Review of Time-Flight (#122)
DVD Release Date: 02 Mar 10
Original Air Date: 23 – 31 Mar 1982
Doctors/Companions: Five, Nyssa of Traken, Tegan Jovanka
Stars: Peter Davison, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding
Preceding Story: Earthshock (Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)
Succeeding Story: Arc of Infinity (Five, Nyssa, Tegan)
One of the things that makes a Bad Reputation story so hard to watch is that there’s almost always the kernel of a good story buried in there somewhere. For Time-Flight, that kernel is surrounded by a villain based on a racist stereotype, an alien consciousness reduced to an overly simplistic good v. bad dichotomy, and a generally mediocre script.
To be frank, I feel like a lot of the Fifth Doctor’s stories are plagued by similar problems. Although he was formative for some of my friends, Five has always ranked kind of in the middle of my list of favorite Doctors; I suppose that’s why. And while his previous entry in these Bad Reputation games was perhaps not as stinky as I’d recalled (ranking only 212 of 254 in io9’s Best-to-Worst list), Time-Flight is in the bottom ten, coming in at #245.
I imagine the pitch for this one was a pretty easy sell. It sounds great on paper: a Concorde plane mysteriously disappears, and when the Doctor and his friends—TARDIS and all—accompany a second Concorde to learn what happened, the crews find themselves at the end of a time corridor 140 million years in Earth’s past. But after that first episode of set-up, things really start to fall apart.
Foremost on my list of missteps is the villain of the piece Kalid (pictured on the left of the cover). When the Doctor meets him, he claims it was “in the deserts of Arabia [that he] learnt all the magic arts,” and I can’t tell if the random words he chants to work his “magic” are meant to be Arabic or some made-up language. Regardless, the character design (and execution) are clearly based on ignorant stereotypes of non-European cultures (and perhaps reference other literature/media unfamiliar to me). I find it so distasteful that I lose huge chunks of plot (there’s one entire episode that barely sounds familiar as I look over my notes) because I’m trying to block out Kalid.
Aside from Kalid, there is an alien presence at work, and they are at odds. While Kalid’s plan is devious and overcomplicated—I never made complete sense of it—the aliens feel poorly conceptualized. On one hand, their motivations seem clear; on the other, their powers and abilities seem to fluctuate as the writer felt the need to make them more or less helpless. Further, a schism within the alien population is presented as straight-up “good v. evil,” which is necessary to fit within the time constraints at work within a Doctor Who story, but makes for really flat, unconvincing characterization.
On the up side, I was amused by the frequent recurrences of “I’ll explain later” from the Doctor (a search of the transcript tells me it was three times, but it felt like more). I enjoyed the Doctor himself in this story, perhaps because he wasn’t at constant loggerheads with Tegan, and both the actual Companions and the temporary ones (the crew of the second Concorde, Alpha Charlie) came across as generally competent and believable. In other words, I found the failings of Time-Flight to be almost entirely in the writing.
So what does that mean for a new viewer? I’d say that unless you are a big fan of Five (or Tegan or Nyssa) or you’re working your way through every story in order, it’s okay to skip this one (or leave it until near the end, if you must watch them all). Before my re-watch, pretty much all I remembered about it was that a Concorde ended up in the past, and I didn’t much care for the story. I’ll bet in a couple of months, I won’t remember much more. That’s probably for the best.