The Doctor Who Real Time Marathon: Time-Flight

TIME-FLIGHT (Part One) 22/03/2022 

Well, I'm not sure what to make of that. Overall, it was actually pretty good. There's a concrete, central mystery - a Concorde flight has travelled back in time and nobody knows why or how - it's set at Heathrow Airport, where Tegan's been wanting to get to since last series, and it actually features Concorde, which is pretty bloody impressive! They're a beautifully designed machine - my Auntie Barbara travelled on one once - and to be actually filming on one is quite a scoop! Plus there was a mention of UNIT and the sector of Government who's in charge of them: C19 (is this a sneaky reference to this being Season 19?) as well as the Brigadier! Maybe they'll turn up later!

On the downside, there was some hideously bad CSO when Concorde landed in the past in a scene which, frankly, could have been filmed on location and been no different other than it wouldn't have looked shit.

Then there's the 'Conjuror' behind the disappearance: a man in a dodgy mask being 'Chinese'. The Talons Of Weng-Chiang at least cast someone who had vaguely Eastern features beneath the Yellowface makeup as Li H'sen Chang but this was, frankly, horribly racist, even if you ignored the dodgy 'Eastern dialogue' he seemed to spout.

And given we just had Adric die, the resolution to that felt horribly callous. There was a debate where Tegan argued they could go back and take him from the freighter before it crashed (I can see no reasonable argument against that) but the Doctor vehemently stated that they couldn't change the past they'd experienced - despite having not actually seen Adric die. Then it was all jolly hockeysticks let's go to the 1851 Great Exhibition. By the time they'd been forced to land at Heathrow due to a Time Contour, Adric had been completely forgotten!

And then there were the weird Bogey-Men. Literally. Grey bogeys with legs who surrounded the Doctor at the cliffhanger and transported away cabin crew Scobie and Bilton when they found the crew and passengers of the kidnapped Concorde stealing the TARDIS! The shots were brief but they weren't particularly well designed.

Overall, though, this episode was intriguing. It's actually really nice to have a sense of continuity on the show again. In some ways this felt like a Troughton story - Davison certainly seemed to be channelling him! - and not just because of the Airport location. This series has been one continuous adventure which echoes the Hartnell and Troughton eras, and the threads seem to knit together very nicely. The Doctor and his companions and the series of adventures they're having all feel well rounded, clearly defined, and a lot more gripping than the series has in years!

Despite the flaws of this episode and the previous serial, on the whole, this is continuing the high quality and refreshing experimentalism of the season. It's certainly the best there's been since Jon Pertwee left the show!

TIME-FLIGHT (Part Two) 23/03/2022 

Well, that was confusing, and not least because of the cliffhanger, but I'll come to that later.

The things that surrounded the Doctor last episode are called 'Plasmatons', a name revealed in the clunkiest piece of dialogue ("Oh, you mean the Plastmatons") I've heard in the show so far. They almost immediately left the Doctor alone for... reasons... but came back later to surround Nyssa. They're particles of matter from the atmosphere which something is making coalesce via psychic control - or something. This would appear to be Kalid, a fat 'Arabian' with grey skin and a long, Oriental moustache. This still feels horribly racist, taking stereotypical perceived traits and melding them into someone who isn't really anything other than 'foreign'.

Then a Professor Hayter from the hijacked Concorde came along - he's an expert in psychology or something, and believes everyone else has been hypnotised and that they're behind the Iron Curtain in Siberia being experimented on by covert Russian forces.

Captain Stapley told the Doctor about the TARDIS being taken and Professor Hayter said they'll have taken it to the Citadel; a rather nice structure painted on the studio backdrop. Actually, given that (Heathrow Airport and Concorde aside) this story is studio-bound, I think the sets and backdrops look very good and are shot very nicely.

Anyway, everyone went to the Citadel except Tegan who stayed behind to look after the incapacitated Nyssa. The Doctor was separated from the others and encountered Kalid who spun him some bullshit story about being a conjuror from the desert.

Stapley found Bilton, the cute Concorde crewman, trying to break into some sort of pod or tomb with everyone from the hijacked Concorde and managed to break the hypnosis despite nearly succumbing himself. Meanwhile, the Plasmatons freed Nyssa and she said she had to go to the Citadel - it seems something has made a psychic connection with her. She and Tegan made their way through corridors inside the Citadel encountering images of Adric, the Melkur and the Lead Terileptil which they ignored because they weren't real, and they reached the Inner Sanctum.

