Timelash

Chapter the 258th, where the Doctor and Peri go out on the Lash and get wasted (i.e. the lead actors' talents are wasted on this.)

Plot:

The planet Karfel is a brutal dictatorship, policed by blue-faced androids and beekeepers (alright, they're guardoliers, but they look like beekeepers), and ruled by the Borad, who's only ever seen in public broadcasts never in person. He has many experiments going on, including those involving a time/space tunnel called the Timelash, which he has the occasional rebel thrown into. He is also stirring up interplanetary war with the neighbouring Bandrils. The corrupt Tekker takes over as the Borad's second-in command, and starts being mean to everyone. Vena, a noblewoman of Karfel, in possession of a MacGuffin that can be used to control the Timelash, inadvertently falls into the time tunnel. At the same time, the Doctor is navigating the TARDIS through the Timelash. The Doctor has been to Karfel many years before, and had become a hero of legend before the Borad banned everyone from talking about him. After arrival, Tekker takes Peri hostage to force the Doctor to fetch Vena and the MacGuffin. This takes him to 1880s Scotland, and someone from there, an aspiring writer called Herbert, stows away in the TARDIS on the trip to take Vena back to Karfel.

There's stand-offs and squabbles once they all return. The Borad turns out to be a scientist that the Doctor reported on his first visit for performing unethical experiments on the local large reptile life, the Morlox. The Borad has experimented on himself, making him half-Karfelon, half Morlox. He wants to do the same to Peri, who will then become his mate; then he'll wipe out every other non-Morlox on the planet. Tekker stands up to the Borad but is killed. The Doctor uses a gizmo powered by crystals from the Timelash to get the Borad to shoot himself with his own death ray, then flies off in the TARDIS with Herbert (after a long conversation with Peri that one wouldn't think there was time for in the situation) to deflect the approaching Bandril fleet. It appears that the TARDIS is destroyed, which makes the Bandrils retreat. A clone of the Borad turns up and grabs Peri. Luckily, the Doctor has survived (somehow) and distracts the Borad, allowing him to be pushed into the Timelash. The Doctor believes he'll travel back to the other end of the tunnel, Loch Ness, and apparently just swim around in it forever, occasionally being mistaken for the monster. This seems unlikely. Herbert wants to stay on Karfel, but the Doctor suspects he'll return home. He shows Peri Herbert's card that he'd dropped earlier; he is a young H. G. Wells.

Context:

Watched from the Blu-ray disc in the season 22 box set with all the children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10), an episode a week over two Sundays in late February 2023. The Better Half declined to join us and said things to the effect that putting on Timelash for the kids was edging towards child cruelty. But  - I thought, on pressing play on episode one - it's not that bad, is it? The trouble is, and this may come down to one's frame of mind when watching, it isn't often so poor as to be fun - though it sometimes is - it's more often just a weary slog to get through. It didn't hold the children's attention al all, with the younger two giving up and leaving the living room before the end of each episode. Only the eldest stuck around to the end to give his one word verdict - "Shit" - before leaving too. We watched the story as broadcast, by the way, without the whizzy new effects available as an alternative viewing experience - effects are the least of Timelash's problems.

First Time Round:

The 22nd season of Doctor Who was broadcast in early 1985, back on Saturday afternoon's after a few years on weekday evenings. It was the final season to be broadcast before my family had a video recorder, so whenever I - as a burgeoning teenage gadabout - didn't make it back home by 5:20pm, I would miss the episode with no way of watching it, perhaps forever. Given that the 1985 stories were mostly two-parters, that meant missing 50% of the narrative, and this happened a few times. Luckily or unluckily, I caught both parts of Timelash in full. Didn't miss a second of it. The story was somewhat overshadowed by the recent hoo-hah of the announcement of Doctor Who's 18-month hiatus; I remember that being in my mind when I watched for the first time. I also remember thinking that Herbert was going to join as a new companion, and the reveal of his true identity at the end came as a nice surprise.

Reaction:

Many an online wag over the years has been tickled by the simple fact that 'Timelash' is an anagram of 'Lame Shit'. It seems apt, but is it really? The production saddled with the pre-scrambled moniker doesn't need any thought or analysis to uncover its lameness; it's pretty obvious to anyone watching it for even the shortest length of time. A truly apt title for the story would be just to call it Lame Shit and get it over with; nobody's going to be fooled for long. Is that a smidge unfair? Maybe. When I watched as a teen, I thought the story was okay if not exactly top drawer. Every time I've watched since, though, I've seen more and more flaws. The script development process seems to have generated a story with significant problems, and then - bad luck upon bad luck - the execution in all departments has made things worse. There's examples at the macro or the micro level, but just to take one: mirrors are banned on Karfel, so the script mandates that the sets and props literally be dull. Peri even points this out at one point, picking up a matt grey drinking vessel. Why, though? Is it because the Borad hates his face after his genetic experimentation, and doesn't want any risk of seeing his reflection? But he never comes out of his secret lair, anyway. Maybe it's because they interfere with the androids, as the Doctor demonstrates to extricate himself from the episode one cliffhanger at the start of episode two. But that comes out of nowhere - how did the Doctor know it would work? The script doesn't explain. There's only a couple of small moments where the mirrors have any relevance, and for that visual interest has been sacrificed.

