122 Time Flight

Started 26-Dec-2019

Horrible.

Amazingly the British Airways Concord access did not save anything.

The concept was very flawed from the start. How the raw flying fruit does a modern jet airliner land on a rocky unprepared Jurassic paddock and then take off again? That just about ruins the story's credibility completely. Add a bunch of BS about telepathy, mind control and willing the Xeraphins to not take over the Master's TARDIS by 'concentrating' is just taking the p*ss.

The story has about 1.5 eps of plot spread out to 4 eps.

The budget is end of season poor-house standard.
Costuming and monsters/special effects are poorly realised.

Performances are valiant failures. Peter Davison and the other two regulars deserve a medal each just for taking this seriously. The G-BOAC crew (Easton, Cashman, and Drinkel) aren't far behind. Anthony Ainley does serious damage to his Master characterisation. Nigel Stock's death scene has to be seen to be believed.

Direction by newcomer Ron Jones is adequate but fails to add anything helpful. Some directors might  have tried to rewrite this badly conceived rubbish.. Imagine Paul Joyce's version of Time-Flight? Ron is clearly a thoughtless, workmanlike plodder.

JNT is responsible for this since he is producer. But he is clearly not served well by Script Editor Eric Saward who let this happen also.

Watching this in 2019 I actually fell asleep in ep 2. Total waste of time and an awful insult to the audience.

A clear candidate for worst ever DW serial.


ABM Rating 0.74/4.00
LJM Rating 1.99/5.00
SPJ Rating 1.51/10   

No. 120 (out of 122)

Link to Cumulative Rankings

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from.....
And it all comes crashing down 
by Thomas Cookson http://www.pagefillers.com/dwrg/timef.htm

In terms of story, what we have is just a very uninvolving rehash of The Three Doctors with its own Gel guards, except they look worse now than they did in 1973. The cliffhanger to part one, where the Gel guards are first unveiled and unleashed on the heroes and the crew is shoddily directed and acted, and even Peter Davison looks embarrassed (and indeed this is more of a certainty in the third cliffhanger where he has to deliver that awful line "The Master has finally defeated me"). It's one of those moments that defies belief at how embarrassing and atrocious it is (see also Warriors of the Deep, Twin Dilemma, Time and the Rani and Love & Monsters).

Alas when the show carried on without Williams, one of its first casualties was a sense of humour. It was no longer cheap and cheerful entertainment. By this point, of course, it was going cheap but it wasn't getting any more cheerful. For all its dullness and embarrassing effects Time-Flight might have been halfway entertaining if it had been done with a bit of tongue in cheek. It might be remembered as having the same kind of cheesy charm as Horns of Nimon, but its deadly earnestness - complete with buttoned shirt, stiff professional flight crew characters seemingly held hostage in children's television at its worst - makes it simply embarrassing and painful to watch. Now fair enough, the bubble wrap in The Ark in Space wasn't done for laughs, but somehow it works on a conceptual level to be genuinely disturbing. By this point, the show seems to have lost its touch for making the cheap effects symbiotic with the whole, and the effect is akin to car-crash television.

It really is the point where the show suffers the worst of John Nathan-Turner's tick box approach to seasons (an approach that hasn't gone away today). So Concorde was inserted into the story because it was something to modernise the show and say '1980's'. So never mind how the show could cover abstract alien worlds and universe-reaching concepts or voyages into history or the future that could speak to any generation inclined to have their mind expanded. All things considered about how Doctor Who is getting repeats and home video is coming out in this period, let's do something that is going to date the show in decades to come anyway.

