"Further From the Truth" (885) is part of Album 68: "Out of the Blue" Episode Description:
"Emily finds a strange note in her locker that launches her on a mystery. The more she investigates, the more she sees that the path of clues is connected to her best friend Matthew Parker!" - AIO
Episode Review:
There’s a moment in “Further from the Truth” where Morrie shouts: “these riddles are getting annoying!” It was then that I imagined a choir of listeners respond in unison: “You got that right!” I doubt I’m the only one who found it tedious to hear characters solving riddles that they read only once and, for that matter, much too quickly. By the time I even started to reflect upon the words of a riddle, a character immediately blurted out the answer. That’s when I figured -- “ah, I’m not meant to solve these riddles. I’m simply supposed to sit back, twiddle my thumbs, and wait for them to just tell me the relevant information.” The result is a rather uninvolving episode, where a lot of cartoonish, artificial-sounding characters -- Emily and Suzu, specifically -- jabber quite a bit, while my mind wandered.
Riddles have played a part in many AIO episodes. Many of us can instantly recall the episodes that featured “A Deaf Cabbage” and “How I do is nothing Great”. We remember them not because they were especially clever, but because their episodes took time to highlight them -- providing listeners with full scenes of characters thinking about them, and, as a result, allowing us a brief moment to think about it, too. “Further From the Truth”, which is approximately two minutes shorter than most episodes, should have spent more time on making each clue more involving and memorable; they should have either had its characters reflect upon them for a longer period of time, or included fewer riddles, or tucked these riddles into lengthier, more interesting scenes with a “countdown” (as “Treasure Hunt” or “The Amazing Loser” did), or, perhaps, accompanied their readings with a more interesting score.
Overall, “Further From the Truth” lacks much of the originality of its predecessor, “A Sacrificial Escape”. Haven’t we seen many elements of this episode play out on Adventures in Odyssey before? A mystery that turned out to be a “fake mystery” like in “The Secret of the Writer’s Ruse” and “Train Ride”? Someone stealing the technology to the Imagination Station like in “Novacom” and, to some extent, in “The World of Whitonia?” A cryptic conversation between Morrie and Suzu in the final scene? A twist ending revealing that the main character was in the Imagination Station the whole time, like in “Out To Sea” and “Things not Seen”? Granted, there’s something very cool about an Odyssey villain who goes around making people experience Imagination Station adventures without their knowledge -- but it’s an idea far too grandiose and epic to be used only once as a surprise ending of a single episode. (assuming this is the last time this “power” will be used...)
Wait, does this mean that Morrie -- or whoever is behind this -- had control of the technology of the Imagination Station? How has this happened so easily when, during the Novacom saga, it took the Chairman albums to get hold of it? And, speaking of the Imagination Station, why is it that non-club listeners are being introduced to the portable Imagination Station for the first time as a twist ending to an episode? How were they supposed to have figured this ending out? So far, this new technology has only been mentioned in club episodes such as “The World of Whitonia” and “Out to Sea”, and I can’t even begin to imagine how random this ending seemed to non-club members. The episode doesn’t even give any background information about the invention such as when it was invented, or how this device works, to help non-club listeners catch up! This highlights the messiness of the “exclusive club episode” model, and I sincerely hope the series will take the logical steps to resolve this.
The “denouement” didn’t feel right either. The way in which the scene between Whit and Emily is written, performed, and orchestrated makes the preceding, traumatic events feel rather inconsequential. Wouldn’t you need years of therapy if you discovered you spent a full day inside the imagination station without knowing? Whit’s matter-of-factness (“So you were standing at the sink?”) combined with Emily’s slight annoyance (“weird!) combined with DePasquale’s uncharacteristically understated music, didn’t emotionally fit with the preceding events. This was a complaint I had with “A Sacrificial Escape”, too, whose wrap-up scenes didn’t match up with the severity, and horror, of the situation presented. In that case, an apologetic conversation between Whit and Emily’s father, or background noises of detectives/police combing the area of Whit’s End, may have felt more fitting.
Although, it’s difficult to judge an entire saga that hasn’t yet concluded, I can say that, so far, the Morrie Saga makes me feel like I’m watching “Lost” -- a show that kept its viewers’ attention by creating endless questions, but that failed to release answers regularly enough to 1) keep us interested and 2) to give us enough confidence that it knew what the answers are. This episode has, yet again, kept its characters (Whit, Matthew and Emily) running in the same hamster wheel they’ve been in for the past four years. The ending to “Further of the Truth”, in cutting off Emily’s final sentence revealing who she believes to be the culprit, still doesn’t give us that moment’s satisfaction that they’ve made any progress, leaving me, admittedly, feeling tired and impatient.
