9x05. The Time Monster
Writer: Robert Sloman
Director: Paul Bernard
Script Editor: Terrance Dicks
Producer: Barry Letts
Synopsis: The Master, posing as
"Professor Thascales," is running an experiment called Transmission Of
Matter Through Interstitial Time (TOMTIT) at the Newton Institute
designed to
summon Kronos, an ancient Chronavore with the power to consume time
itself, in the hopes of using the entity to control the universe. The
Doctor pursues him through time to Atlantis, where they both try to
gain possession of a crystal needed to complete the Master's plan.
Review: There's simply no nice
way to say this: "The Time Monster" is a big pile of garbage. Despite a
few redeeming facets here and there, the serial is mostly a mess of
incomprehensible plotting, bad special effects, and corny dialogue, all
with a tone that is often jarringly childish. In fact, I've found this
review surprisingly difficult to write. I generally prefer to explain
what I see as a serial's merits and faults by singling out specific
scenes as examples, but the scenes in "The Time Monster" are frequently
bad on so many levels at once that it's hard to decide how to
categorize all the badness.
The concept behind "The Time Monster" is that the Master is able to
access a realm outside time through, as Sergeant Benton puts it, the
space "between now and now," and thereby summon Kronos, as well as
create other manipulations of time. As a concept, there's nothing
particularly wrong with this, but it quickly descends into endless
technobabble and random silliness. There are numerous scenes of people
shouting fictional jargon about some weird temporal thingy or other
while frantically pushing buttons on consoles, but the script fails to
create suspense because there's no logic we can follow and no choices
that actually mean anything. Instead we just get completely arbitrary
developments (Kronos has arrived in the form of a big shrieking bird
with a helmet! A German bomb from World War II is going to fall on the
UNIT soldiers! The Brigadier is stuck in time outside the building!
Benton has turned into a baby!), most of which are resolved when the
script decides it's time for another weird temporal thingy. The
Brigadier is portrayed as a buffon for his failure to understand what's
happening and his impatience when the Doctor tells him they have to
wait to take action because of all the weird temporal thingies, but
personally I'm with him: none of this makes
any sense at all, and the characters are little more than pieces in a
board game where no one seems to know the rules. It's something of a
cliché to suggest that a six-part Doctor Who serial could have been
shorter, but it's hard to avoid in this case: "The Time Monster" could
have been cut by at least an episode simply by removing all the absurd
pseudoscience.
I complained in my review of "The Sea Devils" that the Master seems to
do the same thing every time he shows up, i.e. latch onto an
in-progress invasion or otherwise try to harness an already extant
alien power source. At first, I thought maybe "The Time Monster" was
going to take a different approach, in that he's actually doing
something on his own when we first see him. Instead, he ends up
diving head-first into the pit of muwahahahaha-ing camp villainy. For
one thing, no matter how hard Roger Delgado tries to make it seem
intimidating, his "I am the Master, and YOU WILL O-BEY ME" hypnosis
routine has just gotten old, and at this point I end up laughing every
time he tries it. More to the point, his scheming turns out not to be
very smart or competent after all. He has constructed TOMTIT on his own
and is capable of using it to manipulate time in a way that could
conceivably subdue all of Earth -- after all, if he can let loose bombs
and soldiers from past wars in Britain when he tries to attack the UNIT
convoy, imagine if he did that all over the world. Instead he goes for
"all or nothing," as he puts it, and tries to control Kronos so as to
rule the entire universe. After the Autons, the Keller Machine, the
Axons, the Doomsday Weapon, Azal, and the Sea Devils, you'd think he
might know better than to attempt something like this, but
apparently not. Of course, you'd also think he'd be too busy to engage
in what amounts to a hi-tech version of "I can't hear you!" with the
Doctor, especially if, as he claims, he could simply banish the Doctor
into a time vortex whenever he wants. But you'd be wrong about that
too, because this supposedly
dangerous arch-villain with a diabolical plan to take over the universe
does indeed find the time to "pick up the Doctor's words ahead of time,
then feed them back through the TARDIS' telepathic circuits" in order
to . . . make the Doctor talk backwards. Oooh, scary.
The backwards-talk scene, incidentally, is a prime example of a scene
that manages to be bad in almost every conceivable aspect. Not only
does
it make the Master look like an idiot for wasting time when he could
easily kill or at least neutralize the Doctor, and not only
does it resort to ridiculous technobabble to justify itself, but it
also
portrays the Doctor/Master rivalry at about the level of two
schoolchildren bickering in the sandbox. This is just one of many
elements I have in mind when I say that "The Time Monster" is often
surprisingly childish, other examples being the cartoonish sound effect
when Yates throws a grenade, corny jokes like "You can say that again!"
