Open the Box

UNIT #7.4

Released: 21 November 2018

Listened: 4/20/23

It appears that despite Osgood’s and Josh’s insubordination last story, they faced no consequences, because Kate has them with her pseudo-undercover investigating a training organization called Pandora. It seems the government wants UNIT to take “mental resilience training,” but Kate wanted to check it out first, and uncovered a series of mysterious deaths, so now she’s investigating personally. The callback in this story is to “The Mind of Evil,” which seems like an unexpected reference. However, “Mind of Evil” was unusual for its time in casting Pik-Sen Lim as a Captain in the Chinese army, and a somewhat sympathetic character. Ms. Lim has been acting steadily for decades, and was available for this story, so we get to find out what happened to Captain Lee after her encounter with the Master and the Keller Machine. We also learn that Osgood is extremely cranky and sarcastic before she’s had her coffee. We also discover the biggest fears of each of our three main characters, none of which is actually surprising. It’s a fine story, with references I didn’t expect, but nothing too revolutionary. On the whole, this boxed set shakes up the format, which is good, but the characterizations seem a bit off.