It wouldn't be a new season of TBC without a Victorian visit from the Antiques Freaks! Dig your Carnacki Bingo cards out of storage and enjoy a live reading of The Story of the Beetle Hunter by Arthur Conan Doyle, all set to the impeccable scoring and sound design talents of Oselka Sound.

If you'd rather hear a properly acted, serious version of this story, please check out the Gothic Tales audio book narrated by Gary Furlong.

In addition to our usual barnyard language, this episode includes irreverant and sexual humor and some bad Victorian ideas and opinions.

Scribando and Bookbarella return! We're a little tipsy for the first four episodes of the season in service to a future TBC episode, so this one is perhaps not our greatest season opener. We try and fail to do a little scientific thinking around particle and quantum physics and sing a fake song for your amusement, though, so there's that.

Special Thanks to:

• Ken from Antiques Freaks for narrating our cold open for this season
• Lightwitch/Courtney Brooke Hall for our new photos
• Greylord's Hoard for our new logo and graphic design

Links & References:

• The Multiverse is real. Just not in the way you think it is. | Sean Carroll

• You can find many episodes about particle physics and other quantum topics we mentioned on Daniel & Kelly's Extraordinary Universe podcast:

• • What is a particle?

  • Time travel fiction

  • Unraveling misleading popular science

  • How to make sense of quantum entanglement

• Focus playing Hocus Pocus on NBC in 1973 (introduced by Gladys Knight!)

In addition to our usual barnyard language, today's episode includes discussion of depression, suicide, and very brief mentions of guns and pet death.

TBC is an AI-free production. Audio by Oselka Sound.

Thank you to our Patron One In A Thousand who requested this week's book! They wrote in to us earlier this year, saying:

"...At some point in your lives, you've probably experienced media that you felt was ALMOST really good, but for whatever reason it just wasn't, and media that was almost really good can be just as frustrating as outright bad media because you can see that it just needed a little bit of fixing. That's how I felt about The Third Force. It's a tie-in novel to an obscure Japanese multimedia franchise from the 90's called Gadget...Marc Laidlaw was given a lot of creative freedom to write his own interpretation of the story, including more worldbuilding and character development, to mixed results...Laidlaw has confirmed that several characters and plot points from this book went on to inspire elements of the Half-Life series, which he became the lead writer for a couple years after writing this...In a way, The Third Force is almost like a rough first draft for ideas that Laidlaw would execute in a better way later."

In addition to our usual barnyard language, today's episode includes discussion or mention of brainwashing, torture, murder, and general high mind loss.