There are at least two domains where it has been proposed that past inflection is “uninterpreted” or “fake”, because it does not contribute its ordinary back-shifted interpretation: sequence of tense and counterfactuals. Though only occasionally directly compared, both have been analyzed as cases where T0 bears a formally uninterpretable tense feature that must be licensed by a higher counterpart. This paper, however, focuses on differences between the two environments, particularly in their interaction with aspect, and argues that these differences suggest that sequence of tense and counterfactuals cannot both be analyzed in terms of feature licensing. I conclude that of the two, only counterfactuals involve true “fake” past (ie syntactically licensed [upast]), while sequence of tense is better accounted for in other terms.