What's Wrong With... Time-Flight

It would probably be quicker and easier if I actually ran though "What's Right With..." for this story...

You do not arrange for a story such as this to be made by a relatively new director, at the end of a season when the money has run out, right after you've just brought back a hugely popular old monster not seen for seven years, and killed off a companion.

Cheap - and it looks like it - and anti-climactic.

To be honest, even had this story been made at the start of a season, it would have struggled. 

We have the basic concept of not one but two Concorde supersonic airliners transported back to prehistoric Earth. You are being allowed to shoot the actual aircraft at Heathrow Airport - but everything else, including the prehistoric landscape, is going to have to be done in studio.

One of the issues is that Time-Flight was written by a director (Peter Grimwade) who obviously worked in visual imagery terms. The trouble was, his imagination was far more suited to a multi-million pound movie than a relatively cheap BBC drama series.

Kalid...

If Peter Grimwade was aware that the running arc of the season was the Doctor trying to get Tegan to Heathrow, and the Master needed TARDIS components to fix his own ship, then it would have made sense for him to have deliberately set up the time contour to the Heathrow flight path, and donned a disguise for when the Doctor fell into it.

But the story doesn't say that. 

We are left wondering why the Master really needs the Concorde passengers and crew (does he really need all that physical labour?), and why he has disguised himself as a weird magician figure. The latter simply makes no sense as it stands.

Is it a physical disguise, or something else? He throws it off as if it is a disguise - but what is it with all the green slime then?

He wants to gain the knowledge of the Xeraphin. That's a race who managed to get themselves almost wiped out in cross-fire - not even their own war - and then they crash-land on a lifeless planet, and then they allow themselves to become enslaved by a crazy disguise-fetishist. Hardly a race you might actually learn anything from.

The Doctor finds some shrunken Xerpahin - obviously killed by the Master. But how did he manage that before he's broken into their sarcophagus?

The use of the time contour is problematic. It relies on an aircraft with lots of people on board just happening to stumble across it. What if it had gone to a more remote bit of airspace, hardly used by larger 'planes? And why does it only ensnare Concordes? Why no Jumbo Jets or small private 'planes?

Nyssa comments on how cold it is - alerting the Doctor that what looks like Heathrow might not be. But we've just seen snow on the ground at the real one...

How exactly did the crew and passengers of two Concordes get in and out of the aircraft if the airport is only an illusion. No steps. And how did the TARDIS get out of the cargo hold without lifting gear? Did the hypnotised passengers form some sort of human pyramid? You can mess with someone's mid with hypnosis and make them think they're Superman, but you can't actually make them physically stronger.

The wheel unit we see is far too small for a real Concorde.

Why does the Doctor run away so quickly at the end? He may have lost one of the Concordes, but he's brought the one back with all the rich, influential passengers, plus both flight crews. The airport authorities know who he works for and that he has top security clearance - so why the panic?

Why does Tegan wander off and act like she's never seen the inside of an airport before? She flew to the UK from Australia, and wouldn't she have trained at one?

If you're going to end a season on a cliff-hanger, best not to advertise the fact that Janet Fielding will be back next year anyway.

And a Time Lord really ought to know the difference between an era and an epoch.

What's Wrong With... Earthshock

The cave with the bomb seems to be in the middle of nowhere, so what geographical relation has it to the forthcoming conference?

Why place the device somewhere accessible, where it might be found and deactivated? Why not simply stick it in a hole in the ground and bury it, or drop it in the ocean?

If it's a planet-destroying bomb, it could have been placed thousands of miles away where there would be less likelihood of security searches.

The conference surely includes lots of different aliens, so why do the troopers have a scanner that can only pick up mammalian lifeforms? It's a conference to establish an alliance against Cybermen, so shouldn't they at least be able to pick them up on their equipment?

What if an enemy wanted to use robots? Oh look - they have used robots.

The sentinels actually draw attention to the bomb, sort of defeating the whole subterfuge thing.

The Cybermen assume that their plans are fool-proof, but surely they understand the concept of "contingency". They are relying entirely on a single bomb, which has already been disturbed by cavers, so why didn't they think of having a second, or even third, device elsewhere.

The fact that they have placed sentinels shows that they expect potential tampering.

After all, in Revenge of the Cybermen they knew that one bomb would be enough to destroy Voga, but still had three of them carried into the heart of the asteroid.