"Emily finds a strange note in her locker that launches her on a mystery. The more she investigates, the more she sees that the path of clues is connected to her best friend Matthew Parker!" - AIO
Episode Review:
There’s a moment in “Further from the Truth” where Morrie shouts: “these riddles are getting annoying!” It was then that I imagined a choir of listeners respond in unison: “You got that right!” I doubt I’m the only one who found it tedious to hear characters solving riddles that they read only once and, for that matter, much too quickly. By the time I even started to reflect upon the words of a riddle, a character immediately blurted out the answer. That’s when I figured -- “ah, I’m not meant to solve these riddles. I’m simply supposed to sit back, twiddle my thumbs, and wait for them to just tell me the relevant information.” The result is a rather uninvolving episode, where a lot of cartoonish, artificial-sounding characters -- Emily and Suzu, specifically -- jabber quite a bit, while my mind wandered.
Riddles have played a part in many AIO episodes. Many of us can instantly recall the episodes that featured “A Deaf Cabbage” and “How I do is nothing Great”. We remember them not because they were especially clever, but because their episodes took time to highlight them -- providing listeners with full scenes of characters thinking about them, and, as a result, allowing us a brief moment to think about it, too. “Further From the Truth”, which is approximately two minutes shorter than most episodes, should have spent more time on making each clue more involving and memorable; they should have either had its characters reflect upon them for a longer period of time, or included fewer riddles, or tucked these riddles into lengthier, more interesting scenes with a “countdown” (as “Treasure Hunt” or “The Amazing Loser” did), or, perhaps, accompanied their readings with a more interesting score.
Overall, “Further From the Truth” lacks much of the originality of its predecessor, “A Sacrificial Escape”. Haven’t we seen many elements of this episode play out on Adventures in Odyssey before? A mystery that turned out to be a “fake mystery” like in “The Secret of the Writer’s Ruse” and “Train Ride”? Someone stealing the technology to the Imagination Station like in “Novacom” and, to some extent, in “The World of Whitonia?” A cryptic conversation between Morrie and Suzu in the final scene? A twist ending revealing that the main character was in the Imagination Station the whole time, like in “Out To Sea” and “Things not Seen”? Granted, there’s something very cool about an Odyssey villain who goes around making people experience Imagination Station adventures without their knowledge -- but it’s an idea far too grandiose and epic to be used only once as a surprise ending of a single episode. (assuming this is the last time this “power” will be used...)
Wait, does this mean that Morrie -- or whoever is behind this -- had control of the technology of the Imagination Station? How has this happened so easily when, during the Novacom saga, it took the Chairman albums to get hold of it? And, speaking of the Imagination Station, why is it that non-club listeners are being introduced to the portable Imagination Station for the first time as a twist ending to an episode? How were they supposed to have figured this ending out? So far, this new technology has only been mentioned in club episodes such as “The World of Whitonia” and “Out to Sea”, and I can’t even begin to imagine how random this ending seemed to non-club members. The episode doesn’t even give any background information about the invention such as when it was invented, or how this device works, to help non-club listeners catch up! This highlights the messiness of the “exclusive club episode” model, and I sincerely hope the series will take the logical steps to resolve this.
The “denouement” didn’t feel right either. The way in which the scene between Whit and Emily is written, performed, and orchestrated makes the preceding, traumatic events feel rather inconsequential. Wouldn’t you need years of therapy if you discovered you spent a full day inside the imagination station without knowing? Whit’s matter-of-factness (“So you were standing at the sink?”) combined with Emily’s slight annoyance (“weird!) combined with DePasquale’s uncharacteristically understated music, didn’t emotionally fit with the preceding events. This was a complaint I had with “A Sacrificial Escape”, too, whose wrap-up scenes didn’t match up with the severity, and horror, of the situation presented. In that case, an apologetic conversation between Whit and Emily’s father, or background noises of detectives/police combing the area of Whit’s End, may have felt more fitting.
Although, it’s difficult to judge an entire saga that hasn’t yet concluded, I can say that, so far, the Morrie Saga makes me feel like I’m watching “Lost” -- a show that kept its viewers’ attention by creating endless questions, but that failed to release answers regularly enough to 1) keep us interested and 2) to give us enough confidence that it knew what the answers are. This episode has, yet again, kept its characters (Whit, Matthew and Emily) running in the same hamster wheel they’ve been in for the past four years. The ending to “Further of the Truth”, in cutting off Emily’s final sentence revealing who she believes to be the culprit, still doesn’t give us that moment’s satisfaction that they’ve made any progress, leaving me, admittedly, feeling tired and impatient.
Writer: Bob Hoose, Phil Lollar
Director: Phil Lollar
Theme: Friendship
Executive Producer: Dave Arnold
Sound Design: Christopher Diehl
Music: Jared DePasquale
Proverbs: 27:17
Original Air-date: 04.11.2020
Review Date: 04.04.2020