- "...But whatever their explanation for these outrageous findings, one thing is clear: we were never meant to hear The Deca Tapes."—from the opening of Episode 1: The Cleaner
The Deca Tapes Podcast is a 2019 eight-part mystery podcast by Lex Noteboom.
The eponymous tapes, revolving around a group of ten nameless strangers who find themselves trapped in the same space together, released to the public by an anonymous party. Each of them has received a set of instructions on their role, how to live their lives in this space of eight connected rooms. Each tape we listen to is from one of the ten prisoners, with the A-side story following events in the location and a B-side story looking into the prisoner's past. With each tape, the prisoners and the Deca Group responsible for their plight raise more questions than they answer...
You can visit the podcast website here
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Part of the Rusty Quill Network as of 2021.
Tropes revealed by The Deca Tapes:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: The Cleaner's tape reveals his past as a school janitor from June 3rd, 2195. Episode 3's B-story reveals that this is so far into the future that things like comic books have become relics of the past.
- Arc Number: Ten. Ten prisoners on the slowship, the pyramid of ten circles, a total of ten rooms in that shape... Even the prefix deca- means "ten".
- Colony Ship: The crux of the slowships is that it will take them many years to reach their destinations. So many, in fact, that the plan is for the passengers to have children during the trip who will also work when they get there.
- Closed Circle: In the Cleaner's tape, the Teacher posits that the ten of them are all on a ship. The audience learns that specifically, it is a "slowship" created by the Deca Group, a vessel for transporting prisoners to a mining colony.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Implied to be the case with all ten prisoners, who have had their pasts and knowledge of the outside world erased in order to better focus them upon their assigned tasks. The Cook is aware that her memory has been heavily tampered with, due to her memory of her past being somewhat intact.
- Phony Psychic: The Communicator was this back on Earth, pretending to be a medium who could talk to the dead and scamming money from clients.
- The Reveal: Each episode contains at least one for the events on the slowship.
- Episode 1 reveals some of the Cleaner's past from the year 2195 A.D. It also shows that the Cleaner was a criminal, arrested after police found body parts inside of his stolen car.
- Episode 2 ends with the Entertainer missing and words written out in blood in the locker rooms. It also reveals that the Teacher was originally an English spy, sticking microbugs into her students' crafts with which to listen in on their parents.
- Episode 3 begins with information on "slowships", which are meant to travel through outer space. It also reveals the Cook's past as a drug cook like her father. In the slowship, the others find the Entertainer, dead, in one of the lockers.
- Episode 6 has the Fixer tell us the Mystery Function's function: the Preacher or Priest.
- Episode 7 subverts the Red Herring reveal from Episode 6: the Farmer did not kill the Entertainer. His guilt was a result of his past life, killing the drug makers who had made a deal with his family without his knowledge. At the time of the Tapes, the Mystery Function breaks the Cook's rebellion by revealing that the Teacher is pregnant, which spells out the prisoners' purpose in the ship: to raise the children who will work at the mining facility in their place. This hammers home that by the present, when the Deca Tapes were anonymously released on Earth, all ten prisoners have most likely died of old age.
- In Episode 8, the Mystery Function finally reveals who killed the Entertainer, and why: in order to keep the prisoners together through "entertainment", the Entertainer orchestrated his own death in such a way that everybody else on the ship was implicated in one way or another.
- The Queenpin: In the Cook's previous life, she was this, inheriting her father's drug empire after his death, becoming known as the Mad Queen.
- Shout-Out: In Episode 3, the Cook mentions Peter Parker, but due to her mind having been tampered with, she seems to remember him as a real person, not a comic book character.
- Villain Has a Point: A surprisingly twisted example: a Deca Group executive responsible for sending convicted criminals out with the slowships points out how children born of criminals tend to saddled with their guilt themselves from birth, making it harder for them to work their way into better lives. However, the executive then uses this as a justification for letting the children of the passengers share their parents' future work burdens, saying the project just removes any pretense that the children had a chance in the first place.
