The Bridge
is a podcast (2016-2018) set in an "Alternate 2016" on the massive Transcontinental Bridge, a crumbling, mostly abandoned highway spanning the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and the Americas. Though it's less popular than it once was, it's still surveyed by various watchtowers hundreds of feet away from the Bridge, broadcasting regular traffic reports to ensure that proper safety precautions are taken.
Watchtower 10's necessary personnel happen to be: a generalist DJ who spends her free time relaying folklore from abandoned parts of the Bridge, her supervisor (who's only there because he lost a bet), an unfailingly optimistic Bridge Travel Agent, and a groundskeeper who has a thing for romantic comedies.
You'd think that, considering that the Bridge is mostly abandoned, these people would have straightforward, boring jobs. This isn't usually how it happens - the personnel of Watchtower 10 often find themselves embroiled in strange conspiracies dating back to the earliest days of the Bridge itself, or trying to deal with the weirdness that surrounds them on a daily basis.
This podcast contains examples of:
- Abandoned Area: The Bridge itself. While it was once an infrastructural marvel lined with tourist traps, it's fallen into disrepair and unpopularity in the modern era due to either the proliferation of airplanes, rampant supernatural phenomena, or both.
- Alien Geometries: Subverted by Yvette in Payne Manor.
- Alternate History: The Bridge was built in the 1960s or thereabouts, and it's mentioned that technology is slightly more advanced in this world.
- Always on Duty: The Watchtower 10 crew consists of only four people who look after everything (including the monster in the basement).
- Astonishingly Appropriate Interruption: Roger interrupting Etta's story in Bedtime Stories as she says that they'd love to know something from H.P. She, of course, is H.P., and Roger would love to know if she left the chocolate fountain running again.
- Audience Surrogate: Done in a truly terrifying way in The Museum of Oceanic Curiosities.
- Cast Full of Gay: Most of the main characters have been confirmed via
Word of God to be queer. - Casual Danger Dialogue: Kate and Bertie when they get captured by Percy and Nora
- Conditioned to Accept Horror: The entire Watchtower crew (and seemingly everyone who still lives out on the Bridge).
- Creature-Hunter Organization: The Hunt Club and Polaris.
- A Day in the Limelight: Frank gets this in Morpheus. Yvette appears to get this in The Museum of Oceanic Curiosities but we find out at the end that it's not actually her talking.
- Eldritch Abomination: The creatures that live in the ocean.
- Eldritch Location: The Bridge itself. Things just don't seem to... work on the Bridge. There was a genuinely haunted house transported onto the bridge that did something to a paranormal investigator bent on debunking ghost stories, a woman was somehow petrified, people often hear the voices of their family members asking them to find them beneath the waves, all the occupants of a hotel in the middle of the Bridge disappeared, and then there's whatever went horrifyingly wrong at Aqualand.
- Extremely Short Timespan: Most of the show has taken place over the span of just a few days, with the exception of the first two episodes and the mini-episodes. And the longer time passage that we do get (between Oops! Part 2 and Please Pardon Our Mess) lasts only two days and occurs between episodes.
- Fun with Acronyms: People Openly Supporting Elaborate Initiatives Doomed Or Not
- Gender-Equal Ensemble
- Genius Loci: The Bridge may be one - Bertie claims that it didn't want to let go of an actor in a movie set on the Bridge.
- Gondor Calls for Aid: Used in Oops! Part 1. Too bad the only help they get comes two days late and is in the form of Frank.
- High-Dive Escape: Percy and Nora do this at the end of Oops! Part 2.
- Law Enforcement, Inc.: The Travel Agency seems to be this.
- Noodle Incident: Whatever happened to Aqualand, an amusement park in the middle of the Bridge? It's rarely discussed, but apparently it was truly horrible. We later learn at least what happened to the Kraken.
- Protectorate: Don't threaten the Watchtower crew (that includes Bob).
- The Radio Dies First: Percy and Nora take care of this first.
- You Are Not Alone: Home features Etta realizing this. Kate also reminds her in The Enemy of Good.
- You Said You Would Let Them Go: Etta unties Percy under the assumption that Nora would let Roger go unharmed. Nora proceeds to stab Roger in the gut.
