Podcast / Limetown

"It seems I always supposed to tell the story. So, without any further delay, the following report is the first of seven."

Limetown (2015-present) is a horror/Science Fiction podcast/Radio Drama from Two-Up Productions that began airing during the summer of 2015. It focuses on Lia Haddock, an investigative journalist for APR, in her search for the truth about what happened to the scientific village of Limetown, Tennessee, in which (fictively) in 2005, 347 people vanished without a trace. In fact, Haddock's own uncle, Dr. Emile Haddock, was one of the vanished. The story begins when APR publishes the first episode in Lia Haddock's planned seven-part series focused on what in the world happened in Limetown, which ends in Lia receiving a ground-breaking lead: a survivor, who wants to talk to her. What follows is a dive into a rabbit hole begins to shake Lia's view of herself and the world...

The interesting thing about Limetown is its style: it is presented as Lia's actual reporting on the events in Limetown and her discoveries about what happened, with extensive sections devoted to interviews with people in the know. The end result is that it strongly resembles a notable non-fiction podcast, Serial, to the point that people who were recommended Limetown because they liked Serial often miss the fact that Limetown really is fiction, and are rather put off it until the truth dawns upon them.

It can be found here. A prequel novel of the same name written by Cote Smith was released in 2018. A live-action adaptation of the first season, starring Jessica Biel as Lia and Stanley Tucci as Emile, aired in 2019 on Facebook Watch. It was cancelled after one season.

