#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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#5 (19.17 - 19.18): Black Orchid.

A family secret is exposed.

2 episodes. Approx. 50 minutes. Written by: Terence Dudley. Directed by: Ron Jones. Produced by: John Nathan Turner.


THE PLOT

The TARDIS materializes at a railway station in 1925, where the Doctor is mistaken for a cricket player being sent for a match at a party at Cranleigh Hall. The Doctor is happy to go along with this case of mistaken identity, enjoying the chance to show off his skill at the game. But Cranleigh Hall hides a secret - a mysterious figure, held captive in a hidden room.

Soon, the Doctor and his companions are dealing with multiple murders. The killings are somehow linked to Ann Talbot, who is engaged to Lord Cranleigh (Michael Cochrane) - and who also just happens to look exactly like Nyssa! It's a relatively minor murder mystery, a case of family skeletons bringing themselves violently out into the light. The sort of thing the Doctor can sort in minutes. Except the Doctor happens to be the prime suspect!


CHARACTERS

The Doctor: Enjoys the chance to relax and play a game of cricket, which he plays with preternatural skill. Shades of the Eleventh Doctor playing football in The Lodger, as he joins a team suffering a miserable defeat and transforms it into a victory with seemingly no effort. When he's questioned for a murder in Part Two, he is unable to make himself believed. The more he talks, the more he makes himself look like a crazy man.  He finally just stops talking and gives up - a scene Davison plays wonderfully.

Nyssa: This story gives Sarah Sutton a dual role. Though actual character work is light, we do learn that Nyssa is an accomplished dancer, part of her training on Traken - a detail that fits perfectly with her established character. Despite her aristocratic bearing, she is a young girl and can't help but be taken with Ann's suggestion of doubling up their outfits for the party. As Ann, Sutton gets virtually nothing to work with.  Ann doesn't even register as a character, just as a plot device to justify Nyssa's being in danger at the end.

Adric: He can't dance, so spends the party stuffing his face at the buffet table. Which actually may be one of the more reasonable things he's done across Season 19! His general lack of common sense shows itself when he responds to the Doctor's arrest by protesting that it's Ann's word against the Doctor's... hardly the best way to try to garner sympathy or even willingness to listen by either the family or the police chief who is the family's friend.

Tegan: Opens the story by saying that she's decided to stay with the crew and that the Doctor can stop trying to deliver her to Heathrow - a major character shift, and one which apparently happened offscreen between stories. It is nice to see Janet Fielding giving a more laid-back performance, allowing Tegan to be something other than strident and high-strung. Her scenes opposite Sir Robert (Moray Watson) show a genuinely sweet side, and she seems to actually be enjoying herself for a change.


THOUGHTS

Director Ron Jones' first Doctor Who story. Though fandom tends to lump Jones in with Peter Moffatt as a director largely unsuited to Who, I've long felt that he's gotten a bit of a bad rap. He's certainly not up there with Peter Grimwade or Fiona Cumming, but he does understand the value of dramatic lighting.  This greatly enhances some of the scenes in the house, especially in the secret passages. He also deals well with large groups of actors, cutting between different groupings without losing track of where the characters are in the room or making the scene feel like something out of a stage play. He may not be a brilliant television director - but he is a competent one.

Black Orchid works better than most of the classic series' 2-parters, thanks to a narrative that is deliberately slight. There are no aliens, no science fiction elements, just a very minor period melodrama about family secrets.  Just about right to sustain 50 fairly laid-back minutes.

The first episode is quite good. The 1920's setting is impeccably rendered, and this is a rare classic Who story with no embarrassing production aspects. The tone is generally relaxed, with some pleasant scenes of the companions enjoying themselves at a costume party. The mystery is nicely built up in the background, from the cutaways to the mysterious figure who escapes his bonds, to the Doctor's crawling around the mansion's mazelike corridors after discovering a secret passage.

Once the Doctor is arrested in Part Two, however, it all goes a bit off the rails. There's a rushed and unconvincing scene in which the Doctor convinces Sir Robert to let him show off the TARDIS. While this little diversion is going on, the main story at the house becomes rushed. All entirely avoidable, as the story doesn't actually require the Doctor be taken off the grounds at all! Give that 5 - 10 minutes over to investigation within the house, and the script could jettison the silly TARDIS tour and give more breathing space to the resolution.

Despite the flawed ending, Black Orchid is an entertaining little diversion, a nice breather before the heavy action of Earthshock. The first episode, in particular, has a pleasant overall atmosphere, and both regulars and guest cast are in fine form. It could have been better with a little bit of rewriting to the second episode, but it's still highly watchable.


Rating: 6/10.

Previous Story: The Visitation

Next Story: Earthshock

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#4 (19.13 - 19.16): The Visitation.

"I feel as though you've
just killed an old friend..."

4 episodes.  Approx. 96 minutes. Written by: Eric Saward. Directed by: Peter Moffat. Produced by: John Nathan Turner.

THE PLOT

The Doctor's attempt to return Tegan to her own time fails miserably. He reaches the right place, but the wrong time - missing his destination by about 300 years and materializing the TARDIS in a wooded area near a quiet English village, circa 1666.

