Time Flight

Still reeling from Adric's death, the TARDIS crew are flung right back into the thick of things when they arrive at Heathrow airport just after a concord goes missing. The Doctor suspects that the plane has not crashed so much as flown down a time contour into the past, and upon recreating the same flight with another plane discovers he is right. At the other end of the contour is the Arabian magician Kalid, using his sorcery to brainwash the passengers and crew of the first plane into doing his work for him and break into a sealed chamber in his citadel. The Doctor discovers that Kalid is in fact the Master in disguise and he has plans for harnessing the power of a psychic race known as the Xeraphin, power which will make him invincible.

Now imagine if you will what would happen *today* if a plane vanished off a radar. Heathrow airport would not be the relatively calm place it appears in the show, there would be guards everywhere and George Bush would be telling Tony Blair what to do to deal with the situation, and no amount of name dropping or UNIT credentials would convince anyone to fly another plane on the same route within hours of the first one going off the radar. And a concord of all planes. There can be no confusion about timelines for this one since the concords all got mothballed after they started crashing a few years ago.

The TARDIS's arrival at Heathrow creates just as much trouble as when it arrived at Gatwick in The Faceless Ones; police milling about and irate air traffic controllers going mad. Jay watched it with me and we both had a chuckle at some of the sets used for the internal scenes at Heathrow.... a conference room with a water heating radiator for one. "That's hot," Jay said. Actually, it can be.

I have a lot of "whys" attached to the viewing of this episode. Why did the Master hijack a plane from so far in the future? Why not just use the lumbering Plasmatons (they loked like walking poop with an eyeball) as a workforce? And if he wasn't expecting the Doctor, why bother with the Kalid charade aside from it being a handy plot device to keep his presence a secret until the end of episode two. The melting of his face was pretty interesting, green snot everywhere. The Master turning up every now and again after the Doctor thinks he has seen the last of him is getting tiring already; in the Pertwee years there was none of this "oh he's gone for good" and then "Oh you escaped from ________" a few episodes later. Already we have heard "So he did escape from Traken," and in this one it's "You escaped from Castrovalva,". Yawn. Roger Delgado's Master always got away, that was style. Except for that one time he didn't and got locked up. This one... he's becoming predictable.

Nyssa gets to be all latent-telepath on us this time, talking to the Xeraphin minds and being used by them as a conduit. Until the Master covers her with a special effect that looks like spit. "Hork on Nyssa!" I said. "Someone should," Jay replied. I still find her lack of reactions when she sees the Master to be lacking something. If someone killed my father and took over his body I would not be so calm. Unless she's heavily medicated, Adric's death being the only time we ever saw her really get emotional.

And Tegan. Dear Tegan. She finally gets to be an air hostess, although for British Airways, not Air Australia. And she's instrumental in this one, looking after Nyssa and helping the Doctor.... and she gets left behind at Heathrow in the end. Thanks for nothing, Doctor.

"The Doctor and Nyssa were off to new adventures," as the old Target novels used to say.

NEXT EPISODE : THE LAND OF THE DEAD