I suppose the sets and props might have ended up being dull anyway. There's nothing in the script to mandate dull performances, but that's what the director mostly elicits. It's hard to watch the early scenes where rebels in beige clothes run through beige corridors and spout beige dialogue (it's particularly infuriating to see this material given to the couple of them - Tracy Louise Ward and Stephen Mackintosh - who became much more famous subsequently). Eric Saward script editing (and reportedly doing some significant rewriting of relatively inexperienced writer Glen McCoy's scripts) attempts to achieve narrative dynamism by bumping characters off one after the other, without the audience having sufficient time to get to know them: Renis, Kendron, Brunner, Mykros, Tyheer - I couldn't pick any of them out of a line up and I've just watched it. Where a performance is memorable, it's usually for the wrong reasons. Jeananne Crowley as Vena delivers every line staring into the middle distance, displays inappropriate emotion seemingly at random, and sounds out individual words as if she's reading phonetically written Latin from an autocue. The script doesn't help: Vena's father obeys the Borad's order to redirect power knowing that it will mean his wife on life-support in a hospital will die. The Borad then has him killed anyway. Vena never mentions her mother ever (maybe she thinks she's still alive?), and when she finds out her father is dead, her scripted reaction is as if someone's just told her it's beans for supper.

The Doctor arriving livens things up a bit, but - like in most of the stories of season 22 - that doesn't happen until far too late in the first half. Before that, he's stuck in the TARDIS expounding on the wonders of the universe while Peri snarks at him (why does Saward think this stuff is clever?), fiddles with technology, and fits seatbelts to the TARDIS console (it's like something out of a comedy sketch, except it isn't funny). Why does it occur to nobody writing stories in 1985 to just have the Doctor and Peri arrive at the beginning and start having adventures straight away?! Even with delaying tactics reducing the duration of the character's time on Karfel, McCoy and Saward still can't fill that time with anything for Nicola Bryant as Peri to do: she spends the whole story standing about, sometimes chained to something, sometimes not. At least she gets to wear reasonably sensible clothes after spending the previous few stories in garish leotards. Paul Darrow as Tekker chews the scenery, and the lighting rig and a couple of cameras. His OTT performance is always watchable - I love the relish with which he talks of the Doctor not living up to the legends told of him - but there's no coherence to his actions. He just does scene after scene of random panto bad guy stuff like provoking a war in which he must at least suspect his planet could get destroyed, then at the end does a volte face and gets himself killed standing up to the Borad.

Robert Ashby is great as the Borad, and the make-up and prosthetics are excellent. It's not quite enough to offset the feeble model work, the invading alien race portrayed by one glove puppet, or the Timelash made of polystyrene and tinsel. Plus, again, the character's villainy is blasting out in so many random directions: he experiments with time, and genetic hybridisation, and cloning. Pick one thing. The reason for this sci-fi smorgasbord is to hint at the many topics of the works of H. G.Wells. David Chandler's performance as Herbert is fun, and the reveal at the end that he's going to one day be the famous English author is a satisfying moment. It would be better, of course, if the character had any biographical details in common with the real Wells, but as the audience only finds out who he is in the very last shot of the story, that's not something that can trouble one too much on first watch. The script tries to pull the same retrofitting history trick by suggesting that the Borad, banished to the Scotland of centuries before by the Timelash, has been sighted since and taken for the Loch Ness Monster. But he doesn't look anything like the Loch Ness Monster, so that doesn't work. There's some truly honking dialogue, from the swallowed a thesaurus insults favoured by this era "You microcephalic apostate" to the on-the-nose exposition that doesn't even need to be said in the first place, such as this exchange: "He will destroy every Karfelon in the Citadel" "All five hundred of us?!"

Poor Timelash can't catch a break. It starts to build to the climax, with the Borad killed and the Doctor flying off in the TARDIS for a last-minute effort to stop the approaching war-fleet. Then, everything slows to a near halt, and the last-minute effort turns into a last seven minutes effort. Saward has to introduce a long scene of padding as the second episode was found to be seriously under-running. The footage was filmed during one of the next story's studio days, so options were limited: it has to happen in the TARDIS control room (the series' only recurring set) with minimal cast (aside from the two regulars, they got Chandler back to play Herbert again). It would be a tall order, but possible, to maintain the rising tension through many minutes in one location, but Saward doesn't appear to try. It's just the usual comic business and characters arguing, and it kills the ending stone dead. He doesn't even add a retrospective explanation for how the TARDIS survives a collision with missiles in space. In the already shot footage the Doctor waves this away with an "I'll explain one day - it's a neat trick" cop out. Because everything's slowed down, when the Doctor returns to Karfel to face another Borad (the baddie having cloned himself), a development that's silly but not entirely ridiculous for this heightened genre, it doesn't feel like a final exciting corkscrew turn of the plot, it just makes one internally scream "Is this not over yet?!". The anti-cherry on the cake is the Doctor then proceeding to defeat the Borad by taunting him about how ugly and deformed he is. It verges on being ableist for me, and I fear it would fall foul of a 21st century sensitivity reader (if they managed to get that far).

