From Newsgroup: rec.arts.drwho.moderated   
   From Address: jphalt@aol.com   
   Subject: Re: jphalt's Doctor Who reviews   
      
   TIME-FLIGHT   
      
   4 episodes. Approx. 97 minutes. Written by: Peter Grimwade. Directed   
   by: Ron Jones. Produced by: John Nathan Turner.   
      
      
   THE PLOT   
      
   The Doctor is trying to take Tegan and Nyssa to the Great Exhibition   
   of 1851, to take their minds off Adric's death. But the TARDIS   
   materializes at Heathrow Airport, 1982 - the very place the Doctor had   
   been trying to reach throughout the first half of the season. They   
   arrive to learn that a Concorde flight has vanished into thin air. The   
   Doctor is enlisted thanks to his UNIT credentials, and he quickly   
   determines that the missing airplane vanished down a time contour.   
      
   He insists on recreating the conditions of the flight, using another   
   Concorde to follow the first one's path. He has his TARDIS loaded onto   
   the plane, and he and his companions monitor the flight from inside.   
   The console readings tell him what he already suspected: They have   
   been taken back in time, into the Jurassic era. But what waits for   
   them isn't dinosaurs, but rather Khalid, an ancient wizard who has   
   used what appears to be magic to transform the first plane's crew and   
   passengers into a slave labor force.   
      
   The Doctor confronts Khalid and appears to defeat him. But he has   
   fallen into a trap. Khalid is actually the Doctor's old enemy, The   
   Master (Anthony Ainley). And the Doctor has just become ensnared in   
   his most insanely convoluted plan ever!   
      
      
   CHARACTERS   
      
   The Doctor: I'll give Peter Davison credit for trying. The story opens   
   with the Doctor, Nyssa, and Tegan mourning for Adric - then deciding   
   to just get over it and make a trip to the Great Exhibition to cheer   
   themselves up. As far as character writing goes, it's down there with   
   a chipper Barbara telling us that she's completely over her   
   experiences with the Aztecs in Part One of The Sensorites. The   
   difference is that Davison and his co-stars do their best to play   
   against the ridiculous dialogue. As they start chatting about the   
   Great Exhibition, the actors put a note in their delivery to signal   
   that they're simply going into very hard denial about what just   
   happened and grasping for anything to keep themselves busy. An   
   excellent look at actors trying to overrule bad writing through   
   performance alone, and for that one scene, it just about works.   
      
   Nyssa: Develops psychic intuition for this story - and only for this   
   story, as her psychic abilities are never mentioned again on   
   television (though Big Finish made use of them a few times on audio).   
   Her mind is somehow receptive to the Xeraphin, which allows her to   
   lead Tegan to their inner sanctum. She also takes the lead when with   
   Tegan. She does mention the Master's killing of her father, but then   
   barely reacts to the Master's presence in the story's second half -   
   which is quite a comedown from the fierce, "That face - I hate it!"   
   moment in Castrovalva.   
      
   Tegan: Remains the more emotional of the Doctor's companions. She's   
   the one who pushes the Doctor to violate the laws of time to save   
   Adric. She does seem cowed by his angry response. But when she sees   
   Khalid's illusion of Adric, apparently alive and pleading with her and   
   Nyssa to save him, she is the one who wants to stop. It's the more   
   intellectual Nyssa who recognizes the illusion for what it is and   
   presses on. Left to her own devices, Tegan would have stopped at that   
   moment.   
      
   The Master: This is the story in which Anthony Ainley's reputation as   
   a particularly campy Master begins to take hold. He spends the first   
   two episodes disguised as the evil wizard Khalid... for reasons that   
   completely escape understanding, unless you go on the assumption that   
   the Master just wants to "drezz for the occasion." After revealing   
   himself, the Master proceeds to do very little in the second half. He   
   cackles a lot and threatens various guest characters and extras with   
   his Tissue Compression Eliminator. But mostly he just prances from one   
   set to another, marking time until the Doctor can fool him with the   
   Technobabble swap meet that makes up the, er, "climax" of Episode   
   Four. And yes, the climax of this story does indeed appear to be the   
   Doctor and the Master swapping bits of plastic on a bad studio set.   
      
      
   THOUGHTS   
      
   A rather good season of Doctor Who comes to a dismal end with Peter   
   Grimwade's Time-Flight. Why is it so bad? "I'll explain later."   
      
   No, wait. That was the Doctor, waving away any need to provide a basis   
   for any of the proclamations he makes at any point in the serial.   
   Steven Moffat must have been thinking of Time-Flight when he wrote The   
   Curse of Fatal Death. At least there, "I'll explain later" was meant   
   to be funny. Here, it's just lazy writing, which is employed so often   
   across these four episodes that it practically becomes a catch-phrase.   
      
   Really, for a story that's notorious for poor production values, it's   
   startling how much of Time-Flight's failure comes down to bad writing.   
   The story is utterly nonsensical, with the Master's plan bordering on   
   incoherence. The guest characters are flatly written, with the un-   
   hypnotized characters behaving in just as artificial a fashion as the   
   hpynotized ones! I find it hilarious, for example, that Professor   
   Hayter (Nigel Stock) spends Episode Two being an irritating boor whom   
   the Doctor barely tolerates... only for the Doctor to turn around and   
   choose him as his pseudo-companion near the start of Episode Three!   
   Sure, the story looks cheap. But the real problem is that the script   
   doesn't even pretend to hold together.   
      
   Too bad, because it all starts out fairly well. The first two episodes   
   are absorbing. Cheap-looking, to be sure, but also well-paced and   
   moderately intriguing. Had this been a 2-parter, with Khalid simply   
   being who he pretended to be and his initial "defeat" being genuine,   
   then this would have been a perfectly acceptable bit of fluff.   
      
   Unfortunately, once it truly becomes a Master story, what had been   
   entertaining nonsense transforms into abject stupidity. The Xeraphim   
   are introduced midway through Episode Three, with their entire   
   backstory delivered in a mind-numbing infodump. Meanwhile, the episode   
   pads out its running time as the Master tromps in and out of the   
   Doctor's TARDIS while the Concorde flight crew watches through a   
   doorway. So half of the episode could be summed up as, "Nothing   
   happens," and the other half consists of exposition so dense and   
   clunkily delivered that it practically becomes white noise. Episode   
   Four is even worse, alternately rushed and padded. As if to add insult   
   to injury, the story is resolved and the Master defeated... via some   
   trickery the Doctor performed offscreen!   
      
   The good news is that Peter Grimwade would be recommissioned for   
   stories in Seasons 20 and 21, and would do a much better job of   
   writing something watchable in those stories. Based on this debut   
   offering, I'd have probably advised him to stick with directing.   
      
      
   Rating: 2/10.   
      
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