I’m changing up my titling system, but the links to my posts will still stay the same. I used to always simply name the post the name of the episode so that the post’s URL would automatically be aioopinions.com/episode-name so that I wouldn’t have to manually change it every time. Now, however, I’m taking some advice that Ryan Matlock gave me to heart: don’t just call your review “Review of [episode name]”, call it something like “Why I Didn’t Like the Ending of [episode name]”. You’ll still be able to link to and find my reviews of episodes by going to, for example, https://aioopinions.com/a-bite-of-applesauce because I’ll manually set the permalink to the episode name (with dashes replacing any spaces). Now, to the review!

Story — We start off with a nice, quick and simple Chris intro. Then we’re immediately launched into the episode mid-conversation on Connie’s talk show, “Candid Conversations with Connie”. She says that she’ll take one more call, and then they’ll move on to Wooton’s comic book show. A guy named Wes calls and says that he was going to ask a question, but the advice that Connie’s giving is “unrealistic”. Wooton references Connie’s advice in Do or Diet as unrealistic. He says that Connie is unrelatable because she has many friends, and Wooton affirms the fact that Connie has lots of friends.

“Unrelatable?! I’ve never been called that!”

Connie

Connie says that she has a new topic:

“Am I relatable?”

Connie

Wooton tells her that her show is over, and Connie says that she’s going to go on a little longer. Connie mentions that Jillian installed a new smoke alarm that goes off for no reason saying “proceed to exit”. Wooton says that the fire department has great hold music. A caller asks if the comic book show is on, and so Connie hands the phone to Wooton. The caller asks Wooton for advice about a girl, and Connie says that that’s what her show is about. The caller says that he likes to talk to Wooton.

“Okay, you heard her everybody! You can call me to talk to anything in the world or you can call Connie to talk about… Connie.”

Wooton

In the next scene, Wooton is giving wedding advice. Connie says that she could answer the questions too.

“Why is this person ruining your show? Is there any way I can mute her mic without muting yours?”

Jackson, an internet commenter on Candid Conversations

Finally someone calls for Connie, saying that he knew her in high school. He says that he’s messed up his life. He says that his name is Spencer. Spencer begins to tell his life story, about how he started hanging around bad influences. After they’ve talked for twenty minutes, Connie takes a commercial break. Wooton mentions how long Connie’s been going over time, and she tells him that she’ll end her talk with Spencer after the commercial break. Jason runs in asking if her mic is live. He tells Connie that he thinks Spencer is an escaped convict.

After a “real” commercial break in the Odyssey episode, Jason tells Connie that he’s been investigating this case and wants Connie to try to get more information out of him. Jason tells Connie that his real name is Bradley Turnbomb. Connie passes the phone over to Wooton after the commercial break ends and goes out to talk to Jason. She finds out from her high school’s web archive that he was in the astronomy club. They decide that Connie should use that to try to confirm that Spencer is Bradley. Connie moves the conversation on to the names of stars. She asks Wooton if he knows any names of stars, but Spencer is able to name several. He tells her that he was in the astronomy club for all four years.

During the next commercial break, Connie goes out of the studio to talk to Jason again. He says that he got the police to listen into the conversation and Connie just needs to talk and keep him on the line while they try to trace the call and gather more evidence.

Connie asks Bradley what he’s doing right then. He says he’s shaving. She asks about his family, and he says that he doesn’t talk to his family much. His mother asked him,

“What happened to you?”

Mrs. Turnbomb

Bradley says that Connie’s in a list of things that he did wrong. He saw her putting up a flyer about a bible study, and he went to talk to her about it but a friend came up and he didn’t want to be caught asking about a bible study, so he just told her that she had a pen mark on her cheek and moved on.

“I think about that moment. How it could have changed everything. If I would have said ‘hi’ and introduced myself, I think your friendship could have been the difference, Connie. I really do.”

Bradley

Just as he’s finishing saying that, we hear an alarm go off in the background of the phone call. A man’s voice says “proceed to exit, proceed to exit” and then stops. Bradley tries to distract from it after hearing Connie’s reaction and asks if she remembers that moment with the pen mark. Connie asks Wooton to read some more comments from the website, and burst out of the studio to Jason.

“Jason, he’s in my house!”

Connie

She says that she recognized the smoke detector. They don’t know why he’s in her house. Jason says that maybe Bradley thought Connie could help her. Connie goes back into the studio. She says that she has some things to say to Bradley, referring to him as Spencer.

“You need to stop focusing on what you did years ago. You need to think about the choices you’re making now. You have ten thousand choices, every day.”

Connie

Bradley says that he’s irredeemable, and Connie says that Jesus can still forgive him and that he can still make the right choice. The conversation gets heated. Bradley says,

“I see you as the last chance I ever had.”

Bradley

“Stop talking about the past. Listen to me, we don’t have much time!”

Connie

There’s a long pause, and we transition into Connie’s house with Bradley. We hear a clock ticking loudly. Finally, Bradley asks,

“Why don’t we have much time? Connie? Why don’t we have much time? You know, don’t you? You turned me in!”

