Time-Flight Part One

The one where Concorde flies back in time...

Ah, good. How clever that this next story should be written by the man who directed Earthshock. That means there should be a nice transitional through-line dealing with Adric's tragic death and the impact it has on the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa. Peter Grimwade was an excellent director, so should have a firm and realistic grasp of what's possible on a television budget.

Ha ha! I know, I'm being facetious, but that is what you'd think if going into all this with no foreknowledge. One of Doctor Who's companions has just died, and this sort of thing virtually never happens, so you'd think it would be dealt with in a mature, reflective and sensitive way. But no, the best we get is a half-hearted scene trying to wrap up everybody's "feelings" as quickly as possible so that the new story can get underway.

It's such a shame that Doctor Who in 1982 was so unusually brave as to kill off a main character, then dropped the ball by not dealing with the aftermath properly. Fans mock and titter these days about the death of Adric, but back in 1982, young fans had just seen one of their heroes, or at least somebody on the telly they could relate to in some way, killed. Horribly, and suddenly. They even ran silent end credits to compound the shock and tragedy. Earthshock did it right, but Time-Flight sadly does not.

As ever, Tegan is our emotional touchstone, expressing her exasperation at the Doctor and Nyssa's almost clinical response to the tragedy, and demanding to know why Adric cannot be saved. The two aliens state that the freighter crew has been returned to the correct time, and that the Cyber fleet has been "dispersed" (Nyssa showing off again), but Tegan quite rightly pulls them up for their cold approach. "You make it sound like a shopping list!"

Tegan's right. The Doctor and Nyssa should really be more upset, or at least bothered, than this. Peter Davison injects a trace of numbness into his performance, but it's hard to tell with Sarah Sutton. Tegan asks why they can't go back in the TARDIS and rescue Adric before the freighter crashes, and that is a perfectly good and reasonable question. But the Doctor says that some things cannot be changed, and that seems to include the tragic demise of his friend Adric. "You must accept that Adric is dead," he concludes.

Yes, Adric: the young orphaned boy in mourning you befriended in another universe, who supported you after Romana and K-9 left, who basically saved the universe on Traken, who helped with your block transfer computations on Logopolis, who was there for you through your regeneration and stuck with you throughout all your adventures. The Doctor's view of all this is rather skewed. He says: "Adric had a choice. This is the way he wanted it." No, Adric did not want to die. He died as a consequence of being a hero, of emulating his mentor, the man he looked up to and wanted to learn from. He died because he was the last man standing, basically.

It's handled so poorly, it's very disappointing, and gives little closure for young viewers affected by Adric's death. And within moments the Doctor is setting course for 1851 and the opening of the Great Exhibition, as a "special treat to cheer us all up". Yes, because that's what you do when you've just lost someone you supposedly care for. You go on a day out to the zoo or whatever. Sorry, but this is one of Doctor Who's epic fails. Why attempt something so brave, mature and ground-breaking in Earthshock if you're just going to crap all over it in the next story?

So, on with this week's adventure. Speedbird Concorde 192 has gone missing in flight, literally fading away from the skies and the radars of a very dark, compact Air Traffic Control at Heathrow. I thought ATC in The Faceless Ones was unrealistically modest, but this is laughably bad. Are the lights off because designer Richard McManan-Smith couldn't afford any walls or set dressings? Still, the disappearance of an aeroplane mid-flight is deliciously Department S, so I'm into it. It's an intriguing idea for a story.

The TARDIS is caught in some kind of time disturbance, and the scene where the crew are desperately holding on to the console must be the inspiration for Steven Moffat's spoofing of impenetrable dialogue in Time Crash. Nyssa and the Doctor spout on about dimensional stabilisers, relative drift compensators, solar comparators and spatial convergence, which is all gobbledygook to the lay viewer. It sounds as silly as it is. Why not write dialogue that people can understand, instead of chucking a load of bafflegab in to pretend everybody's being clever?

The location work at Heathrow Terminal 1 is lovely to see, a real snapshot of the 14-year-old building when it was the largest short-haul terminal of its kind in western Europe. The decor is depressingly brown and yellow, but seeing it as it was in 1982 makes it clear how much airports have changed since. There are no padded seating areas, video game machines or ashtrays these days! It's a great shot, having the TARDIS materialise in the Terminal building, and it's nice to see the regulars pour out into such a contemporary setting (they haven't been on contemporary Earth since the early scenes of Castrovalva).

It's odd that Tegan doesn't want to leave right there and then, now that she is in the time and place she's been trying to get back to since she first boarded the TARDIS. It kind of undermines Season 19's over-arching theme of trying to get Tegan back home, because as soon as she is home, she barely acknowledges it. Airport security homes in on the TARDIS, and the Doctor throws mention of UNIT, Department C-19 and Sir John Sudbury into the conversation to justify his presence. This may well be the first mention of UNIT since Season 13 seven years earlier, and it begs the question of who Sir John is, and how the Doctor knows him. Doctor Who spin-off fiction has delved into this quite thoroughly over the years, establishing Sudbury as the financial liaison between UNIT and the British Government (C-19). Sudbury pops up in a few books, including The Eye of the Giant, Business Unusual, The Scales of Injustice and Instruments of Darkness (in which we learn he died of a heart attack - or was he murdered?).

