Purposeful travel, not aimless wanderings.
Though it often feels to viewers that the Doctor’s adventures follow one after the other, significant gaps can be inferred between certain stories on Doctor Who. These lacunae offer fertile ground for writers to explore the ways the Doctor’s previous visits to a place have affected its development; at their best, as in the revelation of the Fourth Doctor’s face carved into a mountainside in “The Face of Evil,” such newly invented past interactions both deepen the stakes of the current narrative and remind viewers of our favorite Gallifreyan’s essentially unknowable history. First time series contributor Glen McCoy employs this device in “Timelash” (Story Production Code 6Y), which draws heavily on the Doctor having visited the planet Karfel in one of those heretofore unknown off-screen jaunts.
Karfel, currently under the dictatorial rule of the mysterious Borad (Robert Ashby/Denis Cary), has seen better days since that last encounter. All reflective objects have been banned, war is in the offing with another world, and a rebellion plots against the Borad, who never appears in person, only on viewscreens, attended solely by his tall, blue-skinned androids (Dean Hollingsworth). Those deemed disloyal suffer exile by means of the Timelash, a temporal corridor that, for reasons quite unexplained, leads back to twelfth century Earth. The Doctor and Peri inadvertently encounter this corridor while planning where to go on holiday, the TARDIS passing through right as Vena (Jeananne Crowley), a Karfelon councilor who has just seen her father killed and fiancé sentenced to exile, jumps into the time stream with a key needed to control all the energy on Karfel. She floats, ghost-like, through the blue box, which has the effect of briefly redirecting the Timelash to nineteenth century Earth—1885, to be precise—landing her with a clunk in the Scottish country home of one Herbert (David Chandler), an aspiring writer (hint) who happens to be conducting a seance at the time.
After the death of Vena’s father at the Borad’s surprisingly scaly hands, the ambitious Tekker (Paul Darrow, the second Blake’s 7 star to appear in as many episodes, after Jacqueline Pearce in “The Two Doctors“) takes over the figurehead leadership mantle of Maylin. He uses the Doctor’s subsequent arrival on Karfel to solve the problem of the missing key, which has vexed the Borad immensely. After the briefest of welcomes, he cajoles the Doctor into retrieving the key from the time corridor by threatening Peri. She, in turn, outwits her android captor and escapes into tunnels inhabited by reptilian creatures known as a Morlox (big hint). Members of the rebellion also hide in the tunnels, and they save her from the beast, in order to kill her as a spy. Peri survives only by name-dropping the Doctor, whose last visit has turned into a myth suppressed by the Borad, and then by correctly identifying Jo Grant’s picture in a locket given to one of the rebel’s grandfathers by the Doctor—the Third Doctor, as a hidden mural later confirms. But no sooner do the rebels spare her than one of the androids finds them.
The Sixth Doctor, meanwhile, calculates the exact moment to which the TARDIS has altered the Timelash’s end point and appears in Herbert’s hut shortly after Vena. Upon realizing that the legendary Doctor has returned to keep his “promise” to Karfel, Vena agrees to help him overthrow the Borad. Herbert, fascinated by the idea of a time machine (hint, hint), sneaks aboard the TARDIS, and the three travel back to Karfel posthaste. Tekker secures the amulet as soon as they arrive and orders an android to toss the Time Lord into the Timelash, after gloating at the Doctor’s naivety. And that’s just the first of two forty-five minute episodes…
If this potted précis seems, well, a bit unwieldy, it lands doubly so on screen. McCoy, whose screen writing career is just beginning at the time of writing this story, shows great ambition and a fair knowledge of Doctor Who with his script, but, as is broadly the case with John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward’s run as a producer/script editor team to date, there’s much surface and little depth, even with Saward engaging in quite a bit of uncredited surgery on the story. The underlying conceit, of a writer from the nineteenth century—oh, fine, it’s H.G. Wells, if you haven’t figured it out yet—tagging along on an adventure with the Doctor that leads him to write his masterpiece, has delightful potential. The adventure itself, alas, falls flat, a wan combination of “The Horns of Nimon” (an unseen, monstrous leader bringing ruin to a planet), “The Armageddon Factor” (war between planets that the Doctor must avert), “The Caves of Androzani” (disfigured creature wants Peri for a bride), and the Peladon stories (where the Doctor returns to a setting of political intrigue he has previously influenced and starring the Third Doctor and Jo Grant).
