Hogan Reviews

Finishing off the Causeway boxset is “The Time You Never Had”, which ramps up the Causeway story arc / buzzword that I’ll be honest didn’t know was a thing until it was brought up. Still, this is once again a good story but also once again has its faults and has an ending that felt a little bit like having your cake and eating it too. Still, I think more good than bad at least! Let’s take a look…

The story starts with The Doctor (Paul McGann) and Charley (India Fisher) talking about Audacity (Jaye Griffiths) who since her temporary death in the previous story hasn’t been quite right. They meet up with her in the library where she is frantically trying to read the whole encyclopaedia to “catch up” and learn as much as she can because you never know when you might die… and then a time anomaly strikes the TARDIS and Audacity is nearly struck by something resembling lightning. The Doctor tracks it to its source: 90s Copenhagen and a megacorporation called “Causeway” that has access to technology nobody on Earth should have at that time period, which thanks to that has become a household name across the world and yet The Doctor has never heard of them. As our trio try and get a meeting at Causeway HQ only to be denied by the group’s secretary Annika (Henrietta Wolfmountain, which is one hell of a badass name, I have to say) they have a chat and Audacity gets annoyed when The Doctor reveals they are the same group that sent time tourists to the Aurum in a past adventure and she doesn’t understand why time travel shouldn’t be available to all rather than just an elite few, taking her old world view to a rather silly extreme given the whole messing with timelines thing that the Doctor was clearly talking about…

Anyway, as this is going on we hear the boss of Causeway Peter Mansfield (Andrew Wincott) and their top scientist/his love interest Professor Veronica Hays (Poppy Miller) try more time experiments with no luck, so he decides to call The Doctor and his companions in for a meeting, well aware of who they are. Mansfield starts off sweet-talking our heroes but as they do Prof. Hays scans Charley and finds that for reasons unknown (to her, but not us long-time fans!) she has a massive amount of time energy so she gets kidnapped while everyone else is away and hooked up to a machine to power their time portal device. Audacity and The Doctor, separately, converge on the experiment and try to stop it but its too late and an alien spacecraft lands on their platform and outsteps… a Silurian in a posh suit called Mr. Barabbas (Richard Hope). Peter and Veronica and more than happy to escort him about their establishment but The Doctor twigs that he’s not from another time or place but an entirely different universe, one where the Silurians continued to thrive on Earth instead of humans. As everyone leaves Audacity manages to rescue Charley but the two of them come face to face with Barabbas’s companion: an older Audacity?!

There are some fun twists and all the guest cast is well written and acted, though the end of the story left a lot to be desired in my eyes. Still another very good story, making this a very good boxset overall!

The Continuity:

There’s definitely something off with McGann’s face here… It’s like he’s somehow not looking in any direction is the only way I can explain it…

Causeway were the people behind the “time tourists” seen in the early Audacity story “The Great Cyber-War”. This story also directly follows on from the previous story, “Lost Among the Stars”.

Overall Thoughts:

“The Time You Never Had” is a good two-parter (that’s the length of an old four parter… this can get confusing…) with some good twists but the second half slows down to start it off and then doesn’t give the best ending. Still, more good than bad, and all the new and returning cast do well in their roles which elevates it quite a bit too.

So as part 2 opens we find out that when the weird time lightning thing struck near Audacity it actually STRUCK Audacity and split her in two, with one going over to the alternate timeline and meeting Mr. Barabbas. The two spend many years together, travelling his universe, having adventures (one of which damages her vocal chords so it’s easier to know which Audacity is speaking later in the story…) and clearly falling in love with each other, only a run in with a ship knocked them into “our” universe and Barabbas is worried about his love finding out she’s back at the home she missed so much. Meanwhile The Doctor finds out that Causeway only developed as much as it did so quickly due to an advanced alien time craft crashing into the nearby river, and putting two-and-two together he realises it’s the very craft that Barabbas’s craft slammed into to end up here. It’s all moot though as the two universes are on a collision course and one timeline has to go.

It’s an impossible decision, naturally everyone wants to keep their own world/s alive, and Barabbas makes the decision for them by taking his Audacity and making a run for it, hoping she might forgive him for destroying her entire universe so they can be together, but in the ship The Doctor manages to get through on the last working radio and tells him how he can fix it and his older Audacity overhears. They agree to ram themselves into the other ship, killing everyone in both crafts but not sending the other one to Earth and therefore Causeway would never exist to cause the original anomaly and all the issues, saving both universes. He agrees but tricks his Audacity into being send back to the TARDIS, where she essentially merges with the younger Audacity, leaving her with the memories of both of her split selves, and therefore grieves for the loss of Barabbas. The Doctor heads out and is happy to see Causeway gone, but Annika the secretary appears and is clearly not just a secretary as she implies everything has gone according to her and her organisation’s plans…