They are also quick enough at coming up with a 'Plan B' when the bomb is deactivated. Why not have 'Plan B' in place from the start?

Radio signals travel at 186,410 miles per second in space - so why does it take a whole minute for the Cyber-signal to get from the freighter to the bomb? Just how far out is this vessel?

Why did the Cybermen kill some of the crew if they wanted to keep a low profile of the freighter? They can't all have stumbled into their secret lair.

Scott is a member of Earth's security forces - so why did the Doctor not call on him the minute he and Adric were captured. Why leave him in the TARDIS in the first place?

The Doctor is a suspected murderer, yet Briggs allows him and Adric to remain on the bridge, unsecured. She and Berger simply go about their business with their backs to the pair of potential killers.

It isn't made very clear why the Cyber-Leader leaves a significant number of his troops on the crashing freighter - nor why they suddenly activate remotely. Where do they go to? Only a single damaged Cyberman makes it to the bridge to stop Adric's meddling.

How do the first lot of Cybermen get off the ship? The Leader takes to the TARDIS, but where does his army go? How many escape pods does this sparsely-crewed freighter need? It is logical that the crew might try to escape, so why leave them a pod anyway?

Why did the Cybermen capture Tegan, when they've been killing everyone else? Why, in general, do monsters always seem to know which members of the cast are the regulars?

This one generated heated debate in the pages of DWM: how can the Cybermen have footage from Revenge of the Cybermen when it takes place far in their future? How can they have footage from The Tenth Planet when not only did every Cyberman perish, but so did their entire planet? Uploaded to some computer archive just doesn't wash.

Stuff everyone notices:

One of the troopers turns to look back, and fails to spot the obvious moving shadow of an android on the cavern wall, despite staring right at it.

A couple of Cybermen seem to be having a very casual chat in one scene.

A member of the production team can be seen lurking under a stairway, as spotted by Peter Davison when watching the DVD with the contrast turned up.

A female trooper is grabbed by a Cybermen just as she is about to walk into the TARDIS, yet is seen entering unharmed seconds later.

You can see David Banks' battery pack sliding down his chin, before the clear chin piece suddenly becomes opaque - and earlier his voice modulator picks up Davison's voice briefly.

Earth didn't look like it does today 65,000,000 years ago - and wouldn't have been in the same location in space back then for the freighter to crash into it.

Adric miraculously intuits that the console is about to explode several seconds before it happens. Mr Waterhouse rather spoils the moment.

And can anyone really take seriously the idea of Beryl Reid as a tough space captain?

What's Wrong With... Black Orchid

In interviews, Peter Davison stated that among the stories he hated the most were the ones which he thought were obviously intended for something else and just taken out of a drawer, dusted off, and adapted to Doctor Who. He was clearly thinking of Black Orchid when he said this, and was critical of it in other ways.

Terence Dudley's two-parter is simply a country house whodunnit, in the style of Agatha Christie and many others, which then has the Doctor and companions grafted onto it. It could work equally well with a human protagonist - someone new to the environment arriving and being accused of a crime they didn't do, before helping identify the real culprit.

There are no science fiction trappings other than the regulars and the TARDIS, but we are presented with a monster - which leads to a major problem with the story.

George Cranleigh has been left damaged in both body and mind after being captured and tortured by a native South American tribe.

He's basically crippled and disfigured, and he's presented as a monster. Physical deformity as monstrous. Sometimes you can argue that things were different back then, and such things weren't seen as objectionable. But by the early 1980's people were taking notice about such things. Just a year later Terminus would draw flak over the perceived parallels between the Lazars and leprosy.

As far as plotting goes, there are a few obvious holes (or just a load of plain old nonsense).

We can just about buy no-one at the cricket match knowing what the expected doctor looked like, but surely serious questions would be asked about a stranger, who refuses to give his name, turning up for a weekend stay with three extra people in tow, two of whom are deemed children.

The railway clearly has only the one line, because they filmed at a disused station which is now part of a heritage line.

Bearing in mind what happened to George, how did the flower get back to England?

Not content with being fluent in ancient Aboriginal languages, Tegan knows all about an obscure botanist - despite never having shown any aptitude for the subject.

The Doctor is accused of murder, but for some reason showing the police a space / time machine which is dimensionally transcendental automatically makes everything he says truthful.

He says he didn't kill the servants, so that's alright then.