By this point, Stapley, Bilton, Scobie and Hayter had found the Doctor and Kalid was using his 'psychic' power to conjure up a monster. In the Inner Sanctum, the voice in Nyssa's head told her to bung a rock in the central sarcophagus, which she did, and there was an explosion. The monster evaporated, Kalid fell over and oozed snot, and Hayter pointed out that Kalid's crystal ball was hooked up with a load of circuit boards. At which point Kalid stood up, pulled his face off, and revealed himself to be none other than the Master!

I'm sure this was meant to be a shocking reveal, but it just left me thinking 'Eh?'. Ignoring the whole 'how did he escape Castrovalva?' element as I imagine we'll get an answer next week, why the hell was he masquerading as Kalid? To hide his identity from the Doctor, sure, but even before the Doctor had arrived? Even in scenes when he was entirely alone??? This makes no sense! I'm also not sure about the psychic elements to all this. It's very interesting to have Nyssa revealed as psychic, but the stuff to do with the Plasmatons - their stupid name and the fact that they look like long, grey bogeys on legs being a chief issue here - just don't work very well.

The reappearance of Adric felt like a nice touch, but also served to remind how futile his death was and how quickly everyone got over it. And who was creating the images? The Master? Using his electronic globe? I'm interested to see where this is going but this episode just felt very confused.

TIME-FLIGHT (Part Three) 29/03/2022 

I'm not sure I'm following  this story with all the talk of psychic energy and gestalt aliens, but it's certainly better written than last season's finale and a lot more engaging. Perhaps it would benefit from repeated viewing to grasp exactly what's going on.

It would seem there's an alien race called the Xeraphin whose planet was devastated by an interplanetary war they were caught in the middle of and escaped to the (currently quite desolate) Earth. They were all suffering from radiation sickness, though, so the entire species used their psychic powers to coalesce into one gestalt entity until they were healed. Unfortunately, on the moment of their rebirth, the Master came along and enslaved them to his will (using butchered parts from his TARDIS, it seems), offering the dark side of the Xeraphins' nature a new purpose - to become universal conquerors. The good side, however, latched onto Nyssa to try and overpower their brethren after the Master's Time Contour lured the Doctor (accidentally - he was just looking for a work force from the future to break into the Xeraphins' sanctum so he could transport their gestalt into the heart of his TARDIS to use as a new power source to replace his defunct one).

The Master took the Doctor's key and tried to use the TARDIS to enter the Sanctum, but the Doctor had left the co-ordinate override on and got there first to have a chat with the light and dark manifestations of the Xeraphin about their backstory (see above). Professor Hayter then sacrificed himself so that the Xeraphin could manifest, thinking he'd become all knowledgeable or something; Captain Stapley and Andrew snook into the TARDIS, sabotaging it but failing to stop the Master from nabbing some of the components and ended up materialising somewhere above the Citadel; Roger Scobie bumped into Air Stewardess Angela and tried to get into the sanctum but Angela ended up back in the Master's TARDIS with the rest of the crew and passengers of the first Concorde; and despite having helped the good Xeraphin beat the bad Xeraphin, the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan watched as the gestalt's sarcophagus was transported to the heart of the Master's TARDIS at the cliffhanger. The Master has won!

I'm amazed I managed to make that make sense!

It is better than Logopolis by a mile, though, despite its flaws, one being the utter lack of an explanation as to how the Master escaped Castrovalva, or why he disguised himself. But at least he has motives. And whilst often over-complicated and sometimes silly, it is fun to watch.

My partner thinks Stapley, Bilton and Scobie should replace Tegan, and I find it hard to disagree. She hasn't done much this episode (or story) but the focus is on Nyssa, which is a nice change. Season finale tomorrow. I'm looking forward to seeing how this resolves!

TIME-FLIGHT (Part Four) 30/03/2022 

Well, what can I say about that? That was actually really enjoyable! Far better than last year, but then the maudlin atmosphere of Tom Baker's departure was absent. As was the rather dreary, dry plot about mathematics. I think the best thing about this story was the obvious camaraderie between Richard Easton, Keith Drinkel and Michael Cashman as Stapley, Roger and Andrew. They made their scenes together so much fun to watch and really felt like a team working together to get things done. There was absolutely nothing stilted about their scenes, even when the effects weren't so great. Rehearsals must have been a gas!

