammed into such a small space that it runs the risk of not having much of anything to say by the time its over, resulting in a finished product crippled by its execution, length, and pacing.

And personally I’d put a lot of it on pacing.

I feel a lot of stuff, particularly the events of episodes one through three as well as episodes seven through eight, could have easily been sandwiched together into their own individual episodes.

A single episode could have been dedicated to Kenah's personal relationships and I don't see any rule that says that her interaction with her best friend and a later interaction with her situationship couldn't have happened in the same day.

As for episode seven and eight, I think their placement a little earlier into the season could have given season one a much more tangible conflict which leaves room for Kenah to jump right back into her demons and the listeners truly seeing how dangerous she can be in several episodes rather than just one.

If anything, I think season one would benefit from taking a few pages from whatever season two has cooking and you end up stuck with something that doesn't have enough intrigue interspersed between the mundanity of Kenah's frankly quite normal daily life when she isn't engaging in her problematic hobby of cyber sleuthing.

The show's thriller aspects don't really come to fruition until the very beginning and the very end, causing its effect on the narrative over all to be incredibly brief. This leaves you with a backlog of episodes that, while their contents certainly become much more important and questionable upon a second listen, left me with an arched eyebrow not in contemplation but befuddlement.

Upon listening to Un(con)trolled, I find myself recalling an audio drama back in 2021 that I really enjoyed.

That show was Colt Coeur’s PLEASURE MACHINE which was also a single digit long, black led thriller that deals with the complications of self expression, fairness, and social media. I felt it really nailed its theming due to a combination of its writing, interpersonal narrative style, and brisk but digestible pace that gave its presentation a touch of the surreal. 

I feel like while I had time to marinate with PLEASURE MACHINE's narrative and understand the general gist of what it was trying to say, it's as if Un(con)trolled couldn't decide what speed settings they had adjusted their show to, resulting in a story that goes too slow on the upswing and then much too fast on the final lap.

Which is a shame because I think during the slower moments when the show is analyzing its psychological elements, that's when its writing starts to shine. Un(con)trolled has got quite an interesting message to share about the nature of justice and what is really at stake when we decide that simply blocking somebody isn't enough.

I can still appreciate Un(con)trolled for understanding the complexities that come with taking someone's personal downfall into our own hands and often how messy the consequences can become, especially when they take a toll on us.

Oftentimes a drive to do the right thing requires that we get our hands dirty in the process, maybe see a part of ourselves that we’re not proud of, but it’s often worth it if it means exposing the evils of the truly rotten people of the world.

Right?

In a lot of ways, I find myself fantasizing about all the ways I could show those assholes behind the screen how it feels to be persecuted, annoyed beyond belief, to give them a taste of their own medicine. I'm sure all of us at some point in our lives have wondered what it's like to be Kenah but simply lacked the tools necessary to do any of the things we wanted.

And does that make us bad people for ever even imagining what that kind of power might feel like? I like to think not, but that's sort of the point, isn't it? I don't really know. And that's something about Un(con)trolled that I think gives it much more weight as an emotionally driven story than it does as a high stakes thriller.

The moral ambiguity it presents is interwoven with some nice precision, making us wonder if Kenah's desires from ruining evil internet people is something she does out of a justified moral high ground or out of sick thrill for making her targets squirm.

This is a throughline present throughout the entire story that is strong enough to last several seasons so its a shame that season one ends up being such a short, unfulfilling ride that only barely breaks down the doors of its moral vagueness.

It doesn't feel like the psychological aspects and consequences of Kenah's personal wants really begins to resurface until the end and though it's becoming of a first season to not reach its narrative peak so early into its story, I feel Un(con)trolled could have benefited from skipping all the filler and jumping right into the slimier, messier aspects it has hidden underneath.

Honestly, I think the show would have been so much more interesting if we were getting Kenah during the peak of her obsession instead of it simply being teased about her inevitable relapse by the show's end, perhaps getting comments from her friend and sort of boyfriend along the way as she relapses and keeps relapsing.

I say lean completely into the online vigilante angle, go full political justice hacker, see the perspectives of awful people getting their just desserts. I applaud Kenah for learning to be the bigger person, but the smaller person is the one I wanna hear a story about.

The basis of Un(con)trolled tempts the idea only when season one has ended and merely pinkie promises its gonna get to that troll destroying stuff a little bit later.

Upon completion, I totally understand what Un(con)trolled is getting at and I can appreciate it but I feel it overpromises with a rather lackluster first season with many of the thrilling aspects of a thriller left far off in the distance.

I went into it being convinced I was going into one thing, I continued it assuming it was going to be another, get thrown a curveball by the last two, and then finished feeling a weird combination of confusion and intrigue by the end but mostly confusion.

Maybe in the long term Un(con)trolled will succeed in being the thrilling revenge fantasy it sets out to be, but until then, it's got to get passed its own firewalls.