Sarah -
Oh dear, Harry. Oh dear. We've managed to stay positive through some epic low points in Doctor Who history, but I'm afraid we're facing our greatest challenge in "Timelash".
I can only agree with Peri: "It's so dull. It lacks sparkle. There's no reflection. It's all so mat and lifeless. Even the goblets don't shine."
Harry -
Little did she know but she was about to become as objectified as the objects she was describing. Poor Nicola!
Sarah -
She's fully clothed for a change, but the aliens are still after her!
Harry -
"Timelash" began as new writer Glen McCoy's proposal for a thrilling adventure with the Daleks. Eric Saward promptly rejected it, so McCoy came back with a story idea based on a young H.G. Wells having a thrilling adventure with the Doctor -- an adventure that would inspire many of the science fiction novels he would go on to write. A charming concept, but it was horribly realized by this crew. From top to bottom, this really is a low point.
Sarah -
It's brutal.
Harry -
Before we even get to the story, what is up with Colin's hair? He begins the story with a fresh trim in part one, but by the end of part two he's looking decidedly shaggy. Presumably the story was filmed in a very muddled sequence, or something had to be refilmed. The Doctor's changing hair lengths always fascinate me. Wait until we get to Peter Capaldi's first season!
Sarah -
Don't even get me started on Capaldi's hair or we'll never get back to Colin!
According to the bonus featurette on the DVD, JN-T whisked Baker and Bryant off to Chicago for a con in the middle of filming. And then they had to shoot extra scenes while filming "Revelation of the Daleks" due to "Timelash" running short. Every season of 80s Doctor Who has that one story that gets short shrift -- and "Timelash" is that story in spades!
Harry -
There's the answer. Thank you, Toby Hadoke!
Sarah -
I take that as the ultimate compliment!
Harry -
Anyway, TARDIS, console room, Peri dressed sensibly for a change, and the Doctor poring over some star charts. They discuss taking a holiday and it starts pleasantly enough, but within minutes they are furiously bickering again. It's so tiresome.
Sarah -
And so boring. They were getting on so well in "The Two Doctors" and now we're back to the bickering. I blame Eric Saward for not doing something about this. Every story begins with them bickering and then they get along well in the story -- and then it's back to bickering. This is why we have script editors!
Harry -
Cut to: a trio of young rebels in the citadel.
Where's this citadel? Who knows!
What are they rebelling against? Who knows! But as rebels go, they are pretty shoddy at it. Rounded up immediately by citadel security, the two males are hauled before an assembly of local officials and a sentence is immediately passed on them. They are to be hurled into the Timelash.
What is the Timelash? Who knows! But in they go, wailing at the unfairness of it all. Meanwhile the third rebel, a young female, is brought before the Borad.
Who is the Borad? Who knows! But he has one good eye on the ladies as we'll see.
Sarah -
Why are we watching this story? Who knows! I'm starting to miss "The Space Pirates".
Harry -
The best I could make of it is that this futuristic society is on the planet Karfel. It's a planet. And it's Orwell-a-go-go, with everyone living their lives under the watchful eye of the cameras. There's even a Big Brother character who pops up onscreen to remind everyone he's watching.
He's also intolerant of dissent. He spies on a clandestine discussion between the current civic leader and one of the other officials -- Maylin Renis and Mykros, respectively. Their distrust of the regime and their knowledge of how to bring it down calls for an immediate crackdown. Maylin Renis is brought before the Borad, and is immediately executed. The Borad has a nifty weapon: a kind of mini time destructor ray that rapidly ages its target, until they collapse in a pile of bones. I found it unintentionally comic each time someone's skeleton clattered to the floor. But anyway, that's Renis sorted. Time for a new Maylin, and Tekker wins the title. Played by Paul Darrow, Maylin Tekker has slime oozing out of every pore and he plays the villain with great relish. His first act of office is to condemn Myrkos to the Timelash. A scuffle ensues and the previous Maylin's daughter Vena ends up tumbling through. Woops!
Sarah -
I'm just going to say right now that Paul Darrow is my absolute favorite thing about Timelash. He's so over the top that he's back around to the bottom. Legend has it that he was annoyed by Colin Baker's outsized performance on Blake's 7 and decided to engage in retaliatory upstaging on Doctor Who. Mission accomplished! He flaunted a direct order from JN-T to tone it down and I'm so glad he did. He singlehandedly raises my rating by at least two points!
