Day 166 — June 15th 2021
The Time Monster Episodes Three and Four
The Time Monster — Episode Three
Shall we talk about the episode descriptions on BritBox briefly? They’re an unusual mixture. The description for the Pilot episode is succinct, interesting, and does what it says on the tin; ‘A mysterious police box in a junkyard leads two teachers into an incredible adventure’.
Impressively they used something different for the broadcast version of An Unearthly Child, when I don’t think anyone would have begrudged them keeping the same — ‘Two concerned schoolteachers follow a pupil home to meet her grandfather, the Doctor’. It’s perhaps not as exciting as the original, but still does the job.
I don’t always read the descriptions, because I know which episode I’m about to watch, but sometimes you can’t help but glancing at them while waiting for the episode to load. One the other day, for The Mutants Episode Two caught my eye, because it left me wondering where the story might be set; ‘Fearing that Jo has dies on Solos, the Doctor is forced to make Solos’ atmosphere breathable’.
And then there’s the one today — ‘The Master usis TOMTIT to summon threats from the past to attack UNIT’ — which I actually found a bit exciting! I’ll confess to being underwhelmed by the cliffhanger to Episode Two in which he dramatically summons up a bloke in a robe, but I’m loving the idea that he can pluck pretty much any moment from history and use it to attack his foes.
Having watched the episode… well, that did turn out to be my favourite part. There’s something a bit brilliant about seeing a knight in full armour and holding a lance charge head-first into a convoy of UNIT jeeps. It feels like another one of those perfectly Doctor Who ideas. But I’m a bit saddened that it’s not the premise of the whole episode! I could do without all the Interstitial Time bollocks and just watch four episodes of the Master summoning up various threats from the past instead!
The idea of the bomb falling on the convoy is pretty brilliant too, and in the next episode a local confirms that it fell in the exact spot that a bomb landed during World War Two. That’s the bit that really captivates me. It’s not just summoning up random elements from the past, it’s about bringing specific ones back again. It also gives us the first decent cliffhanger of the story, in which we get a massive explosion and a genuine suggestion that Mike Yates may have been killed off.
Sadly, the Brigadier doesn’t come off all too well in this episode. There’s an awkward moment early on when Nick Courtney is asked to do some slow mo running on the spot, and then the film is actually slowed down, and it looks ridiculous. Like genuinely amateur. The direction in this story isn’t brilliant in general, but that has to be a low point. And then there’s his reaction to being told that UNIT have come face to face with a group of Roundheads;
Yates: ‘Another hallucination, sir. Roundheads attacking us with ball ammunition. Cannon balls, in fact. Out.’
The Brigadier: ‘Captain Yates, if this is some sort of a joke, I…’
Doctor Who: ‘Believe me, Brigadier, this is no kind of a joke. This is
deadly serious.’
I get that this is something of an unusual situation, even for UNIT, but after everything they’ve seen it strikes me as a bit silly for the Brigadier to take exception to this. Especially given that they’re in the middle of dealing with a time experiment! I feel like this is part of a wider dumbing-down of the Brigadier which happens across the Pertwee era. He spends Season Seven being incredulous but accepting, and then gradually becomes a bit more skeptical the longer things go on.
That said, he also gets the best line in the entire story;
Doctor Who: ‘Oh dear.’
Jo: ‘What’s up?’
Doctor Who: ‘Well, it doesn’t work.’
The Brigadier: ‘You astound me.’
It’s a 3/10 for this one, I’m afraid.
The Time Monster — Episode Four
I was a bit unfair on the direction in Episode Three, so it’s only fair that I start this entry by saying that the opening shots of the bomb site here are gorgeous. Really nicely shot, brilliantly set up, and there’s something really exciting about seeing the TARDIS thrown onto its side in a crater. It also looked great strapped to the back of the UNIT jeep in the last episode. The apparatus strapped to the prop so that the UNIT soldiers can get it upright again caused some pretty serious damage to the sign boxes which will stay in place for most of the remainder of the prop’s life, but it does make for a cool shot.
Sadly somewhere the direction is lacking is the arrival of the titular Time Monster — Kronos. He actually appeared in the previous episode, menacing a worried-looking Percival, but here he’s forced to attack Doctor Who and… oh, let’s be honest it looks dreadful. It’s a big white chicken costume, inside which a poor actor is being forced to thrash around while (I’m fairly sure) being suspended from a wire. It’s not flattering, it’s not effective, and it’s the kind of nonsense non fans think of when people talk about Old Testament Doctor Who.
For now, though, let’s return to the subject of the TARDIS, because this episode introduces us to a brand new TARDIS Control Room set and it’s… well, it’s something.
I’ve often seen this one referred to as the ‘washing up bowl TARDIS’ for obvious reasons, and while I think it looks pretty rubbish I can’t fault them for trying to do something a bit different with an old design. And there are elements of the idea that I’m really keen on. I’d never noticed before, for example, that the centre of each washing up bowl contains a small window through which you can see what’s outside the ship. I feel like long term that wouldn’t be the most practical design choice, but it’s a nice idea which works quite well here with the bomb crater visible beyond the white walls. The downside to that, though, is that at first I thought ‘that’s unfortunate, you can see another set through there’ before realising what I was actually looking at.
I also think it’s a shame that, because of the way things are filmed, you get the sense that Doctor Who and the Master have both decided to overhaul their time machines in exactly the same way at exactly the same time. I know you have to suspend your disbelief a little when it comes to using the same set to represent both ships, but this pushes it to a new extreme…!
We spend a lot of the episode stuck inside the TARDISes, which means we’ve plenty of time to admire the new design but I have to admit that I was getting a bit bored of looking at the same set being shot from the same angles over and over. I’m not a huge fan of spending too long inside the TARDIS at the best of times, but this episode pushed that to an extreme.
Back to a 2/10.
