A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

In honor of the snowpocalypse, I listened to a podcast series, "Trapped on Mount Hood," which was so interesting that I read the book it was based on the same day. That was a mistake. (Because the book was bad, not because Iw as traumatized by snow.)

I had not previously heard of the Mount Hood incidents, which was one of the worst alpine disasters in US history. A group of students were taken hiking up Mount Hood students from a private high school is part of a mandatory wilderness program, got caught in a storm, and seven of them died. Two adults also died. I find this particularly awful because it was mandatory for the students, but the disaster happened because the teacher leading them made a series of absolutely terrible decisions.

There was a storm coming, which he knew about, but did not factor into his decision-making. They started too late to avoid at, continued hiking under poor weather conditions, were poorly equipped for getting caught in a storm, ends didn't turn back until long after it would have been prudent to do so. They had to dig into a cave, which wasn't big enough for all of them so they kept having to rotate who was inside and who was outside. Conditions got so bad that a hired guide finally decided to leave and go for help in a blizzard, and took the only student who was willing or strong enough to go with them. They made it out, but got so lost in the blizzard that they had a hard time figuring out where the cave was. Meanwhile the cave got completely buried in snow. By the time the cave was found, several days later only two of the people inside survived.

The behavior of the teacher leading them is a bit mysterious. The author of the book says that he made such bad decisions that he must have been hypothermic. However, the decision to start the hike late when he knew there was a storm coming happened before the hike began, so he couldn't have been hypothermic then. There's also the matter of not taking equipment that should have been taken under the circumstances – also a decision made long before the hike began. However, he previously did not have a pattern of doing reckless things, so it's not really clear why this particular height was different. In previous hikes, they turned back without reaching the summit two out of every three times.

Code 1244 is an incredibly frustrating book. The author interviewed literally everyone who would agree to talk to him who was involved in the incident, and he did get to speak to most of the people who were and who are willing to talk at all. (One of the main people involved, the girl who survived the case she hiked out, has never publicly spoken about it at all.) He had an incredible amount of access so you would think he could have used that to write an interesting book. He did not. It's emblematic that I still don't know what a code 1244 is.

I wishvhe had done an oral history of the event, because I bet that would have been fascinating. What he instead did, as far as I can tell, was to write down every single factual detail that everybody told him, but put in his own words rather than theirs. His own style is extremely dry. He occasionally mentions what people felt or thought, but not all that much. So it's a recital of incredibly minute details. This book has more citations than I think anything I have ever read. About every third sentence is footnoted. I applaud his integrity but it also means that about one third of the book consists of citations.

There are so many details that the overall story often gets lost. It was much harder to follow what was going on in his book then it was in the podcast. I got the book because I was curious to learn more details then the podcasts gave, but when I finished his book, I felt that I knew less, not more. In particular, it was very hard to tell what was going on with the rescue operation and whether or not it was mismanaged, and whether that made a difference. The author obviously felt that one person in particular was to blame for the cave not getting found sooner, but I'm not sure if that was correct.

Based on the podcast, it sounds like he thought that guy was responsible for the guide who hiked out not having been taken up in a helicopter soon enough to search. But in his book, I couldn't tell whether that was a problem or not, or who had made that decision. One thing I really wondered about was why no one ever asked the girl who had hiked out with the guide to go up in a helicopter and see if she could recognize something. It seems to me that two people following the same route might notice or remember different things, so why not ask her if they were going to ask him? This never comes up in either the podcast or the when they finally did let the guide search, it's possibly important because he led the helicopter to the wrong spot five times before he did finally get locate the right spot on his sixth a try. So there was a lot of time wasted searching in the wrong areas, even after he got involved.

It's a very sad story, and also a very interesting one if you're interested in survival and wilderness rescue. If you are, listen to the podcast.

Against the Odds podcast.

The Terra Nova expedition meets House of Leaves meets cosmic horror, but modern day and with women and people of color involved.

An international crew goes to an Arctic research station in Norway to do some quick repairs. They are trapped by a blizzard, and then weird things start happening. Followed by very weird things. Followed by extremely weird and also fucking terrifying things.

This is a fictional podcast made of found footage from the doomed expedition. The doom isn't a spoiler, as you can immediately figure out that if someone is reconstructing what happened from the crew's reports, recordings, etc, complete with notes like "This journal entry was found crumpled under a chair in the common room," it's because no one is around to explain things.

