Adam Blackwell is “the first human being with scientifically confirmed magic powers.” Amy Stirling is the second. Adam can move things with his mind. Amy can read minds, and put her own thoughts into other people’s. The Harbingers follows the two of them from the near past to the near future, as the story of their relationship unravels, as well as the “unprecedented disaster” they found themselves at the centre of.
A story as sprawling as The Harbingers — written and created by Gabriel Urbina — necessitates a framing device. Here, Adam (Andrés Enriquez) and Amy (Lauren Grace Thompson) recount their tales to Claudia Skinner (Emmy Bean), a lawyer hired to defend Adam against the charges from that aforementioned disaster. These recollections hop back and forward in time in a way that is near impossible to keep straight in your head — with that in mind, there’s a handy timeline on the website to help.
That, in a nutshell, is the problem with The Harbingers: listening to the ambitious plot feels too much like work. At the time of writing, we are about a third of the way through the sixteen episode series. So far, the bulk of each instalment has been taken up with people explaining things.
The lore of “The Harbingers,” an ancient cult whose artefacts have enabled this magic, as well as their linguistics, and precisely how Amy and Adam’s special abilities work within this magic system are intricately detailed. Characters are always asking each other, “What do you know about?…” or “Have you heard of…?”, before filling in the gaps when they inevitably haven’t. Old chestnuts like the story of ‘The Scorpion and the Frog’ and ‘Cleopatra’s Nose’ are wheeled out as explanatory tools, when simply a sentence or two would have done. It sometimes plays like we’re having a textbook read out to us, but one with an immersive soundscape.
When the characters aren’t explaining, they are quipping. This seems like a self-aware response to the abundance of info-dumps — the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, so to speak. Often, it comes in place of developing the personalities of the characters, and then it’s simply grating. Between the fire hydrant of table-setting and the relentless sarcastic banter, there’s very little room for a listener to grab an emotional foothold.
That isn’t helped by the relationship between Amy and Adam feeling overly schematic — it’s well-worn enemies to lovers territory, with miscommunications and egos getting in the way of the only two people in the world who know what the other is experiencing being together. There’s also something uncomfortably gendered about the way that he’s shown as using his powers as measured and level-headed, and she’s impulsive and emotional.
There are glimmers of hope along the way, however, which may develop into something more satisfying further down the road. In a conversation that plays out once from each of their perspectives, Adam and Amy talk about how the money owned by the world’s seven richest billionaires would be enough to solve almost every problem on earth, with plenty of change left over. That grounding of Adam and Amy’s magical world in our late-capitalistic reality shows definite potential.
It’s hard to deny the passion and ambition Urbina and the crew have for their project. At the top of the fourth episode, executive producer Eleanor Hyde pops up to talk about the release schedule, and their plans for it to run many more seasons. Her voice radiates enthusiasm, and it feels infectious. While the preponderance of world-building in The Harbingers is testing on the nerves, it’s also the product of someone deeply involved in the story that they’re trying to tell. The execution is flawed, but it’s not nothing that those flaws come from a place of profound investment in the material, even if that investment overrides attention paid to the listener’s experience.
Five episodes in, though it’s clearly made with a whole lot of love, The Harbingers is a podcast that asks for more patience and investment from its audience than it so far proved worthy of receiving. It will however, find a receptive audience from those accustomed to high levels of exposition; fantasy fans will likely see it as a feature rather than a bug of their favourite genre.
Whether all the homework will prove merited is yet to be seen — if we eventually get to the point where our characters stop spending so much time explaining things to each other, then it will surely become a little bit more fun.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd.