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

Black Orchid

When Nyssa met Anne

This is going to be a hard one to review. A short story at only two parts, ‘Black Orchid’ is almost ‘filler’ – they had 26 episodes for the series and JNT didn’t want to do six-parters, which in all fairness was a very good call. The last two broadcast six-parters were very slow drawn-out affairs. However, instead we get ‘Black Orchid’, a two-part purely historical story with a wobbly plot by a man whose attitude was ‘it’s only Doctor Who’.

Terrance Dudley’s ‘Four to Doomsday’ was okay, lacking a fair bit in action but okay. If they offered him a commission it seems he took it, he was a working writer after all. ‘Black Orchid’

Peter Davison plays a rather unconvincing shot to be honest.

struggles to fill out TWO parts though. I mean we have a cricket game taking up a good chunk of episode one, and episode two wastes time taking the Doctor and companions to the police station.

Why? Because the plot itself is one of those ‘what’s going on’ type plots. Once you piece together the shabby plot points and kill the protagonist there’s nothing left. Instead we get prolonged parties, dancing and Adric eating a lot of food. The companions become purely functional, even more so than they have been. Adric is superfluous to the plot again, and Tegan is just there to explain strange Earth traditions to the two alien companions. Nyssa gets a double, for some strange reason, and the Doctor spends 30 per cent of the story wandering secret corridors. It’s naff and boring.

Charleston time!

What tops the dreadful plotting off is Terrence  Dudley getting himself into a hole with the Doctor accused of murder. How does he prove his innocence? He blows his alien cover and shows the police the inside of the TARDIS! It’s not something ever done before and hopefully not again. It’s purely and simply a plot point. It’s dreadful, lazy writing from Dudley. At that point the story was completely lost to me.

Peter Davison points out in the commentary another plot hole where he tells everyone not to let George Cranleigh know he doesn’t have Anne (Nyssa’s double) on the roof, but in fact Nyssa.

The Doctor and Lady Cranleigh.

Then he goes up there and that’s the first thing HE tells the guy! George has been to South America and something bad happened to him and his features got distorted and he went mad and lost the ability to speak it seems. What a horrible caricature was presented on screen. And his own family kept him tied up on a bed all the time! I mean really. Please! Don’t ask an audience to buy this crap.

Can't fix your plotholes? Take everyone into the TARDIS.

Then the cricket scene. Apart from the one ball Peter Davison bowled on the stumps which took a wicket, it’s woefully directed. The shots must have been done in a hurry because it doesn’t look like real cricket at all. The ball moves so slowly, the shots that Davison hits would be lucky to get past cover, the catch he takes clearly did not come off a bat. It seems like they had ten minutes to shoot the cricket game shots and they had to make do.

They dialogue is mostly expositional, especially from Tegan. Grrrr. Bad. BAD. BAAAAAD.

2.5/10

The Visitation

‘The Visitation’ was the second of Peter Davison’s stories to be recorded, behind ‘Four to Doomsday’. It’s a return to a more ‘traditional’ style of Doctor Who story, with an historical setting mixed with alien and science fiction elements. It’s a very solid story, enjoyable too, if not one without its issues as most stories have.

The Doctor and co spy a stranger in the tree

Eric Saward’s first Doctor Who script would see him very quickly become the script editor – Antony Root was script editor on a temporary basis only whilst JNT looked for a permanent person in the post. It’s a very solid four episodes, strongly directed by Peter Moffat, good pace and build up to the climax, a new and interesting villain, and a great setting.

The combination of history and science fiction is what Doctor Who does best, so it’s no surprise that ‘The Visitation’ is such a competent piece. By now, I have to be honest, it seems clear that the show’s biggest issue is the three companions. They have become caricatures and even over 100 minutes of story it seems very difficult to find something for them all to do. Naturally they get split up at points and have their own subplots, in ‘The Visitation’ though they inherit another pseudo-companion, Richard Mace (Michael Robbins) , who gets more of a supporting role than either Tegan, Adric or Nyssa. The sad thing is, he’s far more interesting than any of the three companions as well!

Android disguised as death.

Tegan meets the Tereleptil.

A highway man, an actor and a rogue, it might have been an interesting exercise to have a companion like that, but instead we get feisty, whiny and meek. No offence to any of the actorsn because they did their best with questionable material which rarely showed any interesting in using or developing their characters. Hey, in ‘Kinda’ they just wrote Nyssa out and barely used the other two. It goes to show that by now the best mix is just one companion with the Doctor. They can have a fair bit to do, whilst it allows for more colourful characters (like Mace) to also chime in with a sizeable role without diminishing that of the companion.

In ‘The Visitation’ Tegan spends half the story hypnotised, Nyssa spends nearly half in the TARDIS tinkering with a machine to destroy androids and Adric runs around looking for people, fighting badly and being pretty darned useless.

Saward starts the story well, with a group of humans attacked by androids and Tereleptils who have just arrived on Earth. They all die, so we don’t see any of the characters again,  but immediately the audience is drawn into this story.

Who you looking at?

The Doctor and his companions don’t take long to get drawn into local politics when a group of villagers immediately attack them after they arrive for very little reason other than ‘they’re strangers’. We see the android, the house, the Tereleptils. The main one has some great animatronics moving his mouth, although like the Marshmen in ‘Full Circle’ the joins in the costume betray poorly that there’s a man inside. Needed to be wet! Such a common issue with Who monsters!

Richard Mace helps out the Doctor.

It’s an interesting and pretty silly plot to be fair. Three Tereleptils on Earth plan to wipe out the population with a deadly virus. And then what? There’s just three of them. They can hardly populate the Earth now, can they? Still, it’s effective enough in my opinion. Most plots fall apart under real scrutiny, and I don’t just mean Doctor Who but Sci-fi plots in general.

The sets are a highlight, and the locations were perfectly chosen. The sets are pretty much faultless, easier to do when you don’t have to build a lot of futuristic stuff I know, but even the backdrop for London in the final scene is well done. The idea that this is the start of the fire of London is great too, the sort of thing which Doctor Who should have done more of by now – explain historical events. It’s paced well, moves along, has colourful characters. Far from perfect, but a very solid story!

7.5/10