Review of Timelash (#141)
DVD Release Date: 09 Jul 07
Original Air Date: 09 – 16 Mar 1985
Doctors/Companions: Six, Perpugilliam “Peri” Brown
Stars: Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant
Preceding Story: The Two Doctors (Six, Two, Peri, Jamie)
Succeeding Story: Revelation of the Daleks (Six, Peri)
I may need to cross-file this under “Confessions,” but I should be up front on this: I don’t think I’ve ever truly given this story a fair shake. Even now, viewing it for the nominal purpose of assessing whether or not it deserves its bad reputation, I couldn’t quite divorce myself from my previous poor impressions.
To be fair, though, I’m not the only one who finds Timelash wanting. Aside from the (ableist) fan-epithet anagram I’ve heard used (Lamesh**), it came in dead last—#254 of 254—in the io9’s Best-to-Worst rankings I’ve been using as a loose gauge of quality for my Bad Reputation series.
Is it really that bad? Possibly not—but (as they say) lord, it ain’t good!
I knew I was in trouble when I got about 20 minutes into the story and all I could do was check the running time, waiting for the cliffhanger so I could fast forward through a few more minutes of credits and recap. Worse, by about 23 minutes, I realized to my horror that this was, in fact, from the era of two-parters. I would get no episode break until halfway into the entire hour-and-a-half-long adventure.
On the surface, it shouldn’t be such a bad story—at least, no worse than so many others with similar themes. I mean, this is great fodder for a game of “Spot the Tropes”: The TARDIS is pulled off course, and the Doctor and Peri end up on a planet ruled by a despot, where a rebel faction is trying to fight back. Meanwhile, changes in leadership alter the political landscape, there is a war brewing with a neighboring planet/species, and everyone’s trying to get help for their side from the Doctor, who has been there before.
These are tried and true Doctor Who story elements! So why don’t they work?
It doesn’t help that guest star Paul Darrow is deliberately chewing the scenery, reputedly to get back at Colin Baker for showing him up similarly on Blake’s 7. Nor does it help that the ambassador from the Bandrils, that neighboring species, is nothing more than a weird, earthwormy puppet. Perhaps most of all, it doesn’t help that there’s absolutely zero tension in any of the scenes with nominal peril.
The Morlox, for example, a supposedly deadly local predator used to threaten Peri, looks exactly like the prop it is, never more than a neck and a terminal toothy snout. At no time does it get within less than a head’s length of her, constantly growling but never making any real move to attack. On one occasion, there’s not even anything preventing her from running away from it, as far as I can tell. It takes Herbert, our extra from 19th-century Earth, waving a torch at the Morlox to drive it back a couple of inches and “rescue” her.
Then near the climax, when the Doctor, Herbert, and the TARDIS are theoretically about to get blown to smithereens, the direction is so lackluster that there is not so much as a hint of jeopardy. It’s just another exposition scene in the console room, starkly lit and without even a whisper of incidental music. Of course, given that their eventual survival is glossed over so thoroughly as to be irrelevant (“I’ll explain one day. It’s a neat trick.”), perhaps that was done purposely to keep viewers from getting too invested in the Doctor’s fate, and asking inconvenient questions after.
If one really wants to go to the heart of the matter, though, one need look no further than the hybrid visage of the main villain to understand fandom’s disdain for Timelash. How do you get past that ridiculous face? Or the fact that he can’t get past his own ridiculous face, to the point of enabling his own defeat?
I suppose someone out there has to love this story, but I can’t see it. Sure, there are a few sparkly little moments here and there, but if given the choice, I’ll spend my time on a story with those treasures in ready view rather than sifting through the schlock to find them.