PopSyndicate.com

“So you escaped from Castrovalva. I should have guessed.”

As you might be able to tell from my reviews, I’m a big fan of Peter Davison’s Doctor, and many of the stories from his era of Doctor Who. To my mind, many of them are brilliant tales, awash with big, high-concept ideas (“Enlightenment,” “Frontios”) and although a couple have some tepid middles (“Four to Doomsday,” “Terminus”), I can usually find something to enjoy and focus on in each and every one. I’d rather watch a slightly dull Peter Davison tale than many of the earlier, overlong Jon Pertwee entries, or even some of the decent mid-to-late ‘80s affairs. There are really only two exceptions to this rule. One of them is “Warriors of the Deep,” a story so boring and misguided it makes the atrocious monsters the “entertaining” aspect.

Guess which story is the other.

Most of season 19 seems to have been geared, by accident or design, to serve as a sort of Doctor Who‘s Greatest Hits, taking familiar styles of stories and reinventing them for the ‘80s. The intent was probably to make viewers feel more comfortable after a solid year of change, from a new theme tune arrangement to the replacement of fan favorite Tom Baker with Peter Davison. As a result, “Four to Doomsday” is the William Hartnell-style space ark story; “The Visitation” epitomizes the mid-to-late-‘70s “pseudo-historical”; “Black Orchid” harkens back to the ‘60s history stories; “Earthshock” is an action-adventure take on the base-under-siege thriller; and “Time-Flight”...ah, yes. “Time-Flight” is the crap one.

When the TARDIS accidentally lands at Heathrow Airport in 1982, the Doctor’s UNIT affiliation is enough to pull him into the mystery of a missing Concorde jet (a nice little continuity conceit I’m surprised hasn’t been used more often). With the assistance of another Concorde with full crew, the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan follow the path of the earlier plane into a “time contour”...and arrive 140 million years in Earth’s past. There, they discover a world of vast psychokinetic illusions, provided by the sorcerer, Kalid, who needs the passengers of Concorde as a slave force to break into an ancient chamber - so he can harness the power of the dormant Xeraphin race for his own use.

Admittedly, the first episode isn’t too bad. Back in 1967, “The Faceless Ones” played on the fascination of the British public with the expansive Gatwick airport (where that story was filmed), and there’s something similar going on here; probably the best portions of the story, dated though they may be, take place in and around Heathrow. The difference is that viewers of the ‘80s don’t seen an airport as a big, alien expanse the way they did 20 years earlier. It’s Concorde that functions as the gateway into the great unknown, instead, and that’s fine - even clever - until you realize that the only thing you can actually do with Concorde is…well…go somewhere. And with just a single day of shooting available on Concorde itself, it doesn’t take a genius to realize the now-defunct aircraft is little more than a souped-up plot device.

To be honest, “Time Flight” is never really boring in the sense of “Warriors of the Deep” or even, if you’re not feeling generous, “Four to Doomsday.” It moves along at a brisk pace and there are lots of interesting, high-concept things going on here. Sadly, only one or two such ideas actually work. The idea of a world of hallucinations and mental projections is great, but it’s impossible to get across something of that scale on Doctor Who. Similarly, Kalid, the ostensibly “Eastern” sorcerer, is a makeup nightmare designed to hide the true villain, managing to be unconvincing, repellent, and incredibly racially insensitive all in one fell swoop. (Never mind the fact that the disguise doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.) It doesn’t help that this is the end of the season, either - nearly every special effect reveals the dregs of the budget.

What remains that’s good? The interesting juxtaposition of the mundane world (Heathrow Airport) against the alien, and the individual mind against the collective; it’s an old sci-fi trope, but never more thoroughly considered in Doctor Who than here.  Some of the humor manages to get across, as well, with scenes of mentally-controlled Concorde passengers marching in and out of the villain’s lair as if they’re boarding a plane. Unfortunately it’s not really enough to make up for a more-than-usual amount of absolute nonsense, and a high level of technical gobbledygook to boot. With a lot of time and effort, and probably more money, the scripts for “Time-Flight” could have been made into some really literate science-fiction. As it is, it’s an abject failure - and a confusing abject failure at that.

Doctor Who: Time-Flight flies in on DVD from 2entertain and BBC Video (through Warner). The video quality is typically high, very clean and bright, with good strong colors; it’s obvious that the original location films were still available to get the most from the outdoor scenes. The original mono soundtrack is provided, along with optional English subtitles for the story and all of the video featurettes.