Bradley

He says that she acted like his friend but was actually playing her the whole time.

“You had a chance to tip me off that this was coming. Give me a head start on the police. Your audience felt sorry for me. Did you? Did it even occur to you to help me get away, for even one second?”

Bradley

Police sirens.

“Honestly, no.”

Connie

“No. Of course not.” *slight chuckle* “And you know what, if you had… you wouldn’t be the person that I admired for all those years. Because Connie Kendall… does the right thing. I guess it would have been a bigger betrayal if you had helped me.”

Bradley

We hear a police radio and movement outside the house.

“This is the Odyssey police. You’re surrounded. Come out with your hands up…”

Male police officer over muffled megaphone outside

“You can still turn this around, Spencer, but you have to start by walking out of the house with your hands in the air.”

Connie

Spencer apologizes for eating some of Connie’s food. He says that he cleaned up after himself. He says that he likes her house.

“Well, it was nice talking to you.” To police: “Okay, I’m coming out!”

Bradley

Connie wraps up the show, asking if they have any comments from the listeners. Wooton starts to read a comment from Jackson, but decides against it. He reads one commenting on what a sad story Spencer’s was. Connie comments on it, saying that perhaps what makes her unrelatable to some are her Christian standards and following Jesus.

Chris gives a very short wrap-up. We definitely didn’t need a long wrap-up, because Connie summarized the moral of the episode really well at the end of Candid Conversations.

Trivia — This was the first episode to be recorded remotely due to the recent pandemic. Marshal Younger wrote the script especially for Katie Leigh, Jess Harnell, and Townsend Coleman because he knew that they had good home studios. Unrelatable has only five voice actors in it: the aforementioned actors, and the actors for Bradley Turnbomb and the police officer. The episode was recorded in about eight different locations, in three different time zones. During the recording, Katie Leigh’s computer crashed and, since she was in every scene, they couldn’t continue with the recording. Usually, episodes take four hours to record, but after two hours only four pages had been recorded. Miraculously, they were able to finish the recording in only a little bit over four hours.

“There’s no perfect technology, there are only perfect actors!”

Katie Leigh

Thoughts — After listening to this episode for the fourth time for this review, I once again realized how much I like this episode. It must be one of my favourite episodes of all time. For this review series, my reviews of Album 70, I wanted to keep my thoughts fresh so I planned to only listen to the episodes once before my review listen but I ended up listening to it over Zoom with Skye, James, and Cabella (user cabellakt on WordPress), and with my family on a road trip because I was so eager to share this amazing episode with others. It is most definitely my favourite episode from Albums 68-71, but I’d have to think more and re-listen to some episodes before comparing it with some of the other more recent episodes.

Sound Design — It’s clear to the listener, even over a car speaker, that Spencer/Bradley is outside walking and I was easily able to notice that he went inside a building before Jason mentioned it. We can hear the water running and sounds of the shaving when Connie asks Bradley what he’s doing.

Acting — The slight chuckle when Bradley transitions from being angry at Connie to congratulating her on doing the right thing is amazing. Throughout the episode, Scott Whyte (Bradley’s actor) does an absolutely incredible job. We hear him transitioning between different emotions, and we can tell from his voice that he’s trying to hide something without it being too over the top.

Expectations V.S. Reality — I didn’t really make any major predictions about this episode, but we could start out with a comparison between the official episode description and AIO Wiki’s description at the time.

A call from a mysterious person stirs up Connie’s candid conversation on live radio!

source: aiowiki.com

After a caller says that her on-radio advice is unrealistic, Connie puts Wooton’s scheduled show on hold to convince her audience that she can, in fact, relate to her listeners.

Official description

I have to admit, the earlier version of the description on the AIO Wiki does the episode more justice. However, the official description doesn’t give away any spoilers and effectively sets up the premise of the episode. Let’s go back in time to read what I wrote about the episode back in December 2020 in my post Album 70 Expectations:

This is the episode on the cover of the album, and features Connie, Wooton, and Eugene. As shown in the cover image, Wooton and Connie are live on Kid’s Radio when Jason comes into the studio. This was the first remotely recorded episode and, after hearing A Simple Reminder, I think it should sound fine. However, since this one was the first one recorded remotely, you might be able to tell that it sounds a little bit different.

I certainly gave the facts, and I don’t think I made any mistakes per se. However, the audio quality of the actors was no problem at all. If you weren’t scrutinizing the audio looking for a difference between this episode and episodes recorded in-studio, you wouldn’t notice a difference.

Well, that concludes my review of Unrelatable. I think this episode was incredible. If I were still doing the star ratings, it would definitely get a 5/5 rating. In fact, I’ll add it to the 5/5 category! Hopefully you like my long-winded posts, and let me know if you read the whole review in the comments! I really enjoy writing these longer posts and look forward to getting back to doing my episode reviews. I had planned to get my Album 70 reviews done quick, before I heard or read anyone else’s reviews of them, and, while I have been able to stay away from other reviews, I definitely haven’t been fast at getting them out! Album 72 is about to start releasing early, after all!