What made the Doctor think showing the TARDIS would help him in the first place?

There weren't any Police Public Call Boxes in rural areas in 1925. The model upon which the TARDIS is based wasn't designed until 1929, and took time to roll out from the metropolis. Real boxes were concrete, with only the doors made of wood - so the police could hardly have been expected to know how to shift one even if they did know what it was. 

The Doctor warns everyone that George will kill Nyssa when he finds out he has the wrong girl - then tells George he has the wrong girl...

JNT's insistence on the uniform look for the Doctor and companions leads to the ludicrous sight of the them attending a funeral dressed like wholly inappropriate outfits. 

They have access to the TARDIS. Couldn't they have changed into something black? The Doctor isn't even wearing a black armband. Really quite offensive to the family - even of they did try to frame him for murder.

Talking of which, we know Madge is best friends with the local police bigwig, but is there no criminal comeback on the Cranleighs for their efforts to protect a killer and frame an innocent man?

What's Wrong With... The Visitation

Just a few things...

The one everyone spots is the layout of the buried capsule. From the exterior, it is clear that most of it is under the ground, and yet the escape hatch near the nose opens out onto ground level. The floor should be tilted a lot more as well.

We also have the problem of lots of alien tech left lying around - the capsule as well as the cellar laboratory set up by the Terileptil. The Doctor later worries about a man-made Concorde beneath Heathrow, but this extra-terrestrial equipment will only have been around for a few hundred years.

And the TARDIS crew have the cheek to remark that the tiny power pack retained by Mace might cause future archaeologists a problem...

The aliens are escapees from a prison planet - so where did the android come from? We know it belongs to them as the Doctor talks about it in relation to their aesthetic sensibilities. If built from items on the escape craft, then that's one very well-equipped lifeboat.

They disguise it as the Grim Reaper - but surely it's frightening enough for the local primitives that they don't need to do this.

Despite having built-in armaments, it does a lot of simply standing about and letting people easily run round it to escape - or shake it to bits.

The Terileptil destroys the sonic screwdriver - yet locked the Doctor up with it in the first place rather than search him first. And it leaves him with a power pack.

We have a particularly bad example of the Bond villain habit of leaving the hero to perish in an overly complicated manner, rather than just shoot him.

The Doctor knows that they have arrived at the site of what will one day be Heathrow Airport, but the Doctor has to ask Mace what the nearest population centre is.

The first sizeable town that would have come to his mind would surely be Windsor, rather than London.

As the name suggests, Heathrow was heathland, not covered in forest, in the 17th Century.

Why does the Doctor use an ancient hand-drawn map of London, which isn't topographically accurate, to pin down the location of the Terileptil base?

What's Wrong With... Kinda

For several years the authorship of this story was questioned by some sections of fandom. In the pre-internet era, little was known about Christopher Bailey. Rumours abounded that the writer was a pseudonym for someone well known who did not wish to be associated with the series. This ranged from playwright Tom Stoppard to pop queen Kate Bush.

Bailey employs a lot of imagery and concepts from Christianity and Buddhism, some of which led to confusion with many viewers. VHS recorders were becoming cheaper and therefore more accessible by the time Season 19 arrived, but many households still did not have them - so there was no opportunity to wind back and review scenes. 

It is doubtful any significant proportion of viewers had studied Buddhism - so the names of the characters in the black void, and what they represented, would have been totally meaningless to the audience.

Quite who these people are is still open to debate. Are they the missing crewmembers? If not, what did happen to them and why are they never mentioned again?

Or are they supposed to be representations of the Doctor, Adric and Nyssa, with the strange object beside them representing the TARDIS?

This is the most common assumption. Two of them are playing chess after all, as we saw Tegan's friends playing draughts earlier.

The painted studio floor is all too obvious for the forests of Deva Loka - and we actually see that some of the vegetation grows in plant pots.

The studio is over-lit - the curse of the programme for much of its classic era - so any chance of engendering mood and atmosphere is lost. We don't even have any sequences set at night.

The Kinda know that the dreaming of an unshared mind can allow the Mara to re-enter this world, so why do they allow the glade of the wind chimes to still exist? Shouldn't it have been dismantled - or at the very least guarded in some way? At one point we actually see some of the tribe come across the sleeping Tegan, but they just look at her for a bit then wander away. If this poses such a danger, why not wake her up?

