Drake and the Time That Time Forgot

Wooton has written a new Drake the Cosmic Copper comic book, and Connie thinks it would make a fun radio drama. After a bumpy introduction (Wooton is already on take thirty-one), the recording begins: the tale of Drake, a detective on another planet in the future, and his hovering robot sidekick, Woots.

Drake and Woots are sent to investigate reports of strange rifts at the Space-Time Condominiums, an assignment Drake grumbles about, since his gruff commander already distrusts him after a supercomputer disaster went wrong on his watch. Following a strong magnetic signal, they knock on the door of what turns out to be a hidden laboratory belonging to Dr. Raelyn Game, a scientist who looks about twelve years old. Inside, they meet Genesis, her enormous and delightfully sassy supercomputer, who cheerfully announces that her job is to warp the space-time continuum so humans can pass through it "and then probably die in horrible ways." Raelyn admits she is about to travel through time, and when Drake tries to stop her, she warns that the reaction has gone too far to shut down. Instead of leaving, Drake calls her bluff, and all of them, including Woots, are hurled a hundred years into the past.

They arrive on the eve of the most infamous night in history, when Emperor Griblak declared war on half the universe and began the Galactic Conflict. Raelyn insists she only wants to observe, but when the masked Emperor appears, she pulls a device from her bag and lunges forward. Drake wrestles it away, discovering it is a time pistol that turns physical matter back in time; it is how Raelyn came to look twelve, and she plans to zap the Emperor back into diapers to prevent the war. In the scuffle the pistol accidentally hits Woots, turning the sleek robot into a laptop, and the Emperor's guards arrest everyone.

During the interrogation, the Emperor tests the pistol on Drake, but it appears broken. The Emperor then reveals a chilling secret: Raelyn's own father, Dr. Walter Game, once built a prototype of this technology while working for the Emperor, until a small group of Earth Christians awakened his conscience, and the Emperor had those believers destroyed. Furious at such evil, Drake grabs the pistol, flips off the hidden safety switch he had secretly set, and zaps the Emperor into a baby, the very thing he had told Raelyn not to do. Sheepishly admitting he got a bit worked up, Drake helps everyone escape back to Genesis and return to the present.

But the present is not what they left. They materialize in a dim building that turns out to be a museum about Christianity, where the commander greets them with terrible news. Turning the Emperor into a baby only delayed the war a few decades, and going through puberty a second time made the Emperor angrier than ever, so war was declared on the entire galaxy instead of half of it. Twice as many people died, Earth was obliterated, and Christianity was wiped out completely, making Drake the last believer in existence. Worse still, the Emperor arrives in person and unmasks, revealed to be the commander's own mother, an eighth-generation evildoer. When the travelers vow to go back and undo their mistake, the Emperor threatens to press a destruct button on Genesis. To everyone's horror, Drake dares her to push it. She does, and since Genesis runs on an atomic core, the world erupts in a massive explosion.

Then, suddenly, everyone is fine. Genesis confesses that the entire adventure, from the moment of launch, was nothing but holographic images she created to convince Raelyn to stop fooling around with time. Drake explains he grew suspicious when Woots's sensors registered nothing at all, and he knew it was a fake when the commander and the Emperor somehow remembered a history that had supposedly been changed. Drake tells Raelyn that trying to rewrite the past would be like yanking a thread that runs through all of existence, and that God can use both good and bad things to shape us. Dwelling on the past only makes us short-sighted when there is so much good to do right now. Woots adds that with Raelyn's gift for building incredible machines, the future could hold wonderful things, which earns him Genesis's delight: "Finally, a bot that gets me!"

Back in the studio, Wooton wraps the recording and thanks the cast, including Mrs. Wise, who says her junior-high acting classes have finally paid off and invites Wooton to start calling her Mom. Penny tells Jason his voice is like a foghorn on a rainy night, which he decides to take as a compliment. When Wooton offers to re-record his fumbled introduction, Connie, true to the story's lesson, suggests they just leave that experience in the past.