Time-Flight Part Two

The one where Kalid's true identity is revealed...

Is Time-Flight the story with the very worst merchandise design history of all? I remember when the Time-Flight/ Arc of Infinity DVD box set came out how appalling the sleeve designs were (by Dan Budden). On the Time-Flight cover, Nyssa looks like she's just been dug up, and the cut-and-paste techniques used were worthy of an eight-year-old with Gloy glue and rounded scissors. The heart of the DVD sleeve's "design" is a close-up of a Concorde cockpit. The VHS cover was better, but you can tell that Budden simply glanced at that and tried to copy it (and failed). The bluray disc opted for a shot of Kalid and a plasma-poo, while the box set's booklet tries to make a play on the Fairy liquid bubbles. The Target book had one of those rubbish photographic covers, showing the Doctor smiling in front of Concorde. At least someone was happy.

Anyway, back to the story. It's too easy to get distracted from it because there's so little on offer. We rejoin our heroes as the Plasmatons (for that is what they are) encase the Doctor in soapy bubbles, and while he's in there he hears a spooky voice ask him for help. Despite the fact he was encased while standing, he re-emerges from the bubbles lying down. Not sure why.

Although the effects in this story are pretty ropey, there's a lovely glass shot showing everybody from a distance across the Jurassic plain which tries to remind us of where they are supposed to be. It's all too brief though, and it's very difficult to forget that they are obviously in a BBC studio with a painted backdrop, especially when you hear the wooden set beneath the actors' feet.

But wait, who's this? An old buffer dressed like the Eleventh Doctor wanders on, claiming to be one of the first missing Concorde's crew. He is Professor Hayter, who lectures at the fictional University of Darlington, although I have always found this quite amusing as I went to university in Darlington in the 1990s. OK, so I didn't study at the University of Darlington, it was Darlington College of Technology, but I was studying a degree affiliated to the University of Teesside, so it always feels very right that Darlington has a uni! Hayter even looks like my old law lecturer, Robin Crowther!

Hayter is played by veteran actor Nigel Stock, who bumbles through his lines very capably but with virtually no connection to their meaning. He's saying the lines, but clearly not trying too hard. He was probably wondering why his agent had said yes to this job.

Nyssa is the next to be bubble-wrapped, enveloped in a prison of soap suds, and used by a mysterious intelligence as a medium. She's the natural choice, as she's the blankest canvas. From all of this cheap nonsense the Doctor decides that the answers must lie in the temple painted on the cyclorama behind them, so sets out with Captain Stapley - now a fiercely loyal companion to the Doctor - leaving Tegan to twiddle her thumbs waiting for Nyssa to be released from her bubbly incarceration. It's starting to smack of too many characters (and when I say characters, I merely mean 'people', because these parts really don't have character), and as ever, the companions suffer. Even though there's now only two companions, we've got one trapped in a mass of bubbles, and the other waiting for her to get out of the mass of bubbles. The companion roles go to Hayter and Stapley, bizarrely. It does not ring true at all when Tegan urges Stapley to go with the Doctor, claiming he'd be of more use than she would. That is not at all the Tegan we know.

Reaching the temple, the Doctor, Stapley and Hayter wander round some wisely low-lit tunnels until they find a big room full of hypnotised air crew and passengers trying half-heartedly to open a big egg thing. Nobody's particularly interested in what the container is, or what's inside ("What's behind that thing?"; "Another thing, I shouldn't wonder") even though instinct should tell them it's probably really important. The actors pretending to try and open the container do a very poor job of it. One of the extras agonisingly hammers at the prop with mock force and determination; if you actually watch the background action rather than listen to Stapley and Hayter waffling on, it's rather comical!

Meanwhile, the Doctor finds his TARDIS in Kalid's control centre. The conjurer's interest in the time machine is clear, but his actual plan is not. Kalid claims to have learnt his magical abilities in the deserts of Arabia, which would suggest Kalid is Arabic, especially as the name Kalid means 'immortal' in Arabic. Kalid is a derivation of the name Kaled, so that's either a very clever clue, or a very clever misdirection. Or, perhaps, neither.

Some of the writing is appalling. Peter Grimwade writes a bit like George Lucas, and we all know what Harrison Ford said about that ("You can type this shit, but you sure can't say it"). Peter Davison gets saddled with some really dodgy dialogue that a lesser actor would struggle to make work. He just about succeeds with "We've all got quite good at resisting your sorcery", but is less successful with the clunking "You can exclude me from your wizardry." 

The Doctor establishes that Kalid's powers derive from his bizarre incantations ("Aragoborago abolitha!" and all that tosh), which trigger the mystery intelligence's psychic energies (I'm presuming this is the mystery intelligence which asked the Doctor for help when he was in the bubbles). The Plasmatons, on the other hand, are manifestations assembled from the atmosphere itself, although why these manifestations have to look like armless grey poos on legs goes undiscussed. The Plasmatons really are appallingly rubbish monsters. They're not even monsters, they're just there. It's embarrassing.

Tegan and Nyssa, despite being told by the Doctor not to follow him, follow him to the temple, where they encounter a trio of mildly exciting hallucinations in the form of a Terileptil, Melkur ("What comes from it killed my father" says Nyssa, with curious prescience) and Adric! It's not the real Adric sadly, as Nyssa bluntly reminds Tegan ("Adric's dead"), but it's interesting how the boy's image screams as it fades away, just like the hallucinatory companions in The Five Doctors.

There's also a really rubbish two-headed hand puppet which threatens the lives of the Doctor's friends so keenly that it looks like he's going to give in to Kalid's demand for the TARDIS key. Luckily, he is saved from having to hand it over when Nyssa chucks a heavy/ not heavy crystal thing into the central dais of an inner sanctum the girls have discovered.

There's a big bang, Kalid is thrown melodramatically across the room, and starts to ooze green goo from his nostrils as if he's been attacked by Slimer from Ghostbusters. And then there's the Big Reveal: Kalid isn't an Arabian conjurer after all. He's the Master in disguise! That's a pretty neat twist, to be fair, and one I don't think most viewers would expect (Anthony Ainley's unique mannerisms were still relatively new back then, even to fans). But what I want to know is why the Master was pretending to be Kalid when nobody else was looking, kissing the TARDIS and dressing up in his padded duvet outfit. Why not just don his disguise when the Doctor arrived? Maybe it's yet more proof that the Master is a complete and utter fruit loop.

At least now the Master's on the scene things might get a bit more interesting...

First broadcast: March 23rd, 1982

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The glass shot of the prehistoric plain.
The Bad: Soap suds used as special effects?
Overall score for episode: ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: Part Three...

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