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| The moment Peter Davison started thinking about leaving? |
4 episodes. Approx. 97 minutes. Written by: Peter Grimwade. Directed by: Ron Jones. Produced by: John Nathan Turner.
THE PLOT
The Doctor is trying to take Tegan and Nyssa to the Great Exhibition of 1851, to take their minds off Adric's death. But the TARDIS materializes at Heathrow Airport, 1982 - the very place the Doctor had been trying to reach throughout the first half of the season. They arrive to learn that a Concorde flight has vanished into thin air. The Doctor is enlisted thanks to his UNIT credentials, and he quickly determines that the missing airplane vanished down a time contour.
He insists on recreating the conditions of the flight, using another Concorde to follow the first one's path. He has his TARDIS loaded onto the plane, and he and his companions monitor the flight from inside. The console readings tell him what he already suspected: They have been taken back in time, into the Jurassic era. But what waits for them isn't dinosaurs, but rather Khalid, an ancient wizard who has used what appears to be magic to transform the first plane's crew and passengers into a slave labor force.
The Doctor confronts Khalid and appears to defeat him. But he has fallen into a trap. Khalid is actually the Doctor's old enemy, The Master (Anthony Ainley). And the Doctor has just become ensnared in his most insanely convoluted plan ever!
CHARACTERS
The Doctor: I'll give Peter Davison credit for trying. The story opens with the Doctor, Nyssa, and Tegan mourning for Adric - then deciding to just get over it and make a trip to the Great Exhibition to cheer themselves up. As far as character writing goes, it's down there with a chipper Barbara telling us that she's completely over her experiences with the Aztecs in Part One of The Sensorites. The difference is that Davison and his co-stars do their best to play against the ridiculous dialogue. As they start chatting about the Great Exhibition, the actors put a note in their delivery to signal that they're simply going into very hard denial about what just happened and grasping for anything to keep themselves busy. An excellent look at actors trying to overrule bad writing through performance alone, and for that one scene, it just about works.
Nyssa: Develops psychic intuition for this story - and only for this story, as her psychic abilities are never mentioned again on television (though Big Finish made use of them a few times on audio). Her mind is somehow receptive to the Xeraphin, which allows her to lead Tegan to their inner sanctum. She also takes the lead when with Tegan. She does mention the Master's killing of her father, but then barely reacts to the Master's presence in the story's second half - which is quite a comedown from the fierce, "That face - I hate it!" moment in Castrovalva.
Tegan: Remains the more emotional of the Doctor's companions. She's the one who pushes the Doctor to violate the laws of time to save Adric. She does seem cowed by his angry response. But when she sees Khalid's illusion of Adric, apparently alive and pleading with her and Nyssa to save him, she is the one who wants to stop. It's the more intellectual Nyssa who recognizes the illusion for what it is and presses on. Left to her own devices, Tegan would have stopped at that moment.
The Master: This is the story in which Anthony Ainley's reputation as a particularly campy Master begins to take hold. He spends the first two episodes disguised as the evil wizard Khalid... for reasons that completely escape understanding, unless you go on the assumption that the Master just wants to "drezz for the occasion." After revealing himself, the Master proceeds to do very little in the second half. He cackles a lot and threatens various guest characters and extras with his Tissue Compression Eliminator. But mostly he just prances from one set to another, marking time until the Doctor can fool him with the Technobabble swap meet that makes up the, er, "climax" of Episode Four. And yes, the climax of this story does indeed appear to be the Doctor and the Master swapping bits of plastic on a bad studio set.
THOUGHTS
A rather good season of Doctor Who comes to a dismal end with Peter Grimwade's Time-Flight. Why is it so bad? "I'll explain later."
No, wait. That was the Doctor, waving away any need to provide a basis for any of the proclamations he makes at any point in the serial. Steven Moffat must have been thinking of Time-Flight when he wrote The Curse of Fatal Death. At least there, "I'll explain later" was meant to be funny. Here, it's just lazy writing, which is employed so often across these four episodes that it practically becomes a catch-phrase.
Really, for a story that's notorious for poor production values, it's startling how much of Time-Flight's failure comes down to bad writing. The story is utterly nonsensical, with the Master's plan bordering on incoherence. The guest characters are flatly written, with the un-hypnotized characters behaving in just as artificial a fashion as the hpynotized ones! I find it hilarious, for example, that Professor Hayter (Nigel Stock) spends Episode Two being an irritating boor whom the Doctor barely tolerates... only for the Doctor to turn around and choose him as his pseudo-companion near the start of Episode Three! Sure, the story looks cheap. But the real problem is that the script doesn't even pretend to hold together.
Too bad, because it all starts out fairly well. The first two episodes are absorbing. Cheap-looking, to be sure, but also well-paced and moderately intriguing. Had this been a 2-parter, with Khalid simply being who he pretended to be and his initial "defeat" being genuine, then this would have been a perfectly acceptable bit of fluff.
Unfortunately, once it truly becomes a Master story, what had been entertaining nonsense transforms into abject stupidity. The Xeraphim are introduced midway through Episode Three, with their entire backstory delivered in a mind-numbing infodump. Meanwhile, the episode pads out its running time as the Master tromps in and out of the Doctor's TARDIS while the Concorde flight crew watches through a doorway. So half of the episode could be summed up as, "Nothing happens," and the other half consists of exposition so dense and clunkily delivered that it practically becomes white noise. Episode Four is even worse, alternately rushed and padded. As if to add insult to injury, the story is resolved and the Master defeated... via some trickery the Doctor performed offscreen!
The good news is that Peter Grimwade would be recommissioned for stories in Seasons 20 and 21, and would do a much better job of writing something watchable in those stories. Based on this debut offering, I'd have probably advised him to stick with directing.
Rating: 2/10.
Next Story: Arc of Infinity (not yet reviewed)
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