19x7. Time-Flight
Writer: Peter Grimwade
Director: Ron Jones
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Synopsis: The TARDIS diverts to Heathrow Airport after
encountering a spacetime anomaly, discovering that the Master has
kidnapped the crew and passengers of a Concorde back to prehistoric
Earth, where he is attempting to use the nucleus of an alien race known
as the Xeraphim to power his TARDIS.
Review: I've long contended that fantasy and science fiction
narratives usually need a set of rules. Since such narratives operate
outside the boundaries of the real world, we need to have some sense of
what exactly can and can't happen if we're meant to understand what's at stake and feel invested in the characters' choices. The
biggest problem with "Time-Flight" is that it doesn't have a clear set
of rules, just a set of vague concepts about the Master's TARDIS and
the unruly collective consciousness of the Xeraphim. Once we arrive in
the prehistoric Earth setting, the dialogue becomes bogged down in
discussions of telepathic manifestations, quantum whatchamacallits, and
temporal thingamajiggies while characters appear, disappear, and
generally jump through random hoops.
Plot
contrivances can be
tolerable if at the service of some interesting character development
or subtext, but characterization is fairly weak here as well. At
one point I thought that we were getting glimpses of the fallible
Doctor that has sometimes surfaced since Davison took on the role, in
that he's unable to keep Professor Hayter from being absorbed by the
Xeraphim and later seems to have given up on freeing the Xeraphim. In
fact he has a trick up his sleeve that involves somehow "intercepting"
the Master's TARDIS and sending it to the Xeraphim's home planet where
the Xeraphim might conceivably escape, but this is all accomplished
through more of the borderline-incomprehensible pseudoscience. Later,
Tegan is left behind at Heathrow in a scene so perfunctory that I
honestly wasn't sure what to make of it. Does the Doctor think she's
decided on her own to stay? Is he just avoiding the airport authorities
and planning to come back for her later? I'm not sure, and certainly
the departure of a companion deserves a better explanation than what we
get here. As for the rest of the characters, only Captain Stapley and
his crew made much of an impression - they're able to wrap their minds
around what's happening and improvise ways to disrupt the Master's
plans. Professor Hayter rarely strikes a note other than aloof
arrogance, and the Master himself spends the first two episodes in
disguise as some sort of sorcerer and then abruptly drops the act, with
no real reason supplied for why he gave up on it or why he was doing it
in the first place.
"Time
Flight" is not entirely without its merits. It does address the crew's
lingering grief over Adric's death, with the Doctor insisting that he
will not use time travel to undo what has happened even as he joins
Tegan and Nyssa in mourning their lost companion. And the first episode
carries some nostalgic value in showing the Doctor working with the
British authorities to solve a problem, even invoking his UNIT
credentials to get himself out of trouble. Arguably the most
interesting as a concept is the Xeraphim's collective intelligence,
which isn't actually their natural state but rather the form in which
they were forced to preserve themselves. It is possible for individual
personalities to emerge from the collective, and at the same time, the
Master is able to disrupt the balance between Xeraphim of different
moral orientations. Unfortunately, this is only briefly explored, and
in general the script is more occupied with arbitrary plot machinations
than with characters, ideas, or even any effective suspense.
Rating: ** (out of four)
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