Tropes

• Abandoned Warehouse: The setting for the Season 1 finale is a basement underneath a shuttered Italian restaurant.
• Acid Pool: A variant was used to dispose of the Limetown residents without the Tech.
• Action Prologue: Downplayed Trope. While not exactly action-packed, the first episode features a large number of extra actors in fake archival audio, as well as a lengthy sequence in which the characters wander outdoors with extensive Foley work for sound effects. Later episodes generally take the form of an interview or conversation between two characters in a quiet room, which is much cheaper and easier to produce.
• The Adjectival Man: "The Man We Are All Here For". It's Emile Haddock, Lia's uncle.
• All There in the Manual: The scripts for every Limetown episode and teaser are available from the Two-Up website, revealing details that are not fully conveyed (such as the spelling for Charley's name and Lia Haddock's current situation).
• Anti-Magic: Sylvia is the only person immune to Emile's Psychic Powers.
• Anyone Can Die: 162 people, which included children, died horrible deaths in acid pools simply because they were no longer useful as a control group. The exception seems to be Sylvia, then a seven-year-old girl who Lenore Doogle saved.
• Arc Words: "The man we were all here for" and "I had a purpose in Limetown" are repeated a lot in season 1. Season 2 introduces "Glass Joe."
• Asshole Victim: Played With. A lot of the Limetown researchers make several questionable moral and ethical decisions, but their deaths are still seen as tragic. Perhaps justified, since APR as a news station is not meant to lean one way or another on matters like this, on top of the fact that speaking ill of the recently deceased is not socially acceptable.
• Awful Truth: The Limetown survivors treat its secret like this, repeatedly asking Lia if she's sure she wants to know what really happened.
• Back for the Finale: The final episode of Season 2 brings back Lia Haddock, still held captive by her abductors from Season 1.
• Brand X: "APR", the public radio network for which Lia works, is this to NPR. Everything about the production of Limetown is intended to sound as much like NPR as possible.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The lime caves that Limetown was named for. Doogle's men used these caves to spirit away those who had the Tech into hiding...and those who didn't into their biocrematorial deaths.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: "Glass Joe", a boogeyman that the children of the Bridge inadvertently created and became terrified of via a series of misunderstandings, ultimately wound up causing their deaths after one of the kids had a nightmare of Glass Joe telling them to swim out to sea. This nightmare wound up being shared amongst the other kids thanks to their psychic link, leading to all 7 kids to attempt to swim further and further out to escape Glass Joe, ultimately leading to their slow drowning.
• Conspiracy Thriller
• Consummate Liar: Charley. She's so good at it that she manages to fool Emile Haddock, the psychic who served as the basis for The Tech, into thinking she had a sister who commited suicide.
• Determinator: Lia is really keen on getting to the truth. She falters in the finale, but holds fast to her pursuit of the truth in the face of several armed men. Come Season 2, and she still believes that Limetown will never fully fade from the public eye.
• Dissonant Serenity: In "DDoS", interviewee Dr. Max Finlayson talks about mercenaries going after him, warns Lia to pay for things in cash to "delay the inevitable" and that he knows about "what's coming to him", all with the breezy carelessness of someone talking about a football match.
• Downer Ending:
  • Season 1 ends with Lia Haddock being abducted on live radio, her last words pleading for people to keep searching for the truth and not letting "them" win. Shortly after, APR releases a statement that they're shutting down Lia's Limetown investigation series, and that they will do everything they can to try and find her.
  • Season 2 concludes with Emile utterly failing to get Lia's whereabouts from Charley, who has managed to fool him from the first episode. Instead, Charley leaves him with two different stories on Lia's fate, with no way for him to know which one is true. All the while, the Company has finalized the Limetown Tech and is ready to distribute it. Finally, in a separate location, Lia Haddock is revealed to be alive (just not by name), held captive by the Company since the end of Season 1. When urged by an interrogator, she voices her belief that the story of Limetown, and everybody's pursuit of it, will persist despite the Company's efforts to squash it.
• Driving Question: What happened to the people at Limetown? By the time we find out, it's replaced with another: Who did it? And what do they plan to do with the people of Limetown?
• Electronic Telepathy: This is what the scientists at Limetown were working on. In fact, Limetown was entirely an experiment on it, split up by those who had The Tech and those who did not. The "Hummingbird organization" aims to use and further this tech, with or without the basis: the "man we were all there for", Dr. Emile Haddock.
• Fate Worse than Death: Implied with Winona, and the reason Max shoots himself at the end of episode 5, and why Lenore takes what seems to be a suicide pill in the season finale.
• Forced to Watch: A variant, Daniel Rassmueller and the other parents on the Bridge having to psychically feel their children drown one by one in the cold depths of the ocean, miles away from help.
• Ghost Town: The titular research town is this by the series' present. The Season 2 finale sees Emile bringing Charley to Limetown in one last attempt to get her to talk.
• Hell Is That Noise: The last minute of the Season 1 finale. Armed men breach into the basement and surround Lia and Doogle. Lia's final aired words are cut off when one of the men grab and shut off her microphone.
  "I'm sorry for losing—"
• Intrepid Reporter: Lia puts herself at great risk to report on Limetown.
• Meaningful Name: Limetown. The town was built on top of some limestone caves, where it got its name. But there's something else in the name if you squint simply spelling "lime" backwards makes it "Emil Town"; which makes sense, given that Emile was the Man [They] Were All There For.
  • Averted by the Hummingbird organization. The hummingbird isn't their name or symbol, it's just a sticker that Lenore put on that folder, presumably so she could keep track of it. Their name changes frequently.
  • Napoleon the pig, the first recipient of the tech, was named such by Father Warren Chambers after the first pig who rebelled and took over in Animal Farm.
• Mundanger: The answer to 'What happened to Limetown's population?'. After introducing sci-fi elements, the answer of Limetown's population overnight disappearance was quite simply... government clean-up crew, dissolving the entire town's populace in vats of acid.
  Lenore: This was not magic. Magic is what people invent because reality is awful. This was money, brute force and excel sheets.
• Serial Killer: Daniel Rassmueller is one, targeting survivors of Limetown as a means of destroying all traces of the Tech to ensure the tragedy that happened on the Bridge never happens again.
• Suicide Is Painless: The pill that Lenore took at the end of her interview put her to sleep, then stopped her heart. She offered the same to Lia, who didn't take it.
• Take That!: A pretty brutal one to the Syfy channel, or at least their original movies:
  Lia: "For those of you that have taste, 'Signals' was a Syfy channel movie."
• Telepathy: What the tech made possible for humans.
  • Emile himself is apparently a natural telepath, and was aware of this fact from birth. The Tech was based on him, and he is needed to create more.
• The Calls Are Coming from Inside the House: Episode 3 ends with Lia getting a creepy call from inside her parents' house.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Emile Haddock, whose desire to not be the only person in the world who could hear others thoughts led to the creation of the Limetown and Bridge facilities, which led to the collective deaths of at least 200 people.
• Wham Line: On the subject of "The Man We Were All There For":
  Dierdre Wells: He was your uncle.
  • Also, at the end of Episode 4:
  Max Finlayson: "Don't try to run." BANG
  • In Season 2, Episode 4, "The Bridge", the final dialogue between Charley and the unidentified male holding her captive eventually makes clear that the man is Emile Haddock, and he's trying to save his niece Lia from her captors through torturing Charley.
  • In the season 2 finale:
  Charley, echoed by the film playing in the background: "It's all an Illusion."
  • At the very end of season 2:
  Lia Haddock: "I dreamt you thought you won."
• What the Hell, Hero?: In the Season 1 teaser 4.5, a caller to APR hotline chews Lia out for endangering the lives of everyone she comes in contact with and warns her to stay away from her missing brother, given that just about everyone she goes near in her search for truth drops dead shortly after.

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