Time-Flight is one of those Doctor Who stories that people tend to criticise just by saying what happens in it, as though you’ll never come up with a dismissal of it more damning than “this is the one where they thought they could successfully film Concorde crash-landing on prehistoric Earth”. And that’s completely fair. Peter Grimwade, the writer and director who this week is in the scriptwriter’s chair, should have thought much harder about how he’d feel if someone else asked him to realise a script like this. But cheapness is the least of the problems here.
Let’s extend that “critique through straight-faced recapping” ethos to the Master’s plan here. The Master has escaped his own trap in Castrovalva somehow, but has landed on prehistoric Earth. To escape, he needs a TARDIS, so naturally he destroys his own TARDIS and uses its fully-functional time travel technology to hijack Concordes – no other planes, just Concordes – from early 1980s Heathrow. This, he wagers, will be a mystery the Doctor will investigate by boarding a Concorde and seeing what happens, but not before loading his TARDIS onto the Concorde, which is handy because that’s the only thing the Master actually needs. When the Doctor arrives on prehistoric Earth, the Master will be waiting for him, disguised as a grotesque Chinese stereotype called Kalid with a crystal ball, a disguise the Master maintains even when no-one else is watching him. There is also something with an alien gestalt race called the Xeraphin, but I’m skipping over that because it didn’t make much sense to me.
So yeah, not a great plan! Could possibly have done with rethinking some details there! There are, to be fair, many fine Doctor Who stories where the Master is just off doing some rubbish to entertain himself, but they tend to make it over the finish line through atmosphere, or suspense, or fast pacing. The Master disguising himself as a scarecrow in The Mark of the Rani often gets mentioned alongside this as the character’s nadir, but to be honest even that had a better chance of working: on paper, the idea has a certain folkish weirdness. Kalid, meanwhile, just stinks up two episodes wearing the costume from an am-dram production of Aladdin and being wildly offensive even by the standards of Sinophobic caricatures in old Doctor Who.
When the Master reveals himself, it takes precisely one episode before the Doctor declares the Master has beaten him at last, an eagerness to just give up that would be wildly out of character from any Doctor other than this. I should point out that when I rag on the Fifth Doctor I’m not criticising Peter Davison, who does his best. I’m criticising the production team, who have a very long list of what the Fifth Doctor should not be (short version: Tom Baker) but never quite reaches consensus on what he should be. Davison’s usual fall-back, treating everything with a kind of breathless anxiety, is a perfectly decent actorly trick to disguise the fact that the Doctor is rarely doing anything proactive or heroic. This is the second story in a row where he’s led into a trap by an old enemy, and which is resolved by other people risking their lives after the Doctor runs out of ideas. At least this time none of his companions die in the process, though he does manage to lose another one at Heathrow. I don’t want the Doctor to be infallible, but the occasional non-accidental victory would be nice.
Of the surviving companions, this should have been a golden opportunity to show them off, and not just because we start off in a setting where Tegan’s outfit makes sense for once. The death of Adric should have freed up space to showcase Nyssa, the other scientist on board the TARDIS. Instead she spends most of the story acting spaced out through some sort of psychic link with the Xeraphin, a low-calorie version of Tegan’s possession by the Mara earlier in this season. Nyssa has this ability largely to free Grimwade of the burden of actually showing the Doctor and his companions actually working anything out: every revelation is either predicted by Nyssa, explained by the Master, or just casually dropped in the middle of a storm of technobabble.
The blame, really, has to lie at Grimwade’s door. He is one of the more fascinating creative figures in this era of Doctor Who for me, a writer and director who occasionally pushes back on edicts from the script editor and producer. But this is a total misfire and every problem is inherent in the script. Some of them, admittedly, were forced upon him: British Airways demanded to approve the portrayal of their staff before they let the BBC film on Concorde, which probably explains why the guest characters are such a dull bunch. But normally when a story’s this bad, there is some kind of behind-the-scenes chaos, or a punishing deadline, or some explanation. Time-Flight wasn’t rushed, it was – aptly for a story that starts in an airport – delayed, so much so that Grimwade had the chance to fly on Concorde and do all the research into air traffic control that makes the cockpit scenes so realistically tedious. This is a story that was worked on and cared for and yet is still completely awful; other stories are worse, but few are as inexplicable.
Next: Arc of Infinity (1983)
