The Black Tapes · Pacific Northwest Stories

Episode 202 - Speak No Evil, Think No Evil

February 2, 2016·37 min·3 clips

A hunter's trail camera captures a man in burlap drawing symbols and reading for 28 minutes in a remote meadow.

The tape opens messily. Before the case gets moving, Alex Regan is still working through ads, retakes, and Richard Strand returning one of 11 calls with barely any warmth. The season's frame is plain enough. Alex is still studying Dr. Richard Strand, president and founder of the Strand Institute, with close attention to what he says and what he will not give her. The pieces feel wrong from the start. Someone has seen a figure standing over a bed, and someone else has apparently been gone for five days. Strand remains Strand. When the material piles strange on strange, the tone does not swell; it tightens, with the dry sense that another odd layer has simply landed on the table. The best turn comes from a clip. At first, the exchange almost sounds boring: deer move at night, Alex asks what she is meant to notice, and the answer is just to look again. Then the question shifts. The point is not that the animals appear, but how many legs show up when the frame is watched closely. The episode lets that hang there. It does not rush toward a clean conclusion, and the skeptical handling of the tape makes the possible anomaly feel colder, not bigger. The closing beat with Clotomaca keeps that same control. Alex does not explain the name in the excerpt. She only leaves the listener with the warning not to think it at night with eyes closed. That is where the episode lands: a blurry image, a missing stretch of time, and a repeated name that behave like evidence but refuse to become an answer.

As heard by us

A calm return to Strand, with one small visual question doing most of the work.

The episode goes back to the Strand thread with a calm, controlled pace. Alex Regan treats season two as a continuation of the hunt for Dr. Richard Strand, and the conversation keeps circling one small clip and the uneasy question it raises.

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Why you'd press play

A careful return to Strand, with one deer clip and a mystery that refuses to stay small for long.

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