Longtime listens of McCusker’s work will find this latest entry fits soundly within his ouvre, and is most similar in tone to “The Green Ring Conspiracy” and the “Last Chance Detectives” with a touch of the paranormal à la “Father Gilbert” and “Passages”
Some recurring McCuskerian motifs: trains, and forgeries (Green Ring), the Old West (Passages), codes, and maps (A Code of Honor, Name Not a Number)
More Odyssey Corollaries
There’s a doofy character like Officer Harley/Harlow Doyle, only this one’s a news reporter who appears only in the first two episodes. A Bart Rathbone character (revamped from “The Living Nativity”) appears only in episode one. Hope he returns.
Speaking of hope, Hope Mountain serves a Forest Mountain/Trickle Lake stand-in
The Grand Depot is center of the action, though not its heart in, à la Whits End. It serves as a kind of Main Street and includes an antique store akin to J&J Antiques.
The perfectly polite children include the usual McCusker lineup: the golden boy, the nerd, the troublemaker-bully, the reporter girl(s)
The Worldview
There’s an interesting dig a public school early on, a topic McCusker assiduously avoided in Odyseey (even pulling an episode on the subject from regular release). A critiques of mega-churchism is amusing given the in-state proximity to Colorado Springs. Side note: Are there Colorado towns so packed with practicing Catholics that one church has two weekly masses, and another has three? Sounds more like exurban New Orleans. The kids are all Catholics in the way all Odyssey kids are gauzily evangelical, but for some reason the latter is easier to buy.
The two main mystery plots are developed and braided together neatly in the first five episodes. No spoilers, listen for yourself.
I want to learn how to do the read-along thing for my own audio project!
@lukesirinides