This podcast is spectacularly well-done - exactly what I wanted and didn't get from the terrible The Nox. It combines the best elements of horror, survival/exploration, and found footage/epistolatory fiction into a genuine tour-de-force. (I struggle with found footage movies as shakycam gives me motion sickness, so getting to enjoy this genre with actors was a treat.) It won me over even though I very rarely enjoy fiction podcasts - in fact this is the first I think I've ever enjoyed.

It did take me a couple episodes to get used to everyone's voices and catch up on who was who - I read transcripts for the first few episodes after watching them. But once it gets going, it REALLY gets going. I had to hurriedly turn off one episode because I was listening after dark and that was a mistake.

The multi-lingual cast is using their actual accents and languages. I really loved that aspect. The acting is extremely good, as are the sound effects. But the story is best of all. I ended up really liking the characters, especially Graham Casner and Dr. Rosa de la Torres, and feeling for them. Though the story is horror and everyone is probably doomed from the start, it's not the kind of horror where everyone and everything is terrible. It's the kind of horror - and also the kind of survival/expedition story - where basically decent and competent people try their best, but it doesn't work out because sometimes life is like that. Nature does not forgive, and neither does cosmic horror.

I really enjoyed going into this almost completely cold and I recommend it. Seasons one and two constitute a single arc. It doesn't wrap everything up as there's still a ton of mysteries which presumably continue into the next season, but it does complete the story of that particular expedition.

Content notes: Monster/horror-type violence. Body horror (within my tolerance levels.) Brief, non-graphic mention of sled dogs getting killed by a creature (they're not dogs we know.) No sexual or human-on-human violence. In general, it's more on the suggestive rather than graphic end of things.

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recessional, thank you SO MUCH for reccing this. I'd never even heard of it before.

The White Vault. There's lots of places to listen to this. I listened on Audible and also joined the Patreon to get bonus episodes.

You can read this without being spoiled for more than the first few episodes by not clicking on the cut tags. Cut tags are spoilery through S4 E7.

Dr. Bright is a therapist who treats atypicals (people with powers). They are not known to the general public, but a secret sinister organization, the AM, studies them.

At the start, she has four clients we follow. Caleb is a sweet teenage empath who's struggling to not get overwhelmed by other people's emotions and who has a sweet romance with another boy at his school, Adam, who is not atypical. Sam is a young woman who time-travels when she gets anxious. Chloe is a college-age woman who is an extremely strong receptive telepath.

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We learn early on that Dr. Bright has a secret agenda and wants to use her clients' powers for her own purposes. This is actually not my beef with the show or its portrayal of therapy. Obviously, it's unethical but the show knows it is and this is discussed a lot. Her clients learn what she's doing and why fairly early, and because she does have sympathetic motives they stick with her.

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Chloe, the telepath, I think is incapable of tuning out other people's thoughts. (This isn't 100% clear but it seems like it.) If she attends a therapy session, she can/will read Dr. Bright's mind. That means that she knows everything Dr. Bright knows, including everything Dr. Bright's other clients tell her. She routinely blurts out stuff other clients told Dr. Bright to different clients of Dr. Bright. Effectively, no one can have any secrets or privacy around Chloe, not just because she knows things, but because she will tell everything she knows to everyone.

(Dr. Bright's clients all end up meeting each other, which sets up its own set of ethical issues which I'll get to shortly.)

If I was Dr. Bright dealing with this genuinely fascinating problem in a therapy ethics, there are multiple possible ways to deal with this. The best way would be to only see Chloe over the phone. Another might be, since my clients all know each other anyway and know this is happening, to ask them, privately and individually and after discussing it, whether they consent to Chloe knowing everything they tell me. If even one person says no, then all of Chloe's sessions happen over the phone, permanently.

If I was the writer of this podcast, I would make clear is whether Chloe is literally incapable of shutting up about other people's secrets, whether she can but it's difficult for her for whatever reason, or whether she just doesn't want to or get why this upsets people.

Why this is happening makes a huge difference! Especially since Dr. Bright is literally there to help people control their powers. If Chloe is incapable of shutting up and her other clients don't consent to having her blurt out everything they tell Dr. Bright, then all her sessions need to happen by phone so she can't read Dr. Bright's mind. If it's difficult for her not to blurt, then Dr. Bright should be helping her with this. If she just doesn't think it's a problem and so refuses to stop, she should be booted as a client.

In the show, the why is not made clear but it seems like it's difficult for her not to blurt and she doesn't want to stop. (At one point she complains how haaaaard and saaaaad it is for her to be expected to keep other people's secrets.) Whatever the reason, everyone keeps telling Chloe not to blurt out their secrets to third parties and Dr. Bright keeps complaining that the whole situation is unethical, but no one ever boots Chloe out of their life or asks Dr. Bright to only see her by phone or do anything about it. Chloe is portrayed as a sweet cinnamon roll too good for this world, but in real life, she would be murdered so fast.

