Day 167 — June 16th 2021
The Time Monster Episodes Five and Six
The Time Monster — Episode Five
Going into this story, it was the Atlantis stuff which I was dreading the most. When I think of The Time Monster the things that come to mind are the one-off design of the Control Room, the bizarre decision to make the monster a big white chicken and a load of people in silly wigs. The occasional appearances of Krasis in the last few episodes have done nothing to stem that feeling of ‘this is going to be rubbish’.
Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that I’ve enjoyed this episode — set almost exclusively in Atlantis — far more than any of the four episodes which preceded it!
To start with we open in the TARDIS with Jo managing to survive and hearing the ghostly voice of Doctor Who echoing around the room to her, surrounded by a babble of noise;
Doctor Who: ‘I’m nowhere, Jo. I’m still in the time vortex. The Tardis is relaying my thoughts to you.’
Jo: ‘What are all those other voices I can hear?’
Doctor Who: ‘What other voices? Oh. Oh, those are my subconscious thoughts. But I shouldn’t listen to them too hard if I were you. I’m not all that proud
of some of them.’
How brilliant is that!? I’d totally forgotten about it, and it’s a moment Pertwee plays beautifully. The dropping penny of his ‘oh’ is wonderful, and it genuinely played on my mind for the rest of the episode. I’m amazed more hasn’t been made of that moment. It’s also quite unique for there to be a suggestion that Doctor Who isn’t whiter-than-white. Aside from the odd rogue moment (like shooting dead an Ogron at the start of the season) the character has been absolutely a hero for years at this point — it’s not since the Hartnell era that there’s really been any sense of a dangerous side. It really sparked my imagination right at the start of an episode I wasn’t expecting to enjoy, and I think that set me up for finding more to like elsewhere.
I should say at this point that it’s not worth getting your hopes up just yet. It’s still only a 4/10, but that’s twice as high as most episodes have had so far.
Anyway; Atlantis. The sets are great, for a start. Really huge! I was planning to double check if it had been shot in TC1 — the largest studio space at Television Centre — but my copy of the Complete History volume covering this serial seems to have gone walkies. I’ve probably put it down somewhere and totally forgotten. It’ll turn up half way through Tom Baker’s run.
I suspect that some of the set designs only look as impressive as they do because of the scale afforded to them. The main temple, for example, uses a large blue sheet as a not-totally convincing sky, but it’s easier to overlook because there’s a huge open space and a couple of dozen extras between the camera and the backdrop.
I’m guessing that a lot of this stuff has come from the BBC stock material — probably created for some Grecian period drama and wheeled into studio on and off for a decade. That’s not a criticism, though. Period pieces are something the BBC excels at, and it feels like ages since we’ve seen that in practice on Doctor Who.
And then there’s the dialogue. I didn’t go through the whole episode working it out but several of the bits I plucked out at random did seem to be written in Iambic Pentameter, lending the whole thing even more of a Shakespearean vibe. That was something I praised highly during The Crusade, so it would be more than a bit remiss of me not to do the same here.
So with all this praise, why only a four? Well, it has to be said that the costumes do look a bit silly, and it’s the wigs I really can’t get over. There’s just something about them which I find bizarrely off-putting. It probably doesn’t help that out of a fairly large cast only Pertwee and Delgardo aren’t forced to wear them.
And then there’s the fact that after four episodes which really haven’t clicked with me, I just don’t care enough about The Time Monster for this one good episode to make enough of a difference. Had it come in a story I were enjoying more I suspect this would have ended up being a six or seven, but the goodwill just isn’t there. It almost doesn’t matter how good these final episodes are, my mind has already switched off from them because I know we’ve got a big birthday cake to enjoy tomorrow.
The Time Monster — Episode Six
Last week I saw a TikTok video of someone climbing Pen y Fan — the highest mountain in the southern British isles — first thing in the morning to see the sunrise over the Welsh valleys. I told my wife that it looked amazing and that I’d decided I wanted to do it. She laughed and told me there was no way I was going to make it to the top of that mountain. The next day I mentioned it to a friend and they agreed with the assessment; never going to happen.
Over the weekend I was away at a stag do for said friend’s partner (I’ll be slipping away from my duties as a groomsman next week to watch some Planet of the Daleks) and I realised the place we were staying was only a 20 minute drive from Pen y Fan. There was no way I was going to be up in time for the sunrise, but I realised that if I left the house right then, I could probably make it for sunset.
So I did. I raced to the foot of the mountain, spent an hour and a half wheezing my way to the top, and arrived about three minutes after the sun had vanished behind the horizon. I felt a bit blue. All that effort and exertion (and as an overweight person who spends the day working with Photoshop at the computer, I can tell you that exercise isn’t something I’m built for…!) and I’d managed to just miss the thing I was clambering up there for.
Almost everyone else was leaving. They’d seen the sunset and had a long journey to make back to their cars. The heat had gone, so I pulled my hoodie on and sat at the edge of the summit and stared out at the horizon… and it was the horiziest horizon I’d ever seen.
Oh go on, you knew where I was going with this, didn’t you?
It’s true though. I had one of Doctor Who’s moments of realisation and clarity. Yes I’d missed the sunset, but I’d still managed to get to the top of the mountain, and I spent a half an hour drinking in the beautiful views as the light quickly faded from the sky. Away from everything it was totally peaceful, and while it’s only been a few days so I don’t know how long it’ll last, I genuinely feel like I’ve come back down to ground level feeling more glass-half-full than I was on the way up.
And it’s a better story than the one I was going to tell which involved my toddler picking a daisy in the garden last Tuesday.
Anyway, the highlight of this episode, as you’ve already guessed, is Doctor Who’s beautiful speech to Jo about looking for the positives when all hope seems lost;
Doctor Who: ‘Ah, I’ll never forget what it was like up there. All bleak and cold, it was. A few bare rocks with some weeds sprouting from them and some pathetic little patches of sludgy snow. It was just grey. Grey, grey, grey. Well, the tree the old man sat under, that was ancient and twisted and the old man himself was, he was as brittle and as dry as a leaf in the autumn.’
Jo: ‘But what did he say?’
Doctor Who: ‘Nothing, not a word. He just sat there, silently, expressionless, and he listened whilst I poured out my troubles to him. I was too unhappy even for tears, I remember. And when I’d finished, he lifted a skeletal hand and he pointed. Do you know what he pointed at?’
Jo: ‘No.’
Doctor Who: ‘A flower. One of those little weeds. Just like a daisy, it was. Well, I looked at it for a moment and suddenly I saw it through his eyes. It was simply glowing with life, like a perfectly cut jewel. And the colours? Well, the colours were deeper and richer than you could possibly imagine. Yes, that was the daisiest daisy I’d ever seen.’
Jo: ‘And that was the secret of life? A daisy? Honestly, Doctor...’
Doctor Who: ‘Yes, I laughed too when I first heard it. So, later, I got up and I ran down that mountain and I found that the rocks weren’t grey at all, but they were red, brown and purple and gold. And those pathetic little patches of sludgy snow, they were shining white. Shining white in the sunlight.’
It’s one of Jon Pertwee’s very best moments in the role so far, and an absolute highlight of his era. It’s in moments like this when you realise how brilliant he is, and his kindness to Jo following the story is rather beautiful too.
In the end it doesn’t feel like a whole lot happens in this one. The king dies, the Master gets betrayed, it’s all business as usual. And when we return to Earth at the end to see the UNIT boys freed from their time experiment I found that I really didn’t care all that much. On the whole I think The Time Monster was a bit of a write-off for me from the start.
3/10.
