"Nothing O'Clock" is a Doctor Who story by Neil Gaiman, first published in 2013 in Doctor Who: 11 Doctors 11 Stories. A revised version was published in the 2015 collection Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances. It is set during the Eleventh Doctor's incarnation.
It is the 1980s, and strange things are happening; people wearing masks are buying houses all over, along with business properties and government facilities. When Mr. and Mrs. Brown sell their house for three times the money's worth, they get worried when their daughter Polly goes missing. Cue a police box showing up on their street, and a strange man who offers to find her.
Tropes for this short story include:
- And I Must Scream: The Doctor doesn't kill the Kin; instead, he takes it to Nothing O'Clock, the moment before time begins. It falls outside, and is trapped in that moment forever, erasing itself from history.
- And the Adventure Continues: The Doctor decides to take Amy back to Rory; first, however, he considers getting them gazpacho from Spain.
- Apocalypse How: The Kin briefly causes a Planetary Version with an eventual Universal version implied as the consequences of The Kin's modus operandi.
- Batman Gambit: The Kin comes up with one in order to manipulate The Doctor into taking it to the dawn of time so that it can basically rule the whole of the Universe. Needless to say, the Kin is outmaneuvered handily.
- Berserk Button: Don't harm children and let the Doctor find out about it. It won't end well for you.
- Beyond the Impossible: The Doctor takes the TARDIS, and The Kin, to the moment before the Big Bang, meaning that there is no time in that area. The Doctor outright states that he couldn't do it without the "squiggly whatsit" plugged into the console, and the trip burns out the unit, meaning it can't be done again.
- "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: The Kin notify the Doctor that they did not commit genocide and wipe out the humans; they bought up most of the planet Earth and put the humans in concentration camps the size of Siberia, where the limited space and natural elements wiped them out.
- Defiant to the End: When the Kin have cornered Amy, she takes off one's mask and assures them she will not ask when what the time is. Thanks to Timey-Wimey Ball, she's miraculously saved.
- Glamour Failure: Once you realize that it's The Kin you're dealing with, the image that the mask is supposed to convey is lost, and all you see is a cheap mask over the Kin's "face".
- Kick the Dog: The Kin kills Polly For the Evulz. She just wanted her diary back. Much to the Kin's consternation, the Doctor takes it personally and ensures they are not killed but that they cannot harm other humans.
- Me's a Crowd: The true danger of The Kin. The Kin isn't a race, it's a temporal collective of one individual entity moving back and forth in time so frequently that it has a multitude of itself — with the consequence being a time stream so riddled with holes that time in the local area will eventually collapse.
- Missing Child: Polly vanishes just as the parents are waiting in a hotel to find a new place to open up. The police are no help since their building was also bought out.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: Zigzagged. The Kin wear paper masks because their true faces are considered hideous. If they need to, however, then they can pose as someone else and the masks seem lifelike.
- Schmuck Bait: Asking the people in masks, "What time is it?" when they tell you to do so. The Doctor concludes that they use it to affix themselves to points in time and multiply.
- Too Clever by Half: The Kin thinks they have tricked the Doctor by posing as Amy and convincing him to go to the beginning of time. They failed to consider one thing: the Doctor knows they killed a little girl and so he's decided to give them a Fate Worse than Death: being trapped at the moment before time.
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Justified. The Time Lords went to the trouble of devising an elaborate prison for the Kin, rather than executing the ones endangering the timestream...because there is no such thing as "the ones endangering the timestream", just one. An execution would be genocide, which the Time Lords refused to do.
