The Time Museum

A great lookback on Ian as a character. It’s very fun, but it has a major flaw: This story chooses to be confusing.

We meet up with an old Ian in recent times. Long after his time travel days. He’s woken up by the curator of a time museum, who takes him to see his own past.

The time museum itself is built out of memories from time travellers, and Ian is one of the exhibits. But memory-eating monsters are attacking the museum, so Ian and the curator have to run through Ian’s memories and find a solution.

And this is a great premise, but it is squandered by a few flaws. They’re not necessarily fatal flaws, but they drag it down hard.

The first flaw is that Ian’s memories are completely jumbled. He does not remember much of his adventures or the locations within the museum. This takes away any real reflection and introspection for the character. There’s no real way to look back on it all. This turns it into mostly name-dropping. And that can be fun. Ian suddenly yelling out “The Doctor is getting married’ gives me a grin, but it is so fleeting and doesn’t leave you with anything afterwards.

The second flaw is that the actual threat of the plot is clear incredibly quick. Yes, there are memory-eating monsters after Ian and the curator, but at the same time the curator keeps going on about how delectable Ian’s memories are. Hmmmm. I wonder if there’s more going on there. And there is, but it is unclear how Ian actually found all that out. He’s constantly muddling up memories, and suddenly he has all the answers out of nowhere. It’s a bit jarring.

A third flaw is comparatively small, but the sound design of this story is pretty bad. I don’t notice sound design all that often. But it feels really unbalanced and blown out here. And that distracts from the actual events that are happening. Not a dealbreaker, but noticable in a bad way.

The last flaw in the story is the circumstances of it all. While told in a jumbled order, it never becomes completely clear why Ian is in the time museum. The curator, while being an unreliable source, tells us that Ian gave permission to become an exhibit. That’s kind of hard to believe, considering he’s non-stop talking about how he wants to go home. Yet it is also clear that Ian is indeed a part of the time museum. He has his own annex as the first human time traveller. There is a section for him. So, what’s going on there? Did Ian actually decide to become a part of the museum? The signs point to it being the case, but why would he? And if not, how did they get an entire annex with his memories. It's a bit confusing and hard to keep track of.

And that’s what drags down “The Time Museum”. It is interesting, and as someone who has now experienced all Ian stories he could find, quite a fun lookback. But it is hindered by incoherency, inconsistency and, at the same time, a very obvious twist. It makes the story not really excel in anything other than namedropping. It could have been truly special and a great farewell for the character, but it is just okay. And that hurts a little.