"Why would I say it again?", and Benton being turned into an
infant
as a side effect of the TOMTIT experiments. In fact, while watching
this, I was uncomfortably reminded of the Doctor Who stories I would make up
when I was seven years old. Of
course, a seven-year-old mentality is still somewhat less annoying than
the
Beavis-and-Butthead mentality that would invent a piece of technology
with the acronym TOMTIT in the first place. I'd ignore this as
accidental cluelessness, but the script itself
seems to be making an issue of it, given that the characters themselves
snicker at the title. In fact, the way it keeps coming up in the first
couple of episodes, without anyone acknowledging exactly why they're snickering, almost
makes
me think the production team were just trying to see how many
times they could get away with saying it on television.
The final two episodes, in which the action shifts to Atlantis, are a
little more tolerable simply because there isn't so much absurd
pseudoscience. Still, if "The Time Monster" in general plays like a bad
re-hash of "The Daemons," with the Master summoning an ancient force
that has influenced Earth's history, then the final two episodes are a
bad re-hash of "The Curse of Peladon." The costuming and aesthetics are
similar, and once again there are rumors of a terrible monster that
must be confronted (the Minotaur), but without the subtext about
international alliances and societal progress. Instead, we are given
little more than stock "palace intrigue" situations. King Dalios and
Queen Galleia are mildly engaging characters, and I suppose the script
may be trying to get some sort of message across about the Master's
manipulation of Atlantean religion, but at this point the serial had
just lost my interest, and there certainly isn't anything interesting
enough to merit the forty minutes spent in Atlantis. The inclusion of
the Minotaur is especially perfunctory, given that the Doctor is able
to defeat it with an old bull-fighting routine.
The last episode of "The Time Monster" does at least give the Doctor
and Jo some decent scenes. When they're imprisoned in Atlantis, the
Doctor tells a story about how, at a time in his life when he'd lost
all hope, a strange old hermit who lived near his home helped him to
see the good things in the universe and how a decaying old flower
suddenly seemed like "the daisiest daisy ever" to him. This doesn't
amount to much more than a "glass half full" philosophy, but it fits
with the Doctor's generally optimistic outlook, and it's intriguing to
hear him allude to his past (especially since he refuses to tell Jo
exactly why he was so despondent at the time). We also see that,
despite his capacity for self-sacrifice, the Doctor has trouble making
the decision to sacrifice Jo's life: it is she, and not the Doctor, who
decides to stop the Master by executing a "time-ram" that could kill
all three of them. And while the Doctor's rivalry with the Master
mostly plays as a bad joke, it takes an interesting turn at the end.
When Kronos prepares to sentence the Master to an eternity of torment,
the Master demonstrates that his inflated sense of pride does have some
limits, committing the ultimate self-humiliation by throwing himself at
the Doctor's feet and begging for forgiveness. The Doctor, of course,
can't help but plead for the Master's freedom to Kronos, reasoning that
even the Master doesn't deserve such a horrible punishment.
These few good moments, however, can't compensate for all the nonsense
we have to sit through, and "The Time Monster" pulls off the curious
feat of somehow being both completely absurd and utterly dull. The
Pertwee era got off to a fantastic start with Season 7, stumbled a bit
in Season 8, and seemed to be making a partial return to form in Season
9. I think that verdict still stands on the basis of the previous four
installments, but Season 9 certainly ends with a resounding thud and
what might be the low point of all the perserved serials to date.
Other notes:
- The scene in which the Master summons various soldiers and vehicles
to attack the UNIT squadron is another one that's bad on numerous
levels at once. It relies on bogus science, it's generally cartoonish,
and it manages to make the Brigadier look like an idiot for accusing
Yates of "hallucinating." I'm not usually a big fan of Yates' backtalk,
but I must admit I chuckled when the Brigadier asks over the radio
about the source of the gunfire and Yates replies, "Another
hallucination, sir."
- On a related note, it's a telling sign that Benton, who turns into a
baby and ends up standing naked in the laboratory when he's restored to
his normal age, receives the kindest treatment of any UNIT character in
"The Time Monster." He has a good moment when he sees through the
Master's impersonation of the Brigadier and designs a ruse to trap him
(though it's partially undermined when he subsequently falls for a
simplistic "look out behind you!" trick).
- I'm kind of surprised that the BBC allowed the whole "TOMTIT" thing
at all, really. I certainly don't think you could say that over and
over again on American network television today, especially in the
post-wardrobe-malfunction era.
Rating: * (out of four)
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