Doctor Who: The Time Monster

Ok, so let's get this out of the way straight off - The Time Monster is, arguably, not the worst Jon Pertwee story. It is not as boring as The Mutants or Colony in Space; it is not as anti-climatic as The Monster of Peladon (which also manages to be pretty boring in its own right). And yes, the monsters are not made out of barely animated plasticine, like in Invasion of the Dinosaurs.

But for me, this is the clunker of the Pertwee era. Partly it is because of Pertwee himself. Whereas the actors playing the Doctor in the first two stories in this series gave their all even to terrible scripts, Pertwee just comes across as a smug tosser in this story. He treats Jo as one might a slightly retarded child, while displaying open contempt to anyone who stands in his way or even dares to disagree with him. As far as I am concerned Pertwee is one of the weakest Doctors, but was still capable of turning in the occasional great performance. Unfortunately, The Time Monster sees him at his boorish, truculent worst.

Then we have the treatment of UNIT, who are nothing more than a way to pad out the storyline. When UNIT first appeared, they were a source of dramatic tension on the story, as the largely anti-establishment Doctor attempted to get on with an organisation happy to kill in order to carry out its job of defending that establishment and the country/world as a whole. Here, they are a comfortable family largely incapable of carrying out any effective military work. Even Jo Grant - as one of the most sympathetic members of that organisation - is treated poorly, being given little else to do other than confess to being dim and talking about groovy dresses until the very end of this long story. However, the treatment of UNIT reaches its nadir in the treatment of Benton who, having been allowed to briefly outwit the Master at the beginning of the story, is then reduced to a man wearing a nappy as a punchline to a poor joke. At the very end to the story you can see how the production team has ceased to take the programme seriously - which does rather raise the question of why the hell I should take their story seriously when they clearly can't be bothered to do so.

The story is also padded out, to the extent where the first two cliffhangers are largely the same. There seems to be a sense in which the whole story just wants to get to Atlantis because that's where the interesting stuff is going to happen - yet the Atlantis side to the story is dispensed with in a couple of hurried, breathless episodes that may as well have taken place on Peladon.

Then we have the central monster to the piece - Kronos. A great concept, sadly realised by a man in crappy bird costume. And this is the formidable, nightmarish, all-powerful creature that can be enslaved by the Master without him even breaking a sweat. And the Master himself, while generally played well (if slightly hysterically at times) by Roger Delgado, is only memorable because of the calibre of the actor playing him. The script leaves him as little more than a plot cipher - a way of moving a largely pedestrian plot slowly, and grudgingly, forward.

And this is perhaps the reason why I most resent The Time Monster - not because it is unmitigated crap, but because there is, on some level, a decent story here struggling to get out. The problem it has, though, is that the production team seem oblivious to the need to make that hint of a decent story into something that is actually good, or, at the very least, credible. I remember reading once that The Time Monster has, as a season finale, and end of term feel to it. This is true, but only in as much as the teachers just don't give a fuck anymore.

A wasted opportunity and, surely, an insult to those people who, unlike me, rate Pertwee's Doctor.