By failing to take any action they allow this whole chain of events to take place. If it's all to do with fate and "the wheel of time" - so predestined to happen - this isn't made clear.

Was showing a lot of 1980's alarm clocks really the best way to represent the "wheel of time" concept on screen?

Deva Loka is known to the colonial force as S14 - i.e. the 14th planet explored by Commander Sanders. As with the various bosses of bases-under-siege in the Troughton era, we have to wonder how he managed to achieve his position or to retain it.

Adric mentions that the malfunctioning Total Survival Suit might be responsible for the missing crew members. Sanders agrees - and then sets off alone into the jungle in it. No thought of getting it checked out.

As with Sanders' suitability to hold a senior role in the party, so with Hindle. Apparently some background of how he came to have his mental health issues was included in the script, but dropped for the actual programme. A TV show can only be judged by what actually appears on screen.

As with Ghost Light yet to come, if it has to be explained in an interview after the event then there's been a pretty serious problem with the script-editing. (Christopher Bidmead's decision to quit after one season did lead to this being a bit chaotic, script-wise, behind the scenes, with the involvement of three different script editors on some stories of Season 19 - Bidmead, Anthony Root and Eric Saward).

The final episode underran, necessitating Eric Saward devising an additional scene which was recorded during the making of Earthshock. It's just Tegan and Adric arguing in the base airlock.

Keep an eye on Adrian Mills when Aris' wooden framework is attacked by the real TSS. He's clearly worried about the fact that the fire hasn't quite gone out.

The Mara would have worked a lot better as an unseen force for evil, manifesting only through its possession of others. The decision to have it materialise as a huge, pink, plastic-looking snake is an obvious error of judgement. Preferably it should never have been seen at all, but if it had to be included then something with the look and colouring of a real snake would have been (slightly) better.

The climax is all about evil being unable to face itself - but the snake is never seen to be at the same level of the mirrors. It's looking right over everyone's head, and if it had only shrunk itself it could have escaped through one of the many gaps in the mirrors.

As a psychic force, capable of possessing people, why did it take on this giant snake form in the first place?

What's Wrong With... Four To Doomsday

If you go back and read the letters pages of Doctor Who Monthly, as it was at the time, then you'll know that problems began with this story's title. Several people wrote in to ask what it referred to. 

Of course, it can be seen in two different ways simultaneously - it's four days until Monarch's ship arrives at Earth, and he plans to wipe out all organic life there; and it can also refer to the fact that there are four occupants in the TARDIS, and they are also headed towards potential doom should Monarch succeed.

Behind the scenes, this was Peter Davison's first production as Doctor - and you can tell he hasn't quite got to grips with how he intends to play the part.

As for the story...

The timescale for Monarch's visits to Earth don't tie up. It's stated that each visit sees his vessel doubling its speed, but the human civilisations represented don't mirror this fact. The key dates - derived from Bigon's dialogue - would be 35500 BC, 15500 BC, 5500 BC, and 500 BC approx. The Aboriginals might fit with the first date, and the Athenians with the last, but the Mayans and Chinese don't fit with either of the middle dates.

One of the reasons for the length of journey is supposed to be down to the Urbankans not yet mastering faster-than-light travel. And yet the series is filled with less technologically advanced races who appear to have such propulsion.

The Doctor claims that the TARDIS has only missed Earth by a short margin, but if Monarch's ship is travelling as fast as claimed then four days out would place it still a very long distance from the planet.

Why does he keep going backwards and forwards anyway? He has no interest in the human race - he's going to wipe it out - and only wants the natural resources. Why not simply take these on an earlier visit when there isn't going to be the technology (weaponry in particular) which might pose a threat to him?

Indeed, the Moon would hold most of what he is after on Earth. He is primarily after silicon, which he should have been able to get elsewhere a lot quicker and easier.

The androids go crazy when they indulge in any sort of organised activity. So how can they dance?

Monarch has no interest in the cultures of Earth, so why have the recreationals in the first place? What is the point of providing entertainment to robots?

(And on screen, these recreationals are boring and repetitive. A nice idea, which then gets used as padding).

Why does the Chinese dragon suit - product of an ancient Imperial era - have the name of a London kung-fu club printed inside it?

How can Tegan possibly know an Aboriginal language that's tens of thousands of years old? It can't be the TARDIS translation system in action - otherwise everyone would be able to understand them.

(So why can't it translate?).

