Review of The Time Monster (#64)
DVD Release Date: 06 Jul 10
Original Air Date: 20 May – 24 Jun 1972
Doctors/Companions: Three, Jo Grant
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning
Preceding Story: The Mutants (Three, Jo)
Succeeding Story: The Three Doctors (Three, Jo, Two, One, the Brigadier)
The fascinating thing about doing a year full of Highs & Lows like this is that the experience highlights just how subjective such labels can be. This month’s entry is a case in point.
While the list I’ve been using from io9 compiled by Charlie Jane Anders ranks The Time Monster as #238 of 254 (leaving it ahead of only 6% of other stories), it is well known to Verity! podcast listeners that Lizbeth Myles ranks it as one of best stories of all time (or, at the very least, in her personal list of favorites). That leaves a wide range of opinion into which to fit my own assessment.
Predictably, I fall somewhere between the two extremes, though closer to Lizbeth’s end of the scale. Perhaps it’s because I’m already a fan of the Pertwee era, and Delgado’s Master in particular, that I didn’t find the “preponderance of fluff” (as Charlie Jane put it) so objectionable. Some of that fluff includes gems like the “time sensor” (which, when we see it face-on, is shaped… perhaps more suggestively than entirely appropriate for a family show) and a device the Doctor constructs out of household items in order to interfere with the Master’s time experiments, the latter of which is one of the few things that consistently stick in my mind about this story.
On the other hand, when we finally get our inter-dimensional havoc-wreaker Kronos on screen, the result is… less than optimal. Rather than being a somewhat terrifying force of destruction, like its sibling chronovores of the Ninth Doctor’s era, the man-in-a-white-winged-costume is barely shy of laughable (until he’s hanging from a wire swinging back and forth in the background, at which point Kronos crosses firmly into laughable territory).
Given the production limitations of the time, though, they did a decent job. And sure, there were plenty of bits that could’ve been cut down to streamline the narrative, but if the remit is to create six episodes, then sometimes you have to stretch the story a bit to fit. The result here is some classic megalomania from the Master (the original, the best!), some wonderful timey-wimey-ness, some fascinating dimensional transcendentalism, and some standard Doctor Who storytelling in which an old legend turns out to have been real (in this case, Atlantis). We even get a moment where the Doctor essentially claims to have been a student of the Buddha (seriously—go look up the Flower Sermon, compare it to the story the Doctor tells Jo in prison, and tell me if I’m wrong).
Sure, I could find things to complain about—there’s some super patronizing shit towards women in here, and the Queen’s costume is ridiculous fan service (at least the Minotaur was well-built, for viewers who prefer the male form)—but in this case, for me the joys of watching Delgado do his thing and the cleverness of the twists in both space and time outweigh the negatives that simply pervade this era.
In the end, I suspect it all comes down to one’s own personal calculus regarding fluff tolerance, Delgado/Pertwee love, and the weight of genre plot elements vs. questionable effects. For me, that calculus falls solidly in the “pros” column, and I consider the hours spent watching The Time Monster time well spent.