A story for the Eleventh Doctor and Valarie Lockwood. Written by Felicity Barker, and read by Safiyya Ingar.
Following an argument over the Web of Time, Valarie is in the TARDIS library when they crash. The Doctor and her explore, finding themselves in the room of Évariste Galois on 29th May 1832, the day before he's due to die in a duel. Valarie brings up trying to save him, but the Doctor tries to explain why. Before they can have a proper fight, Valarie walks outside to look around, and gather her own thoughts.
She ends up finding a temporal rift, stepping through into a prison cell with a younger version of Galois, in 1830. He explains how his revolutionary activities have landed him in trouble, and Valarie decides to free him by taking him back to the future. The pair depart into the future, where Valarie hears the noise of the TARDIS engines. Worrying she's been left behind, she drags Galois inside, only to barely avoid running into her past self. As the Doctor would explain later, the rift only takes things between two exact points, and with it crashing the TARDIS to one end, Valarie and Galois have walked out at the same time as their original materialisation. When her past self leaves, she finds the Doctor, who admonishes her, but says he understood why she would do it. He says to fix the paradox, Galois has to go back, with Valarie accompanying at his request for companionship.
This goes badly when the rift deposits her at the exact time as her past self going through the rift the first time, which briefly causes her to intersect with her past self before fracturing time. There now exist two ghostly versions of Galois with them, one acting out his original prison sentence, another continuing a conversation with the first Valarie, who no longer exists. The TARDIS then materialises, with the Doctor stepping out... followed by another version of Valarie. This pair come from a timeline where the TARDIS crashed at the other end of rift. This Valarie and another Galois from the timeline where this TARDIS never landed fade to ghosts as timelines begin to fray and fracture.
The Doctor takes the stable versions of Valarie and Galois aboard, where he explains the occurences via stickers. If an event, a life, is a sticker stuck to the web of time, then changing it moves the sticker, but a glob of glue is left behind. Those are the ghosts. But the stickers can't be changed an infinite amount of times without wearing thin, and with the paradox growing with every change, things look dangerous. The Doctor analyses the two and finds Valarie is the source of the paradox - her own actions changing her own past caused the rift to form in the first place, which then caused the TARDIS to crash ("It's paradoxes all the way down!") With Galois's help to recognise the linear algebra, after consoling Valarie on how they share the deaths of their parents' in common, the Doctor sets a plan in motion. Giving Valarie co-ordinates, he sends her back through the rift to her version of the Doctor in 1832, and gets him to fly the TARDIS in reverse, as he does the same from 1830, knitting the space-time continuum back together. The audio is revealed to be a log by this Valarie, trying to save some memory of her soon-to-be-gone timeline self, both as proof she existed, and as evidence for future Valarie as to the dangers of messing with time...
Following an argument over the Web of Time, Valarie is in the TARDIS library when they hit some temporal turbulence, which quickly clears. The Doctor offers to take her anywhere she wants, and Valarie chooses. 30th May, 1832. She wants to see Galois, without quite knowing why. She wants to be there, to comfort him. The Doctor seems suspicious, but takes here there, and the two acknowledge that, while they don't remember each other, the feel a strange kinship.
The Galois Group contains examples of the following tropes:
- Bizarre Alien Senses: Discussed. Valarie starts the audio angry at Eleven specifically because she lacks his time senses, and is thus forced to rely on his nebulous judgements as to when they can and cannot affect history.
- Buffy Speak: The Doctor tells Valarie to look out for anything "timey".
- Cessation of Existence: The Doctor describes this as the result of fixing the paradox, as in theory they should snap back into the original with the paradox never having happened. Valarie has some existential angst over the whole thing.
- Continuity Nod:
- Valarie mentions a mysterious caller menacing the TARDIS, Time Spiders, and her mother's death, referencing the events The Eleventh Doctor Chronicles.
- The Blinovitch Limitation Effect is mentioned.
- Exact Eavesdropping: Valarie brings Galois into the Motel de Motel just in time for the Doctor to explain to her past-self when and how Galois will die, merely 2 years in his own timeline.
- Freudian Excuse: Galois supposes that Valarie has this, railing against the Web of Time because she can't change her mother's death.
- Historical Domain Character: Évariste Galois, French mathematician and political agitator
- Metaphorgotten: As typical for Eleven, he describes the TARDIS colliding with a "time pothole", only to elaborate on how it's nothing like a pothole. Amusing, due to time shenanigans, two versions of him produce the same spiel.
- Mind Screw: Valarie describes the experience of changing her own timeline by being teleported to exact time and space as somewhere she'd already been as "Feeling outside myself, and the universe around and within me." It leaves her feeling very, very shaken.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: It's Valarie's own actions which place her at the centre of the paradox, after she enters the rift a second time, which procedes to dump her exactly where she'd landed the first time, causing her past to fracture.
- The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: In the 1830 timezone, Galois is imprisoned due to threatening Prince Philippe with murder. He mentions at the end his father was murdered by political opponents who couldn't abide a republican mayor.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Downplayed. Valarie doesn't remember the events in the splintered timeline, but she has a strange whim to see Galois on his death bed. In exchange, while Galois also doesn't consciously remember, he mentions feeling comfort that someone cared about him.
