A Companion Chronicles special, released for free with Doctor Who Magazine to promote Big Finish.
Jo Jones — formerly Jo Grant — finds herself rather suddenly in the far future and on a deserted rock in space. With her in the room is a young archaeologist named Newton Calder, who's been stuck there for quite a bit. He asks Jo to try and remember the previous time they met, when Jo was still working at UNIT, and to tell her the story.
When the TARDIS landed Jo and the Third Doctor on that barren rock, they met a team of stranded archaeologists, there to discover where some rather alarming technology signals were coming from. The dig site was soon revealed to be surrounded by "ghosts": copies of dead loved ones from just before they died, who were entirely unaware that they were dead. They were summoned whenever someone thought strongly about them, and appeared to be completely real— only to vanish after about an hour, and not remember a thing during their next visit.
The ghosts turned out to be a side-effect of a memory contraption, which got buried on the rock after a particularly vicious war between Time Lord and a rival civilisation. Realising that these people had developed time travel technology, the Time Lords had gone back in time to erase the society from ever properly existing. The technology that was left behind simply served as a bitter reminder of the war that never was, conjuring up images of the dead as a memento mori.
When it turned out that one of the archaeologists planned to use the tech to conjure up copies of dead artists and celebs, in order to make himself rich and famous, Jo concentrated really hard and summoned up mirages of Benton and the Brigadier to distract the villain for a while. (After all, she was in the far future, so technically UNIT was full of dead loved ones.) Realising that she needed to contact the Doctor at the base, and that none of her loved ones would understand what was going on and how to get around on the planet, she then summoned up a mirage of herself, which ran back to base and contacted the Doctor. With the villain soon shot dead (with very little protest from the Doctor — he had other things on his mind than ethical issues), Newton Calder was the only surviving crew member, and Jo was sad that they had to leave him behind until rescue would appear. The TARDIS was not reliable enough to take him safely home, so all the Doctor could do for him was fix the sabotaged radio. Jo vowed to remembered the events as best as she could for the rest of her life, so that the mirage of her future self would eventually be able to contact the Doctor when summoned up by her previously.
Newton Calder kindly tells Jo that she's been great company for the hour she existed, and that she can tell him the story again the next day, when she'll appear to him again with no memory of her previous visit as a mirage. Just like she's done for the past three months. But just as she's trying to cope with the idea of having been a "ghost" all this time, his mayday is answered, and he's finally able to escape from being haunted day after day by all his loved ones.
Tropes:
- And Then John Was a Zombie
- Cliffhanger: A literal one.
- Dead All Along
- Dramatic Irony: Three seems to genuinely believe that the Time Lords swore off war crimes after their first retroactive destruction of a civilisation. As we know from "Neverland" and the audios following it, they of course merrily continued.
