Day 165 — June 14th 2021
The Time Monster Episodes One and Two
The Time Monster — Episode One
I spent a lot of this episode not really know what I was going to say about it, but then luckily one of the characters in the story summed up my feelings for me perfectly;
‘I’ve never heard such a farrago of unscientific rubbish in all my life!’
Oh I know it’s not really fair to criticise Doctor Who for the accuracy of its science (especially given that I’m not enough of a scientist to know what could work and what wouldn’t anyway), but the biggest problem I’m having with the science on display in this episode is that it’s bloody boring. Take the Master’s description of what needs to be done to fix TOMTIT;
Ruth: ‘You know what caused the overload then?’
The Master: ‘Yes. Don’t you see? You were drawing power from somewhere outside of time itself. Now, what we have to do is to build a time vector filter into the transmitter here. Look, let me show you. something like this. It’s a paracybernetic control circuit, in fact.’
Ruth: ‘Yes, but won’t that take some time to set up?’
I found myself watching the episode but not really taking any of it in. I don’t really understand the Master’s plan (it’s certainly not as simple as ‘I’m going to wake up the Sea Devils and let them wipe out humanity’) and I don’t think I really care about it, either.
It doesn’t help that there’s a lot of other stuff in the episode which feels pretty boring too. Take the reveal that the Master is involved. Doctor Who announces that he’s had a dream about the Master and that the whole world needs to be on alert because he’s out there somewhere…
…only for us to cut directly to the Master in the middle of an experiement. There’s no dramatic reveal, no attempt to drum up any excitement that he’s back. He’s just stood there. Yawn.
Even the cliffhanger is pretty boring — the experiment is going on, the Master shouts out a load of stuff that we don’t yet understand and that’s it. Episode over. There’s no real sense of danger, we just end with a sense of ‘what have I just watched?’.
Perhaps the biggest criticism I can level at this episode is that it feels like it’s come directly out of Season Eight. That run of adventures was something of a mixed bag for me. It gave me one of my favourite Pertwee tales in The Claws of Axos, but it was also home to two of my lowest-rated stories (Terror of the Autons and The Mind of Evil). Everything about that year felt a bit safe, and Doctor Who’s relationship with Jo was far from the nicest team-up we’ve ever had.
Season Nine has been something of a tonic to all that, feeling fresh and exciting and far more up my street. I really like UNIT as a concept but I think the series has really benefitted from losing them across this run of adventures. They pop up in three quarters of Day of the Daleks, but we’ve not seen them now for ages. I was expecting to be excited when the Brigadier popped back up on screen but… no. It was another ‘yawn’ moment for me.
Ho hum, maybe I’m just being tetchy because I know this isn’t a story with a great reputation, but it’s really not off to a great start with a 2/10.
The Time Monster — Episode Two
Okay, I’ve decided to aim for being broadly positive when discussing this episode. So it’s gonna be a pretty short entry. Ho ho. I’m gonna pick out two positive things, one negative and a thing that started well but fell apart. But I’ll start off by saying that — I’m sorry — it’s another 2/10 for this one.
So. Let’s start with the one that fell apart. Benton gets to be a bit brilliant in this one, and I really wasn’t expecting him to be. Percival is forced to phone him up and tell him that the Brigadier has asked him to leave his post unattended. He doesn’t fall for that. Even UNIT aren’t that stupid. But then the Master phones up and does a pitch perfect impression of the Brig, and I was convinced that Benton would be hoodwinked.
In fact I was so convinced that when he opened a window before leaving the room my first thought was ‘that’s not very secure…’! But of course he hasn’t been taken in by the ruse at all, and climbs up the side of the building to be back in the room before the Master can arrive.
Benton’s been a regular presence in the series for ages now, but this feels like the first time in ages that he’s actually been given some great material to work with. He usually comic relief, and while that’s welcome it’s always nice to see him do something good for once.
Only having been brilliant, managed to out-manoeuvre the Master and gain the upper hand surprisingly early in the narrative he’s then tripped up by falling for ‘the oldest trick in the book’ — the Master pretends that Doctor Who has just entered the room and Benton turns around to look! D’oh! It was all going so well.
As for positives, you’ve got just how scary the Master is here. The way he snaps and barks at Percival is genuinely quite horrible, and it feels far closer in tone to the character as introduced in Terror of the Autons than the slightly cuddlier version we’ve had more recently. It perhaps helps that he’s not shared any scenes with Doctor Who yet, so there’s less chummy banter and more being genuinely nasty.
Then there’s Doctor Who’s description of the Chronovores which sounds proper brilliant;
Doctor Who: ‘A place that is no place. A dangerous place where creatures love beyond your wildest imagination. Kronovores, time eaters. They swallow a life as quickly as a boa constrictor can swallow a rabbit, fur and all.’
Ruth: ‘Are you saying that Kronos is one of these creatures?’
Doctor Who: ‘I am. The most fearsome of the lot.’
And then one negative; it’s Bessie. Back when the car was introduced in Doctor Who and the Silurians I said ‘I don’t know if this might be considered heresy, but I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of Bessie’, and it’s this sort of thing that I was thinking of when I said that. There’s loads of sequences in Episode One where they’ve sped the film up to make it look like the car is going especially fast, and Doctor Who explains that it’s perfectly safe and will still break as normal;
Doctor Who: ‘The brakes work by the absorption of inertia, including yours.’
We get to see that in action today when the car comes whizzing down the gravel drive and then effects a sudden stop outside the institute, and it looks ridiculous. I know it’s a silly thing to say about a show where an alien travels through time in a phone box but I just can’t take it seriously, and I genuinely think it’s the kind of idea that makes the show silly.
Anyway, enough whining. Here’s hoping I’ll be feeling a bit more charitable when we reach tomorrow’s episodes…