Any time someone brings up Chloe blurting out everything other clients told Dr. Bright to third parties, Chloe or someone else points out that Dr. Bright was also unethical. ONE PERSON BEING UNETHICAL DOES NOT MEAN IT'S OKAY FOR SOMEONE ELSE TO BE UNETHICAL. ALSO, CHLOE, SHUT THE FUCK UP BEFORE SOMEONE SHOVES YOU OFF A CLIFF.

This brings me to my biggest single problem with the show: almost everyone in it is from the Crab Nebula. (On FFA, "from the Crab Nebula" is shorthand for "person operating off of an incredibly strange set of assumptions about life/human beings/everything.") The particular quadrant of the Crab Nebula is, I think, young people on Tumblr.

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Almost everyone's values and ethics and reactions are skewed from how humans normally are, and they're all skewed in the same weird directions.

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People keep defending the evil lab with "but they do some good work," which is true, but WHO THE FUCK CARES WHEN THEY'RE ALSO IMPRISONING AND TORTURING PEOPLE WHO SOMETIMES DIE AS A RESULT? The evil lab people say they don't kill anyone on purpose and their experiments aren't meant to kill anyone, which appears to be true, but WHO CARES! They literally grab atypicals off the street, lock them up, and do experiments on them and sometimes they die! Not killing them on purpose doesn't make that better!

As of season four, everyone knows they still have atypicals locked up and experimented on, but no one is doing anything to break them loose and they're still half-heartedly defending the AM as "they do some bad things and some good things, it's complicated." NO IT ISN"T!

And that's not all! There is SO MUCH Crab Nebula reasoning!

A telepath constantly blurting out your secrets to third parties? Worth resignedly bitching about but not worth doing anything about.

A time-traveler using her ability to spy on the evil organization kidnapping, experimenting on, and sometimes killing atypicals? BAD. INVASION OF PRIVACY.

A therapist telling one of their clients something another client told them in therapy? Unethical enough to literally say "So much for ethics!" in a "Oh well, can't be helped" manner.

A violent sociopath is seriously injured when attempting to kidnap your friend? TERRIBLE. THE WORST.

Guiltily not caring if that sociopath dies? TERRIBLE. THE WORST. (No one ever wishes him dead without feeling guilty about wishing harm on another human being. I wish people harm all the time because they're harming other people, and I feel no guilt about it, and those aren't even people who threatened to murder someone I loved!)

Using the word "rape" or "sexual assault?" Apparently so horrifying that it can't be done, even when people are explicitly talking about it, such as exchanges like this:

Character A: "Did he... do anything to you? You know, when he kidnapped you and you spent all that time together, I mean I don't know his sexual orientation but, well...?"

Kidnapped Character: "No! Absolutely not! Nothing of the kind happened."

YOU CAN SAY SEXUAL ASSAULT, THESE ARE ADULT CHARACTERS ON AN ADULT SHOW DEALING WITH TRAUMA.

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There's this weird prudishness and naivete going on, which is especially weird given that the show deals very openly and explicitly about topics like trauma, mental illness, and sexual orientation. This juxtaposition feels very Tumblr teenager to me.

AND ALSO, when you have a situation where your clients end up all knowing each other and hanging out together, one's telepathic and two are empathic, and they don't have any real therapy options other than you, stop wringing your hands about the unethical lack of privacy and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

It's actually a very interesting problem in therapeutic ethics. The most relevant ethical frameworks I can think of come from group therapy and situations in which dual relationships and clients knowing each other is unavoidable, such as being a therapist in a hospital or in a very small town where you're the only one.

The solution that comes to my mind is to get everyone's input, first individually and then (if they all want) in a group setting. You could decide that within the group, you don't have secrets, but you cannot reveal anything from within the group to anyone outside of the group.

And this is just touching the surface! There's so much more, like why the fuck Dr. Bright wouldn't tell a client that the organization she's involved with KIDNAPS AND EXPERIMENTS ON PEOPLE LIKE HER when there is literally no reason not to tell her other than that-- HER STATED REASON FOR NOT DISCLOSING THIS - is that the organization doesn't always do this and is sometimes helpful WHEN IT DOESN'T DECIDE TO KIDNAP AND EXPERIMENT ON YOU WHAT THE ACTUAL CRAB NEBULA FUCK.