#7 (19.23 - 19.26): Time-Flight.

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.

Previous Story: Earthshock
Next Story: Arc of Infinity (not yet reviewed)

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#1 (19.1 - 19.4): Castrovalva

4 episodes. Written by: Christopher H. Bidmead. Directed by: Fiona Cumming.  Produced by: John Nathan Turner.


THE PLOT

The Doctor has regenerated, but this time it is not going well. He keeps losing his bearings, forgetting his own identity and the geography of his own TARDIS. He needs time for rest and recovery. But there is no time. The Master is still in pursuit of the Doctor, determined to wipe his old enemy out of Time and Space forever, and he has captured Adric in order to spring a lethal trap. The TARDIS is sent plummeting back to the beginning of creation, to be destroyed by the Big Bang.

Adrenaline allows the Doctor to regain his faculties long enough to avoid destruction, but now he needs rest more than ever. Tegan and Nyssa bring him to Castrovalva, a place of absolutely simplicity where the Doctor can recover control of his own mind. But the Master has not yet finished with the Doctor, and has one last trap ready to spring...


CHARACTERS

The Doctor: Peter Davison's first story, this was actually recorded somewhere around the middle of his first season's production. A good decision on JNT's part, as it means that Davison is fully confident in the role, with his performance is at its best. In his own way, Davison is just as good as Tom was in the previous two stories. He's instantly engaging and sympathetic as the disoriented and weakened Doctor, particularly when the TARDIS is in imminent danger near the end of Episode One.  The Doctor is left helpless to do anything about it - leaving this man, so accustomed to taking control, incredibly frustrated and desperate to do something.

In those brief scenes in which he does gain his wits and is again The Doctor, he takes command effortlessly. On his entry to the Zero Room, he goes from something akin to a frightened child to a confident leader, fully in control... all done just with a change in carriage and tone of voice. Also in this scene, the Doctor assigns roles to each of his three companions.  A last attempt by writer and outgoing script editor Christopher H. Bidmead to provide a guideline for his successor in dealing with the companion overload, perhaps?  In any case, the roles are well-reasoned, and the scene conveys that this Doctor will take a more collaborative role than the Fourth Doctor did, and will rely on his companions more.

Tegan: Waiting to record this story also helped greatly with Tegan's characterization. Tegan strongly irritated me in her debut. Thankfully, Janet Fielding has greatly toned down her performance by this point. She and Sarah Sutton show a strong screen rapport in this story.  While Fielding quickly becomes the dominant persona, the brash Tegan taking a leadership role over the more analytical Nyssa in the script as well, she doesn't drown out her co-star. In Logopolis, Tegan felt surplus to requirements. Here, she fits nicely into the team, and I found myself liking both character and performance.

Adric: He's also less annoying here than in Logopolis... though that's largely because he's sidelined for the bulk of the story.  Bidmead is too good a writer to completely sideline one of his regulars, though. Even in marginalizing Adric, he makes him a key part of the narrative. Adric is essentially the battery fueling the Master's trap. He is still written as a strong member of the Doctor's team, actively resisting the Master at every turn. This is much better than the active hindrance Adric will become in... Well, exactly one story's time. Unfortunately, Matthew Waterhouse never worked as well opposite Davison as he did opposite Tom, so I doubt there will be many bright spots ahead for this character.

Nyssa: "That face! I hate it!" An advantage of following on from the previous two stories, with a script by the outgoing script editor, is that Bidmead still remembers that the Master is walking around in the body of Nyssa's father. That makes Nyssa's cry at the start of Episode Two a quite strong character moment. The Master is not just an enemy.  He's not even just an enemy who has wiped out her entire world and is apparently about to destroy her too. He is an an enemy who is doing all of this with her father's face, his every maniacal laugh corrupting her memories of a father she cherished.

There are other good character beats for Nyssa. We not only see Nyssa develop a rapport with Tegan, but also with the new Doctor. As early as Episode Two, when Nyssa assists the Doctor by building his new (much tinier) Zero Room, we see that Sarah Sutton and Peter Davison do work very well together on-screen. Davison's instincts, that Nyssa was particularly well-suited to his Doctor, were correct, and it's a shame that neither his producer nor his incoming script editor were able to appreciate and capitalize on that.

