Doctor Who/Recap/S19/E07 Time-Flight

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< Doctor Who‎ | Recap‎ | S19


Sorry Peter, but you're not getting a ride in the plane.
"The Master has defeated me at last..."
—The Doctor, having a sudden attack of Genre Blindness

Mostly notable for being the first time British Airways allowed filming aboard a Concorde, Time-Flight is one of the sillier stories of Classic Who.

Tired of Tegan and Nyssa constantly bitching at him for letting Adric die, the Doctor silently vows to get rid of the more mouthy one. Thus, Tegan gets dropped off at her new job at Heathrow, only minutes after she left. Time travel is a handy thing. Sadly, before she can even check in with HR or learn where the break room is, the TARDIS crew gets tangled up in something involving disappearing Concordes.[1] As it turns out, the Concordes are vanishing to the Jurassic era, which is where the Doctor, Nyssa, Tegan and a second plane go to investigate. To no one's surprise except the Doctor's (and maybe a few who didn't see the anagram in the credits), Big Tony's back again. He's also in disguise, as an Asian-esque mystic, though he has no reason to be.[2]

There's also stuff about an ancient alien Hive Mind that wants to respawn onto Earth, while the Master wants to use them as the core of his own TARDIS. Oh, and his TARDIS is somehow damaged after escaping Castrovalva. Maybe. The crew of the second plane bumbles around, confused; meanwhile the Doctor, Nyssa, and Tegan... also bumble around. Adric shows up for a split second, only to be told he's supposed to be dead; then he vanishes.[3] There's also some really odd stuff involving swapped TARDIS parts, Concorde planes being able to takeoff from unpaved and bumpy ground using compressed air from tires, the Master beating the Doctor at the alien-hivemind subplot and mass hallucinations for random extras wandering around the sets.

In the end, the Doctor beats the Master by getting back to (present day) Heathrow first, thus preventing him from landing. Then, thinking that he's finally gotten Tegan home at last, leaves her there—unaware that she was having second thoughts about the job and really wanted to stay aboard the TARDIS.

Just try to ignore the birds flying around in what's meant to be the Jurassic, OK?

Tropes

  1. ↑ For the benefit of our younger tropers, Concordes were supersonic aircraft--sleek on the outside, luxurious on the inside, and capable of flying from New York to London in 3 hours. They were supposed to be The Aircraft Of The Future; trouble was... 1) tickets came at a substantial premium over regular tickets, even in those days of generally higher ticket prices; 2) the 1973 and 1979 oil crises made ordinary travel (and a fortiori luxury travel) more difficult and expensive; and 3) a highly-publicised crash in Gonesse, France in 2000 singlehandedly turned the Concorde's exemplary record of safety (in terms of passenger-miles flown) into a shitty record of safety. This is why we're all still stuck on crappy cattle car flights instead of being whisked around the world at Mach 1.
  2. ↑ This is, of course, the Master we're talking about. Superfluous disguises are his HAT.
  3. ↑ The real reason for Adric's scene is so he'd be listed in the credits, so viewers wouldn't be able to deduce his death just by looking at the credits for the next week's serial.
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