On January 15th 2197, the fighter-carrier Valiant crosses Pluto's orbital path on schedule. The Sixth Doctor and Evelyn arrive on board and promptly get captured by Captain Oswin, who isn't even remotely in the mood to deal with stowaways. Her crew has recently started hallucinating bell sounds and there's an impending war, so she has much more pressing matters on her mind. But when the hallucinating crew members find a new door on the Valiant that leads to nowhere, Oswin has little choice except to trust the Doctor. Especially once going through that door into nowhere becomes a compulsion, and soldiers start voluntarily throwing themselves in.
Six and Evelyn trace the bell sound to a night train in 1952, and they ask Oswin to wait for them while they vworp over onboard the train. Six disguises himself as a train conductor with a goofy accent while Evelyn pretends to be a harmless old lady. They meet a very snarky man named Trevor Ridgely (Nicholas Briggs), the only passenger on board, as well as Palmer, Trevor's guard. Trevor's being transported to a military base which secretly gathers clever scientists for war purposes. Evelyn quickly changes her story and pretends to have been summoned to said base as well. As it turns out, Trevor's a genius who's been scribbling away at some sci-fi doodles... of star reactor spacecraft engines. The Doctor realises that he's pretty much looking at a blueprint of the Valiant, and that Trevor may not be recognised as a genius just yet, but one day he'll be regarded as the Da Vinci of his time. Unfortunately, Evelyn begins to hallucinate, rips the drawings out of Trevor's hand and tries to throw herself off the train with them.
The Doctor manages to save her, but Evelyn's very shaken by what she saw in the hallucinatory nowhere place: a giant mouth full of very alien things. The Doctor takes her and the TARDIS back to the Valiant, where Oswin is still losing crew members to the mysterious door. She's about to nuke the entire ship in order to destroy the terrible void. As the Doctor blocks the door by simply parking his TARDIS in front of it, Oswin coldly informs Evelyn that they were gone for two months, and there aren't many solutions left.
The Doctor steps through the door and confronts the Eldritch Abomination inside: the giant mouth Evelyn saw earlier. With Trevor's voice, the thing explains its motivation. It was a member of a race that existed on Earth billions of years ago, and when its culture reached the level of interstellar travel, something went very wrong and they were transported to the event horizon of the universe itself instead. In anger and retaliation, it began to erase other earth races from time as soon as these reached the edge of the solar system. Many, many of earth's non-human cultures were already destroyed by them and erased from time forever, and Trevor's plans for interstellar travel (necessary for humanity's technological development) were part of that erasing process. The Doctor realises that, through a massive Timey-Wimey Ball, Oswin's nuclear bomb wouldn't just be a reaction to the original race's destruction, but at the same time part of its cause. Since he knows what must happen, he preserves the timeline in which the original race remains erased from time and humanity achieves interstellar flight.
Tropes:
- Author Appeal: Nicholas Briggs is the writer and director, performs the music, post produces, and plays a character who's lauded as the modern Da Vinci.
- Brief Accent Imitation: Six' attempt at lower class English is fairly hilarious.
- Call-Back: The Doctor mentions having had a sonic device for vibrating, and Evelyn asks him if he's going to "sing".
- Closed Circle: The train only has a few carts, and two other passengers.
- Deadpan Snarker: Trevor.
- Demonic Possession: Evelyn turns out to have been taken over for quite some time.
- Eldritch Location: The door.
- Evil Sounds Deep: The Eldritch Abomination behind the door.
- Existentialism: An eternity to ponder it...
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Fake American: A couple. - A Fate Worse Than Death: At Time's End for the beings that live there, existence is torture.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: The being takes the face of Trevor, in Time's End.
- Godzilla Threshold: Oswin's willing to nuke her own ship in order to destroy the door.
- Human Popsicle: Of the Cryogenic sleep kind on a space voyage, employed for long distance.
- Madness Mantra: "I must.. I must... I must..."
- No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Trevor only has one set of his "doodles".
- Red Scare: Evelyn is considered to be either a Russian or a Chinese spy.
- San Dimas Time: Cruelly subverted when the Doctor and Evelyn come back two months later, and hundreds of people have died. But then played straight when Time's End unravels and everything happens at once.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The Doctor feels a Bad Future so bad he slams the TARDIS in full reverse, and goes to try and trace where it went wrong, because his Time Lord senses are going haywire.
- Make Wrong What Once Went Right: And someone or something is trying to do the opposite.
- The Slow Path: Oswin's forced to take it.
- Stable Time Loop: Which created the Nowhere Place.
- Stuff Blowing Up: Once the door opens and one of the Damocles pilots hears it.
- Terrible Ticking: Only the Doctor, Evelyn and Armstrong can hear the bell. Anybody destined to kill themselves by walking through the door do, actually.
- Time Crash: Countless of races that have been evolved on Earth have been ripped from time itself.
- Title Drop: The Doctor calls Time's End "The Nowhere place".
- Void Between the Worlds: Behind the door.
- Wham Line:The Doctor: "According to the TARDIS... That door is 50 billion years old."
- Another one from Oswin:
"TWO MONTHS." - Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: The race at the end of time is angry, scary, but mostly just sort of incompetent and confused.
- And The Doctor as well. He destroys countless of races, just so that their suffering stops.
- You Can't Fight Fate: The Doctor unravels Time's End only for the Time Stop of the nuclear missile to impact on the ship which went caused the Time Crash and destroyed them all.
