REVIEW | Falling Ordinary: On Recordings on a Dead Alien from Sarangani by Carlou Barroca Espedillon

Growing up in a town that sat squarely between the mountains and the sea, my friends and I spent our nights waiting for something to happen. We sat on the concrete barriers of an unfinished bridge, swinging our legs over the dark water, scanning the sky for a sign. We wanted lights. We wanted abduction. We wanted a rupture in the air of the province that would suck us up and deposit us somewhere, anywhere, that wasn’t here. We wanted to be special, which is to say, we wanted to be chosen.

Nothing ever came down. The only lights were the tricycles sputtering home and the flicker of televisions broadcasting the evening news. We grew up. We stopped looking up. We learned that the gravity of a small town is stronger than the pull of the stars.

I thought of those humid, empty nights while reading Carlou Barroca Espedillon’s Recordings on a Dead Alien from Sarangani. It is a zine that understands the crushing weight of the ordinary. It understands that if a spaceship were to crash-land in the Philippines, specifically in Alabel, Sarangani, it wouldn’t be an Independence Day spectacle of lasers and presidents. It would be a municipal headache. It would involve the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), gossip, and a lot of paperwork.

The zine presents itself as a collection of transcripts, a dossier compiled by a researcher named “Mr. E” regarding an extraterrestrial event that occurred on April 26, 2008. The premise is classic science fiction, but the execution is delightfully, heartbreakingly realist. The spacecraft is described by locals as a spinning disco ball driven by a drunkard. It crashes not into a metropolis, but into the salty waters of Barangay Ladol, interrupting the date of Arnold and Esmeralda, who are more worried about their parents finding out they are making out than an alien. 

This is the zine’s first triumph: it grounds the fantastical in the banality of Filipino life. The alien, later affectionately and somewhat indignantly named “Bogart” by his neighbors, does not demand, “Take me to your leader.” Instead, he sits in a cottage, stares at the police, and eventually rents an apartment from an old landlady named Ate Tine.

Espedillon excels at depicting the bureaucracy of wonder. The narrative is filtered through the lens of local governance through municipal health officers, retired doctors, and barangay captains. In one of the most compelling sections, Dr. Anecito Fabio, the former Municipal Health Officer, describes the alien’s physiology with a mix of scientific curiosity and provincial limitation. He notes that Bogart has a single lung that, before the doctor’s eyes, undergoes mitosis and splits into two.

This moment of biological adaptation is pivotal. Bogart evolves. But he doesn’t evolve into something superior. He evolves into us. This is the central tragedy that Espedillon slowly unveils: assimilation as a form of degradation. Bogart goes from a pale, translucent being to a man with a farmer’s tan. He goes from a creature of the cosmos to a tenant worrying about rent. The sci-fi element, which is the rapid evolution, is used not to empower the character, but to trap him in the human condition.

How does an alien learn to be Filipino? Not through grand history books, but through the flickering blue light of a CRT television. Espedillon pays close attention to the specific cultural artifacts that shape Bogart’s consciousness. He learns language by watching Detective Conan and a soap opera featuring the band Cueshe.

There is a subtle critique here of how culture is consumed and learned. Bogart’s “education” is a hodgepodge of dubbed anime and local melodrama. He learns to speak, but his first words are stuttering mimics of pop culture. Ate Tine, his landlady, observes this process with a grandmotherly pragmatism, feeding him pancit bihon and adobo as he absorbs the rhythms of the local dialect. The alien becomes a mirror of the promdi experience, the outsider trying to learn the codes of a new place through its media and its food, desperate to be understood.

Despite all the effort, there remains a loneliness at the center of this story, articulated by “KC,” Bogart’s childhood friend and perhaps the only person who saw him clearly. KC describes a friendship forged in the boredom of a provincial childhood. She recounts the bullying Bogart faced, not because he was a threat, but simply because he was different, and then, eventually, because he was too smart. “Gusto nako mabal-an kung paunsa magdako ang mga tawo,” Bogart tells her. I want to know how humans grow.

He learns that humans grow by shrinking. He learns that intelligence is often met with aggression. KC notes with clarity: “Sometimes prejudice requires no logic; we are just assholes for no reason.” The tragedy of Bogart is that he succeeds in his mission to assimilate. He becomes so human that he develops people-pleasing tendencies to avoid a psychological scar familiar to anyone who has ever tried too hard to fit in.

Espedillon constructs an anti-climax as a narrative device. We expect Bogart to reveal a grand purpose: a scouting mission, a warning about climate change, a galactic war. Instead, the years roll by. 2008 becomes 2012, becomes 2022. Bogart does not do anything. He just lives.

