Audio Drama

Hell Cats
1x14 Promises Kept [season finale]

Well, I thought that was really good overall. A nice mix of swashbuckling fiction (exactly what you want from a pirate story) and historical fact (there's plenty of gaps in the latter to be filled by the former). It has a very modern sensibility to some of the characters and their relationships, which I guess would rub some listeners up the wrong way, but it's actually fitting — these people were forerunners to modern ideas about the place of women, the value of freedom, and LGBTQ+ lifestyles; while they may not have actually used the same language to express those ideas, it's hard to think they would've disagreed with them. Besides, any work of fiction is as much about the time it was written as it is about the time it's set, so I think it works to view these historical people through a modern lens.

It comes to such a fitting close that I'm almost loathe to listen to the second series (which definitely goes beyond recorded events into the realm of total fictionalisation, from what I can tell)... but it's the same writer and lead actors, and it's set in a different but equally swashbuckling milieu (that of highwaymen), so hopefully it's as entertaining.

[Listen to it (again) on Audible.]