The Time War: Cass boxset ends with a two parter (or the length of a four parter, if you want to think of it that way!) that once again proves to be a fun story to follow with a good “Time War screwing everything up” plot, a great set of new characters and the TARDIS trio is once again on fine form. So let’s take a look!
The story actually starts with a brief flashforward where The Doctor (Paul McGann), Alex (Sonny McGann) and Cass (Emma Campbell-Jones) survive an explosion and are arrested for it, much to their confusion. I seem to remember this happening to another audio recently, where they clearly think the start of the story is too slow so they throw in a cheap flashforward… oh well (thinking about it the story was an Audible Star Wars story, so I can’t complain about Big Finish re-hashing it, anyway!) How they got there was the TARDIS detecting an anomaly, again, and the trio finding a Dalek factory on a barren uninhabited world, a factory constructing a “Retcon Bomb” (top marks for that name!) by using the remains of a Battle TARDIS.
The Doctor manages to destroy it but in the process he, Alex and Cass wake up in the ruins of a monument surrounded by people in a city that previously wasn’t there. As the story moves on two investigators in Kade and Oshia (Ian Cunningham and Nadia Albina) interview them and oddly enough don’t believe their story, but The Doctor sees a bigger problem: they were sent back in time by an hour or two and the Daleks will be arriving soon to set up their factory, giving the new people of the planet little time left.
It’s a fun mystery, the settlement names, people names (especially head honcho “Davon” played by Gareth Armstrong) and local deity Kaledia is all based vaguely on Daleks, yet nobody in the settlement have ever heard of them. It all leads to a fun finale where you actually care about the results because the extra time has afforded room for you to actually give a damn about the guest cast’s fate.
The Continuity:
Um… The biggest thing that stood out I mentioned in the other review… Oh well: “A very purple cover!” … That’ll do.
Beyond connecting to the previous set of stories in the box, nothing much! Though Alex remembers The Doctor giving him a “Temporal Interociter” in the past, which is something The Doctor did to the original, this-timeline-Alex in that version’s final story “Lucie Miller / To The Death”.
Overall Thoughts:
“Previously, Next Time” was a fun story that managed to get me to care about a set of brand new characters enough that the big sequence at the end felt like it had actual stakes, and it paid off well. Another fine story to cap off a really good box set!
In the end The Doctor figures out how to set things right and stop the Daleks for good but in doing so it will restore the original timeline, which means the entirely new population of people will cease to exist once again. Sadly for people like Kade and Oshia, it soon becomes clear that their two options are be exterminated or to never have existed in the first place but stop an evil army that would’ve killed them anyway, so it’s not much of a choice. The Doctor takes the duo into the TARDIS as it all goes down and says that they may survive but as he speaks the two vanish and The Doctor and Alex wonder what they were talking about. A legitimately sad end to some fun characters, nice to have a bit of jeopardy actually pay off though.
The Doctor and Alex realise something is amiss and while The Doctor thinks there should be four of them (more Bliss issues!) Alex remembers Cass, which allows The Doctor to do so as well. It turns out resetting the timeline has caused her to vanish, not just from the planet but from the TARDIS database as well. The hunt for Cass will be the theme next time, I guess!
Hogan Reviews 