Meanwhile, Vena ends up in H.G. Wells' sitting room. Why? Who knows!
The TARDIS, of course, arrives in the midst of this kerfuffle and Tekker turns on the charm. He takes Peri hostage, forcing the Doctor to enter the Timelash and retrieve the amulet that went in with Vena. I'm sure there's a reason he needs the amulet, but I don't remember why and I'm not sure I care.
Harry -
The amulet is powerful, like all amulets.
Sarah -
Of course. Silly me!
Harry -
And the Doctor is known to these people, having been there once before. So they know he's capable of retrieving the amulet, which is powerful.
Sarah -
How weird was the retconning of the Third Doctor and Jo in this story? I can't have been the only confused viewer trying to remember when we'd been here before. That was all quite useless.
Harry -
It was a welcome but pointless shoutout. I'm trying to imagine a scenario where the Doctor breaks out his photo album of old friends and companions, so that Peri would have been able to recognize Jo Grant at a glance.
Sarah -
"And here's my best friend, Miss Smith. She was so much better than you." Good times in the TARDIS!
Harry -
The Doctor calculates his way after Vena, who has been welcomed from beyond the stars by young "Herbert", amateur spiritualist, at his cottage in Scotland. The Doctor introduces himself and explains to Vena that he is her means of returning to Karfel.
Initially cute in an astonished sort of way, Herbert quickly becomes annoying -- it's like watching someone watch Doctor Who for the first time and they start explaining everything about the show back to you. Initially cute, but after a while...
Sarah -
After a while, you just want to smack them and tell them to STFU!
Harry -
Departing with Vena, the Doctor tells Herbert to stay put and forget this ever happened, but instead he stows away aboard the TARDIS. Now he's a fan stalker!
Sarah -
And then he does it again at the end of the story!
Harry -
The TARDIS returns to the Karfellian Hall of the Peoples (I made that up), and the powerful amulet is returned to Tekker's oily hands. Naturally, he orders everyone to be thrown into the Timelash. Another scuffle ensues, until one of the peculiar blond-haired, blue-skinned androids seizes the Doctor by the scruff of the neck and pushes him towards the Timelash. Here comes the cliffhanger: cue the extreme close-up of the Doctor's agonized face!
Sarah -
I'm fairly certain he was just mirroring the viewers' feelings.
But wait! There's been an insurrection and the baddies are driven from the Hall of the Peoples! Hooray! This will certainly make things more interesting!
Except it doesn't. The Doctor shimmies down a rope into the Timelash to pillage some crystals. Why? WHO KNOWS! What I do know is this has to be the most tedious "adventure" scene ever. The crystal allows the Doctor to create a time ruse, whatever that might be.
Harry -
Oh man, this was a case of "don't show us what's behind the shimmering screen" -- because it's so disappointing. Poor Colin having to straddle those grey outcroppings as if he was the universe's worst burlesque dancer, surrounded by a wall of Christmas glitter and craft store foam shapes... oh man.
Sarah -
As if the costume wasn't humiliation enough. Please, let's pile some more on.
Harry -
Meanwhile, Peri has been kidnapped from her tour of the citadel, but she escaped down to the caves below. After being menaced by a leftover prop from "Invasion of the Dinosaurs", some other rebels help her escape back into the citadel... where she is promptly kidnapped again, dragged back to the caves and tied up.
Sarah -
Has any companion ever suffered as many as indignities as Nicola Bryant?
Harry -
Oh man. Meanwhile, Tekker has used all his diplomatic charm to trigger a war between the people of Karfel and the mercantile sock puppets of planet Bandril. Shit is getting cray.
Sarah -
OMG, the puppet! What the what, Harry? It's off the hook!
Harry -
As for the Timelash crystals, the Doctor uses them to fashion all sorts of merchandise that every wide-eyed Herbert would want for their birthday. An invisibility cloak! A 10-second time shifter! A reverse ray blaster! In stores now!
Sarah -
Now they're just making shit up and throwing it out there.
