Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athi) takes on a private job for Virgil Davenport (Martin Donovan) to restore a collection of tapes that were burned in a fire. If he completes the job he will receive a payout of $100,000 USD. After he accepts the job he moves to Davenport’s private estate, which was once a private college, and begins his work. He starts his first tape learning about Melody Pendras (Dina Shihabi). Melody has moved into the Visser, an old apartment complex, to learn about the community and hopefully find her mother that gave her up for adoption. As Dan watches through Melody’s tapes, his reality shifts as he realizes his father, Dr. Steven Turner (Charlie Hudson III), is also a part of the story. Once Dan realizes his father is a key figure in the events leading up to the fire at the Visser, Dan becomes more involved in Melody’s tapes as he tries to uncover why his father was involved with Melody. As he looks more into the tapes and receives outside help from his best friend Mark Higgins (Matt McGorry), who runs a mystery and horror podcast, he begins to discover more and more about the mysteries at the Visser and its survivors.
Archive 81 (Rebecca Sonnenshine, 2022, USA) is a great story that drags the viewer along for the ride. Some episodes are harder to get through than others, but it’s a story that leaves you wanting to understand more, see more, and experience more. Archive 81 (2022) is definitely an experience and worth a watch. Throughout the storyline, we see Dan uncover the death of his family along with uncovering the secrets and lies behind The Visser.
(spoilers ahead)
The 8-episode series has a strong start and easily sets the audience up to binge the show in one night. However, halfway through, the story changes pace; no longer filled with jumpscares and scary ghost stories, the story almost shows a love story between Dan and Melody. The audience watches as Dan crosses through the screen and into Melody’s world (literally). As the Visser’s true history unravels, Dan gets more than physically involved as he’s transported into the Visser with Melody. The audience never gets clarification on how or why Dan can transcend through time and physical space, but it’s confirmed by Beatriz Reyes (Sol Miranda) that their secret meetings are real.
Between midnight meetings in the community center in the basement and ice cream dates at the market across the street, their relationship bounces back-and-forth between romantic and platonic. However, Dan and Melody’s relationship is poorly executed. It doesn’t develop much further than a virtual ice cream date and confuses the audience more than anything. The writers should’ve left the relationship platonic; it would’ve added to the story for them to relate to each other more like family, considering they both lost their families to the cult run by the Voss household and Baldung witches.
(end spoilers)
The show is a great story about family if you look into it hard enough. “Family” doesn’t just mean blood-related nor does it mean that you’ve had to know them since you were born. Here, family is about who you care about and who cares about you. A family is filled with those who are willing to show up for you, to save you, to help you, to care for you, and make sure you’re safe. The Visser is a group of people with different backgrounds, interests, and personalities that have come together and formed that family. Maybe Dan looks at Melody in a similar way; as he watches through her tapes, and goes through some of his father’s recordings, he sees how Melody was unknowingly involved in his childhood. Their bond through his father might be the connection the audience is searching for.
The writers never define Dan’s relationship with Melody, why he’s interested in her story, nor why he cares so much to uncover the truth about her and the Visser. The lack of information does nothing but leave the question in the viewer’s head, “Why does he care so much about Melody?” [Now, I’m not going to spoil the ending because the show is honestly so captivating and deserves to be watched, but from one viewer to another, when you watch this show and you see the ending… you will ask yourself: “Why does he care so much about Melody, to the point that he is willing to do all of this?” And let’s not forget where he ends up at the end…]As a “binger” and a person who never trusts that a good Netflix Original will never have more than one season, I love to get all the information I can. This series leaves us with a lot of unanswered questions and theories of what will happen next. Throughout the series I kept wondering, “well, what happened to her?” or “What’s her story?”. Whatever the question, I didn’t receive the answers I wanted. Little did I know, this show is based on the podcast Archive 81 (Daniel Powell and Marc Sollinger, USA, 2016) created by Dead Signals. The podcast has over three seasons, with the fourth currently being written. (http://www.archive81.com/) If you liked the show, head over to the podcast to listen to the original cast of Archive 81.
check out my quick review here 🙂
