The 13-episode audio drama called “Spire” can best be boiled down by saying it’s “Free Guy” meets “Freaky Friday.” The video game inspired comedy starring Ryan Reynolds and the Disney film about a mother and daughter switching bodies sums up the theme and gimmick found in this science fiction series. Even with a simple comparison, the story of Spire is anything but.

Emi Spreel recommends this audio drama for its “unique setting and lots of twist and turns that deserves a bigger audience!” The cast and crew of “Spire” are currently crowdfunding the second (and final) part of their audio drama. Once this review goes live, you’ll have 20 days to support the project.

The Epic and the Personal

Right from the start, the opening music sets the mood of Spire. It’s a blend of orchestral and deep electronic bass that screamed HBO’s Game of Thrones theme music to me. The themes of the actual show are anything but epic in the traditional sense. There are no armies, nations, magic or even technology that could theoretically take over the world like Sauron or Skynet. Instead the creators go big on the inside, focusing on characters and interpersonal relationships rather than plot and external forces.

While the core story may be a variant of the “Free Guy” plot, that particular interpretation doesn’t come until roughly the half way point when the writers add another layer to the story. The audio drama episodes are all over 30 minutes long and can sometimes feel like a chore to keep track of everyone and everything going on.

Spire Audio Drama: Same Actor, Different Characters.

By far the most compelling and confusing reason to keep coming back is the body swapping of Malachi and Cosima. The actors playing those two are good, but unless someone said who they really were, then their vocal performances sounded the same regardless of what body they’re in. The body swapping happens frequently enough. You’re never confused about who is who, but it never reaches that level of impersonation or diction one might expect in a story where two voice actors play both a young woman and young man.

The story follows a three-act structure fairly well that, by the end, I could totally see this as a movie. There are some freedoms taken and changes/additions made that hold it back in my opinion. Those are the political intrigue and audience’s genre expectations. Translating it into a television show is another matter entirely.

Genre, Tone and Structure: Existential Empathy

There are a lot of moving parts like the mystery of the thirteen figures who control the spire, and how Cosima and Malachi swapped bodies in the first place. Those are just two of the many shifting and layered story threads and relationships to keep track of during Spire’s over nine hour runtime in 13 episodes. If that sounds complicated. It’s not. The problem has more to do with the genre and audience expectations.

A science fiction simulation world isn’t new. It goes back to at least the 1990s with “The Matrix,” and the idea that the world might not be real hearkens back to Descartes and probably before. The motives of various groups and their motives happen slower and less frequent than I would’ve liked. I’m sure there are more acute listeners out there, but the middle episodes and their exposition up to the finale all kind of blended together.

While Cosima and Malachi’s body swapping adventure is a reason to keep coming back, that doesn’t mean the ending will stick the landing. It does that, and goes above and beyond. The speech Malachi gives in Cosimas’s body (or it might’ve been Cosima in her own body) managed to grab my attention while my mind wandered a bit and hit me right in the gut. It’s one of the strangest things in fiction. How a fictional character can mean more to us than some real people in our life. The best way I can describe it without spoiling is that it gives a fresh way of looking at the existentialism of fictional characters. That way is empathy.

9/10 Stars