This confronted me with a terrifying question: if a being from the stars can travel lightyears only to end up watching afternoon soaps and paying 10,000 pesos in rent, what hope is there for the rest of us? The story suggests that the ultimate destination of all sentient life is not transcendence, but mediocrity. “Maybe ‘unremarkable’ is not that bad,” the narrator muses near the end. But there is a darker, more impenetrable silence at the heart of this dossier. The zine is titled Recordings ON a Dead Alien, not BY him. The preposition acts as a gate. We are forever trapped on the outside, looking in. The format itself, i.e., the transcripts, interviews, observations, ensures that Bogart remains an object of study rather than a subject of experience. We know how much he weighed. We know what he ate. We know he watched Detective Conan. But we never know what he felt when the sun hit his newly tanned skin. We never know if the splitting of his lung was painful or ecstatic. We never know if he looked at the mountains of Sarangani and felt home, or if he felt a crushing, intergalactic homesickness that no amount of pancit could cure.

Did Bogart define a good life by the stillness of an afternoon? Or was his assimilation a form of surrender, a slow drowning in the banality of a world that refused to be amazed by him? Bogart is a ghost in his own story. It recalls the friction at the heart of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy: the terror of The Look (le regard). Sartre posited that to be looked at by another is to lose one’s subjectivity, to be solidified into an object in someone else’s world. Bogart is the ultimate victim of this gaze. He is observed, measured, and recorded, but never encountered as a free subject. The text forces us to confront the terrifying possibility that to be known by others is to be misunderstood, that our true selves are untranslatable frequencies that no recording device can capture. We are left with the husk of his life, the measurements of his corpse, but the living remains a secret he took to the grave.

The narrative arc concludes with a death that fits this thesis perfectly. Bogart does not die in a blaze of glory or a return to the stars; he chokes on a bangus (milkfish) tail. It is a death so specific to the locale, so physically grounded, that it strips away the last vestiges of his alien mystique.

When Dr. Tumamac, the pathologist, performs the autopsy, he is disappointed. He wanted to find a galaxy inside the ribcage; instead, he finds a middle-aged man. “The body on my table looked like a forty-year-old man in his midlife crisis,” he complains. The alien magic had faded, metabolized into flesh and bone. Dr. Tumamac’s disappointment mirrors the reader’s realization: we wanted a monster or a savior, but we got a neighbor. We got a guy who died eating fish.

Yet, for all its grounded charm, the zine is not without the edges of a work that is still finding its own frequency. The conceit of the transcript, that these are raw, unpolished audio recordings, is occasionally betrayed by the author’s own literary hand. Mr. E, our supposed bureaucrat-researcher, sometimes waxes too poetic, observing details no government interviewer would likely note or care for. This slippage invites an interrogation of authority: Does the writer trust the raw data to speak, or must they impose a literary order upon the chaos? By manicuring the transcripts with poetic insight, the text inadvertently asserts an authoritarian grip on the narrative, refusing to let the archive remain beautifully, banally incoherent.

The illusion of the text wavers, reminding us that we are reading a story, not holding a classified file. Espedillon occasionally fills the silence where he should have trusted the reader to find meaning in the gaps.

This structural unevenness is most palpable in the zine’s conclusion. The narrative suddenly shifts to a “Bonus Story,” an essay on Adobong Puti. Its inclusion feels initially jarring, risking feeling like an afterthought or a disjointed appendix. It is a gamble that threatens to untether the reader from the story of the alien just as the emotional weight of his death settles.

And yet, despite the structural friction, this gamble reveals itself as the thematic key to the entire work.

The author writes about the simplicity of salt, vinegar, and garlic with no soy sauce to hide the flavor. He recounts his mother confusing his Adobong Puti for Paksiw. “Adobo? Ano ba ‘yan, parang paksiw!” she exclaims. The narrator realizes that “in principle, Adobong Puti is just the same as Paksiw.” This confusion of labels mirrors Bogart’s existence. Is he an Alien or a Human? Is it Adobo or Paksiw? This suggests that these labels ultimately fail to capture the essence of the thing. Just as the dish is defined by its taste and the memory it evokes rather than its name, Bogart is defined by his lived experience through the heat, the bullying, the friendship, rather than his origin.

What do we hold fast? In the end, Bogart didn’t hold fast to his alien origins. He let them go to fit into the frame of a doorway, to fit into a school desk, to fit into a town that didn’t know what to do with him.

Finishing this, I found myself back on that unfinished bridge. I realized that my friends and I were wrong to wait for an abduction to save us from the ordinary. This work suggests that even if the sky finally opened up, the gravity of the town would still win. We wouldn’t be lifted up. The alien would just be pulled down. He would sit beside us on the concrete barrier, waiting for something to happen as just another body trapped in the humidity.

Bogart’s life wasn’t the rupture we prayed for. It was a hum fading into the static of the very air we were desperate to escape. We wanted to be chosen, to be special. But Bogart teaches us that we don’t need to be saved from the ordinary. We need to be held by it. Perhaps, the most extraordinary thing a life can do is to stop fighting gravity, and simply  realize that it is simply the earth hugging us close, welcoming us home.

This review is part of Mindanews’ literary feature on SOX Zine Fest 2025, focusing on select zines highlighted from the event on November 29, 2025, at Notre Dame of Marbel University, Koronadal City, South Cotabato.