A story for the Sixth Doctor and Charley Pollard. Written by Grace Knight, and read by India Fisher.
The Doctor and Charley arrive on a space station after the Doctor picks up a time disturbance. They find the crew unable to form any new memories, except for two - Professor Artemis Vane, and her adoring postdoc, Dr Marty Chisleworth. The Doctor is easily able to figure out the place has been colonised by parasites from the vortex, feeding on the scientist's perception of time. The Doctor and Charley are unaffected due to their prior time travel saturating them with chroniton particles, which leaves them "bad tasting". After dismissing Charley's advice they call for "Pest Control", the Doctor builds a device to flood the ship with the same particles, which will persuade the swarm back into the vortex, through the hole they came from. In the process, however, Marty is electrocuted, and while the Doctor is able to bring him round, Charley notices just how much care and worry the 71 year old Professor lavishes on the 27 year old postdoc, and in return how much more confident and valued he feels around her.
As the parasites leave, the Doctor confronts Vane. He knows she's the reason the parasites are here - they would've followed through a hole in time, left after a time traveller with no ship passed from one time to another. He wants to know her grand invasion plan, and doubly so what she wants with the innocent she's roped in, the young Marty. Defiant, Vane admits the truth - in the future, she and Marty are married. Or, rather, they were. They met at age 40, but 10 years later, Marty died of a congenital disease. Vane felt this was life being desperately unfair, and spent 21 years building a time machine. She didn't want to change Marty's past, but wanted to alleviate a time in his life he'd felt miserable and lonely. Just to give him a friend. Make him happy for a month, then leave his life entirely, to retire to some beach planet.
Six is appalled. He points out that Marty never consented to his own past being meddled with, and that even this could meddle with a formative experience, changing him into someone completely different. Seeing that the two are at loggerheads, Charley is able to convince Six to go for a walk, and convincing her that it's best to leave, having already given him a perfect "going away present". Her and Marty bid goodbye, and while Marty is suspicious of who she it - why would a highly respected academic want to sit with him, one of several postdocs of his class - Vane sadly brushes him off with "I'm no-one." With the time hole she created stitched up, the Doctor and Charley return Vane to her own time, letting her retire in her loneliness on that beach planet.
Charley reflects on this. It was then she knew that, the day Six found out who she really was, how she'd witnessed his future death and been rescued by accident without ever mentioning, it would be the day she'd have to leave him behind.
These Stolen Hours contains examples of the following tropes:
- Anti-Villain: Professor Vane only travelled into the past to console her dead husband during a sad time in her life. Unfortunately, the parasites snuck through the hole left behind, and Six chews her out for meddling with history.
- Framing Device: Charley narrates the story in the First Person as she visits the space station again long after her travels with Six, now working for the Viyrans.
- May–December Romance: Played with. The 71 year old Vane is deeply in love with the 27 year old Marty, but he mostly seems to regard her with admiration and awe. Of course, from her perspective, she fell in love with him when they were both aged 40.
- Temporal Paradox: Six gets at Vane for almost causing one of these, asking her what would happen if she affected Marty's past to the point where he was a different person who would never fall in love with her?
