After becoming horrified at the Doctor's flippant behaviour in "Absolution", Charley has had enough and demands to leave the TARDIS. She realises that life with a centuries-old alien will never truly be fulfilling for her. The Doctor attempts to take her to Singapore 1931, Charley's original destination when she first stowed away on the R101. She plans to live out the rest of her life in her own time, pretending to be dead and simply resisting the urge to visit her home, her family, and especially... Edith. She and the Doctor share a final hug before Charley closes her eyes and tells him to leave her. When she opens them again, he's still there, quite excited about the fact that they accidentally ended up in 2008.
Charley, however, becomes quite cross with the Doctor for failing to return her to her own time. In frustration, she walks off, leaves a goodbye letter for the Doctor at a nearby hotel, and goes along with the first gentleman adventurer she can find: a somewhat shady character named Byron. Unfortunately for her, Byron isn't so much an adventurer as a crook intent on salvaging some gold from a war evacuation ship from 1942. He's particularly interested in Charley because of her name. The Doctor strong-arms Charley into investigating the mystery ship together with him, and soon discovers that there aren't any corpses on board. When he falls down a hole caused by time corrision and gets separated from her, Charley goes back into the TARDIS to fetch some rope... and promptly gets vworped to 1942 when the Hostile Action Displacement System activates.
Charley ends up meeting the crew of the ship, which inexplicably also includes Byron. Meanwhile, in the Future…, the salvage crew — Byron and friends — make their way on board the ship. One of them is a very old and very snarky lady, Byron's mother... named Charley Pollard.
This older Charley doesn't remember a thing about the Doctor or her life before Singapore. She was found shipwrecked as the ship's only survivor and was adopted by the Byron family, and subsequently spent so much time Wandering the Earth that young Byron had a very rough and lonely childhood. Eight is pretty shocked when he realises he can't change time to undo all that, but he's willing to take older Charley along in the TARDIS from now on anyway.
In 1942, Charley discovers that the crew has a few unexpected members. Among them is a young upper-class lady named Madeleine Fairweather, who dressed up as a boy just to go on an adventure. Charley quickly befriends her when she realises how much they have in common. Also on the ship, however, is a legion of Cybermen.
People quickly begin to get murdered and converted, and the Cybermen have some time-hopping technology of their own. Their intention is simple: they want to save humanity from having to evacuate the planet a few millennia from now.
The Doctor eventually discovers that older Charley is, in fact, Madeleine, who was found shipwrecked without her memory. Sadly, since no other survivors were recorded, the Doctor has to assume that Charley died in 1942. Madeleine promptly dies, and so does Byron — the 1942 Byron's grandson. Charley is made into the Cyberleader, and when the Doctor finally reaches her, he's forced to erase her mind just to get the Cyber-parts out... but due to The Power of Love, she retains much of her identity. The Doctor's subsequently also partially converted, but pops himself into a brief coma to get everything out again. In the confusion, the Cybermen are defeated by Charley implanting them with her own identity via remote (which is how a partially-converted Madeleine ended up convinced she was Charley in the first place) and the rest of the crew attempt — very unsuccessfully — to swim to the shore. By the time Charley has escaped from it all, she's stuck on a desert island all alone with just a rudimentary radio.
The Doctor, absolutely convinced that Charley's safely back in Singapore, goes to find her at the hotel and is handed her letter. She bids him a loving farewell. He talks back to the letter, fondly, but without much emotion. He crumples up the letter, tells the receptionist to bin it, and leaves. After all, she was just a small part of his long life. And in the end, "everybody leaves."
The ending theme kicks in, but at it's tail-end is a short epilogue: Charley, still alone on future Earth, uses the radio she was left with to constantly broadcast an SOS, and sure enough, the TARDIS vworps in after a while. Ecstatic with joy and relief, Charley runs up the TARDIS, but the person she finds inside isn't quite that someone she expected...
The Girl Who Never Was contains examples of:
- Added Alliterative AppealThe Doctor: I think a person's private pockets are private, and if you will plunder a person's private's pockets.
Byron: And you know all about plunder pal.- And this later gets him this rerort as well;Byron: And I won't have some ponstop pirate pit me to the post.
- And this later gets him this rerort as well;
- Amnesiac Hero: The Doctor suffers from amnesia again when Byron shoots him with the Cyberplanner, losing his memory of the last few hours.
- Bavarian Fire Drill: The Doctor pulls one on an officer, pretending to be from Interpol.
- Bittersweet Ending: The Doctor loses consciousness and his memory (again), and doesn't know what happened to Charley in the year 500,002, and finds the letter she wrote at the beginning of the episode, thinking she left him.
- Body Horror: Not just the usual Cyberconversion, but for the Cybermen as well when they contract the temporal corrosion. Their body disintegrates.
- Body Surf: The Cyberplanner does this to Charley, then the Doctor.
