The hero’s journey is full of pitfalls. And I’m not just talking about the usual: plagues, armies, spears, actual pits to fall into. I mean that when it comes to the telling, it can become so much hot air, so much hubris, so much self-involvement, even in the greatest of tales. Which brings me to Against the Odds, Wondery’s popular pod about all the terrible things people can survive, which rose to fame when we were all neck-deep in talk of resilience (think one year into Covid, when patience was wearing thin).
Against the Odds is a series of great tales: true stories of people surviving torture in a prisoner-of-war camp, weeks alone in a jungle or trapped in an underwater cave, raging wildfires, awful acts of God and man. This podcast is about resilience, about people overcoming the titular odds to survive situations of immeasurable hardship to tell the tale.
As for the telling part, the narrators and self-described adventurers Mike Corey and Cassie De Pecol work hard to make these stories immersive and gripping, with multiple characters, cliffhangers, twists and red herrings to take us through the tortuous blow-by-blow of these often excruciating stories. They take turns narrating these episodic true-life dramas, bringing in actors’ voices and sound effects for the screeching monkeys or breaking glass or gunshots or what have you.
Many of these are gobsmacking tales: remember the Thai schoolboys who spent 18 days in a cave and had to be rescued by underwater divers? Or the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes and who spent two months waiting for help to arrive?
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Then there was the 22-year-old Israeli backpacker who ended up lost in the Bolivian jungle alone for three weeks. I’m telling you, wild things happen to people once they stray from the beaten path.
But too often the craft here feels clumsy, and Corey and De Pecol lean into the histrionic – their description of a POW (the late US senator John McCain, as it happens) ruminating with pride on his country while spitting in the face of a North Vietnamese prison warden lays the stars and stripes on thick. Still, these stories are a reminder of the incredible discomfort humans can endure and somehow get through – and that’s a lot of discomfort.
Too often, Against the Odds gets heavy-handed with the heroism: is it always mettle that gets someone through?
Against the Odds may sound uplifting, but much of it is grim going. It’s hard to make stories about the Donner Party – a group of American pioneers who ended up snowbound in the Sierra Nevada and had to eat the bodies of their dead friends to stay alive – sound inspirational exactly, even if some of them did make it to California. It’s also a reminder that what one person can overcome may be too much for another: the path to resilience is lined with the bodies of the not-quite-resilient-enough.
The best episodes are the post-story interviews with people who have some association with the event described: the Israeli backpacker bringing some nuance to his own tale of derring-do, or a man who was 13 years old when a hurricane hit, and still lives with the legacy. There’s much of interest in the rest too – it’s one thing to recall the headlines after 2005′s Hurricane Katrina, another to hear harrowing personal accounts from people who barely survived the ordeal.
Too often, though, Against the Odds gets heavy-handed with the heroism: is it always mettle that gets someone through? Mightn’t it sometimes be just luck? A lighter touch and a tighter edit wouldn’t have detracted from the thrilling truth of it all: that extraordinary things happen to ordinary people, and sometimes they make it through to tell us about it.
