With the Daleks trapped in a time bubble, the Eighth Doctor fully expects that they'll stew for a few hundred years until Romana, now Lady President of Gallifrey, takes pity on them. He also decides that he really needs to talk to Romana about the whole Charley being a paradox thing and time falling apart. So he happily congratulates Charley on her birthday, which by all logic must have happened at some point during their travels, and he tells her he'll just drop her off on a party planet in a pocket universe for about a year until he's sorted stuff out.
Charley won't have it, of course, and calls him a fancy space Peter Pan who lifts young girls from their regular lives and doesn't think of the consequences. But her opinion hardly counts either way when she's captured by a group of Gallifreyans of the Celestial Intervention Agency (C.I.A.) and taken before Romana. They figure out that although Charley is pretty much a nobody, and although the Doctor rescues people all the time from certain death, Charley's rescue set off a freak chain reaction in the web of time. This had let to "anti-time" bleeding through, and "the boys and girls of Never-Never-Land" invading Gallifrey.
It turns out that these "never-people" were all literally erased from time and put in the Oubliette of Rassilon by the C.I.A.'s old Policy of Rassilon. And since no one remembered them, no one in the C.I.A. realised that they were deleting hundreds of people every year, let alone that this is still ongoing. One of them found out and, wrecked by guilt, confessed and ended up being erased herself. She's now taken on Charley's form as a tribute to this interesting new paradox, and feeds on time and time anomalies.
The never-people want to bring anti-time into proper time and see Charley as a very convenient way to bring that about. They brainwash the C.I.A. members and spout religious chants about Rassilon. The Doctor believes that the purported Casket of Rassilon in anti-time is, in fact, just a big ball of anti-time unrelated to Rassilon in any way (after all, he's seen Rassilon's resting place and met the guy, and he was doing just fine). The connected legends about Zagreus all over the universe must also just be a ruse. Without any truth at its mythical core. Because Zagreus can't be real. And Zagreus certainly can't be in the casket, can't be anti-time itself. But...
When time starts looping in on itself, Charley gives the Doctor her grand Anguished Declaration of Love and begs him to just kill her. He throws an Anguished Declaration of Love right back at her and refuses to kill her, instead rushing back into his TARDIS for a last-minute escape plan. He's interrupted by Rassilon himself, who freezes time just to give the Doctor his Fanboy Squee of Rassilon. The Doctor tells him everything that's been happening. With Rassilon's blessing, he then materialises his TARDIS around all of the anti-time, causing it to implode on itself and incorporate Charley's entire time warping into the regular timeline proper. He fully expects to die and to sacrifice the life of the TARDIS as well... without asking her. But they both live, and the Web of Time is healed. It's scarred with inconsistencies, but stable. Charley's existence is no longer a cause for time warping, because the new Web of Time now can't have existed without Charley's existence. A proper paradox.
Rassilon takes a moment to give Romana his blessing as well, and Charley finds the Doctor inside the TARDIS. But it turns out Peter Pan has suddenly changed into Captain Hook. He's growling and snarling at her, approaches her, begs her to stay away, and hits her in the face. When the anti-time imploded, he was at the centre of the impact, and something has leaked through into his mind and turned him into a magnificently Large Ham... Zagreus.
Tropes
- All Myths Are True: The Doctor at first dismisses Zagreus as nothing more than a child's nursery rhyme who was never real, but Charley brings up "Ring a Ring o' Roses", a similarly silly rhyme that has its basis in the very real bubonic plague. Zagreus eventually turns out to be very much real, and most of the legends surrounding him are entirely factual.
- Another Dimension: Anti-Time, the necessary opposite to the normal universe.
- Anguished Declaration of Love: Trying to make a final heroic speech to tell The Doctor it's ok to sacrifice her, Charley tells him she loves him.
- Apocalypse Maiden: The Doctor preventing Charley's death on the R101 and taking her all across time and space has turned her into a time anomaly, a living gateway to a universe of anti-time.
- Arc Welding: This adventure pulls together every single Eight episode, plus a couple from Five, Six and Seven.
- Bad Future: What the Anti-Time threatens to bring, where Romana is a ruthless dictator and the Daleks are held in her thrall.
- Bigger on the Inside: Not exclusively the Doctor's TARDIS either.
- Big "SHUT UP!": QUIET
- Blatant Lies: As we find out in the next episode, everything Rassilon says.
- The Bus Came Back: Romana, after popping back up in "The Apocalypse Element", returns here and will be a Big Finish mainstay from here on out.
- Vansell was also introduced in "The Apocalypse Element", but doesn't survive this story.
- Call-Back: The adventure starts off with a narration about the crashing R101, the fast return switch and the fleet of TARDIS.
- Romana potentially letting the Daleks out, but maybe only after 20 years.
- Cliffhanger: One that wouldn't be resolved for a year and a half!
