Time-Flight (1982) Review

Squint and it could be a Pertwee story.

Time-Flight is an imaginative and fun adventure story, scuppered by dreadful production values, poor casting decisions and JNT's decision to involve the Master(kinda hell yeah?). 

WRITTEN BY

Peter Grimwade, who directed Earthshock. A man of many talents, it seems.

PLOT

The TARDIS finally arrives at Heathrow airport... by accident. There, the Doctor discovers that a Concorde plane has vanished into a time warp and proceeds to run an experiment on another Concorde that takes him, Tegan, Nyssa and the flight crew into prehistoric times, where the Master has laid a trap...

ANALYSIS

Basically, if you strip away the horrible visuals, replace pretty much everyone in the guest cast apart from Nigel Stock(professor Hayter) and Richard Easton(Captain Stapley) and not involve the Master, this would be a brilliant romp. Yet it seems like everyone involved decided that this was to be the somber epilogue to the season. Which definitely makes sense from an overall arc viewpoint: Adric has just been killed and another confrontation with the man who tortured him, concluding with the unfortunate abandonment of another companion sounds like the perfect closing chapter. 

So why on Earth did they pick this script to do it??? If any story screams "holiday", it's this one, with a setting that suggests dinosaurs will show up any second, a crazy Arabian wizard as the (original) main villain and a focus on planes(which we usually use to travel to relaxing locations). Even the presumably rewritten ending, where the Master's TARDIS is repelled off into time and space like a ball in a cricket match, sounds hilarious. 

As it is, Time-Flight is still enjoyable, although the second half is considerably weaker and I'm guessing that's the half that Grimwade didn't write or at least originally plan, as it largely abandons the storyline we had up to this point in favor of messing about with the components of two TARDISes until I had no idea who had what and what it all meant for them. 

CHARACTERS

Peter Davison spends most of this story over-acting. I mean, I've heard his out of breath delivery of lines is the norm(which I find really worrying, because I hate it when he does that), but seriously, he hits you with every emotion he's asked to deliver. It's that very earnest way of behaving that's usually reserved for when you're interacting with toddlers(which, I just realised, is kind of genius since he is a Time Lord).

Tegan and Nyssa both did very little in this story, but they also both had shining moments. I liked that Tegan's character development in Earthshock stuck and she continues to be a warm and enthusiastic presence on the TARDIS(boy, that's not something I ever thought I'd say about Tegan). Of course, she's still snippy as ever, but now it's in a fun way. That is, of course, until she's randomly abandoned at the end. Um, what??

Nyssa's role in the episode is to serve as the mouthpiece of the Xeraphin. Why her? Because... she's alien, I guess. She's also become a bit sassy, which I find funny(has to be Tegan's bad influence).

I absolutely adore Anthony Ainley as Kalid. I have no idea what the thought process behind him was, but it's one of the most entertaining performances in Doctor Who history. There should be a comic book made where he teams up with Soldeed, the BOSS and Mavic Chen(GUARDIAN OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM). He just has this big grin on his face the whole time and happily wobbles about, rambling nonsense whilst messing about with time and space. I can just imagine him in morning slippers, dancing awfully to pop music and resolving to conquer the world after coffee, because why not?
And then, in the middle of the story, he randomly vomits out green muck and is revealed to be the Master. Sure... well, my personal theory is that Kalid is actually a Gallifreyan superhero that the Master was cosplaying. And speaking of the Master, it's a pretty generic appereance, as his presence was very clearly last-minute. No memorable lines or cool moments. 

Even though professor Hayter was a humorless, stuffy character, I really liked him. Mostly because he combined classic British manners with the lecturing personality of my grandpa. He was mildly endearing that way. 

Captain Stapley almost made for a better Brigadier than the actual man. He's a charming man, driven by duty and yet compelled to hang on the Doctor's every word. The kind of guy who looks at everybody fondly. God bless Stapley. I love people like him. 

Not gonna spend too much on the rest of the flight crew, since they were never fleshed out properly, but suffice to say, none of them are particularly good. They talk awkwardly, with pauses between dialogue and can never figure out what to do with their hands. The extras are even worse, though, although it may be a case of poor direction since apparently nobody told them to actually act frightened at the prospect of being murdered by a psychotic alien. By the time Tegan instructs them to go to Concorde, they're just happily chatting away as if nothing was wrong in the world. Facepalm.

The Xeraphin are quite interesting, if somewhat underdeveloped aliens. I would've loved to have seen more of their Jekyll-and-Hyde dynamic, but they're pretty much dropped right after their introduction to become a McGuffin.

NOTES

*Do pilots really say "we're flying supersonic..." so casually? Is super a casual word amongst pilots? I have to know.

*Why on Earth would the person monitoring the airplanes at Heathrow airport be doing so inside a small, poorly lit room???

*"Aren't you forgetting something important?" Did Tegan just seriously suggest that the Doctor forgot Adric's death?

*She redeems herself by making the perfectly natural observation that they could simply use the TARDIS to retrieve Adric from the spaceship. Nobody saw him die, nobody mourned his death. There is literally nothing that would change if they just went and got him out of there. Unless Adric's bloody remains had something to do with the way Earth was shaped.