- Buffy Speak:The Doctor: The telegraph is linked to this... Big glow wotsit.
- Call-Back: The HADS, the Hostile Action Defense System, makes an appearance and plays a crucial part in the plot by splitting up the Doctor and Charley.
- The R-101 is described (but not explicitly named). Singapore being Charley's end destination of that journey is the reason this audio adventure is here is mentioned in Seasons of Fear.
- Within the same story as well, when Byron first meets Charley she says she didn't notice him, and later he says he's got a gun in his pocket. When Charley meets his grandfather, Byron, he says he didn't notice her, and she says she's got a gun in her pocket.
- Charley recognizes the Cybermen by their voice, and manages to prolong her survival by mentioning their deeds there.
- Charlotte mentions the ship having Storm Warnings.
- The Doctor tries to convince Charlotte to cling to life by remeniscing about Orson Welles and Venice.
- The Doctor mentions the Mary Celeste, and Charley jokes that Daleks probably invaded it at one point. She's not wrong.
- Charley mentions C'Rizz (Last seen in the previous story, "Absolution" and her uncle Jacques, who she last alluded to in Memory Lane.
- Charley's first words to the Sixth Doctor are: "I was expecting someone else."
- The Doctor's last words are:
- Call-Forward: (Unintentionally) The Cyberplanner needs a Time-Lord brain in order to properly function. The Doctor also has to erase Charley's mind in order to save her life (although it doesn't take).
- Creepy Monotone: Charley when partially converted into a Cyberleader. The Cybermen themselves sound a bit more like the ones from The Tenth Planet with a bit of sing song AcCENT upon the Wrong SylLABle.
- Distress Call: Charley survives and is stuck on a desert island, but on the hour, every hour, she keeps sending dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Both the Cyberplanner and Byron. The Cyberplanner brings the corrosion from the future into his past. Byron foolishly listens to a Cybermen when he's told to put down a gold ingot, thinking he would help him move the stuff. He gets converted.
- Then later in the Post-Climax Confrontation Byron suffers from the temporal corrosion.
- Identical Grandson: The actor playing Byron plays both the grandfather in 1942 and his grandson in 2008.
- Invisibility: The ship has a machine that bends away light, so when it hits a storm it disappears for a long time.
- Keystone Army: The Cybermen in this story function as one, requiring a Cyberleader or a Cyberplanner to function.
- Lightning Can Do Anything: More specifically power a machine that has been without power for decades. (Instead of blowing it up.)
- Major Injury Underreaction: The partially Cyber-converted Byron doesn't notice he's lost a limb till Charley points it out.
- Meanwhile, in the Future…: The Doctor's plot and Charley's plot run simultaneously.
- Nazi Gold: The gold in the story.
- No Honor Among Thieves:Detective Hu: Smugglers blow up smugglers. What do you care?
- Oh, Crap!: The (all male) passengers on the ship, under the impression that the Cybermen boarding are a "White Slavery" ring, protest that there are no women aboard and are not happy when the Cybermen inform them that they do not discriminate based on gender.
- Red Herring: Charlotte Pollard isn't Charley. But she's the exact age Charley would be if Charley went to 1942 and took The Slow Path, plus she claims to have been amnesiac.
- Rummage Fail: One of Byron's men goes through the Doctor's pockets. ... And gets a mousetrap on his fingers for a reward.
- Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!: The elder Charlotte Pollard. Who's not Charley Pollard at all.
- Shout-Out: To Titanic and The Three Stooges mentioned by the Doctor and Charlotte, respectively.
- The Cybermen at one point as well states: "Resistance is futile."
- Seven Deadly Sins: Greed is Byron the younger's, and it leeds directly into his death.
- Stable Time Loop: How Charlotte Pollard gets her name.
- And the temporal corrosion. Charley picks it up on the Batavia wreck in 2008. Then when she is taken back to 1942 she spreads it on the Batavia.
- The Stinger: One in which Charley is stuck on an island, and keeps sending out a distress call... Until it's picked up by the TARDIS and the Doctor. But she was expecting someone else.
- Sweet Polly Oliver: Fairweather is a girl, but doesn't actively hide it.
- Theme Song Reveal: At the very end, Charley doesn't recognise the man in the TARDIS. The Sixth Doctor version of the theme tune then kicks in.
- Title Drop: The last thing of her Voice Over Letter isCharley: I'm bailing out. Escape strategy #5. I'm going to dissapear. There is no freedom like being dead, be anywhere, be anyone I want. Just like a Time-Lord really. Don't look for me, please, but remember me. I'll remember you always, with love the girl who never was.
- Unwilling Roboticisation: Happens to any number of characters, as is to be expected in a Cyberman story.
- Voice Over Letter: Charley's goodbye to the Doctor.
- What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: Stupid, stupid Doctor!
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: "Cyber" Byron shows up in the TARDIS, and forces the Doctor and Charley to go back to the year 500,002.
