The Middle

Main Range #232

Released: 15 November 2017

Listened: 9/4/20

This one is a high-concept story, where the travelers land on a planet that’s divided into three castes by age: the young, who do nothing but party, the middle-aged, who apparently all have unceasing office jobs, and the elderly, who go...somewhere else. Somewhere else turns out to be a riff on Old Man’s War, because they’re locked into powered armor and forced to fight in a war. This scenario splits up the three travelers fairly quickly, giving them a range of other people to interact with. The Doctor confronts his pacifism (for a bit), Constance gets to use her organizational skills (if not her codebreaking ones), and Flip gets a physical adventure, although she’s still a bit more restrained than she had been in previous stories. The minor characters are the ones who make this story, all of them being nicely realized and well performed. The plot doesn’t so much climax as unravel, with a series of conclusions one after the other. Each tells a piece of the bigger picture, but none are really wholly satisfying. How much you like this one will depend on how appealing you find the concept, or the guest actors.