Time-Flight: Ranking - 215

  Time-Flight

(Season 19, Dr 5 with Nyssa, Tegan and the ghost of Adric, 22-30/3/1982, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, director: Ron Jones) 

'I'm afraid there's been a delay in the planned fight involving Concorde, by some 140 million years, due to a technical hitch involving a renegade timelord and some plasmatons. We'll try putting you on a different flight...Whoops, there were some sentient leaves on the line...No wait, it was just some Vervoids. Now there's too much snow...but we shooed the Great Intelligence out the way and we're back on schedule again now...Alright, apparently it's now a replacement bus service, only the Happy Hearts Holiday Club from Bolton have themselves been hijacked by the Chimerons. I give up, let's switch you over to Gatwick... Oh great, now we've all lost our identities in a giant explosion. Well, at least it saves money on the duty free I suppose' 

Ranking: 215

 

 I knew this story’s dismal reputation long before I finally got a chance to see it – and actually I first got to know it from the novelisation, given to me by my local library van because the person who’d had it before me hated it so much they’d thrown it across the room and ripped it nearly in half so they didn’t want to stock it anymore, which didn’t instil me with an awful lot of confidence in it I confess. What was it that made them mad I wonder? The Master’s irrational plan? (no more irrational than The Master’s other plans it has to be said). The emphasis on Concorde (I’m no fan of planes but it’s as good and different a backdrop to a Who story as any. I’m amazed Heathrow agreed to it by the way: I mean, they don’t come out of it that well – who wants their flight to be late by 140 million years and hijacked by aliens? It’s not the best advertyisement ever). The oddball characters who don’t behave like everyday people? (I rather like oddball charactersand rarely behave like everyday people myself, I admit). What I found was a story that isn’t anywhere near as bad as its reputation: flawed certainly, weirdly plotted as a lot of Peter Davison stories are (that’s the problem of having episodes on twice a week and – on every story of the first Davison story except this one as it happens - finding things to do for three companions, with ‘companion’ duties here given to the Concorde crew), with a convoluted plot (that’s the problem with having to find things to do that an all-powerful character hasn’t done before) and budgeted for economy class (as pretty much all 1980s DW stories are, particularly season closers when the money’s all run out). I could say that about maybe half the 5^th Doctor stories though and there’s nothing too wrong here that isn’t also wrong with the rest of the era though and a few things that are maybe a little better. Take Tegan; she’s normally written as antagonistic and bitchy but here she feels like a real person, finally getting to Heathrow airport after a whole series of trying to get there and the false-ending when she realises this isn’t what she wanted after all following multiple stories of nagging for just this is such a great twist to the character (ruined by the arbitrary way she falls into the Doctor’s life again in ‘Arc Of Infinity’). Take Nyssa: she’s more pro-active than normal, able to see through the psychic conditioning to work out what’s really going on even moe than the Doctor. She’s emotional too and even screams at one point – very un-Nyssa like. Take Adric’s ghost; a sweet last goodbye, written into the script purely so Matthew Waterhouse can be credited in the Radio Times and nobody who bought it a week early would guess what would happen at the end of ‘Earthshock’, but a scene that works really well (even if you have to feel for poor Matthew, going back towork amongst his old work colleagues after killing him off against his will). Take Concorde: basing a whole story in a series that can go anywhere in time and space round a mere aircraft that the production team only got a few snatched hours filming on is indeed a crazy idea, but its DW crazy and gives us some new focal point to run around (also, the model used when Concorde took back their toy to actually fly around the world with is pretty good it has to be said). Take The Master: Yes, I don’t know why he went to all the trouble of disguising himself on a planet where nobody lived either just in case the Doctor comes along either, but it makes for a great cliffhanger (and another daft Radio Times entry, when Anthony Ainley was credited as Leon Ny Taly so as not to give away who he was, even though it’s the sort of name that screams out that it’s a pseudonym for somebody). Take Professor Hayter…Please, somebody take Professor Hayter…No, I’m kidding, as much as other fans find him irritating I like my dotty professors (being, y’know, quite close to one myself) and he’s one of DW’s dottiest. I love how his re-actions are the exact opposite of how a ‘normal’ person would re-act at being whisked so many epochs from home. Yes Captain Stapley and crew are a bit too, well, stiff-upper-lip and all too ready to believe that Concorde has travelled to a distant world (a condition of the filming at Heathrow perhaps, to make the flight crew look like heroes?), but I even like the way their British pluck lasts even on an uncivilised planet; it’s a new twist DW has never really done since the UNIT days (and they never travelled to exotic worlds – exotic worlds came to them). If nothing else ‘Timeflight’ explains why planes always seem to take off late – they went back in time 140 million years where the crew and passengers were enslaved then hypnotised to forget about it. I mean, it makes a lot more sense than the other explanations airports give. Clearly it’s too muddled to be a classic (a lot of 1980s Master stories are) and parts of it are indeed embarrassing when the production resources have to create a whole primeval planet out of threepence, but you get used to that as a DW fan. After hearing so many rude and unprintable things about it I was all poised to reach for the emergency exits and it’s really not that bad at all, just misunderstood. Maybe I’m more fond of it than most because my sights were set lower before I saw it. Maybe I’m fond of it because that novelisation is actually pretty good, even if I couldn’t actually read the top line of half the pages where it had been squished. Maybe I’m fond of it because it was the last part was the episode broadcast nearest to when I was born (which of us has aged better? ‘Timeflight’ obviously, even with the lycra and casual oriental racism). Or maybe I’m just a little bit monkeynuts, the Kalid’s hypnotised me and it really is that dreadful, I don’t know, but somewhere here in the ranking – eighty to a hundred places higher than mot fans would put it – seems about right.

+Of all the many people connected with the series I ever met at DW conventions, Anthony Ainley was easily the nicest and most likeable. He was one of the best actors the show ever had too, with a subtlety and class even when the scripts insisted on turning his Master into a pantomime villain. A lot of fans laugh at his portrayal in this story but the disguise fooled everyone I watched it with the first time and probably me too had I not already read the novel, even if I still don’t have a clue as to why he was disguised as a large Chinese mystic at all. I love it when he gets the chance to prove that The Master is just a part and he can do so much more.  

- Even I’m not going to find excuses for the plasmatons, the wobbly obelisks that are clearly made out of polysterene – yeah, that’s one element of this story that really is as bad as everyone always says.