False Negative

UNIT #5.4

Released: 29 November 2017

Listened: 4/14/23

Looks like it’s time for a parallel-universe story, and it’s amazing that we haven’t had one before. While following up a lead on the Auctioneers, Osgood and Josh get popped over to a parallel universe. Unfortunately, it’s just about the most cliched type of parallel universe imaginable, where everybody’s the same, just evil. Much like the Star Trek version, it’s hard to imagine how this civilization could have produced the exact same people in the exact same positions, when they’re constantly backstabbing each other (sometimes literally). And of course Sam gets killed in the first few minutes, because apparently Warren Brown just wasn’t available for this set. Despite the “everybody’s evil” trope, the story doesn’t take itself very seriously. Josh and Osgood are a couple in this universe, because that causes maximum embarrassment for “our” Josh and Osgood as they try to impersonate their counterparts. Shindi, oddly, is mostly the same, just crankier. And Kate, for no reason I can tell, is not so much evil as lazy. She spends most of the story trying to check her emails. Our Osgood once again does a pretty decent job operating in the field, despite some initial confusion. She figures out what’s going on very quickly and adapts better than Josh. And the characters left in “our” universe figure things out awfully quickly as well, because Kate’s pretty smart. (And she’s heard of this before – she specifically asks whether her alt-self wears an eye-patch, a reference to “Inferno,” but she treats it as an inside joke.) And that pretty much wraps up the boxed set. It’s a mixed bag, because that was the intention. I think my favorite is probably the Sontaran story, but that could vary depending on the day.