John Phipps

Much smarter than your average podcast: Passenger List reviewed

As the narcosis of cliché starts taking hold, this paranoia thriller will surprise you with something inventive or daring

Passenger List is part of a subgenre I call digital paranoia, which features a recurring cast of post-Snowden hackers, traffickers and Isis converts. Image: Andriy Popov / Alamy Stock Photo 
issue 10 July 2021

Passenger List opens with a carefully structured ripple of breaking news bulletins: a mysterious catastrophe, an unconvincing official explanation, the repetitive stupidity that surrounds disaster. A plane has disappeared, no wreckage has been found. A woman whose brother was on board begins to search for the truth. The authorities say it was a bird strike: a flock of geese was shredded in the engines and 200 passengers crumpled on impact with the Atlantic ocean. Of course, the authorities’ story doesn’t make sense. So we follow our hero, Caitlin, a lone citizen searching indefatigably for answers in a shadow world of half-truth and paranoia.

It seems that we never tire of this subject matter. Something was planned, lives were lost, and now that plan is being hidden by people in power. Passenger List is about conspiracy, paranoia, the difficulty of distinguishing truth from fantasy. If this is a relatively modern form of story, it’s also one that confirms a profound human preference — for hidden intelligence and a designing hand over and above random contingency.

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