In principle though the idea of a plane literally vanishing from the present was a potentially spooky idea and in keeping with the show's remit of taking the ordinary and familiar and dipping it head first into the strange and dangerous. But there seems no effort to capitalise on that. The mystery of where the plane disappeared to is revealed in episode one, and its prehistoric Earth which, to be fair, feels very redundant and hardly otherworldly. The story feels far too much like business as usual in order to work. They're all alive and merely have the Master's hold of hypnotism to deal with, and all you have to do is talk to the slaves and they snap out of the trance. It should be easy enough to just stroll through this adventure then. The Doctor has a TARDIS, so all he has to do is get everyone in and take them all home. Except that the Master has sabotaged the TARDIS and so the Doctor is called upon to trade parts with the Master.

Not exactly the height of excitement is it? Not exactly universe shattering. Once it's revealed that its just the Master's old tricks that took the plane out of time, it loses all its intrigue and potential wow factor. When we meet the lobotomised cast of cipher characters performed atrociously we have even less reason to care, or feel involved in this supposed battle of mind over matter.

And of course there is the Master. And now it's time for me to rant.

Let me stress this first. Anthony Ainley was actually rather good as the Master, but he was cursed by a mass of redundant and poor stories that caused familiarity to breed contempt.

Nevertheless, this is one of those stories that makes me wonder why no-one thought and realised that the Master was actually never originally intended to outlive the Pertwee era, and certainly shouldn't have outlived the Tom Baker era. It makes me think of how Deadly Assassin could have been a great story for the Master to go out in, or how if Graham Williams disliked the Master, instead of spending his entire era avoiding the character, perhaps Williams should have given him one story for the sake of killing him off for good.

The thing is that the Master Returns Trilogy was impressive stuff (a story arc that I respect rather than like) and seems to indicate that the writers understand from the example of Deadly Assassin that the Master works best after a long hiatus of rethinking the villain, and hatching up the kind of grand story that makes him seem more powerful and dangerous. And yet, come this story they're already squandering that completely, and it's been barely a season on. Logopolis really had upped the ante by making the Master a force of annihilation on a galactic scale, and that should really have changed everything, and would be very hard to follow up and such a follow up should have been done with proper care. But they didn't even bother acknowledging any of that.

All part of the checklist of course. That's why there's no adequate explanation for how the Master survived Castrovalva, and why the Master was disguised as Kalid. Originally Kalid was supposed to be a character in his own right but the writer was forced to include the Master and so that's why the disguise comes off as so contrived. There is a cost to using the Master here. Perhaps if they hadn't used him and had saved him for next year instead, maybe fans would be less inclined to see him as overused. Maybe his escape from death in Mark of the Rani would have made him seem genuinely indestructible and frightening rather than a cop-out.

Personally though I think if they weren't going to leave the character for dead after Castrovalva, they should have only brought him back twice again, namely in The Five Doctors and Survival. The fact is that after Logopolis, the rules should have changed. The Doctor and Master can't have their amiable little gentlemen's duel anymore like they did in the Pertwee era. That's why I think the Master should have been used sparingly. They both have to be poised to kill one other, and they both should seem convincingly able to. Once the Master has caused the atrocities of Logopolis, the Doctor should really consider him to be an enemy to urgently eliminate, just like he did with Sutekh and Morbius. Sadly, that becomes forgotten by the Doctor, but then again the Master forgets the Doctor's actions in Planet of Fire and that should have changed everything too.

Throughout most of Season 19, the Fifth Doctor came across as fairly tough and capable. He did manage to vanquish the Master with the power of words in Castrovalva (encouraging the people of Castrovalva to think as individuals and rebel against him), he seems to have lost none of his wisdom in Kinda, and in Earthshock he is still able to make quick calculations and take decisive action with lightening speed, and seems to know when violence is called for. But here he could easily tackle and vanquish the Master but doesn't seem up to the job. A contrived excuse so that the Master can escape for his next story.