Harry -
Armed and ready, the Doctor marches off to confront the Borad. Finding him in his control room, the Doctor realizes that the Borad is actually Megelen, an old scientist he met previously on Karfel. Megelen was horribly disfigured when his DNA became fused with that of a Morlox in an explosion. Presumably driven mad, Megelen now wants to create a second human-Morlox hybrid out of Peri.
Sarah -
Can Peri not just find a nice normal warlord to settle down with? Someone who will love her for who she is and not what some psychopath wants her to be?
Harry -
Maybe someday she'll find true love, even if it's very shouty.
Sarah -
We can only hope.
Harry -
Have you noticed the running theme in season 22, Sarah? Mad scientists run amok, from Quillam on Varos to the Rani and Dastari, and now Megelen. All of them tinkering with DNA in insane experiments. It's the mad scientist season.
Sarah -
Mad Scientists are always good for a laugh.
So, the Borad ages Tekker to death and seems to have caused his own death while trying to kill the Doctor. The Doctor hops in the TARDIS to avert an incoming sock puppet missile. Peri follows, they bicker, she retreats. But look, Herbert has stowed away again. That scamp!
The Doctor uses the TARDIS to deflect the missile and BOOM! There goes the TARDIS. But wait, don't be sad, he's alive. Hooray!
Guess who else is alive? The Borad! That scamp!
And this is where the crazy bounds over the insanity cliff into the canyon of batshit cray-cray.
Harry -
The wheels are completely off and "Timelash" careens into unforgiveable territory. Namely, coming up with shit that is just implausible, even for Doctor Who. So the Borad can clone himself, but he cannot isolate and restore the human DNA of his clones? That's too much of an ask for a mad scientist?
Sarah -
Don't start trying to impose logic now -- it's far too late for that!
Harry -
(I will concede this: the Borad was nicely realized. His face was a brilliant achievement by the makeup department, and Robert Ashby's dark chocolate voice gave tasty resonance to even his hokiest lines. One other side note: about halfway through the story, it clicked for me that the phony, "Big Brother" Borad -- Denis Carey -- had previously appeared as The Keeper of Traken in that eponymous story, and as Professor Chronotis in "Shada".)
Sarah -
(OK, fine, I'll concede that, too. Poor Denis Carey, being dragged into this mess.)
Harry -
Back to the careening story. The absolute worst moment from so many to choose from was when Peri asked the Doctor how he and the TARDIS had escaped the exploding sock puppet missile. He shrugs it off and says he'll tell her later. What? Seriously? That kind of drek passes quality control in the JN-T/Saward era? Wow.
Sarah -
Quality control? You're cracking me up! Saward's whining in the DVD extra was infuriating: "There were no writers available, so we had to go with the unemployed ambulance driver. JN-T wouldn't let me hire any real writers." Boo-flipping-hoo. I've come to loathe him in these past months.
Harry -
It's astonishing to think that people off the street could be commissioned to write a Doctor Who story back then. That's the impression I get.
By then, the Borad had seized Peri like some trophy he'd like to keep for himself, been frightened by his own appearance when the Doctor smashes his old portrait and reveals a mirror (smashing a portrait to reveal a mirror? Makes total sense to JN-T and Saward), and falls into the Timelash. Apparently he's going to become the Loch Ness Monster... even though a previous Doctor Who story showed us that the Zygons were behind the Loch Ness Monster! WHAT THE HELL?
That does it. They broke me. I'm done with this mess.
Sarah -
There must be a left over bottle of gin around her somewhere. Let's find it and get the hell out of here.
Harry -
Dahling, pass me your glass.
Best Line: Didn't make note of one.
Favourite Moment: each time one of the skeletons of the Borad's victims clattered comically to the floor, the sound they made amused me.
Lasting Image: the Borad's excellently-done face makeup.
2/10
Sarah -
Best Line:
Herbert: But who would know?
Doctor: I would. So would every other Time Lord from here to Gallifrey, and I can assure you, they're not all as pleasant and agreeable as I am.
(I have to admit that made me laugh.)
Favorite Moment: Every moment Paul Darrow is chewing up the scenery.
Lasting Image: The Doctor's burlesque shimmy into the Timelash.
2/10
Our marathon continues with Story #141: Revelation of the Daleks...
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