- Clothing Damage: Eight suffers some more, this time by heavy rain. Literally heavy rain.
- Continuity Nod: The Matrix returns.
- The Corruption: Anti-Time.
- Creative Sterility: Vansell thinks this is what's happening to the Time Lords (He's right, but even a broken clock...)
- Derelict Graveyard: The planetoid.
- Deus ex Machina: Rassilon.
-
Development Gag: Much of the story was taken from planned-but-veto'd bits of the Doctor Who Magazine comic "The Final Chapter", which Alan Barnes had written years previously. - Disney Death
- Doom Magnet: The Doctor's tendency to be this is pointed out.
- Driven to Suicide: Sentris had been a Coordinator for the CIA, and discovered that she had authorized hundreds of people to be wiped from existence by the Oubliette of Eternity. She was so horrified by her own actions (that she couldn't even remember) that she subjected herself to the Oubliette.
- Eldritch Abomination: Essentially, Zagreus, though the truth is much more complicated.
- Eldritch Location: The dimension of Anti-Time.
- Embarrassing Nickname: The Doctor refers to Vansell almost exclusively as "Nosebung".
- Evil Is Hammy: Being possessed by Zagreus really allows Paul McGann to go to town.
- Exact Time to Failure: When the Casket is initializing its final dematerialization, the Doctor superimposes his TARDIS over the timeship, Causing the countdown to become one for self-destruction, instead.
- Failed a Spot Check: The Doctor manages to describe how a battle TARDIS fires Time Torpedoes, as it's firing Time Torpedoes and can't believe they actually shot him.
- Fate Worse than Death: The Unpeople are echoes of Gallifreyans erased from time by execution. Among their number are two childhood friends of Romana's whom she no longer has any memory of.
- Friendless Background: Romana insists that she had no friends as a child, but she meets the neverpeople ghosts of two Gallifreyans who were her childhood friends, erased from existence by the Oubliette of Eternity.
- Foreshadowing: Zagreus.
- Gag Nose: The Doctor mockingly refers to Vansell as "old Nosebung". He later uses the nickname in a more endearing tone after he finds out about Vansell's Heroic Sacrifice.
- Good Cop/Bad Cop: Name-dropped by the Doctor.
- Gossip Evolution: The Doctor believes this about Zagreus at first, dismissing the legend as nothing but Chinese whispers. He's proven very, very wrong.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: There's a brief one that loops thrice, which clues Charley in on the fact that she could save time by killing herself. This idea was later used in the TV show proper, in the episode "Father's Day".
- Heroic Sacrifice: Charley and the Doctor both really want to make one.
- Vansell does one when he shakes off the Mind Control.
- Hold Your Metatoads
- Hologram: Of Rassilon.
- Time Lord Popsicle: The Doctor, because of Rassilon.
- Immediate Sequel: Picks up directly after "The Time of the Daleks" and "Foreshadowing".
- Ironic Echo
- Manchild: Charley uses Peter Pan as a metaphor to describe the Doctor as a "boy who never grew up".
- Messianic Archetype: The Doctor is Jesus and Rassilon is God, and that's just barely speaking metaphorically.
- The next episode, "Zagreus", reveals that Rassilon was lying through his teeth.
- Mind Control: The casket.
- Mind Screw: One of the most confusing episodes in all of Doctor Who.
- Necessarily Evil: In a vision in the Matrix, the Dalek Emperor pleads to the Time Lords to release them because their "continuity" needed the Daleks' existence.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: The Doctor once again refers to the Time Lords as red tape embracers.
- Our Ghosts Are Different: The Never-people.
- Papa Wolf: The Doctor towards Charley.
- Patient Zero: Charley's suspected of being a carrier of "Anti-Time".
- Post Humous Character: The Daleks are considered dead, or as good as, but fill an important role in the story.
- Ret-Gone: The Never-people.
- Sarcastic Clapping: The Doctor, at one point.
- Sealed Evil in a Duel: Zagreus and Rassilon.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The Doctor fears the Timelords are planning to plant Charley back onto the R101 to have time take its course.
- Squee: Rassilon likes the Doctor.
- Stage Whisper: The Doctor and Romana, while bluffing the Neverpeople.
- Techno Babble: A good half of the episode. The Doctor and Romana also engage in some quick Improv Techno Babble while desparately bluffing their enemies.
- Temporal Paradox: Charley's death still causes a Negative Space Wedgie.
- That Man Is Dead: The Doctor
- Time Stands Still: When the REAL Rassilon confronts the Doctor in the TARDIS.
- Timey-Wimey Ball
- The Virus: Anti-Time.
- Wait Here: The Doctor puts an awful lot of effort into getting Charley out of harm's way at the beginning, but she's got less than no interest in it.
- Whole-Plot Reference: To Peter Pan. Lampshaded all over the episode.
- Would Hit a Girl: Zagreus.
