Doctor Who A-Z #64: The Time Monster (1972)

Doctor Who’s ninth season began with a story that anticipated Marvel’s X-Men and ends with this, a story that anticipates Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. The dialogue about “women’s lib” between the Master’s unwitting lackeys Ingram and Hyde has the nose-bruising glibness of a classic Rick Dagless/Liz Wool interaction, and the first appearance of the titular time monster Kronos is a comic highlight to match anything in ‘Skipper the Eyechild’. I realise making fun of the special effects in fifty-year-old BBC science fiction dramas is a cheap, lazy form of criticism. Nobody expects motion capture to match Thanos, and there are perfectly good stories whose effects aren’t much better than this.  But, having taken delivery of this extremely unconvincing bird-man costume, the production team didn’t have to make it flap its feeble wings. They didn’t have to make it squawk. 

The results of this, after over two episodes of build-up about what an unprecedented threat Kronos is, his first manifestation resembles nothing so much as a pigeon that’s got stuck in the Master’s lab. Back in the day, there was a common observation among Doctor Who fans that stories with the word “time” in the title always turned out awful. This isn’t always the case – and the link has been severed by new series stories like World Enough and Time anyway – but you can see what they were talking about here. What’s more, it makes the exact same mistake that two of the later “time” stories (Time-flight and Time and the Rani) will, namely building its suspense around a Time Lord trying to gain the secrets of time travel. Frankly, saying it out loud should be enough to demonstrate why this doesn’t work.

Then again, could any of this story be pitched or summarised at all? God knows Robert Sloman’s other scripts aren’t exactly models of dramatic unity, but they feel like they happen in some kind of order. Here, we feel like we’re watching Sloman’s notes rather than his script. Every concept that will come into play at the end is mentioned in the first episode, but not because it’s being coherently set up, it’s more so Sloman can remind himself to bring this stuff back in later on. There’s no reason for the Doctor to automatically assume everything from his (sensational-looking) opening dream is about to imminently come true, just as there’s no reason for Jo to have a long conversation about Atlantis four episodes before she and the Doctor will visit that mythical location. It gets to the point where you feel active relief every time there’s a non-coincidental plot development.

Even if Sloman would struggle to say any of this stuff out loud, Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning are up to the task. Most Doctor-companion partnerships look pretty threadbare by the end of a second season together, but Pertwee and Manning still seem to be finding new ways to play off each other at this point. Pertwee, in particular, is remarkably sincere and convincing considering some of the absolute nonsense he’s got to say, which means he’s on fire when he gets something that’s actually nicely written. For all the deservedly poor reputation of the serial, Pertwee’s “daisiest daisy” speech in episode six is one of his most famous moments; in context it kills the pace of the story stone dead, but there’s no doubting Pertwee’s investment in it.

Admittedly, the story hasn’t exactly been galloping along prior to this. When Atlantis comes into play, it’s after four episodes of stalling, very little of which has been fun stalling (I will admit to a certain affection for the Doctor’s home-made contraption to jam the Master’s equipment, even if it’s on screen for too long). If you were feeling exceptionally charitable, you might say this has invented Robert Holmes’s method for dividing up six-parters into a four-parter and a two-parter four years before Holmes works it out, but it’s done it through incompetence rather than strategy. The strange thing is, if you have to shift location in the last third of a story, Atlantis is a very good choice of location to shift to. It does, at least, promise a spectacular finale due to the one thing everyone knows about Atlantis. But it has to introduce too many new characters at such a late stage, and Sloman is far, far too in love with his nonexistent ability to write cod-classical dialogue.

Indeed, there’s a lot of ingredients in here that normally work well but flatline here. I have a fondness for stories which play the Doctor and the Master’s relationship as though they were Milton’s God and Satan, even if it wouldn’t work with every pairing. Anthony Ainley managed it with Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy, and he should have been given the chance to do it with Colin Baker rather than play second fiddle to the Rani and the Valeyard. But he couldn’t have done it opposite Davison’s Doctor, and Peter Capaldi and Michelle Gomez were too wry and cunning for this kind of bombast. On paper, Pertwee and Roger Delgado should be ideal for it, with their shared aristocratic bearing. But the deus ex machina ending, while thematically appropriate for a story about Greek mythology, feels self-parodic. The Doctor is absurdly indulgent of his nemesis, and the Master’s escape is hilariously low-effort. He might as well shout “Look over there!”; presumably the only reason why he doesn’t is because he’d already tried that earlier on against Sergeant Benton.

Possessed of fleeting moments of charm – I love the Master’s impersonation of the Brigadier – The Time Monster is nevertheless an unholy mess. There aren’t many Pertwee stories that are this bad, and most of the ones that get close are at least from his final season, where several key figures were clearly running on fumes. This, by contrast, is the work of a team who are high on their own fumes, barely set up and ending on a disgraceful children’s-sitcom gag, bloated and self-indulgent, made with maximum confidence and minimum judgement. There’s no reason, no excuse for it.

Next: The Three Doctors (1972-3)

Graham’s Archive – The Time Monster

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