Okay, I have to start this out with an apology. I wrote a review of the first two episodes of Limetown, and I recommended it to you all. I thought it was going to be great. I thought it was going to be true to the podcast. I thought it was going to be worth your time to watch.

After finishing the show, I can confirm to you that it is, in fact, not worth watching it at all. It was such a disappointment, an absolute spit in the faces of the original creators. 

Let’s break down why shall we?

I’d like to start with Deirdre Wells. They decided to cast Marlee Matlin as Deirdre. If you’re not familiar with this incredible actress, let me tell you a few things about her. I first saw her on West Wing, where I fell in love with her. She’s funny as hell, a great actress, and also happens to be deaf. 

If you know about Limetown already, then you know that the town was testing tech that allowed people to hear other people’s thoughts. Now, I’m sure you can imagine that a deaf woman would be more interested in that than most. The ability to communicate, actually communicate with people after not being able to for most of your life would be too magical for words. They could have explored that. They could have gotten into how it was to be isolated her whole life, and then feel even more isolated when other people got the tech and she didn’t.

But they didn’t’ bother to do any of that. This was one of the few things that a show could have done so much better than a podcast. I mean, you can’t convey the actions of a deaf person in a purely audio medium. That sort of feels like a dick move. But no, there was none of that. She was just deaf, and they didn’t do anything with it.

What they did do instead was completely ruin the relationship between Dierdre and Max. If you recall from the podcast, Dierdre was all but convinced Max didn’t love her all that much. She was largely surprised when she heard that he’d called out “Goodbye Dorothy,” right before he died. She seemed more angry at him than anything. Like long term anger. One that had smoldered to a low blaze through the years. And Max? Max didn’t mention her at all.

Now, let’s talk about what really ruined the show for me. It was a specific thing, and it had a name.

Lia.

I touched on this in the first post I did about the show. I loved Lia in the podcast. She was sweet, smart and cared about what she was doing. And she really, really, didn’t give a shit about her uncle Emile. She didn’t remember him, didn’t realize the connection he had with her.

This was incredibly important if you read the prequel novel. Emile stays with his brother’s family for some time, and he has this great connection with Lia. It’s suggested but never said out loud, that he can’t hear Lia’s thoughts. That was important to him. Lia was important to him. So the fact that she doesn’t even remember their bond is heartbreaking. It means something that’s felt deeply. And this show just pissed all over that.

I especially hated what happened to Mark. It was ugly, it was brutal, and it was completely unnecessary. It just made me feel sick. And look, I’m all about the flawed hero character. I love flawed heroes. But there is a difference between a flawed hero and someone I just really genuinely hate. This made Lia into someone I hated.

Now, let’s talk about Emile showing up on the second to last episode. What in the hell was that? It didn’t make any sense for him to show up. And it made no sense, how Lia reached to him.

This whole show she’s having some sort of crisis because she wants to find her uncle. Then he shows up, right out of the blue, and asks her to come with him. And she says no. 

She hasn’t done a damn thing all season that wasn’t selfish. She’s done all these horrible things and she claims that it was all for the survivors. But it wasn’t, it was for her. But when the time came, she didn’t take what she’d been searching for all this time. 

But she didn’t. Now, this makes sense for the Lia of the podcast. She cared about the story, not her uncle. She would have turned him down. But the Lia of the show would have gone with her uncle all the way. 

Now finally, I want to point out something that I thought was done almost to perfection. The last episode was almost perfect.

Lenore was great. The actress, the lines, the execution. Everything about her was wonderful. All through this last episode were little added scenes that did add something to the story. It was masterfully done.

Maybe it was so good because Lia was hardly on the screen.

So that’s it. I have nothing more to say on the subject of this show. But I do have some advice for the creators. 

Don’t bother with a season two. Get season three of the podcast done instead.