Passenger List Is a Mystery Where the Biggest Culprit Is Grief
Mystery-thriller Passenger List dropped September 16 on Radiotopia
Atlantic Flight 702 was on its way from London to New York City when it disappeared mid-flight. There was no trace of a crash, and no radar contact. Eventually, it was blamed on a bird strike; the nation grieved, blamed each other, and then moved on.
Kaitlin Le doesn’t believe this story. And she’s willing to do whatever it takes to figure out what happened to her twin brother.
This is the story of Passenger List, a new podcast created by John Dryden (Tumanbay) and co-written and co-directed by Lauren Shippen (The Bright Sessions, The AM Archives), with additional writing by Mara Wilson and Kevin Rodriguez. The listener treks along on Kaitlin’s journey as she tries to unravel the mystery of the missing plane and the tangled knots of her own despair. Listeners shadow Kaitlin’s investigation through recorded sound: on-location interviews Kaitlin records on her phone, the conversations she has on encrypted phone lines, and the recordings made by government authorities that may have begun to track her investigation. Passenger List, loosely inspired by the 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and other aviation mysteries, is a chronicle about grief and the forms it can take, expertly packaged as a conspiracy mystery thriller told through archival audio.
The mystery and the thrill rely upon the design of the recorded audio files. This recorded framework is crucial to, and practically inextricable from, both the deployment of tension and the impact of emotion. One missing recording lies at the base of the mystery, even if it isn’t explicitly stated: The black box that the plane would have had — an electronic recording device that’s used to determine what happened after aviation accidents. Of course, if you can’t find the wreckage, you can’t recover the box. (In fact, due to MH370, many people have called for the recorders to live stream data to the ground and have longer-lived batteries for the beacons). As for the audio we do hear: Passenger List leans into found-footage methods without explicitly stating upfront how the listener has access to these recordings, because the point is not how they’re able to hear it; the point is that Kaitlin’s is the limited perspective from which the listener experiences the world.
Each episode opens with a recording related to whichever passenger Kaitlin is going to be focusing on in the episode, segues through a series of media reports about the plane, and then spends the rest of the episode with Kaitlin. Listeners spend almost all their time with Kaitlin, experiencing the same moments she is. This narrow field of vision, is how Passenger List is able pressurize the listener in a pot of water that’s slowly coming to a roiling boil.
Played by Kelly Marie Tran (Star Wars), Kaitlin is a young Vietnamese-American woman who is doggedly determined to investigate every single angle that she can think of, even if it means making uncomfortable, impulsive, and even horrific decisions in her lines of questioning. She blackmails one woman with the promise of information about a relocated child; she asks the wife of a Muslim pilot if her husband was an extremist. She makes only half-hearted apologies that rest upon the bed of her grief as an excuse; she “just wants answers, like you do,” she tells the people she wounds. Watching all of this through the lens of her archives is what makes these various choices so stark, and what makes everyone’s grief feel so deep and so near.
Even though it often seems like the framework of a recording or a phone call will put some layer of distance between listener and story, in Passenger List it takes on a layer of surveillance that layers on the strain. Mark Henry Phillips’s (Homecoming; Serial) sound design is inspired and laser-focused on creating an immersive story that grips you by the heart. The audio retains the quality of recordings, both in-person and over phone calls, but refrains from adding too much static or noise. When needed, it becomes fuzzy at the edges, or Kaitlin’s voice gets just a little bit closer to the ears. The recording for Passenger List was at least in part a realistic, on-location recording style, a method Dryden is known for and a stellar way to achieve natural immersion. This means that, for example, if there is a scene at a dinner table, actors sit at a table with a tablecloth with dinner plates and glasses for them to interact with.
This authenticity is the key to immersion in Passenger List, and it exists not only in sound, but also in character, especially in the creation of Kaitlin. Shippen and Tran deeply engaged one-on-one to talk about Tran and Kaitlin and how to make sure Kaitlin sounds real. One stand-out moment in the first episode is when Kaitlin and her mother switch between English and Vietnamese, a common linguistic phenomenon in the households of immigrant families. Kaitlin’s decisions and questions are all led by a familial grief that is bone-deep, but shoved aside in order to solve the problem that’s causing it, even though there may not really be a solution in the traditional sense. Her stubbornness, and her reluctance to speak to counselors and deal with the ongoing needs of her life — such as attending classes or paying tuition — all stem from a desire to no longer suffer from the grief and guilt that come with surviving her twin brother.
Kaitlin’s unwillingness to admit that she jumps at any potential answer, regardless of the consequences to anyone else, is superbly written and acted, linked by the case studies of each passenger that Kaitlin treats like a checklist of who she might be able to blame. Viewing so many different stages of grief through Kaitlin’s lens is heartbreaking, as if watching people speak to their past self with little impact. With these recordings, we are deep within Kaitlin’s inner life; her conversations are not just about other people’s lives, but about repeating over and over “my brother was on 702” in a voice that gets steadily more depressed and about asking “what do you really know about your loved one?”
The use of recorded audio drives emotional impact in little and big ways, from the cracked and furious tones of a Muslim wife hounded and ostracized by society to the seconds spent with Kaitlin’s hitching breaths after someone leaves an interview or she hangs up the phone, when it sounds like she’s about to cry before the recording stops. As I listen, I’m reminded clearly of Dessa’s song “Good Grief”, about how grief is only good when it’s faded and in the past and how we do anything we can to avoid it in the present.
They say there’s good grief, but how can you tell it from the bad?
Maybe it’s only in the fact good grief’s the one that’s in your past.
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