Time-Flight Part Three

The one where Professor Hayter becomes a Plasmaton...

My hope that things would improve now that the Master's on the scene seemed to be misplaced. For most of this episode the Master is trotting in and out of the Doctor's TARDIS with various bits of circuitry, achieving very little but chuckling an awful lot. Stapley and Bilton's attempts to derail the Master's plans are shockingly inept too. In fact, there's very little about the aircrew that impresses me. The actors are passable at best, with Michael Cashman and Judith Byfield particularly poor ("Nyssa and Tegan dead?"), and Richard Easton and Keith Drinkel struggling to make anything they say or do believable. Drinkel's delivery of the line "Oh no..." when the Master steals the TARDIS is truly awful.

I mean, this whole thing is awful. What's going on, and why? We learn that the Master is stranded in prehistory and managed to harness the psychic powers of the mysterious intelligence he found in the Jurassic to reach forward in time, accidentally abducting Concorde. We later learn that the entity, "an immeasurable intelligence at the centre of a psychic vortex", came to Earth in search of a new home after its planet Xeriphas was destroyed in the Vardon-Kosnax War. The Xeraphin were poisoned by radiation, and so merged into one gestalt being, an entire race absorbed into one bioplasmic body.

You following? I'm not sure I am, it just feels like a bunch of people saying words they don't understand, or care about. The usually reliable Peter Davison is wandering through his dialogue in a daze, visibly uncommitted to whatever's going on, while Nyssa and Tegan, who spend half the episode unconscious, are barely recognisable as characters.

Nigel Stock's Hayter is becoming a bit of a condescending git too (why Angela Clifford refers to him as a "friendly face" I do not know). He roundly refuses to accept anything that happens, even refusing to believe the evidence of his own eyes sometimes, and seems to be the only character who sees all of this for the crazy nonsense that it is. Everybody else, from the aircrew to the passengers, readily accept their outlandish predicament, principally because writer Peter Grimwade needs them to. There's barely an ounce of realism or truthfulness in any of the characterisations in Grimwade's script. He's opting for plot over character, and in the case of part 3, he's opted for infodump over incident.

Once the sanctum has been broken into, the Doctor is reunited with Nyssa and Tegan, and they all meet the creature at the heart of the sarcophagus. First we meet Anithon, representative of the Xeraphin's good side, who gives lots of background explaining the Master's involvement and the presence of the crashed spaceship outside. This is after Professor Hayter is killed horrifically by being absorbed and turned into a Plasmaton. It's quite a grisly demise, and Nigel Stock dies well, I'll give him that!

We then meet the dark Xeraphin, Zarak, who would rather team up with the Master in a desperate bid for power and supremacy than side with the good Doctor. The Master's apparently exhausted his dynamorphic generator, a concept expanded upon an awful lot in the novel The Quantum Archangel, in which some kind of link is made between a TARDIS's dynamorphic generators and the Eye of Harmony. Frankly, my head hurts quite enough from trying to wade through Grimwade's impenetrable dialogue and plotting. How did they expect the millions of lay viewers watching in 1982 to understand what's going on?

The episode culminates in the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan managing to suppress the dark side of the Xeraphin using their will alone, but when the Master uses an induction loop to transfer the Xeraphin sarcophagus containing the gestalt into his own TARDIS, it seems the day has been lost. "The Master has finally defeated me," the Doctor rather arrogantly declares. Actually, it's not all about you this time, Doctor. The Master is just trying to soup-up his own TARDIS and escape Earth's prehistory, you're just an incidental in all this. If I try too hard to make the course of events work - how the Master never intended to abduct Concorde, and never expected the Doctor or his TARDIS to be aboard - my brain starts to fray at the edges.

I cannot wait for this to be over.

First broadcast: March 29th, 1982

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Killing off Professor Hayter is a surprisingly brutal move.
The Bad: After a promising start involving Heathrow and Concorde, this is becoming a cheap, meaningless B-movie runaround.
Overall score for episode: ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: Part Four...

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