The signal error here, though, comes not from rehashing old ideas—Doctor Who relies, after all, on the same six or so basic plots—but on the misuse of the Doctor having been here before. McCoy builds up this revelation as as a major selling point in the story, replete with a “promise” he made to return, yet the payoff lands with a dull thud, just a device to let the Doctor easily gain trust from the locals and to provide a thin motivation for revenge. For on his prior visit, the Doctor, you see, ruined the Borad’s chance at tenure—which, granted, in some circles might well be seen as ample reason to enslave a planet and bring ruin to all that is good and beautiful…
The Doctor escapes his fate by stunning an android using a mirror purloined from Herbert’s home—something of a design flaw, to be sure—and once the blue automaton and one of Tekker’s flunkies are hurled back to 12th century Earth (causing who knows what damage to the timeline), the Doctor and the rebels seal themselves in. The second episode thus devolves into a “base under siege” narrative, with an android and assorted guards setting up a “time web” to blast through the sealed doors to the Timelash chamber, just as many a Cyberman and Silurian has attempted in the past.
To be fair, everyone involved seems to be trying their best. The set and effects teams work wonders to create a sense of a real, lived-in, spacious compound on Karfel, and their realization of the interior of the Timelash, where the Doctor rappels down just inside the threshold to retrieve the “Kontron” crystals at the heart of the machine, brings about a welcome sense of scale, and peril, for the attempt. The blue-skinned android, of which there are many, all played with subtle robotic menace by Dean Hollingsworth, likewise feels just alien enough without resorting to distracting prostheses; it’s amazing what a vivid yellow wig and some voice processing can do. Veteran director Pennant Roberts, last seen helming “Warriors of the Deep,” another studio-heavy story, does his best with camera angles and pacing to keep the story visually interesting, hiding the true visage of the Borad for quite some time while providing tantalizing hints of his monstrousness.
When the fierce foe (played in “real” form by Robert Ashby, the false human visage of the viewscreen by Denis Cary) finally reveals himself, at the mid-point of the second episode, the wait to see the the half-human, half-Morlox creature proves worthwhile. The makeup effects seamlessly, and unsettlingly, blend the two halves, and the initial shock of the Borad’s appearance marks perhaps the high point of the story. Once the scientist Megelen, the Borad’s promising career came to a halt when the Third Doctor found his experiments on Morlox to verge beyond the ethical pale, informing the Karfelon authorities of his depravities. A subsequent unauthorized experiment with Mustakozene Eighty resulted in a Morlox being accidentally enmeshed into Megelen’s physical structure, a fate he hopes to replicate in Peri, his bride-to-be, not unlike Chessene’s efforts to create a compatible consort out of the Second Doctor in “The Two Doctors” just a story prior.
To take his final revenge, the Borad has goaded the Bandrils, a reptilian species from a neighboring world, into war by refusing to export grain to their famine-stricken planet, and their attack fleet approaches. The Borad intends for their weapons to destroy all life on Karfel, save himself, his future bride, and the rest of the Morlox slithering about the tunnels. The Bandril doomsday device will only kill higher lifeforms with central nervous systems, which the Morlox (and Morlox-adjacent) conveniently lack.
So thin is the real threat of the Borad, though, that the Doctor seemingly dispatches him with more than fifteen minutes left in the story, turning his “time acceleration” ray back upon him by means of a device whipped up from one of the Kontron crystals purloined earlier out of the Timelash. The unsettling aging process of the ray is demonstrated three times in the story, as Vena’s father, Renis (Neil Hallett) and Tekker himself fall victim to it as well, first growing old then crumbling into bones—an effect so nice they used it thrice.
The crescendo of impending doom, via the Bandril’s onrushing missile, wanes somewhat given that McCoy has the Doctor argue with first Peri and then Herbert for several minutes as they each try to stand by the Doctor in the moment of danger. The badinage, though clever and fast paced, strains against the audience’s expectation of action. When something does finally happen—the Doctor positions the TARDIS between Karfel and the missile as a shield, causing it to explode before reaching its target—the impervious time machine is declared destroyed by the remorseful Bandril, despite the Doctor previously in the story assuring Peri, and the viewers, that it is indestructible. (Which, of course, it is.)
