Where to begin? It’s something all writers have to consider and in “The Destiny of Special Agent Ace Galaksi” perhaps they start where it all began…Maybe? The premise of this show revolves around a single person—an agent of the Canadian Special Investigations Service (CSIS). The first scene has nothing to do with him. It sets up the “omniscient” beings that work at the big book of destiny, which the title should say it all.
It’s sort of that blurred line when a story has an omniscient POV character, is it limited or omniscient? Without opening up that can of worms, there really didn’t seem to be a point to the big book of destiny office scenes. They seemed there to provide expositional setup for the scene that comes right after it. Why not just go to straight to the next scene?
That being said, the scenes that took place at the big book of destiny were entertaining, they just distracted from the main story and weren’t as funny as the rest of the scenes. That sort of brought the overall story down, because everything built up so much and then stopped and resumed itself after a few minutes of witty banter. But at that time, all the tension is gone and one kind of forgets what the characters were even doing. In some cases, entire days or weeks have gone by and a single line of dialogue is all one gets for the time that has elapsed. It’s the same problem that “The Dark Knight Rises” has when skipping ahead in time. If one isn’t paying attention, then the line can be easily missed.
This story is a comedy, there’s no denying that. The jokes they tell are quite clever and funny, though some could border on insulting for some individuals. Looking past those kind of jokes and the comedic elements itself, the story is a smorgasbord of things happening that make sense, but don’t have a lot of weight to them. Then again, comedies aren’t known for their emotionally powerful scenes, so I’m willing to look past that.
Despite the complexity of the story. the plot is fairly simple. Special Agent Ace Galaksi wants to find out why a dinosaur had a tennis ball necklace buried with it. Of course that answer is reveled, but not at the end like one might think. The audience learns the answer early on, the events just keep escalating to a point where I really didn’t care anymore. It was the “yes, but” storytelling methodology—where something goes right, BUT then something horrible happens soon after—taken to the extreme. It raised the stakes so much that it became obvious what the creator was doing.
All that said, this audio drama is a great comedy series and knows that it wants to be one. At six episodes long, you’re definitely getting a good story. It just sits in that weird place in my brain where the pros outweigh the cons, but the cons are the things I remember the most about it.