The Girl Who Never Was (audio story)

The Girl Who Never Was
Doctor:	Eighth Doctor
Companion(s):	Charley Pollard
Main enemy:	Byron The Cybermen
Main setting:	Singapore, 31 December 1930 to 1 January 1931 Earth, 17 January 1942 Earth, 500,002
Key crew
Publisher:	[[publisher::Big Finish Productions]]
Writer:	Alan Barnes
Director:	Barnaby Edwards
Music:	Andy Hardwick post production=Gareth Jenkins
Cover by:	Alex Mallinson
Release details
Release number:	103
Release date:	December 2007
Format:	4 episodes on 2 CDs
Production code:	8Q/E
ISBN:	ISBN 978-1-84435-287-6
Big Finish Doctor Who audio stories
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Next →	The Bride of Peladon

The Girl Who Never Was was the one hundred and third monthly Doctor Who audio release produced by Big Finish Productions. This was the last audio story to feature the Eighth Doctor and Charlotte Pollard travelling together. However it is not the final appearance for Charlotte Pollard who goes on to travel with the Sixth Doctor beginning with The Condemned.

Publisher's summary

"Dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot. Someone's listening. Somewhere."

A ghost ship.

A girl with no memory, adrift in time.

An old enemy.

This could be Charlotte Pollard's finest hour - or her last.

Set course for Singapore, 1931.

Journey's end.

Plot

to be added

Cast

• The Doctor - Paul McGann
• Charley Pollard - India Fisher
• Byron - Danny Webb
• Miss Pollard - Anna Massey
• Madeleine Fairweather - Amanda Root
• Curly - David Yip
• Borthwick - Robert Duncan
• Receptionist - Natelie Mendoza
• Colville - Tim Sutton
• Young Man - Jake McGann
• Soldier - Nicholas Briggs

References

Astronomical objects

• Charley mentions the Garazone system.

Cybermen

• There is a Cyber-Planner present.
• There are several Cybermen present.

The Doctor

• The Doctor has had a room at the Singapore Hilton since 1872.

Individuals

• Charley mentions C'rizz.

Technology

• The Doctor and Charley saw a form of radar-jamming device on Quaxan IV.

Theories and concepts

• Both the Doctor and Charley mention the Web of Time.

Time travel

• The ship is transferred through time to Earth after a solar flare.
• Temporal corrosion is a fungal organism which grows in the Time Vortex.

Notes

Illustration by Anthony Dry from DWM 390.

• Chronologically, this is the final Eighth Doctor audio drama to feature Charley Pollard. However, it was not the final Eighth Doctor/Charley audio. AUDIO: Solitaire was released after this story. It remains possible for Big Finish to record more Eighth Doctor/Charley adventures set prior to The Girl Who Never Was, in the same way that there were more Evelyn Smythe adventures after her "final" story was released. For that matter, there was nothing preventing them from setting a story afterward as well.
• This is the first encounter between the Sixth Doctor and Charley. However, Colin Baker does not appear in this story. The cliffhanger resolves in AUDIO: The Condemned, where we understand that the TARDIS that landed at the end of this story in fact belonged to the earlier incarnation.
• The paradox of Charley meeting the Sixth Doctor was ultimately resolved in AUDIO: Blue Forgotten Planet. That story explained how it was possible for the Eighth Doctor to have no knowledge of Charley prior to his first encounter with her on the R101 (AUDIO: Storm Warning) — despite having had many adventures with her as the Sixth Doctor. Indeed, one of the central themes of the Sixth Doctor/Charley adventures, which began in the final seconds of The Girl Who Never Was, was the tension between her desire to avoid telling the Doctor too much and his need to fully trust her.
• The circumstances in which Charley meets the Sixth Doctor in this story are explicitly pertinent to understanding the resolution to the overall Sixth Doctor/Charley story arc in AUDIO: Blue Forgotten Planet.
• Paul McGann's son, Jake, again appears in a supporting role in this adventure. He would later play the Doctor's great-grandson Alex Campbell in AUDIO: An Earthly Child, AUDIO: Relative Dimensions and AUDIO: Lucie Miller / To the Death.
• This story was voted as readers favourite audio in the Doctor Who Magazine 2008 survey.
• An illustrated preview appeared in DWM 390 by Anthony Dry.
• This audio drama was recorded on 27 and 28 June 2007 at The Moat Studios.

Continuity

• Charley first met the Doctor aboard the British airship R101 on 5 October 1930. (AUDIO: Storm Warning)
• The Doctor tried to get Charley to the right Singapore in AUDIO: Seasons of Fear.
• The Doctor and Charley refer to their trip to Venice in 2294 (AUDIO: The Stones of Venice) and their encounter with Orson Welles on 30 October 1938 (AUDIO: Invader from Mars).
• Charley first encountered the Cybermen aboard a Telosian star destroyer in the Garazone system in 2503. (AUDIO: Sword of Orion)
• Charley mentions her uncle Jacques. (AUDIO: Memory Lane)
• The Doctor and Charley discuss Daleks boarding the Mary Celeste in 1872. (TV: The Chase)
• The Doctor employs the technique of wiping Charley's mind but is unsuccessful as she almost immediately remembers everything. The Tenth Doctor later did the same thing to Donna Noble, though in her case the process was more successful. (TV: Journey's End)
• Upon entering the TARDIS and seeing the Sixth Doctor, Charley tells him that she was "expecting someone else." (TV: The Caves of Androzani)
• Later in his personal timeline, the Doctor would meet Charley on one further occasion when he and Lucie Miller encountered his younger self while he was travelling with her and C'rizz in an American frontier town in the 1870s. This encounter was observed by the Sixth Doctor and his companion Evelyn Smythe. (AUDIO: The 100 Days of the Doctor)
• When the Doctor returns to the hotel, the receptionist says the clocks can't be wrong, because they all have beryllium chips. (TV: Doctor Who)

External links

• Official The Girl Who Never Was page at bigfinish.com
• The Girl Who Never Was at the Doctor Who Reference Guide
• DisContinuity for The Girl Who Never Was at Tetrapyriarbus - The DisContinuity Guide