The Fourth Door

Life has changed… I imagine a number of us who will read this probably remember a time when we only had a couple channels on the TV. No? Only me? Am I that old now? Anyway…

We have been cord cutters for years now. We stepped away from the network television grind and haven’t looked back. For a long time our entertainment life revolved around Netflix and Hulu. But times have changed. There are a number of different ways to get entertainment in your living room and tons of different sources for the entertainment. Our personal choice is our Apple TV and sometimes the xbox. Each of them works a bit different than the other, even when we are using them for the same source.

But I digress…

The reason I bring this up is something I ran across recently. A content provider by the name of Go90 popped into the world not too long ago. For me the biggest draw came from one show they carried that isn’t anywhere else (short of purchasing the seasons). Yeah, they allow access to the old show Babylon 5. The sad part of this, until now I hadn’t been able to see all of the episodes of the original run. Yeah, I love the way we are getting access to stuff we might never had in the past. But still I am pulling a bit away from the purpose here.

Yeah, as much as I have wanted to watch all the way through Babylon 5, I still like to explore and see what else is available. Which is when I stumbled upon the show The Fourth Door. Now this, this is something that shows the changes in our world of entertainment. This was an internet serial cut over 12 episodes. Each episode was roughly 8 minutes or so in length. So if you have around 2 hours to kill, you have basically a movie to watch as you binge your way through the entire story.

The entire concept of the story is actually pretty simple. Take the idea of your life flashing before your eyes when you die and make it into a journey to find your way to the other side. It was that and so much more. But we aren’t going to spend as much time looking at that aspect right now.

Instead what stood out to me the most was the way they told the story. The whole thing was told as a voyage of discovery. We as the viewer travel through limbo with the two main characters as they are trying to figure out their way through the final door. All while we see the story play out through flash back, action comic book cut scenes, and tests of the heroes’ resolve. All the way through we don’t actually see specifically whose story is being played out until the very end. And yes, the story does play with our affections as it is cut between either of the heroes.

Stories like this would never have flown in the past. Not with the homogenous forms of entertainment that came and still come from the big networks. No, we needed to see a revolution and people seeking different forms of entertainment for stuff like this to come into the world.

Go90 does have an app that you can watch on a tablet or a phone, but I was disappointed to see that they don’t allow casting to a Chromecast or AppleTV. Well, unless you have a way to connect a computer to your tv. Considering I have a Chromecast in the office and the AppleTV in the living room, I can turn those screens into an extension of my laptops screen. Yeah, we have come a long way…

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If you enjoy these stories, consider leaving some coffee money in the jar or you could buy a book or two. Either way helps keep the stories flowing.