Time-flight

Four episodes

Aired between 22nd March 1982 and 30th March 1982

Written by Peter Grimwade
Produced by John Nathan-Turner
Directed by Ron Jones

Synopsis

Concorde goes missing and the staff at Heathrow airport start freaking out.

On the TARDIS, the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa have only just collected and dropped the crew of the freighter and surviving marines off in the 26th Century (see Earthshock).

Nyssa and Tegan ask the Doctor to go back in time, but the Doctor refuses, angrily saying that there's some laws that even he can't break and they shouldn't ask him again.  He tries to take their minds off Adric's death by going to the Great Exhibition of 1851, but instead lands in Heathrow Airport, 1982.

They immediately get arrested, but thanks to the Doctor's UNIT credentials, they come to find out about the missing Concorde.

The Doctor offers to help and they load the TARDIS onto a second concorde, flying it out to the area where the other one went missing.  Whilst on the flight, the TARDIS picks up some kind of strange signal, but they all believe they pass through the area without too much trouble and land back at Heathrow.

It's not long however before they discover that this Heathrow is an illusion (like a perception filter) and they've actually travelled back in time 140 million years.

Once they can see clearly, they notice the second Concorde on a desolate plane, a great citadel in the distance, and the remains of an alien spacecraft.

The crew and passengers of the first Concorde are entranced except for Professor Hayter, a prof. in Hypnosis.  The hypnotised humans are marshalled by blobs of energy known as Plasmatons. As they talk to the Prof. the crew start to take the TARDIS to the citadel and Nyssa gets visions and hears voices.

Meanwhile, at the Citadel, a strange oriental creature known as the Kalid works with a force of psychokinetic energy to entrance everyone. It's the same energy that's affecting Nyssa so strangely.   He can view things through a crystal ball and watches with curiosity and manages to trap Nyssa in a block of the Plasmatons.

The Doctor goes with Hayter and the pilots to the citadel and finds scores of humans trying to gain entrance to a sealed chamber.  He leaves the others there to try and help the humans to snap out of it whilst he ventures further.  The Doctor meets Kalid and finds that he's brought the Concordes back through time so he can use the people on them as a slave force to get access to the sealed chamber.

Kalid manipulates the psychokinetic energies around the area to try and blackmail the Doctor into letting him have access to the TARDIS, otherwise he will hurt Hayter and the crew.

Nyssa breaks free of the Plasmatons and heeding to the voices in her head, she and Tegan go to the citadel.  They find numerous visions including one of Adric who begs them not to go any further.  They understand that it's just apparitions though, so they go onwards.  They eventually get to the sealed chamber and they somehow gain access to it.

Nyssa in a trance throws a nearby artefact into a tank and the effects hurt the Kalid who collapses and starts bleeding green slime.

The Doctor is puzzled as they examine the Kalid's crystal ball.  It turns out not to be controlled by psychokinesis, but by electronics.  The Master shrugs off his Disguise as the Kalid and laughs.

Turns out the Master somehow escaped Castrovalva but has found himself stranded in pre-historic England as his own TARDIS needs a new power source.  He found the chamber and equipment and he believes that the centre of the chamber could hold the power he needs.  Now the Doctor is here though, he wants the Doctor to give him his TARDIS so he can get into the chamber another way.

The Doctor has no option but to give him the keys, then they run to the chamber to try and get in it before the Master.  They break the wall down eventually and find Nyssa and Tegan in there.  Through Nyssa, the group learn that the tank like structure contains the essence of a race known as the Xeraphin.  Because of all the souls inside it, it's got a good personality and a bad one, the bad called to the Master, the good to Nyssa.

Prof. Hayter sacrifices his body to become a vessel of the Xeraphin. They use it to appear as an entity called Anithon.  It explains that the Xeraphin came to earth to escape the Vardon-Kosnax war. The Earth contained so much radiation that they built the citadel and shed their bodies to hide in hibernation until the world was safe. The Master's arrival forced the split personality of the Xeraphin however.

Through a couple of attempts, the Master is eventually successful in bringing the Xeraphin sarcophagus onboard his own TARDIS and making it the new power source.  Some of the Concorde crew manage to sabotage his electronics however and the Master is forced to negotiate with the Doctor for equipment so that they can all get off Pre-historic earth.

They do indeed get back to the modern day, and the Doctor reveals that he tricked the Master. He gave him a temporal limiter like he asked for, but set it to arrive slightly after them, so that it pings the Master's TARDIS all the way to modern day Xeriphas, where he hopes the Master will have revenge exacted on him for taking the sarcophagus.

Together, the Doctor and Nyssa fly away as the Law start to ask questions, believing that Tegan is now back where she's wanted to be for months.  Tegan however did decide to run back to the TARDIS, but she's too late. They're gone.

Trivia

• This one required a lot of talking with British Airways to get permission for filming Concorde.  They used stock footage for some things, one of them including a bird that flies past the plane in pre-historic times as it's taking off!

• This story was the brain child of renowned director Peter Grimwade. He wrote the scripts and had to make numerous changes over quite a long time before it was ready for filming.

• The Master was a result of John Nathan-Turner meddling with the script and insisting on bringing him back. The Kalid was originally going to be an actual Arrabian sorcerer

• Matthew Waterhouse was included as a vision in this story, purely so that they could put his name in the Radio Times and nobody know his character was going to die in the story prior to this

• This is actually the first story where the Masters shrinking weapon is named - the Tissue Compression Eliminator

The Review

When you hear the outline of the story, it doesn't sound too bad, but trust me, it is.  That's probably due to the bad execution of a half good idea. The script isn't amazing, and the dialogue is AWFUL, but it could have been salvaged if not for the over-ambitious attempt to realise this story on practically zero budget.

The Masters involvement just makes zero sense, least of which being the fact that he wears the Kalid costume for no apparent reason and dribbles green goo, again, why?!

Watching this story is just tedious as it's slow paced, full of jargon and arguments with an old guy over whether aliens exist.  If it was the first or only story of a drama production, you might get away with it, but rightly or wrongly, it's something that people in Doctor Who tend to just accept and get on with for the sake of the audience watching it.  It's like a companion refusing to believe that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside for at least four stories.

The only redeeming feature of this story for me is the aftrermath of Adric's death (which is incredibly short for the same reasons mentioned above)  and the faux departure of Tegan at the end.  Supposedly, she was always meant to come back, but if you watched it at the time, it was perhaps an additional shock that she'd been left behind.  Ultimately, I would say do yourself a favour and give this one a miss, there's nothing worth seeing at all and you can use your time in much better ways.

Rating

3 out of 10

Re-watchability Factor

2 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

The Faceless Ones

The Three Doctors 

Invasion of the Dinosaurs

Smith and Jones (Doctor Who, Series 3)