Connectivity:

Both Timelash and Demons of The Punjab feature scenes in Earth history where benign aliens are witnessed by a male human who takes them to be demonic.

Deeper Thoughts:

Doctor Who without the Doctor. Infamously, the producer of Timelash John Nathan-Turner took his two lead actors Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant out of rehearsals for the story to work on a pantomime that Nathan-Turner was directing as a side hustle, and which he had roped them into to star. At the time, and for a good length of time afterwards, it was de rigueur within fandom to criticise JNT for everything he did. I think people were mostly being unfair, but in this case it's hard to defend him. Throughout the making of Doctor Who, before and since Timelash, there have always been the pressures, logistical headaches and compromises that come from needing to get x number of episodes in the can per year without enough time or resources. To make that situation even worse for a somewhat frivolous side venture (albeit one that I'm sure was well made and enjoyable for those who attended it) seems like an obvious, unforced error. What couldn't happen in the 1980s was that the characters just be written out for a while; that was unthinkable. I talked in the last blog post about how the expectation is that the Doctor will almost always be the protagonist of any Who story's narrative, so obviously he or she has to appear. It was not always thus, however. In the 1960s, Doctor Who production involved the rehearsal and recording of a new episode every week, for almost every week of the year. The workload and turnaround equivalent to that of a soap opera today.

Unlike a soap, though, Doctor Who only had a maximum of four regulars to take the weight of the narratives. If someone was absent for a week's work because of illness or holiday, it was much more noticeable. Clever (and sometimes not so clever) strategies were required. This wasn't restricted to the 60s either; every year for a good few years after Doctor Who returned in 2005, they needed to squeeze one more episode out of the schedule than they had time for, and had to employ what was called double-banking. Two stories would be made simultaneously, meaning that another character (either the companion or a guest character) would take the majority of the action in one of them, while the Doctor starred more fully in the other. This gave rise to the so-called 'Doctor lite' episodes like Love & Monsters or Blink. They were never 'Doctor-less' episodes, though. Some footage of the Doctor, maybe gathered in only a few hours, would be intercut with the action to give the lead character a presence. This was sometimes employed in the 60s too, with a bit of pre-recording - on film or sometimes just audio - done of the Doctor or companion who was otherwise out for that week's multi-camera shoot in studio. The production line approach to making the episodes didn't leave as much time for this to be done as there was in the 21st century, though - it would usually mean an actor missing some of a previous week's rehearsal to go to Ealing studios, and would be limited to short scenes (editing anything into the finished product was a lot less easy than later too). Sometimes, it just wasn't possible.

So, are there any episodes without the Doctor in at all? The answer is yes, but very few. Every Doctor from Jon Pertwee up to Jodie Whittaker appears in every one of their episodes in new footage; so, it's only the black and white years we need to look at. Patrick Troughton was away for four episodes in all. In the first of these (episode four of Evil of the Daleks) he's in pre-filmed sequences; in the second (episode two of The Web of Fear), he appears at the start in the reprise from the previous episode. Often a reprise would be performed by the actors again as part of the recording session for the next story; the rest of the time (particularly if there was an actor featured who was not in the studio that week), it would be edited in from a film recording of the end of the previous episode. For the last two of Pat's holidays (episode two of The Wheel in Space, and episode four of The Seeds of Death), the Doctor's knocked out and represented by a body double sleeping with face pointing away from the camera. Not the most imaginative method, but it suffices. So, the Doctor appears but not played by the usual actor (though the use of Doctor doubles in scenes is by no means limited to holiday cover, so it counts).

William Hartnell had ten weeks off in all, either for holiday or illness. Body doubles were used for two (The Dalek Invasion of Earth four and The Tenth Planet three) who were both depicted in their first scene, shot from behind almost identically, to faint, then kept out of the way after that. A couple of episodes (The Space Museum three and The Time Meddler two), the Doctor is present in the film-recorded reprise, plus in the latter Hartnell has recorded audio that's played in to simulate him talking to another character through a door. In the two middle episodes of The Celestial Toymaker there's pre-recorded audio again, plus a body double. Well, really, its just a hand double - the Toymaker makes the Doctor invisible except for his hand, which can be seen moving the pieces of the Toymaker's trilogic game. The two middle episodes of The Massacre are open to interpretation: Hartnell appears (albeit in one he's only present in pre-filmed sequences) but he's maybe not playing the Doctor. When I covered the story for the blog many years ago, I came down on the side of the Abbot of Amboise shown in the episodes being a separate character. This is the consensus view of commentators over the years, but there is a possible reading (though a stretched one) that it is in fact the Doctor impersonating the Abbot in some scenes. That leaves three where the Doctor is most definitely absent: Mission to the Unknown (which features none of the regular cast), and episodes three and four of The Keys of Marinus from the very first Doctor Who season. So just three (or five depending on your Massacre interpretation) Doctor-less as opposed to Doctor lite episodes. Unless current showrunner Russell T Davies takes things in a very unexpected direction, that's how it's going to stay.

 

In Summary:

Karfel now! Down with this sort of thing!