Doctor Who: Time-flight (1982)
Reviewed by: FrillyShirtCyberman
The gist of it:
The Doc decides to cheer Tegan and Nyssa up after Adric gets himself whacked by the Cybermen driving under the influence. They end up in Heathrow (finally!! kick Tegan off, Mack Daddy Davo!) and walk around ’til the police gets them. After pulling rank with the airport security guys (UNIT, baby, UNIT), The Davo and his bints are told that the Concorde disappeared (damn valet parking!).
“They are cheap as chips”, thought the delusional Timelord…until he saw the bill.
Since any collateral damage is paid by the Brigadier’s chequebook, The Doc suggests to get another Concorde airborne and do a bit of investigating aboot. The Concorde disappears too, with Tardis and all and reappears in the past. Waaaaay back in the past. So much, that Tegan grows magic hair curlers. The horror!!
“Oh my God! We are trapped in a 60’s serial!”
There, an old dude in a fat suit (Mike Myers or Eddie Murphy, take yer pick) is doin’ some hocus pocus chanting (or singing along Britney Spears, can’t remember). His called Kalid and does bad ass stuff, like singing mistah luvva luvva, bombaaaSTIC to summon soap sud monsters and watch his sphere o’ death (TM)
“What’s that? Fat bastard? Norbit? I don’t remember!”
Before you can say “Langoliers”, The Doc, his bints and the three pilots (one looks like Magnum!) start going all Scooby Doo on us. Nyssa develops telepathy after being bitten by an insect called Badplotus Devisus. The Dude in the Fat Suit sends some grey jello monsters to attack but they survive. After wandering through the papier mache sets (and doing a great homage to Patrick Troughton’s coin flip in “The Invasion”), they finally confront The Dude, who turns out to be the Master.
“Ok, which of you cnuts said Delgado was better?”
Planning to use the souls of an extinct alien race to power off his Tardis. Davo hits him with a copy of the Dianetics book and races to defuse the situation. The Master recovers and gets all the passengers from the flight crammed together into his Tardis, which has better leg room than most American Airlines flights.
Yup, more leg space than most airlines.
The Doc and co are left to die, but Pilot Magnum sabotaged the Masters Tardis and his two other friend pilots switched some circuits that the Master nicked, so now he’s trapped too in this time zone. In a homage to 80’s airline hostage crisis, The Davo goes Interpol and exchanges the passengers for some circuits of goobledygooks. The Davo helps the Concorde lift off, pushing it easily like it was a Corgi model.
No, I don’t have a Ferrari or a manservant called “Higgins”. Why do you ask?
They go back into Heathrow (and without losing luggage, proving that this story is fantasy). The Master ends up in Hull with the rest of the alien souls. Tegan is thankfully left behind.
Rant:
I knew before hand the baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad rep this story had, but still watched it with an open mind. I had vague memories of it, remembering only the Heathrow bits since I remembered the airport from my trip with my mum and aunt in early 1990 (i saw this story for the first time in 1991).
It does have some very cheap sets (caves) and badly designed monsters (the grey pudding/custard/soap bubbles plasmabaddies!!). I feel it tried to cover way to many things without answering them: Nyssa’s telepathic? Why take the concorde, which doesn’t sit as many passengers as other planes? Heck, steal a mexican bus, dude, you’ll keep your Plasmatons fed forever!
The Master is riddled with terrible plans in the 80’s.
Davo does the best he can with his part, which I dug. The Master wasn’t really necessary, but I prefer Ainley’s acting in this one over Castrovalva, just to compare two stories from the same season. The best bits are the ones in the airport and the film inserts from the Concorde, which don’t amount to much, really. The three pilots from the Concorde are bit of a weird act. They start as disbelieving dudes, but soon become the tech-savvy Moe, Curly and Larry. One of them even pilots the Tardis!
Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. It’s the brigadier!
It isn’t a really terrible story per se, but somethings are unexplained. Ok, so Nyssa is more perceptible to ESP than others, it’s inferred but not acknowledged. The production does falter a lot around, with clever cost-cutting moves like using mirrors with landscape painted on used. Sometimes to terrible results, other to okay-ish ones. I’m a firm believer that if you can’t do an effect, don’t show it, just let them imagine it. Then again, I read a lot of books and have a fairly active imagination. What the heck do I know about tv?
Peter Davison was caught nicking BBC supplies…again!
All in all, I don’t rate it as the worst Peter Davison story. It just feels a bit crammed in some parts, too spread in others. The actors do a decent job, so no problem on that aspect!
It was good to lose Tegan. Too bad she comes back next year!
Go for some duty free booze, will ya? (*thinking* yeah, be gone, so I’ll have Mack Daddy Davo for me!!)
Frillyrating:
