Time Works by: Steve Lyons directed by: Edward Salt: You Will Die in Five Hours

Time Works stars Paul McGann as the Doctor with Ronald Pickup as Kestorian, Tracey Childs as the Figurehead, India Fisher as Charley and Conrad Westmass as C’rizz.  It was written by Steve Lyons, directed by Edward Salt and released in March 2006 by Big Finish Productions.

 

This is just one of those stories that really feels like it belongs in the middle of the Divergent Universe Arc.  It’s a story that takes place on a planet where everything is regulated by the concept of time.  Everyone is forced to work in a specific shift and live until their assets to society are determined no longer useful to society which is when the clockwork men come.   Steve Lyons does a great job at making this planet just feel alien very much in the same vain as Conundrum and Head Games which of course just gets you wrapped up in the setting and the characters of Time Works and just how the mechanics of this world works.  What really becomes striking when concerning the way Lyons writes the story.  It isn’t done in the traditional plot point A to point B to point C, but mixed up scene by scene as time on this planet isn’t working as a line from cause to effect, but almost events running parallel with Tracey Childs’ magnificent Figurehead manipulating the events from behind the scenes which actually makes it feel a lot like a spiritual successor to Head Games in that it comments a bit on the Seventh Doctor.  Paul McGann is great as the Eighth Doctor but there are points in this story that Lyons goes out of his way to show the Doctor has changed from the manipulative man that was the Seventh Doctor was, but of course his time came and he died.

 

Lyons is great at crafting the supporting cast of this story as they are all really interesting and have fleshed out characters, but this actually causes Charley and C’rizz to suffer.  Now India Fisher and Conrad Westmass are both doing their very best in this story to be engaging, but they don’t really have much to do except explore.  They’re both doing a lot of enjoyable things in the story but it almost feels like their parts were meant for Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester from the novels, not because they are out of character, but they just have things that feel more like those characters.  The story’s style also causes the pacing to suffer early on as Part One is pretty much divided into little snippets of story before it actually allows us to go on.

 

Time Works is just an extremely difficult story to talk about, even more so than The Natural History of Fear and Creatures of Beauty, as it does a lot of the same style of storytelling in the nonlinear fashion.  It is done for a really good story that wouldn’t feel out of place in a lot of different ranges, especially the Divergent Universe Arc which was sadly cut severely short or the Virgin New Adventures.  87/100