Who Review: Time-Flight
Something strange is going on at Heathrow airport. It seems one of their Concorde’s has gone missing, disappearing from radar just as it was coming in to land. Meanwhile, on board the TARDIS, the Doctor offers to take his companions back to the Great Exhibition as way to help them move on from the loss of Adric. But something sends the TARDIS off course and they end up inside one of the terminals at Heathrow. When security comes to investigate, the Doctor appeals to UNIT, and the trio are taken to the airport authorities who have been instructed by UNIT to get the Doctor’s help to find their missing aircraft. The Doctor suspects some kind of temporal anomaly, which would explain why the TARDIS was affected. His solution is fly another Concorde along the same flight path as the previous one, and use the TARDIS on board to track where, and when, the flight is going. As the Doctor predicted, they disappear from radar, but they seem to land back at Heathrow. But what they see is an illusion. The truth is that they have traveled back in time some 140 million years. Their perception is being manipulated by a conjurer named Kalid, who is not at all what he appears to be, and who will go to extreme lengths to achieve his true intentions…
SPOILER ALERT!! My comments may (and likely will) contain spoilers for those that haven’t seen this serial. If you want to stay spoiler-free, please watch the story before you continue reading!
“Time-Flight” follows directly on from the events of the previous story, “Earthshock,” most notably, the death of companion Adric. Still in shock, the Doctor’s suggestion of a trip to the Great Exhibition seems a little heartless. After all, Tegan and Nyssa are still grieving the loss of their friend. It would be consistent of the Doctor’s character to be insensitive to human grieving since he’s not human. But one of the Fifth Doctor’s personality traits is a greater sensitivity to suffering than his previous incarnation, so it is somewhat out-of-character. Interestingly, when Tegan tells the Doctor to travel back in time and rescue Adric, the Doctor insists that he can’t change what’s happened, and they should never ask him to do something like that again. It appears the concept of a “fixed point in time” that can’t be changed existed in the Classic Series! It’s all moot anyway, since the crew wind up in Heathrow, and are soon caught up in the mystery of the missing Concorde.
With the help of Captain Stapely and the second Concorde crew, the Doctor is able to detect where and when the aircraft has traveled. When they load the TARDIS horizontally into the Concorde’s cargo hold, the Doctor flips a switch on the console so the TARDIS interior is verticle. Nyssa says she wishes they’d known about that on Castrovalva–one of a number of references to previous stories in this episode.
Peter Davison, who played the Fifth Doctor, considered “Time-Flight” a good story let down by bad effects. In all honesty, I think that’s generous. It’s not a terrible story, but it lacks the dramatic scale of previous adventures. It turns out that Kalid is actually the Master, who escaped from Castrovalva but at the cost of his TARDIS which suffered damage along the way. He is now stranded on prehistoric Earth, getting there around the same time as the Xeraphin. The Xeraphin had attempted to escape a battle situation and ended up crashing on Earth. The Master’s arrival caused the ethereal and powerful Xeraphin to split between good and evil, the evil side aligning with the Master, the good side helping the Doctor. The Master wants to use the power of the Xeraphin to get his TARDIS going again so he can escape. This power would be dangerous in the hands of the Master, so the Doctor must try to stop him.
While the Xeraphin do engage with the plot, ultimately the story is all about the Master trying to escape prehistoric Earth. He’s not trying to take over the world, or the universe–he just wants to get away. Granted, getting away with a powerful energy source in his TARDIS is a potential recipe for disaster, but I don’t get the feeling the Master’s that concerned. For him, the Xeraphin power (which is, actually, a gestalt of all the Xeraphin) is simply a means to getting his TARDIS away from Earth. When the Doctor proclaims, “The Master has defeated me,” at the episode three cliffhanger, I’m not convinced: the Doctor never gives up that easily. And exactly how did the Master “defeat” the Doctor? He didn’t try to kill the Doctor; the Doctor just failed to stop the Master at that point in the story.
The special effects are not brilliant. At best they are passable, but never outstanding. And while the appearances of Adric, the Melkur from “The Keeper of Traken” (Nyssa’s first story), and a Terileptil from “The Visitation” are a nice surprise, I can’t help feeling they’re a bit contrived. It’s the last story in the season, so they’re reminding us of past story elements. But Nyssa and Tegan aren’t taken in by these psychological manifestations, which just underscores the fact that they’re there more for the audience than the story.
The best cliffhanger is at the end of episode four where the Doctor and Nyssa accidentally leave Tegan behind at Heathrow. To those watching at the time, it looks like this is Tegan’s last story, which would be unusual since there was no announcement that Janet Fielding was leaving the show. You can be sure people tuned in for season twenty to find out if Tegan is coming back.
I think the real winners of this story are the British Airways pilots. They come across as level-headed, resourceful, and able to quickly adapt to strange concepts and evolving situations. No wonder Heathrow was so willing to let the BBC film there!
To sum up, I think “Time-Flight” is for the die-hard Whovian. Unless you have to know what happened to the Master, there’s nothing here for the casual viewer. Pretend the season ended with “Earthshock” and move on.