If everyone on board is an android, where did all the food come from? We later discover that Monarch is still partially organic, but surely he doesn't need as much food as this.

Also, why do his ministers and the intelligent android leaders not twig that he can't be fully robotic (there's oxygen as well as food laid on the ship) and so see through his hypocrisy?

And why have these ethnic leaders on board in the first place? All Monarch needs are robotic drones to do the work.

The script has Adric claiming to know things about the Doctor that we haven't ever witnessed - the writer seeming to think they have travelled together a lot more than they actually had. If this really was the case - with various unseen adventures - then surely the boy would have known that the Doctor would oppose Monarch, and that it is wrong to side with him. 

The idiotic, unlikeable Adric really starts here.

Why does Tegan try to pilot the TARDIS? She knows that she will be safe enough inside with the doors locked, and she knows that it rarely goes where it's supposed to go. She's only been in the ship for a matter of hours at this stage, and can't know anything about how it actually works - so what is she doing dematerialising? She must know that she is actually abandoning her friends.

Why does the TARDIS come to a halt in the vicinity of the spaceship, instead of, say, Skaro or in Medieval France? If this is the work of the TARDIS itself, why did it even allow Tegan to operate it in the first place?

Going back to Doctor Who Monthly's letters pages, there was much debate about the space-walk which the Doctor undertakes to retrieve the TARDIS. Most letters pointed out how stupid this was, quoting the science, whilst others took to its defence.

There's an effort to get round the lack of oxygen in space, but nothing is mentioned about the sub-zero temperatures. Even if the Doctor had some hitherto unmentioned ability to generate internal heat, this wouldn't extend to his cricket ball. This would have shattered against the side of the TARDIS, rather than bounce off it.

What's Wrong With... Castrovalva

This story follows on from the very moment Logopolis ends (indeed, we get the regeneration as a pre-credits sequence) - yet the location appears to have totally changed (as have all the security guards).

We've been told that the Pharos Project is in Cambridgeshire - yet the ambulance which turns up has come all the way from East Sussex, just over 100 miles distant.

Who called the ambulance in the first place? We see it, but no police cars. If the incident is one of trespassers then there ought to be police cars, not ambulances. 

If called because the Doctor was seen to fall then that's impossibly quick. (It can't have been called for the technician who was knocked out earlier, as it would have gone to the building where he was injured and not way over where the Doctor fell).

The Fourth Doctor fell off the telescope wearing boots and the Fifth gets up in the exact same clothing - but is now wearing shoes. We've seen the Doctor's outfits change during regeneration before (the First to Second) but then they changed significantly, not just a single item.

As with the last story, if the Master has a fully functioning TARDIS, including its chameleon circuit, why does it appear as a classical column in the middle of a piece of waste ground in 1981?

And another knock-on from Logopolis: when exactly did the Master came up with the plan to use Block Transfer Computations - which he's only just learned about - to set up two different traps for the Doctor.

He couldn't have known he was going to be able to capture a mathematical boy-genius, yet within seconds he not only has a copy of him to infiltrate the TARDIS and send it to Event One, but also gets the whole Castrovalva trap set up within minutes of that failing.

Why would someone who regards himself as a criminal genius have back-up plans in the first place? Shouldn't he be so confident of his abilities that his initial plans cannot ever possibly fail?

If Block Transfer Computations can manipulate matter, why does the Master not use it ever again, or as a simpler method of killing the Doctor, like making a piano materialise above his head? He may have lost Adric but there are other mathematical experts around whom he could exploit.

Why has the Zero Room never been mentioned before? Surely it would have helped the Second, Third and Fourth Doctors recover from their regenerations.

When we see the Doctor levitate, the question mark on his shirt collar reverses - as does his hair parting.

Why does no-one comment on his telepathic communication with Tegan and Nyssa, which he hasn't demonstrated before? His lips don't move when he speaks. Is this supposed to be telepathy, or just bad dubbing?

If the Zero Room really is totally cut-off from the external world as the Doctor says, how can a mathematical projection of Adric be projected into it?

Tegan's handbag mysteriously shifts from the Cloister Room where she left it in the last story, to the console room.

We are told in Part Two that Event One is the beginning of the Galaxy. It is the theorised beginning of the Universe. Galaxies aren't created in the same way.

Anthony Ainley wears a decent make-up as the Portreeve, but you do wonder why the Doctor - recent regeneration or not - can't recognise him.