The Master: Just as it is a web in which The Master ensnares Adric, it's the imagery of the web that defines his traps. He starts with a simple, direct trap, designed simply to obliterate the Doctor. He has also prepared a trap within that trap, and revels in the complexity of his back-up plan. He doesn't seem disappointed that the Doctor escapes his first snare. After all, that allows him to actually use his second idea.

It's interesting to note how easily the Master could simply destroy the Doctor within Castrovalva.  But he doesn't.  He allows his enemy to heal, at least to a point at which the Doctor can appreciate the web in which the Master has entangled him. It's not enough for the Master to win - He wants to humiliate the Doctor, to have the Doctor know that he has won, and perhaps to impress him just a little bit. It makes him a more interesting and engaging villain. The final image of him here - entangled by his own creations, an evil version of Dr. Frankenstein destroyed by the goodness of his own monsters - is a memorable one.  It probably should have been the last seen of him, at least for a while, but it's a striking end to this trilogy.  Issues with the Master's later overuse/misuse are a discussion for another time.


THOUGHTS

In a sense, Logopolis and Castrovalva are not two stories, but one epic 8-parter.  Logopolis was all about entropy. Things fall apart, things decay. Tremas is taken over by the Master, Logopolis falls, Traken is wiped out, the Doctor dies... everything crumbles and degrades. Castrovalva becomes a story about life. The Master creates projections as a trap, but they gain free will. The Doctor's regeneration is rocky, but he recovers and comes out ready to face the universe with a sunny grin, declaring that he "feels absolutely splendid." Out of the chaos, order is restored.

Castrovalva is very different from previous stories introducing new Doctors. Previous stories dealt with the regeneration in the first one to two episodes, then got on with a more traditional narrative. Here, the central concern is the Doctor's regeneration. "I'm the Doctor," Davison says, "or at least I will be, if this regeneration works out." After 7 years, Tom was not just a Doctor, but the Doctor to most viewers. By making the changeover difficult within the narrative, it helps ease viewers over their own difficulties in accepting a new lead. Given this, I think that making the regeneration itself into the narrative was appropriate here. Bidmead's script helps in selling this, weaving the ongoing Doctor/Master rivalry and the ongoing entropy/renewal themes into that narrative.

Like Logopolis, the story consists of many set pieces. We get the Doctor literally unraveling the trappings of his previous persona as he descends into the labyrinth of his own TARDIS, unfamiliar to him in his addled state. The Master's first trap, the trip to Year Zero, is irrelevent to the actual plot, but it creates a sense of jeopardy for the early part of the story. There are many other set pieces.  Tegan and Nyssa, carrying the Doctor through the woodland surrounding Castrovalva. The trap of Castrovalva springing itself by sending the characters through a loop, returning them again and again to the courtyard. As was the case in Logopolis, most of the set pieces work. As was also the case with Logopolis, I enjoyed the fantasy elements: the castle overseen by a kindly wizard (the Portreeve), in which the Doctor might heal. The people, conjured out of nothing by a magic (mathematical) trick, who nevertheless assert their own will and declare, "We are free!"

This is a tighter script than Logopolis was, though, and the threads hang together much better.  Rather appropriate, in a story in which a tapestry plays a major part. There's a structure to the way the sequences are laid out. Except for the hook of the Master's first trap, the pieces build from lower-key ones (the unraveling of the scarf, the trip through the woods) to the more intense and bizarre (the loop, Castrovalva folding in on itself). Perhaps Bidmead learned from experience, perhaps he simply benefited from having a script editor other than himself to oversee his work. Either way, Castrovalva combines most of the strengths of his writing in Logopolis with a stronger narrative, making for a more satisfying overall viewing experience.

Castrovalva ends the trilogy began with The Keeper of Traken and continued with Logopolis.  In my opinion, these three stories taken together remain the most thoughtful and structured handover in the series' run.  Castrovalva in itself is my favorite of the three parts of this trilogy, and contends with Troughton's debut for my favorite "new Doctor" story.


My Rating: 10/10.

Previous Story: Logopolis
Next Story: Four to Doomsday

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