Before they get a chance to simply leave and try again, they find themselves the target of a mob of paranoid villagers who believe they are "plague carriers." They are rescued by actor-turned-highwayman Richard Mace (Michael Robbins), who tells them of strange lights in the sky.

That's when the Doctor discovers alien technology. The lights were a ship, crash landing. Now the survivors of the ship, members of a species known as the Terrileptils, plan to wipe out all life on Earth. And far from proving an impediment, the Doctor's arrival actually helps their plans - because it gives them access to his TARDIS!


CHARACTERS

The Doctor: Though I'm no fan of writer/script editor Eric Saward, I will give credit where it's due. In his first serial for Doctor Who, he gets the Doctor right. We see a Doctor who is temperamental. When Tegan has a minor meltdown at his failure to return her to Heathrow Airport, he is not inclined to forgive her - at least, not until Nyssa and Adric press him to. He does play favorites with his young charges, clearly preferring Nyssa's company to the other two. When the alien technology is found in Episode One, he becomes instantly transfixed on the thought of alien survivors in this village. But he only explains why to Nyssa, not pausing to explain himself to the others. Davison remains terrific, and seems energized by the character beats in the script.

Nyssa: After largely sitting out the previous story, The Visitation gives Nyssa a much larger role. She acts as the Doctor's most reliable support, with the first two episodes seeing him treating her almost as an apprentice. He keeps her with him when he enters the deserted house, insisting that his other companions wait for them outside. Upon discovering some Terileptil technology, he snaps at Tegan and Adric to touch nothing; then he and Nyssa take a closer look and exchange observations. Though Nyssa is less than pleased at the Doctor's plan to "improvise with an armed android," she ends up being the one to carry out his plan - which ends up working very well when she finds herself in close quarters with the android.

Adric: Senses Tegan's dislike of him, and there's an amusing early beat when the Doctor tries to evade the issue by very awkwardly reaching out to touch his shoulder. He behaves impulsively at several turns, ignoring Nyssa's very reasonable arguments to stay in the TARDIS and promptly getting himself captured by villagers. His headstrong nature does help the Doctor near the end, however, when his need to act by moving the TARDIS overcomes the Terrileptils' attempts to seal the Doctor and Tegan inside the house.

Tegan: Though her opening meltdown seems a particularly unwarranted "stroppy Tegan" moment, the script does at least provide some context. We first see her recalling what happened to her with the Mara, grappling with the idea of her body being taken over by this creature. In this way, we are shown that she is already in an emotional state when confronted with the disappointment of the TARDIS' missed landing. The rest of the serial sees her being barely tolerated by the Doctor, who clearly prefers Nyssa's company. However, her emotional nature does make a good contrast to her companions' more clinical responses, and she's the only one who seems genuinely appalled at the aliens' plans.


THOUGHTS

The Visitation is noteworthy, in that it was the first contribution of Eric Saward. Saward clinched the post as script editor on the strength of this story, apparently largely because it was a rare script that did not require any significant rewrites.

I've already given Saward credit for his characterization of the regulars, particularly the Doctor. And I will admit that showing understanding of the characters is a significant quality. Add to that, The Visitation is well-structured, with each episode building on the information established in the one before.

Unfortunately, it is also the very definition of a bog-standard average Who story.

This is my third viewing of it, and my reaction remains unchanged. As I sit in front of the screen, it isn't long before I find myself getting just a bit sleepy. There's an awful lot of tromping back and forth between the house and the TARDIS, the TARDIS and the village, the village and the house.  All the back and forth makes the pace feel very leisurely, even downright sluggish. The final episode manages to eke out some momentum - but even then, there's no real urgency. It feels very much as if Saward had enough plot for a 2-parter, and then just stretched it out until he reached 4 parts.

Decent direction would have overcome a lot of the problems here. This story cries out for a bit of atmosphere: some clouds, some fog, some darkness. Instead, the Doctor and his friends tromp around a very pleasant-looking bit of woods on a very clear and pleasant day (and usually do so in long shot). Peter Moffatt's stagy direction is just ill-suited to this kind of piece. Fiona Cumming, Peter Grimwade, or even John Black would have gotten much more out of this. Moffatt appears to be afraid of the close-up, and keeping distance from the characters puts the audience at a distance from the action as well.

I emphasize that this story isn't at all bad. It all hangs together and is perfectly watchable, and it does get better as it goes. It also has a terrific performance by Peter Davison, who is firmly the Doctor by this point, and an engagingly campy one by Michael Robbins as a theatrical actor-turned-highwayman. But with no spark of inspiration, a sluggish pace, and outright lifeless direction, it's hard to see how this ever gained such a high reputation. I enjoyed all three of Davison's previous stories considerably more than this one (yes, even Four to Doomsday).

As for Saward? Well, on the strength of this story's characterization and structure, I would certainly have re-commissioned him for another story. But with the lack of inspiration on display here, it wouldn't even have crossed my mind to make him the series' script editor...


Rating: 5/10.

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Next Story: Black Orchid


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