The Master himself seems completely harmless (unlike the Pertwee era where he was resourceful at finding powerful allies) and you never feel he's a real threat to the passengers. But then this story contrives an off-screen reason for the Master to be not quite up to his capabilities. See, his TARDIS is depleted and he needs the extra power to escape. Last time we saw him he was the great destroyer, bringing worlds to ruin. But they've kept him around and made him a more comfortable harmless villain who isn't all powerful anymore, but isn't out of the picture either. They want to have their cake and eat it too and it doesn't work. And it would get worse in Planet of Fire where the Master has shrunken himself and needs an elixir of life, making it fairly handy for the Doctor if he happens to be in a position to burn him to death. Really, outside of Castrovalva and The Five Doctors, the Davison eras made the worst Master stories with the most contrived elements.

Though for the record, in the Colin Baker era, the Master was only enjoyable because he was sidelined, and the stories were so bad he couldn't have been anything less than a highlight.

Now, granted, in Deadly Assassin the Master was emaciated and disfigured, but if anything, this made the Master more dangerous and savage, like a wounded animal. Survival would use the same approach. That's why I think it should have been a case that after the genocide of Logopolis, the Doctor has to make sure the Master is imprisoned in Castrovalva, and then must continually thwart his escapes, and when the Master does escape the collateral should be distressing. This is why I like the idea of following it up with only The Five Doctors and Survival. That way the Time Lords release him from Castrovalva but keep him on a leash. Then Rassilon exiles the Master to the Cheetah planet and the Doctor has to prevent him from escaping to modern-day Earth. I'm kind of tempted to add Mark of the Rani, because it's one story where the Doctor puts up a proper fight against his foe, but that would bugger up the continuity, unless we used the idea that this was a Master from a previous timeline.

All that considered though, it's still a terrible face-off in its own right. It's not just that the Master's plans are incoherent, but the Doctor's plan with which to thwart him is even worse. The Doctor manages to beat the Master with a bit of unconvincing technobabble that doesn't make sense or engage because he simply describes a solution with a lot of 'ifs' in it and expects us to be content (and my father always used to say that 'if' was the most important word in the world). He doesn't even bother to go to Xeraphus to make sure the Xeraphins escaped and that the Master's TARDIS stays broken. We become invested in the fate of the Xeraphus but we never see the outcome for them, which is so frustrating. These things aren't resolved, they're simply turned off with a flick of the switch and talked away very ineptly.

80's stories were supposedly full of fresh ideas from the Season 18 rennaissance, but boy were they done in such a cumbersome way. But there's a sense here that there's actually nothing beneath its stuffy dialogue and protracted parts exchanges.

I don't really know what to say. As I've said before of the Davison era, not only is this a bad story, but it's one we're not allowed to forget the same way as we could if this were The Time Monster or Creature from the Pit because it's tied in with the linear lore of the now soap-like show. Tegan leaves, and comes back in Arc of Infinity, as a seemingly more upbeat and fun character leading many fans to speculate that she found herself a decent sex life between seasons. The Master supposedly meets Kamelion because of the events in this story, and that leaves quite a plot arc. That's why much of the bad stories of the Davison era tend to weigh down the era as a whole as if the stories are chained together on a sinking boat. In which case this is the deadest weight of them all.

It's the kind of thing that makes me wish that someone had watched this before broadcast and realised that it couldn't go out and that the show was losing the plot. If only they'd ditched this story, and in its place done a final story where the Doctor takes Tegan home. You could have the TARDIS land on Concorde mid flight if you really wanted to use the gimmick. Then the Doctor and Nyssa retire to Gallifrey where the Doctor vows he will never place his friends in danger again and he will become president and encourage his people to take action against the evils of the universe. The end.

And then have Eric Saward join forces with Terry Nation to do a Dalek spinoff series, and maybe do the odd one-off story like The Five Doctors and Remembrance of the Daleks at anniversary intervals.

I can dream.

Well, in conclusion, all thumbs down. If I was watching this back in 1982, I'd have tolerated the bitchy companions up until this story but this is really where my patience would run out and I'd see the show as a dead loss. Time-Flight is one of the worst, most demoralising stories of Doctor Who ever.