Realizing, perhaps, that several minutes remain in the run-time, the Borad reappears somehow in a room with only one door, having conveniently perfected tissue regeneration as a hedge against happenstance. He grabs Peri, who has spent an inordinate amount of time being throttled in this story, and threatens to kill her, but the Doctor makes an equally sudden encore. Vanity, thy name is Borad, for all it takes is the revelation of a mirror behind the mural of the Third Doctor to cause Peri to scream at the sight of the scaly fiend—and for the regenerating mutant to recoil at the sight of himself as well. Stunned, he teeters at the edge of the Timelash, which the Doctor activates before pushing him in. And what becomes of the Borad, with his fins for limbs and exceedingly long life span? Well, he winds up in a loch near Inverness in 1179, where, the Doctor suggests, over the course of a thousand years he will be seen “from time to time.” (The Zygons might have something to say about that, though, with McCoy, Nathan-Turner, and Saward here re-writing the canonical identity of the Loch Ness Monster some ten years after the mysterious beastie was established as the Skarasen in “Terror of the Zygons.”)
The Doctor then destroys the triangular Timelash and whisks Herbert home where, no doubt, he will regale the world of his adventures with Morlox and time travel. As a coda, the Doctor unearths Herbert’s calling card, revealing the eager writer’s identity to an audience that has already figured it out.
Paul Darrow and David Chandler bring Tekker and Mr. Wells to life with their performances, bright sparks in an uneven presentation. Darrow in particular seems born to the proud, honor-bound, yet brazenly amoral type, and viewers of Blake’s 7 undoubtedly saw hints of the roguish Avon in his manifestation of Tekker, who dies, in the end, trying to protect his planet. It’s somewhat over the top, not subtle in the least, but the ease with which Darrow oozes venom and perfidy deserves a chance to shine. Chandler, meanwhile, does well to convey the kind of boundless curiosity that a writer like Wells must have had to help develop the literary style and approach that would later be termed science fiction, while still keeping the character tethered to a nineteenth century propriety.
It’s an unfortunate outing for Nicola Bryant, though, with Peri absolutely pigeonholed into a passive role, lacking agency despite finally being costumed in a practical pantsuit as opposed to a crop top or multi-layered Victorian gown. The plucky American teen is called upon mostly to scream and cower from somewhat obviously plastic beasties shown only as long, bobbing reptilian necks, and she is led about and otherwise restrained by the neck in a manner that is almost as uncomfortable for the audience as for Bryant herself. The presence of so many other speaking roles, spanning Karfelon councilors both craven and bold through to rebels drawn straight from central casting, to say nothing of pseudo-companion Herbert, reduces Peri to a plot device, a sidelining of the main companion in a style that was passé by Doctor Who‘s second season. Bryant, and Peri, deserve better.
The same cannot be said for Colin Baker, as the Sixth Doctor receives quite a bit of attention and screen time in “Timelash,” with moments of scientific ingenuity and introspection blended with action, danger, and wit, a fully rounded presentation of Gallifrey’s favored son. Baker himself is hitting his stride by this point, the multi-colored coat fitting quite well. McCoy has a keen sense of the Doctor’s centrality to the series, an understanding not all writers actually bring to Doctor Who, and viewers get to see the Doctor in full plumage here. This Doctor contains a bit of each who has come before, the good and the bad, with prickliness and empathy, brilliance and stubbornness, shining through in equal measure. And, to McCoy and Baker’s credit, it’s no mean feat, as there is much precedent to amalgamate into a single character by this point.
To castigate “Timelash” too harshly as unfocused and lacking coherence is to misunderstand where Doctor Who has wound up twenty-two years after first bursting on the scene with boundless potential, captivating viewers with the possibilities of a time machine and a hero with a thousand faces and personalities. From educational tours through history to moral tales about contemporary human foibles, from action adventures in outer space to political potboilers, Doctor Who has pretty much done it all by the mid-’80s, multiple times over. Unlike the earliest seasons, though, by Season Twenty-Two writers—fledgling writers like McCoy especially—have, indeed, grown up with the series; the result, as with “Timelash,” is a pastiche of years’ worth of the Doctor’s adventures. Multiple “genres” of the show are crammed into some ninety-odd minutes in “Timelash,” with fierce creatures and strange aliens and time shenanigans lined up against technobabble and figures from history and ray-gun shootouts, all wrapped up with a pithy bow at the end.
What’s missing, as has been the case more often than not in recent years, is the soul, the depth, the promise of something new on the show, which is collapsing under the weight of over a hundred and forty prior stories. It’s just not enough to drop callbacks to that long history on the screen and expect it to suffice, nor is it, any more, possible to avoid such resonances, given just how much the Doctor has already done. Something needs to give, and while the BBC higher-ups who hold the series’ fate in their hands in 1985 may have their own axes to grind with Doctor Who, they’re not wrong about the need for—and the inevitability of—change.
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Post 147 of the Doctor Who Project