Archive 81

Portal Combat

Archive 81 -
The TV Show
Stream date: January 2022
Eight Episodes.

Warning: Meticulously restored spoilers jumping out of the screen at you here.

Archive 81 is an eight episode streaming TV show which is based on a 2016 podcast. Now I’ve not listened to the original podcast (although I may well do at some point) but, considering this show was raved about when it hit the airwaves in January and had very high ratings and positive critical feedback... you kinda have to wonder why Netflix has cancelled it after one season. Especially since, although a part of the story has a conclusion, there’s definitely a cliff hanger to lead into a second season.

The show follows Dan, played by Mamoudou Athie, who is a top tape and film restorer for a firm. Then a powerful, wealthy, faceless corporation owner named Davenport, played by Hal Hartley regular Martin Donovan, hires him to work in solitude in a compound by himself in the Catskill Mountains, for which he will pay a princely sum. His job, to restore a bunch of old, burned video cassettes which were rescued from a fire in the Visser Hotel in the 1990s. A woman called Melody, played by Dina Shihabi, was convinced the hotel had a clue to her mother, who abandoned her in a convent when she was a baby. So we have, at first, two levels of narrative running, as Dan works to restore the tapes and piece together just what happened in the Visser in its final weeks. Meanwhile, the found footage videos Melody made are augmented by the audience eye going into those scenarios and also following her story as she shoots the footage, also filling us in on the bits in between the various tapes that Dan is restoring.

Fairly quickly in the show, though, Melody’s reality starts bleeding into Dan’s reality and it’s not long before the two, aided and abetted in about equal measure in their own times by Dan’s friend Mark (played by Matt McGorry) and Melody’s sometime girlfriend Annabelle (played by Julia Chan), start almost working together to solve the mystery. And when I say together, I mean just that, as Dan and Melody keep overlapping and meeting in dream state versions of each others world. At first Dan thinks he’s just gone crazy due to his history of mental illness but, pretty soon, he starts finding evidence of his encounters with her decades before, on the tapes he’s restoring, not to mention finding that his dad was somehow involved in the mystery too... his family all burned in their home one day when he was out walking the dog as a kid.

And... it’s okay. I actually started watching this and getting quite into the first two episodes but, yeah, it does get a bit formulaic and the mystery takes its time to unfold and is pretty much spelled out in every episode before it’s all finally revealed in the last two. It’s pretty obvious that there is witchcraft actively taking place using human sacrifice to open a portal between dimensions at certain points in time... well, it was not much of a surprise to me, at least. I think it might be because I’d recently just watched some great TV shows like Invasion (reviewed here), Yellowjackets (reviewed here), From (reviewed here) and the absolute masterpiece that is Station Eleven (reviewed here) so, coming off the back of those, the pacing and ‘page turner’ quality that so many were giving it good reviews for may have been lost to me.

That being said, the acting by all concerned in the show was great, with a special shout out to Mamoudou Athie on this one for fleshing out the slightly distanced Dan as an unflappable and confident character that the audience is willing to keep tuning in for (although ‘tuning in’ my not be the correct turn of phrase that the kids are using these days, i suspect). Also, since his character has a love of old fantasy and science fiction serials and movies, such as Flash Gordon (although, dude, Flash Gordon didn’t release in 1940... you’re confusing it with the third serial, Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts. Not to mention his home studio is kitted out with framed prints of Criterion Collection covers such as Hausu and Solaris (although, when he puts Tarkovsky’s Solaris on his television in one scene, the aspect ratio seems to be a lot less wider than it should be so, I don’t know what print he’s watching a transfer of at that point).

Add, yeah, it’s a short review and, although obviously a lot of people loved Archive 81 (which makes Netflix cancelling it seem even stranger), I don’t think I’d recommend it myself. It grabbed me from the beginning but, somewhere around the third or fourth episode it stopped feeling essential to me and more of a... well, not a chore but, I dunno, it just didn’t stray into any original territory... I felt like I’d seen it all before. That being said, I will attempt to track down the podcast at some point because, while the TV show gives the appearance that Dan has rescued Melody from another realm, it then goes to show that he, himself, has been trapped in 1994 (although, I don’t believe he is, I believe he’s still in the other dimension). So maybe the podcast will tell me what happens next... although my understanding is its already quite different from the TV adaptation, with the tapes Dan’s restoring on the podcast being audio files, not audio/visual media, for example. I’ll let you know what I find out if I do.