Doctor Who: Time-Flight

There is something immensely frustrating about the Peter Davison era. It contains some of the best stories Doctor Who has ever produced, but for every Earthshock, Enlightenment and The Caves of Androzani there's an Arc of Infinity or Time-Flight. Consistency is not the strength of the Fifth Doctor's time in the TARDIS. That said, the choice of this one as the clunker of Davison's tenure was easy, as Time-Flight fails on every level.

The idea of the abduction of Concorde is not neccessarily a bad one, although the airplane now comes across just as much of an anacrhonism as a police box. However the way in which the script is implemented is cack-handed in the extreme. The whole thing feels like an extended exercise in padding of the worst kind. The entire first episode can be summed up in just a couple of sentences. If Time-Flight was made today then it would be a single, 45 minute story that would still feel overlong. At just over 90 minutes, it feels in dire need of an editor. And any script that contains the line "I just know" when the fate of the lead character is being discussed after a supposedly exciting cliffhanger is really not trying.

The script isn't helped by the direction, which is unimaginative in the extreme. It uses the age old technique of "just point the camera at the actors and hope for the best". And such flat direction inspires really flat set design as well. The whole thing reeks of "it'll do". The problem is that it really won't do; by setting their sights so low, the production team managed to create somethng truly terrible.

Then there are the Plasmatons. I've seen this story more than once, but I'm still not sure what they are meant to be. I've no doubt that this is explained in the story somewhere because my problem is that I just don't care about them on any level. This is because they are spectacularly unsuccessful as monsters. They look like the greying turds of a very unhealthy set of bowels. On legs. By the time the Xeraphin appear to be boring for a bit I'd lost all interest in this farrago of uninteresting nonsense.

And the Master... It has been made clear in the new series that the Master is utterly bonkers, and I do wonder whether that was a bit of retrospective continuity created in part owing to his behaviour in this story, where he is madder than a box of badgers. The very fact that he stays in his terrible disguise even in front of hypnotised people who don't know who he is is either the act of someone taking the piss or who has long since descended into utter madness. The only time I can remember the Master being more mental than this is when he stands disguised as a scarecrow in a field in The Mark of the Rani for no reason whatsoever. And then there's the further problem that Anthony Ainley manages to render even the heaviest of make-up supremely irrelevant, since he plays each disguise of the Master he ever had in such a way that it is blatantly obvious who is behind that disguise.

But Ainley's is far from the worst performance in this story. Janet Fielding is as awful as ever, turning in a performance that some would call "hyper-real" but I would call borderline hysterical without ever being convincing. The crew of concorde are boring beyond belief - as if someone wanted to have the very cliche of an airplane crew on the small screen. And then there's the extra in episode one who emotes "But where have they gone?" with the sort of look on his face of a man who has just accidentally messed himself. Poor acting is nothing new in Doctor Who, but there seems to be a curious clustering of terrible performances in this dreadful instalment.

Anything good about it? Well, there is that curious scene at the start with the TARDIS crew where they all decide that it is best to forget about Adric basically because he was a weapons grade bellend. The Doctor could have used the TARDIS not to change history but to rescue Adric in the nick of time. His unwillingness to even think about this is very telling about his opinion of Adric. Despite it all, Davison still has fun with his role - I particularly like the Doctorishness of rushing out to find out the cricket scores and then invoking UNIT to get himself out of and then straight into trouble is entertaining. And had I watched this live on its original broadcast then I would have whooped as Tegan departed. Of course, that departure would be undermined in the next story by her return (just as Adric's death is undermined by his re-appearance in Episode Two as a phantasm), but I do rather like the idea of the Doctor off-loading two of his most irritating companions ever in quick succession. But that's about it. The rest of it is tiresome shit.

And let me make this very clear - we've got another six clunkers to go, but this is, in my opinion, the worst of the lot. In fact, it is a strong contender for the worst Doctor Who story of all time. The world of Doctor Who would be positively enhanced if the script for Time-Flight had been summarily rejected, and the story becoming nothing that a footnote in an article in the Doctor Who Magazine about unproduced stories.