The information subtitle track, composed by Martin Wiggins, will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about “Time-Flight,” and then a little bit more. It’s a very cohesive track, with notes on writer Peter Grimwade’s work on Doctor Who, his development of the script, the complications of filming Concorde, and the horrific revelation that a version of this story was originally intended as Tom Baker’s swansong (euugh!). There’s even a few wicked little moments of humor. It won’t save the story, of course, but activating this track certainly helped me to better enjoy my viewing.

The audio commentary for this story features actors Peter Davison, Sarah Sutton and Janet Fielding, accompanied by script editor Eric Saward. As you might guess from other Davison-era tracks, this is very, very funny, with just enough restraint for an occasional compliment. Saward seems to be in a good mood here, and unlike the later “Warriors of the Deep,” he gets into the spirit of things very quickly. Davison also has some interesting things to say about the story - even going so far as to warn Janet Fielding against calling the story “crap” (recalling a famous 1990s interview he gave) - and there is a general aura of respect from all four toward late writer Peter Grimwade. A good track, well paired with the one for “Arc of Infinity.”

In Britain, Doctor Who: Time-Flight is considered a budget “standard” release, paired with a special edition of the next story, Doctor Who: Arc of Infinity. So while it looks like this disc is packed with featurettes, there’s really only one that was made specifically for the release, and that’s Mouth on Legs (14 mins.): Tegan actress Janet Fielding’s first (and only, she says!) on-camera interview. It’s actually very funny and frank, without being at all unpleasant; it seems like Fielding has gotten over the snippy bad humor she displayed in her very few first commentaries and is now having a bit of fun reliving her time on the show. There is quite a bit of discussion about Tegan’s various styles (of course!), including the immortal comment on producer John Nathan-Turner: “How could you trust a man whose aesthetic included the Hawaiian shirt?” Good stuff; just don’t ask her to hit you over the head with a Mara stick…

Deleted Scenes (4 mins.) are usually more in the way of extended scenes, taken largely from timecoded VHS. Generally, the ends of takes have been left in, with actors breaking out of character (and Peter Davison’s wry observation, “My God, that was melodrama”).

Jurassic Larks (20 mins.) presents edited highlights from the behind-the-scenes studio recordings, with production subtitles to put the footage in context and narrate the (limited) action. Having seen the 90-minute studio tape that circulated fandom, I can assure you the most interesting bits have been cherry-picked here. However, I do recommend you run this one with English subtitles on as well, so you can tell what the cast and crew are muttering. Outtakes (14 mins.) come from the same source; in fact, one outtake is weirdly repeated from the previous featurette. Together, these make for an impressive collection of studio footage…interesting stuff, for sure, but probably just about as much as you’d ever want to watch for one story.

The Peter Grimwade Interview (4 mins.) comes from a 1987 recording originally made for the Myth Makers series of fan-made interview tapes. Grimwade certainly had the courage of his convictions, although I’m not sure I agree that pushing Doctor Who to its limits is necessarily a good idea. However, it’s always neat to hear thoughts and opinions from cast and crew who, sadly, died before the recent fandom boom, and this is no exception. Hopefully there is more material that could be used on other releases Grimwade wrote or directed.

Photo Gallery (8 mins.) is a selection of publicity photographs, often geared around Concorde, set to a suite of the story’s incidental music. At the end, a small selection of design department pictures have also been included.

Doctor Who Annual and Radio Times Listings are meant for fans with a DVD-Rom drive; you can access PDF versions of the full 1983 Doctor Who annual, filled with stories and comics for kids (including another airplane adventure!), and the billings for “Time-Flight” as featured in Radio Times, Britain’s equivalent to TV Guide.

Finally, The Coming Soon Trailer (1 min.) previews the release of Doctor Who: The Time Warrior on DVD, as if to say, “You should have waited and spent your money on this one. Doesn’t it look better?” And it is, too.

The disc opens with a trailer for Doctor Who: The Complete Second Season on DVD.

Doctor Who: Time-Flight is an odd one. At the concept level, the story is sound, but the execution is almost bewildering to behold. I’ve yet to run in to anyone who genuinely admits to liking this story. Still, most of the extras are pretty good, if not spectacular (the commentary and Janet Fielding’s interview being the main draws here), though most are composed from archive material. The end result is…well, something of a curate’s egg. I certainly would not pay the SRP of $24.98 for this, but if you can find it really cheap and are looking to have a complete collection of Davison-era Doctor Who, you’ll certainly find at least a few things about it to enjoy. 

2