*I get that the TARDIS crew need a time out after Adric's death, but is "the crystal palace, opening day!!" really the best choice? I'd suggest a spa, not a circus.

*Is it really possible for 80s airport security tech to pick up the TARDIS's arrival immediately?

*More of Davison's over-acting: he grabs the newspaper furiously as if the Daleks themselves were after him, then casually comments on cricket scores.

*I must point out that I like how the show has reconnected with contemporary Earth since the JNT era began. It feels consistent in a way that it hasn't since the Pertwee days.

*I find it very unbelievable that the Doctor could just get by on his name in UNIT. Literally anyone could impersonate him. And even without so, they didn't even bother to show up and check?

*The Doctor tells the Concorde pilots that they're all safe because of his TARDIS, whilst apparently forgetting that nobody except him as any clue as to what the TARDIS is.

*I have to admit, whilst the continuity is often pointless, I am warming to the idea of the TARDIS crew mentioning their past exploits like mature adventurers.

*How could Nyssa and Tegan just walk into the TARDIS without being disoriented by the change in gravity(as it was lying on its side inside the Concorde)??

*As much as I like Stapley, I must question how he developed such a healthy respect for the Doctor despite him only having gotten them trapped in prehistoric times by that point?

*Poor Nyssa: why does alien possession always cause breathing problems in sci-fi?

*Instead of just shouting at the hypnotised people, why not try slapping them?

*Okay, I understand you've completely run out of money. But did you guys really look at the Plasmatons(aka the walking turds) and think: yup, we can go with that?

*Why does Kalid create a giant snake to kill the flight crew instead of just using his powers to choke them all to death or something?

*Okay, I get that Kalid is the bad guy, but he's not done THAT much harm to them... so why do they completely ignore him when he collapses to the floor and starts vomiting?

*Why does absolutely nobody question who the heck the Master is, and more importantly why he pretended to be Kalid?

*At one point, we return to Kalid's control room to see the flight crew stripping apart the alien technology! Methinks some Adam Mitchell action was required here.

*Right before Hayter accepted the Xeraphin's offer, why did Tegan grab Nyssa? She had no idea what would happen! For all she knew, she could've absorbed the knowledge of the universe by touching her!

*Maybe I missed something, but how did the Master find the Xeraphin? Especially since his TARDIS was apparently already breaking down?

*So, are the Xeraphin just representations of good and evil(in which case, how can there be other ones?) And if they're just members of the race, why would the Xeraphin even have evil people in there?

*The TARDIS travels around in this story almost as often as in a Matt Smith episode.

*What was the point of the Doctor sending the TARDIS back to the Concorde with Nyssa and the flight crew and then just randomly wandering around the Master's base before arriving there himself?

*Best scene of the entire season: the Master's TARDIS breaks down because of the Doctor's components and he accuses the Doctor of sabotage, at which point the Doctor turns to Nyssa and irritatedly growls: "What's he talking about, Nyssa, have you been tampering with the TARDIS?!"

*If Kalid is supposed to be from Arabia, what was up with his face?

CONTINUITY ADVISOR

1) Continuing from the events of the previous story, the Doctor reveals that the Cyber-Fleet was dispersed and that he took the crew of the freighter back home in the TARDIS. And of course, Adric is dead. All of this was pretty vital after last episode, I think.

2) The Doctor mentions that Adric died saving others, like his brother Vash(from Full Circle). Nice, but Vash has never been mentioned once since that story and I'm not sure Tegan and Nyssa even knew Adric had a brother, so it's a bit weird to bring him up here.

3) The Doctor uses his UNIT credentials to get him out of a problem and also name-drops Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. All of that is utter fan service.

4) Nyssa wishes, that she'd known about the TARDIS's gravity alignment system when they were on Castrovalva. A subtle callback to a similar situation. Okay, I'll let it slide.

5) The Doctor wishes he still had his scarf. This one's just stupid. You DO! Just go into the TARDIS and get one!

6) In order to distract Tegan and Nyssa, Kalid uses his machines to transmit images of the Melkur(from The Keeper Of Traken) and a Terileptil(from The Visitation). Good character-based moments, but not for the casual audience. I especially like Nyssa's description of the Melkur as "what comes from that killed my father"(Tegan KNOWS about the Master!!)

7) The Doctor mentions the Master's off-screen escape from Castrovalva. Nice of them to reference the fact that we never saw it happen, just to confirm it's not a continuity error.

8) For some reason, the Master's TARDIS still looks like a pillar. Is his chameleon circuit broken? 

9) The Master's penchant for miniaturising people returns once again... remember people, Delgado did it ONCE. Was it really that memorable?

10) At one point, the Doctor thinks about materialising his TARDIS around the Master's, which leads Tegan to retort: "You know what happened before(in Logopolis)!" I just don't see why this needed to be in here.

BEST QUOTE

Professor Hayter's reaction to the Doctor's story: "I've never heard such an extravagant explanation!"

CONCLUSION

So much lost potential.