Doctor Who: Time-Flight: Part Two starts as nothing actually happens to the Doctor (Peter Davison) & the Plasmatron creatures just disappear. The stranded Doctor, Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), Tegan (Janet Fielding) & Concorde Captain Stapley (Richard Easton) bump into Professor Hayter (Nigel stock) wandering around, a passenger from the abducted Concorde flight 192. Professor Hayter tells the Doctor that he was able to resist the hallucinations the rest of the passengers & crew were under & managed to escape, they all decide to investigate a large Citidel like structure in the distance where the other's are held. There the Doctor runs into an old enemy...
Episode 24 from season 19 this Doctor Who adventure originally aired here in the UK during March 1982, directed by Ron Jones one has to say even as a Doctor Who fan that Time-Flight is awful & it's getting worse. The script by Peter Grimwade has one of the silliest premises I've seen in a long while & just doesn't work on any sort of level. Time-Flight is one of those cases where events & things 'just happen', for instance a Concorde just happens to fly into a time vortex, the Doctor just happens to appear & just happens to be allowed to investigate it, British Airways just happen to give him another Concorde, the Doctor just happens to be attacked by walking blocks of cement who just happen to not do anything to him, the washing up liquid bubble cocoon the Doctor is trapped inside just happens to disappear, Professor Hayter just happens to be wandering around & just happens to run into the Doctor, the Doctor just happens to find the location of Khalid's secret control room, Nyssa just happens to have some sort of intuition which makes her disobey the Doctor which just happens to lead to the rescue of three of Khalid's prisoners & both Tegan & Nyssa just happen to know where the center of the citadel is & Nyssa just happens to know what piece of equipment to destroy. I could go on & those unlikely 'just happen' moments all come within the first two episodes! Things don't happen in Time-Flight for a reason or as a consequence of anything else & the whole plot becomes very random & disjointed. Time-Flight really is awful, from the horrible hole ridden plot to the the awful scientific explanations which just lose the viewer, constant talk of scientific terminology & things which don't exist & make no sense means that most people will find Time-Flight hard to follow & unable to understand exactly whats going on. It just doesn't work at all on a conceptual or technical level.
Speaking if technical issues Time-Flight is one of the poorest made Doctor Who stories ever. I'm not being funny here but forget the much maligned Warriors of the Deep (1984) because Time-Flight is much, much worse. In fact I suspect that the reason why Warriors of the Deep has a worse reputation is that it was released on VHS years before Time-Flight & was more widely available & easier to watch. From the Plastatron creatures that look like cement blocks on legs to the cocoon the Doctor & Nyssa are trapped in which is obviously just some washing up liquid bubbles superimposed over the actor! They look embarrassing & you can clear see some of the bubbles bursting! Then there's the two headed snake like Plasmatron creature which is obviously a bad sock puppet. The end of this episode sees the return of the Master last seen in the opening story of season nineteen Castrovalva (1982) after he removes his Khalid disguise. It is never explained how he escaped from Castrovalva but who cares? The Khalid mask looks awful, it looks like someone has smeared mud all over his face & it's dried up & cracked. The whole production on Time-Flight is a shambles right down to it's obviously cardboard pantomime type sets. For those interested Time-Flight: Part Two marked the last appearance of Matthew Waterhouse as Adric who had died in the previous story Earthshock (1982) as a hallucination suffered by Nyssa & Tegan who are also confronted by hallucinations of a reptilian alien Terileptil from The Visitation (1982) & the robotic Melkur from The Keeper of Traken (1981).
Time-Flight: Part Two is even worse than Part One but both are still terrible. One of the worst Doctor Who stories ever in all aspects.
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