Most surprising was the abrupt departure of Tegan! Having rescued the Concorde passengers from the Master, bargaining with him using a dodgy TARDIS component, and beaten him back to Heathrow on his test run of the new TARDIS power source (ie- the Xeraphin gestalt), the TARDIS materialised on the top floor of a car park and, instead of sticking around while the Doctor and Nyssa wired something up to send the Master's TARDIS on a one way trip to Xeraphas, Tegan took a stroll around the Airport. Forced to provide an answer to the Airport commander, the Doctor and Nyssa pegged it in the TARDIS (assuming Tegan had chosen to stay on Earth to continue her life where she left off, I guess) only for Tegan to turn up seconds later having expected to be going with them. It's a pretty downbeat departure for a companion, and I'd expected more, but it concludes Tegan's arc fairly well.

Is this another example of several stories taking place on the same day? The War Machines, The Faceless Ones and The Evil Of The Daleks all had episodes taking place on the same day (20/07/66) and it would seem Logopolis, Four To Doomsday and possibly this story (if it were to make sense) happened on 28/02/80. Interestingly, both trilogies feature an adventure at an airport!

Anyhow, the plot held together fairly well. I won't pretend to fully understand it but, ignoring the Master's mysterious escape from Castrovalva and random decision to pretend to be an Arabian magician for shits and giggles, it was an entertaining story which featured a fair amount of technobabble that, unlike in Logopolis didn't distract from the adventure. The fact that the Master succeeded in incorporating the Xeraphin into his TARDIS engines was quite sad, and this is the fourth story in a row where the Doctor has failed to prevent the shit from hitting the fan in some way - he started the Great Fire of London, he failed to get any justice for George Cranleigh, he couldn't save Adric and he failed to save the Xeraphin - but I guess by sending them to their home planet (hopefully okay now after 140 million years) they stand a chance of freeing themselves. I mean, even after being enslaved to the Master's TARDIS, the good aspect of the Xeraphin apparently manifested Professor Hayter (who had been absorbed into them rather than killed) to pilot the TARDIS with Stapley and Bilton in it to collect the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan from the Inner Sanctum. So the ending wasn't such a downer as it seemed.

Overall, I've really enjoyed this series. It's felt like an entirely new show and I've loved the new TARDIS crew. Tegan was a great addition, headstrong and very well scripted. Janet Fielding played the character brilliantly and I think I'll miss her. Occasionally, she was scripted as being a little negative and that may easily have become tedious over time, but I really enjoyed her dynamic with the rest of the cast.

Nyssa has easily become my favourite companion since Jo left. Practical, intelligent, and with an ability to take the Doctor to task, she's very much like Romana but without the smugness. I feel sorry for Adric. It seems he really is dead, and the way he was treated by the Doctor this series leaves me a little sad. He worked so well with Tom Baker in the last two stories of Season 18 - they were pretty much the best aspect of both those serials! - and then, after being absent for most of Castrovalva he seemed regularly side-lined until his final story. There was quite a sense of pathos to his story arc which I'm not sure whether to laud or condemn.

Peter Davison is brilliant in the role of the Doctor, though. He's much younger than his predecessors but is so much better than Tom (at least, since Season 12), and portrays the Doctor as smart, irascible, anxious, superior and inquisitive in equal measures. The scene where he was explaining to Nyssa what he'd done to the TARDIS component he was giving to the Master today absolutely screamed of him channelling Troughton, and his impressions of his predecessors in Castrovalva were spot on. He's a brilliant actor and exactly what the show needed after seven years of Tom!

Back to tonight's episode - one or two cringey moments; a stock footage shot of Concorde taking off from behind clearly had blocks of flats in the background and, having rescued the first Concorde's passengers from the Master, how the fuck did they all get into the second Concorde? Rope ladder? Winch? Levitation? Some of them weren't exactly young or agile-looking! Even Tegan seemed to be able to board with ease after fannying about with the compressed air from Victor Foxtrot's tyres! 

The sets and model shots were pretty good, though, especially a composite long shot of the Doctor and Tegan returning from the Citadel. I noticed that the Master's TARDIS is an ionic column again, but this time brown; and I loved that he temporarily disguised it as Concorde.

This may not have been the best story of the Season, but it wasn't the worst. Actually, 'worst' isn't a word I could use on any of the stories this series; all of them have been a step up from much of the last few years and been entertaining even when, like Black Orchid, they haven't been entirely satisfactory on a narrative level. So next year we have adventures with the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa to look forward to, and it's the Twentieth Anniversary! I hope they celebrate like they did for the Tenth! I don't think I've ended a series feeling so optimistic in years!