The Doctor very quickly - and I mean very quickly - gets accepted as leader of the team investigating Concorde's disappearance, and suggests they fly a second craft along the same flight path as Speedbird Concorde 192 to see if it happens again, only this time with the TARDIS on board to monitor things. Heathrow was very snowy in January 1982, when Time-Flight was filmed, but this adds a certain uniqueness to the location scenes where we see the TARDIS being loaded aboard the craft by forklift, and the Doctor and friends escorted by car to the plane.

The three-man crew of Concorde are an amusingly twee bunch who accept far too easily the concepts being thrown at them. They accept what's going on like you might accept a surprise birthday party, or a sloppy kiss from your Auntie Win, with a bemused air. Having the police box in the cargo hold is a "pretty rum idea", just an amusement, not something to be puzzled or confused by. Grimwade isn't interested in his characters reacting or speaking realistically, he just wants to get on with his Big Idea.

The TARDIS is stowed on its side aboard Concorde, so the Doctor has to climb in and lower himself carefully into the control room, across the frankly filthy floor, to flick a switch and turn the ship's interior back to upright. We know the interior is in a separate dimension to the exterior shell, so this is fine, but what doesn't make any sense at all is how Tegan and Nyssa then simply swan in as if they have walked in upright from outside. The Doctor later leaves the TARDIS standing and walking, but in reality you'd have to climb out. It's hard to visualise how the portal might look, with the interior being upright and the exit being sideways, so I don't blame them for not trying to show it, but the direction doesn't make sense. Tegan and Nyssa should still enter the control room on their hands and knees, surely?

Urgh, just move on. Concorde comes in to land at Heathrow, apparently in the right place and time, but it's only when the actors suddenly appear with an appalling Colour Separation Overlay background that it becomes obvious something's wrong. The CSO effect is one of the worst seen in the show's history, and it's so appallingly obvious that they're not really there. Then Nyssa screams, we get a brief glimpse of some emaciated skeletons sitting on a rock, and then everything shimmers from a photograph of Terminal 1 to a set in Studio 8. They're not at Heathrow at all, they've actually landed at the same spot spatially, but 140,000,000 years earlier, in the Jurassic!

McManan-Smith's valiant attempt to recreate the Jurassic plains in a BBC studio fail abysmally. He had to try, but to be honest, he didn't succeed with the materials, time and finances offered him. It's a dodgy painted cyclorama, a few less-than-solid rocks, and a light sprinkling of sand or gravel. At no point am I convinced of where they are, all I can think of is that they are in a studio and it looks rubbish. The brief use of model shots to depict Concorde and a separate spacecraft in the distance just adds to the woeful attempts to portray prehistory on a Doctor Who budget.

Things go rapidly downhill from here. Why does Nyssa claim she saw a "creature" (not a brontosaurus) when it was actually a bunch of skeletons (she even said as much herself: "Didn't you see them? They were decaying corpses")? Why is the flight crew so ridiculously accepting of the situation? They've travelled millions of years back in time on an aeroplane and somehow landed smoothly and safely on a Jurassic desert plain. This is no longer just a "pretty rum idea", it's ludicrous!

From here on, it's almost like the entire cast gives up bothering to act and just wanders through their lines and moves like automatons, praying for the end of the day to come so they can go home and do their laundry. Nobody is convincing in anything they say or do. The way Ron Jones directs them makes everything so stilted and amateur, particularly the bits where the walking grey poo monsters appear, and all the actors freeze in place while the camera cross-fades. The second example, where Peter Davison literally freezes as he waits for the shot to change and the poo monsters to fade in, is toe-curlingly awful.

Poo monsters. I'm not sure what they are supposed to be, but they just look like blobs on legs. No eyes, faces, arms, nothing, just big grey walking poo creatures. What sort of a monster has no arms to catch and hold its prisoners with? And then some Fairy Liquid washing up bubbles are overlaid on top. Just awful.

And who is that weird East Asian conjurer spouting ridiculous chanty dialogue? He's obviously the evil mastermind behind the luring of Concorde to prehistory, but what were they aiming for with the characterisation? Is he supposed to be Chinese? Nepalese? Japanese? Is he supposed to be speaking Chinese, Nepali, Mandarin? It's an intriguing performance, for sure, and who this guy is and what he's up to is about the only thing keeping me interested in part 2 right now.

First broadcast: March 22nd, 1982

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The use of real Concorde and Heathrow in Doctor Who is special.
The Bad: Plenty to choose from, but I'm going to opt for those poo monsters.
Overall score for episode: ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: Part Two...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part Two; Part Three; Part Four

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site.

Time-Flight is available as part of a BBC DVD box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Time-Flight-Arc-Infinity/dp/B000R20VKA