Time-Flight

The Doctor and the Master in disguise

And then there was ‘Time-Flight’. Yes. Look, being a Time Lord I am lucky enough to understand the plot – and no, it doesn’t make it any better. The Zeraphin combined all their power together and became one incredibly powerful entity. Inside this entity is good and bad. They were individuals at one point, they wished to be so again, but the Master came along and as individuals were made he destroyed them (or should I say shrunk them with the TCE). He then battles for the power which the Zeraphin hold as a huge collective entity inside a sarcophagus. The good and bad side of the Zeraphin fight each other, and the bad wins agreeing to side with the Master (this is at about the end of episode three).

However, the Master tries to rematerialise his TARDIS at Heathrow and the Doctor blocks him with his TARDIS and boots him off to Zaraphax, the home world of the Zeraphin where they will deal with him. He’s stuck there because of something the Doctor has done to the part of the TARDIS he gave him.

CSO on the tarmac.

Does it all make sense in the end? I don’t know. Peter Grimwade decided to have a crack at writing and Saward probably wishes he didn’t. It is seriously convoluted and there are some bizarre elements to the script such as the Master disguising himself. The disguised Master seems to die a horrible death only to rise again back to normal. Why he decided such a bizarre form I have no idea.

Then his main plan to get to the Zeraphin. Import a whole lot of people by opening a time tunnel to 1983 to smash through the wall of the room that housed the sarcophagus. They’ve been there for a day or two at least and haven’t made the slightest impact but the Doctor asks them and suddenly they break through in minutes. That turn of events isn’t as stupid as the scenes of a host of passengers from the first Concorde bashing on the wall in the back ground continuously.

The Master reveals himself

One of the better effects shots of the story.

Look, episode one is ok, because none of the complexities of the plot are entered into really. Episodes 2-4 are just some of the weakest Doctor Who ever produced. Or directed. The sets appear to be 10 metres across and very matte, very cheap. Concorde is represented by one solitary wheel. This is the classical of everything that doesn’t work in Doctor Who being rolled into one story. It’s a dead-set shocker. It’s almost impossible to follow, dull and slow, appears to have been directed on the fly by Ron Jones, it is full of one-dimensional characters (at least most of the actors seem to enjoy it I guess even if the characters they had to play are rubbish) and I haven’t even started on the Plasmatons. They appear to be magic rocks with legs. LEGS. One of the most pathetic things to appear in the series. They rival the Fourmasi and are worse than the giant Prawn in ‘The Invisible Enemy’.

Nice that they were able to use Concorde. Not so nice that the Doctor and Nyssa without a second thought left Earth and Tegan behind. Bad scripting there because on JNT’s idea to split them up and reunite them at the start of the next season. And really, we didn’t need another Master story so soon after ‘Castrovalva’.

So yeah

1/10