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Wolverine: The Long Night is Marvel’s podcast hello

By Jason Burke

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Marvel jumps into the podcast game, sinking its claws into the medium with Wolverine: The Long Night.  Here is a comprehensive review of Episodes 1 through 3.

Disney is on a rampage. The House of Mouse is plugging itself into all corners of your life, desperate to suction every last red cent from whatever pocket or couch cushion it can find it.

In fact, ever since the Disney purchased the fledgling Marvel Entertainment way back in 2009 for a mere $4.24 billion, the competition (looking at you, DC) has been left decimated as far as movies, television and just about every other form of entertainment, save one: the podcast.

So, when word spread that Marvel and Stitcher had entered into a partnership to break into audio fiction, you couldn’t help but ask yourself one question: What took so long?

After all, what other medium can potentially reach so many millions without the exhaustive overhead of big set pieces and a bloated CGI budget? It’s when these questions are answered that you suddenly find yourself listening to Wolverine: The Long Night.

Wolverine: The Long Night isn’t looking to upend the medium like the Marvel Cinematic Universe has for better or worse. At least, not yet. However, it is taking steps to create content the only way Disney and its minions seem to know how: through quality.

Moody and atmospheric, penned by veteran novelist and comic book scribe Ben Percy, the script is crafted more as a supernatural thriller than something in the comic book superhero genre. Only three episodes in, and thus far, Logan (Richard Armitage from The Hobbit series, basically a Hugh Jackman lite) is really only known to us only through our previous knowledge of the character.

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The world of the podcast is slowly revealed when special agents Sally Pierce (Celia Keenan-Bogler) and Tad Marshal (Ato Essandoh) are dispatched to the fictional towns of Burns, Alaska — a place at the edge of the world. Pierce and Marshal are tasked with investigating an abandoned trawler and a crew that’s been viciously sliced through in the cargo hold. But once the agents discover two more bodies with similar claw-like wounds in town, the two are almost instantly a Scully and Mulder transported into a Twins Peak-ish town fit for unwelcoming cops,  possible drug shipments, supernatural cults and children living off the grid.

It’s type of place people go to escape, which, unfortunately, never seems to be the case for our grizzled hero, Logan, as he becomes a person of interest who is tough to find. Only revealed in flashbacks and off-hand remarks in conversations, this iteration of the character has moved to a hardened, uglier, carnal monstrosity than the one that donned big screens for Fox studios.

All credit given to Hugh Jackman, whose Wolverine became the sexiest man to don a pompadour since Elvis Presley, but we get a dose, albeit, a small one, of the damage razor-sharp claws laced with the strongest metal on earth can really do. Even without the bloody visuals, you can cringe at the mental picture as a fisherman who witnessed, firsthand, the dismembered bodies and explained, “One of his eyes was … split through so that it was jellying out.”

Our only true interaction with Logan is a breathy, snarling phone call to special agent Marshal in which he growls, “Hear you been looking for me. Don’t!”  But building up the mythos and setting the story is what moves it. It’s a slow burn, but we know we are waiting for the fuse to hit the dynamite.

The script, in and of itself, is not completely original. After all, we are retelling the mythos of Wolverine, here. The true standout is the quality of the acting and its sound, and that can be placed squarely on the shoulders of its director Brendan Baker, who took it upon himself to immerse the listener in this world.

Using ambisonic microphones which capture sound on a horizontal plane but also above and below the listener, Baker is able to give the listener a real world feel. It’s as if you’re a ghost, a quiet observer, the fly on the wall, or in this case, the middle of the woods.

Baker and his team create subtle nuances to teleport you into this world: doors opening and closing, the squeak of the car seat as the characters interact, the subtle movements. Having the actors record together and off each other also help the feel and flow of the story.

Pressed for how this world fits in with the multitude that Marvel has already created, Marvel contends that this is a whole new world. This version of Wolverine is wholly his own, separate from the comics. But the only true question, the one which remains, is whether Marvel can conquer this world as well.